Oryx and Crake

Oryx said she had many chances to see that old carrot up close, because Jack wanted to do movie things with her when there were no movies. Then he would be sad and tell her he was sorry. That was puzzling.

“You did it for nothing?” said Jimmy. “I thought you said everything has a price.” He didn’t feel he’d won the argument about money, he wanted another turn.

Oryx paused, lifting the nail-polish brush. She looked at her hand. “I traded him,” she said.

“Traded him for what?” said Jimmy. “What did that pathetic prick of a loser have to offer?”

“Why do you think he is bad?” said Oryx. “He never did anything with me that you don’t do. Not nearly so many things!”

“I don’t do them against your will,” said Jimmy. “Anyway you’re grown up now.”

Oryx laughed. “What is my will?” she said. Then she must have seen his pained look, so she stopped laughing. “He taught me to read,” she said quietly. “To speak English, and to read English words. Talking first, then reading, not so good at first, and I still don’t talk so good but you always have to start somewhere, don’t you think so, Jimmy?”

“You talk perfectly,” said Jimmy.

“You don’t need to tell lies to me. So that is how. It took a long time, but he was very patient. He had one book, I don’t know where he got it but it was a book for children. It had a girl in it with long braids, and stockings—that was a hard word, stockings—who jumped around and did whatever she liked. So this is what we read. It was a good trade, because, Jimmy, if I hadn’t done it I couldn’t be talking to you, no?”

“Done what?” said Jimmy. He couldn’t stand it. If he had this Jack, this piece of garbage, in the room right now he’d wring his neck like a wormy old sock. “What did you do for him? You sucked him off?”

“Crake is right,” said Oryx coldly. “You do not have an elegant mind.”

Elegant mind was just mathtalk, that patronizing jargon the math nerds used, but it hurt Jimmy anyway. No. What hurt was the thought of Oryx and Crake discussing him that way, behind his back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He ought to know better than to speak so bluntly to her.

“Now maybe I wouldn’t do it, but I was a child then,” said Oryx more softly. “Why are you so angry?”

“I don’t buy it,” said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?

“You don’t buy what?”

“Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap.”

“If you don’t want to buy that, Jimmy,” said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, “what is it that you would like to buy instead?”

Jack had a name for the building where the movies went on. He called it Pixieland. None of the children knew what that meant—Pixieland—because it was an English word and an English idea, and Jack couldn’t explain it. “All right, pixies, rise and shine,” he’d say. “Candy time!” He brought candies for them as a treat, sometimes. “Want a candy, candy?” he’d say. That also was a joke, but they didn’t know what it meant either.

He let them see the movies of themselves if he felt like it, or if he’d just been doing drugs. They could tell when he’d been shooting or snorting, because he was happier then. He liked to play pop music while they were working, something with a bounce. Upbeat, he called it. Elvis Presley, things like that. He said he liked the golden oldies, from back when songs had words. “Call me sentimental,” he said, causing puzzlement. He liked Frank Sinatra too, and Doris Day: Oryx knew all the words to “Love Me or Leave Me” before she had any idea what they meant. “Sing us some pixieland jazz,” Jack would say, and so that was what Oryx would sing. He was always pleased.

“What was this guy’s name?” said Jimmy. What a jerk, this Jack. Jack the jerk, the jerkoff. Name-calling helped, thought Jimmy. He’d like to twist the guy’s head off.

“His name was Jack. I told you. He told us a poem about it, in English. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack has got a big candlestick.”

“I mean his other name.”

“He didn’t have another name.”

Working was what Jack called what they did. Working girls, he called them. He used to say, Whistle while you work. He used to say, Work harder. He used to say, Put some jazz into it. He used to say, Act like you mean it, or you want to get hurt? He used to say, Come on, sex midgets, you can do better. He used to say, You’re only young once.

“That’s all,” said Oryx.

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

“That’s all there was,” she said. “That’s all there was to it.”

“What about, did they ever…”

“Did they ever what?”

“They didn’t. Not when you were that young. They couldn’t have.”

“Please, Jimmy, tell me what you are asking.” Oh, very cool. He wanted to shake her.

“Did they rape you?” He could barely squeeze it out. What answer was he expecting, what did he want?

“Why do you want to talk about ugly things?” she said. Her voice was silvery, like a music box. She waved one hand in the air to dry the nails. “We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It’s not good for you.”

She would never tell him. Why did this drive him so crazy? “It wasn’t real sex, was it?” he asked. “In the movies. It was only acting. Wasn’t it?”

“But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.”

7

Sveltana

Snowman opens his eyes, shuts them, opens them, keeps them open. He’s had a terrible night. He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.

The sun is above the horizon, lifting steadily as if on a pulley; flattish clouds, pink and purple on top and golden underneath, stand still in the sky around it. The waves are waving, up down up down. The thought of them makes him queasy. He’s violently thirsty, and he has a headache and a hollow cottony space between his ears. It takes him some moments to register the fact that he has a hangover.

“It’s your own fault,” he tells himself. He behaved foolishly the night before: he guzzled, he yelled, he gibbered, he indulged in pointless repinings. Once he wouldn’t have had a hangover after so little booze, but he’s out of practice now, and out of shape.

At least he didn’t fall out of the tree. “Tomorrow is another day,” he declaims to the pink and purple clouds. But if tomorrow is another day, what’s today? The same day as it always is, except that he feels as if he has tongue fur all over his body.

A long scrawl of birds unwinds from the empty towers—gulls, egrets, herons, heading off to fish along the shore. A mile or so to the south, a salt marsh is forming on a one-time landfill dotted with semi-flooded townhouses. That’s where all the birds are going: mi

He climbs down from the tree, more carefully than usual: he’s still a bit dizzy. He checks his baseball cap, dumps out a butterfly—attracted by the salt, no doubt—and pisses on the grasshoppers, as usual. I have a daily routine, he thinks. Routines are good. His entire head is becoming one big stash of obsolete fridge magnets.