Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  He passes the first barricade with its crapped-out scopers and busted searchlights, then the checkpoint booth. A guard is lying half in, half out. Snowman isn't too surprised by the absence of a head: in times of crisis emotions run high. He checks to see if the guy still has his spraygun, but no dice.

  Next comes a tract kept free of buildings. No Man's Land, Crake used to call it. No trees here: they'd mowed down anything you could hide behind, divided the territory into squares with lines of heat-and-motion sensors. The eerie chessboard effect is already gone; weeds are poking up like whiskers all over the flat surface. Snowman takes a few minutes to scan the field, but apart from a cluster of dark birds squabbling over some object on the ground, nothing's moving. Then he goes forward.

  Now he's on the approach proper. Along the road is a trail of objects people must have dropped in flight, like a treasure hunt in reverse. A suitcase, a knapsack spilling out clothes and trinkets; an overnight bag, broken open, beside it a forlorn pink toothbrush. A bracelet; a woman's hair ornament in the shape of a butterfly; a notebook, its pages soaked, the handwriting illegible.

  The fugitives must have had hope, to begin with. They must have thought they'd have a use for these things later. Then they'd changed their minds and let go.

  RejoovenEsense

  ~

  He's out of breath and sweating too much by the time he reaches the RejoovenEsense Compound curtain wall, still twelve feet high but no longer electrified, its iron spikes rusting. He goes through the outer gate, which looks as if someone blew it apart, pausing in its shadow to eat the chocolate energy bar and drink the rest of his water. Then he continues on, across the moat, past the sentry boxes where the CorpSeCorps armed guards once stood and the glassed-in cubicles where they'd monitored the surveillance equipment, then past the rampart watchtower with the steel door - standing forever open, now - where he'd once have been ordered to present his thumbprint and the iris of his eye.

  Beyond is the vista he remembers so well: the residences laid out like a garden suburb with large houses in fake Georgian and fake Tudor and fake French provincial, the meandering streets leading to the employees' golf course and their restaurants and nightclubs and medical clinics and shopping malls and indoor tennis courts, and their hospitals. To the right are the off-bounds hot-bioform isolation facilities, bright orange, and the black cube-shaped shatterproof-glass fortresses that were the business end of things. In the distance is his destination - the central park, with the top of Crake's charmed dome visible above the trees, round and white and glaring, like a bubble of ice. Looking at it, he shivers.

  But no time for pointless repining. He hikes rapidly along the main street, stepping around the huddles of cloth and gnawed human carcasses. Not much left except the bones: the scavengers have done their work. At the time he walked out of here this place looked like a riot scene and stank like an abattoir, but now all is quiet and the stench is mostly gone. The pigoons have rooted up the lawns; their hoofmarks are everywhere, though luckily not too fresh.

  His first object is food. It would make sense to go all the way along the road to where the malls are - more chance of a square meal there - but he's too hungry for that. Also he needs to get out of the sun, right now.

  So he takes the second left, into one of the residential sections. Already the weeds are thick along the curbs. The street is circular; in the island in the middle, a clutch of shrubs, unpruned and scraggly, flares with red and purple flowers. Some exotic splice: in a few years they'll be overwhelmed. Or else they'll spread, make inroads, choke out the native plants. Who can tell which? The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

  The house he chooses is medium-sized, a Queen Anne. The front door's locked, but a diamond-paned window has been smashed: some doomed looter must have been there before him. Snowman wonders what the poor guy was looking for: food, useless money, or just a place to sleep? Whatever it was, it wouldn't have done him much good.

  He drinks a few handfuls of water from a stone birdbath, ornamented with witless-looking frogs and still mostly full from yesterday's downpour, and not too muddied with bird droppings. What disease do birds carry, and is it in their shit? He'll have to chance it. After splashing his face and neck he refills his bottle. Then he studies the house for signs, for movements. He can't rid himself of the notion that someone - someone like him - is lying in wait, around some corner, behind some half-opened door.

  He takes off his sunglasses, knots them into his sheet. Then he climbs in through the broken window, one leg and then the other, throwing his stick in first. Now he's in the dimness. The hair on his arms prickles: claustrophobia and bad energy are already pressing him down. The air is thick, as if panic has condensed in here and hasn't yet had time to dissipate. It smells like a thousand bad drains.

  "Hello!" he calls. "Anybody home?" He can't help it: any house speaks to him of potential inhabitants. He feels like turning back; nausea simmers in his throat. But he holds a corner of his rancid sheet over his nose - at least it's his own smell - and makes his away across the mouldering broadloom, past the dim shapes of the plump reproduction furniture. There's a squeaking, a scurrying: the rats have taken over. He picks his steps with care. He knows what he looks like to rats: carrion on the hoof. They sound like real rats though, not snats. Snats don't squeak, they hiss.

  Did squeak, did hiss, he corrects himself. They were liquidated, they're extinct, he must insist on that.

  First things first. He locates the liquor cabinet in the dining room and goes through it quickly. A half-bottle of bourbon; nothing else, only a bunch of empties. No cigarettes. It must have been a non-smoking household, or else the looter before him pinched them. "Fuck you," he says to the fumed oak sideboard.

  Then he tiptoes up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Why so quietly, as if he's a real burglar? He can't help it. Surely there are people here, asleep. Surely they will hear him and wake up. But he knows that's foolish.

  There's a man in the bathroom, sprawled on the earth-tone tiles, wearing - what's left of him - a pair of blue-and-maroon-striped pyjamas. Strange, thinks Snowman, how in an emergency a lot of people would head for the bathroom. Bathrooms were the closest things to sanctuaries in these houses, places where you could be alone to mediate. Also to puke, to bleed from the eyes, to shit your guts out, to grope desperately in the medicine cabinet for some pill that would save you.

  It's a nice bathroom. A Jacuzzi, ceramic Mexican mermaids on the walls, their heads crowned with flowers, their blonde hair waving down, their painted nipples bright pink on breasts that are small but rounded. He wouldn't mind a shower - this place probably has a gravity-flow rainwater backup tank - but there's some form of hardened guck in the tub. He takes a bar of soap, for later, and checks the cabinet for sunblock, without success. A BlyssPluss container, half full; a bottle of aspirin, which he snags. He thinks about adding a toothbrush, but he has an aversion to sticking a dead person's toothbrush into his mouth, so he takes only the toothpaste. For a Whiter Smile, he reads. Fine with him, he needs a whiter smile, though he can't at the moment think what for.

  The mirror on the front of the cabinet has been smashed: some last act of ineffectual rage, of cosmic protest - Why this? Why me? He can understand that, he'd have done the same. Broken something; turned his last glimpse of himself into fragments. Most of the glass is in the sink, but he's careful where he places his feet: like a horse, his life now depends on them. If he can't walk, he's rat food.

  He continues along the hall. The lady of the house is in the bedroom, tucked under the king-sized pink and gold duvet, one arm and shoulder blade outside the covers, bones and tendons in a leopard-skin-print nightie. Her face is turned away from him, which is just as well, but her hair is intact, all of a piece, as if it's a wig: dark roots, frosted wisps, a sort of pixie look. On the right woman that could be attractive.

 
; At one time in his life he used to go through other people's bureau drawers given half the chance, but in this room he doesn't want to. Anyway it would be the same sort of thing. Underwear, sex aids, costume jewellery, mixed in with pencil stubs, spare change, and safety pins, and a diary if he got lucky. When he was still in high school he'd liked reading girls' diaries, with their capital letters and multiple exclamation marks and extreme phrasing - love love love, hate hate hate - and their coloured underlining, like the crank letters he used to get, later, at work. He'd wait till the girl was in the shower, do a lightning-swift rummage. Of course it was his own name he'd be searching for, though he hadn't always liked what he'd found.

  Once he'd read, Jimmy you nosy brat I know your reading this, I hate it just because I fucked you doesn't mean I like you so STAY OUT!!! Two red lines under hate, three under stay out. Her name had been Brenda. Cute, a gum-chewer, sat in front of him in Life Skills class. She'd had a solar-battery robodog on her dresser that barked, fetched a plastic bone, and lifted its leg to pee yellow water. It's always struck him how the toughest and most bitchy girls had the schmaltziest, squishiest doodads in their bedrooms.

  The vanity table holds the standard collection of firming creams, hormone treatments, ampoules and injections, cosmetics, colognes. In the half-light that comes through the slatted blinds these things gleam darkly, like a still life muted with varnish. He sprays himself with the stuff in one of the bottles, a musky scent he hopes might cut the other smells in here. Crack Cocaine, its label says in raised gold lettering. He thinks briefly about drinking it, but remembers he has the bourbon.

  Then he bends down to take stock of himself in the oval mirror. He can't resist the mirrors in the places he breaks into, he sneaks a peek at himself every chance he has. Increasingly it's a shock. A stranger stares back at him, bleary-eyed, hollow-cheeked, pocked with bug-bite scabs. He looks twenty years older than he is. He winks, grins at himself, sticks out his tongue: the effect is truly sinister. Behind him in the glass the husk of the woman in the bed seems almost like a real woman; as if at any moment she might turn towards him, open her arms, whisper to him to come and get her. Her and her pixie hair.

  Oryx had a wig like that. She liked to dress up, change her appearance, pretend to be different women. She'd strut around the room, do a little strip, wiggle and pose. She said men liked variety.

  "Who told you that?" Jimmy asked her.

  "Oh, someone." Then she laughed. That was right before he scooped her up and her wig fell off ... Jimmee! But he can't afford to think about Oryx right now.

  He finds himself standing in the middle of the room, hands dangling, mouth open. "I have been unintelligent," he says out loud.

  Next door there's a child's room, with a computer in gay red plastic, a shelf of teddy bears, a wallpaper frieze of giraffes, and a stash of CDs containing - judging from the pictures on them - some extremely violent computer games. But there's no child, no child's body. Maybe it died and was cremated in those first few days when cremations were still taking place; or maybe it was frightened when its parents keeled over and began gurgling blood, and it ran away somewhere else. Maybe it was one of the cloth and bone bundles he passed on the streets outside. Some of them were quite small.

  He locates the linen closet in the hall and exchanges his filthy sheet for a fresh one, this time not plain but patterned with scrolls and flowers. That will make an impression among the Craker kids. "Look," they'll say. "Snowman is growing leaves!" They wouldn't put it past him. There's a whole stack of clean sheets in the closet, neatly folded, but he takes only the one. He doesn't want to weight himself down with stuff he doesn't really need. If he has to he can always come back for more.

  He hears his mother's voice telling him to put the discarded sheet into the laundry hamper - old neurological pathways die hard - but he drops it onto the floor instead and goes back downstairs, into the kitchen. He hopes he'll find some canned food there, soy stew or beans and fake wieners, anything with protein in it - even some vegetables would be nice, ersatz or not, he'll take anything - but whoever smashed the window also cleaned out the cupboard. There's a handful of dry cereal in a plastic snap-top container, so he eats that; it's unadulterated junk-gene cardboard and he has to chew it a lot and drink some water to get it down. He finds three packets of cashew nuts, snac-pacs from the bullet train, and gobbles one of them immediately; it isn't too stale. There's also a tin of SoyOBoy sardines. Otherwise there's only a half-empty bottle of ketchup, dark brown and fermenting.

  He knows better than to open the refrigerator. Some of the smell in the kitchen is coming from there.

  In one of the drawers under the counter there's a flashlight that works. He takes that, and a couple of candle ends, and some matches. He finds a plastic garbage bag, right where it should be, and puts everything into it, including the sardines and the other two packs of cashews, and the bourbon and the soap and aspirin. There are some knives, not very sharp; he chooses two, and a small cooking pot. That will come in handy if he can find something to cook.

  Down the hallway, tucked in between the kitchen and the utility room, there's a small home office. A desk with a dead computer, a fax, a printer; also a container with plastic pens, a shelf with reference books - a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bartlett's, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The striped-pyjamas guy upstairs must have been a word person, then: a RejoovenEsense speechwriter, an ideological plumber, a spin doctor, a hairsplitter for hire. Poor bugger, thinks Snowman.

  Beside a vase of withered flowers and a framed father-and-son snapshot - the child was a boy then, seven or eight - there's a telephone scratch pad. Scrawled across the top page are the words GET LAWN MOWED. Then, in smaller, fainter letters, Call clinic ... The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it both. Snowman can picture the guy figuring it out as he looked down at his own moving hand. He must have been an early case, or he wouldn't still have been worrying about his lawn.

  The back of his neck prickles again. Why does he have the feeling that it's his own house he's broken into? His own house from twenty-five years ago, himself the missing child.

  Twister

  ~

  Snowman makes his way through the curtained demi-light of the living room to the front of the house, plotting his future course. He'll have to try for a house richer in canned goods, or even a mall. He could camp out there overnight, up on one of the top shelving racks; that way he could take his time, bag only the best. Who knows? There may still be some chocolate bars. Then, when he knows he's covered the nutrition angle, he can head for the bubble-dome, pilfer the arsenal. Once he's got a functional spraygun in his hands again he'll feel a lot safer.

  He throws his stick out through the broken window, then climbs out himself, taking care not to rip his new flowered sheet or cut himself or tear his plastic bag on the jagged glass. Directly across from him on the overgrown lawn, cutting off access to the street, there's a quintuplet of pigoons, rooting around in a small heap of trash he hopes is only clothing. A boar, two sows, two young. When they hear him they stop feeding and lift their heads: they see him, all right. He raises his stick, shakes it at them. Usually they bolt if he does that - pigoons have long memories, and sticks look like electroprods - but this time they stand their ground. They're sniffing in his direction, as if puzzled; maybe they smell the perfume he sprayed on himself. The stuff could have analogue mammalian sex pheromones in it, which would be just his luck. Trampled to death by lustful pigoons. What a moronic finish.

  What can he do if they charge? Only one option: scramble back through the window. Does he have time for that? Despite the stubby legs carrying their enormous bulk, the damn things can run very fast. The kitchen knives are in his garbage bag; in any case they're too short and flimsy to do much damage to a full-sized pigoon. It would be like trying to stick a paring knife into a truck tire.

  The boar lowe
rs its head, hunching its massive neck and shoulders and swaying uneasily back and forth, making up its mind. But the others have already begun moving away, so the boar thinks better of it and follows them, marking its contempt and defiance by dropping a pile of dung as it goes. Snowman stands still until they're all out of sight, then proceeds with caution, looking frequently behind him. There are too many pigoon tracks around here. Those beasts are clever enough to fake a retreat, then lurk around the next corner. They'd bowl him over, trample him, then rip him open, munch up the organs first. He knows their tastes. A brainy and omnivorous animal, the pigoon. Some of them may even have human neocortex tissue growing in their crafty, wicked heads.

  Yes: there they are, up ahead. They're coming out from behind a bush, all five of them; no, all seven. They're staring in his direction. It would be a mistake to turn his back, or to run. He raises the stick, and walks sideways, back in the direction from which he's come. If necessary he can take refuge inside the checkpoint gatehouse and stay there till they go away. Then he'll have to find a roundabout route to the bubble-dome, keeping to the side streets, where evasion is possible.

  But in the time it takes him to cover the distance, slip-stepping as if in some grotesque dance with the pigoons still staring, dark clouds have come boiling up from the south, blotting out the sun. This isn't the usual afternoon storm: it's too early, and the sky has an ominous greenish-yellow tinge. It's a twister, a big one. The pigoons have vanished now, gone to seek shelter.

  He stands outside the checkpoint cubicle watching the storm roll forward. It's a grand spectacle. He once saw an amateur documentary-maker with a camcorder sucked right up into one of those. He wonders how Crake's Children are getting along, back at the shore. Too bad for Crake if the living results of all his theories are whirled away into the sky or swept out to sea on a big wave. But that won't happen: in case of high seas, the breakwaters formed by fallen rubble will protect them. As for the twister, they've weathered one of those before. They'll retreat into the central cavern in the jumble of concrete blocks they call their thunder home and wait it out.