Oryx and Crake

Maybe Crake was right, thinks Snowman. Under the old dispensation, sexual competition had been relentless and cruel: for every pair of happy lovers there was a dejected onlooker, the one excluded. Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself.

That had been the milder form: the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.

“How much misery,” Crake said one lunchtime—this must have been when they were in their early twenties and Crake was already at the Watson-Crick Institute—“how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there’d be no more sexual torment. Better plan—make it cyclical and also inevitable, as in the other mammals. You’d never want someone you couldn’t have.”

“True enough,” Jimmy replied. Or Jim, as he was now insisting, without results: everyone still called him Jimmy. “But think what we’d be giving up.”

“Such as?”

“Courtship behaviour. In your plan we’d just be a bunch of hormone robots.” Jimmy thought he should put things in Crake’s terms, which was why he said courtship behaviour. What he meant was the challenge, the excitement, the chase. “There’d be no free choice.”

“There’s courtship behaviour in my plan,” said Crake, “except that it would always succeed. And we’re hormone robots anyway, only we’re faulty ones.”

“Well, what about art?” said Jimmy, a little desperately. He was, after all, a student at the Martha Graham Academy, so he felt some need to defend the art-and-creativity turf.

“What about it?” said Crake, smiling his calm smile.

“All that mismatching you talk about. It’s been an inspiration, or that’s what they say. Think of all the poetry—think Petrarch, think John Do

“Art,” said Crake. “I guess they still do a lot of jabbering about that, over where you are. What is it Byron said? Who’d write if they could do otherwise? Something like that.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Jimmy. He was alarmed by the reference to Byron. What right had Crake to poach on his own shoddy, threadbare territory? Crake should stick to science and leave poor Byron to Jimmy.

“What do you mean?” said Crake, as if coaching a stutterer.

“I mean, when you can’t get the otherwise, then…”

“Wouldn’t you rather be fucking?” said Crake. He wasn’t including himself in this question: his tone was one of detached but not very strong interest, as if he were conducting a survey of people’s less attractive personal habits, such as nose-picking.

Jimmy found that his face got redder and his voice got squeakier the more outrageous Crake became. He hated that. “When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

“That’s not quite all that’s left over,” said Crake. “The archeologists are just as interested in gnawed bones and old bricks and ossified shit these days. Sometimes more interested. They think human meaning is defined by those things too.”

Jimmy would like to have said Why are you always putting me down? but he was afraid of the possible answers, because it’s so easy being one of them. So instead he said, “What have you got against it?”

“Against what? Ossified shit?”

“Art.”

“Nothing,” said Crake lazily. “People can amuse themselves any way they like. If they want to play with themselves in public, whack off over doodling, scribbling, and fiddling, it’s fine with me. Anyway it serves a biological purpose.”

“Such as?” Jimmy knew that everything depended on keeping his cool. These arguments had to be played through like a game: if he lost his temper, Crake won.

“The male frog, in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it’s been documented—discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.”

“So?”

“So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”

“Your analogy falls down when it comes to female artists,” said Jimmy. “They’re not in it to get laid. They’d gain no biological advantage from amplifying themselves, since potential mates would be deterred rather than attracted by that sort of amplification. Men aren’t frogs, they don’t want women who are ten times bigger than them.”

“Female artists are biologically confused,” said Crake. “You must have discovered that by now.” This was a snide dig at Jimmy’s current snarled romance, with a brunette poet who’d renamed herself Morgana and refused to tell him what her given name had been, and who was currently on a twenty-eight-day sex fast in honour of the Great Moon-Goddess Oestre, patroness of soybeans and bu

Poor Morgana, thinks Snowman. I wonder what happened to her. She’ll never know how useful she’s been to me, her and her claptrap. He feels a little paltry for having pawned Morgana’s drivel off on the Crakers as cosmogony. But it seems to make them happy enough.

Snowman leans against a tree, listening to the noises off. My love is like a blue, blue rose. Moon on, harvest shine. So now Crake’s had his way, he thinks. Hooray for him. There’s no more jealousy, no more wife-butcherers, no more husband-poisoners. It’s all admirably good-natured: no pushing and shoving, more like the gods cavorting with willing nymphs on some golden-age Grecian frieze.

Why then does he feel so dejected, so bereft? Because he doesn’t understand this kind of behaviour? Because it’s beyond him? Because he can’t jump in?

And what would happen if he tried? If he burst out of the bushes in his filthy tattered sheet, reeking, hairy, tumescent, leering like a goat-balled, cloven-hoofed satyr or a patch-eyed buccaneer from some ancient pirate film—Aarr, me hearties!—and attempted to join the amorous, blue-bottomed tussle? He can imagine the dismay—as if an orang-utang had crashed a formal waltzfest and started groping some sparkly pastel princess. He can imagine his own dismay too. What right does he have to foist his pustulant, cankered self and soul upon these i

“Crake!” he whimpers. “Why am I on this earth? How come I’m alone? Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?”

He needs to ditch this morbid tape-loop, flee the discouraging scene. Oh honey, a woman’s voice whispers, Cheer up! Look on the bright side! You’ve got to think positive!

He hikes doggedly onward, muttering to himself. The forest blots up his voice, the words coming out of him in a string of colourless and soundless bubbles, like air from the mouths of the drowning. The laughter and singing dwindle behind him. Soon he can’t hear them at all.