The Heart Goes Last

IV | THE HEART GOES LAST Haircut

Stan clocks in at Positron, takes a shower, changes into the orange boiler suit, lines up for the routine haircut. They like to preserve the appearance of an authentic prison, though the shorn look for convicts is archaic – it belongs with the head lice of olden times – and they no longer do the full buzz: just short enough so when it’s time to leave again the hair’s a respectable civilian length.

“Have a good month outside?” asks the barber, whose name is Clint. Clint has a big T on his front because he’s playing the part of a Trusty. He’s not one of the original criminals, the ones who were still in here when the Project began: you’d never let a dangerous offender anywhere near those scissors and razors. Outside, when he’s a civilian, Clint does tree pruning. Before he signed onto the Project he was an actuary, but he’d lost that job when his company moved west.

It’s a familiar story, though nobody talks much about what they were before: backward glances are not encouraged. Stan himself doesn’t dwell on his

Dimple Robotics interlude, back when he’d thought the future was like a sidewalk and all you had to do was make it from one block to the next; nor does he dwell on what came after, when he had no job. He hates to think of himself the way he was then: grimy, morose, with the air being sucked out of his chest by the sense of futility that was everywhere like a fog. It’s good to have goals again, among them the discovering and seduction of Jasmine. He can almost feel her in his fingertips – the yielding, the rubberiness, the humid jungle heat.

Steady, he tells himself as he swings himself into the chair. Hands out of the pockets. Don’t give yourself a hernia.

Clint must have learned the barbering here: they’d all had to apprentice, in order to gain or hone a practical skill of use inside Positron.

“Yeah, good month, can’t complain,” says Stan. “You?”

“Terrific,” says Clint. “Did a little work on my house. Went to the committee, got permission, painted the kitchen. Primrose yellow, gave the place a lift. Northern exposure. Wife was pleased.”

“What’s she do, inside?” Stan asks.

“Works in the hospital. Surgeon,” says Clint. “Heart, mostly. Yours?”

“Hospital too, Chief Medical Administrator,” says Stan. He feels a twinge of pride in Charmaine: despite her pink locker, she’s no airhead. It’s a serious position, it comes with power. You need to be dependable, you need to be upbeat, she’s told him. Also stable, discreet, and not given to dark thoughts.

“Must be a tough job sometimes,” says Clint. “Dealing with sick people.”

“Was at first,” says Stan. “Got to her a bit. But she’s more used to it

now.” She’s never told him much about her work, but then, he’s never told her much about his.

“You’d need a cool head,” says Clint. “Not sentimental.”

This calls for no more than a yup. Clint decides on a tactful, snippety-snipping silence, which is fine with Stan. He needs to concentrate on Jasmine, Jasmine of the fuchsia kiss. She won’t let him alone.

He closes his eyes, sees himself as one of those dorky video-game hero princes of his childhood, slashing his questing way through swamps full of tentacled man-eating plants, annihilating giant leeches, hacking through the poison brambles to the iron castle where Jasmine lies asleep, guarded by a dragon, the dragon of Max, and shortly to be awakened by a kiss, the kiss of Stan. Trouble is she’s already awake, she’s super awake, having sex with the dragon. Him and his big scaly tail.

Bad reverie. He opens his eyes.

Who is Max? He could be someone Stan sees often without knowing it. He could be a guy who’s left his scooter with Stan for repair while he spent his month in the slammer, he could be playing a guard right now, locking Stan in at night and saying, Stay in line. He could even be Clint: is that possible? Could “Clint” be a fake name? Surely not. Clint is an older guy, with greying hair and a paunch.

“There you go,” says Clint. He holds up a mirror so Stan can see the back of his own head. There’s a bristly roll of fat taking shape at the nape of his neck, but only if he leans his head back. When he finds Jasmine he must remember to keep his head upright. Or forward a little. She might put her hand there, a hand with long, strong fingers tipped with nails the colour of arterial blood. At the mere thought, he feels himself flushing. Clint is whisking off the prickly hairs.

“Thanks,” says Stan. “See you in two.”

Two months – one in, one out – until his next Clint haircut. Before then he’ll be connected with Jasmine, whatever it takes.

He joins the lineup for lunch, which is always the first thing that happens after the haircut. Positron food is excellent, because if the cooking team orders up crap for you, you’ll dish out crap to them the next month to get even. Works like a charm: it’s amazing how many painstaking chefs have sprung into being. Today it’s chicken dumplings, one of his favourites. It’s an added satisfaction that he himself has made a contribution to the production of the chickens, in his Positron role as Poultry Supervisor.

Lunch hour was to be stressful in the months just after he’d signed in. At that time there were still some bona fide criminals in the place. Drug dealers, gang enforcers, grifters and con artists, assorted thieves. Seriously shaved heads, deeply engraved tats that hooked the wearer to their affiliates and advertised feuds. There were shovings in the cafeteria lineup, there were glarings, there were standoffs. Stan learned some ingenious combinations of words he would never have put together himself, even when fighting with Conor, and you had to admire the inventiveness, the poetry, even. (Pus, cock, liverwurst, mother, dog, strawberry jam: how did that one go, exactly?) Scuffles broke out over muffins, plates of scrambled eggs were shoved into faces.

Things might escalate: stompings, the cracking of bones. Then the guards would be expected to muscle in, but only some of them had formerly been real guards, so these interventions lacked authority. Tramplings took place, kickings, punchings, chokings, hot coffee scaldings, followed by retribution behind the scenes: mysterious knifings in the showers, puncture wounds traced to double-pronged barbecue forks lifted from the kitchen, concussions caused by men somehow banging their heads repeatedly on rocks, out in the market-garden area, among the sheltering rows of tomato plants.

Throughout those days, Stan hunkered down and kept his mouth shut and tried to be as invisible as possible, knowing he was no Conor – he lacked the skill set for such hardcore games. But that period didn’t last long, because the disturbances caused by the criminal elements were too great a threat to the Project. The initial thinking had been that the criminals would be sprinkled among the volunteers now making up the bulk of the prisoners, which was supposed to have an improving effect on the crims. Not only that, but they too would be let out every second month to take their turns as civilian inhabitants of Consilience, doing town-side tasks or acting as guards at Positron.

This would give them an experience they might never have had before – namely, a job – and would also earn them respect from others and a place in the community, leading to a newfound self-respect. Having prisoners act as guards and the reverse would be positive all round, went the mantra. The guards would be less likely to abuse their authority, as it would soon be their turn to be under lock and key. And the prisoners would have an incentive for good behaviour, since violent acting-out would attract retaliation. Also, there was no longer an upside to criminality. Gang dominance got you no material wealth, and you couldn’t fence anything: who’d want to buy stuff that was replicated in all the Consilience furnished houses anyway? There were no illicit substances that could be bootlegged or pushed, no rackets that could be run. That was the official theory.

But it seemed some criminals wanted to throw their weight around just for the hell of it: top dog was top dog, even if there was no financial payoff. Gangs formed, non-criminals were intimidated by criminals or else drawn into circles of dark power they found newly appealing. There were home invasions in the town, trashing-and-smashing parties, maybe even – it was rumoured – gang rapes. At one point there was a threat of an uprising against management, with hostages taken and ears cut off, but that plan was discovered in time, through a spy.

The outside forces could always have turned off the power supply and the water – any halfwit could figure that out, in Stan’s opinion – but then the bad news would leak out and the Project would go down in flames, way too publicly. The model would be judged worthless. And a shitload of investors’ money would have been wasted.

Once surveillance was tightened, the worst troublemakers vanished. Consilience was a closed system – once inside, nobody went out – so where had they gone? “Transferred to another wing” was the official version. Or else “health problems.” Rumours as to their actual fates began to circulate, in furtive hints and nods. Behaviour improved dramatically.

Duty

Lunch completed, Stan has a brief rest in his cell; then, once the chicken dumplings have settled, he works out in the weights room, concentrating on his core strength. Then it’s time for his shift at the poultry facility.

Positron has four kinds of animals – cows, pigs, rabbits, and chickens. It also has extensive greenhouses that stand on the sites of demolished buildings, and several acres of apple trees, in addition to the outdoor market gardens. These, and the soybean and perennial-wheat fields, are supposed to produce the fresh food, both for Positron Prison and for the town of Consilience. Not only the fresh foods but the frozen ones, and not only foods but drink: soon there will be a brewery. Some items are brought in from outside – quite a few items, in fact – but that state of affairs is viewed as temporary: in no time at all, the Project will be self-sustaining.

Except for paper products, and plastics, and fuel, and sugar, and bananas, and …

But still, think of the savings in other areas, such as chickens. The chickens have been an unqualified success. They’re plump and tasty, they breed like mice, eggs roll out of them with clockwork regularity. They eat the leafy leftovers from the vegetables, and the table scraps from the Positron prison meals, and the chopped-up remnants of slaughtered animals. The pigs eat the same things, only more of them. The cows and the rabbits are still vegetarian.

But apart from eating them, Stan has nothing to do with the cows and pigs and rabbits, only the chickens. These live in wire cages but are let out for a run twice a day, which is supposed to improve their morale. Their heating and light are run by a computer inside a little shed, which Stan checks periodically: there was a malfunction once that almost resulted in roast chicken, but Stan knew enough to be able to reprogram and save the day. The eggs are collected via ingenious chutes and funnels, with a digital program counting them; Stan himself has made some improvements that reduced egg breakage, but it’s running fine now. Mainly he spends his four-hour shift supervising the afternoon chicken outing, breaking up the pecking-order squabbles, and monitoring the combs for poor health and moping.

It’s a make-work job, he knows that. He suspects that each chicken has a chip implanted in it, with the real supervision done that way, in a roomful of automated chicken snoopers recording numbers on flow charts and graphs. But he finds the routine soothing.

In earlier days – during the semi-reign of the run-amok real criminals, and before the authorities had put in the spyware cameras overlooking the poultry facility – Stan got daily visitations during his shifts from men inside Positron, his fellow prisoners-for-a-month.

What they wanted was a short time alone with a chicken. They were willing to trade for it. In return, Stan would be offered protection from the furtive gang thuggery that was then running like an undercurrent beneath the orderly routines of Positron Prison.

“You want to what?” he asked the first time. The guy had spelled it out: he wanted to have sex with a chicken. It didn’t hurt the chicken, he’d done it before, it was normal, lots of guys did it, and chickens didn’t talk. A guy got very horny in here with no outlets, right? And it was no fair that Stan was keeping the chickens all to himself, and if he didn’t unlock that wire cage right now, his life might not be so pleasant, supposing he was allowed to keep it, because he might end up as a chicken substitute like the fag he probably was.

Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better that than dead.

Conor would have known what to do. Conor would have cold-cocked the guy, turned him into chicken feed. Conor would have charged a higher price. Conor would have been running the thuggery himself. But then, Conor might not have survived, once Management started ironing out the Positron glitches in dead earnest.

Strolling between the rows of cages now, listening to the soothing clucks of contented hens, smelling the familiar ammonia scent of chicken shit, he wonders if he’s ashamed of himself for his chicken pimping, and discovers that he isn’t. Worse, he ponders giving it a try himself, which might ease his tormented desires by wiping the image of Jasmine off his brain with a living feather duster. But there were the surveillance cameras: a man could look very undignified with a chicken stuck onto him like a marshmallow on a stick. Most likely it wouldn’t work as an exorcism: he’d only start having daydreams about Jasmine in feathers.

Cut it, Stan, he tells himself. Block it off. Suck it up. He’s getting way too obsessive. There must be a drug he could take to get rid of this waking dream. No, this waking nightmare: endless tantalization, with no release. Maybe he’ll ask Charmaine about some sort of calming, deflationary pill: she works in Medical, she could get her hands on something. But how can he explain his problem to her – I’m lusting for a woman I’ve never seen – much less his needs? She’s so clean, so crisp, so blue and white, so baby-powder-scented. She wouldn’t understand a compulsion as twisted as this. Not to mention so plain bone-ass dumb.

Maybe he needs to spend some time in the woodworking shop, after his poultry shift. Saw something in two. Pound a few nails.

The Heart Goes Last

Charmaine slips her green smock on over her orange basics. There’s another Special Procedure scheduled for this afternoon. They always do them in the afternoons; they like to avoid the darkness of night. That way it’s more cheerful for everyone, her included.

She checks to make sure she has her mask, and her surgical gloves: yes, in her pocket. First she needs to get the key from the monitoring desk that sits at the conjunction of three corridors. There’s no receptionist in the flesh at that desk, only a head box, but at least there’s a head in the box. Or a canned image of a head. Whether it’s live or not is anyone’s guess: they do those things so well nowadays. Maybe soon they’ll have robots carrying out the Special Procedures and she’ll no longer be required for them. Would that be a good thing? No. Surely the Procedure needs the human factor. It’s more respectful.

“Could I have the key, please,” she says to the head. It’s best to treat the heads as if they’re real, just in case they are.

“Log in, please,” says the head, smiling. She, or it, is an attractive though square-jawed brunette with bangs and small hoop earrings. The heads change every few days, maybe to give the illusion that they exist in real time.

Charmaine can’t stop herself from wondering if the head can see her. She enters her code, verifies it with her thumb, stares at the iris reader beside the head box until it blinks.

“Thank you,” says the head. A plastic key slides out of a slot at the bottom of the box. Charmaine pockets it. “Here is your top-confidential Special Procedure for today.” A slip of paper emerges from a second slot: room number, Positron Prison name, age, last dosage of sedative, and when administered. The man must be pretty doped up. It’s better that way.

She keys herself into the dispensary, locates the cabinet, codes its door open. There’s the vial, all ready for her, and the needle. She snaps on her gloves. The man is attached to his bed at five points, as they always are now, so thrashing around, kicking, and biting are not options. He’s groggy but awake, which is good. Charmaine is in favour of awake: it would be wrong to carry out the Procedure on someone who’s asleep, because they would miss out. On what exactly she’s not sure, but on something that’s nicer than it otherwise would be.

He looks up at her: despite the drugs, he’s clearly frightened. He tries to speak: a thickened sound comes out. Uhuhuhuh … They always make that sound; she finds it a little painful.

“Hello,” she says. “Isn’t it a lovely day? Look at all that sunshine! Who could be down on a day like today? Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” This is true: from all she’s observed, the experience appears to be an ecstatic one. The bad part happens to her, because she’s the one who has to worry about whether what she’s doing is right. It’s a big responsibility, and worse because she isn’t supposed to tell anyone what she’s actually doing, not even Stan.

Granted, it’s only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that.

Most of the Procedures are men, but not all. Though none of the ones she’s done have been women, yet. Women are not so incorrigible: that must be it.

She leans over, kisses this man on the forehead. A young man, smooth-skinned, golden under the tattoos. She leaves the mask in her pocket. She’s supposed to wear it for the Procedure to protect against germs, but she never does: a mask would be scary. No doubt she’s being monitored via some hidden camera, but so far no one has reprimanded her about this minor breach of protocol. It’s not easy for them to find people willing to carry out the Procedure in an efficient yet caring way, they’d told her: dedicated people, sincere people. But someone has to do it, for the good of all.

The first time she attempted the forehead kiss, there was a lunge of the head, an attempt at snapping. He’d drawn blood. She requested that a neck restraint be added. And it was. They listen to feedback, here at Positron.

She strokes the man’s head, smiles with her deceptive teeth. She hopes she appears to him like an angel: an angel of mercy. Because isn’t she one? Such men are like Stan’s brother, Conor: they don’t fit anywhere. They’ll never be happy where they are – in Positron, in Consilience, maybe even on the entire Planet Earth. So she’s providing the alternative for him. The escape. Either this man will go to a better place, or else to nowhere. Whichever it is, he’s about to have a great time getting there.

“Have a wonderful trip,” she says to him. She pats his arm, then turns her back so he can’t see her sliding the needle into the vial and drawing up the contents.

“Off we go,” she says cheerfully. She finds the vein, slips in the needle.

Uhuhuh, he says. He strains upward. His eyes are horrified, but not for long. His face relaxes; he turns his gaze from her to the ceiling, the white blank ceiling, which is no longer white and blank for him. He smiles. She times the procedure: five minutes of ecstasy. It’s more than a lot of people get in their whole lifetimes.

Then he’s unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last.

Textbook. If anything, better. It’s good to be good at what you do.

She codes in the numbers that signal a successful termination, drops the needle into the recycling bin – not much sense in having sterile needles for the Procedure, so they get reused. Positron is big on anti-waste procedures. She peels off the gloves, contributes them to the Save Our Plastics box, then leaves the room. Others will now arrive, do whatever is done. The death will be recorded as “cardiac arrest,” which is true so far as it goes.

What will happen to the body? Not cremation; that’s a wasteful power draw. And nobody in any form, dead or alive, departs through the gates of Consilience. She’s wondered about blood siphoning, about organ harvesting, but wouldn’t they want them brain-dead and on a drip rather than plain old dead, period? Surely the fresher the better, when it comes of organs. Protein-enriched livestock feed? Charmaine can’t believe they’d do that, it wouldn’t be respectful. But whatever happens, it’s bound to be useful, and that’s all she needs to know. There are some things it’s better not to think about.

Tonight she’ll join the knitting circle, as usual. Some of them are doing little cotton hats for newborns, some of them are working on a new thing – blue knitted teddy bears, so cute. “Had a nice day?” the knitting circle women will say to her. “Oh, a perfect day,” she’ll reply.

Scooter

It’s mid-September. In the evenings, when Stan goes for a stroll around the block, he wears a fleece jacket. A few leaves have fallen on the lawn already; he rakes them up in the early mornings, before breakfast. Not many people around at that hour. Just the odd black Surveillance car, gliding past silently as a shark. Is it protocol to give them a friendly wave? Stan has decided against it: better to pretend they’re invisible. Anyway, who’s inside? Those cars may be remote-controlled, like drones.

After breakfast – poached eggs if he’s lucky, they’re one of his favourites – and then a goodbye peck from Charmaine, he goes to his civilian job, working at the electric scooter repair depot. It was a good choice: his one-time job at Dimple Robotics has been taken into consideration by those who hand out the jobs around here, and anyway he’s always liked tinkering, messing around with machines and their digital programs. He once took apart the cheap musical toaster some joker from Dimple had given them for a wedding present and rebuilt it to play “Steam Heat.” Charmaine had thought that was cute, at first. Though repetitive melodies can get on the nerves.

Each scooter has a number, but no name attached, because it wouldn’t do for a driver to know the identity of the Alternate, in case they happened to run into each other on a switchover day. There would be grudges held, there would be arguments: Who made the dent? Who scratched the finish? What kind of a dickhead would let its battery run down, or leave it out in the rain? It’s not as if the things don’t have covers! The scooters belong to the town of Consilience, not to any one person. Or any two people. But it’s amazing how possessive you can get about this shit.

The scooter he’s working on at the shop is the one Charmaine drives: pink with purple stripes. The scooters are all two-tone, to match the two lockers of their drivers. His own – his own and Max’s – is green and red. It’s infuriating to think of that bastard Max driving around on the scooter, with his ass-end clamped onto the very same scooter seat that Stan thinks of as his own. But better not to dwell on that. He needs to keep his cool.

Charmaine has been having trouble with her scooter for a couple of days now. The darn thing – that’s how she puts it – has been sputtering at start-up, then conking out after a few blocks. Maybe something about the solar hookup?

“I’ll take it in for you,” Stan offered. “To the depot. Work on it there.”

“Oh thanks, hon, would you?” she said airily. Maybe not as appreciatively as once, or is he imagining that? “You’re a doll,” she added a bit absentmindedly. She was cleaning the stove at the time: such chores are appealing to her, she gets some sort of a kick out of dirt removal. Since it means he always has squeaky clean underwear, he’s not complaining.

He’d identified the problem – frayed wiring – and spent a couple of evenings in their garage fixing the short-outs so the scooter was operating just right and he could drive it down to the depot to do some more work on it, or that’s what he told Charmaine.

Really he wanted to have the scooter all to himself. In two more weeks – on the first day of October – it will be turned over to Jasmine, and he wants to customize it in advance of that event.

Why has it taken him so long to figure this out? This method of tracing Jasmine? When it’s been right in front of him all this time! All he needs is a second Consilience smartphone; with a little hackwork and manipulation, he can then synch his own to it and embed the doctored phone in the scooter. Then he can track where Jasmine goes when he’s in prison and recover that stored information via his own phone once he gets out. No one in the Project can access outside Wi-Fi, but they can communicate on the Consilience Wi-Fi network within the system, and view maps of the town on the Consilience interactive GPS, and that’s all he needs.

It was easy enough to get hold of Charmaine’s phone. She’d been so preoccupied lately she convinced herself she must have set it down somewhere, maybe at work, and who knows what happened to it? She reported it gone and they issued her another one. So far, so good. He’ll be in the slammer all October, managing the chickens, but when he comes out on November 1 he’ll be able to reconstruct the pathways Jasmine has been following in his absence.

And eventually those pathways will lead him somehow to a point of intersection – a place where he might be able to catch a glimpse of her, or even ambush her. On a switchover day, he’ll bump into her in the supermarket aisle, or what passes for a supermarket in Consilience. He’ll linger on a street corner. He’ll crouch behind a shrub, on a vacant lot. Then, before she knows it, he’ll have his mouth on those cherry-flavoured lips, and she’ll crumple; she won’t be able to resist, any more than paper can resist a lit match. Whoosh! Up in flames! Ring of fire! What a picture. He can barely stand it.

You’re nuts, he tells himself. You’re a stalker. You are a freaking maniac. You might get caught. Then what, smartass? Off to the hospital for your so-called health problems? What do they do in Positron to lunatics like you?

Nevertheless, he proceeds. The seat of the scooter is the best place to hide the extra phone. He cuts a slit in the fake leather, low down at the side, where it won’t be noticed. There. Done. He uses a line of superglue to seal the cut; nobody who isn’t looking would ever spot it.

“Good as new,” he tells Charmaine as he returns her scooter. She exclaims with joy, a cooing sound he used to find provocative but now finds sickly sweet, then gives him a perfunctory hug.

“I’m so grateful,” she tells him. But not grateful enough by a long shot. When he crawls on top of her that night and tries a few new gambits, hoping for more than her limited repertoire of little gasping breaths followed by a sigh, she starts to giggle and says he’s tickling. Which is not very fucking encouraging. He might as well be porking a chicken.

But never mind. Now that he can follow Jasmine, divine her every move, read her mind, she’s almost within reach. Meanwhile, he can practise for a couple of weeks by tracking Charmaine around on the scooter. It will be boring, because where can she go? The bakery where she works, the shops, the house, the bakery, the shops. She’s so predictable. No news there. But he’ll be able to tell whether his two-phone system is working or not.

Pushover

It’s already the first of October. Another switchover day. Where has the time gone?

Charmaine lies tangled in her shed clothes on the floor of the vacant house – quite a solid house this time, slated for reno rather than demolition. The wallpaper is subdued, an embossed ivy-leaf design in eggshell and truffle. The writing stands out on it: dark red paint, black marker. Short, forceful words, sudden and hard. She says them over to herself like a charm.

“You’re such a surprise,” Max says to her. Murmurs in her ear, which he’s nibbling. Will this be a two-in-a-row day? she wonders. She arrived at the vacant house early, hoping it would be. “Cool as a cucumber,” Max continues, “but then … That husband of yours is one lucky guy.”

“I’m not the same with him,” she says. She wishes he wouldn’t ask her to talk about Stan. It’s not fair.

“Tell me how you are, with him,” says Max. “No. Tell me how you’d be with a perfect stranger.” He wants her to turn him on by describing mild atrocities. A few ropes, modified screaming. It’s a game they sometimes play, now that it’s fall and they know each other better.

Now she has to think about Stan. Stan in real life. “Max,” she says. “I need us to be serious.”

“I am serious,” says Max, moving his mouth down her neck.

“No, listen. I think he suspects me of something.” Why does she even think that? Because Stan’s been looking at her, or rather looking through her, as if she’s made of glass. That’s scarier than if he’d been crabby or angry, or outright accused her.

“How could he?” says Max. His head comes up: he’s alarmed. If Stan walked in through the front door, Max would be out the window like a shot. That’s what he’d do, she knows by now; that’s the realistic truth. She shouldn’t spook him too much, because she doesn’t want him fleeing, not before there’s a need. She wants to clutch him against her, the way kids clutch their stuffed animals: the thought of letting him go makes her sadder than anything.

“I don’t think he knows,” she says. “Not knows. As such. But he looks at me funny.”

“Is that all?” says Max. “Hey. I look at you funny too. Who wouldn’t?” He takes hold of her hair, turns her head, gives her a brief kiss. “Are you worried?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. He has a temper,” she says. “He might get violent.” That has an effect on Max.

“I would,” he says. “Hey. I would love to get violent with you.” He raises his hand; she flinches away, as he wants her to. Now they’re entwined again, snarled up in random cloth, falling down into namelessness.

Eyes closed, getting her breath back, she realizes how worried she is really: on a scale of one to ten, it’s at least an eight. What if Stan really does know? And what if he cares? He could get ugly, but how ugly? He could turn threatening. His brother Conor is that way, from what Stan’s told her: he’d think nothing of bashing a girl senseless if she cheated on him. What if Stan has a bad part like that hidden inside him?

Maybe she should protect herself now, while she can. If she saved just a little from each Procedure vial – if she pocketed one of the needles instead of depositing it for recycling – would anyone notice? She’d have to slide the needle in while Stan was asleep, so he’d be denied a beatific exit. Which would be unfair. But there’s a downside to everything.

What would she do with the body? That would be a problem. Dig a hole in the lawn? Someone would see. She has a wild thought of stashing it in her pink locker, supposing she could even drag it down there: Stan is quite heavy. Also she might have to cut part of him off to make him fit in, though the lockers are big. But if she left him there it would make a horrible stench, and the next time Max’s wife, Jocelyn, came down to the cellar to open her purple locker she’d be sure to smell it.

Max has never said much about Jocelyn, despite Charmaine’s gentle pestering. At the outset she’d vowed never to be jealous, because isn’t she herself the one Max truly wants? And she isn’t jealous: curiosity isn’t the same as jealousy. But whenever she asks, Max stonewalls her. “You don’t need to know,” he says.

She pictures Jocelyn as a rangy, aristocratic woman with her hair skinned back from her head, like a ballerina or a schoolteacher in old movies. A distant, snobby, disapproving woman. Sometimes she has the feeling that Jocelyn knows about her and is contemptuous of her. Worse: that Max has told Jocelyn about her, that they both think she’s a credulous pushover and a dime-a-dozen little slut, that they laugh together about her. But that’s paranoid.

She doesn’t think Max would be much help with Stan, supposing Stan was dead. Yes, Max is overpoweringly sexy, but he doesn’t have backbone, he doesn’t have grit, not the way Charmaine herself has them. He’d leave her holding the bag, the bagful of danger. The bagful of Stan, because she’d have to put Stan into a bag of some kind, she wouldn’t be able to look at him in cold blood that way. Lying inert and defenceless. She’d remember too much about how it was when they were in love, and then when they first got married, and had sex in the ocean, and he had that green shirt with the penguins on it … Just thinking about that shirt while at the same time thinking about Stan being dead makes her want to cry.

So maybe she does love him. Yes, of course she does! Think of how lucky she was to meet him, after Grandma Win died and she was all by herself, since her mother was gone and her father was gone in a different way, plus she had no wish to see that person ever again. Think of everything she and Stan have been through together, of what they had, what they lost, what they still had in spite of those losses. Think of how loyal he’s been to her.

Be the person you’ve always wanted to be, they’d said at Positron. Is this the person she’s always wanted to be? A person so slack, so quick to give herself over, so easily rendered helpless, so lacking in, lacking in what? But whatever she’s lacking in, she would never want to harm Stan.

“Roll over, dirty girl,” says Max. “Open your eyes.” At some moments he likes her to watch him. “Tell me what you want.”

“Don’t stop,” she says.

He pauses. “Don’t stop what?” It’s such pauses that will make her say anything.

Has she been a fool? No question, yes. Has it been worth it? No. Maybe. Yes.

Or yes, right now.