Oryx and Crake

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 Snowman.

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

“I only saw that one,” said Snowman. “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 antique-roadshow 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.