Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Jimmy had mourned for weeks. No, for months. Which one of them was he mourning the most? His mother, or an altered skunk?

  His mother had left another note. Not a note - a wordless message. She'd trashed Jimmy's father's home computer, and not only the contents: she'd taken the hammer to it. Actually she'd employed just about every single tool in Jimmy's father's neatly arranged and seldom-used Mr. Home Handyman tool box, but the hammer seemed to have been her main weapon of choice. She'd done her own computer too, if anything more thoroughly. Thus neither Jimmy's father nor the CorpSeCorps men who were soon all over the place had any idea of what coded messages she might have been sending, what information she may or may not have downloaded and taken out with her.

  As for how she'd got through the checkpoints and the gates, she'd said she was going for a root canal procedure, to a dentist in one of the Modules. She'd had the paperwork, all the necessary clearances, and the backstory was real: the root canal specialist at the HelthWyzer dental clinic had toppled over with a heart attack and his replacement hadn't arrived, so they were contracting out. She'd even made a genuine appointment with the Module dentist, who'd billed Jimmy's dad for the time when she hadn't shown up. (Jimmy's dad refused to pay, because it wasn't his missed appointment; he and the dentist had a shouting match about it later, over the phone.) She hadn't packed any luggage, she'd been smarter than that. She'd booked a CorpSeCorps man as protection in the taxi ride from the sealed bullet-train station through the short stretch of pleebland that had to be crossed before reaching the perimeter wall of the Module, which was the usual thing to do. No one questioned her, she was a familiar sight and she had the requisition and the pass and everything. No one at the Compound gate had looked inside her mouth, though there wouldn't have been much to see: nerve pain wouldn't have shown.

  The CorpSeCorps man must have been in cahoots with her, or else he'd been done away with; in any case he didn't come back and he was never found. Or so it was said. That really stirred things up. It meant there had been others involved. But what others, and what were their goals? It was urgent that these matters be clarified, said the Corps guys who grilled Jimmy. Had Jimmy's mother ever said anything to him, the Corpsmen asked?

  Like, what did they mean by anything? said Jimmy. There were the conversations he'd overheard on his mini-mikes, but he didn't want to talk about those. There were the things his mother rambled on about sometimes, about how everything was being ruined and would never be the same again, like the beach house her family had owned when she was little, the one that got washed away with the rest of the beaches and quite a few of the eastern coastal cities when the sea-level rose so quickly, and then there was that huge tidal wave, from the Canary Islands volcano. (They'd taken it in school, in the Geolonomics unit. Jimmy had found the video simulation pretty exciting.) And she used to snivel about her grandfather's Florida grapefruit orchard that had dried up like a giant raisin when the rains had stopped coming, the same year Lake Okeechobee had shrunk to a reeking mud puddle and the Everglades had burned for three weeks straight.

  But everyone's parents moaned on about stuff like that. Remember when you could drive anywhere? Remember when everyone lived in the pleeblands? Remember when you could fly anywhere in the world, without fear? Remember hamburger chains, always real beef, remember hot-dog stands? Remember before New York was New New York? Remember when voting mattered? It was all standard lunchtime hand-puppet stuff. Oh it was all so great once. Boohoo. Now I'm going into the Twinkies package. No sex tonight!

  His mother was just a mother, Jimmy told the CorpSeCorps man. She did what mothers did. She smoked a lot.

  "She belong to any, like, organizations? Any strange folk come to the house? She spend a lot of time on the cellphone?"

  "Anything you could help us out with, we'd appreciate it, son," said the other Corpsman. It was the son that clinched it. Jimmy said he didn't think so.

  Jimmy's mother had left some new clothes for him, in the sizes she said he would soon grow into. They were sucky, like the clothes she always bought. Also they were too small. He put them away in a drawer.

  ~

  His father was rattled, you could tell; he was scared. His wife had broken every rule in the book, she must've had a whole other life and he'd had no idea. That sort of thing reflected badly on a man. He said he hadn't kept any crucial information on the home computer she'd wrecked, but of course he would have said that, and there was no way of proving otherwise. Then he'd been debriefed, elsewhere, for quite a long time. Maybe he was being tortured, as in old movies or on some of the nastier Web sites, with electrodes and truncheons and red-hot nails, and Jimmy worried about that and felt bad. Why hadn't he seen it all coming and headed it off, instead of playing at mean ventriloquism?

  Two cast-iron CorpSeCorps women had stayed in the house while Jimmy's father was away, looking after Jimmy, or so it was called. A smiling one and a flat-faced one. They made a lot of phone calls on their ether cells; they went through the photo albums and Jimmy's mother's closets, and tried to get Jimmy to talk. She looks really pretty. You think she had a boyfriend? Did she go to the pleeblands much? Why would she go there, said Jimmy, and they said some people liked to. Why, said Jimmy again, and the flat-faced one said some people were twisted, and the smiling one laughed and blushed, and said you could get things out there you couldn't get in here. What sorts of things, Jimmy wanted to ask, but he didn't because the answer might entangle him in more questions, about what his mother liked or might want to get. He'd done all of his betrayal of her in the HelthWyzer High lunchroom, he wasn't going to do any more.

  The two of them cooked terrible leathery omelettes in an attempt to throw Jimmy off guard by feeding him. After that didn't work, they microwaved frozen dinners and ordered in pizza. So, your mother go to the mall a lot? Did she go dancing? I bet she did. Jimmy wanted to slug them. If he'd been a girl he could have burst into tears and got them to feel sorry for him, and shut them up that way.

  After Jimmy's dad came back from wherever he'd been taken, he'd had counselling. He looked like he needed it, his face was green and his eyes were red and puffy. Jimmy had counselling too, but it was a waste of time.

  You must be unhappy that your mother's gone.

  Yeah, right.

  You mustn't blame yourself, son. It's not your fault she left.

  How do you mean?

  It's okay, you can express your emotions.

  Which ones would you like me to express?

  No need to be hostile, Jimmy, I know how you feel.

  So, if you already know how I feel, why are you asking me, and so on.

  Jimmy's dad told Jimmy that they two fellows would just have to forge ahead the best way they could. So they did forge ahead. They forged and they forged, they poured out their own orange juice in the morning and put the dishes in the dishwasher when they remembered, and after a few weeks of forging Jimmy's dad lost his greenish tint and started playing golf again.

  Underneath you could tell he wasn't feeling too shabby, now that the worst was over. He began whistling while he shaved. He shaved more. After a decent interval Ramona moved in. Life took on a different pattern, which involved bouts of giggly, growly sex going on behind doors that were closed but not soundproof, while Jimmy turned his music up high and tried not to listen. He could have put a bug in their room, taken in the whole show, but he had a strong aversion to that. Truth to tell, he found it embarrassing. Once there was a difficult encounter in the upstairs hall, Jimmy's father in a bath towel, ears standing out from the sides of his head, jowls flushed with the energy of his latest erotic tussle, Jimmy red with shame and pretending not to notice. The two hormone-sodden love bunnies might have had the decency to do it in the garage, instead of rubbing Jimmy's nose in it all the time. They made him feel invisible. Not that he wanted to feel anything else.

  How long had they been going at it? Snowman wonders now. Had the two of them been having it off behind the pigoon pens in their biosuits and
germ-filtering face masks? He doesn't think so: his father was a nerd, not a shit. Of course you could be both: a nerdy shit, a shitty nerd. But his father (or so he believes) was too awkward and bad at lying to have become involved in full-fledged treachery and betrayal without Jimmy's mother noticing.

  Though maybe she had noticed. Maybe that was why she'd fled, or part of the reason. You don't take a hammer - not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench - to a guy's computer without being quite angry.

  Not that she hadn't been angry in general: her anger had gone way beyond any one motive.

  The more Snowman thinks about it, the more he's convinced that Ramona and his father had refrained. They'd waited till Jimmy's mother had buggered off in a splatter of pixels before toppling into each other's arms. Otherwise they wouldn't have done so much earnest, blameless gazing at each other in Andre's Bistro at OrganInc. If they'd been having a thing already they'd have been brusque and businesslike in public, they'd have avoided each other if anything; they'd have had quick and dirty trysts in grungy corners, weltering around in their own popped buttons and stuck zippers on the office carpet, chewing each other's ears in car parks. They wouldn't have bothered with those antiseptic lunches, with his father staring at the tabletop while Ramona liquefied the raw carrots. They wouldn't have salivated on each other over the greenery and pork pies while using young Jimmy as a human shield.

  Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He's a grown-up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them?

  (He blames them.)

  Ramona sat Jimmy down and gazed at him with her big black-fringed smudgy sincere eyes, and told him that she knew this was very hard on him and it was a trauma for them all, it was hard on her too, though maybe he, you know, might not think so, and she was aware that she couldn't replace his real mother but she hoped, maybe they could be buddies? Jimmy said, Sure, why not, because apart from her connection with his father he liked her well enough and wanted to please her.

  She did try. She laughed at his jokes, a little late sometimes - she was not a word person, he reminded himself - and sometimes when Jimmy's father was away she microwaved dinner for just herself and Jimmy; lasagna and Caesar salad were her staples. Sometimes she would watch DVD movies with him, sitting beside him on the couch, making them a bowl of popcorn first, pouring melted butter substitute onto it, dipping into it with greasy fingers she'd lick during the scary parts while Jimmy tried not to look at her breasts. She asked him if there was anything he wanted to ask her about, like, you know. Her and his dad, and what had happened to the marriage. He said there wasn't.

  In secret, in the night, he yearned for Killer. Also - in some corner of himself he could not quite acknowledge - for his real, strange, insufficient, miserable mother. Where had she gone, what danger was she in? That she was in danger of some sort was a given. They'd be looking for her, he knew that, and if he were her he wouldn't want to be found.

  But she'd said she would contact him, so why wasn't she doing it? After a while he did get a couple of postcards, with stamps from England, then Argentina. They were signed Aunt Monica, but he knew they were from her. Hope you're well, was all they said. She must have known they'd be read by about a hundred snoops before ever getting to Jimmy, and that was right, because along came the Corpsmen after each one, asking who Aunt Monica was. Jimmy said he didn't know. He didn't think his mother was in any of the countries the stamps were from, because she was way smarter than that. She must have got other people to mail them for her.

  Didn't she trust him? Evidently not. He felt he'd disappointed her, he'd failed her in some crucial way. He'd never understood what was required of him. If only he could have one more chance to make her happy.

  "I am not my childhood," Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can't turn them off, he can't change the subject, he can't leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. They'd had that in grade school. Religion of the Week. All right, class, now quiet as mice, that means you, Jimmy. Today we're going to pretend we live in India, and we're going to do a mantra. Won't that be fun? Now let's all choose a word, a different word, so we can each have our own special mantra.

  "Hang on to the words," he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

  Crake

  ~

  A few months before Jimmy's mother vanished, Crake appeared. The two things happened in the same year. What was the connection? There wasn't one, except that the two of them seemed to get on well together. Crake was among the scant handful of Jimmy's friends that his mother liked. Mostly she'd found his male pals juvenile, his female ones airheaded or sluttish. She'd never used those words but you could tell.

  Crake though, Crake was different. More like an adult, she'd said; in fact, more adult than a lot of adults. You could have an objective conversation with him, a conversation in which events and hypotheses were followed through to their logical conclusions. Not that Jimmy ever witnessed the two of them having such a conversation, but they must have done or else she wouldn't have said that. When and how did these logical, adult conversations take place? He's often wondered.

  "Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself." Then she'd gaze at Jimmy with that blue-eyed, wounded-by-him look he knew so well. If only he could be like that - intellectually honourable. Another baffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing. Jimmy would do better at intellectual honourableness if only he would try harder. Plus, if he had any fucking clues about what the fuck it meant.

  "I don't need supper," he'd tell her yet again. "I'll just grab a snack." If she wanted to do that wounded thing she could do it for the kitchen clock. He'd fixed it so the robin said hoot and the owl said caw caw. Let her be disappointed with them for a change.

  He had his doubts about Crake's honourableness, intellectual or otherwise. He knew a bit more about Crake than his mother did.

  When Jimmy's mother took off like that, after the rampage with the hammer, Crake didn't say much. He didn't seem surprised or shocked. All he said was that some people needed to change, and to change they needed to be elsewhere. He said a person could be in your life and then not in it any more. He said Jimmy should read up on the Stoics. That last part was mildly aggravating: Crake could be a little too instructive sometimes, and a little too free with the shoulds. But Jimmy appreciated his calmness and lack of nosiness.

  Of course Crake wasn't Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n's instead of the usual spelling? "My dad liked music," was Crake's explanation, once Jimmy got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. "He named me after a dead pianist, some boy genius with two n's."

  "So did he make you take music lessons?"

  "No," said Crake. "He never made me do much of anything."

  "Then what was the point?

  "Of what?"

  "Of your name. The two n's."

  "Jimmy, Jimmy," said Crake. "Not everything has a point."

  Snowman has trouble thinking of Crake as Glenn, so thoroughly has Crake's later persona blotted out his earlier one. The Crake side of him must have been there from the beginning, thinks Snowman: there was never any real Glenn, Glenn was only a disguise. So in Snowman's reruns of the story, Crake is never Glenn, and never Glenn-alias-Crake or Crake/Glenn, or Glenn, later Crake. He is always just Crake, pure and simple.

  Anyway Crake saves time, thinks Snowman. Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?

  Crake turned up at HelthWyzer High in September or October, one of those months that used to be c
alled autumn. It was a bright warm sunny day, otherwise undistinguished. He was a transfer, the result of some headhunt involving a parental unit: these were frequent among the Compounds. Kids came and went, desks filled and emptied, friendship was always contingent.

  Jimmy wasn't paying much attention when Crake was introduced to the class by Melons Riley, their Hoodroom and Ultratexts teacher. Her name wasn't Melons - that was a nickname used among the boys in the class - but Snowman can't remember her real name. She shouldn't have bent down so closely over his Read-A-Screen, her large round breasts almost touching his shoulder. She shouldn't have worn her NooSkins T-shirt tucked so tightly into her zipleg shorts: it was too distracting. So that when Melons announced that Jimmy would be showing their new classmate Glenn around the school, there was a pause while Jimmy scrambled to decipher what it was she'd just said.

  "Jimmy, I made a request," said Melons.

  "Sure, anything," said Jimmy, rolling his eyes and leering, but not taking it too far. There was some class laughter; even Ms. Riley gave him a remote, unwilling smile. He could usually get round her with his boyish-charm act. He liked to imagine that if he hadn't been a minor, and she his teacher and subject to abuse charges, she'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.

  Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it.

  When Jimmy got around to focusing on Crake, he wasn't too cheered. Crake was taller than Jimmy, about two inches; thinner too. Straight brown-black hair, tanned skin, green eyes, a half-smile, a cool gaze. His clothes were dark in tone, devoid of logos and visuals and written commentary - a no-name look. He was possibly older than the rest of them, or trying to act it. Jimmy wondered what kinds of sports he played. Not football, nothing too brawny. Not tall enough for basketball. He didn't strike Jimmy as a team player, or one who would stupidly court injury. Tennis, maybe. (Jimmy himself played tennis.)