They keep the windows mostly closed because of the mosquitoes and the gangs and the solitary vandals. The solitaries don’t usually have guns or knives—if they have those kinds of weapons you have to get out there triple fast—but they’re more likely to be bat-shit crazy, and a crazy person with a piece of metal or a rock or even a high-heeled shoe can do a lot of damage.
In the opening paragraphs of The Heart Goes Last, Atwood establishes the desperate living conditions of the novel's dystopian version of the Rust Belt region. Following a financial collapse, Stan and Charmaine lose their humble middle-class status and find themselves living out of their third-hand Honda—the only thing of value they have left. In this passage, the narrator comments on the threats of violence that pervade the lawless streets and make the couple's sleep even more fitful. With few options for making money in this context, the couple are prime targets for an exploitative project like Consilience/Positron, which preys on people in exactly their position.
She said there was a news item that claimed a total blood renewal, young blood for the old, staves off dementia and rolls your physical clock back twenty, thirty years. "It’s only been tried with mice… Mice aren’t people! But some folks will clutch at anything. We’ve turned away at least a dozen baby-blood offers. We tell them we can’t accept it."
Early in the novel, the narrator comments on how Stan has raised some money lately by selling his blood. In this passage, Atwood reveals that people have become so desperate for money that they are willing to sell their babies' blood. While the parents' actions may seem reprehensible, it is more disturbing to think that, in this dystopian society, there is a market for babies' blood—wealthier people who will exploit poor people by draining the life essence of the most defenseless citizens.
She’d started to reach her arm from the back seat into the front, in order to touch Stan, to reassure him, but then she thought better of it. Stan might take it the wrong way, he’d want to get into the back seat with her, he’d want them to make love, and that could be so uncomfortable with the two of them squashed in together because her head would get jammed up against the car door and she’d start to slide sideways off the seat, with Stan working away at her as if she was a job he had to get done really fast, and her head going bump bump bump. It was not inspirational.
After another uncomfortable night sleeping in their car, Charmaine wants to try to raise her husband's spirits. In this passage, the narrator comments on how she restricts herself from touching him because she doesn't want to initiate sex. In addition to losing everything, the couple's sex life has suffered, in part because Stan is always grumpy, and in part because it's too dangerous to leave themselves vulnerable to attack while distracted by intimacy. With this narrative commentary, Atwood plants the seed for an affair that will only be the start of the couple's problems.
Last week, Sandi and Veronica asked her if she’d like to turn a few. She could make more that way than she was making behind the bar; way more, if she’d go offsite. They had a couple of rooms nearby they could use, classier than the Fuck Tank, they had beds. Charmaine had a fresh look: the clients liked sweet, big-eyed, kiddie-faced blondes like her.
Oh no, Charmaine said. Oh no, I couldn’t! Though she’d had a tiny flash of excitement, like peering in through a window and seeing another version of herself inside, leading a second life; a more raucous and rewarding second life. At least more rewarding financially, and she’d be doing it for Stan, wouldn’t she? Which would excuse whatever happened. Those things with strange men, different things. What would it be like?
But no, she couldn’t, because it was way too dangerous. You never knew what men like that would do, they could get carried away. They might get started on the self-expression. And what if Stan found out? He’d never go for it, no matter how much they needed the cash. He’d be destroyed. Besides, it was wrong.
While working at PixelDust, Charmaine becomes friendly with Veronica and Sandi, two sex workers who frequent the bar and sometimes service clients in the "Fuck Tank" in the back room. The suggestion that she could have sex with some of their customers provokes a flash of excitement for Charmaine, who can instantly see the appeal in cheating on her husband, especially if it was financially rewarding. This passage is significant because it foreshadows Charmaine's eventual affair with Phil ("Max"), who draws out Charmaine's submerged desire to be a sexual submissive.
As he’s getting into his car, another car pulls up in front of the trailer-park entrance; a fancy hybrid, black and sleek, with tinted windows. Con has some upmarket playmates, it looks like.
“Here comes business,” says Jerold. Stan’s curious to see who gets out, but nobody does. They’re waiting for him to leave.
Although they have lost touch, Stan pays a visit to his brother, Conor, at the trailer park out of which Conor operates his criminal enterprise. As he's leaving, Stan sees a fancy, mysterious car pull up to do business with his brother. He doesn't get the chance to see who is in the car, but Stan will later learn that the passenger is Jocelyn, the cofounder of Consilience/Positron. Unbeknownst to Stan, Jocelyn has already taken notice of Stan and his relation to Conor. She will make use of this connection, manipulating Stan and Charmaine to achieve her Machiavellian goals.
It’s a man in a suit, just the head and the shoulders, looking straight out of the screen, right into her eyes. There’s something convincing about him even before he speaks—he’s so serious, like what he’s about to say is very important. And when he does speak, she could swear he’s reading her mind.
“Tired of living in your car?” he says to her. Really, straight to her! It can’t be, because how would he even know she exists, but it feels like that. He smiles, such an understanding smile. “Of course you are! You didn’t sign up for this. You had other dreams. You deserve better.” Oh yes, breathes Charmaine. Better! It’s everything she feels.
While working at PixelDust bar, Charmaine sees a TV ad promoting the Consilience/Positron project. In this passage, the narrator hints at Charmaine's impressionability. Rather than critically evaluate the generic, schlocky sales pitch for what it is, Charmaine is convinced by the man's seriousness even before he has spoken. She also takes the coincidental mention of living in a car as a sign that he is speaking directly to her needs. In reality, the project is preying upon people, like Charmaine, who have lost everything in the financial crash and are willing to trade their lives for the opportunity to sleep in a clean bed.
He looks up at her: despite the drugs, he’s clearly frightened. He tries to speak: a thickened sound comes out. Uhuhuhuh…They always make that sound; she finds it a little painful.
“Hello,” she says. “Isn’t it a lovely day? Look at all that sunshine! Who could be down on a day like today? Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” This is true: from all she’s observed, the experience appears to be an ecstatic one. The bad part happens to her, because she’s the one who has to worry about whether what she’s doing is right. It’s a big responsibility, and worse because she isn’t supposed to tell anyone what she’s actually doing, not even Stan.
Granted, it’s only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that.
In this passage, Atwood reveals what Charmaine has been doing as Chief Medications Administrator. While ostensibly tasked with handing out medications like she used to do before the financial crash, Charmaine is secretly being made to euthanize "troublemakers" who refuse to comply with Consilience/Positron's totalitarian standards. In this sinister revelation, the reader learns that Charmaine—a deeply suggestible person who is evidently mired in denial—has gone along with the killings, convincing herself that her pleasant bedside manner makes the murders less reprehensible. As the novel goes on, the reader will learn that Charmaine's suggestible nature has caught Jocelyn's attention and inspired her to use Charmaine as a pawn in her game.
“The cameras are off, but not for long,” she says. “So I’m going to tell you this very quickly.” Her manner has changed completely. Gone is the awkward flirtation, the dominatrix pose. She’s urgent, straightforward.
“Forget everything you think you know about me; and by the way, you kept your cool very well during our time together. I know I’m not your favourite squeeze toy, but you would have fooled most. Which is why I’m asking you to do this: because I think you can.”
She pauses, eyeing him. Stan swallows. “Do what?” he says. Lie, steal, inflict wounds? Conor things? Something from the shadowlands: it has that feel.
“We need to smuggle somebody to the outside—outside the Consilience wall,” she says. “I’ve already switched your database entries. You’ve been Phil these past months, but now you’re going to be Stan again, just for a few hours. Then after that we can get you out.”
After subjecting Stan to months of psychological torture in which she forces him to study and reenact his wife's affair, Jocelyn reveals she has been conducting a sinister ruse. Not merely torturing Stan for sick thrills, she has been creating a false justification for why she would want to have him euthanized. In this exchange, taking place on Valentine's Day morning, Jocelyn brings Stan out of the dark and into her elaborate plan to use him to leak scandalous information about Consilience/Positron. With this revelation, Jocelyn exposes herself to be more than a mere sadist: she has a Machiavellian plan up her sleeve. More perceptive than he knows, Stan accurately senses that something about Jocelyn's demeanor reminds him of his criminal brother, Conor. As it turns out, Conor and Jocelyn have been working together the entire time Stan has been in the community.
Charmaine stirs, stretches, opens her blue, blue eyes. Stan sticks his head into her sightline, gazes deeply. “How are you, honey?” he says.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Stan!” she says. “Is that you? Where’s your hair?”
“It’s me all right,” he murmurs. “It’ll grow back.” Is this working?
She wraps her arms around him. “Don’t ever leave me! I’ve been having such a bad dream!” She hugs him tight, locks on to his mouth like an octopus. A boiling-hot octopus. Now she’s ripping off his shirt, now her hand is reaching down…
“Whoa, wait up, honey!” he tells her. “You’ve just had an operation!”
“I can’t wait,” she whispers into his ear. “I want you now!”
Fan-fucking-tastic, thinks Stan. At last.
After the climactic scene in which Stan, Conor and Jocelyn obstruct Ed's plan to turn Charmaine into his sex slave with a brain surgery, Stan learns that Jocelyn has a reward for his help: turning Charmaine into his hopelessly devoted partner (and sex slave). In this exchange, Charmaine wakes up feeling a "boiling-hot" passion for her husband, a change that satisfies Stan. Unbeknownst to the couple, their passionate reunion is completely organic, as Charmaine hasn't received the brain adjustment surgery. In this way, Atwood implies that the tribulations of the past few months have reignited the couple's love for each other.
“You never had that operation. That brain adjustment.”
“That can’t be true,” says Charmaine flatly. “It can’t be true! There’s been such a difference!”
“The human mind is infinitely suggestible,” says Jocelyn.
“But. But now I love Stan so much,” says Charmaine. “I have to love him, because of that thing they did! It’s like an ant, or something. It’s like a baby duck! That’s what they said!”
“Maybe you loved Stan anyway,” says Jocelyn. “Maybe you just needed some help with it.”
“This isn’t fair,” says Charmaine. “Everything was all settled!”
“Nothing is ever settled,” says Jocelyn. “Every day is different. Isn’t it better to do something because you’ve decided to? Rather than because you have to?”
“No, it isn’t,” says Charmaine. “Love isn’t like that. With love, you can’t stop yourself.” She wants the helplessness, she wants…
In the final chapter of the novel, Charmaine and Stan are living happily in a house outside Las Vegas with their three-month-old daughter, Winnie. Just as promised, Jocelyn arrives one year after the couple's renewal of vows to deliver her "gift": the news that Charmaine never had the brain adjustment surgery that supposedly forced her to be devoted to Stan. In this exchange, Charmaine is upset to learn that her mind hasn't been programmed to love her husband, as she was told. Jocelyn says that her love for Stan must be genuine, and all Charmaine needed was the suggestion of the surgery to work on her like a placebo. Charmaine, however, worries over what might happen now that she knows another man like Max might lead her to cheat on Stan again. With Jocelyn's comment, Atwood leaves Charmaine and the reader with the open-ended question of whether it is better to choose to devote yourself to someone you love or to feel like the decision is out of your power. For Charmaine, free will comes with the risks of uncertainty, instability, but also excitement.
