The Heart Goes Last

XV | THERE There

Stan has a new job. He’s an Empathy Module adjustor for UR-ELF Las Vegas, Robotics Department. He’s in charge of perfecting the Elvis grin, which has never been quite accurate. Too tight and it’s a snarl, too loose and it’s a drool; UR-ELF has had complaints both ways. But Stan is making progress: he’s going to ace this! After that’s done, he’s already booked for the Marilyns, where some tweaks to the pout are required.

It’s the weekend, so he’s home, his own home, trimming the cactus hedge. His hedge, his own cactus hedge. And his trimmers; he keeps them in razor-sharp condition. On the lawn – his lawn, or rather their lawn, which is covered with Astro-Turf because of the Vegas watering restrictions – little Winnie, already three months old, gurgles on a blanket covered with images of cute baby ducks. Stan wondered about naming her Winifred – her nickname would sound too much like a kids’-story bear, and she’d be called Poo at school and teased for being named after a turd, but Charmaine said it was a tribute to her Grandmother Win, because what would have happened if it hadn’t been for her, and anyway it was only little boys who had such potty brains. So they could jump that bridge when they came to it, when they could always opt for Winnie’s second name, which is Stanlita. Charmaine insisted on that; she said it was like a memorial to their undying love. Stan said there wasn’t any such name as Stanlita, and Charmaine said there was, and he looked it up online, and fuck if she wasn’t right.

Under the shade of a sun umbrella, Charmaine sits in a lawn chair, knitting a tiny hat for what she hopes will soon be the next baby, and keeping an eye on Winnie. She hovers over the kid: there have been some unexplained baby disappearances in the news lately, and Charmaine is worried that they’re being stolen for their valuable, age-cancelling blood. Stan tells her it’s not likely to happen in their part of town, but Charmaine says you never know, and a stich in time saves nine.

She’s keeping an eye on Stan too, because she has this notion that he might ramble off and get involved in adventures, with or without predatory women. She never used to be so possessive of him, but ever since that thing they did to her head she’s been like this. A micro-manager of Stan. At first it was flattering, but some days he feels a little too examined.

Nor can he dump the fact that Charmaine was once willing to kill him, no matter how much she’d boo-hooed about it. The story – the story Jocelyn subsequently fed him – is that Charmaine always knew that scene was fake, and that’s what they both pretend to believe. But he doesn’t buy it; she’d been serious.

Not that he can use it against her. And he can’t use her fling with Max either, because thanks to Jocelyn, Charmaine has the counter-weapon, namely his fling with Jocelyn. He could say he was coerced into it, but that won’t wash: Charmaine would only say the same thing about herself. I couldn’t help it, and so on. And Charmaine knows about his pursuit of the imaginary Jasmine, which is more than humiliating for him: to be a rascal is one thing, it’s almost respectable, but to be an idiot is pathetic. They’re evenly balanced on the teeter-totter of cheating, so by mutual consent they never mention it.

On the other hand, his sex life has never been so good. Partly it’s whatever adjustment they made inside Charmaine’s brain, but also it has to be his repertoire of verbal turn-ons. They’re straight from the videos of Charmaine and Max that Jocelyn made him watch, and though it was hell at the time he’s grateful to her now, because all he needs to do is haul out one of those riffs – Turn over, kneel down, tell me how shameless you are – and Charmaine is toffee in his hands. She’ll do it all, she’ll say it all; she’s everything he once longed for in the imaginary Jasmine, and more. True, the routine has become slightly predictable, but it would be surly to complain. Like complaining that the food’s too delicious. What kind of a complaint is that?

Gift

Charmaine is basking like a seal. Or a like whale. Or a like a hippo. Like something that basks, anyway. Even her knitting is going better than it used to, now that she knows what it’s for. She knitted a bear for Winnie, though a green one not blue, and she embroidered the eyes to avoid a choking hazard. And this hat will be darling once she’s finished.

What a beautiful day! But all the days are beautiful. Thank heavens she had that adjustment to her brain, because she couldn’t ask for more out of life, she appreciates things so much more than she used to do, even when something goes wrong, such as the drain water spitting up into the dryer like it did yesterday, with a full load in there too. That would once have taken her mood way down. But after the plumber came and fixed it, she put that load through again with an extra dose of lavender-scented fabric softener, and it was just like new.

And that’s good, because her white cotton top with the peasant frill was in that load, and it’s what she wants to wear to the Positron Survivors’ Reunion. She’ll see Sandi and Veronica there, and catch up on their news. They’re both doing well, according to their online pages: Sandi’s in hairweaving, she has a real knack for it, and Veronica’s with a speaker’s agency and goes around talking about how to work with your sexual orientation if it doesn’t happen to fit in with society’s norms. Just last week she spoke to a gathering of shoe fetishists, and instead of giving her a bouquet or a plaque or anything they gave her the cutest pair of blue shoes, with peek-a-boo toes and ginormous high heels. Charmaine can’t wear shoes like that any more, they give her pain in the Achilles tendon. Maybe she’s getting middle-aged.

Max and Aurora might be there as well. She hasn’t kept up with them. There’s still a little needle of hurt buried somewhere in the cushions of warm wishes she takes care to send their way whenever she thinks about them. Or thinks about Max. She still does think about Max, from time to time. In that way. Which is odd, because those feelings about Max were supposed to have been wiped.

What she tries not to think about is the work she used to do, back in her other life at Positron Prison, before her shadows got erased. If you do bad things for reasons you’ve been told are good, does it make you a bad person? Thinking too much about that could really spoil everything, which would be selfish. So she tries to put that side of things right out of her mind.

Stan turns the hedge-trimmer off. He raises the visor he has to wear because of the flying cactus prickles, takes off his leather gloves, wipes his forehead.“Stan, honey, want a beer?” Charmaine calls. She’s not drinking herself, it wouldn’t be good for Winnie.

“In a minute,” he says. “Just got a foot more to do.” Charmaine thinks maybe they should take the cactus hedge out and put in a fence of woven sticks, but Stan didn’t go for that idea. He says why fix it if it’s not broke? Actually he said, Not fucking broke and told her to quit nagging him about it. She wasn’t nagging, but she let it rest. Let him keep on believing anything he wants to believe, because when he’s grumpy he won’t have sex, and the sex is amazing, way better than before; how can it not be, now that her brain’s been reborn?

Stan can still get a little impatient with her in daily life. Even though everything’s so wonderful. It’s the pressures of his work. Charmaine will get some work too, in a while, maybe part-time because it’s good to get some validation from the real world.

A dark hybrid car’s pulling up in front of the house. Jocelyn gets out of it. She seems to be alone.

Stan lowers his visor, switches on his trimmer, turns his back. So that’s all right, thinks Charmaine, it means he’s not interested in Jocelyn, despite the way she’s flashing her legs.

“Jocelyn!” says Charmaine as Joceyln walks across the AstroTurf toward her. “What a surprise! It’s so good to see you!” She sets down her knitting, makes flailing motions in the lawn chair.

Jocelyn’s wearing a fashionable dark grey linen sheath, white Cuban-heeled sandals, a floppy-brimmed sunhat. “Don’t get up,” she says. “Cute baby.” You can see she isn’t much interested; if she was, she would’ve picked Winnie up and gone Ooochie-kootchie or some normal thing like that. But then Winnie might spit up on Jocelyn’s expensive outfit, and that would not improve their relationship. Not that they have one: Charmaine hasn’t seen Jocelyn since the wedding. She and Conor are in Washington, doing something top, top secret. Or that’s the version Stan got from Conor.

“Can I get you a cold drink?” Charmaine says dutifully.

“I can’t stay a minute,” Jocelyn says. “I just came by to deliver your wedding gift.”

“Oh,” says Charmaine hopefully. “How great!” But what is it? Jocelyn isn’t carrying a package. Maybe it’s a cheque, and that would be nice too but not so tasteful. A personally chosen item is better, in Charmaine’s opinion. Though not always.

“It’s not an object,” Jocelyn says. Charmaine has a memory flash of Jocelyn’s head when it was in a box. She used to think that head could read her thoughts, and here was Jocelyn doing that very same thing, only not in a box.

“It’s a piece of information, about you.”

“About me?” Charmaine says, dismayed. Is this another trick, is it some blackmail thing like those videos of her and Max? But those were supposed to have been destroyed.

“You can choose,” says Jocelyn. “To hear it or not. If you hear it, you’ll be more free but less secure. If you don’t hear it, you’ll be more secure, but less free.” She crosses her arms, waits.

Charmaine has to think. How could she be more free? She’s already free enough. And she’s already secure, as long as Stan has his job and she has Stan. But she knows herself well enough to realize that if Jocelyn goes away without telling her, she’ll always be curious about what it was.

“Okay, tell me,” she says.

“Simply this,” says Jocelyn. “You never had that operation. That brain adjustment.”

“That can’t be true,” says Charmaine flatly. “It can’t be true! There’s been such a difference!”

“The human mind is infinitely suggestible,” says Jocelyn.

“But. But now I love Stan so much,” says Charmaine. “I have to love him, because of that thing they did! It’s like an ant, or something. It’s like a baby duck! That’s what they said!”

“Maybe you loved Stan anyway,” says Jocelyn. “Maybe you just needed some help with it.”

“This isn’t fair,” says Charmaine. “Everything was all settled!”

“Nothing is ever settled,” says Jocelyn. “Every day is different. Isn’t it better to do something because you’ve decided to? Rather than because you have to.”

“No, it isn’t,” says Charmaine. “Love isn’t like that. With love, you can’t stop yourself.” She wants the helplessness, she wants …

“You prefer compulsion? Gun to the head, so to speak?” says Jocelyn, smiling. “You want your decisions taken away from you so you won’t be responsible for your own actions? That can be seductive, as you know.”

“No, not exactly, but …” It will take Charmaine a while to think this through. There’s an open door, and standing just on the other side of it is Max. Not Max as such, because his brain really has been altered, he’s bonded to Aurora now and he’ll be devoted to her forever, not that Charmaine begrudges Aurora that, because she’s suffered so much in her previous life, and doesn’t she deserve a little out-of-your-mind ecstasy, like …

Never mind like what. Better not to dwell on that in too much detail. The past is the past.

So not Max, but a shadow of Max. A Max-like person. Someone who isn’t Stan, waiting for her in the future. That would be so destructive! Why is she even considering it? Maybe she ought to see a therapist or something. “Of course not!” she says. “But I need …”

“Take it or leave it,” says Jocelyn. “I’m only the messenger. As they say in court, you’re free to go. The world is all before you, where to choose.”

“How do you mean?” says Charmaine.