Oryx and Crake

Vulturizing

After four deranged years Jimmy graduated from Martha Graham with his dingy little degree in Problematics. He didn’t expect to get a job right away, and in this he was not deceived. For weeks he’d parcel up his meagre credentials, send them out, then get them back too quickly, sometimes with grease spots and fingerprints from whatever sub-basement-level cog had been flipping through them while eating lunch. Then he’d replace the dirty pages and send the package out again.

He’d snared a summer job at the Martha Graham library, going through old books and earmarking them for destruction while deciding which should remain on earth in digital form, but he lost this post halfway through its term because he couldn’t bear to throw anything out. After that he shacked up with his girlfriend of the moment, a conceptual artist and long-haired brunette named Amanda Payne. This name was an invention, like much about her: her real name was Barb Jones. She’d had to reinvent herself, she told Jimmy, the original Barb having been so bulldozed by her abusive, white-trash, sugar-overdosed family that she’d been nothing but a yard-sale reject, like a wind chime made of bent forks or a three-legged chair.

This had been her appeal for Jimmy, for whom “yard sale” was in itself an exotic concept: he’d wanted to mend her, do the repairs, freshen up the paint. Make her like new. “You have a good heart,” she’d told him, the first time she’d let him inside her defences. Revision: overalls.

Amanda had a rundown condo in one of the Modules, shared with two other artists, both men. The three of them were all from the pleeblands, they’d gone to Martha Graham on scholarship, and they considered themselves superior to the privileged, weak-spined, degenerate offspring of the Compounds, such as Jimmy. They’d had to be tough, take it on the chin, battle their way. They claimed a clarity of vision that could only have come from being honed on the grindstone of reality. One of the men had tried suicide, which conferred on him—he implied—a special vantage. The other one had shot a lot of heroin and dealt it too, before taking up art instead, or possibly in addition. After the first few weeks, during which he’d found them charismatic, Jimmy had decided these two were bullshit technicians, in addition to which they were puffed-up snots.

The two who were not Amanda tolerated Jimmy, but just marginally. In order to ingratiate himself with them he took a turn in the kitchen now and then—all three of the artists sneered at microwaves and were into boiling their own spaghetti—but he wasn’t a very good cook. He made the mistake of bringing home a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins one night—a franchise had opened around the corner, and the stuff wasn’t that bad if you could forget everything you knew about the provenance—and after that the two of them who were not Amanda barely spoke to him.

That didn’t stop them from speaking to each other. They had lots to say about all kinds of junk they claimed to know something about, and would drone on in an instigated way, delivering themselves of harangues and oblique sermons that were in fact—Jimmy felt—aimed at himself. According to them it had been game over once agriculture was invented, six or seven thousand years ago. After that, the human experiment was doomed, first to gigantism due to a maxed-out food supply, and then to extinction, once all the available nutrients had been hoovered up.

“You’ve got the answers?” said Jimmy. He’d come to enjoy needling them, because who were they to judge? The artists, who were not sensitized to irony, said that correct analysis was one thing but correct solutions were another, and the lack of the latter did not invalidate the former.

Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.

“Like your computers?” murmured Jimmy. “The ones you do your art on?”

Soon, said the artists, ignoring him, there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed. People would creep along through this tubing, single file, stark naked, their only view the asshole of the one before them in the line, their urine and excrement flowing down through vents in the floor, until they were randomly selected by a digitalized mechanism, at which point they would be sucked into a side tunnel, ground up, and fed to the others through a series of nipple-shaped appendages on the inside of the tube. The system would be self-sustaining and perpetual, and would serve everybody right.

“So, I guess that would do away with war,” said Jimmy, “and we’d all have very thick kneecaps. But what about sex? Not so easy, packed into a tube like that.” Amanda shot him a dirty look. Dirty, but complicit: you could tell the same question had occurred to her.

Amanda herself wasn’t very talkative. She was an image person, not a word person, she said: she claimed to think in pictures. That was fine with Jimmy, because a bit of synesthesia never went amiss.

“So what do you see when I do this?” he’d ask her, in their earliest, most ardent days.

“Flowers,” she’d say. “Two or three. Pink.”

“How about this? What do you see?”

“Red flowers. Red and purple. Five or six.”

“How about this? Oh baby I love you!”

“Neon!” Afterwards she would sigh, and tell him, “That was the whole bouquet.”

He was susceptible to those invisible flowers of hers: they were after all a tribute to his talents. She had a very fine ass too, and the tits were real, but—and he’d noticed this early—she was a little flinty around the eyes.

Amanda was from Texas, originally; she claimed to be able to remember the place before it dried up and blew away, in which case, thought Jimmy, she was about ten years older than she made out. She’d been working for some time on a project called Vulture Sculptures. The idea was to take a truckload of large dead-animal parts to vacant fields or the parking lots of abandoned factories and arrange them in the shapes of words, wait until the vultures had descended and were tearing them apart, then photograph the whole scene from a helicopter. She’d attracted a lot of publicity at first, as well as a few sacks of hate mail and death threats from the God’s Gardeners, and from isolated crazies. One of the letters was from Jimmy’s old dorm roommate, Bernice, who’d cranked her rhetorical volume up considerably.

Then some wrinkly, corrupt old patron who’d made a couple of fortunes out of a string of heart-parts farms had given her a hefty grant, under the illusion that what she was doing was razor-sharp cutting-edge. This was good, said Amanda, because without that chunk of change she would have had to abandon her artwork: helicopters cost a lot of money, and then of course there was the security clearance. The Corpsmen were really anal about airspace, she said; they suspected everyone of wanting to nuke stuff from above, and you practically had to let them climb into your underpants before they’d let you fly anywhere in a hired copter, unless you were some graft-ridden prince from a Compound, that is.

The words she vulturized—her term—had to have four letters. She gave a great deal of thought to them: each letter of the alphabet had a vibe, a plus or minus charge, so the words had to be selected with care. Vulturizing brought them to life, was her concept, and then it killed them. It was a powerful process—“Like watching God thinking,” she’d said on a Net Q&A. So far she’d done PAIN—a pun on her last name, as she’d pointed out in chat-room interviews—and WHOM, and then GUTS. She was having a hard time during the summer of Jimmy because she was blocked on the next word.

Finally, when Jimmy didn’t think he could stand any more boiled spaghetti, and the sight of Amanda staring into space while chewing on a strand of her hair no longer brought on an attack of lust and rapture, he landed a job. It was with an outfit called AnooYoo, a minor Compound situated so close to one of the more dilapidated pleeblands that it might as well have been in it. Not too many people would work there if they’d had other choices, was what he felt on the day he went for the interview; which might have accounted for the slightly abject manner of the interviewers. He could bet they’d been rejected by a dozen or two job-hunters before him. Well, he beamed at them telepathically, I may not be what you had in mind, but at least I’m cheap.

What had impressed them, said the interviewers—there were two of them, a woman and a man—was his senior dissertation on self-help books of the twentieth century. One of their core products, they told him, was the improvement items—not books any more, of course, but the DVDs, the CD-ROMs, the Web sites, and so forth. It wasn’t these instructionals as such that generated the cash surplus, they explained: it was the equipment and the alternative medicines you needed in order to get the optimum effect. Mind and body went hand in hand, and Jimmy’s job would be to work on the mind end of things. In other words, the promotionals.

“What people want is perfection,” said the man. “In themselves.”

“But they need the steps to it to be pointed out,” said the woman.

“In a simple order,” said the man.

“With encouragement,” said the woman. “And a positive attitude.”

“They like to hear about the before and the after,” said the man. “It’s the art of the possible. But with no guarantees, of course.”

“You showed great insight into the process,” the woman said. “In your dissertation. We found it very mature.”

“If you know one century, you know them all,” said the man.

“But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.”

“Exactly!” said the man, as if Jimmy had just solved the riddle of the universe in one blinding flashbulb of light. He got a finger-cracking handshake from the man; from the woman he got a warm but vulnerable smile, which left him wondering whether or not she was married. The pay at AnooYoo wasn’t that great, but there might be other advantages.

That evening he told Amanda Payne about his good fortune. She’d been carping about money lately—or not carping, but she’d inserted a few pointed remarks about pulling your own weight into the prolonged and intent silences that were her specialty—so he thought she’d be pleased. Things hadn’t been that good in the sack lately, ever since his ChickieNobs blunder, in fact. Maybe they’d pick up now, in time for a heartfelt, plangent, and action-filled finale. Already he was rehearsing his exit lines: I’m not what you need, you deserve better, I’ll ruin your life, and so forth. But it was best to work up to these things, so he elaborated on his new job.

“Now I’ll be able to bring home the bacon,” he concluded in what he hoped was a winsome but responsible tone.

Amanda wasn’t impressed. “You’re going to work where?” was her comment; point being, as it unfolded, that AnooYoo was a collection of cesspool denizens who existed for no other reason than to prey on the phobias and void the bank accounts of the anxious and the gullible. It seemed that Amanda, until recently, had had a friend who’d signed up for an AnooYoo five-month plan, touted as being able to cure depression, wrinkles, and insomnia all at the same time, and who’d pushed herself over the edge—actually, over the windowsill of her ten-storey-up apartment—on some kind of South American tree bark.

“I could always turn them down,” said Jimmy, when this tale had been told. “I could join the ranks of the permanently unemployed. Or, hey, I could go on being a kept man, like now. Joke! Joke! Don’t kill me!”

Amanda was more silent than ever for the next few days. Then she told him she’d unblocked herself artistically: the next key word for the Vulture Sculpture had come to her.

“And what’s that?” said Jimmy, trying to sound interested.

She looked at him speculatively. “Love,” she said.

AnooYoo

Jimmy moved into the junior apartment provided for him in the AnooYoo Compound: bedroom in an alcove, cramped kitchenette, reproduction 1950s furniture. As a dwelling place it was only a small step up from his dorm room at Martha Graham, but at least there was less insect life. He discovered quite soon that, corporately speaking, he was a drudge and a helot. He was to cudgel his brains and spend ten-hour days wandering the labyrinths of the thesaurus and cranking out the verbiage. Then those above would grade his offerings, hand them back for revision, hand them back again. What we want is more… is less… that’s not quite it. But with time he improved, whatever that meant.

Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier. It was his task to describe and extol, to present the vision of what—oh, so easily!—could come to be. Hope and fear, desire and revulsion, these were his stocks-in-trade, on these he rang his changes. Once in a while he’d make up a word—tensicity, fibracionous, pheromonimal—but he never once got caught out. His proprietors liked those kinds of words in the small print on packages because they sounded scientific and had a convincing effect.

He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos that came from above telling him he’d done a good job meant nothing to him because they’d been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYoo was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.

His social life was—for the first time in many years—a zero: he hadn’t been stranded in such a sexual desert since he was eight. Amanda Payne shimmered in the past like a lost lagoon, its crocodiles for the moment forgotten. Why had he abandoned her so casually? Because he’d been looking forward to the next in the series. But the woman interviewer from AnooYoo about whom he’d had such hopes was never seen again, and the other women he encountered, at the office or in the AnooYoo bars, were either mean-minded eye-the-target sharks or so emotionally starved even Jimmy avoided them as if they were quagmires. He was reduced to flirting with waitpersons, and even they turned a cold shoulder. They’d seen fast-talking youngsters like him before, they knew he had no status.

In the company café he was a new boy, alone once more, starting over. He took to eating SoyOBoy burgers in the Compound mall, or taking out a greasy box of ChickieNobs Nubbins to munch on while working overtime at his computer terminal. Every week there was a Compound social barbecue, a comprehensive ratfuck that all employees were expected to attend. These were dire occasions for Jimmy. He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel; he loitered on the edges gnawing on a burned soydog and silently ripping apart everyone within eyesight. Saggy boobs, ran the thought balloon in his head. Bunfaced tofubrain. Thumbsucking posterboy. Fridgewoman. Sell his granny. Wobble-bummed bovine. Bladderheaded jerk.

He got the occasional e-mail from his father; an e-birthday card perhaps, a few days later than his real birthday, something with dancing pigoons on it, as if he were still eleven. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True. Ramona would write him chatty, dutiful messages: no baby brother for him yet, she’d say, but they were still “working on it.” He did not wish to visualize the hormone-sodden, potion-ridden, gel-slathered details of such work. If nothing “natural” happened soon, she said, they’d try “something else” from one of the agencies—Infantade, Foetility, Perfectababe, one of those. Things had changed a lot in the field since Jimmy came along! (Came along, as if he hadn’t actually been born, but had just sort of dropped by for a visit.) She was doing her “research,” because of course they wanted the best for their money.

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 manner of speaking, said Crake.

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 connecting them stretched thinner. What did they have to say to each other? Jimmy’s wordserf job was surely one that Crake would despise, though affably, and Crake’s pursuits might not be something Jimmy could understand any more. He realized he was thinking of Crake as someone he used to know.

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.

There was a close-up of her, of her beautiful cat’s face, her delicate smile. Jimmy thought he recognized her. He froze her image, then unpacked his old printout, the one from when he was fourteen—he’d kept it with him through all his moves, almost like a family photo, out of sight but never discarded, tucked in among his Martha Graham Academy transcripts. He compared the faces, but a lot of time had gone by since then. That girl, the eight-year-old in the printout, must be seventeen, eighteen, nineteen by now, and the one from the news broadcast seemed a lot younger. But the look was the same: the same blend of innocence and contempt and understanding. It made him feel light-headed, precariously balanced, as if he were standing on a cliff-edge above a rock-filled gorge, and it would be dangerous for him to look down.

Gripless

The CorpSeCorps had never lost sight of Jimmy. During his time at Martha Graham they’d hauled him in regularly, four times a year, for what they called little talks. They’d ask him the same questions they’d already asked a dozen times, just to see if they got the same answers. I don’t know was the safest thing Jimmy could think of to say, which most of the time was accurate enough.

After a while they’d taken to showing him pictures—stills from buttonhole snoop cameras, or black-and-whites that looked as if they’d been pulled off the security videocams at pleebland bank ATMs, or news-channel footage of this or that: demonstrations, riots, executions. The game was to see if he recognized any of the faces. They’d have him wired up, so even if he pretended ignorance they’d catch the spikes of neural electricity he wouldn’t be able to control. He’d kept waiting for the Happicuppa caper in Maryland to turn up, the one with his mother in it—he dreaded that—but it never showed.

He hadn’t received any foreign postcards for a long time.

After he’d gone to work at AnooYoo, the Corpsmen appeared to have forgotten about him. But no, they were just paying out the rope—seeing if he, or else the other side, meaning his mother, would use his new position, his dollop of extra freedom, to try to make contact again. After a year or so, there was the familiar knocking on the door. He always knew it was them because they never used the intercom first, they must have had some kind of bypass, not to mention the door code. Hello, Jimmy, how ya doing, we just need to ask you a few questions, see if you can help us out a little here.

Sure, be glad to.

Attaboy.

And so it went.

In—what?—his fifth year at AnooYoo, they finally hit pay dirt. He’d been looking at their pictures for a couple of hours by then. Shots of a boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away; a row of heads on poles—that was in the ex-Argentine, said the CorpSeCorps, though they didn’t say whose heads they were or how they’d got onto the poles. Several women going through a supermarket checkout, all in sunglasses. A dozen bodies sprawled on the floor after a raid on a God’s Gardeners safe house—that outfit was outlawed now—and one of them sure looked a lot like his old roomie, the incendiary Bernice. He said so, being a good boy, and got a pat on the back, but obviously they’d known that already because they weren’t interested. He felt bad about Bernice: she’d been a nut and a nuisance, but she hadn’t deserved to die like that.

A lineup of mug shots from a Sacramento prison. The driver’s licence photo from a suicide car-bomber. (But if the car had blown up, how had they come by the licence?) Three pantiless waitresses from a pleebland no-touching nookie bar—they threw that in for fun, and it did cause a waver on the neural monitor, unnatural if it hadn’t, and smiles and chuckles all round. A riot scene Jimmy recognized from a movie remake of Frankenstein. They always put in a few tricks like that to keep him on his toes.

Then more mug shots. Nope, said Jimmy. Nope, nope, nothing.

Then came what looked like a routine execution. No horseplay, no prisoners breaking free, no foul language: by this Jimmy knew before he saw her that it was a woman they were erasing. Then came the figure in the loose grey prison clothing shuffling along, hair tied back, wrists handcuffed, the female guard to either side, the blindfold. Shooting by spraygun, it was going to be. No need for a firing squad, one spraygun would have done, but they kept the old custom, five in a row, so no single executioner need lose sleep over whose virtual bullet had killed first.

Shooting was only for treason. Otherwise it was gas, or hanging, or the big brainfrizz.

A man’s voice, words coming from outside the shot: the Corpsmen had the sound turned down because they wanted Jimmy to concentrate on the visuals, but it must have been an order because now the guards were taking off the blindfold. Pan to close-up: the woman was looking right at him, right out of the frame: a blue-eyed look, direct, defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the sound came suddenly up. Goodbye. Remember Killer. I love you. Don’t let me down.

No question, it was his mother. Jimmy was shocked by how old she’d become: her skin was lined, her mouth withered. Was it the hard living she’d been doing on the run, or was it bad treatment? How long had she been in prison, in their grip? What had they been doing to her?

Wait, he wanted to yell, but that was that, pullback shot, eyes covered again, zap zap zap. Bad aim, red spurts, they almost took her head off. Long shot of her crumpling to the ground.

“Anything there, Jimmy?”

“Nope. Sorry. Nothing.” How could she have foreseen he’d be looking?

They must have picked up the heartbeat, the surge of energy. After a few neutral questions—“Want a coffee? Need a leak?”—one of them said, “So, who was this killer?”

“Killer,” Jimmy said. He began to laugh. “Killer was a skunk.” There, he’d done it. Another betrayal. He couldn’t help himself.

“Not a nice guy, eh? Some sort of biker?”

“No,” said Jimmy, laughing more. “You don’t get it. A skunk. A rakunk. An animal.” He put his head down on his two fists, weeping with laughter. Why did she have to drag Killer into it? So he’d know it was really her, that’s why. So he’d believe her. But what did she mean about letting her down?

“Sorry about that, son,” said the older of the two Corpsmen. “We just had to be sure.”

It didn’t occur to Jimmy to ask when the execution had taken place. Afterwards, he realized it might have been years ago. What if the whole thing was a fake? It could even have been digital, at least the shots, the spurts of blood, the falling down. Maybe his mother was still alive, maybe she was even still at large. If so, what had he given away?

The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he’d lost, or—sadder—had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn’t even know who’d wasted it.

He was angry most days. At first he sought out his various lovers, but he was moody with them, he failed to be entertaining, and worse, he’d lost interest in the sex. He stopped answering their e-messages—Is anything wrong, was it something I did, how can I help—and didn’t return their calls: explaining wasn’t worth it. In earlier days he would have made his mother’s death into a psychodrama, harvested some sympathy, but that wasn’t what he wanted now.

What did he want?

He went to the Compound singles bar; no joy there, he already knew most of those women, he didn’t need their neediness. He went back to Internet porn, found it had lost its bloom: it was repetitive, mechanical, devoid of its earlier allure. He searched the Web for the HottTotts site, hoping that something familiar would help him to feel less isolated, but it was defunct.

He was drinking alone now, at night, a bad sign. He shouldn’t be doing that, it only depressed him, but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he’d whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark’s mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth.

He knew he was faltering, trying to keep his footing. Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. Carefree, thick-skinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything. Turning a blind eye. Now he found himself wincing away. The smallest setbacks were major—a lost sock, a jammed electric toothbrush. Even the sunrise was blinding. He was being rubbed all over with sandpaper. “Get a grip,” he told himself. “Get a handle on it. Put it behind you. Move forward. Make a new you.”

Such positive slogans. Such bland inspirational promotions vomit. What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.

On the worst nights he’d call up Alex the parrot, long dead by then but still walking and talking on the Net, and watch him go through his paces. Handler: What colour is the round ball, Alex? The round ball? Alex, head on side, thinking: Blue. Handler: Good boy! Alex: Cork-nut, cork-nut! Handler: There you are! Then Alex would be given a cob of baby corn, which wasn’t what he’d asked for, he’d asked for an almond. Seeing this would bring tears to Jimmy’s eyes.

Then he’d stay up too late, and once in bed he’d stare at the ceiling, telling over his lists of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dibble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat. If Alex the parrot were his, they’d be friends, they’d be brothers. He’d teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.

But there was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them. It no longer delighted Jimmy to possess these small collections of letters that other people had forgotten about. It was like having his own baby teeth in a box.

At the edge of sleep a procession would appear behind his eyes, moving out of the shadows to the left, crossing his field of vision. Young slender girls with small hands, ribbons in their hair, bearing garlands of many-coloured flowers. The field would be green, but it wasn’t a pastoral scene: these were girls in danger, in need of rescue. There was something—a threatening presence—behind the trees.

Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull.

Or it might be the girls themselves that were dangerous. There was always that possibility. They could be a bait, a trap. He knew they were much older than they appeared to be, and much more powerful as well. Unlike himself they had a ruthless wisdom.

The girls were calm, they were grave and ceremonious. They’d look at him, they’d look into him, they would recognize and accept him, accept his darknesses. Then they would smile.

Oh honey, I know you. I see you. I know what you want.