“Welcome to Martha Graham, son,” said the president with a smile fake as a vitamin-supplement salesman’s.
When can I stop being a son? thought Jimmy.
Not yet. Oh, not yet. “Attaboy, Jimmy,” said his father at the garden party afterwards, giving him the arm punch. He had chocolate soy goo on his dweeby tie, which had a pattern of pigs with wings. Just don’t hug me, Jimmy prayed.
“Honey, we’re so proud of you,” said Ramona, who’d come decked out like a whore’s lampshade in an outfit with a low neckline and pink frills. Jimmy’d seen something like that on HottTotts once, only it was worn by an eight-year-old. Ramona’s push-up-bra breast tops were freckled from too much sun, not that Jimmy was much interested in those any more. He was familiar with the tectonics of cantilevered mammary-gland support devices by now, and anyway he found Ramona’s new matronly air repellent. She was getting little creases on either side of her mouth, despite the collagen injections; her biological clock was ticking, as she was fond of pointing out. Pretty soon it would be the NooSkins BeauToxique Treatment for her – Wrinkles Paralyzed Forever, Employees Half-Price – plus, in say five years, the Fountain of Yooth Total Plunge, which rasped off your entire epidermis. She kissed him beside the nose, leaving a smooch of cerise lipstick; he could feel it resting on his cheek like bicycle grease.
She was allowed to say we and to kiss him, because she was now officially his stepmother. His real mother had been divorced from his father in absentia, for “desertion,” and the bogus wedding of his father had been celebrated, if that was the word for it, soon after. Not that his real mother would have given a wombat’s anus, thought Jimmy. She wouldn’t have cared. She was off having cutting-edge adventures on her own, far from the dolorous festivities. He hadn’t had a postcard from her in months; the last one had shown a Komodo dragon and had borne a Malaysian stamp, and had prompted another visit from the CorpSeCorps.
At the wedding Jimmy got as drunk as it took. He propped himself against a wall, grinning stupidly as the happy couple cut the sugary cake, All Real Ingredients, as Ramona had made known. Lots of cackling over the fresh eggs. Any minute now Ramona would be planning a baby, a more satisfactory baby than Jimmy had ever been to anybody.
“Who cares, who cares,” he’d whispered to himself. He didn’t want to have a father anyway, or be a father, or have a son or be one. He wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient. From now on he was going to be fancy-free, doing whatever he liked, picking globes of ripe life off the life trees, taking a bite or two, sucking out the juice, throwing away the rinds.
It was Crake who’d got him back to his room. By that time Jimmy had been morose, and barely ambulatory. “Sleep it off,” said Crake in his genial fashion. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
Now here was Crake at the graduation garden party, looming up out of the crowd, shining with achievement. No, he wasn’t, Snowman amends. Give him credit for that at least. He was never a triumphalist.
“Congratulations,” Jimmy made himself say. It was easier because he was the only one at this gathering who’d known Crake well for any length of time. Uncle Pete was in attendance, but he didn’t count. Also, he was staying as far away from Crake as possible. Maybe he’d finally figured out who’d been running up his Internet bill. As for Crake’s mother, she’d died the month before.
It was an accident, or so went the story. (Nobody liked to say the word sabotage, which was notoriously bad for business.) She must have cut herself at the hospital – although, said Crake, her job didn’t involve scalpels – or scratched herself, or maybe she’d been careless and had taken her latex gloves off and had been touched on a raw spot by some patient who was a carrier. It was possible: she was a nail-biter, she might have had what they called an integumental entry point. In any case she’d picked up a hot bioform that had chewed through her like a solar mower. It was a transgenetic staph, said some labcoat, mixed with a clever gene from the slime-mould family; but by the time they’d pinned it down and started what they hoped would be effective treatment, she was in Isolation and losing shape rapidly. Crake couldn’t go in to see her, of course – nobody could, everything in there was done with robotic arms, as in nuclear-materials procedures – but he could watch her through the observation window.
“It was impressive,” Crake told Jimmy. “Froth was coming out.”
“Froth?”
“Ever put salt on a slug?”
Jimmy said he hadn’t.
“Okay. So, like when you brush your teeth.”
His mother was supposed to be able to speak her last words to him via the mike system, said Crake, but there was a digital failure; so though he could see her lips moving, he couldn’t hear what she was saying. “Otherwise put, just like daily life,” said Crake. He said anyway he hadn’t missed much, because by that stage she’d been incoherent.
Jimmy didn’t understand how he could be so nil about it – it was horrible, the thought of Crake watching his own mother dissolve like that. He himself wouldn’t have been able to do it. But probably it was just an act. It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.
Happicuppa
~
For the vacation following graduation, Jimmy was invited to the Moosonee HelthWyzer Gated Vacation Community on the western shore of Hudson’s Bay, where the top brass of HelthWyzer went to beat the heat. Uncle Pete had a nice place there, “nice place” being his term. Actually it was like a combination mausoleum and dirty-weekend hideaway – a lot of stonework, king-sized magic-finger beds, bidets in every bathroom – though it was hard to imagine Uncle Pete getting up to anything of much interest in there. Jimmy had been invited, he was pretty sure, so that Uncle Pete wouldn’t have to be alone with Crake. Uncle Pete spent most of his time on the golf course and the rest of it in the hot tub, and Jimmy and Crake were free to do whatever they liked.
They probably would have gone back to interactives and state-sponsored snuff, and porn, as relaxation after their final exams, but that was the summer the gen-mod coffee wars got underway, so they watched those instead. The wars were over the new Happicuppa bean, developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and had needed to be handpicked and processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty.
The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafés were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army. Or by the armies, various armies; a number of countries were involved. But the soldiers and dead peasants all looked much the same wherever they were. They looked dusty. It was amazing how much dust got stirred up in the course of such events.
“Those guys should be whacked,” said Crake.
“Which ones? The peasants? Or the guys killing them?”
“The latter. Not because of the dead peasants, there’s always been dead peasants. But they’re nuking the cloud forests to plant this stuff.”
“The peasants would do that too if they had half a chance,” said Jimmy.
“Sure, but they don’t have half a chance.”
“You’re taking sides?”
“There aren’t any sides, as such.”
Nothing much to be said to that. Jimmy thought about shouting bogus, decided it might not apply. Anyway they’d used up that word. “Let’s change channels,” he said.
But there was Happicuppa coverage, it seemed, wherever you turned. There were protests and demonstrations, with tear gas and shooting and bludgeoning; then more protests, more demonstrations, more tear gas, more shooting, more bludgeoning. This went
on day after day. There hadn’t been anything like it since the first decade of the century. Crake said it was history in the making.
Don’t Drink Death! said the posters. Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes; in the United States, a Boston Coffee Party sprang up. There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence – only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they’d been taken off, and severe-looking baggy-boobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smiley-faced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front. They were filmed dumping Happicuppa products into the harbour, but none of the boxes sank. So there was the Happicuppa logo, lots of copies of it, bobbing around on the screen. It could have been a commercial.
“Makes me thirsty,” said Jimmy.
“Shit for brains,” said Crake. “They forgot to add rocks.”
As a rule they watched the unfolding of events on the Noodie News, via the Net, but for a change they sometimes watched fully clothed newscasters on the wall-sized plasma screen in Uncle Pete’s leatherette-upholstered TV room. The suits and shirts and ties seemed bizarre to Jimmy, especially if he was mildly stoned. It was weird to imagine what all those serious-faced talking heads would look like minus their fashion items, full frontal on the Noodie News.
Uncle Pete sometimes watched too, in the evenings, when he was back from the golf course. He’d pour himself a drink, then provide a running commentary. “The usual uproar,” he said. “They’ll get tired of it, they’ll settle down. Everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee – you can’t fight that.”
“No, you can’t,” Crake would say agreeably. Uncle Pete had a chunk of Happicuppa stock in his portfolio, and not just a little chunk. “What a mort,” Crake would say as he scanned Uncle Pete’s holdings on his computer.
“You could trade his stuff,” said Jimmy. “Sell the Happicuppa, buy something he really hates. Buy windpower. No, better – buy a croaker. Get him some South American cattle futures.”
“Nah,” said Crake. “I can’t risk that with a labyrinth. He’d notice. He’d find out I’ve been getting in.”
Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy. Stop the Hipocrissy, read the note left at a safe distance.
“That’s pathetic,” said Jimmy. “They can’t even spell.”
“They made their point though,” said Crake.
“I hope they fry,” said Uncle Pete.
Jimmy didn’t answer, because now they were looking at the blockade of the Happicuppa head-office compound in Maryland. There in the shouting crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is a Crappi Cup, with a green bandanna over her nose and mouth, was – wasn’t it? – his vanished mother. For a moment the bandanna slipped down and Jimmy saw her clearly – her frowning eyebrows, her candid blue eyes, her determined mouth. Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked: he must have let out a gasp. Then there was a CorpSeCorps charge and a cloud of tear gas and a smattering of what sounded like gunfire, and when Jimmy looked again his mother had disappeared.
“Freeze the frame!” he said. “Turn back!” He wanted to be sure. How could she be taking such a risk? If they got hold of her she’d really disappear, this time forever. But after a brief glance at him Crake had already switched to another channel.
I shouldn’t have said anything, thought Jimmy. I shouldn’t have called attention. He was cold with fear now. What if Uncle Pete made the connection and phoned the Corpsmen? They’d be right on her trail, she’d be roadkill.
But Uncle Pete didn’t seem to have noticed. He was pouring himself another Scotch. “They should spraygun the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Once they’ve smashed those cameras. Who took that footage anyway? Sometimes you wonder who’s running this show.”
“So what was that about?” said Crake when they were alone.
“Nothing,” said Jimmy.
“I did freeze it,” said Crake. “I got the whole sequence.”
“I think you better erase it,” said Jimmy. He was past being frightened, he’d entered full-blown dejection. Surely at this very moment Uncle Pete was turning on his cellphone and punching in the numbers; hours from now it would be the CorpSeCorps interrogation all over again. His mother this, his mother that. He would just have to go through it.
“It’s okay,” said Crake, which Jimmy took to mean: You can trust me. Then he said, “Let me guess. Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus Homo, Species sapiens sapiens, subspecies your mother.”
“Big points,” said Jimmy listlessly.
“Not a stretch,” said Crake. “I spotted her right away, those blue eyes. It was either her or a clone.”
If Crake had recognized her, who else might have done so? Everyone in the HelthWyzer Compound had doubtless been shown pictures: You seen this woman? The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction. He wasn’t dependable, he was a security risk, he had a taint.
“My dad was the same,” said Crake. “He buggered off too.”
“I thought he died,” said Jimmy. That’s all he’d ever got out of Crake before: dad died, full stop, change the subject. It wasn’t anything Crake would talk about.
“That’s what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food.”
“Did he jump, or what?” said Jimmy. Crake didn’t seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.
“It was the general opinion,” said Crake. “He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word suicide. They said ‘your father’s accident.’”
“Sorry about that,” said Jimmy.
“Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really supportive.” Crake said supportive like a quote. “She said, besides being my dad’s boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I’d ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be resolved for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me – tell me all about how my father had problems.”
“Meaning your dad was a nutbar,” said Jimmy.
Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. “Yeah. But he wasn’t. He was acting worried lately, but he didn’t have problems. He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I’d have known.”
“You think he maybe fell off?”
“Fell off?”
“Off the overpass.” Jimmy wanted to ask what he’d been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Was there a railing?”
“He was kind of uncoordinated,” said Crake, smiling in an odd way. “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”
“You get along with him?”
Crake paused. “He taught me to play chess. Before it happened.”
“Well, I guess not after,” said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn’t like that at all.
~ ~ ~
How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?
No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked – events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate.
There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become o
ne. He had shut things out.
Applied Rhetoric
~
At the end of that vacation, Crake went off to Watson-Crick and Jimmy to Martha Graham. They shook hands at the bullet-train station.
“See you around,” said Jimmy.
“We’ll e-mail,” said Crake. Then, noticing Jimmy’s dejection, he said, “Come on, you did okay, the place is famous.”
“Was famous,” said Jimmy.
“It won’t be that bad.”
Crake was wrong, for once. Martha Graham was falling apart. It was surrounded – Jimmy observed as the train pulled in – by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials – sheets of tin, slabs of plywood – and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass shut out.
The security at the Martha Graham gateway was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls – scrawled all over with faded graffiti – could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf. Inside them, the Bilbao-ripoff cast-concrete buildings leaked, the lawns were mud, either baked or liquid depending on the season, and there were no recreational facilities apart from a swimming pool that looked and smelled like a giant sardine can. Half the time the air conditioning in the dorms didn’t work; there was a brownout problem with the electrical supply; the food in the cafeteria was mostly beige and looked like rakunk shit. There were arthropods in the bedrooms, families and genera various, but half of them were cockroaches. Jimmy found the place depressing, as did – it seemed – everyone there with any more neural capacity than a tulip. But this was the hand life had dealt him, as his dad had said during their awkward goodbye, and now Jimmy would just have to play it as well as he could.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 16
