The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

pressure inside the social pressure-cooker. Wouldn’t they agree?
    The woman in the suit glances up. What’s she looking at? Her gaze sweeps over them, calm, cool. Then she turns back to her cellphone. Without a phone himself, Stan feels naked: they’d had to turn in their cells at the beginning of the workshop. They’ve been promised new ones, but those will work only inside the wall. Stan wonders when the new ones will be issued.
    Ed lowers his voice: serious stuff coming up. Sure enough, on comes a PowerPoint with a slew of graphs. The financial big guns have concealed the true statistics to avoid panic, he says, but a shocking 40 percent of the population in this region is jobless, with 50 percent of those being under twenty-five. That’s a recipe for systems breakdown, right there: for anarchy, for chaos, for the senseless destruction of property, for so-called revolution, which meant looting and gang rule and warlords and mass rape, and the terrorization of the weak and helpless. That is the grim prospect staring everyone in this area right between the eyes. They’ve already noticed the symptoms for themselves, which is – he is sure – why they saw the desirability of signing in.
    What can be done? Ed asks, wrinkling his brows. How to keep the lid on? Which it was in the interests of society at large to do, as they would surely agree. At the official leadership level, ideas were running out fast. There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings. Too many once-bustling cities are stagnant or derelict, especially in the northeast, but other regions as well where long droughts have taken their toll. Too many of the disenfranchised are living in abandoned cars or subway tunnels or even in culverts. There’s an epidemic of drugging and boozing: suicide-grade alcohol, skin-blistering drugs that kill you in under a year. Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem? It isn’t even a problem, it’s beyond a problem. It’s more like a looming collapse. Is their once-beautiful region doomed to be a wasteland of poverty and wreckage?
    At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. (Here Ed flicked through a few more slides.) Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise once they were back in the outside world. Even when the prisons were privatized, even when the prisoners were rented out as unpaid labour to international business interests, the cost–benefit charts did not improve, because American slave workers couldn’t outperform the slave workers in other countries. Competitiveness in the slave labour market was linked to the price of food, and Americans – who remain goodhearted despite everything, stray puppy-rescuers every one – here Ed smiles indulgently, contemptuously – weren’t ready to starve their prisoners to death while working them to the bone. No matter how much the prisoners were vilified by the politicians and the press as filthy dregs and toxic scum, still, heaps of stick-legged corpses can’t be hidden from view indefinitely. The odd unexplained death, maybe – there has always been the odd unexplained death, says Ed, shrugging – but not heaps. Some snoop would make a phone video; such things can escape despite the best attempts to keep things under hatches, and who knows what sort of uproar, not to mention uprising, might result?
    Stan feels a small prickle at the back of his neck. That’s his brother Ed could talking about! Or maybe not Con specifically; but he’s pretty sure that if Ed got a close-up look at Con, he’d file