Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Oryx saw her brother's face darken and grow hard, and she wasn't surprised when he ran away; and whether he was ever caught and punished Oryx never knew. Nor did she ask, because asking - she had now found out - would do no good.

  One day a man did take Oryx by the hand and say she should come into the hotel with him. She gave him her shy smile, and looked up sideways and said nothing, and pulled her hand away and told Uncle En afterwards. Then Uncle En said a surprising thing. If the man asked again, he said, she was to go into the hotel with him. He would want to take her up to his room, and she must go with him. She should do whatever the man asked, but she shouldn't worry, because Uncle En would be watching and would come to get her. Nothing bad would happen to her.

  "Will I be a melon?" she asked. "A melon-bum girl?" and Uncle En laughed and said where did she pick up that word. But no, he said. That was not what would happen.

  Next day the man appeared and asked Oryx if she would like some money, a lot more money than she could make by selling roses. He was a long white hairy man with a thick accent, but she could make out the words. This time Oryx went with him. He held her hand and they went up in an elevator - this was the frightening part, a tiny room with doors that shut, and when the doors opened you were in a different place, and Uncle En hadn't explained about that. She could feel her heart thumping. "Don't be afraid," said the man, thinking she was afraid of him. But it was the other way around, he was afraid of her, because his hand had a tremor. He unlocked a door with a key and they went in, and he locked the door behind them, and they were in a mauve-and-gold-coloured room with a giant bed in it, a bed for giants, and the man asked Oryx to take off her dress.

  Oryx was obedient and did as she was told. She had a general idea of what else the man might want - the other children already knew about such things and discussed them freely, and laughed about them. People paid a lot of money for the kinds of things this man wanted, and there were special places in the city for men like him to go; but some wouldn't go there because it was too public and they were ashamed, and they foolishly wanted to arrange things for themselves, and this man was one of that kind. So Oryx knew the man would now take off his own clothes, or some of them, and he did, and seemed pleased when she stared at his penis, which was long and hairy like himself, with a bend in it like a little elbow. Then he kneeled down so he was on her level, with his face right next to hers.

  What did this face look like? Oryx couldn't remember. She could remember the singularity of his penis but not the singularity of his face. "It was like no face," she said. "It was all soft, like a dumpling. There was a big nose on it, a carrot nose. A long white penis nose." She laughed, holding her two hands over her mouth. "Not like your nose, Jimmy," she added in case he felt self-conscious. "Your nose is beautiful. It is a sweet nose, believe me."

  "I won't hurt you," said the man. His accent was so ridiculous that Oryx wanted to giggle, but she knew that would be wrong. She smiled her shy smile, and the man took hold of one of her hands and placed it on himself. He did this gently enough, but at the same time he seemed angry. Angry, and in a hurry.

  That was when Uncle En plunged suddenly into the room - how? He must have had a key, he must have been given a key by someone at the hotel. He picked Oryx up and hugged her and called her his little treasure, and yelled at the man, who seemed very frightened and tried to scramble into his clothes. He got caught in his trousers and hopped around on one foot while trying to explain something with his bad accent, and Oryx felt bad for him. Then the man gave money to Uncle En, a lot of money, all the money in his wallet, and Uncle En went out of the room carrying Oryx like a precious vase and still muttering and scowling. But out on the street he laughed, and made jokes about the man hopping around in his snarled-up trousers, and told Oryx she was a good girl and wouldn't she like to play this game again?

  So that became her game. She felt a little sorry for the men: although Uncle En said they deserved what happened to them and they were lucky he never called the police, she somewhat regretted her part. But at the same time she enjoyed it. It made her feel strong to know that the men thought she was helpless but she was not. It was they who were helpless, they who would soon have to stammer apologies in their silly accents and hop around on one foot in their luxurious hotel rooms, trapped in their own pant legs with their bums sticking out, smooth bums and hairy bums, bums of different sizes and colours, while Uncle En berated them. From time to time they would cry. As for the money, they emptied their pockets, they threw all the money they had at Uncle En, they thanked him for taking it. They didn't want to spend any time in jail, not in that city, where the jails were not hotels and it took a very long time for charges to be laid and for trials to be held. They wanted to get into taxis, as soon as they could, and climb onto big airplanes, and fly away through the sky.

  "Little SuSu," Uncle En would say, as he set Oryx down on the street outside the hotel. "You are a smart girl! I wish I could marry you. Would you like that?"

  This was as close to love as Oryx could get right then, so she felt happy. But what was the right answer, yes or no? She knew it was not a serious question but a joke: she was only five, or six, or seven, so she couldn't get married. Anyway the other children said that Uncle En had a grown-up wife who lived in a house elsewhere, and he had other children as well. His real children. They went to school.

  "Can I listen to your watch?" said Oryx with her shy smile. Instead of, was what she meant. Instead of marrying you, instead of answering your question, instead of being your real child. And he laughed some more, and he did let her listen to his watch, but she didn't hear any little voice inside.

  Pixieland Jazz

  ~

  One day a different man came, one they'd never seen before - a tall thin man, taller than Uncle En, with ill-fitting clothes and a pock-marked face - and said that all of them would have to come with him. Uncle En had sold his flower business, this man said; the flowers, and the flower-sellers, and everything else. He'd gone away, he'd moved to a different city. So this tall man was the boss now.

  A year or so later, Oryx was told - by a girl who'd been with her the first weeks in the room with the mattresses, and had turned up again in her new life, her life of movie-making - that this wasn't the real story. The real story was that Uncle En had been found floating in one of the city's canals with his throat cut.

  This girl had seen him. No, that was wrong - she hadn't seen him, but she knew somebody who had. There was no doubt about who it was. His stomach was puffed up like a pillow, his face was bloated, but it was Uncle En all right. He had no clothes on - someone must have taken them. Maybe someone else, not the one who'd cut his throat, or maybe the same one, because what use did a corpse have for good clothes like his? No watch on him either.

  "No money," the girl had said, and she'd laughed. "No pockets, so no money!"

  "There were canals in this city?" Jimmy asked. He thought maybe that would give him a clue as to which city it had been. In those days he'd wanted to know whatever it was possible to know, about Oryx, about anywhere she'd been. He'd wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He'd tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he'd shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more - he was convinced - he loved her.

  "Oh yes, there were canals," Oryx said. "The farmers used them, and the flower-growers, to get to the markets. They tied up their boats and sold what they had right there, right at the quays. That was a pretty sight, from a distance. So many flowers." She looked at him: she could often tell what he was thinking. "But a lot of cities have canals," she said. "And rivers. The rivers are so useful, for the garbage and the dead people and the babies that get thrown away, and the shit." Although she didn't like it when he swore, she sometimes liked to say what she called bad words herself, because it shocked him. She had a large supply of bad words once she got going. "Don't worry so much, Jimmy," she added
more gently. "It was a long time ago." More often than not she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself - herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.

  So Uncle En had ended up in the canal. He'd been unlucky. He hadn't paid off the right people, or he hadn't paid them off enough. Or maybe they'd tried to buy his business and the price was too low and he wouldn't do it. Or his own men had sold him out. There were many things that could have happened to him. Or maybe it was nothing planned - just an accident, a random killing, just a thief. Uncle En had been careless, he'd gone out walking by himself. Though he wasn't a careless man.

  "I cried when I heard about it," said Oryx. "Poor Uncle En."

  "Why are you defending him?" Jimmy asked. "He was vermin, he was a cockroach!"

  "He liked me."

  "He liked the money!"

  "Of course, Jimmy," said Oryx. "Everyone likes that. But he could have done much worse things to me, and he didn't do them. I cried when I heard he was dead. I cried and cried."

  "What worse things? What much worse?"

  "Jimmy, you worry too much."

  The children were herded out of the room with the grey mattresses, and Oryx never saw it again. She never saw most of the other children again. They were divided up, and one went this way and one that. Oryx was sold to a man who made movies. She was the only one of them that went with the movie man. He told her she was a pretty little girl and asked how old she was, but she didn't know the answer to that. He asked her wouldn't she like to be in a movie. She'd never seen a movie so she didn't know whether she would like it or not; but it sounded like an offer of a treat, so she said yes. By this time she was good at knowing when yes was the expected answer.

  The man drove her in a car with some other girls, three or four, girls she didn't know. They stayed overnight at a house, a big house. It was a house for rich people; it had a high wall around it with broken glass and barbed wire on the top, and they went in through a gate. Inside, it had a rich smell.

  "What do you mean, a rich smell?" Jimmy asked, but Oryx couldn't say. Rich was just a thing you learned to tell. The house smelled like the better hotels she'd been in: many different foods cooking, wooden furniture, polishes and soap, all those smells mixed in. There must have been flowers, flowering trees or bushes nearby, because that was some of the smell. There were carpets on the floor but the children didn't walk on them; the carpets were in a big room, and they went past the open door and looked in and saw them. They were blue and pink and red, such beauty.

  The room they were put in was next to the kitchen. Perhaps it was a storeroom, or it had been one: there was the smell of rice and of the bags it was packed in, though no rice was in that room then. They were fed - better food than usual, said Oryx, there was chicken in it - and told not to make any noise. Then they were locked in. There were dogs at that house; you could hear them outside in the yard, barking.

  The next day some of them went in a truck, in the back of a truck. There were two other children, both girls, both of them small like Oryx. One of them had just come from a village and missed her people there, and cried a lot, silently, hiding her face. They were lifted up into the back of the truck and locked in, and it was dark and hot and they got thirsty, and when they had to pee they had to do it in the truck because there was no stopping. There was a little window though, up high, so some air got in.

  It was only a couple of hours, but it seemed like more because of the heat and the darkness. When they got to where they were going they were handed over to another man, a different one, and the truck drove off.

  "Was there any writing on it? The truck?" asked Jimmy, sleuthing.

  "Yes. It was red writing."

  "What did it say?"

  "How would I know?" said Oryx reproachfully.

  Jimmy felt foolish. "Was there a picture, then?"

  "Yes. There was a picture," said Oryx after a moment.

  "A picture of what?"

  Oryx thought. "It was a parrot. A red parrot."

  "Flying, or standing?"

  "Jimmy, you are too strange!"

  Jimmy held on to it, this red parrot. He kept it in mind. Sometimes it would appear to him in reveries, charged with mystery and hidden significance, a symbol free of all contexts. It must have been a brand name, a logo. He searched the Internet for Parrot, Parrot Brand, Parrot Inc., Redparrot. He found Alex the cork-nut parrot who'd said I'm going away now, but that was no help to him because Alex was the wrong colour. He wanted the red parrot to be a link between the story Oryx had told him and the so-called real world. He wanted to be walking along a street or trolling through the Web, and eureka, there it would be, the red parrot, the code, the password, and then many things would become clear.

  The building where the movies were made was in a different city, or it might have been in a different part of the same city, because the city was very big, said Oryx. The room she stayed in with the other girls was in that building too. They almost never went outside, except up onto the flat roof sometimes when the movie was to be made up there. Some of the men who came to the building wanted to be outside while the movie was being filmed. They wanted to be seen, and at the same time they wanted to be hidden: the roof had a wall around it. "Maybe they wanted God to see them," said Oryx. "What do you think, Jimmy? They were showing off to God? I think so."

  These men all had ideas about what should be in their movie. They wanted things in the background, chairs or trees, or they wanted ropes or screaming, or shoes. Sometimes they would say, Just do it, I'm paying for it, or things like that, because everything in these movies had a price. Every hair bow, every flower, every object, every gesture. If the men thought up something new, there would have to be a discussion about how much that new thing ought to cost.

  "So I learned about life," said Oryx.

  "Learned what?" said Jimmy. He shouldn't have had the pizza, and the weed they'd smoked on top of that. He was feeling a little sick.

  "That everything has a price."

  "Not everything. That can't be true. You can't buy time. You can't buy ..." He wanted to say love, but hesitated. It was too soppy.

  "You can't buy it, but it has a price," said Oryx. "Everything has a price."

  "Not me," said Jimmy, trying to joke. "I don't have a price."

  Wrong, as usual.

  Being in a movie, said Oryx, was doing what you were told. If they wanted you to smile then you had to smile, if they wanted you to cry you had to do that too. Whatever it was, you had to do it, and you did it because you were afraid not to. You did what they told you to do to the men who came, and then sometimes those men did things to you. That was movies.

  "What sort of things?" said Jimmy.

  "You know," said Oryx. "You saw. You have the picture of it."

  "I only saw that one," said Jimmy. "Only the one, with you in."

  "I bet you saw more with me in. You don't remember. I could look different, I could wear different clothes and wigs, I could be someone else, do other things."

  "Like what else? What else did they make you do?"

  "They were all the same, those movies," said Oryx. She'd washed her hands, she was painting her nails now, her delicate oval nails, so perfectly shaped. Peach-coloured, to match the flowered wrapper she was wearing. Not a smudge on her. Later on she would do her toes.

  It was less boring for the children to make the movies than to do what they did the rest of the time, which was nothing much.

  They watched cartoons on the old DVD in one of the rooms, mice and birds being chased around by other animals that could never catch them; or they brushed and braided one another's hair, or they ate and slept. Sometimes other people came to use the space, to make different kinds of movies. Grown-up women came, women with breasts, and grown-up men - actors. The children could watch them making those movies if they didn't get in the way. Though sometimes the actors objected because the little girls would giggle
at their penises - so big, and then sometimes, all of a sudden, so small - and then the children had to go back into their room.

  They washed a lot - that was important. They took showers with a bucket. They were supposed to be pure-looking. On a bad day when there was no business they would get tired and restless, and then they would argue and fight. Sometimes they'd be given a toke or a drink to calm them down - beer, maybe - but no hard drugs, those would shrivel them up; and they weren't allowed to smoke. The man in charge - the big man, not the man with the camera - said they shouldn't smoke because it would make their teeth brown. They did smoke sometimes anyway, because the man with the camera might give them a cigarette to share.

  The man with the camera was white, and his name was Jack. He was the one they mostly saw. He had hair like frayed rope and he smelled too strong, because he was a meat-eater. He ate so much meat! He didn't like fish. He didn't like rice either, but he liked noodles. Noodles with lots of meat.

  Jack said that where he came from the movies were bigger and better, the best in the world. He kept saying he wanted to go home. He said it was only pure dumb chance he wasn't dead - that this fucking country hadn't killed him with its lousy food. He said he'd almost died from some disease he'd got from the water and the only thing that had saved him was getting really, really pissed, because alcohol killed germs. Then he had to explain to them about germs. The little girls laughed about the germs, because they didn't believe in them; but they believed about the disease, because they'd seen that happen. Spirits caused it, everyone knew that. Spirits and bad luck. Jack had not said the right prayers.

  Jack said he would get sick more often from the rotten food and water, only he had a really strong stomach. He said you needed a strong stomach in this business. He said the videocam was antiqueroadshow junk and the lights were poor so no wonder everything looked like cheap shit. He said he wished he had a million dollars but he'd pissed all his money away. He said he couldn't hold on to money, it slid off him like water off a greased whore. "Don't be like me when you grow up," he would say. And the girls would laugh, because whatever else happened to them they would never be like him, a rope-haired clownish giant with a cock like a wrinkly old carrot.