The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [220]
A morbid image, Myra would say.
What else would you suggest? I would reply.
The fact is that my heart has been acting up again. Acting up, a peculiar phrase. It’s what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms – these tremors and pains, these palpitations – are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.
The doctor isn’t pleased. He’s been muttering about tests and scans, and trips into Toronto where the specialists lurk, those few who have not fled for greener pastures. He’s changed my pills, added another one to the arsenal. He’s even suggested the possibility of an operation. What would be involved, I asked, and what would be accomplished? Too much of one, as it turns out, and not enough of the other. He suspects that nothing short of a whole new unit – his term, as if it’s a dishwasher we’re talking about – will do. Also I would have to stand in line, waiting for someone else’s unit, one that’s no longer needed. Not to put too fine a gloss on it, someone else’s heart, ripped out of some youngster: you wouldn’t want to install an old rickety wizened-up one like the one you intend to throw away. What you want is something fresh and juicy.
But who knows where they get those things? Street children in Latin America is my guess; or so goes the most paranoid rumour. Stolen hearts, black-market hearts, wrenched from between broken ribs, warm and bleeding, offered up to the false god. What is the false god? We are. Us and our money. That’s what Laura would say. Don’t touch that money, Reenie would say. You don’t know where it’s been.
Could I live with myself, knowing I was carrying the heart of a dead child?
But if not, then what?
Please don’t mistake this rambling angst for stoicism. I take my pills, I take my halting walks, but there’s nothing I can do for dread.
After lunch – a piece of hard cheese, a glass of dubious milk, a flabby carrot, Myra having fallen down this week on her self-appointed task of stocking my refrigerator – Walter returned. He measured, sawed, hammered, then knocked on the back door to say he was sorry for the noise but everything was shipshape now.
“I made you some coffee,” I said. This is a ritual on these April occasions. Had I burned it this time? No matter. He was used to Myra’s.
“Don’t mind if I do.” He removed his rubber boots carefully and left them on the back porch – Myra has him well trained, he’s not allowed to track what she calls his dirt onto what she calls her carpets – then tiptoed in his mammoth socks across my kitchen floor; which, thanks to the energetic scourings and polishings of Myra’s woman, is now as slick and treacherous as a glacier. It used to have a useful adhesive skin on it, an accumulation of dust and grime like a thin coating of glue, but no longer. I really should strew it with grit, or I’ll slip on it and do myself an injury.
Watching Walter tiptoe was a treat in itself – an elephant walking on eggs. He reached the kitchen table, setting his yellow leather work gloves down on it, where they lay like giant, extra paws.
“New gloves,” I said. They were so new they almost glowed. Not a scratch on them either.
“Myra got those. Guy three streets over, took the ends of his fingers off with a fretsaw and she’s all steamed up about it, worried I’ll do the same or worse. But that guy’s a numbnuts, moved here from Toronto, pardon my French but he shouldn’t be allowed to fool with saws, could of took his head off while he was at it, no loss to the world either. I told her, have to be ten bricks short of a load to pull a stunt like that, and anyways I don’t own a fretsaw. But she makes me cart the darn things around anyways. Every time I go out the door, it’s Yoo-hoo, here’s your gloves.”
“You could lose them,” I