Steeply's Jarvik-heart article
pursuing her active schedule with the extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse. The heart’s ventricular tubes ran up to shunts in the woman’s arms and ferried life-giving blood back and forth between her living, active body and the extraordinary heart in her purse. […] the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.
Context
"Helen" Steeply's one planted byline: the accountant whose Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart lived in her purse until Poor Tony snatched it. A prosthesis-dependent life the public can't read correctly — her literal cry for her stolen heart gets heard as figurative, and she dies of the misreading, collapsing "onto her empty chest." Her restenosis is also Gertraude Marathe's disease, wiring this grotesque straight into the A.F.R. serial's prosthetic-heart motive.