Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [76]
Some of the Conversat is less interesting, with too much writing, and some of it is only charts on the wall or looking through microscopes, which we can do whenever we want to anyway.
It’s crowded as we shuffle along the halls, following the paper streamers, baby-blue and yellow, in our winter overshoes. We haven’t taken our coats off. It’s very warm. The clanking radiators are going full-blast, and the air is filling with other people’s breath.
We come to a room where there’s a cut-open turtle. It’s in a white enamel tray, like the ones in butcher shops. The turtle is alive; or it’s dead, but its heart is alive. This turtle is an experiment to show how the heart of a reptile can keep on going after the rest of it is dead.
The turtle’s bottom shell has a hole sawed into it. The turtle is on its back so you can see down into it, right to the heart, which is beating away slowly, glistening dark red down there in its cave, wincing like the end of a touched worm, lengthening again, wincing. It’s like a hand, clenching and unclenching. It’s like an eye.
They’ve attached a wire to the heart, which runs to a loudspeaker, so you can hear the heart beating throughout the entire room, agonizingly slow, like an old man walking up stairs. I can’t tell if the heart is going to make it to the next beat, or not. There’s a footstep, a pause, then a crackling like the kind of static on the radio that my brother says comes from outer space, then another pulse, a gasp of air sucked in. Life is flowing out of the turtle, I can hear it over the loudspeaker. Soon the turtle will be empty of life.
I don’t want to stay in this room but there’s a lineup, in front of me and behind. All of the people are grown-ups; I’ve lost sight of Danny and my brother. I’m hemmed in by tweed coats, my eyes as high as their second buttons. I hear another sound, coming over the sound of the heart like an approaching wind: a rustling, like poplar leaves, only smaller, drier. There’s black around the edges of my eyes and it closes in. What I see is like the entrance to a tunnel, rushing away from me; or I am rushing away from it, away from that spot of daylight. After that I’m looking at a lot of overshoes, and the floorboards, stretching into the distance, at eye level. My head hurts.
“She fainted,” somebody says, and then I know what I have done.
“It must have been the heat.”
I am carried out into the cold gray air; it’s Mr. Banerji who carries me, making sounds of distress. My father hurries out and tells me to sit with my head down between my knees. I do this, looking at the tops of my overshoes. He asks if I’m going to be sick and I say no. My brother and Danny come out and stare at me, not saying anything. Finally my brother says, “Eee-shay ainted-fay,” and they go back in.
I stay outside until my father brings the car around and we drive home. I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.
Cordelia says, “Think of ten stacks of plates. Those are your ten chances.” Every time I do something wrong, a stack of plates comes crashing down. I can see these plates. Cordelia can see them too, because she’s the one who says Crash! Grace can see them a little, but her crashes are tentative, she looks to Cordelia for confirmation. Carol tries a crash once or twice but is scoffed at: “That wasn’t a crash!”
“Only four left,” says Cordelia. “You better watch yourself. Well?”
I say nothing.
“Wipe that smirk off your face,” says Cordelia.
I say nothing.
“Crash!” says Cordelia. “Only three left.”
Nobody ever says what will happen if all of the stacks of plates fall down.
I’m standing against the wall, near the GIRLS door,