Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Internal consistency is best. Snowman learned this earlier in his life, when lying had posed more of a challenge for him. Now even when he's caught in a minor contradiction he can make it stick, because these people trust him. He's the only one left who'd known Crake face to face, so he can lay claim to the inside track. Above his head flies the invisible banner of Crakedom, of Crakiness, of Crakehood, hallowing all he does.

  The first star appears. "Star light, star bright," he says. Some grade-school teacher. Big-bum Sally. Now close your eyes right up

  tight. Tighter! Really tight! There! See the wishing star? Now we will all wish for the thing we want the very, very most of all in the whole wide world. But shhh - don't tell anyone, or the wish won't come true!

  Snowman screws his eyes shut, pushes his fists into them, clenches his entire face. There's the wishing star all right: it's blue. "I wish I may, I wish I might," he says. "Have the wish I wish tonight."

  Fat chance.

  "Oh Snowman, why are you talking to no one?" says a voice. Snowman opens his eyes: three of the older children are standing just out of reach, regarding him with interest. They must have crept up on him in the dusk.

  "I'm talking to Crake," he says.

  "But you talk to Crake through your shiny thing! Is it broken?"

  Snowman lifts his left arm, holds out his watch. "This is for listening to Crake. Talking to him is different."

  "Why are you talking to him about stars? What are you telling to Crake, oh Snowman?"

  What, indeed? thinks Snowman. When dealing with indigenous peoples, says the book in his head - a more modern book this time, late twentieth century, the voice a confident female's - you must attempt to respect their traditions and confine your explanations to simple concepts that can be understood within the contexts of their belief systems. Some earnest aid worker in a khaki jungle outfit, with netting under the arms and a hundred pockets. Condescending self-righteous cow, thinks she's got all the answers. He'd known girls like that at college. If she were here she'd need a whole new take on indigenous.

  "I was telling him," says Snowman, "that you ask too many questions." He holds his watch to his ear. "And he's telling me that if you don't stop doing that, you'll be toast."

  "Please, oh Snowman, what is toast?"

  Another error, Snowman thinks. He should avoid arcane metaphors. "Toast," he says, "is something very, very bad. It's so bad I can't even describe it. Now it's your bedtime. Go away."

  "What is toast?" says Snowman to himself, once they've run off. Toast is when you take a piece of bread - What is bread? Bread is when you take some flow--What is flour? We'll skip that part, it's too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it ... Please, why do you cook it? Why don't you just eat the plant? Never mind that part - Pay attention. You cook it, and then you cut it into slices, and you put a slice into a toaster, which is a metal box that heats up with electricity - What is electricity? Don't worry about that. While the slice is in the toaster, you get out the butter - butter is a yellow grease, made from the mammary glands of - skip the butter. So, the toaster turns the slice of bread black on both sides with smoke coming out, and then this "toaster" shoots the slice up into the air, and it falls onto the floor...

  "Forget it," says Snowman. "Let's try again." Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.

  Toast is me.

  I am toast.

  Fish

  ~

  The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine - they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

  Monkey brains, had been Crake's opinion. Monkey paws, monkey curiosity, the desire to take apart, turn inside out, smell, fondle, measure, improve, trash, discard - all hooked up to monkey brains, an advanced model of monkey brains but monkey brains all the same. Crake had no very high opinion of human ingenuity, despite the large amount of it he himself possessed.

  There's a murmuring of voices from the direction of the village, or from what would be a village if it had any houses. Right on schedule, here come the men, carrying their torches, and behind them the women.

  Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over again. They're every known colour from deepest black to whitest white, they're various heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair, no bushiness. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads for a high-priced workout program.

  Maybe this is the reason that these women arouse in Snowman not even the faintest stirrings of lust. It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. These were the places he'd single out, putting his mouth on them. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better? There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him. He'd liked to comfort them, stroke them gently at first, reassure them. Make them happier, if only for a moment. Himself too, of course; that was the payoff. A grateful woman would go the extra mile.

  But these new women are neither lopsided nor sad: they're placid, like animated statues. They leave him chilled.

  The women are carrying his weekly fish, grilled the way he's taught them and wrapped in leaves. He can smell it, he's starting to drool. They bring the fish forward, put it on the ground in front of him. It will be a shore fish, a species too paltry and tasteless to have been coveted and sold and exterminated, or else a bottom-feeder pimply with toxins, but Snowman couldn't care less, he'll eat anything.

  "Here is your fish, oh Snowman," says one of the men, the one called Abraham. Abraham as in Lincoln: it had amused Crake to name his Crakers after eminent historical figures. It had all seemed innocent enough, at the time.

  "This is the one fish chosen for you tonight," says the woman holding it; the Empress Josephine, or else Madame Curie or Sojourner Truth, she's in the shade so he can't tell which. "This is the fish Oryx gives you."

  Oh good, thinks Snowman. Catch of the Day.

  Every week, according to the phases of the moon - dark, first quarter, full, second quarter - the women stand in the tidal pools and call the unlucky fish by name - only fish, nothing more specific. Then they point it out, and the men kill it with rocks and sticks. That way the unpleasantness is shared among them and no single person is guilty of shedding the fish's blood.

  If things had gone as Crake wanted, there would be no more such killing - no more human predation - but he'd reckoned without Snowman and his beastly appetites. Snowman can't live on clover. The people would never eat a fish themselves, but they have to bring him one a week because he's told them Crake has decreed it. They've accepted Snowman's monstrousness, they've known from the beginning he was a separate order of being, so they weren't surprised by this.

  Idiot, he thinks. I should have made it three a day. He unwraps the warm fish from its leaves, trying to keep his hands from trembling. He shouldn't get too carried away. But he always does.

  The people keep their distance and avert their eyes while he crams handfuls of fishiness into his mouth and sucks out the eyes and cheeks, groaning with pleasure. Perhaps it's like hearing a lion gorge itse
lf, at the zoo, back when there were zoos, back when there were lions - a rending and crunching, a horrible gobbling and gulping - and, like those long-gone zoo visitors, the Crakers can't help peeking. The spectacle of depravity is of interest even to them, it seems, purified by chlorophyll though they are.

  When Snowman has finished he licks his fingers and wipes them on his sheet, and places the bones back in their leaf wrappings, ready to be returned to the sea. He's told them Oryx wants that - she needs the bones of her children so she can make other children out of them. They've accepted this without question, like everything he says about Oryx. In reality it's one of his smarter ploys: no sense leaving the scraps around on land, to attract rakunks and wolvogs and pigoons and other scavengers.

  The people move closer, men and women both, gathering around, their green eyes luminescent in the semi-darkness, just like the rabbit: same jellyfish gene. Sitting all together like this, they smell like a crateful of citrus fruit - an added feature on the part of Crake, who'd thought those chemicals would ward off mosquitoes. Maybe he was right, because all the mosquitoes for miles around appear to be biting Snowman. He resists the urge to swat: his fresh blood only excites them. He shifts to the left so he's more in the smoke of the torches.

  "Snowman, tell us please about the deeds of Crake."

  A story is what they want, in exchange for every slaughtered fish. Well, I owe them, Snowman thinks. God of Bullshit, fail me not.

  "What part would you like to hear tonight?" he says.

  "In the beginning," prompts a voice. They're fond of repetition, they learn things by heart.

  "In the beginning, there was chaos," he says.

  "Show us chaos, please, oh Snowman!"

  "Show us a picture of chaos!"

  They'd struggled with pictures, at first - flowers on beach-trash lotion bottles, fruits on juice cans. Is it real? No, it is not real. What is this not real? Not real can tell us about real. And so forth. But now they appear to have grasped the concept.

  "Yes! Yes! A picture of chaos!" they urge.

  Snowman has known this request would be made - all the stories begin with chaos - and so he's ready for it. From behind his concrete-slab cache he brings out one of his finds - an orange plastic pail, faded to pink but otherwise undamaged. He tries not to imagine what has happened to the child who must once have owned it. "Bring some water," he says, holding out the pail. There's a scramble around the ring of torches: hands reach out, feet scamper off into the darkness.

  "In the chaos, everything was mixed together," he says. "There were too many people, and so the people were all mixed up with the dirt." The pail comes back, sloshing, and is set down in the circle of light. He adds a handful of earth, stirs it with a stick. "There," he says. "Chaos. You can't drink it ..."

  "No!" A chorus.

  "You can't eat it ..."

  "No, you can't eat it!" Laughter.

  "You can't swim in it, you can't stand on it ..."

  "No! No!" They love this bit.

  "The people in the chaos were full of chaos themselves, and the chaos made them do bad things. They were killing other people all the time. And they were eating up all the Children of Oryx, against the wishes of Oryx and Crake. Every day they were eating them up. They were killing them and killing them, and eating them and eating them. They ate them even when they weren't hungry."

  Gasping here, widened eyes: it's always a dramatic moment. Such wickedness! He continues: "And Oryx had only one desire - she wanted the people to be happy, and to be at peace, and to stop eating up her children. But the people couldn't be happy, because of the chaos. And then Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the chaos, and he poured it away." Snowman demonstrates, sloshing the water off to the side, then turns the pail upside down. "There. Empty. And this is how Crake did the Great Rearrangement and made the Great Emptiness. He cleared away the dirt, he cleared room ..."

  "For his children! For the Children of Crake!"

  "Right. And for ..."

  "And for the Children of Oryx, as well!"

  "Right," says Snowman. Is there no end to his shameless inventions? He feels like crying.

  "Crake made the Great Emptiness ...," say the men.

  "For us! For us!" say the women. It's becoming a liturgy. "Oh, good, kind Crake!"

  Their adulation of Crake enrages Snowman, though this adulation has been his own doing. The Crake they're praising is his fabrication, a fabrication not unmixed with spite: Crake was against the notion of God, or of gods of any kind, and would surely be disgusted by the spectacle of his own gradual deification.

  If he were here. But he's not here, and it's galling for Snowman to listen to all this misplaced sucking up. Why don't they glorify Snowman instead? Good, kind Snowman, who deserves glorification more - much more - because who got them out, who got them here, who's been watching over them all this time? Well, sort of watching. It sure as hell wasn't Crake. Why can't Snowman revise the mythology? Thank me, not him! Lick my ego instead!

  But for now his bitterness must be swallowed. "Yes," he says. "Good, kind Crake." He twists his mouth into what he hopes is a gracious and benevolent smile.

  At first he'd improvised, but now they're demanding dogma: he would deviate from orthodoxy at his peril. He might not lose his life - these people aren't violent or given to bloodthirsty acts of retribution, or not so far - but he'd lose his audience. They'd turn their backs on him, they'd wander away. He is Crake's prophet now, whether he likes it or not; and the prophet of Oryx as well. That, or nothing. And he couldn't stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.

  "Oh Snowman, tell us about when Crake was born," says one of the women. This is a new request. He isn't ready for it, though he should have expected it: children are of great interest to these women. Careful, he tells himself. Once he provides a mother and a birth scene and an infant Crake for them, they'll want the details. They'll want to know when Crake cut his first tooth and spoke his first word and ate his first root, and other such banalities.

  "Crake was never born," says Snowman. "He came down out of the sky, like thunder. Now go away please, I'm tired." He'll add to this fable later. Maybe he'll endow Crake with horns, and wings of fire, and allow him a tail for good measure.

  Bottle

  ~

  After the Children of Crake have filed away, taking their torches with them, Snowman clambers up his tree and tries to sleep. All around him are noises: the slurping of the waves, insect chirpings and whirrings, bird whistles, amphibious croaks, the rustling of leaves. His ears deceive him: he thinks he can hear a jazz horn, and under that a rhythmic drumming, as if from a muffled nightclub. From somewhere farther along the shore comes a booming, bellowing sound: now what? He can't think of any animal that makes such a noise. Perhaps it's a crocodile, escaped from a defunct Cuban handbag farm and working its way north along the shore. That would be bad news for the kids in swimming. He listens again, but the sound doesn't recur.

  There's a distant, peaceful murmur from the village: human voices. If you can call them human. As long as they don't start singing. Their singing is unlike anything he ever heard in his vanished life: it's beyond the human level, or below it. As if crystals are singing; but not that, either. More like ferns unscrolling - something old, carboniferous, but at the same time newborn, fragrant, verdant. It reduces him, forces too many unwanted emotions upon him. He feels excluded, as if from a party to which he will never be invited. All he'd have to do is step forward into the firelight and there'd be a ring of suddenly blank faces turned towards him. Silence would fall, as in tragic plays of long ago when the doomed protagonist made an entrance, enveloped in his cloak of contagious bad news. On some non-conscious level Snowman must serve as a reminder to these people, and not a pleasant one: he's what they may have been once. I'm your past, he might intone. I'm your ancestor, come from the land of the dead.
Now I'm lost, I can't get back, I'm stranded here, I'm all alone. Let me in!

  Oh Snowman, how may we be of help to you? The mild smiles, the polite surprise, the puzzled goodwill.

  Forget it, he would say. There's no way they can help him, not really.

  There's a chilly breeze blowing; the sheet is damp; he shivers. If only this place had a thermostat. Maybe he could figure out some way of building a little fire, up here in his tree.

  "Go to sleep," he orders himself. With no result. After a long session of tossing, turning, and scratching, he climbs back down to seek out the Scotch bottle in his cache. There's enough starlight so he can get his bearings, more or less. He's made this trip many times in the past: for the first month and a half, after he was fairly sure it was safe to relax his vigilance, he got pissed out of his mind every night. This was not a wise or mature thing for him to have done, granted, but of what use are wisdom and maturity to him now?

  So every night had been party night, party of one. Or every night he'd had the makings, whenever he'd been able to locate another stash of alcohol in the abandoned pleebland buildings within reach. He'd scoured the nearby bars first, then the restaurants, then the houses and trailers. He'd done cough medicine, shaving lotion, rubbing alcohol; out behind the tree he's accumulated an impressive dump of empty bottles. Once in a while he'd come across a stash of weed and he'd done that too, though often enough it was mouldy; still, he might manage to get a buzz out of it. Or he might find some pills. No coke or crack or heroin - that would have been used up early, stuffed into veins and noses in one last burst of carpe diem; anything for a vacation from reality, under the circumstances. There'd been empty BlyssPluss containers everywhere, all you'd need for a non-stop orgy. The revellers hadn't managed to get through all the booze, though often enough on his hunting and gathering trips he's discovered that others had been there before him and there was nothing left but broken glass. There must have been riotous behaviour of all sorts imaginable, until finally there had been no one left to keep it up.