The news jockeys were trying to keep calm. The experts didn’t know what the superbug was, but it was a pandemic for sure, and a lot of people were dying fast – just sort of melting. As soon as they said, “No need for panic,” in that eerie calm tone with those glued-on smiles, I could tell it was really serious.
The second bad thing was that some guys in biosuits came into the Snakepit and stuffed the dead people into body bags and took them out. But they didn’t check out the second floor, although I screamed and screamed. I guess they couldn’t hear me because the Sticky Zone walls were thick and the Snakepit music was still going and it must have drowned me out. That was lucky for me, because if I’d left the Sticky Zone right then I’d have caught what everyone else was catching. So it wasn’t really a bad thing, but it felt like it at the time.
The next day the news was even worse. The plague was spreading, and there was rioting and looting and killing going on, and the CorpSeCorps had just more or less vanished: they must’ve been dying too.
And a few days after that, there wasn’t any more news.
Now I was really scared. But I told myself that although I couldn’t get out, nobody else could get in, and I’d be okay as long as the solar didn’t break down. It would keep the water flowing and the minifridge running, and the freezer, and the air filters. Air filtering was a plus, because it would soon be smelling very bad out there. And I would take one day at a time and see what came of it.
I knew I’d have to be practical, or I’d lose hope and slide into a Fallow state and maybe never come out of it. So I opened the minifridge and the freezer and counted all the stuff inside – the Joltbars and energy drinks and snacks, and the frozen ChickieNobs and the faux fish. If I ate only a third of every meal instead of half, and saved the rest instead of tossing it down the chute, I’d have enough for at least six weeks.
I’d been trying to call Amanda, but she hadn’t answered. All I could do was leave text messages: CUM 2 SCLS. My hope was that she’d get the texts and realize something was wrong, and then she’d come to Scales and figure out how to unlock the door. I’d kept my cellphone turned on all the time in case she called, but now when I tried to phone or even text I got NO SERVICE. Once I did get a short message – IM OK– but the channels must have been jammed with frantic people trying to reach their families, because I didn’t get anything more.
Then I guess the calling must have thinned out as people died, and I was able to get through. No picture, just her voice. “Where are you?” I said, and she said, “Nicked a solarcar. Ohio.”
“Don’t go into the cities,” I said. “Don’t let anyone touch you.” I wanted to tell her what I’d been learning from the news, but she’d faded out. After that I couldn’t even get a signal. The relay towers must have gone down.
You create your own reality, the horoscopes always said, and the Gardeners said that too. So I tried to create the reality of Amanda. Now she was in her khaki desert-girl outfit. Now she’d stopped to have a drink of water. Now she was digging up a root and eating it. Now she was walking again. She was coming towards me, hour by hour. She wouldn’t get the sickness, and no one would kill her, because she was so smart and strong. She was smiling. Now she was singing. But I knew I was just making it up.
51
I hadn’t seen Amanda except on the phone for such a long time, not since I’d started working at Scales. Before that, there had been a period when I hadn’t even known where she was. I’d lost touch when Lucerne had thrown out my purple phone, back when I’d still been living inside the HelthWyzer Compound. At that time I thought I’d never see Amanda again – that she was gone out of my life forever.
That was what I still believed as I sat on the bullet train on my way to the Martha Graham Academy. I was feeling very alone and sorry for myself: I hadn’t lost only Amanda, I’d lost everything in my life that had any meaning. The Adams and the Eves, or some of them, such as Toby and Zeb. Amanda. But most of all, Jimmy. I was over the worst of the hurt he’d caused me, but there was a dull ache. He’d been so sweet to me, then he’d shut me out as if I wasn’t really there. That was a cold and miserable feeling. I was so depressed that I’d even given up the idea that I might get together with Jimmy again, at Martha Graham: it seemed like a far-fetched daydream.
By the time I was on that bullet train it had been a long time since I’d been in love with Jimmy. No: it had been a long time since Jimmy had been in love with me – when I was being honest and not only angry and sad, I knew that I was still in love with Jimmy. I’d slept with other boys, but I’d just been going through the motions. I was going to Martha Graham partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing that you got, like a dress. I didn’t care what happened to me one way or the other, I just felt grey.
That was not at all the Gardener way of thinking. The Gardeners said the only real education was the education of the Spirit. But I’d forgotten what that meant.
Martha Graham was an artistic school named after a famous ancient dancer, so dance courses were featured at it. Since I had to take something I took Dance Calisthenics and Dramatic Expression – you didn’t need any background or math for those. I figured I could get a job in one of the Corps, leading the in-corp noon-hour exercise programs that the better ones had. Tone to Music, Yoga for Middle Management – one of those.
The Martha Graham campus was like the Buenavista Condos – it had been classy once, but now it was falling apart, and had mould issues, and the ceilings leaked. I couldn’t eat the stuff in the cafeteria because who knew what was in it – I still had a lot of trouble with animal protein, especially if it might be organs and noses. But I felt more at home there than I had in the HelthWyzer Compound, because at least Martha Graham wasn’t so shiny and fake-looking and it didn’t smell of chemical cleaning products. Or any cleaning products at all.
Every freshperson at Martha Graham had to share a suite. The roommate I was given was called Buddy the Third; I didn’t see much of him. He was in Football, but the Martha Graham team always got pulverized and Buddy the Third was drunk or stoned a lot as a result. I’d lock the door on my side of our shared bathroom because the guys on the football team were known for date rape and I didn’t think Buddy would even bother with the date part of it, but I could hear him in there throwing up in the mornings.
There was a Happicuppa franchise on campus, and I’d go there for breakfast because they had vegan muffins, I wouldn’t have to listen to Buddy puking, and I could use their washroom, which stank less than mine. One day I was walking up to the Happicuppa, and there was Bernice. I recognized her right away. I was really startled to see her. It was shocking – like a jolt of electricity. All the guilt I’d once felt about her but had more or less forgotten came flooding back.
She was wearing a green T-shirt with a big G on it and holding a sign that said, A HAPPICUPPA IS A CRAPPICUPPA. There were two other kids with the same T-shirt, but different signs: BREW OF EVIL, DON’T DRINK DEATH. I could see from the outfits and facial expressions that they were extreme fanatic ultra-greens, and they were picketing the place. This was the year when there were all the Happicuppa riots – I’d seen them onscreen.
Bernice wasn’t any prettier than she used to be. If anything, she was chunkier, and her scowling was fiercer. She didn’t spot me, so I had a choice: I could have gone right past her and into the Happicuppa, pretending I hadn’t seen her, or I could have turned around and slid away. But I found myself going right back into Gardener mode, remembering all those teachings about taking responsibility and if you killed a thing you had to eat it. And I had killed Burt, in a way. Or I felt I had.
So I didn’t dodge it. Instead I went right up to her and said, “Bernice! It’s me – Ren!”
She jumped as if I’d kicked her. Then she focused on me. “So I see,” she said in a sour voice.
“Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. I mu
st’ve been really nervous to say that because why would Bernice want a coffee from a place she was picketing?
She must have thought I was making fun of her because she said, “Piss off.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way. How about a water, then? We could drink it over there, by the statue.” The statue of Martha Graham was a sort of mascot: it showed her being Judith, holding up the head of her enemy Holofernes, and the students had painted the head’s neck stump red and stuck steel wool under Martha’s armpits. There was a flat base right underneath the Holofernes head where you could sit.
She gave me another scowl. “You are so backslidden,” she said. “Bottled water is evil. Don’t you know anything?”
I could have called her a bitch and just walked away from everything. But this was my one chance to put things right, at least with myself. “Bernice,” I said, “I want to make you an apology. So just tell me what you can drink, and I’ll get some of it, and we’ll go someplace and drink it.”
She was still grumpy – no one could hold a grudge like her – but after I’d said we needed to put Light around it, which must’ve triggered off the better Gardener part of her, she said there was this organic mix in a recyclable carton made of pressed kudzu leaves, you could get it at the campus supermarkette, and she still had some picketing to do, but by the time I came back with the stuff she could take a break.
We sat underneath the head of Holofernes with the two boxes of liquid mulch I’d bought, and the taste brought back my early days at the Gardeners – how unhappy I’d been at first, and how Bernice had stuck up for me then. “Didn’t you go to the West Coast?” I asked her. “After all that …”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, I’m back here now.” She said that Veena had backslidden and joined an entirely different religion called the Known Fruits, who claimed it was a mark of God’s favour to be rich because By their fruits ye shall know them, and fruits meant bank accounts. Veena had gone into a HelthWyzer vitamin-supplements franchise, and had quickly expanded to five outlets, and was doing very well. Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.
Veena had wanted Bernice to take Business at college, but Bernice had stayed a Gardener by faith, so they’d fought about it; and Martha Graham was a compromise because it had courses in How to Profit from Holistic Healing. Which was what Bernice was taking.
I couldn’t picture Bernice healing anything, because I couldn’t picture her wanting to heal anything. Grinding dirt into your cut was more her style. But I said that was really interesting.
I told her what I was taking, but I saw she didn’t care. So I told her about my roommate, Buddy the Third, and she said the entire Martha Graham Academy was filled with people like that – Exfernals frittering away their time on Earth without one serious thought in their heads except drinking and getting laid. She’d had a roommate like that at first, plus he’d been an animal-murderer because he’d worn leather sandals. Though they’d been fleather. But they’d looked like leather. So she’d burnt them. And thank God she didn’t have to share a bathroom with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual things with girls practically every night, like some degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.
“Jimmy!” she said. “What a meat-breath!”
When I heard the name Jimmy I thought, It can’t be the same one, but then I thought, Oh yes it can. While this was running through my head, Bernice said why didn’t I move into the room adjoining hers since now that Jimmy had moved out it was empty.
I’d wanted to make it up with her but not that much. So I launched into what I needed to say. “I’m very sorry about Burt,” I said. “Your dad. About him dying like that. I feel so responsible.”
She looked at me as if I was crazy. “What’re you talking about?” she said.
“That time I told you he was having sex with Nuala, and you told Veena, and she blew up and called the CorpSeCorps? Well, I don’t think he was having sex with Nuala. Me and Amanda – we kind of made it up because we were being mean. I feel terrible about it, and I’m really sorry. I don’t think he ever did anything worse than girls’ armpits.”
“At least Nuala was a grown-up,” said Bernice. “But he didn’t stop at the armpits. With the girls. He was a degenerate, just like my mother said. He used to tell me I was his favourite little girl, but not even that was true. So I told Veena. That’s why she ratted him out. So you can stop feeling so self-important.” I got the old glare, though this time with red watery eyes. “You’re just lucky it was never you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Bernice, I’m really sorry.”
“I don’t want to talk about this any more,” said Bernice. “I prefer to spend my time in more productive ways.” She said would I come and stencil Happicuppa protest signs with her, and I said I’d already skipped one class that day, but maybe some other time. She gave me that slitty-eyed look that said she could tell I was wriggling out of something. Then I asked her what her old roommate Jimmy had actually looked like, and she said why was that any of my business?
She was right back into her bossy mode, and I knew that if I hung around with her much longer I’d be nine years old again, and she’d have the same hold on me, only more so because however awful things might be for me in my life they’d always be worse in hers, and she’d have a victim hammerlock on me. I said I really had to run, and she said, “Yeah, right,” and then she said I hadn’t changed at all, I was still just as much of a simpy lightweight as I’d ever been.
Years later – when I was already working at Scales and Tails – I saw onscreen that Bernice had been spraygunned in a raid on a Gardeners safe house. That was after the Gardeners had been outlawed. Though being outlawed wouldn’t have stopped Bernice; she was a person with the courage of her convictions. I had to admire her for that – for the convictions, and also for the courage – because I never really felt I had either one.
There was a close-up of her dead face, looking more gentle and peaceful than I’d ever seen her look in life. Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought – kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges – that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she’d grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she’d been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.
52
Before that conversation with Bernice when she’d talked about her former roommate, I’d been half expecting to see Jimmy – in a classroom, at the Happicuppa, or just walking somewhere. But now I felt he must be very close by. He was right around the corner, or on the other side of a window; or I’d wake up one morning and there he would be, right beside me, holding my hand and looking at me the way he used to do when we first got together. It was like being haunted.
Maybe I’ve imprinted on Jimmy, I thought. Like a baby duck hatching out of an egg and the first thing it sees is a weasel, so that’s what it follows around for the rest of its life. Which is likely to be short. Why did it have to be Jimmy who was the very first person I’d fallen in love with? Why couldn’t it have been someone with a better character? Or at least a less fickle person. A more serious person, not so given to playing the fool.
The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t get interested in anyone else. There was a hole in my heart that only Jimmy could fill. I know that’s a country-and-western thing to say – I’d heard enough of that kind of worldly music on my Sea/H/Ear Candy by then – but it’s the only way I can explain it. And it isn’t that I wasn’t aware of Jimmy’s faults, because I was.
I did see Jimmy eventually, of course. The campus wasn’t huge, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. I saw him in the distance, and he saw me, but he didn’t com
e rushing over. He stayed in the distance. He didn’t even wave, he looked away as if he hadn’t seen me. So if I’d been waiting for the answer to the question I was always asking myself – Does Jimmy still love me? – I had it now.
Then I met a girl in Dance Calisthenics – Shayluba somebody – who’d been with Jimmy for a while. She said it was great at first, but he started saying how he was really bad for her, he was incapable of commitment because of the girlfriend he’d had in high school. They were too young, it ended badly, and he’d been an emotional dumpster ever since, but maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched.
“Was her name Wakulla Price?” I asked.
“No, actually,” said Shayluba. “It was you. He pointed you out.”
Jimmy, what a fraud and bullshitting liar you are, I thought. But then I thought, What if it’s true? What if I’d crapped up Jimmy’s life just as much as he’d crapped up mine?
I tried to forget all about him. But somehow I couldn’t. Beating myself up over Jimmy had become a bad habit with me, like biting your nails. Every once in a while I’d see him drifting past in the distance, which was like having just one cigarette when you’re trying to quit – it starts you off again. Not that I was ever a smoker.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 57
