Summary
Stan clocks in at the prison, changing into his orange jumpsuit and getting the routine haircut. He chats with Clint, the barber, and commits himself to connecting with Jasmine before his next cut in two months. He has excellent chicken dumplings for lunch, feeling pride as a Positron Poultry Supervisor. The narrator comments that the real criminals are gone now, and with them the threat of violence and rumors of uprisings. Behavior among prisoners improved once the troublemakers were transferred and rumors circulated of them being killed. After working out, Stan goes to his job checking in on the chickens. He finds the routine soothing. He used to let gang members, before they disappeared, have sex with the chickens because he felt threatened by the men. He is unnerved not to feel shame for being a chicken pimp.
Charmaine works her job doing Special Procedures: euthanizing the worst criminals who risk ruining the Positron/Consilience project. She’s reassured that the injections are a last resort. Her bedside manner is meant to be soothing, and she thinks of herself as an angel of mercy, cheerfully doing injections that will stop restrained men’s hearts. At her evening knitting circle, she’ll tell everyone she had a great day.
In mid-September, Stan is working his scooter repair job as a civilian. Charmaine’s scooter is in for repair because of frayed wires. He realizes that Jasmine uses the same scooter, so he can use it to trace her whereabouts. Dismissing thoughts that he is a stalker, he hides a second-hand Consilience phone in the seat and returns the scooter to his wife. In November, he’ll be able to reconstruct Jasmine’s movement and plan a switchover day ambush. On October 1, Max and Charmaine meet to have sex. She confesses that she thinks Stan knows about the affair, and worries over what Stan might do—how ugly things could get. She imagines euthanizing Stan to protect herself, though his large body would be difficult to dispose of. Max, as sexy as he is, has no backbone. He wouldn’t help if she killed Stan.
A Town Meeting is broadcast on the December 1 switchover day. Stan drinks beer and watches Ed talk about the great progress the project has been making, with expansion to other cities and profits rolling in. Stan wonders, resentfully, about whether any of that money will trickle down, and also if it’s true that he can never leave the box. Stan has been tracking Charmaine’s scooter and wonders about the detours to inspect real estate she’s been making on switchover days. He’s learned that Jasmine goes to the gym often and fantasizes about her fit body. Ed announces that some people have been doing “digital experimentation” with phones and warns people to stop. Stan, feeling as though he has been directly addressed, decides to remove the phone from the scooter. He has Jasmine in his “crosshairs” anyway.
Stan plans to ambush Jasmine at the house, knowing it will be more private than the gym. He waits in the garage, knowing Max won’t be able to get to the house without the red and green scooter Stan still has with him. To his surprise, a woman named Jocelyn enters the garage through a side door. He recognizes her from the presentation with Ed on day one. She says she works for Surveillance and knows about “Jasmine” and Stan’s tracking phone, which appeared on her systems. In the kitchen, she says her husband Phil has been cheating on her again—with Charmaine. Because Jocelyn controls the identity codes, she has made it so Phil will stay in prison an extra month in Stan’s place. Jocelyn says they can recreate the affair between “Max and Jasmine” by watching the surveillance footage and reenacting it. He is disappointed that she is masculine and muscular, not like his bland, perky wife. He wants to leave, but she threatens him with a report on the rules he has broken. They both have a beer and he asks what he’ll have to do.
On January 1, a clerk stops Charmaine from leaving prison as usual. She worries she isn’t doing her job properly, but a clerk assures her it’s probably nothing. While waiting, Charmaine worries about not being able to meet Max that day. She also worries about Stan not knowing where she is. Meanwhile, Stan trims the hedge and panics about the vise-grip Jocelyn has him in. He breathes deeply and tells himself at least he’s alive. He has fantasized about beheading her. Back at the prison, a woman from Human Resources named Aurora informs Charmaine that she must stay in prison another month and is being fired as a Medications Administrator. She is “in limbo” at the moment because her identity codes and cards have been deactivated for some reason. She has to wait to be re-verified. She is being placed temporarily in Laundry in the position of Towel-Folding. She thinks about how solid Stan is, and how he’d know what to do. She cries that night in her cell when she sees that she has no cellmate.
While out of prison, Jocelyn has been forcing Stan to watch videos of his wife cheating on him; then he has to reenact the sex with her on the couch. Stan misses Charmaine, even though he resents her for lying to him. He imagines she is going nuts in prison. He believes his life depends on fulfilling Jocelyn’s warped demands. He wonders how long he can last until he does something violent. In February, Jocelyn tells Stan she wants to spend a special Valentine’s Day with him before she lets him reunite with his wife. In prison, Charmaine learns that she’ll be reinstated as Chief Medications Administrator but can’t leave the prison yet because her alternate is still in her house. Aurora refuses to pass on a message to Stan that Charmaine is ok because no messages can go out of the prison. After the meeting with Aurora, Charmaine sees Ed giving the TV host Lucinda Quant a tour of the facility with TV cameras. Quaint is considering making a show called After the Home Front about the Positron Project.
Two days before Valentine’s, Stan watches a Town Meeting announcement from Ed, who says that the project is so successful that shady journalists are trying to worm their way in and muck-rake a scandal. Stan is interested to learn about the “subversives,” if they exist. Jocelyn turns to Stan and asks if he believes in free will. In prison, Charmaine wonders if the journalists know about the procedures. Ed arrives to tell people in Charmaine’s knitting circle that the situation is under control and saboteurs have been identified. He asks people not to react to strange sounds just before a distant scream can be heard. The women pretend to ignore it. Before leaving, Ed approaches Charmaine to compliment the blue bear she is knitting. She is suddenly certain that he knows about Max.
On Valentine’s Day, Jocelyn cooks eggs for Stan and tells him to eat both because he’ll need the energy. Stan feels dizzy as Jocelyn tells him the cameras are off and he can forget everything he thinks he knows about her. She wants him to be a messenger who takes information outside. She confesses that she is one of the people who want to expose the Project. Despite being Ed’s founding partner, she disagrees with the compromises made to satisfy greedy new investors. Ed has set up transplant clinics inside Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics, selling organs harvested from euthanized Positron people. Now that they’ve run out of “real criminals,” Ed wants to bring in more from the outside. The next lucrative venture is baby’s blood, which is supposedly rejuvenating. Jocelyn wants to send Stan out of the prison with a flash drive of documents about everything; he’ll deliver it to a media person who’s willing to expose it.
The car comes to pick them up; Phil is driving. Jocelyn explains that he slept with Charmaine as a setup. Jocelyn needed a motive for why she’d want to have Stan eliminated. Because the higher-ups know what she did with Stan, they’ll buy that she wants to punish both Charmaine and Stan by having Charmaine euthanize Stan. Jocelyn says it has to be real for Charmaine. Stan insists Charmaine won’t kill him. Phil starts the car and Stan is sedated by Jocelyn.
Analysis
In the fourth chapter, Atwood uses the novel’s alternating point-of-view structure to create another instance of dramatic irony. While we are in Stan’s perspective, the narrator comments on how Stan has been curious about what’s happened to the “troublemakers” who revolted against the prison’s totalitarian living conditions; Stan has heard rumors that, because no one can leave the project once they have signed up, the undesirables have been killed. In the next subchapter, Atwood reveals that the answers to his questions lie with his wife.
With the revelation that Charmaine has been euthanizing “the worst criminals” as the euphemistically named “Chief Medications Administrator,” Atwood builds on the themes of exploitation, loss of human rights, and manipulation. As shown in her affair with Max, Charmaine is a highly suggestible person who will do as she is told. The Positron leadership exploits this quality, manipulating her into believing she is doing a good thing by injecting poison into the necks of men who refuse to obey the prison rules. Charmaine’s denial is on display as she convinces herself that having a pleasant attitude during the “Special Procedure” makes the murders less reprehensible.
The theme of surveillance arises when Stan, driven mad by his obsession with “Jasmine,” hides a phone in the scooter Charmaine shares with her alternate. By tracing the phone’s location, Stan can track the woman’s movements and plot a would-be spontaneous encounter with her. While Stan understands that the amateur surveillance project is no different than stalking, he dismisses the moral implications of his actions. Meanwhile, Charmaine dispassionately ponders killing Stan to avoid the messiness of him discovering the affair. In this way, Atwood shows that both Charmaine’s and Stan’s moral compasses have begun pointing them toward increasingly immoral decisions after a year inside the totalitarian complex of Positron/Consilience.
Having determined Jasmine’s movement pattern, Stan waits in the garage on a switchover day, planning an “ambush”—an ambiguous term that implies he may be planning to rape her. In an instance of situational irony, Jocelyn arrives to reveal that she, as head of Surveillance for the project, has known about his tracking in the scooter. Furthering the situational irony, Jocelyn tells Stan that Jasmine is a codename his own wife uses while she carries out an affair with Phil, Jocelyn’s husband.
With evidence of rule-breaking against both Stan and Charmaine, Jocelyn is able to exploit and manipulate Stan into living with her and reenacting their respective spouses’ affair. Jocelyn’s manipulative powers even extend to demoting Charmaine and keeping her locked up while she has her way with Stan. However, in another instance of situational irony, Jocelyn eventually reveals that she has been using Stan and Charmaine as pawns in a plot to expose the greed and corruption of Ed, her business partner.
While Jocelyn genuinely believed in the project’s supposed goal of solving joblessness and crime, Ed has gotten carried away with having the power of life and death over an imprisoned population. Jocelyn needs Stan to smuggle out documents that will expose Ed’s selling of dead participants’ organs and of babies’ blood. However, Jocelyn’s Machiavellian plan involves the continued manipulation of both Stan and Charmaine.
