Oryx and Crake

“If you were ninety and you had the chance for one last fuck but you knew it would kill you, would you still do it?” Crake asked him once.

“You bet,” said Jimmy.

“Addict,” said Crake.

Snowman finds himself humming as he goes through the kitchen cupboards. Chocolate in squares, real chocolate. A jar of instant coffee, ditto coffee whitener, ditto sugar. Shrimp paste for spreading on crackers, ersatz but edible. Cheese food in a tube, ditto mayo. Noodle soup with vegetables, chicken flavour. Crackers in a plastic snap-top. A stash of Joltbars. What a bonanza.

He braces himself, then opens the refrigerator, betting on the fact that these guys wouldn’t have kept too much real food in there, so the stench won’t be too repulsive. Frozen meat gone bad in a melted freezer unit is the worst; he came across quite a lot of that in the early days of rummaging through the pleeblands.

There’s nothing too smelly; just a shrivelled apple, an orange covered with grey fur. Two bottles of beer, unopened—real beer! The bottles are brown, with thin retro necks.

He opens a beer, downs half of it. Warm, but who cares? Then he sits down at the table and eats the shrimp paste, the crackers, the cheese food and the mayo, finishing off with a spoonful of coffee powder mixed with whitener and sugar. He saves the noodle soup and the chocolate and the Joltbars for later.

In one of the cupboards there’s a windup radio. He can remember when those things started being doled out, in case of tornadoes or floods or anything else that might disrupt the electronics. His parents had one when they were still his parents; he used to play with it on the sly. It had a handle that turned to recharge the batteries, it would run for half an hour.

This one looks undamaged, so he cranks the thing up. He doesn’t expect to hear anything, but expectation isn’t the same as desire.

White noise, more white noise, more white noise. He tries the AM bands, then the FM. Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkkk. Then he tries the short-wave. He moves the dial slowly and carefully. Maybe there are other countries, distant countries, where the people may have escaped—New Zealand, Madagascar, Patagonia—places like that.

They wouldn’t have escaped though. Or most of them wouldn’t. Once it got started, the thing was airborne. Desire and fear were universal, between them they’d been the gravediggers.

Kkkkk. Kkkkk. Kkkkk.

Oh, talk to me, he prays. Say something. Say anything.

Suddenly there’s an answer. It’s a voice, a human voice. Unfortunately it’s speaking some language that sounds like Russian.

Snowman can’t believe his ears. He’s not the only one then—someone else has made it through, someone of his own species. Someone who knows how to work a short-wave transmitter. And if one, then likely others. But this one isn’t much use to Snowman, he’s too far away.

Dickhead! He’s forgotten about the CB function. That was what they’d been told to use, in emergencies. If there’s anyone close by, the CB is what they’d be doing.

He turns the dial. Receive, is what he’ll try.

Kkkkkk.

Then, faintly, a man’s voice: “Is anyone reading me? Anyone out there? Do you read me? Over.”

Snowman fumbles with the buttons. How to send? He’s forgotten. Where is the fucker?

“I’m here! I’m here!” he shouts.

Back to Receive. Nothing.

Already he’s having second thoughts. Was that too hasty of him? How does he know who’s at the other end? Quite possibly no one he’d care to have lunch with. Still, he feels buoyant, elated almost. There are more possibilities now.

Rampart

Snowman’s been so entranced—by the excitement, the food, the voices on the radio—that he’s forgotten about the cut on his foot. Now it’s reminding him: there’s a jabbing sensation, like a thorn. He sits down at the kitchen table, pulls the foot up as high as he can to examine it. Looks like there’s a sliver of bourbon-bottle glass still in there. He picks and squeezes and wishes he had some tweezers, or longer fingernails. Finally he gets a grip on the tiny shard, then pulls. There’s pain but not much blood.

Once he’s got the glass piece out he washes the cut with a little of the beer, then hobbles into the bathroom and rummages in the medicine cabinet. Nothing of use, apart from a tube of sunblock—no good for cuts—some out-of-date antibiotic ointment, which he smears on the wound, and the dregs of a bottle of shaving lotion that smells like fake lemons. He pours that on too, because there must be alcohol in it. Maybe he should hunt for some drain cleaner or something, but he doesn’t want to go too far, fry the entire foot sole. He’ll just have to cross his fingers, wish for luck: an infected foot would slow him right down. He shouldn’t have neglected the cut for so long, the floor downstairs must be percolating with germs.

In the evening he watches the sunset, through the narrow slit of the tower window. How glorious it must have been when all ten of the videocam screens were on and you could get the full panoramic view, turn up the colour brightness, enhance the red tones. Toke up, sit back, drift on cloud nine. As it is the screens turn their blind eyes towards him, so he has to make do with the real thing, just a slice of it, tangerine, then flamingo, then watered-down blood, then strawberry ice cream, off to the side of where the sun must be.

In the fading pink light the pigoons waiting for him down below look like miniature plastic figurines, bucolic replicas from a child’s playbox. They have the rosy tint of i

Night falls. He lies down on one of the cots in the bedroom, the bed that’s made. Where I’m lying now, a dead man used to sleep, he thinks. He never saw it coming. He had no clue. Unlike Jimmy, who’d had clues, who ought to have seen but didn’t. If I’d killed Crake earlier, thinks Snowman, would it have made any difference?

The place is too hot and stuffy, though he’s managed to pry the emergency air vents open. He can’t get to sleep right away, so he lights one of the candles—it’s in a tin container with a lid, survival supplies, you’re supposed to be able to boil soup on those things—and smokes another cigarette. This time it doesn’t make him so dizzy. Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

He thumbs through the sex-site printouts. The women aren’t his type—too bulgy, too altered, too obvious. Too much leer and mascara, too much cowlike tongue. Dismay is what he feels, not lust.

Revision: dismayed lust.

“How could you,” he murmurs to himself, not for the first time, as he couples in his head with a rent-a-slut decked out in a red Chinese silk halter and six-inch heels, a dragon tattooed on her bum.

Oh sweetie.

In the small hot room he dreams; again, it’s his mother. No, he never dreams about his mother, only about her absence. He’s in the kitchen. Whuff, goes the wind in his ear, a door closing. On a hook her dressing gown is hanging, magenta, empty, frightening.

He wakes with his heart pounding. He remembers now that after she’d left he’d put it on, that dressing gown. It still smelled of her, of the jasmine-based perfume she used to wear. He’d looked at himself in the mirror, his boy’s head with its cool practised fish-eye stare topping a neck that led down into that swaddling of female-coloured fabric. How much he’d hated her at that moment. He could hardly breathe, he’d been suffocating with hatred, tears of hatred had been rolling down his cheeks. But he’d hugged his arms around himself all the same.