Atwood Margaret - The Heart Goes Last

“I’m sure that’s true,” says Aurora in her tone that means the opposite. “But think of it this way. What if he decides to pay you a visit?”

A big What If, thinks Charmaine. She doesn’t need to ask who he is, but she doubts very much that he’ll be visiting, since from what Jocelyn says his dick is in a cast. “I don’t think he will,” she says. “Not this weekend.”

“You never know,” says Aurora. “I understand he can be impetuous. Anyway, he’ll be happy to hear you’ve had a chaperone. I also understand he can be quite jealous. And we wouldn’t want any undue suspicions to arise, would we?”

It’s better than she thought it would be, the weekend with Aurora. You should never pass up the chance to learn something new, and Charmaine learns several things. First of all, she learns that Aurora can make good scrambled eggs. Second, she learns that Ed is planning some sort of a trip, and that Charmaine will be invited on it, but Aurora doesn’t know where or when, so right now it’s only a heads-up.

And third, she learns that Aurora’s face is not her original face. It’s always been obvious that she’s had work done, Charmaine has known that from the get-go, but what Aurora tells her goes way beyond mere work.

“You may have wondered about my face” is how Aurora opens the face round. This is on the Sunday, after they’ve watched Some Like It Hot while eating popcorn and drinking beer, not that Charmaine likes beer that much but it seemed like the right thing to do. Then they got into the mixed drinks, which by this time are unusual, since the ingredient options are running out.

Now they’re feeling like old best girfriends from school, or at least Charmaine is feeling like that. Not that she had any best girlfriends from school, not really close ones. When she was little she wasn’t allowed to have them, and then later she didn’t want to have them, because they would ask too much about her life. So maybe she’s having a best girlfriend now. Though it might just be the effect of her fourth Campari and soda, or is it a gin and tonic, or maybe something with vodka.

“Your face? What do you mean?” says Charmaine, trying to be kind and helpful while at the same time paying attention.

“You don’t have to pretend,” says Aurora. “I know what I look like. I know it’s too … tight. But I used to look very different. And then, for a while, I looked … I didn’t have any face at all.”

“No face?” says Charmaine. “Everyone has a face!”

“Mine got scraped off,” says Aurora.

“You’re kidding!” says Charmaine, and then she can’t help laughing because it’s too ridiculous, a scraped-off face, like scraping icing off a cake, and then Aurora laughs too, as much as she can, considering.

“I was in a roller-derby accident,” she says when they’re finished laughing. “It was a charity thing, for the image consultant agency I was working for then. We were raising money for lung cancer. I guess I shouldn’t have volunteered, but I really wanted to help out. You know.”

“Oh, yes. I know. But roller skates, that’s dangerous,” says Charmaine. She wouldn’t have spotted Aurora as being that athletic. Face scraped off! It hurts her to think about it. Aurora is looking blurry, and Charmaine can almost see underneath her skin. Hurt is what’s under there. So much hurt.

“Yes. I was young then, I thought I was tough. I shouldn’t even say accident, it was a deliberate trip for Maris in Accounts. She had it in for me because of this man called Chet, not that there was anything. And I landed right on my face, at top speed. I came out looking like hamburger.”

“Oh,” says Charmaine, sobering up a little. “Oh, terrible.”

“I couldn’t even sue,” says Aurora. “There wasn’t even a category.”

“Of course not,” says Charmaine sympathetically. “Darned insurance companies.”

“So they offered me a full-face transplant,” says Aurora. “For signing up at Positron.”

“They did?” says Charmaine. “You can do that with faces?” Pop your face off and pop another one on – you could be a whole different person, on the outside, not just on the inside.

“Yes. They were at the experimental stage and there I was. I was custom-made for them. They wanted to see if they could transplant a whole face. Why suffer is how they put it.”

“Whose face did you get?” Charmaine asks. It’s a stupid question, she shouldn’t have asked it. The face of a Procedure is the answer: the face of someone who didn’t need their face any more. But they’d have been blissed out while it was peeled off them, they wouldn’t have known. And it was all for the best. The better. The good. She upends her drink.

“Those were early days,” Aurora says. “They’re doing things differently now.”

“Differently,” says Charmaine. “Things. You mean they’re killing them differently? Those prisoners? They’re not doing the Procedure?” She shouldn’t have blurted that out, she knows never to use the k-word. She’s had too much to drink. At least she didn’t say murdering.

“ Killing is harsh,” says Aurora. “It was positioned as the alleviation of excessive pain. And happily there are now more ways than one of doing that! Alleviating the excessive pain. Ways that are less harsh.”

“You mean, they don’t kill them?” Even to herself, Charmaine sounds like a five-year-old. She’s overdoing it on the dumb.

“Hardly at all any more,” says Aurora. “The thing is, people get lonely; they want someone to love them. That can be arranged for anyone now, even if you look like something the cat coughed up. Why should anyone have to endure that kind of emotional damage? Lord knows I can identify with the whole solution! Considering the way my face … this face is, you can imagine I haven’t had much of a love life.”

“Poor you,” says Charmaine. “Of course, there can be a downside.”

“A downside to what?” says Aurora a little coldly.

“Well, you know. To a sex life. All of that,” says Charmaine. She could tell Aurora about a few of her own downsides, but why dwell on the negative?

“Not if the person is devoted,” says Aurora. “Not if they’re fixated on you. Only you. It can be done, they do it by changing the brain, it’s like a magic love potion.”

“Oh,” says Charmaine. “That would be …” What’s the word? Amazing? Impossible? She’s never felt she had a lot of choice with the love, especially with the hopeless kind. The kind that was mostly sex. You loved someone in that way, and wham! You couldn’t help yourself. It was like going down a water slide: you couldn’t stop. Or that’s how it was with Max. Maybe she’ll never be able to feel anything like that again.

“Jocelyn’s promised me,” says Aurora. “If I helped her. She says I can have that done, very soon now. I’ve been waiting so long! But now I can have a whole new life.” Her eyes tear up.

Charmaine is almost envious. A whole new life. How can she herself get one of those?

Escort

“You’ve snagged your first Elvis Escort gig,” Rob tells Stan at breakfast. Or at Stan’s breakfast. It’s more like lunch for Rob, but Stan slept in. They’re both eating much the same thing, however: undifferentiated foodstuffs. Things that come already sliced, things in foil packages, things in jars. The Elvisorium is not a gourmet establishment.

Stan pauses in mid-crackle. He has to stop gobbling Pringles, they’ll make him fat. “Where?” he says.

“Woman here for that broadcaster convention,” says Rob. “Television, or ex-television from the sound of it. Thought I ought to know who she was. She wants someone to take her to a show. Sounds harmless.”