The Heart Goes Last - Страница 12

She ought to have been appalled by herself, by what she’d done. Instead she was amazed, and also jubilant. Had it really happened? Would it happen again? How could she contact him, or even believe in his existence? She couldn’t. It was like standing on a cliff edge. It made her dizzy.

At ten o’clock she went into her double cell, where the woman she shared with was already asleep, and there was the reassuring clang of the door and click of the lock. It felt safe to be caged in, now that she knew she had this other person inside her who was capable of escapades and contortions she’d never known about before. It wasn’t Stan’s fault, it was the fault of chemistry. People said chemistry when they meant something else, such as personality, but she does mean chemistry. Smells, textures, flavours, secret ingredients. She sees a lot of chemistry in her work, she knows what it can do. Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless.

She slept that night as if drunk. The next day she went about her hospital duties as briskly as usual, hiding behind the grillwork of her smile. Ever since then she’s been waiting: inside Positron while Max inspects vacant dwellings in Consilience; then in the house with Stan, working at her bakery job during the days; she does the pies and the cinnamon buns. Then there’s an hour or two of being Jasmine, with Max, on switchover days, while he’s going into Positron Prison and she’s coming back to civilian life, or vice versa. A vacant house. The anxiety. The haste. The rampage.

Then more waiting. It’s like being stretched so thin you feel you’ll break the very next minute; but she hasn’t broken yet. Though maybe leaving the note was breakage of a sort. Or the beginning of it. She should have had better control.

Stan must have read the note. It has to have been like that. He must have read it and then tucked it back under the fridge, because Max described where he’d found it, and it was a lot farther over to the right than where she’d stashed it. Ever since then, Stan has been so preoccupied he might as well be deaf and blind. When he makes love – that’s how Charmaine thinks of it, as distinct from whatever it is that happens with Max – when Stan makes love, it isn’t to her. Or not his usual idea of her. He’s almost angry.

“Let go,” Stan said to her once. “Just fucking let go!”

“What did you mean, ‘Let go?’ ” she asked him afterwards in her puzzled, clueless voice, the voice that had once been her only voice. “Let go of what? What are you talking about?” He said, “Never mind” and “Sorry” and seemed ashamed of himself. She did nothing to discourage that. She wants him to feel ashamed of himself, because such feelings of his are a part of her disguise.

He called her Jasmine once, by mistake. What if she’d answered? It would have been a giveaway. But she caught herself and pretended she hadn’t heard. Maybe Stan has fallen in love with her note, with its ill-advised fuchsia kiss. Is that funny, or is it dangerous?

What if Stan finds out? About her, about Max. What would he do? He has a temper; it was worse when they were in the car, but even since coming here he’s thrown some glassware, he’s sworn at things when they don’t work the way he wants: the hedge pruner, the lawn trimmer. He wouldn’t enjoy the discovery that there is no Jasmine really, except inside Charmaine. She would lose him then. He wouldn’t be able to stand it.

She needs to break it off with Max. She needs to keep them both safe – Stan as well as Max – and herself too. Just not yet. Surely she can permit herself a few more hours, a few more moments, of whatever it is. Not happiness; it isn’t that.

It would have been better if Max’s wife, Jocelyn, had found that note. What would she have thought? Nothing too unsafe. She wouldn’t have known who “Max” was because he never uses that name with his wife, according to him, and he doesn’t have sex with her much, or nothing like the sex he has with Charmaine, so there’s no need to be jealous. It’s two different worlds, and Max and Jasmine are in one of them, and the wife is in the other.

For Jocelyn, “Max” and “Jasmine” would just be the Alternates, living in the house whenever she and her husband were in Positron. She would have thought that “Max” and “Jasmine” were Stan and Charmaine, if she paid any attention at all. What else could she possibly have thought?

So, whew! Charmaine tells herself. Looks like you got away with it, so far.

You said what? She hears Max’s voice in her head, the way she often does when

he isn’t there. She invents him, she knows it; she makes up things for him to say. Though it doesn’t feel like making up, it feels as if he’s really talking to her. Whew? Like a vintage funny-paper guy? Baby, you’re so fucking retro, you’re cool! Now I’m gonna make you say something better with your slutty purple mouth. Ask me for it. Bend over.

Anything, she answers. Anything inside this non-house, inside this nothing space, a space that doesn’t exist, between these two people with no real names. Oh anything. Already she’s abject.

Here it is now, today’s address. Max’s scooter is already parked, discreetly, four derelict doors away. She can barely make her way up the front steps, her legs are so wobbly. If anyone were watching, they’d think she was crippled.

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.