The Handmaid's Tale(44)

“So I tried to recall my section of the list. I won’t tell you the name I chose, because I don’t want them to get in trouble, if they haven’t already. It could be I’ve spilled all this stuff, it’s hard to remember what you say when they’re doing it. You’ll say anything.

“I chose them because they were a married couple, and those were safer than anyone single and especially anyone gay. Also I remembered the designation beside their name. Q, it said, which meant Quaker. We had the religious denominations marked where there were any, for marches. That way you could tell who might turn out to what. It was no good calling on the C’s to do abortion stuff, for instance; not that we’d done much of that lately. I remembered their address, too. We’d grilled each other on those addresses, it was important to remember them exactly, zip code and all.

“By this time I’d hit Mass Ave. and I knew where I was. And I knew where they were too. Now I was worrying about something else: when these people saw an Aunt coming up the walk, wouldn’t they just lock the door and pretend not to be home? But I had to try it anyway, it was my only chance. I figured they weren’t likely to shoot me. It was about five o’clock by this time. I was tired of walking, especially that Aunt’s way like a goddamn soldier, poker up the ass, and I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.

“What I didn’t know of course was that in those early days the Aunts and even the Centre were hardly common knowledge. It was all secret at first, behind barbed wire. There might have been objections to what they were doing, even then. So although people had seen the odd Aunt around, they weren’t really aware of what they were for. They must have thought they were some kind of army nurse. Already they’d stopped asking questions, unless they had to.

“So these people let me in right away. It was the woman who came to the door. I told her I was doing a questionnaire. I did that so she wouldn’t look surprised, in case anyone was watching. But as soon as I was inside the door, I took off the headgear and told them who I was. They could have phoned the police or whatever, I know I was taking a chance, but like I say there wasn’t any choice. Anyway they didn’t. They gave me some clothes, a dress of hers, and burned the Aunt’s outfit and the pass in their furnace; they knew that had to be done right away. They didn’t like having me there, that much was clear, it made them very nervous. They had two little kids, both under seven. I could see their point.

“I went to the can, what a relief that was. Bathtub full of plastic fish and so on. Then I sat upstairs in the kids’ room and played with them and their plastic blocks while their parents stayed downstairs and decided what to do about me. I didn’t feel scared by then, in fact I felt quite good. Fatalistic, you could say. Then the woman made me a sandwich and a cup of coffee and the man said he’d take me to another house. They hadn’t risked phoning.

“The other house was Quakers too, and they were paydirt, because they were a station on the Underground Femaleroad. After the first couple left, they said they’d try to get me out of the country. I won’t tell you how, because some of the stations may still be operating. Each one of them was in contact with only one other one, always the next one along. There were advantages to that – it was better if you were caught – but disadvantages too, because if one station got busted the entire chain backed up until they could make contact with one of their couriers, who could set up an alternate route. They were better organized than you’d think, though. They’d infiltrated a couple of useful places; one of them was the post office. They had a driver there with one of those handy little trucks. I made it over the bridge and into the city proper in a mail sack. I can tell you that now because they got him, soon after that. He ended up on the Wall. You hear about these things; you hear a lot in here, you’d be surprised. The Commanders tell us themselves, I guess they figure why not, there’s no one we can pass it on to, except each other, and that doesn’t count.

“I’m making this sound easy but it wasn’t. I nearly shat bricks the whole time. One of the hardest things was knowing that these other people were risking their lives for you when they didn’t have to. But they said they were doing it for religious reasons and I shouldn’t take it personally. That helped some. They had silent prayers every evening. I found that hard to get used to at first, because it reminded me too much of that shit at the Centre. It made me feel sick to my stomach, to tell you the truth. I had to make an effort, tell myself that this was a whole other thing. I hated it at first. But I figure it was what kept them going. They knew more or less what would happen to them if they got caught. Not in detail, but they knew. By that time they’d started putting some of it on the TV, the trials and so forth.

“It was before the sectarian roundups began in earnest. As long as you said you were some sort of a Christian and you were married, for the first time that is, they were still leaving you pretty much alone. They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else.

“I was underground it must have been eight or nine months. I was taken from one safe house to another, there were more of those then. They weren’t all Quakers, some of them weren’t even religious. They were just people who didn’t like the way things were going.

“I almost made it out. They got me up as far as Salem, then in a truck full of chickens into Maine. I almost puked from the smell; you ever thought what it would be like to be shat on by a truckload of chickens, all of them carsick? They were planning to get me across the border there; not by car or truck, that was already too difficult, but by boat, up the coast. I didn’t know that until the actual night, they never told you the next step until right before it was happening. They were careful that way.

“So I don’t know what happened. Maybe somebody got cold feet about it, or somebody outside got suspicious. Or maybe it was the boat, maybe they thought the guy was out in his boat at night too much. By that time it must have been crawling with Eyes up there, and everywhere else close to the border. Whatever it was, they picked us up just as we were coming out the back door to go down to the dock. Me and the guy, and his wife too. They were an older couple, in their fifties. He’d been in the lobster business, back before all that happened to the shore fishing there. I don’t know what became of them after that, because they took me in a separate van.

“I thought it might be the end, for me. Or back to the Centre and the attentions of Aunt Lydia and her steel cable. She enjoyed that, you know. She pretended to do all that love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin stuff, but she enjoyed it. I did consider offing myself, and maybe I would have if there’d been any way. But they had two of them in the back of the van with me, watching me like a hawk; didn’t say a hell of a lot, just sat and watched me in that wall-eyed way they have. So it was no go.

“We didn’t end up at the Centre though, we went somewhere else. I won’t go into what happened after that. I’d rather not talk about it. All I can say is they didn’t leave any marks.

“When that was over they showed me a movie. Know what it was about? It was about life in the Colonies. In the Colonies, they spend their time cleaning up. They’re very clean-minded these days. Sometimes it’s just bodies, after a battle. The ones in city ghettoes are the worst, they’re left around longer, they get rottener. This bunch doesn’t like dead bodies lying around, they’re afraid of a plague or something. So the women in the Colonies there do the burning. The other Colonies are worse, though, the toxic dumps and the radiation spills. They figure you’ve got three years maximum, at those, before your nose falls off and your skin pulls away like rubber gloves. They don’t bother to feed you much, or give you protective clothing or anything, it’s cheaper not to. Anyway they’re mostly people they want to get rid of. They say there’s other Colonies, not so bad, where they do agriculture: cotton and tomatoes and all that. But those weren’t the ones they showed me the movie about.

“It’s old women, I bet you’ve been wondering why you haven’t seen too many of those around any more, and Handmaids who’ve screwed up their three chances, and incorrigibles like me. Discards, all of us. They’re sterile, of course. If they aren’t that way to begin with, they are after they’ve been there for a while. When they’re unsure, they do a little operation on you, so there won’t be any mistakes. I’d say it’s about a quarter men in the Colonies, too. Not all of those Gender Traitors end up on the Wall.

“All of them wear long dresses, like the ones at the Centre, only grey. Women and the men too, judging from the group shots. I guess it’s supposed to demoralize the men, having to wear a dress. Shit, it would demoralize me enough. How do you stand it? Everything considered, I like this outfit better.

“So after that, they said I was too dangerous to be allowed the privilege of returning to the Red Centre. They said I would be a corrupting influence. I had my choice, they said, this or the Colonies. Well, shit, nobody but a nun would pick the Colonies. I mean, I’m not a martyr. I’d already had my tubes tied, years ago, so I didn’t even need the operation. Nobody in here with viable ovaries either, you can see what kind of problems it would cause.