Shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best; they showed electrocutions and lethal injections. Once they'd made real-time coverage legal, the guys being executed had started hamming it up for the cameras. They were mostly guys, with the occasional woman, but Jimmy didn't like to watch those: a woman being croaked was a solemn, weepy affair, and people tended to stand around with lighted candles and pictures of the kids, or show up with poems they'd written themselves. But the guys could be a riot. You could watch them making faces, giving the guards the finger, cracking jokes, and occasionally breaking free and being chased around the room, trailing restraint straps and shouting foul abuse.
Crake said these incidents were bogus. He said the men were paid to do it, or their families were. The sponsors required them to put on a good show because otherwise people would get bored and turn off. The viewers wanted to see the executions, yes, but after a while these could get monotonous, so one last fighting chance had to be added in, or else an element of surprise. Two to one it was all rehearsed.
Jimmy said this was an awesome theory. Awesome was another old word, like bogus, that he'd dredged out of the DVD archives. "Do you think they're really being executed?" he said. "A lot of them look like simulations."
"You never know," said Crake.
"You never know what?"
"What is reality?"
"Bogus!"
There was an assisted-suicide site too - nitee-nite.com, it was called - which had a this-was-your-life component: family albums, interviews with relatives, brave parties of friends standing by while the deed was taking place to background organ music. After the sad-eyed doctor had declared that life was extinct, there were taped testimonials from the participants themselves, stating why they'd chosen to depart. The assisted-suicide statistics shot way up after this show got going. There was said to be a long lineup of people willing to pay big bucks for a chance to appear on it and snuff themselves in glory, and lotteries were held to choose the participants.
Crake grinned a lot while watching this site. For some reason he found it hilarious, whereas Jimmy did not. He couldn't imagine doing such a thing himself, unlike Crake, who said it showed flair to know when you'd had enough. But did Jimmy's reluctance mean he was a coward, or was it just that the organ music sucked?
These planned departures made him uneasy: they reminded him of Alex the parrot saying I'm going away now. There was too fine a line between Alex the parrot and the assisted suicides and his mother and the note she'd left for him. All three gave notice of their intentions; then all vanished.
Or they would watch At Home With Anna K. Anna K. was a self-styled installation artist with big boobs who'd wired up her apartment so that every moment of her life was sent out live to millions of voyeurs. "This is Anna K., thinking always about my happiness and my unhappiness," was what you'd get as you joined her. Then you might watch her tweezing her eyebrows, waxing her bikini line, washing her underwear. Sometimes she'd read scenes from old plays out loud, taking all the parts, while sitting on the can with her retro-look bell-bottom jeans around her ankles. This was how Jimmy first encountered Shakespeare - through Anna K.'s rendition of Macbeth.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death,
read Anna K. She was a terrible ham, but Snowman has always been grateful to her because she'd been a doorway of sorts. Think what he might not have known if it hadn't been for her. Think of the words. Sere, for instance. Incarnadine.
"What is this shit?" said Crake. "Channel change!"
"No, wait, wait," said Jimmy, who had been seized by - what? Something he wanted to hear. And Crake waited, because he did humour Jimmy sometimes.
Or they would watch the Queek Geek Show, which had contests featuring the eating of live animals and birds, timed by stopwatches, with prizes of hard-to-come-by foods. It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie.
Or they would watch porn shows. There were a lot of those.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
To access the more disgusting and forbidden sites - those for which you had to be over eighteen, and for which you needed a special password - Crake used his Uncle Pete's private code, via a complicated method he called a lily-pad labyrinth. He'd construct a winding pathway through the Web, hacking in at random through some easy-access commercial enterprise, then skipping from lily pad to lily pad, erasing his footprints as he went. That way when Uncle Pete got the bill he couldn't find out who'd run it up.
Crake had also located Uncle Pete's stash of high-grade Vancouver skunkweed, kept in orange-juice cans in the freezer; he'd take out about a quarter of the can, then mix in some of the low-octane carpet sweepings you could buy at the school tuck shop for fifty bucks a baggie. He said Uncle Pete would never know because he never smoked except when he wanted to have sex with Crake's mother, which - judging from the number of orange-juice cans and the rate at which they were getting used up - wasn't often. Crake said Uncle Pete got his real kicks at the office, bossing people around, whipping the wage slaves. He used to be a scientist, but now he was a large managerial ultra-cheese at HelthWyzer, on the financial end of things.
So they'd roll a few joints and smoke them while watching the executions and the porn - the body parts moving around on the screen in slow motion, an underwater ballet of flesh and blood under stress, hard and soft joining and separating, groans and screams, close-ups of clenched eyes and clenched teeth, spurts of this or that. If you switched back and forth fast, it all came to look like the same event. Sometimes they'd have both things on at once, each on a different screen.
These sessions would take place for the most part in silence, except for the sound effects coming from the machines. It would be Crake who'd decide what to watch and when to stop watching it. Fair enough, they were his computers. He might say, "Finished with that?" before changing. He didn't seem to be affected by anything he saw, one way or the other, except when he thought it was funny. He never seemed to get high, either. Jimmy suspected he didn't really inhale.
Jimmy on the other hand would wobble homewards, still fuzzy from the dope and feeling as if he'd been to an orgy, one at which he'd had no control at all over what had happened to him. What had been done to him. He also felt very light, as if he were made of air; thin, dizzying air, at the top of some garbage-strewn Mount Everest. Back at home base, his parental units - supposing they were there, and downstairs - never seemed to notice a thing.
"Getting enough to eat?" Ramona might say to him. She'd interpret his mumble as a yes.
HottTotts
~
Late afternoons were the best time for doing these things at Crake's place. Nobody interrupted them. Crake's mother was out a lot, or in a hurry; she worked as a diagnostician at the hospital complex. She was an intense, square-jawed, dark-haired woman with not much of a chest. On the rare occasions when Jimmy had been there at the same time
as Crake's mother, she hadn't said much. She'd dug around in the kitchen cupboards for something that would pass as a snack for "you boys," as she called the two of them. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of her preparations - the dumping of stale crackers onto a plate, the sawing up of chewy orange-and-white-marbled hunks of cheesefood - and stand stock-still, as if she could see someone else in the room. Jimmy had the impression she couldn't remember his name; not only that, she couldn't remember Crake's name either. Sometimes she would ask Crake if his room was tidy, though she never went in there herself.
"She believes in respecting a child's privacy," said Crake, straight-faced.
"I bet it's your mouldy socks," said Jimmy. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these little socks." He'd recently discovered the joys of quotation.
"For that we've got room spray," said Crake.
As for Uncle Pete, he was rarely home before seven. HelthWyzer was expanding like helium, and therefore he had a lot of new responsibilities. He wasn't Crake's real uncle, he was just Crake's mother's second husband. He'd taken on that status when Crake had been twelve, a couple of years too old for the "uncle" tag to have been viewed by him as anything but totally rancid. Yet Crake had accepted the status quo, or so it appeared. He'd smile, he'd say Sure, Uncle Pete and That's right, Uncle Pete when the man was around, even though Jimmy knew Crake disliked him.
One afternoon in - what? March, it must have been, because it was already hot as hell outside - the two of them were watching porn in Crake's room. Already it felt like old time's sake, already it felt like nostalgia - something they were too grown-up for, like middle-aged guys cruising the pleebland teeny clubs. Still, they dutifully lit up a joint, hacked into Uncle Pete's digital charge card via a new labyrinth, and started surfing. They checked into Tart of the Day, which featured elaborate confectionery in the usual orifices, then went to Superswallowers; then to a Russian site that employed ex-acrobats, ballerinas, and contortionists.
"Whoever said a guy can't suck his own?" was Crake's comment. The high-wire act with the six flaming torches was pretty good, but they'd seen things like that before.
Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. "The next best thing to being there," was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they'd be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren't visible, their names weren't used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted.
This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she'd been then. Her name wasn't Oryx, she didn't have a name. She was just another little girl on a porno site.
None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy - they'd always struck him as digital clones - but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from the start. She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. She was on her knees, with another little girl on either side of her, positioned in front of the standard gargantuan Gulliver-in-Lilliput male torso - a life-sized man shipwrecked on an island of delicious midgets, or stolen away and entranced, forced to experience agonizing pleasures by a trio of soulless pixies. The guy's distinguishing features were concealed - bag with eyeholes over the head, surgical tape over the tattoos and scars: few of these types wanted to be spotted by the folks back home, though the possibility of detection must have been part of the thrill.
The act involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent and obscene: the three of them were going over the guy with their kittenish tongues and their tiny fingers, giving him a thorough workout to the sound of moans and giggles. The giggles must have been recorded, because they weren't coming from the three girls: they all looked frightened, and one of them was crying.
Jimmy knew the drill. They were supposed to look like that, he thought; if they stopped the action, a walking stick would come in from offside and prod them. This was a feature of the site. There were at least three layers of contradictory make-believe, one on top of the other. I want to, I want to not, I want to.
Oryx paused in her activities. She smiled a hard little smile that made her appear much older, and wiped the whipped cream from her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer - right into Jimmy's eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want.
Crake pushed the reverse, then the freeze, then the download. Every so often he froze frames; by now he had a small archive of them. Sometimes he'd print them out and give a copy to Jimmy. It could be dangerous - it could leave a footprint for anyone who might manage to trace a way through the labyrinth - but Crake did it anyway. So now he saved that one moment, the moment when Oryx looked.
Jimmy felt burned by this look - eaten into, as if by acid. She'd been so contemptuous of him. The joint he'd been smoking must have had nothing in it but lawn mowings: if it had been stronger he might have been able to bypass guilt. But for the first time he'd felt that what they'd been doing was wrong. Before, it had always been entertainment, or else far beyond his control, but now he felt culpable. At the same time he felt hooked through the gills: if he'd been offered instant teleportation to wherever Oryx was he'd have taken it, no question. He'd have begged to go there. It was all too complicated.
"This a keeper?" Crake said. "You want it?"
"Yeah," said Jimmy. He could barely get the word out. He hoped he sounded normal.
So Crake had printed it, the picture of Oryx looking, and Snowman had saved it and saved it. He'd shown it to Oryx many years later.
"I don't think this is me," was what she'd said at first.
"It has to be!" said Jimmy. "Look! It's your eyes!"
"A lot of girls have eyes," she said. "A lot of girls did these things. Very many." Then, seeing his disappointment, she said, "It might be me. Maybe it is. Would that make you happy, Jimmy?"
"No," said Jimmy. Was that a lie?
"Why did you keep it?"
"What were you thinking?" Jimmy said instead of answering.
Another woman in her place would have crumpled up the picture, cried, denounced him as a criminal, told him he understood nothing about her life, made a general scene. Instead she smoothed out the paper, running her fingers gently over the soft, scornful child's face that had - surely - once been hers.
"You think I was thinking?" she said. "Oh Jimmy! You always think everyone is thinking. Maybe I wasn't thinking anything."
"I know you were," he said.
"You want me to pretend? You want me to make something up?"
"No. Just tell me."
"Why?"
Jimmy had to think about that. He remembered himself watching. How could he have done that to her? And yet it hadn't hurt her, had it? "Because I need you to." Not much of a reason, but it was all he could come up with.
She sighed. "I was thinking," she said, tracing a little circle on his skin with her fingernail, "that if I ever got the chance, it would not be me down on my knees."
"It would be someone else?" said Jimmy. "Who? What someone?"
"You want to know everything," said Oryx.
5
~
Toast
~
Snowman in his tattered sheet sits hunched at the edge of the trees, where grass and vetch and sea grapes merge into sand. Now that it's cooler he feels less dejected. Also he's hungry. There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
A breeze riffles the leaves overhead; insects rasp and trill; red light from the setting sun hits the tower blocks in the water, illuminating an unbroken pane here and there, as if a scattering of lamps has been tur
ned on. Several of the buildings once held roof gardens, and now they're top-heavy with overgrown shrubbery. Hundreds of birds are streaming across the sky towards them, roostward bound. Ibis? Herons? The black ones are cormorants, he knows that for sure. They settle down into the darkening foliage, croaking and squabbling. If he ever needs guano he'll know where to find it.
Across the clearing to the south comes a rabbit, hopping, listening, pausing to nibble at the grass with its gigantic teeth. It glows in the dusk, a greenish glow filched from the iridicytes of a deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment. In the half-light the rabbit looks soft and almost translucent, like a piece of Turkish delight; as if you could suck off its fur like sugar. Even in Snowman's boyhood there were luminous green rabbits, though they weren't this big and they hadn't yet slipped their cages and bred with the wild population, and become a nuisance.
This one has no fear of him, though it fills him with carnivorous desires: he longs to whack it with a rock, tear it apart with his bare hands, then cram it into his mouth, fur and all. But rabbits belong to the Children of Oryx and are sacred to Oryx herself, and it would be a bad idea to offend the women.
It's his own fault. He must have been stupefied with drink when he was laying down the laws. He should have made rabbits edible, by himself at any rate, but he can't change that now. He can almost hear Oryx, laughing at him with indulgent, faintly malicious delight.
The Children of Oryx, the Children of Crake. He'd had to think of something. Get your story straight, keep it simple, don't falter: this used to be the expert advice given by lawyers to criminals in the dock. Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they'd eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can't talk.
Oryx and Crake Page 8
