The Heart Goes Last (14 page)

Aurora consults her PosiPad again. “I see here that you’re set to resume your duties tomorrow afternoon,” she says. “After lunch. When we make a mistake here, we do move to rectify it. Congratulations on a good outcome! We’ve all been rooting for you.”

Charmaine wonders who’s been doing the rooting, because she hasn’t noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes. “Goodness, I’m late for a meeting,” says Aurora. “We have a whole new group of prisoners coming in, and all at once! Any further questions or points of information?”

Yes, says Charmaine. While she herself has been detained in Positron, what has Stan been told about her situation? Surely he’s been worried about her! Does he know why she wasn’t there? At home. Was he told what happened? Or did he think she’d just been subtracted? Sent to Medications? Erased? She hasn’t dared to ask about this before – it might have sounded like complaining, it might have cast suspicion, it might have interfered with her chances for exoneration – but she’s been cleared now.

“Stan?” says Aurora blankly.

“Stan. My husband, Stan,” says Charmaine.

“That’s not information I have access to,” says Aurora. “But I’m sure it’s been taken care of.

“Thank you,” says Charmaine again. To demand any more answers during this delicate transition that’s taking place – this rehabilitation – might be pushing her luck.

Then there’s Max, kept equally in the dark. Longing for her! Lusting for her! He must be going crazy. But she couldn’t ask Aurora about Max.

“Could I maybe just send him a message?” Charmaine says. “Stan? For Valentine’s Day? To let him know I’m okay, and that I …” A tremulous pause on the verge of tears, which she feels she might really shed. “That I love him?”

Aurora stops smiling. “No. No messages while in Positron. You know better than that. If prison isn’t prison, the outside world has no meaning! Now, enjoy the rest of your experience here.” She nods, stands up, and bustles out of the Chat Room.

At least there won’t be much more of these darn towels, Charmaine thinks as she folds and stacks, folds and stacks. Maybe you can get a lung disease from the fluff. As she’s wheeling her completed set over to the Outtake window, there’s a sort of murmuring behind her, coming from the other women in Towel-Folding. She turns to see: it’s Ed, the CEO of the Positron Project, ushering in an older woman who isn’t wearing an orange boiler suit. On her head she has something that looks like a turban, decorated with red felt flowers.

“Oh my god!” Charmaine says. It just sort of comes out of her. “Lucinda Quant! I used to love your show,
The Home Front,
it was so … I’m so glad you got better!” She’s babbling, she’s making a fool of herself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t …”

“Thanks,” says Lucinda Quant gruffly. She seems pleased. She’s quite leathery, or at least her skin is. She didn’t used to look like that on TV, but maybe it’s the illness.

“I’m sure Ms. Quant appreciates your support,” says Ed in that suave voice he has. “We’re giving her a quick tour of our wonderful project. She’s considering a new show called
After the Home Front
, so she can tell the world about the wonderful solution we have here, to the problems of homelessness and joblessness.” He smiles at Charmaine. He’s standing close to her. “You’ve been happy here, haven’t you?” he says. “Since coming to the Project?”

“Oh yes,” says Charmaine. “It’s been so, it’s been so …” How can she describe what it’s been, considering everything, such as Max and Stan? Is she going to cry?

“Excellent,” Ed says. He pats her arm and turns away, dismissing her. Lucinda Quant gives Charmaine a sharp glance from her beady, red-rimmed eyes. “Cat got your tongue?” she says.

“Oh no,” says Charmaine. Is Ed going to make trouble for her because she didn’t say the right thing? “It’s only … I wish I could’ve been on your show.” And she does wish that, because then maybe people would’ve sent in money, and she and Stan would never have felt the need to sign on.

Stan does the countdown: two more days before Valentine’s Day. The subject hasn’t come up again, but every once in a while he catches Jocelyn looking at him speculatively, as if measuring him.

Tonight they’re on the sofa as usual, but this time the upholstery will remain unsullied. They’re side by side, facing forward, like a married couple – which they are, though they’re married to other people. But they aren’t watching the digital gyrations of Charmaine and Phil tonight. They’re watching actual TV – Consilience TV, but still TV. If you drank enough beer, slit your eyes, wiped the context, you could almost believe you were in the outside world. Or the outside world in the past.

They’ve tuned in at the end of a motivational self-help show. So far as Stan can make out, it’s about channelling the positive energy rays of the universe through the invisible power points on your body. You do it through the nostrils: close the right nostril with the index finger, breathe in, open, close the left nostril, breathe out. It gives a whole new dimension to nose-picking.

The star of the show is a young light-haired woman in a skintight pink leotard. She looks familiar, but then such generic women do. Nice tits – especially when she does the right nostril – despite the air bubble chatter coming out of her mouth. So, something for everyone: self-help and nostrils for the women, tits for the men. Distractions. They don’t go out of their way to make you unhappy here.

The pink leotard woman tells them to practise every day, because if you focus, focus, focus on positive thoughts, you’ll attract your own luck to yourself and shut out those negative thoughts that try to get in. They can have such a toxic effect on your immune system, leading to cancer and also to outbreaks of acne, because the skin is the body’s largest organ and extra sensitive to negativity. Then she tells them that next week the feature will be pelvic alignment, so they should all pick up their yoga mats at the gym. She signs off with a freeze-frame smile.

Could that be Sandi, Stan wonders, Charmaine’s erstwhile slut friend from PixelDust? No, too pretty.

New music comes on – “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” sung by Judy Garland – and with it the Consilience logo:
consilience = cons + resilience. do time now, buy time for our future.

Yes, it’s another Town Meeting. Stan yawns, tries not to yawn again. He opens his eyes wider. Here come the usual head-deadeners: the graphs, the statistics, the hectoring disguised as uplift. Violent incidents are down for the third time in a row, says a small guy in a tight suit, and let’s keep that arrow moving down: shot of a graph. Egg production is up again. Another graph, then a shot of eggs rolling down a chute and an automatic counter registering each egg with a digitized number. Stan has a pang of nostalgia – those chickens and eggs were once
his
chickens and eggs. They were his responsibility, and, yes, his tranquility. But now all that has been taken away from him and he’s been demoted to chief toe licker for Jocelyn the spook.

Suck it up, he tells himself. Close the right nostril, breathe in.

Now another face comes on. It’s Ed the confidence man, onscreen to make them all feel confident, but an Ed who’s more substantial and assured, weightier in manner, more full of himself. Maybe he’s scored a major contract. In any case, he’s puffed up with the importance of what he’s about to deliver.

The Project has been going well, says Ed. Their unit, here at Consilience, was the first, the pioneering town, and others in the chain have similarly prospered. Head office is getting inquiries daily from other stricken communities, who see the Project as a way of solving their own problems, both economic and social. There are different solutions to similar problems – Louisiana has kept its honey-hole model, the for-profit hosting of recalcitrants from some of the other states, and Texas is still dealing with its criminality statistics by means of executions. But many other jurisdictions are looking for a more
rewarding
 … for a more
humane,
or at least a more … for something more like Consilience. There is every reason to believe that their twin city is being viewed at a high level as a possible model for the future. Full employment is hard to beat. He smiles.

But now, a frown. In fact, says Ed, the model has been shown to be so effective – so conducive to social order, and, because of that, so positive in economic terms, and indeed so positive for the invest – for the
supporters
and
visionaries
who’d had the courage and moral fibre to see a way forward in a time of multiple challenges … The Consilience model has been, in a word, so successful that it has created enemies. As successful enterprises always do. Where there is light, it does seem a rule that darkness will shortly appear. As it now has, he is sorry to inform them.

An even deeper frown, a thrusting of the forehead, a lowering of the chin, a raising of the shoulders: an angry-bull stance. Who are these enemies? First of all, they are reporters. Muck-raking journalists trying to worm their way in, to get evidence … to get pictures and other material that they can distort for so-called exposés, in order to turn the outside world against everything the Positron Project stands for. These shady so-called reporters aim to undermine the foundations of returning prosperity and to chip away at trust, that trust without which no society can function in a stable manner. Several of these journalists have actually made it inside the wall, pretending they wanted to sign on, but luckily they were identified in time. For instance, just the other day a female TV journalist with excellent credentials had been given a mini-tour under strict conditions of confidentiality but had been discovered in the act of taking clandestine pictures intended to present a slanted view.

How to explain the wish of such people to sabotage such an excellent venture? Except by saying they are maladjusted misfits who claim to be acting as they do in the interests of so-called press freedom, and in order to restore so-called human rights, and under the pretence that transparency is a virtue and the people need to know. But isn’t it a human right to have a job? Ed believes it is! And enough to eat, and a decent place to live, which Consilience provides – those are surely human rights!

These enemies, not to mince words – says Ed – have already been involved in stirring up protest gatherings, luckily quite small ones, and have been writing hostile blog posts, though happily without credibility. None of this has gone very far as yet, because what evidence do these malcontents have for their scurrilous allegations? Scurrilous allegations that he will not dignify by repeating. These people and their networks must be identified, and then they must be neutralized. For, otherwise, what will happen? The Consilience model will be threatened! It will be attacked on all sides by what may seem at first like small forces, but together in a mob those forces are not small, they are catastrophic, just as one rat is negligible but a million rats is an infestation, a plague. So the sternest of measures must be taken before things get out of control. A solution is required.

And such a solution has indeed been devised, though not without much careful thought and the rejection of less viable alternatives. It is the best solution available at this time and in this place: they can take Ed’s word for that.

And this is where he needs their cooperation. For the jewel in the middle of Consilience – Positron Prison, to which they have all given so much of their time and attention – Positron Prison has been chosen for a vital role in that solution. Every resident of Consilience will have a part to play, but for the present they can best help by simply going about their daily routines as if nothing unusual is happening, despite the unavoidable disruptions that may occur in that routine from time to time. Though it is earnestly hoped that such disruptions will be kept to a minimum.

Remember, says Ed, these enemies, if they had their way, would destroy everyone’s job security and their very way of life! They should all bear that in mind. He has great faith in the common sense of the citizens of Consilience, and in their ability to recognize the greater good and to choose the lesser evil.

He allows himself a tiny smile. Then he is replaced by the Consilience logo and the familiar sign-off slogan:
a meaningful life.

Stan has found this news of interest, if it is news. Are there really enemies? Are they really trying to undermine the Project? What would be the point? He himself has fucked his life up, but for the other people in here – anyone he knows, at least – this place beats the hell out of what they had before.

He looks sideways at Jocelyn. She’s staring thoughtfully at the screen, on which a toddler in the Positron preschool is playing with a blue knitted teddy bear, a ribbon around its neck. They’ve taken to running kiddie pictures after the Town Meetings, as if to remind everyone not to stray off the course Consilience has set for them, because wouldn’t they be endangering the security and happiness of these little ones? No one but a child abuser would do that.

Jocelyn switches the TV off, then sighs. She’s looking tired. She knew what Ed was going to say, Stan thinks. She’s in on his solution, whatever it is. Maybe she wrote the speech.

“Do you believe in free will?” she asks. Her voice is different; it’s not her usual confident tone. Is this some kind of trap?

“How do you mean?” says Stan.

The first truck arrives the next morning. It’s unloaded at the main gates. The people herded out are wearing the regulation orange boiler suits, but they’re hooded, their hands plasticuffed behind their backs. Instead of being driven straight to Positron, they’re shuffled along the street, shepherded by a batch of guards. The prisoners must have some way of seeing out the front; they don’t stumble as much as you’d think. Some are women, judging from the shapes muffled beneath their baggy clothing.

No need to parade them like this unless it’s a demonstration, thinks Stan. A demonstration of power. What’s been going on in the turbulent world outside the closed fishbowl of Consilience? No, not a fishbowl, because no one can see in.