Once he’d read, Jimmy you nosy brat I know your reading this, I hate it just because I fucked you doesn’t mean I like you so STAY OUT!!! Two red lines under hate, three under stay out. Her name had been Brenda. Cute, a gum-chewer, sat in front of him in Life Skills class. She’d had a solar-battery robodog on her dresser that barked, fetched a plastic bone, and lifted its leg to pee yellow water. It’s always struck him how the toughest and most bitchy girls had the schmaltziest, squishiest doodads in their bedrooms.
The vanity table holds the standard collection of firming creams, hormone treatments, ampoules and injections, cosmetics, colognes. In the half-light that comes through the slatted blinds these things gleam darkly, like a still life muted with varnish. He sprays himself with the stuff in one of the bottles, a musky scent he hopes might cut the other smells in here. Crack Cocaine, its label says in raised gold lettering. He thinks briefly about drinking it, but remembers he has the bourbon.
Then he bends down to take stock of himself in the oval mirror. He can’t resist the mirrors in the places he breaks into, he sneaks a peek at himself every chance he has. Increasingly it’s a shock. A stranger stares back at him, bleary-eyed, hollow-cheeked, pocked with bug-bite scabs. He looks twenty years older than he is. He winks, grins at himself, sticks out his tongue: the effect is truly sinister. Behind him in the glass the husk of the woman in the bed seems almost like a real woman; as if at any moment she might turn towards him, open her arms, whisper to him to come and get her. Her and her pixie hair.
Oryx had a wig like that. She liked to dress up, change her appearance, pretend to be different women. She’d strut around the room, do a little strip, wiggle and pose. She said men liked variety.
“Who told you that?” Jimmy asked her.
“Oh, someone.” Then she laughed. That was right before he scooped her up and her wig fell off … Jimmee! But he can’t afford to think about Oryx right now.
He finds himself standing in the middle of the room, hands dangling, mouth open. “I have been unintelligent,” he says out loud.
Next door there’s a child’s room, with a computer in gay red plastic, a shelf of teddy bears, a wallpaper frieze of giraffes, and a stash of CDs containing – judging from the pictures on them – some extremely violent computer games. But there’s no child, no child’s body. Maybe it died and was cremated in those first few days when cremations were still taking place; or maybe it was frightened when its parents keeled over and began gurgling blood, and it ran away somewhere else. Maybe it was one of the cloth and bone bundles he passed on the streets outside. Some of them were quite small.
He locates the linen closet in the hall and exchanges his filthy sheet for a fresh one, this time not plain but patterned with scrolls and flowers. That will make an impression among the Craker kids. “Look,” they’ll say. “Snowman is growing leaves!” They wouldn’t put it past him. There’s a whole stack of clean sheets in the closet, neatly folded, but he takes only the one. He doesn’t want to weight himself down with stuff he doesn’t really need. If he has to he can always come back for more.
He hears his mother’s voice telling him to put the discarded sheet into the laundry hamper – old neurological pathways die hard – but he drops it onto the floor instead and goes back downstairs, into the kitchen. He hopes he’ll find some canned food there, soy stew or beans and fake wieners, anything with protein in it – even some vegetables would be nice, ersatz or not, he’ll take anything – but whoever smashed the window also cleaned out the cupboard. There’s a handful of dry cereal in a plastic snap-top container, so he eats that; it’s unadulterated junk-gene cardboard and he has to chew it a lot and drink some water to get it down. He finds three packets of cashew nuts, snac-pacs from the bullet train, and gobbles one of them immediately; it isn’t too stale. There’s also a tin of SoyOBoy sardines. Otherwise there’s only a half-empty bottle of ketchup, dark brown and fermenting.
He knows better than to open the refrigerator. Some of the smell in the kitchen is coming from there.
In one of the drawers under the counter there’s a flashlight that works. He takes that, and a couple of candle ends, and some matches. He finds a plastic garbage bag, right where it should be, and puts everything into it, including the sardines and the other two packs of cashews, and the bourbon and the soap and aspirin. There are some knives, not very sharp; he chooses two, and a small cooking pot. That will come in handy if he can find something to cook.
Down the hallway, tucked in between the kitchen and the utility room, there’s a small home office. A desk with a dead computer, a fax, a printer; also a container with plastic pens, a shelf with reference books – a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bartlett’s, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The striped-pyjamas guy upstairs must have been a word person, then: a RejoovenEsense speechwriter, an ideological plumber, a spin doctor, a hairsplitter for hire. Poor bugger, thinks Snowman.
Beside a vase of withered flowers and a framed father-and-son snapshot – the child was a boy then, seven or eight – there’s a telephone scratch pad. Scrawled across the top page are the words GET LAWN MOWED. Then, in smaller, fainter letters, Call clinic … The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it both. Snowman can picture the guy figuring it out as he looked down at his own moving hand. He must have been an early case, or he wouldn’t still have been worrying about his lawn.
The back of his neck prickles again. Why does he have the feeling that it’s his own house he’s broken into? His own house from twenty-five years ago, himself the missing child.
Twister
~
Snowman makes his way through the curtained demi-light of the living room to the front of the house, plotting his future course. He’ll have to try for a house richer in canned goods, or even a mall. He could camp out there overnight, up on one of the top shelving racks; that way he could take his time, bag only the best. Who knows? There may still be some chocolate bars. Then, when he knows he’s covered the nutrition angle, he can head for the bubble-dome, pilfer the arsenal. Once he’s got a functional spraygun in his hands again he’ll feel a lot safer.
He throws his stick out through the broken window, then climbs out himself, taking care not to rip his new flowered sheet or cut himself or tear his plastic bag on the jagged glass. Directly across from him on the overgrown lawn, cutting off access to the street, there’s a quintuplet of pigoons, rooting around in a small heap of trash he hopes is only clothing. A boar, two sows, two young. When they hear him they stop feeding and lift their heads: they see him, all right. He raises his stick, shakes it at them. Usually they bolt if he does that – pigoons have long memories, and sticks look like electroprods – but this time they stand their ground. They’re sniffing in his direction, as if puzzled; maybe they smell the perfume he sprayed on himself. The stuff could have analogue mammalian sex pheromones in it, which would be just his luck. Trampled to death by lustful pigoons. What a moronic finish.
What can he do if they charge? Only one option: scramble back through the window. Does he have time for that? Despite the stubby legs carrying their enormous bulk, the damn things can run very fast. The kitchen knives are in his garbage bag; in any case they’re too short and flimsy to do much damage to a full-sized pigoon. It would be like trying to stick a paring knife into a truck tire.
The boar lowers its head, hunching its massive neck and shoulders and swaying uneasily back and forth, making up its mind. But the others have already begun moving away, so the boar thinks better of it and follows them, marking its contempt and defiance by dropping a pile of dung as it goes. Snowman stands still until they’re all out of sight, then proceeds with caution, looking frequently behind him. There are too many pigoon tracks around here. Those beasts are clever enough to fake a retreat, then lurk around the next corner. They’d bowl him over, trample him, then rip him open, munch up the organs first. He knows their tastes.
A brainy and omnivorous animal, the pigoon. Some of them may even have human neocortex tissue growing in their crafty, wicked heads.
Yes: there they are, up ahead. They’re coming out from behind a bush, all five of them; no, all seven. They’re staring in his direction. It would be a mistake to turn his back, or to run. He raises the stick, and walks sideways, back in the direction from which he’s come. If necessary he can take refuge inside the checkpoint gatehouse and stay there till they go away. Then he’ll have to find a roundabout route to the bubble-dome, keeping to the side streets, where evasion is possible.
But in the time it takes him to cover the distance, slip-stepping as if in some grotesque dance with the pigoons still staring, dark clouds have come boiling up from the south, blotting out the sun. This isn’t the usual afternoon storm: it’s too early, and the sky has an ominous greenish-yellow tinge. It’s a twister, a big one. The pigoons have vanished now, gone to seek shelter.
He stands outside the checkpoint cubicle watching the storm roll forward. It’s a grand spectacle. He once saw an amateur documentary-maker with a camcorder sucked right up into one of those. He wonders how Crake’s Children are getting along, back at the shore. Too bad for Crake if the living results of all his theories are whirled away into the sky or swept out to sea on a big wave. But that won’t happen: in case of high seas, the breakwaters formed by fallen rubble will protect them. As for the twister, they’ve weathered one of those before. They’ll retreat into the central cavern in the jumble of concrete blocks they call their thunder home and wait it out.
The advance winds hit, stirring up debris on the open field. Lightning zips between the clouds. He can see the thin dark cone, zigzagging downwards; then darkness descends. Luckily the checkpoint is built into the security building beside it, and those things are like bunkers, thick and solid. He ducks inside as the first rain strikes.
There’s a shrieking of wind, a crashing of thunder, a vibrating sound as everything still nailed down hums like a gear in a giant engine. A large object hits the outer wall. He moves inward, through one doorway and then another, scrabbling in his garbage bag for the flashlight. He’s got it out and is fumbling with it when there’s another gigantic crash, and the overhead lights blink on. Some previously fried solar circuit must have been refried.
He almost wishes the lights hadn’t gone on: there’s a couple of biosuits off in the corner, with whatever’s left inside them in a bad state of repair. Filing cabinets pulled open, paper scattered everywhere. Looks as if the guards were overwhelmed. Maybe they were trying to stop people from getting out through the gates; there was an attempt to enforce a quarantine, as he recalls. But the antisocial elements, which would have included just about everyone by then, must have broken in and trashed the secret files. How optimistic of them to have believed that any of the paperwork and storage disks might still have been of use to anyone.
He forces himself to go over to the suits; he prods them with his stick, turns them over. Not as bad as he thought, not too smelly, only a few beetles; anything soft is mostly gone. But he can’t find any weapons. The antisocials must have made off with those, as he would have done. As he did do.
He leaves the inmost room, goes back to the receptionist’s area, the part with the counter and the desk. All at once he’s very tired. He sits down in the ergonomic chair. It’s been a long time since he sat in a chair, and it feels strange. He decides to set out his matches and candle ends, in case the lights go out again; while he’s at it he has a drink of birdbath water and the second package of cashews. From outside comes the howling of the wind, an unearthly noise like a huge animal unchained and raging. Gusts are coming in, past the doors he’s closed, stirring up the dust; everything rattles. His hands are shaking. This is getting to him, more than he’s allowed himself to admit.
What if there are rats in here? There must be rats. What if it starts to flood? They’ll run up his legs! He pulls his legs up onto the chair, folds them over one of the ergonomic arms, tucks the floral sheet around them. No hope of hearing any telltale squeaking, the racket of the storm is too loud.
A great man must rise to meet the challenges in his life, says a voice. Who is it this time? A motivational lecturer from RejoovTV, some fatuous drone in a suit. A gabbler for hire. This is surely the lesson taught to us by history. The higher the hurdle the greater the jump. Having to face a crisis causes you to grow as a person.
“I haven’t grown as a person, you cretin,” Snowman shouts. “Look at me! I’ve shrunk! My brain is the size of a grape!”
But he doesn’t know which it is, bigger or smaller, because there’s nobody to measure himself by. He’s lost in the fog. No benchmarks.
The lights go out. Now he’s alone in the dark.
“So what?” he tells himself. “You were alone in the light. No big difference.” But there is.
He’s ready though. He gets a grip. He stands the flashlight on end, strikes a match in its feeble beam, manages to light a candle. It wavers in the drafty air but it burns, casting a small glowing circle of soft yellow on the desk, turning the room around him into an ancient cave, dark but protective.
He rummages in his plastic bag, finds the third pack of cashews, rips it open, eats the contents. He takes out the bottle of bourbon, thinks about it, then unscrews the top and drinks. Gluk gluk gluk, goes the cartoon writing in his head. Firewater.
Oh sweetie, a woman’s voice says from the corner of the room. You’re doing really well.
“No I’m not,” he says.
A puff of air – whuff! – hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can’t be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He’d rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she’ll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.
10
~
Vulturizing
~
After four deranged years Jimmy graduated from Martha Graham with his dingy little degree in Problematics. He didn’t expect to get a job right away, and in this he was not deceived. For weeks he’d parcel up his meagre credentials, send them out, then get them back too quickly, sometimes with grease spots and fingerprints from whatever sub-basement-level cog had been flipping through them while eating lunch. Then he’d replace the dirty pages and send the package out again.
He’d snared a summer job at the Martha Graham library, going through old books and earmarking them for destruction while deciding which should remain on earth in digital form, but he lost this post halfway through its term because he couldn’t bear to throw anything out. After that he shacked up with his girlfriend of the moment, a conceptual artist and long-haired brunette named Amanda Payne. This name was an invention, like much about her: her real name was Barb Jones. She’d had to reinvent herself, she told Jimmy, the original Barb having been so bulldozed by her abusive, white-trash, sugar-overdosed family that she’d been nothing but a yard-sale reject, like a wind chime made of bent forks or a three-legged chair.
This had been her appeal for Jimmy, for whom “yard sale” was in itself an exotic concept: he’d wanted to mend her, do the repairs, freshen up the paint. Make her like new. “You have a good heart,” she’d told him, the first time she’d let him inside her defences. Revision: overalls.
Amanda had a rundown condo in one of the Modules, shared with two other artists, both men. The three of them were all from the pleeblands, they’d gone to Martha Graham on scholarship, and they considered themselves superior to the privileged, weak-spined, degenerate offspring of the Compounds, such as Jimmy. They’d had to be tough, take it on the chin, battle their way. They claimed a clarity of vision that could only have come from being honed on the grindstone of reality. One of the men had tried suicide, which conferred on him – he implied – a special vantage. The other one had shot a lot of heroin and dealt it too, before taking up art instead, or possibly in additi
on. After the first few weeks, during which he’d found them charismatic, Jimmy had decided these two were bullshit technicians, in addition to which they were puffed-up snots.
The two who were not Amanda tolerated Jimmy, but just marginally. In order to ingratiate himself with them he took a turn in the kitchen now and then – all three of the artists sneered at microwaves and were into boiling their own spaghetti – but he wasn’t a very good cook. He made the mistake of bringing home a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins one night – a franchise had opened around the corner, and the stuff wasn’t that bad if you could forget everything you knew about the provenance – and after that the two of them who were not Amanda barely spoke to him.
That didn’t stop them from speaking to each other. They had lots to say about all kinds of junk they claimed to know something about, and would drone on in an instigated way, delivering themselves of harangues and oblique sermons that were in fact – Jimmy felt – aimed at himself. According to them it had been game over once agriculture was invented, six or seven thousand years ago. After that, the human experiment was doomed, first to gigantism due to a maxed-out food supply, and then to extinction, once all the available nutrients had been hoovered up.
“You’ve got the answers?” said Jimmy. He’d come to enjoy needling them, because who were they to judge? The artists, who were not sensitized to irony, said that correct analysis was one thing but correct solutions were another, and the lack of the latter did not invalidate the former.
Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 21