I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves. We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours. After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me. I liked the feel of them, and the look. Luke said I had the mind of an antiquarian. He liked that, he liked old things himself. It’s.
All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening.
It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation.
She’s wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina’s. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift. Heads with the hair pulled back into buns are so elegant and confined, so maidenish; then the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known.
Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said, just a fluke. All we’ve done is return things to Nature’s norm.
What confronts us, now the excitement’s over, is our own failure.
But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is.
Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been – long ago, briefly – a queasy form of popular entertainment. There had even been online TV shows about it: computer-generated landscape pictures with deer grazing in Times Square, serves-us-.
Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.
You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On.
For every rule there is always an exception: this too can be depended upon.
I admit I relish it, this lick of dissipation.
What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!
The two of us were – by our own admission – proficient and shameless liars of long standing. It’s a wonder either one of us believed a word the other said.
Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.
They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away, computers could be destroyed. Only the spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing.
The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.
In the moment just before giving, I am loved.
As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.