Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  In the company cafe he was a new boy, alone once more, starting over. He took to eating SoyOBoy burgers in the Compound mall, or taking out a greasy box of ChickieNobs Nubbins to munch on while working overtime at his computer terminal. Every week there was a Compound social barbecue, a comprehensive ratfuck that all employees were expected to attend. These were dire occasions for Jimmy. He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel; he loitered on the edges gnawing on a burned soydog and silently ripping apart everyone within eyesight. Saggy boobs, ran the thought balloon in his head. Bunfaced tofubrain. Thumbsucking posterboy. Fridgewoman. Sell his granny. Wobble-bummed bovine. Bladderheaded jerk.

  He got the occasional e-mail from his father; an e-birthday card perhaps, a few days later than his real birthday, something with dancing pigoons on it, as if he were still eleven. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True. Ramona would write him chatty, dutiful messages: no baby brother for him yet, she'd say, but they were still "working on it." He did not wish to visualize the hormone-sodden, potion-ridden, gel-slathered details of such work. If nothing "natural" happened soon, she said, they'd try "something else" from one of the agencies - Infantade, Foetility, Perfectababe, one of those. Things had changed a lot in the field since Jimmy came along! (Came along, as if he hadn't actually been born, but had just sort of dropped by for a visit.) She was doing her "research," because of course they wanted the best for their money.

  Terrific, thought Jimmy. They'd have a few trial runs, and if the kids from those didn't measure up they'd recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs - perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn. Then they'd load this hypothetical wonderkid up with their bloated expectations until the poor tyke burst under the strain. Jimmy didn't envy him.

  (He envied him.)

  Ramona invited Jimmy for the holidays, but he had no wish to go, so he pleaded overwork. Which was the truth, in a way, as he'd come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?

  After a while he was granted a promotion. Then he could buy new toys. He got himself a better DVD player, a gym suit that cleaned itself overnight due to sweat-eating bacteria, a shirt that displayed e-mail on its sleeve while giving him a little nudge every time he had a message, shoes that changed colour to match his outfits, a talking toaster. Well, it was company. Jimmy, your toast is done. He upgraded to a better apartment.

  Now that he was climbing up the ladder he found a woman, and then another one, and another one after that. He no longer thought of these women as girlfriends: now they were lovers.

  They were all married or the equivalent, looking for a chance to sneak around on their husbands or partners, to prove they were still young or else to get even. Or else they were wounded and wanted consolation. Or they simply felt ignored.

  There was no reason he couldn't have several of them at once, as long as he was conscientious about his scheduling. At first he enjoyed the rushed impromptu visits, the secrecy, the sound of Velcro ripped open in haste, the slow tumbling onto the floor; though he figured out pretty soon that he was an extra for these lovers - not to be taken seriously, but instead to be treasured like some child's free gift dug out of a box of cereal, colourful and delightful but useless: the joker among the twos and threes they'd been dealt in their real lives. He was merely a pastime for them, as they were for him, though for them there was more at stake: a divorce, or a spate of non-routine violence; at the least, a dollop of verbal uproar if they got caught.

  One good thing, they never told him to grow up. He suspected they kind of liked it that he hadn't.

  None of them wanted to leave their husbands and settle down with him, or to run away to the pleeblands with him, not that this was very possible any more. The pleeblands were said to have become ultra-hazardous for those who didn't know their way around out there, and the CorpSeCorps security at the Compound gates was tighter than ever.

  Garage

  ~

  So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

  His body had always been easy to maintain, but now he had to work at it. If he skipped the gym he'd develop flab overnight, where none was before. His energy level was sinking, and he had to watch his Joltbar intake: too many steroids could shrink your dick, and though it said on the package that this problem had been fixed due to the addition of some unpronounceable patented compound, he'd written enough package copy not to believe this. His hair was getting sparser around the temples, despite the six-week AnooYoo follicle-regrowth course he'd done. He ought to have known it was a scam - he'd put together the ads for it - but they were such good ads he'd convinced even himself. He found himself wondering what shape Crake's hairline was in.

  Crake had graduated early, done post-grad work, then written his own ticket. He was at RejoovenEsense now - one of the most powerful Compounds of them all - and climbing fast. At first the two of them had continued to keep in touch by e-mail. Crake spoke vaguely of a special project he was doing, something white-hot. He'd been given carte blanche, he said; the sun shone out of his bum as far as the top brass were concerned. Jimmy should come and visit sometime and he'd show him around. What was it that Jimmy was doing, again?

  Jimmy countered with a suggestion that they play chess.

  Crake's next news was that Uncle Pete had died suddenly. Some virus. Whatever it was had gone through him like shit through a goose. It was like watching pink sorbet on a barbecue - instant meltdown. Sabotage was suspected, but nothing had been proved.

  Were you there? asked Jimmy.

  In a manner of speaking, said Crake.

  Jimmy pondered this; then he asked if anyone else had caught the virus. Crake said no.

  As time went by, the intervals between their messages became longer and longer, the thread connecting them stretched thinner. What did they have to say to each other? Jimmy's wordserf job was surely one that Crake would despise, though affably, and Crake's pursuits might not be something Jimmy could understand any more. He realized he was thinking of Crake as someone he used to know.

  Increasingly he was restless. Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.

  On the evenings when none of his lovers had managed to lie to their husbands or equivalents well enough to spend time with him, he might go to a movie at the mall, just to convince himself he was part of a group of other people. Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

  There were the usual political assassinations out there in the pleebs, the usual strange accidents, the unexplained disappearances. Or there were sex scandals: sex scandals always got the newscasters excited. For a while it was sports coaches and little boys; then there was a wave of adolescent girls found locked in garages. These girls were said - by those who had done the locking - to be working as maids, and to have been brought from their squalid countries-of-origin for their own good. Being locked in the garage was for the protection of these girls, said the men - respectable men, accountants, lawyers, merchants dealing in patio furniture - who were dragged into court to defend themselves. Frequently their wives backed them up. These girls, said the wives, had been practically adopted, and were treated almost like one of the family. Jimmy loved those two words: practically, almost.

  The girls themselves told other stories, not all of them credible. They'd been drugged, said some. They'd been made to perfor
m obscene contortions in unlikely venues, such as pet shops. They'd been rowed across the Pacific Ocean on rubber rafts, they'd been smuggled in container ships, hidden in mounds of soy products. They'd been made to commit sacrilegious acts involving reptiles. On the other hand, some of these girls seemed content with their situations. The garages were nice, they said, better than what they'd had at home. The meals were regular. The work wasn't too hard. It was true they weren't paid and they couldn't go out anywhere, but there was nothing different or surprising to them about that.

  One of these girls - found locked in a garage in San Francisco, at the home of a prosperous pharmacist - said she used to be in movies, but was glad she'd been sold to her Mister, who had seen her on the Net and had felt sorry for her, and had come in person to fetch her and had paid a lot of cash to rescue her, and had flown with her on a plane across the ocean, and had promised to send her to school once her English was good enough. She refused to say anything negative about the man; she appeared to be simple, truthful, and sincere. When asked why the garage was locked, she said it was so nobody bad could get in. When asked what she did in there, she said she studied English and watched TV. When asked how she felt about her captor, she said she would always be grateful to him. The prosecution failed to shake her testimony, and the guy got off scot-free, although he was ordered to send her to school immediately. She said she wanted to study child psychology.

  There was a close-up of her, of her beautiful cat's face, her delicate smile. Jimmy thought he recognized her. He froze her image, then unpacked his old printout, the one from when he was fourteen - he'd kept it with him through all his moves, almost like a family photo, out of sight but never discarded, tucked in among his Martha Graham Academy transcripts. He compared the faces, but a lot of time had gone by since then. That girl, the eight-year-old in the printout, must be seventeen, eighteen, nineteen by now, and the one from the news broadcast seemed a lot younger. But the look was the same: the same blend of innocence and contempt and understanding. It made him feel light-headed, precariously balanced, as if he were standing on a cliff-edge above a rock-filled gorge, and it would be dangerous for him to look down.

  Gripless

  ~

  The CorpSeCorps had never lost sight of Jimmy. During his time at Martha Graham they'd hauled him in regularly, four times a year, for what they called little talks. They'd ask him the same questions they'd already asked a dozen times, just to see if they got the same answers. I don't know was the safest thing Jimmy could think of to say, which most of the time was accurate enough.

  After a while they'd taken to showing him pictures - stills from buttonhole snoop cameras, or black-and-whites that looked as if they'd been pulled off the security videocams at pleebland bank ATMs, or news-channel footage of this or that: demonstrations, riots, executions. The game was to see if he recognized any of the faces. They'd have him wired up, so even if he pretended ignorance they'd catch the spikes of neural electricity he wouldn't be able to control. He'd kept waiting for the Happicuppa caper in Maryland to turn up, the one with his mother in it - he dreaded that - but it never showed.

  He hadn't received any foreign postcards for a long time.

  ~

  After he'd gone to work at AnooYoo, the Corpsmen appeared to have forgotten about him. But no, they were just paying out the rope - seeing if he, or else the other side, meaning his mother, would use his new position, his dollop of extra freedom, to try to make contact again. After a year or so, there was the familiar knocking on the door. He always knew it was them because they never used the intercom first, they must have had some kind of bypass, not to mention the door code. Hello, Jimmy, how ya doing, we just need to ask you a few questions, see if you can help us out a little here.

  Sure, be glad to.

  Attaboy.

  And so it went.

  In - what? - his fifth year at AnooYoo, they finally hit pay dirt. He'd been looking at their pictures for a couple of hours by then. Shots of a boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away; a row of heads on poles - that was in the ex-Argentine, said the CorpSeCorps, though they didn't say whose heads they were or how they'd got onto the poles. Several women going through a supermarket checkout, all in sunglasses. A dozen bodies sprawled on the floor after a raid on a God's Gardeners safe house - that outfit was outlawed now - and one of them sure looked a lot like his old roomie, the incendiary Bernice. He said so, being a good boy, and got a pat on the back, but obviously they'd known that already because they weren't interested. He felt bad about Bernice: she'd been a nut and a nuisance, but she hadn't deserved to die like that.

  A lineup of mug shots from a Sacramento prison. The driver's licence photo from a suicide car-bomber. (But if the car had blown up, how had they come by the licence?) Three pantiless waitresses from a pleebland no-touching nookie bar - they threw that in for fun, and it did cause a waver on the neural monitor, unnatural if it hadn't, and smiles and chuckles all round. A riot scene Jimmy recognized from a movie remake of Frankenstein. They always put in a few tricks like that to keep him on his toes.

  Then more mug shots. Nope, said Jimmy. Nope, nope, nothing.

  Then came what looked like a routine execution. No horseplay, no prisoners breaking free, no foul language: by this Jimmy knew before he saw her that it was a woman they were erasing. Then came the figure in the loose grey prison clothing shuffling along, hair tied back, wrists handcuffed, the female guard to either side, the blindfold. Shooting by spraygun, it was going to be. No need for a firing squad, one spraygun would have done, but they kept the old custom, five in a row, so no single executioner need lose sleep over whose virtual bullet had killed first.

  Shooting was only for treason. Otherwise it was gas, or hanging, or the big brainfrizz.

  A man's voice, words coming from outside the shot: the Corpsmen had the sound turned down because they wanted Jimmy to concentrate on the visuals, but it must have been an order because now the guards were taking off the blindfold. Pan to close-up: the woman was looking right at him, right out of the frame: a blue-eyed look, direct, defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the sound came suddenly up. Goodbye. Remember Killer. I love you. Don't let me down.

  No question, it was his mother. Jimmy was shocked by how old she'd become: her skin was lined, her mouth withered. Was it the hard living she'd been doing on the run, or was it bad treatment? How long had she been in prison, in their grip? What had they been doing to her?

  Wait, he wanted to yell, but that was that, pullback shot, eyes covered again, zap zap zap. Bad aim, red spurts, they almost took her head off. Long shot of her crumpling to the ground.

  "Anything there, Jimmy?"

  "Nope. Sorry. Nothing." How could she have foreseen he'd be looking?

  They must have picked up the heartbeat, the surge of energy. After a few neutral questions - "Want a coffee? Need a leak?" - one of them said, "So, who was this killer?"

  "Killer," Jimmy said. He began to laugh. "Killer was a skunk." There, he'd done it. Another betrayal. He couldn't help himself.

  "Not a nice guy, eh? Some sort of biker?"

  "No," said Jimmy, laughing more. "You don't get it. A skunk. A rakunk. An animal." He put his head down on his two fists, weeping with laughter. Why did she have to drag Killer into it? So he'd know it was really her, that's why. So he'd believe her. But what did she mean about letting her down?

  "Sorry about that, son," said the older of the two Corpsmen. "We just had to be sure."

  It didn't occur to Jimmy to ask when the execution had taken place. Afterwards, he realized it might have been years ago. What if the whole thing was a fake? It could even have been digital, at least the shots, the spurts of blood, the falling down. Maybe his mother was still alive, maybe she was even still at large. If so, what had he given away?

  The next few weeks were the worst
he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he'd lost, or - sadder - had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it.

  He was angry most days. At first he sought out his various lovers, but he was moody with them, he failed to be entertaining, and worse, he'd lost interest in the sex. He stopped answering their e-messages - Is anything wrong, was it something I did, how can I help - and didn't return their calls: explaining wasn't worth it. In earlier days he would have made his mother's death into a psychodrama, harvested some sympathy, but that wasn't what he wanted now.

  What did he want?

  He went to the Compound singles bar; no joy there, he already knew most of those women, he didn't need their neediness. He went back to Internet porn, found it had lost its bloom: it was repetitive, mechanical, devoid of its earlier allure. He searched the Web for the HottTotts site, hoping that something familiar would help him to feel less isolated, but it was defunct.

  He was drinking alone now, at night, a bad sign. He shouldn't be doing that, it only depressed him, but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he'd whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark's mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth.

  He knew he was faltering, trying to keep his footing. Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.