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Terrific, thought Jimmy. They’d have a few trial runs, and if the kids from those didn’t measure up they’d recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs—perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn. Then they’d load this hypothetical wonderkid up with their bloated expectations until the poor tyke burst under the strain. Jimmy didn’t envy him.
(He envied him.)
Ramona invited Jimmy for the holidays, but he had no wish to go, so he pleaded overwork. Which was the truth, in a way, as he’d come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?
After a while he was granted a promotion. Then he could buy new toys. He got himself a better DVD player, a gym suit that cleaned itself overnight due to sweat-eating bacteria, a shirt that displayed e-mail on its sleeve while giving him a little nudge every time he had a message, shoes that changed colour to match his outfits, a talking toaster. Well, it was company. Jimmy, your toast is done. He upgraded to a better apartment.
Now that he was climbing up the ladder he found a woman, and then another one, and another one after that. He no longer thought of these women as girlfriends: now they were lovers. They were all married or the equivalent, looking for a chance to sneak around on their husbands or partners, to prove they were still young or else to get even. Or else they were wounded and wanted consolation. Or they simply felt ignored.
There was no reason he couldn’t have several of them at once, as long as he was conscientious about his scheduling. At first he enjoyed the rushed impromptu visits, the secrecy, the sound of Velcro ripped open in haste, the slow tumbling onto the floor; though he figured out pretty soon that he was an extra for these lovers—not to be taken seriously, but instead to be treasured like some child’s free gift dug out of a box of cereal, colourful and delightful but useless: the joker among the twos and threes they’d been dealt in their real lives. He was merely a pastime for them, as they were for him, though for them there was more at stake: a divorce, or a spate of non-routine violence; at the least, a dollop of verbal uproar if they got caught.
One good thing, they never told him to grow up. He suspected they kind of liked it that he hadn’t.
None of them wanted to leave their husbands and settle down with him, or to run away to the pleeblands with him, not that this was very possible any more. The pleeblands were said to have become ultra-hazardous for those who didn’t know their way around out there, and the CorpSeCorps security at the Compound gates was tighter than ever.
Garage
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.
His body had always been easy to maintain, but now he had to work at it. If he skipped the gym he’d develop flab overnight, where none was before. His energy level was sinking, and he had to watch his Joltbar intake: too many steroids could shrink your dick, and though it said on the package that this problem had been fixed due to the addition of some unpronounceable patented compound, he’d written enough package copy not to believe this. His hair was getting sparser around the temples, despite the six-week AnooYoo follicle-regrowth course he’d done. He ought to have known it was a scam—he’d put together the ads for it—but they were such good ads he’d convinced even himself. He found himself wondering what shape Crake’s hairline was in.
Crake had graduated early, done post-grad work, then written his own ticket. He was at RejoovenEsense now—one of the most powerful Compounds of them all—and climbing fast. At first the two of them had continued to keep in touch by e-mail. Crake spoke vaguely of a special project he was doing, something white-hot. He’d been given carte blanche, he said; the sun shone out of his bum as far as the top brass were concerned. Jimmy should come and visit sometime and he’d show him around. What was it that Jimmy was doing, again?
Jimmy countered with a suggestion that they play chess.
Crake’s next news was that Uncle Pete had died suddenly. Some virus. Whatever it was had gone through him like shit through a goose. It was like watching pink sorbet on a barbecue—instant meltdown. Sabotage was suspected, but nothing had been proved.
Were you there? asked Jimmy.
In a ma
Jimmy pondered this; then he asked if anyone else had caught the virus. Crake said no.
As time went by, the intervals between their messages became longer and longer, the thread co
Increasingly he was restless. Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.
On the evenings when none of his lovers had managed to lie to their husbands or equivalents well enough to spend time with him, he might go to a movie at the mall, just to convince himself he was part of a group of other people. Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?
There were the usual political assassinations out there in the pleebs, the usual strange accidents, the unexplained disappearances. Or there were sex scandals: sex scandals always got the newscasters excited. For a while it was sports coaches and little boys; then there was a wave of adolescent girls found locked in garages. These girls were said—by those who had done the locking—to be working as maids, and to have been brought from their squalid countries-of-origin for their own good. Being locked in the garage was for the protection of these girls, said the men—respectable men, accountants, lawyers, merchants dealing in patio furniture—who were dragged into court to defend themselves. Frequently their wives backed them up. These girls, said the wives, had been practically adopted, and were treated almost like one of the family. Jimmy loved those two words: practically, almost.
The girls themselves told other stories, not all of them credible. They’d been drugged, said some. They’d been made to perform obscene contortions in unlikely venues, such as pet shops. They’d been rowed across the Pacific Ocean on rubber rafts, they’d been smuggled in container ships, hidden in mounds of soy products. They’d been made to commit sacrilegious acts involving reptiles. On the other hand, some of these girls seemed content with their situations. The garages were nice, they said, better than what they’d had at home. The meals were regular. The work wasn’t too hard. It was true they weren’t paid and they couldn’t go out anywhere, but there was nothing different or surprising to them about that.
One of these girls—found locked in a garage in San Francisco, at the home of a prosperous pharmacist—said she used to be in movies, but was glad she’d been sold to her Mister, who had seen her on the Net and had felt sorry for her, and had come in person to fetch her and had paid a lot of cash to rescue her, and had flown with her on a plane across the ocean, and had promised to send her to school once her English was good enough. She refused to say anything negative about the man; she appeared to be simple, truthful, and sincere. When asked why the garage was locked, she said it was so nobody bad could get in. When asked what she did in there, she said she studied English and watched TV. When asked how she felt about her captor, she said she would always be grateful to him. The prosecution failed to shake her testimony, and the guy got off scot-free, although he was ordered to send her to school immediately. She said she wanted to study child psychology.