MaddAddam 03 - MaddAddam

by Margaret Atwood

  But she needn’t have worried, because when they get there Jimmy’s eyes are closed. Lulled by the purring, he’s gone back to sleep.

  The gleaner team has moved off along the street, or what used to be a street. Zeb first, then Black Rhino, then Swift Fox, with Katuro bringing up the rear. They’re moving slowly, carefully, in and around the rubble. They’ll be scoping out possible ambushes, taking no chances.

  Toby wants to run after them, like a left-behind kid – Wait! Wait! Let me come with you! I have a rifle! – but no point in that.

  Zeb hadn’t asked if there was anything he could bring for her. If he had, what would she have said? A mirror? A floral bouquet? She should have requested at least the paper and the pencils. But somehow she couldn’t.

  Now they’re out of sight.

  The day moves on. The sun travels up and across the sky, the shadows flatten, food appears and is eaten, words are spoken; dining table objects are gathered together and washed. Sentries take turns. The cobb-house wall rises a little higher, the fence around it gains a coil of wire, weeds are removed from the garden, laundry is deployed. The shadows begin to stretch again, the afternoon clouds gather. Jimmy is carried inside, and the rain rains, with impressive thunder. Then the skies clear, the birds resume their contests, the clouds begin to redden in the west.

  No Zeb.

  The Mo’Hairs and their shepherds return, Crozier and Beluga and Shackleton, adding three hormonally charged males to the in-camp population mix. Crozier is dangling around Ren, Shackleton edging up to Amanda, Zunzuncito and Beluga are both eyeing Lotis Blue: the intrigues of love are unfolding as they do among the young, and as they do as well among the snails on the lettuce and the shiny green beetles that plague the kale. Murmurings, the shrug of a shoulder, the step forward, the step back.

  Toby proceeds through her tasks as if in a monastery, steadily, dutifully, counting the hours.

  Still no Zeb.

  What could have happened to him? She blots out the pictures. Or she tries to blot them out. Animal, with teeth and claws involved. Vegetable, a falling tree. Mineral, cement, steel, broken glass. Or human.

  Suppose he were suddenly not there. A vortex opens: she closes it. Never mind her own loss. What about the others? The other humans. Zeb has valuable skills, he has knowledge that can’t be replaced.

  They’re so few in number, so necessary to one another. Sometimes this encampment feels like a vacation of sorts, but it isn’t. They aren’t escaping from daily life. This is where they live now.

  She tells the Crakers there will be no story tonight, because Zeb has left the story of Zeb inside her head, but some of that story is hard to understand and she needs to put it in order before she can tell it to them. They ask her if a fish would help, but she says not now. Then she goes to sit by herself in the garden.

  You’ve lost, she tells herself. You’ve lost Zeb. By now Swift Fox must already have him, firmly clamped in her arms and legs and whatever orifices appeal. He’s tossed Toby herself aside like an empty paper bag. Why not? No promises were given.

  The breeze dies, damp heat rises from the earth, the shadows blend together. Mosquitoes whine. Here’s the moon, not so full any more. The hour of the moth comes round again.

  No moving lights approach, no voices. Nothing and no one.

  She spends the midnight watch with Jimmy in his cubicle, listening to him breathe. There’s a single candle. In its light the nursery-rhyme pictures on his quilt waver and swell. The cow grins, the dog laughs. The dish runs away with the spoon.

  Drugstore Romance

  In the morning Toby avoids the group at the breakfast table. She’s in no mood for lectures on epigenetics, or for curious glances, or for speculation about how she’s taking the defection of Zeb. He could have said a firm no to Swift Fox, but he didn’t. The message was clear.

  She goes around to the cooking shed, helps herself to some cold pork and burdock root from yesterday that’s withering under an upside-down bowl: Rebecca doesn’t like to throw out food.

  She sits down at the table, checks the neighbourhood. In the background the Mo’Hairs mill around, waiting for Crozier to let them out and lead them off to eat the weeds along the pathways. Here he comes now, in his biblical bedsheet getup, holding a long stick.

  Over by the swing set Ren and Lotis Blue are walking Jimmy to and fro in an awkward six-legged assemblage. His muscle tone isn’t great, but he’ll build up his strength quickly enough: underneath the wear and tear he’s still young. Amanda’s there too, sitting on one of the swings; and several of the Crakers, nibbling on the ubiquitous kudzu vines and watching, puzzled but not frightened.

  From a distance the scene is bucolic, though there are off-notes: the missing or escaped Mo’Hair is still escaped or missing, Amanda is apathetic and gazing down at the ground, and from the set of Crozier’s tight shoulders and the way he turns his back on Ren, he’s jealous of her Jimmy-pampering. Toby herself is an off-note, though she must appear calm to anyone watching. It’s best to look that way, and through long Gardener training she knows how to keep her face flat, her smile gentle.

  But where is Zeb? Why isn’t he back yet? Has he found Adam One?

  If Adam’s injured, he’ll need to be carried. That would slow them down. What’s happening out there in the ruined city, where she can’t see? If only the cellphones still worked. But the towers are down; even if there were still a power source, no one here would know how to repair the tech. There’s a hand-cranked radio, but it ceased to function.

  We’ll have to learn smoke signals all over again, she thinks. One for he loves me, two for he loves me not. Three for smouldering anger.

  She spends the day working in the garden, on the theory that it will be soothing. If only she had some beehives to care for. She could share the daily news with the bees, as she and old Pilar used to do, back on the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden before Pilar died. Ask them for advice. Request that they fly out and explore and then report back to her, as if they were cyberbees.

  Today we honour Saint Jan Swammerdam, first to discover that the Queen Bee is not a King, and that all worker Bees in a hive are sisters; and Saint Zosima, eastern patron of Bees, who lived the selfless monastic life in the desert, as we, too, are doing in our own way; and Saint C. R. Ribbands, for his meticulous observations on Bee communication stratagems. And let us thank the Creator for the Bees themselves, for their gifts of Honey and Pollen, for their priceless work of fertilization among our Fruits and Nuts and our flowering Vegetables, yes, and for the comfort they bring to us in times of stress, with, as Tennyson once wrote, the murmuring of innumerable Bees …

  Pilar had taught her to rub a little royal jelly into her skin before working with the bees: that way, they wouldn’t see her as a threat. They’d walk on her arms and face, their tiny feet touching as gently as eyelashes, as lightly as a cloud passing over. The bees are messengers, Pilar used to say. They carry the news back and forth between the seen world and the unseen one. If a loved one of yours has crossed the shadow threshold, they will tell you.

  Suddenly, today, there are dozens of honeybees in the garden, busying themselves among the bean flowers. There must be a new wild swarm nearby. One bee alights on her hand, tastes the salt on it. Is Zeb dead? she asks it silently. Tell me now. But it lifts off again without signalling.

  Had she believed all that? Old Pilar’s folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn’t quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhere darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

  In the late afternoon, once the thunder is over, the gleaner team returns. Toby sees them walking down the street, weaving in and out among the abandoned trucks and solarcars, backlit in the declin
ing sun, and counts their silhouettes even before she can identify them. Yes, there are four. Nobody’s missing. But also, no one’s been added.

  As they approach the fence around the cobb house Ren and Lotis Blue run to meet them, with a posse of Craker children following. Amanda runs too, though not as fast as the others. Toby walks.

  “It was intense!” Swift Fox is saying as she comes up. “But at least we made it to the drugstore.” She’s flushed, a little sweaty; smudged, jubilant. She sets down her pack, opening it. “Wait’ll you see what I got!”

  Zeb and Black Rhino look wiped; Katuro less so.

  “What happened?” Toby says to Zeb. She doesn’t say, “I was worried sick.” Surely he knows that.

  “Long story,” Zeb says. “Tell you later. I need a shower. Any trouble?”

  “Jimmy woke up,” she says. “He’s kind of weak. And thin.”

  “Good,” says Zeb. “Let’s fatten him up and get him walking. We could use some more help around here.” Then he’s moving away from her, over towards the back of the cobb house.

  Toby feels a blip of rage travelling through her body. Gone for almost two days and that’s all he has to say about it? She’s not a wife, she has no nagging rights, but she can’t stop the images: Zeb rolling around in the aisles of the deserted drugstore with Swift Fox, tearing off her camouflage outfit among the bottles of conditioner and shampoo-in colour, more than thirty exciting tints; or were they a couple of aisles over, near the condoms and sensation-enhancing gels? Maybe they’d squashed themselves in beside the cash register, or over by the baby products – finished off with a whole box of wet wipes. Something of the sort happened. It must have happened, to bring out that smug look on the face of Swift Fox.

  “Nail polish, painkillers, toothbrushes! Look, tweezers!” she’s saying now.

  “Looks like you cleaned the place out,” says Lotis Blue.

  “There wasn’t that much left,” says Swift Fox. “Looters were through, looks like they were interested in the pharmaceuticals. The Oxy, the BlyssPluss pills, anything with codeine.”

  “Not much use for the hair products?” says Lotis Blue.

  “No. And the girl stuff – they didn’t take that,” says Swift Fox. She starts unloading the packages of Heavy Days and tampons and Slimlines. “I made the guys carry some in their own packs. They scored some beer too. Now that was a minor miracle.”

  “Why did it take so long?” Toby asks. Swift Fox smiles at her, not snidely. Instead she’s too friendly, too guileless, like a teenager who’s broken curfew.

  “We got kind of trapped,” she says. “We poked around and gathered stuff, but then in the afternoon, right before we were going to head back, there was a herd of those huge pigs – the ones that used to try raiding the garden before we shot some of them.

  “At first they were just lurking along behind us, but when we’d finished in the drugstore and were coming out, we saw they were heading us off. So we ran back into the drugstore, but the front windows were smashed, so there was nothing to keep them out. We managed to get up onto the roof through a little trapdoor in the storeroom ceiling – they can’t climb.”

  “Did they look hungry?” says Ren.

  “How can you tell with a pig?” says Swift Fox.

  They’re omnivorous, thinks Toby. They’ll eat anything. But hungry or not, they’d kill in spite. Or for revenge. We’ve been eating them.

  “So then?” says Ren.

  “We stayed up on the roof for a while,” says Swift Fox, “and then the pigs came out of the drugstore and saw we were up on the roof. They’d found a carton of potato chips, they dragged it outside and had a party, keeping an eye on us the whole time. They were flaunting those chips: they must’ve known we were hungry. Zeb said to count them in case they split up into groups, with some of them creating a distraction and the others waiting to ambush us. Then they went off to the west, not walking but trotting, as if they’d decided on a goal. And we looked, and there was something over there. There was smoke.”

  Every once in a while something in the city catches fire. An electrical connection, still attached to a solar unit; a pile of damp organics, going up in a fit of spontaneous combustion; a cache of carbon garboil, heated by the sun. So smoke is not unheard of, and Toby says so.

  “This was different,” says Swift Fox. “It was thinner, like a camping fire.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot the pigs?” says Lotis Blue.

  “Zeb said it would be a waste of time because there were too many of them. Also we didn’t want to run out of energy packs for the sprayguns. Zeb thought we should go over there and take a look, but it was getting dark. So we stayed at the drugstore for the night.”

  “On the roof?” says Toby.

  “In the storeroom,” says Swift Fox. “We barricaded the door with some of the boxes in there. But nothing happened, except rats; there were a lot of those. Then in the morning we went over to where we saw the fire. Zeb and Black Rhino figured it was the Painball guys.”

  “Did you see them?” asks Amanda.

  “We saw the remains of their fire,” says Swift Fox. “Burnt out. Pig tracks all over it. Also what was left of our Mo’Hair. The one with the red braids? They’d been eating it.”

  “Oh no,” says Lotis Blue.

  “The Painballers or the pigs?” says Amanda.

  “Both,” says Swift Fox. “But we didn’t see any two guys. Zeb says the pigs must’ve chased them away. We did find a dead piglet, a little farther along: spraygun kill, Zeb said. A hind leg cut off. He says we should go back for it later because those pigs aren’t likely to throw themselves in our way again, not after one of their young has been killed, so we should make the most of any stray pork. But we heard some of those crazy vicious dog splices, so maybe we’ll have to fight them for it. It’s a zoo out there.”

  “If it really was a zoo there’d be fences,” says Lotis Blue. “That Mo’Hair was stolen, right? It didn’t just wander off. Those two guys must’ve been quite close to us and nobody saw them.”

  “That’s creepy,” says Ren.

  Swift Fox isn’t listening. “Look what else I got,” she says. “Pregnancy tests, the kind where you pee on sticks. I figure we’ll all be needing them. Or some of us will.” She smiles, but she doesn’t look at Toby.

  “Count me out,” says Ren. “Who’d bring a baby into this?” She sweeps her arm: the cobb house, the trees, the minimalism. “Without running water? I mean …”

  “Not sure you’ll have that option,” says Swift Fox. “In the long run. Anyway, we owe it to the human race. Don’t you think?”

  “Who’d be the dads?” says Lotis Blue with some interest.

  “I’d say take your pick,” says Swift Fox. “The line forms to the left. Just choose the one with the longest tongue hanging out.”

  “Guess you’ll be stuck with Ivory Bill then,” says Lotis Blue.

  “Did I say longest tongue?” says Swift Fox. She and Lotis Blue giggle, Ren and Amanda do not.

  “Let’s see those pee sticks,” says Ren.

  Toby stares into the darkness. Should she follow Zeb? He must have finished his shower by now: the cobb-house showers are never long, unless it’s Swift Fox, using up all the sun-warmed water. But Zeb is not in evidence.

  She stays awake in her cubicle, just in case. Moonlight silvering her eyes. Owls calling, in love with each other’s feathers. Nothing she wants.

  Weeding

  No Zeb all morning. No one mentions him. She doesn’t ask.

  Lunch is soup, with meat of some kind – smoked dog? – and kudzu with garlic. Polyberries that could be riper. A salad of mixed greens. “We need to figure out how to get some vinegar,” says Rebecca. “Then I can do a proper dressing.”

  “First we’d need to make the wine,” says Zunzuncito.

  “I’m all for that,” says Rebecca. She’s put some arugula seeds into the salad, for a peppery effect. She has a plan for making a saltworks – an evaporating pan, down by
the shore. Once the coast is clear, she says. Once the Painballers are accounted for.

  After lunch there’s indoor time, undercover time. The sun’s high and burning, the storm clouds not yet building. The air is sticky with moisture.

  Toby stays in her cubicle, trying to nap but sulking instead. No sulking allowed, she tells herself. No wound-licking. She can’t even be certain that there’s a wound to lick. Though she does feel wounded.

  Late afternoon, after the rain. Nobody’s around, with the exception of Crozier and Manatee, standing sentinel. Toby’s kneeling in the garden, killing slugs. It’s an act that would once have made her feel guilty – For are not Slugs God’s creatures too, Adam One would say, with as much claim to breathe the air, as long as they do it somewhere else in a place that is more congenial for them than our Edencliff Rooftop Garden? But right now killing them serves as an outlet for her. An outlet for what? She doesn’t wish to ponder that.

  Worse, she finds herself editorializing. Die, evil slug! She drops each plucked slug into a tin can with wood ash and water in the bottom. They’d used salt earlier, but there’s little of that to spare. Perhaps a swift blow with a flat rock would be kinder to the slugs – the wood ash must be painful – but she’s not in the mood to weigh the relative kindness of slug execution methods.

  She yanks out a weed. How thoughtlessly we label and dismiss God’s Holy Weeds! But Weed is simply our name for a plant that annoys us by getting in the way of our Human plans. Consider how useful and indeed edible and delicious so many of them are!

  Right. Not this one. Ragweed, from the look of it. She tosses it onto the pile of discards.