the Jarvik-heart article: 'She stole my heart, stop her!'
‘She stole my heart, stop her!’ In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship gone sour.
Context
The cleanest demonstration in the novel of the ironic reflex turning lethal. The accountant is shouting the literal, single-entendre truth — a purse-snatcher has physically stolen the artificial heart out of her purse — and a sidewalk of Harvard Square sophisticates hears only the dead metaphor, "she stole my heart," and reflexively decodes it as a knowing joke, a lovers'-spat cliché, and smiles. The Cambridge patrolmen top it off, "publicly heard to passively quip, 'Happens all the time.'" Everyone assumes the cry for help is a figure of speech, because in this culture the earnest literal reading is the one nobody reaches for first. The crowd's ironic knowingness — the little superior smile that says we get it, we're not naïve — is exactly what lets a woman die chasing her own heart down the block. The register war rendered as a body count.