Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  After that, after he got his new room, things were a little better. At least he was free to pursue his social life unhampered. He'd discovered that he projected a form of melancholy attractive to a certain kind of woman, the semi-artistic, wise-wound kind in large supply at Martha Graham. Generous, caring, idealistic women, Snowman thinks of them now. They had a few scars of their own, they were working on healing. At first Jimmy would rush to their aid: he was tender-hearted, he'd been told, and nothing if not chivalrous. He'd draw out of them their stories of hurt, he'd apply himself to them like a poultice. But soon the process would reverse, and Jimmy would switch from bandager to bandagee. These women would begin to see how fractured he was, they'd want to help him gain perspective on life and access the positive aspects of his own spirituality. They saw him as a creative project: the raw material, Jimmy in his present gloomy form; the end product, a happy Jimmy.

  Jimmy let them labour away on him. It cheered them up, it made them feel useful. It was touching, the lengths to which they would go. Would this make him happy? Would this? Well then, how about this? But he took care never to get any less melancholy on a permanent basis. If he were to do that they'd expect a reward of some sort, or a result at least; they'd demand a next step, and then a pledge. But why would he be stupid enough to give up his grey rainy-day allure - the crepuscular essence, the foggy aureole, that had attracted them to him in the first place?

  "I'm a lost cause," he would tell them. "I'm emotionally dyslexic." He would also tell them they were beautiful and they turned him on. True enough, no falsehood there, he always meant it. He would also say that any major investment on their part would be wasted on him, he was an emotional landfill site, and they should just enjoy the here and now.

  Sooner or later they'd complain that he refused to take things seriously. This, after having begun by saying he needed to lighten up. When their energy flagged at last and the weeping began, he'd tell them he loved them. He took care to do this in a hopeless voice: being loved by him was a poison pill, it was spiritually toxic, it would drag them down to the murky depths where he himself was imprisoned, and it was because he loved them so much that he wanted them out of harm's way, i.e., out of his ruinous life. Some of them saw through it - Grow up, Jimmy! - but on the whole, how potent that was.

  He was always sad when they decamped. He disliked the part where they'd get mad at him, he was upset by any woman's anger, but once they'd lost their tempers with him he'd know it was over. He hated being dumped, even though he himself had manoeuvred the event into place. But another woman with intriguing vulnerabilities would happen along shortly. It was a time of simple abundance.

  He wasn't lying though, not all the time. He really did love these women, sort of. He really did want to make them feel better. It was just that he had a short attention span.

  "You scoundrel," says Snowman out loud. It's a fine word, scoundrel; one of the golden oldies.

  They knew about his scandalous mother, of course, these women. Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome. Snowman is ashamed to remember how he'd used that story - a hint here, a hesitation there. Soon the women would be consoling him, and he'd roll around in their sympathy, soak in it, massage himself with it. It was a whole spa experience in itself.

  By then his mother had attained the status of a mythical being, something that transcended the human, with dark wings and eyes that burned like Justice, and a sword. When he got to the part where she'd stolen Killer the rakunk away from him he could usually wring out a tear or two, not from himself but from his auditors.

  What did you do? (Eyes wide, single pat of hand on arm, sympathetic gaze.)

  Oh, you know. (Shrug, look away, change subject.)

  It wasn't all acting.

  Only Oryx had not been impressed by this dire, feathered mother of his. So Jimmy, your mother went somewhere else? Too bad. Maybe she had some good reasons. You thought of that? Oryx had neither pity for him nor self-pity. She was not unfeeling: on the contrary. But she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was that the hook - that he could never get from her what the others had given him so freely? Was that her secret?

  Asperger's U.

  ~

  Crake and Jimmy kept in touch by e-mail. Jimmy whined about Martha Graham in what he hoped was an entertaining way, applying unusual and disparaging adjectives to his professors and fellow students. He described the diet of recycled botulism and salmonella, sent lists of the different multi-legged creatures he'd found in his room, moaned about the inferior quality of the mood-altering substances for sale in the dismal student mall. Out of self-protection, he concealed the intricacies of his sex life except for what he considered the minimum of hints. (These babes may not be able to count to ten, but hey, who needs numeracy in the sack? Just so long as they think it's ten, haha, joke, .)

  He couldn't help boasting a little, because this seemed to be - from any indications he'd had so far - the one field of endeavour in which he had the edge over Crake. At HelthWyzer, Crake hadn't been what you'd call sexually active. Girls had found him intimidating. True, he'd attracted a couple of obsessives who'd thought he could walk on water, and who'd followed him around and sent him slushy, fervent e-mails and threatened to slit their wrists on his behalf. Perhaps he'd even slept with them on occasion; but he'd never gone out of his way. Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

  The girls Jimmy accumulated had found Crake more than a little creepy, and it had made Jimmy feel superior to come to his defence. "He's okay, he's just on another planet," was what he used to say.

  But how to know about Crake's present circumstances? Crake divulged few factoids about himself. Did he have a roommate, a girlfriend? He never mentioned either, but that meant nothing. His e-mail descriptions were of the campus facilities, which were awesome - an Aladdin's treasure-trove of bio-research gizmos - and of, well, what else? What did Crake have to say in his terse initial communications from the Watson-Crick Institute? Snowman can't remember.

  They'd played long drawn-out games of chess though, two moves a day. Jimmy was better at chess by now; it was easier without Crake's distracting presence, and the way he had of drumming his fingers and humming to himself, as if he already saw thirty moves ahead and was patiently waiting for Jimmy's tortoiselike mind to trundle up to the next rook sacrifice. Also, Jimmy could look up grandmasters and famous games of the past on various Net programs, in between moves. Not that Crake wasn't doing the same thing.

  After five or six months Crake loosened up a bit. He was having to work harder than at HelthWyzer High, he wrote, because there was a lot more competition. Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; singletrack tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude -- these were not your sharp dressers - and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour.

  More than at HelthWyzer? asked Jimmy.

  Compared to this place, HelthWyzer was a pleebland, Crake replied. It was wall-to-wall NTs.

  NTs?

  Neurotypicals.

  Meaning?

  Minus the genius gene.

  So, are you a neurotypical? Jimmy asked the next week, having had some time to think this over. Also to worry about whether he himself was a neurotypical, and if so, was that now bad, in the gestalt of Crake? He suspected he was, and that it was.

  But Crake never answered that one. This was his way: when there was a question he didn't want to address, he acted as if it hadn't been asked.

  You should come and se
e this joint, he told Jimmy in late October of their sophomore year. Give yourself a lifetime experience. I'll pretend you're my dull-normal cousin. Come for Thanksgiving Week.

  The alternative for Jimmy was turkey with the parental-unit turkeys, joke, haha, , said Jimmy, and he wasn't up for that; so it would be his pleasure to accept. He told himself he was being a pal and doing Crake a favour, for who did lone Crake have to visit with on his holidays, aside from his boring old australopithecine not-really-an-uncle Uncle Pete? But also he found he was missing Crake. He hadn't seen him now for more than a year. He wondered if Crake had changed.

  Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course - Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there - but he'd taken a position on that. He'd write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigour.

  For the same reason he'd taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks, ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.

  Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered - at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power - an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who'd said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn't recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.

  He compiled lists of old words too - words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today's world, or toady's world, as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers. (Typo, the profs would note, which showed how alert they were.) He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

  One of his term papers - for his Applied Rhetoric course - was titled "Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear," and it supplied him with a great stand-up routine for use in the student pubs. He'd quote snatches of this and that - Improve Your Self-Image; The Twelve-Step Plan for Assisted Suicide; How to Make Friends and Influence People; Flat Abs in Five Weeks; You Can Have It All; Entertaining

  Without a Maid; Grief Management for Dummies - and the circle around him would crack up.

  He now had a circle around him again: he'd rediscovered that pleasure. Oh Jimmy, do Cosmetic Surgery for Everyone! Do Access Your Inner Child! Do Total Womanhood! Do Raising Nutria for Fun and Profit! Do The Survival Handbook of Dating and Sex! And Jimmy, the ever-ready song-and-dance man, would oblige. Sometimes he'd make up books that didn't exist - Healing Diverticulitis Through Chanting and Prayer was one of his best creations - and nobody would spot the imposture.

  He'd turned that paper topic into his senior dissertation, later. He'd got an A.

  There was a bullet-train connection between Martha Graham and Watson-Crick, with only one change. Jimmy spent a lot of the three-hour trip looking out the window at the pleeblands they were passing through. Rows of dingy houses; apartment buildings with tiny balconies, laundry strung on the railings; factories with smoke coming out of the chimneys; gravel pits. A huge pile of garbage, next to what he supposed was a high-heat incinerator. A shopping mall like the ones at HelthWyzer, only there were cars in the parking lots instead of electric golf carts. A neon strip, with bars and girlie joints and what looked like an archeological-grade movie theatre. He glimpsed a couple of trailer parks, and wondered what it was like to live in one of them: just thinking about it made him slightly dizzy, as he imagined a desert might, or the sea. Everything in the pleeblands seemed so boundless, so porous, so penetrable, so wide-open. So subject to chance.

  Accepted wisdom in the Compounds said that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands, apart from buying and selling: there was no life of the mind. Buying and selling, plus a lot of criminal activity; but to Jimmy it looked mysterious and exciting, over there on the other side of the safety barriers. Also dangerous. He wouldn't know the ways to do things there, he wouldn't know how to behave. He wouldn't even know how to pick up girls.

  They'd turn him upside down in no time, they'd shake his head loose. They'd laugh at him. He'd be fodder.

  The security going into Watson-Crick was very thorough, unlike the sloppy charade that took place at Martha Graham: the fear must have been that some fanatic would sneak in and blow up the best minds of the generation, thus dealing a crippling blow to something or other. There were dozens of CorpSeCorps men, complete with sprayguns and rubber clubs; they had Watson-Crick insignia, but you could tell who they really were. They took Jimmy's iris imprint and ran it through the system, and then two surly weightlifters pulled him aside for questioning. As soon as it happened he guessed why.

  "You seen your runaway mother lately?"

  "No," he said truthfully.

  "Heard from her? Had a phone call, another postcard?" So they were still tracking his snail mail. All of the postcards must be stored on their computers; plus his present whereabouts, which was why they hadn't asked where he'd come from.

  No again, he said. They had him hooked up to the neural-impulse monitor so they knew he wasn't lying; they must also have known that the question distressed him. He was on the verge of saying And if I had I wouldn't tell you, apeface, but he was old enough by then to realize that nothing would be served by that, and it was likely to land him on the next bullet train back to Martha Graham, or worse.

  "Know what she's been doing? Who she's hanging out with?"

  Jimmy didn't, but he had a feeling they themselves might have some idea. They didn't mention the Happicuppa demonstration in Maryland though, so maybe they were less informed than he feared.

  "Why are you here, son?" Now they were bored. The important part was over.

  "I'm visiting an old friend for Thanksgiving Week," said Jimmy. "A friend from HelthWyzer High. He's a student here.

  I've been invited." He gave the name, and the visitor authorization number supplied to him by Crake.

  "What sort of a student? What's he taking?"

  Transgenics, Jimmy told them.

  They pulled up the file to check, frowned at it, looked moderately impressed. Then they made a cellcall, as if they hadn't quite believed him. What was a serf like him doing visiting the nobility? their manner implied. But finally they let him through, and there was Crake in his no-name dark clothing, looking older and thinner and also smarter than ever, leaning on the exit barrier and grinning.

  "Hi there, cork-nut," said Crake, and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like sudden hunger. He was so pleased to see Crake he almost wept.

  Wolvogs

  ~

  Compared with Martha Graham, Watson-Crick was a palace. At the entranceway was a bronzed statue of the Institute's mascot, the spoat/gider - one of the first successful splices, done in Montreal at the turn of the century, goat crossed with spider to produce high-tensile spider silk filaments in the milk. The main application nowadays was bulletproof vests. The CorpSeCorps swore by the stuff.

  The extensive grounds inside the security wall were beautifully laid out: the work, said Crake, of the JigScape Faculty. The students in Botanical Transgenics (Ornamental Division) had created a whole array of drought-and-flood-resistant tropical blends, with flowers or leaves in lurid shades of chrome yellow and brilliant flame red and phos
phorescent blue and neon purple. The pathways, unlike the crumbling cement walks at Martha Graham, were smooth and wide. Students and faculty were beetling along them in their electric golf carts.

  Huge fake rocks, made from a combo-matrix of recycled plastic bottles and plant material from giant tree cacti and various lithops - the living-stone members of the Mesembryanthemaceae - were dotted here and there. It was a patented process, said Crake, originally developed at Watson-Crick and now a nice little money-spinner. The fake rocks looked like real rocks but weighed less; not only that, they absorbed water during periods of humidity and released it in times of drought, so they acted like natural lawn regulators. Rockulators, was the brand name. You had to avoid them during heavy rainfalls, though, as they'd been known to explode.

  But most of the bugs had now been ironed out, said Crake, and new varieties were appearing every month. The student team was thinking of developing something called the Moses Model, for dependable supplies of fresh drinking water in times of crisis. Just Hit It With a Rod, was the proposed slogan.

  "How do those things work?' asked Jimmy, trying not to sound impressed.

  "Search me," said Crake. "I'm not in NeoGeologicals."

  "So, are the butterflies - are they recent?" Jimmy asked after a while. The ones he was looking at had wings the size of pancakes and were shocking pink, and were clustering all over one of the purple shrubs.

  "You mean, did they occur in nature or were they created by the hand of man? In other words, are they real or fake?"

  "Mm," said Jimmy. He didn't want to get into the what is real thing with Crake.

  "You know when people get their hair dyed or their teeth done? Or women get their tits enlarged?"

  "Yeah?"

  "After it happens, that's what they look like in real time. The process is no longer important."

  "No way fake tits feel like real tits," said Jimmy, who thought he knew a thing or two about that.

  "If you could tell they were fake," said Crake, "it was a bad job. These butterflies fly, they mate, they lay eggs, caterpillars come out."