The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHOICE

Stan lets his mind float free. Time is passing; whatever will happen to him is about to happen. There’s not a thing he can do about it.

Are these my last minutes? he asks himself. Surely not. Despite his earlier moment of panic, he’s now oddly calm. But not resigned, not numbed. Instead he’s intensely, painfully alive. He can feel his own thunderous heartbeat, he can hear the blood surging through his veins, he can sense every muscle, every tendon. His body is massive, like rock, like granite; though possibly a little soft around the middle.

I should have worked out more, he thinks. I should have done everything more. I should have cut loose from…from what? Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He’s been the puppet of his own constricted desires.

He shouldn’t have let himself be caged in here, walled off from freedom. But what does freedom mean any more? And who had caged him and walled him off? He’d done it himself. So many small choices. The reduction of himself to a series of numbers, stored by others, controlled by others. He should have left the disintegrating cities, fled the pinched, cramped life on offer there. Broken out of the electronic net, thrown away all the passwords, gone forth to range over the land, a gaunt wolf howling at midnight.

But there isn’t any land to range over any more. There isn’t any place without fences, roadways, networks. Or is there? And who would go with him, be with him? Supposing he can’t find Conor. Supposing, unthinkable, that Conor is dead. Would Charmaine be up to such a trip? Would she even want him to smuggle her out? Would she consider it rescue? She’s never liked camping, she wouldn’t want to do without her clean flowered sheets. Still, he has a brief flash of longing: the two of them, hand in hand, walking into the sunrise, all betrayals forgotten, ready for a new life, somewhere, somehow. With maybe some strike-anywhere matches, and…what else would they need?

He tries to visualize the world outside the wall of Consilience. But he has no real picture of that world any more. All he sees is fog.

—

Charmaine keys herself into the dispensary, locates the cabinet, codes open its door. She finds the vial and the needle. She pockets them, snaps on her latex gloves, then walks along the corridor to the left.

These corridors are always empty when she’s on her way to a Procedure. Do they do that on purpose, so nobody will know who has terminated which person? Nobody, that is, except the head. And whoever is behind the head. And whoever may be watching her right now, from inside a light fixture or through a tiny lens the size of a rivet.

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