IJ study archive

Scene 045: steeply jarvik heart article

Scene
45
Pages
142–144
When
document dated 10 Aug YDAU (2009); incident undated, earlier YDAU
Where
document: Moment magazine article; incident: Harvard Square, Cambridge → heart found behind the Boston Public Library, Copley Squarein: Downtown Boston · Cambridge (Harvard/Central Sq, other) (also)
POV
framed document — an all-caps editorial headnote, then 'Helen Steeply's' mawkish soft-news prose

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

The full text of "ENORMOUS, ELECTROLYSIS-RASHED 'JOURNALIST' 'HELEN' STEEPLY'S ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED ARTICLE" — the planted clipping that backstops Steeply's cover before the Orin profile. In Moment's parody-mawkish prose: the second North American recipient of a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart, a 46-year-old Boston accountant with irreversible restenosis, carried the prosthesis in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse, and in fashionable Harvard Square a transvestite purse snatcher — drug addict, strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, auburn wig — tore it from her grasp. She gave chase shouting "Stop her! She stole my heart!"; passers-by smiled knowingly at what they took for an alternative lifestyle's lovers' quarrel, two patrolmen quipped "Happens all the time," and she ran four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest. The snatcher (recognizably Poor Tony Krause) smashed the still-beating heart behind the Boston Public Library in Copley Square; the article closes with the victim's brain-dissecting medical student too moved to wield his power saw.

What to notice

The article's badness is engineered, and its moral scheme runs entirely on two abused adverbs. Everything the victim does is "active": she is "actively window shopping", her lifestyle, schedule, and body all get the house adjective, until it is applied — past the point of meaning, past the point of death — to her "formerly active, alert brain" under the dissection saw. Officialdom, meanwhile, can only "passively quip" and is later heard to have "passively speculated": active virtue, passive callousness, an entire ethics done in copy-editor's shorthand. Watch the grammar buckle under the pathos — "the ill gotten woman's Aigner purse" mislays its own modifier, gaining the wrong noun — and count the brand-and-neighborhood tics (Aigner twice, "fashionable" three times): a spy's idea of what a women's-magazine voice sounds like, mimicry pitched just slightly too hard. And the piece's typography commits its one act of cruelty knowingly: it puts scare quotes on the fleeing snatcher — the purse-snatching 'woman' — policing someone else's gender masquerade in a byline whose own gender is the actual fake. Prose in drag, sneering at drag.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 142: The headnote: Helen's only putative byline, 10 Aug YDAU, the Orin-profile assignment, JOI's microwave suicide dated "four years" back — the heading is where the reader first learns HOW JOI died.
  • p. 142-143: The Jarvik IX exposition: restenosis, the purse-installed prosthesis, ventricular tubes to arm-shunts; Moment's "searching and fearless journalistic doggedness" self-congratulation; the victim's fate "has, sadly, been kept from the North American people."
  • p. 143: The snatch in Harvard Square; the costume inventory that IDs Poor Tony; the chase — "Stop her! She stole my heart!"; the knowing smiles of misreading passers-by.
  • p. 143-144: The patrolmen's "Happens all the time"; the four-block chase as "testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX," per an anonymous official.
  • p. 144: The heart possibly beating on in the purse (it "runs on the same rechargeable power cell as an electric man's razor"); its remains found "behind the historic Boston Public Library in fashionable Copley Square," beaten with a stone or small hammer-like tool.
  • p. 144: The mawkish coda: victims' fates "frequently kept from the light of public knowledge"; six weeks later the Brigham and Women's medical student, moved by the "terse toe tag," confesses a temporary inability to wield the brain-dissection power saw.

Themes in this scene

  • Surveillance and Disguise: the article exists to make "Helen Steeply" real — journalism as cover identity; even its subject is a man in a dress, a disguise reporting a disguise.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Poor Tony's July YDAU desperation glimpsed from the outside — the post-Wo fugitive (scene 040) now snatching purses solo; the smashed heart is an addict opening a container that, for once, holds no fix.
  • Irony and Sincerity: "She stole my heart" — dead-metaphor cliché made horribly literal while bystanders' ironic knowingness (smirks at a presumed lovers' spat) gets a woman killed; Moment's sob-prose is itself a parody of fake sincerity.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Restenosis: the victim's disease is Mme. Marathe's disease (scene 038, n.48 — an Interdependence/dioxin illness); the echo inside Steeply's own cover artifact stitches the espionage and street threads together.
  • Bystanders-watching-a-death-with-detachment rhymes with the Projects heart-attack nobody helps (scene 040, p. 131) and, at scale, the Entertainment's watchers (scenes 025/028): spectation instead of intervention.
  • The cover prose indicts its own author: the article laments fates "kept from the light of public knowledge" while Steeply's actual agency is concealing the Entertainment's April victims (the attaché's room-fills-up arc, scenes 028/029) — Carlisle's catch, textually clean.

Forward

  • Poor Tony continuity: same boa/wig/heels as the Christmas Eve fiasco (scene 040); the heart smashed behind the Copley library — his own blower-grate home turf (scene 040, pp. 133-135). This July crime precedes his catastrophic withdrawal and Gray Line seizure (pp. 299-307), where this purse-snatch is recalled.
  • The headnote's Orin-profile assignment is the op running through scenes 029-041 and beyond ("a possibly very special somebody," p. 137); the op plays out across's Orin scenes (pp. 565-575; "Moment's Junoesque Ms. Steeply," p. 574) and n.234's interview transcripts, where Orin knows the piece is for Moment ("If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie's going to read it").
  • JOI's suicide method (head in microwave) here gets its bluntest early statement; the head/body theme of scene 049 ("head is body") terminates in this image — fuller treatment in Molly Notkin's account (scene 159, pp. 788-795), Joelle's own (scene 178, pp. 938-941), and the wraith sections.
  • The headnote's "four years" for a five-year interval (YTSDB→YDAU) is part of a systematic off-by-one around JOI's death (cf. scenes 013/044); Carlisle reads the pattern through Hamlet's warped dead-father clock ("But two months dead — nay, not so much" vs. Ophelia's "twice two months") — grief-arithmetic as design, his reading, worth carrying wherever the error recurs.

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 142: the full all-caps headnote — establishes "putative," the electrolysis rash, the Orin assignment, and the microwave in one breath.
  • p. 143: "Stop her! She stole my heart!" — literalized cliché; the book's irony-kills thesis in a street scene.
  • p. 143-144: "smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle's relationship gone sour" — knowingness as fatal misreading.
  • p. 144: "gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest" — the empty chest as image; grotesque comedy at maximum cruelty.
  • p. 144: "were publicly heard to passively quip, 'Happens all the time,'" — institutional irony as non-intervention; the patrolmen as the bystander-problem in uniform.

What links here Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (12) · Passages quoted here (23) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs