Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  At ground level it's dark as an armpit. A flashlight would come in handy, one of the windup kind. He should keep an eye out. He gropes and stumbles in the right direction, scanning the ground for a glimmer of the vicious white land crabs that come out of their burrows and scuttle around after dark - those things can give you quite a nip - and after a short detour into a clump of bushes, he locates his cement hidey-hole by stubbing his toe on it. He refrains from swearing: no way of telling what else might be prowling around in the night. He slides open the cache, fumbles blindly within it, retrieves the third of Scotch.

  He's been saving it up, resisting the urge to binge, keeping it as a sort of charm - as long as he's known it was still there it's been easier to get through time. This might be the last of it. He's certain he has explored every likely site within a day's out-and-back radius of his tree. But he's feeling reckless. Why hoard the stuff? Why wait? What's his life worth anyway, and who cares? Out, out, brief candle. He's served his evolutionary purpose, as fucking Crake knew he would. He's saved the children.

  "Fucking Crake!" he can't help yelling.

  Clutching the bottle with one hand, feeling his way with the other, he reaches his tree again. He needs both hands for climbing, so he knots the bottle securely into his sheet. Once up, he sits on his platform, gulping down the Scotch and howling at the stars - Aroo! Aroo! - until he's startled by a chorus of replies from right near the tree.

  Is that the gleam of eyes? He can hear panting.

  "Hello, my furry pals," he calls down. "Who wants to be man's best friend?" In answer there's a supplicating whine. That's the worst thing about wolvogs: they still look like dogs, still behave like dogs, pricking up their ears, making playful puppy leaps and bounces, wagging their tails. They'll sucker you in, then go for you. It hasn't taken much to reverse fifty thousand years of man-canid interaction. As for the real dogs, they never stood a chance: the wolvogs have simply killed and eaten all those who'd shown signs of vestigial domesticated status. He's seen a wolvog advance to a yapping Pekinese in a friendly manner, sniff its bum, then lunge for its throat, shake it like a mop, and canter off with the limp body.

  For a while there were still a few woebegone house pets scrounging around, skinny and limping, their fur matted and dull, begging with bewildered eyes to be taken in by some human, any human. The Children of Crake hadn't fit their bill - they must have smelled weird to a dog, sort of like walking fruits, especially at dusk when the citrus-oil insect repellant kicked in - and in any case they'd shown no interest in puppy-dogs as a concept, so the strays had concentrated on Snowman. He'd almost given in a couple of times, he'd found it hard to resist their ingratiating wriggles, their pitiful whining, but he couldn't afford to feed them; anyway they were useless to him. "It's sink or swim," he'd told them. "Sorry, old buddy." He'd driven them away with stones, feeling like a complete shit, and there haven't been any more lately.

  What a fool he'd been. He'd let them go to waste. He should have eaten them. Or taken one in, trained it to catch rabbits. Or to defend him. Or something.

  Wolvogs can't climb trees, which is one good thing. If they get numerous enough and too persistent, he'll have to start swinging from vine to vine, like Tarzan. That's a funny idea, so he laughs.

  "All you want is my body!" he yells at them. Then he drains the bottle and throws it down. There's a yelp, a scuttling: they still respect missiles. But how long can that last? They're smart; very soon they'll sense his vulnerability, start hunting him. Once they begin he'll never be able to go anywhere, or anywhere without trees. All they'll have to do is get him out in the open, encircle him, close in for the kill. There's only so much you can do with stones and pointed sticks. He really needs to find another spraygun.

  After the wolvogs have gone he lies on his back on the platform, gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.

  Time passes. He wants to sing a song but can't think of one. Old music rises up in him, fades; all he can hear is the percussion. Maybe he could whittle a flute, out of some branch or stem or something, if only he could find a knife.

  "Star light, star bright," he says. What comes next? It's gone right out of his head.

  No moon, tonight is the dark of the moon, although the moon is there nevertheless and must be rising now, a huge invisible ball of stone, a giant lump of gravity, dead but powerful, drawing the sea towards itself. Drawing all fluids. The human body is ninety-eight per cent water, says the book in his head. This time it's a man's voice, an encyclopedia voice; no one he knows, or knew. The other two per cent is made up of minerals, most importantly the iron in the blood and the calcium of which the skeletal frame and the teeth are comprised.

  "Who gives a rat's ass?" says Snowman. He doesn't care about the iron in his blood or the calcium in his skeletal frame; he's tired of being himself, he wants to be someone else. Turn over all his cells, get a chromosome transplant, trade in his head for some other head, one with better things in it. Fingers moving over him, for instance, little fingers with oval nails, painted ripe plum or crimson lake or rose-petal pink. I wish I may, I wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight. Fingers, a mouth. A dull heavy ache begins, at the base of his spine.

  "Oryx," he says. "I know you're there." He repeats the name. It's not even her real name, which he'd never known anyway; it's only a word. It's a mantra.

  Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she's pale and shadowy, but if he can say her name over and over, then maybe she'll glide into his body and be present with him in his flesh, and his hand on himself will become her hand. But she's always been evasive, you can never pin her down. Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark.

  6

  ~

  Oryx

  ~

  Snowman wakes up suddenly. Has someone touched him? But there's nobody there, nothing.

  It's totally dark, no stars. Clouds must have come in.

  He turns over, pulls his sheet around him. He's shivering: it's the night breeze. Most likely he's still drunk; sometimes it's hard to tell. He stares up into the darkness, wondering how soon it will be morning, hoping he'll be able to go back to sleep.

  There's an owl hooting somewhere. That fierce vibration, up close and far away at once, like the lowest note on a Peruvian flute. Maybe it's hunting. Hunting what?

  Now he can feel Oryx floating towards him through the air, as if on soft feathery wings. She's landing now, settling; she's very close to him, stretched out on her side just a skin's distance away. Miraculously she can fit onto the platform beside him, although it isn't a large platform. If he had a candle or a flashlight he'd be able to see her, the slender outline of her, a pale glow against the darkness. If he put out his hand he could touch her; but that would make her vanish.

  "It wasn't the sex," he says to her. She doesn't answer, but he can feel her disbelief. He's making her sad because he's taking away some of her knowledge, her power. "It wasn't just the sex." A dark smile from her: that's better. "You know I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them. "No, really," he says to Oryx.

  No answer, no response. She was never very forthcoming at the best of times.

  "Tell me just one thing," he'd say, back when he was still Jimmy.

  "Ask me a question," she'd reply.

  So he would ask, and then she might say, "I don't know. I've forgotten." Or, "I don't want to tell you that." Or, "Jimmy, you are so bad, it's not your business." Once she'd said, "You have a lot of pictures in your head, Jimmy. Where did you get them? Why do you think they are pictures of me?"

&n
bsp; He thought he understood her vagueness, her evasiveness. "It's all right," he'd told her, stroking her hair. "None of it was your fault."

  "None of what, Jimmy?"

  How long had it taken him to piece her together from the slivers of her he'd gathered and hoarded so carefully? There was Crake's story about her, and Jimmy's story about her as well, a more romantic version; and then there was her own story about herself, which was different from both, and not very romantic at all. Snowman riffles through these three stories in his head. There must once have been other versions of her: her mother's story, the story of the man who'd bought her, the story of the man who'd bought her after that, and the third man's story - the worst man of them all, the one in San Francisco, a pious bullshit artist; but Jimmy had never heard those.

  Oryx was so delicate. Filigree, he would think, picturing her bones inside her small body. She had a triangular face - big eyes, a small jaw - a Hymenoptera face, a mantid face, the face of a Siamese cat. Skin of the palest yellow, smooth and translucent, like old, expensive porcelain. Looking at her, you knew that a woman of such beauty, slightness, and one-time poverty must have led a difficult life, but that this life would not have consisted in scrubbing floors.

  "Did you ever scrub floors?" Jimmy asked her once.

  "Floors?" She thought a minute. "We didn't have floors. When I got as far as the floors, it wasn't me scrubbing them." One thing about that early time, she said, the time without floors: the pounded-earth surfaces were swept clean every day. They were used for sitting on while eating, and for sleeping on, so that was important. Nobody wanted to get old food on themselves. Nobody wanted fleas.

  When Jimmy was seven or eight or nine, Oryx was born. Where, exactly? Hard to tell. Some distant, foreign place.

  It was a village though, said Oryx. A village with trees all around and fields nearby, or possibly rice paddies. The huts had thatch of some kind on the roofs - palm fronds? - although the best huts had roofs of tin. A village in Indonesia, or else Myanmar? Not those, said Oryx, though she couldn't be sure. It wasn't India though. Vietnam? Jimmy guessed. Cambodia? Oryx looked down at her hands, examining her nails. It didn't matter.

  She couldn't remember the language she'd spoken as a child. She'd been too young to retain it, that earliest language: the words had all been scoured out of her head. But it wasn't the same as the language of the city to which she'd first been taken, or not the same dialect, because she'd had to learn a different way of speaking. She did remember that: the clumsiness of the words in her mouth, the feeling of being struck dumb.

  This village was a place where everyone was poor and there were many children, said Oryx. She herself was quite little when she was sold. Her mother had a number of children, among them two older sons who would soon be able to work in the fields, which was a good thing because the father was sick. He coughed and coughed; this coughing punctuated her earliest memories.

  Something wrong with the lungs, Jimmy had guessed. Of course they all probably smoked like maniacs when they could get the cigarettes: smoking dulled the edge. (He'd congratulated himself on this insight.) The villagers set the father's illness down to bad water, bad fate, bad spirits. Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.

  Bells were rung, however. Prayers were said. Small images were burned in the fire. But all of this was useless, because the father died. Everyone in the village knew what would happen next, because if there was no man to work in the fields or in the rice paddies, then the raw materials of life had to come from somewhere else.

  Oryx had been a younger child, often pushed to the side, but suddenly she was made much of and given better food than usual, and a special blue jacket, because the other village women were helping out and they wanted her to look pretty and healthy. Children who were ugly or deformed, or who were not bright or couldn't talk very well - such children went for less, or might not be sold at all. The village women might need to sell their own children one day, and if they helped out they would be able to count on such help in return.

  In the village it was not called "selling," this transaction. The talk about it implied apprenticeship. The children were being trained to earn their living in the wide world: this was the gloss put on it. Besides, if they stayed where they were, what was there for them to do? Especially the girls, said Oryx. They would only get married and make more children, who would then have to be sold in their turn. Sold, or thrown into the river, to float away to the sea; because there was only so much food to go around.

  One day a man came to the village. It was the same man who always came. Usually he arrived in a car, bumping over the dirt track, but this time there had been a lot of rain and the road was too muddy. Each village had its own such man, who would make the dangerous journey from the city at irregular intervals, although it was always known ahead of time that he was on his way.

  "What city?" asked Jimmy.

  But Oryx only smiled. Talking about this made her hungry, she said. Why didn't sweet Jimmy phone out for some pizza? Mushrooms, artichoke hearts, anchovies, no pepperoni. "You want some too?" she said.

  "No," said Jimmy. "Why won't you tell me?"

  "Why do you care?" said Oryx. "I don't care. I never think about it. It's long ago now."

  This man - said Oryx, contemplating the pizza as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, then picking off the mushrooms, which she liked to eat first - would have two other men with him, who were his servants and who carried rifles to fend off the bandits. He wore expensive clothes, and except for the mud and dust - everyone got muddy and dusty on the way to the village - he was clean and well-kempt. He had a watch, a shiny gold-coloured watch he consulted often, pulling up his sleeve to display it; this watch was reassuring, a badge of quality. Maybe the watch was real gold. There were some who said it was.

  This man wasn't regarded as a criminal of any sort, but as an honourable businessman who didn't cheat, or not much, and who paid in cash. Therefore he was treated with respect and shown hospitality, because no one in the village wanted to get on his bad side. What if he ceased to visit? What if a family needed to sell a child and he would not buy it because he'd been offended on a previous visit? He was the villagers' bank, their insurance policy, their kind rich uncle, their only charm against bad luck. And he had been needed more and more often, because the weather had become so strange and could no longer be predicted - too much rain or not enough, too much wind, too much heat - and the crops were suffering.

  The man smiled a lot, greeted many of the village men by name. He always gave a little speech, the same one every time. He wanted everyone to be happy, he would say. He wanted satisfaction on both sides. He didn't want any hard feelings. Hadn't he bent over backwards for them, taking children that were plain and stupid and a burden on his hands, just to oblige them? If they had any criticism of the way he conducted affairs, they should tell him. But there was never any criticism, though there was grumbling behind his back: he never paid any more than he had to, it was said. He was admired for this, however: it showed he was good at his trade, and the children would be in competent hands.

  Each time the gold-wristwatch man came to the village he would take several children away with him, to sell flowers to tourists on the city streets. The work was easy and the children would be well treated, he assured the mothers: he wasn't a low-down thug or a liar, he wasn't a pimp. They would be well fed and given a safe place to sleep, they would be carefully guarded, and they would be paid a sum of money, which they could send home to their families, or not, whatever they chose. This sum would be a percentage of their earnings minus the expense of their room and board. (No money was ever sent to the village. Everyone knew it would not be.) In exchange for the child apprentice, he would give the fathers, or else the widowed mothers, a good price, or what he said was a good price; and it was a decent-enough price, considering
what people were used to. With this money, the mothers who sold their children would be able to give the remaining children a better chance in life. So they told one another.

  Jimmy was outraged by this the first time he heard about it. That was in the days of his outrage. Also in the days of his making a fool of himself over anything concerning Oryx.

  "You don't understand," said Oryx. She was still eating the pizza in bed; with that she was having a Coke, and a side of fries. She'd finished with the mushrooms and now she was eating the artichoke hearts. She never ate the crust. She said it made her feel very rich to throw away food. "Many people did it. It was the custom."

  "An asshole custom," said Jimmy. He was sitting on a chair beside the bed, watching her pink cat's tongue as she licked her fingers.

  "Jimmy, you are bad, don't swear. You want a pepperoni? You didn't order them but they put them on anyway. I guess they heard you wrong."

  "Asshole isn't swearing, it's only graphic description."

  "Well, I don't think you should say it." She was eating the anchovies now: she always saved them till last.

  "I'd like to kill this guy."

  "What guy? You want this Coke? I can't finish it."

  "The guy you just told me about."

  "Oh Jimmy, you would like it better maybe if we all starved to death?" said Oryx, with her small rippling laugh. This was the laugh he feared most from her, because it disguised amused contempt. It chilled him: a cold breeze on a moonlit lake.

  Of course he'd marched his outrage off to Crake. He'd whammed the furniture: those were his furniture-whamming days. What Crake had to say was this: "Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck."