The Heart Goes Last (6 page)

When he gets to the list of jobs, Stan chooses Robotics first. After that, IT; and third, scooter repair. He figures he could do any one of them. Just so long as he doesn’t end up in Kitchen Cleanup, he’ll be fine.

That evening, he and Charmaine do their first shopping with their Posidollars, and share their first meal in their new abode. Charmaine can’t get over it; she’s so happy she’s warbling. She wants to open all the closet doors, turn on all the appliances. She can hardly wait to see what sorts of jobs they’ll be given, and she’s signed herself up for scooter lessons. It will all be so terrific!

“Let’s go to bed,” says Stan. She’s spinning out of control. He feels he needs a butterfly net to catch her, she’s so hyper.

“I’m just too excited!” she says. As if, thinks Stan. He wishes he were the object of that excitement, and not the dishwasher, which she’s now cooing over as if it’s a kitten. He can’t shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there’s no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he’s ungrateful by nature.

Stan’s lost count of the exact time they’ve been inside the twin cities. You can get into a drifting mode. Has a year gone by already? More than a year. He’s repaired scooters one month, dealt with egg-counting software the next, then back to the scooters. Nothing he hasn’t been able to handle.

He’s listening to “Paper Doll” on his phone ear buds while rinsing out his coffee cup. Those flirty guys, he hums to himself. At first he hated the music in Consilience, but he’s begun to find it oddly consoling. Doris Day is even kind of a turn-on.

Today is switchover day, when he and Charmaine both go into the prison. How does she pass the time away from him, inside the women’s wing? “We knit a lot,” she’s told him. “In the off-hours. And there are the vegetable gardens, and the cooking – we take turns at those daily things. And the laundry, of course. And then at the hospital, my job as Chief Medications Administrator – it’s a big responsibility! I’m never bored! The days just fly by!”

“Do you miss me?” Stan asked her a week ago. “When you’re in there?”

“Of course I miss you. Don’t be silly,” she said, kissing him on the nose. But a nose kiss wasn’t what he wanted.
Do you hunger for me, do you burn for me?
That’s what he’d like to ask. But he doesn’t dare ask that, because he’s almost certain she would laugh.

It’s not that they don’t have sex. They certainly have more of it than they had in the car; but it’s sex that Charmaine enacts, like yoga, with careful breath control. What he wants is sex that can’t be helped. He wants helplessness. No no no, yes yes yes. That’s what he wants. He’s come to realize that, in recent months.

Down in the cellar, he opens the large green locker and stows away the clothes he’s been wearing for summer: the shorts, the T-shirts, the jeans. He may not be using these for a while: by the time he gets back here next month, the hot weather may be over and he’ll be into the fleece pullovers, though you never know with September. He won’t have to do so much lawn maintenance then, which is a plus. Though the lawn will be a wreck. Some guys have no feeling for lawns, they take them for granted, they let them mat up and dry out and then the yellow ants get into them and it takes a lot of work to bring them back. If he were here all the time he could keep the lawn in peak condition.

Upstairs, clean towels are deployed in the bathroom, clean sheets are on the bed. Charmaine did that before she set off on her scooter for Positron. In the past couple of months he’s been leaving the house after she does, so he does the final check: no bathtub ring, no orphaned sock, no ends of soap or wispy gatherings of shed hair on the floor. When they return on the first day of every second month, Stan and Charmaine are supposed to find the house pristine, spotless, hinting of lemon-scented cleaning products, and Charmaine likes to leave it that way. She says they should lead by example.

It certainly hasn’t been spotless every time they’ve returned. As Charmaine has pointed out, there have been hairs, there have been toast crumbs, there have been smudges. More than that: three months ago Stan found a folded note: the corner was sticking out from under the refrigerator. It must originally have been attached with the silver fridge magnet in the shape of a duck, the same one Charmaine uses to post shopping reminders.

Despite the strict Consilience taboo against contact with Alternates, he read the note immediately. Though it was done on a printer, it was shockingly intimate:

Darling Max, I can hardly wait till next time. I’m starved for you! I need you so much. XXOO and you know what more – Jasmine.

There was a lipstick kiss: hot pink. No, darker: some kind of purple. Not violet, not mauve, not maroon. He riffled through his head, trying to recall the names of the colours on the paint chips and fabric swatches Charmaine spends so much time brooding over. He’d lifted the paper to his nose, breathed in: still a faint scent, like cherry bubble gum.

Charmaine has never worn a lipstick that colour. And she’s never written him a note like that. He dropped it into the trash as if it was burning, but then fished it out and slid it back under the refrigerator: Jasmine shouldn’t know that her note to Max had been intercepted. Also, it’s possible Max looks under the fridge for such notes – it might be a kinky little game they play – and Max would be upset not to find it. “Did you get my note?” Jasmine would say to him as they lay stuck together. “What note?” Max would answer. “Omigod, one of them found it!” Jasmine would exclaim. Then she would laugh. It might even turn her on, the consciousness of a third pair of eyes having seen the imprint of her avid mouth.

Not that she needs turning on. Stan can’t stop thinking about that: about Jasmine, about her mouth. It’s bad enough here at the house, even with Charmaine breathing beside him, lightly or heavily depending on what they’re doing, or rather on what he’s doing – Charmaine has never been much of a joiner, more of a sidelines woman, cheering him on from a distance. But at Positron, in his narrow bed in the men’s wing, that kiss floats in the darkness before his open eyes like four plush pillows, parted invitingly as if about to sigh or speak. He knows the colour of that mouth by now, he’s tracked it down.

Fuchsia. It has a moist, luscious feel to it.
Oh hurry,
that mouth says
. I need you, I need you now! I’m starved for you!
But it’s speaking to Stan, not to the guy whose clothes repose in the locker beside his own. Not to Max.

Max and Jasmine, those are their names – the names of the Alternates, the two others who occupy the house, walk through its routines, cater to its demands, act out its fantasies of normal life when he and Charmaine aren’t there. He isn’t supposed to know those names, or anything at all about their owners: that’s Consilience protocol. But because of the note, he does know the names. And by now he knows – or deduces, or, more accurately, imagines – a lot of other things as well.

Max’s locker is the red one. Charmaine’s locker is pink, Jasmine’s is purple. In an hour or so – once Stan has left the house, once he’s logged out – Max will walk in through the front door, open the red locker, take out his stored clothes, carry them upstairs, arrange them in the bedroom, on the shelves, in the closet: enough for a month’s stay.

Then Jasmine will arrive. She won’t bother with her locker, not at first. They’ll throw themselves into each other’s arms. No: Jasmine will throw herself into Max’s arms, press herself against him, open her fuchsia mouth, tear off Max’s clothes and her own, pull him down onto – what? The living room carpet? Or will they stumble upstairs, reeling with lust, and fall entwined onto the bed, so thoughtfully and neatly made up with newly ironed sheets by Charmaine before she left? Sheets with a border of birthday-party bluebirds tying pink ribbon bows. Nursery sheets, kiddie sheets: Charmaine’s idea of cuteness. Those sheets don’t seem right for Max and Jasmine, who would never choose such bland, pastel accessories for themselves. Black satin is more their style. Though, like everything else in the place, the sheets came with the house.

Jasmine isn’t a sheet ironer, nor does she make up the bed for Stan and Charmaine before she leaves: they find the mattress bare, and no towels set out in the bathroom either. But of course Jasmine is lax about such household details, thinks Stan, because all she really cares about is sex.

Stan rearranges Jasmine and Max in his head, this way and that, lace bra ripped asunder, legs in the air, hair wildly tangled, even though he has no idea what either of them looks like. Max’s back is covered with scratch marks like a cat fancier’s leather sofa.

What a slut, that Jasmine. Flaming hot in an instant, like an induction cooker. He can’t stand it.

Maybe she’s ugly. Ugly ugly ugly, he repeats like a charm, trying to exorcise her – her and her maddening bubble-gum lipstick smell and her musky voice, a voice he’s never heard. But it doesn’t work, because she’s not ugly, she’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful she glows in the dark.

No such pranks with Charmaine. No blistering fuchsia kisses, no rolling around on the carpet. A month from now it’ll be “Stanley! Stan! Honey! I’m here!” in a light, clear voice, a voice without undertones: Charmaine, wearing her blue-and-white-striped shirt, so crisp, with its faint underscent of bleach and its overtone of baby-powder-themed fabric softener.

He wouldn’t have her any other way. That’s why he married her: she was an escape from the many-layered, devious, ironic, hot–cold women he’d tangled himself up with until then; women too open to being poached by Conor, and by others as well. Transparency, certainty, fidelity: his various humiliations had taught him to value those. He liked the retro thing about Charmaine, the cookie-ad thing, her prissiness, the way she hardly ever swore. When they’d got married they’d pictured kids, once they could afford them. They still do picture them. Maybe that will happen soon, now that they’re no longer living in their car.

He keys in the code on his locker, waits for it to flash CLOSED, climbs the cellar stairs, leaves the house. Once outside, he taps a second code into the signal pad beside the door, coding himself out.

Over at Positron, Jasmine and Max must already have changed into the civvies they stored there last month. Now they must be checking out of their prison wings and ditching their orange prison uniforms at the main desk. Very soon they’ll hop onto their scooters and make their way to this house. Stan has a voyeur’s urge to hide behind the hedge, that cedar hedge he trimmed last week, tidying up the slapdash job done by Max during his last sojourn. He’ll wait until they’re both inside, then peer through the windows. He’s figured out the sight lines, he’s left the ground-floor blinds up a crack. If they go upstairs, though, he’ll have no option but to set up the extension ladder, and he knows how screechy and metallic that would be.

And what if he falls off? Worse, if Max leans out the window, stark naked, and pushes him off? He doesn’t know anything about Max, except from what’s implied in that note; also, Max had first choice of lockers, and he chose the red one. He must be aggressive. Stan wouldn’t wish to be pushed off an extension ladder by an angry naked man, a naked man to whose rippling epidermis he now adds copious tattoos. Most likely Max also has a shaved head, covered in scars and welts from all the times he’s broken men’s teeth and jaws with the sheer force of his bullet-shaped skull.

Stan’s own skull still has a cushion of sandy hair, but it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-two. He’s never used his skull to butt anyone in the mouth, though he’s willing to bet Max has. Most likely Max once worked as a bodyguard for some black-jacketed, gold-chained, coke-pushing, girl-enslaving money lord, in his life before Positron. Someone like Conor, only a larger, tougher, meaner, more powerful Conor. On level ground, Stan might be able to hold his own against such a man, but on that ladder he’d be off balance. And he’d land in the hedge, bashing a jagged hole in it, after all his careful trimming.

That asswipe Max is even worse with the hedge than he is with the lawn. Stan found the hedge trimmer in the garage, its blade gummed up with slaughtered foliage. But there’s no chance Max is able to focus on hedge trimming, since Jasmine leaps on the poor sod every time she sees him in his leather work gloves and starts pawing at his belt buckle.

All things considered, better not to peer in the window.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day, not too hot for the first of August. Charmaine finds switchover days almost festive: when it’s not raining, the streets are full of people, smiling, greeting one another, some walking, some on their colour-coded scooters, the odd one in a golf cart. Now and then one of the dark Surveillance cars glides through them: there are more of those cars on switchover days.

Everyone seems quite happy: having two lives means there’s always something different to look forward to. It’s like having a vacation every month. But which life is the vacation and which is the work? Charmaine hardly knows.

Making her way to the Consilience town pharmacy on her pink-and-purple electric scooter, she checks her watch: she doesn’t have much time. She needs to key in at Positron by five-thirty at the latest, and it’s already three. She told Stan she had to do some ordering for the prison hospital: that’s why she was in a rush to leave the house. The month before last, her excuse was slipcovers – didn’t he agree about the slipcovers, weren’t they a drab colour, shouldn’t they both go and view the selection and put in a requisition for something more cheerful? Look, she has some fabric swatches! A floral, or maybe an abstract motif?

Anything along those lines and Stan zones out, and she can count on his not having heard a word she’s said. He’d notice her if she were to suddenly disappear, but he doesn’t register her much otherwise. Lately he’s been treating her like white noise, like the rivulet sound on their sleep machine. This would once have hurt her – did hurt her – but now it suits her fine.