Oryx and Crake

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 te

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 A

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.