Oryx and Crake

Nooners

Noon is the worst, with its glare and humidity. At about eleven o’clock Snowman retreats back into the forest, out of sight of the sea altogether, because the evil rays bounce off the water and get at him even if he’s protected from the sky, and then he reddens and blisters. What he could really use is a tube of heavy-duty sunblock, supposing he could ever find one.

In the first week, when he’d had more energy, he’d made himself a lean-to, using fallen branches and a roll of duct tape and a plastic tarp he’d found in the trunk of a smashed-up car. At that time he’d had a knife, but he lost it a week later, or was it two weeks? He must keep better track of such things as weeks. The knife was one of those pocket items with two blades, an awl, a tiny saw, a nail file, and a corkscrew. Also a little pair of scissors, which he’d used to cut his toenails and the duct tape as well. He regrets the loss of the scissors.

He was given a knife like that for his ninth birthday, by his father. His father was always giving him tools, trying to make him more practical. In his father’s opinion Jimmy couldn’t screw in a light bulb. So who wants to screw in a light bulb? says the voice in Snowman’s head, a stand-up comic this time. I’d rather do it in bed.

“Shut up,” says Snowman.

“Did you give him a dollar?” Oryx had asked him when he told her about the knife.

“No. Why?”

“You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won’t cut you. I wouldn’t like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, someone,” said Oryx. Someone played a big part in her life.

“Someone who?” Jimmy hated him, this someone—faceless, eyeless, mocking, all hands and dick, now singular, now double, now a multitude—but Oryx had her mouth right next to his ear and was whispering, Oh, oh, some, one, and laughing at the same time, so how could he concentrate on his stupid old hate?

In the short period of the lean-to he’d slept on a fold-up cot he’d dragged from a bungalow half a mile away, a metal frame with a foam mattress on top of a grillwork of springs. The first night he’d been attacked by ants, and so he’d filled four tin cans with water and stuck the cot legs into them. That put a stop to the ants. But the build-up of hot, damp air under the tarp was too uncomfortable: at night, at ground level, with no breeze, the humidity felt like a hundred per cent: his breath fogged the plastic.

Also the rakunks were a nuisance, scuffling through the leaves and sniffing at his toes, nosing around him as if he were already garbage; and one morning he’d woken to find three pigoons gazing in at him through the plastic. One was a male; he thought he could see the gleaming point of a white tusk. Pigoons were supposed to be tusk-free, but maybe they were reverting to type now they’d gone feral, a fast-forward process considering their rapid-maturity genes. He’d shouted at them and waved his arms and they’d run off, but who could tell what they might do the next time they came around? Them, or the wolvogs: it wouldn’t take them forever to figure out that he no longer had a spraygun. He’d thrown it away when he’d run out of virtual bullets for it. Dumb not to have swiped a recharger for it: a mistake, like setting up his sleeping quarters at ground level.

So he’d moved to the tree. No pigoons or wolvogs up there, and few rakunks: they preferred the undergrowth. He’d constructed a rough platform in the main branches out of scrap wood and duct tape. It’s not a bad job: he’s always been handier at putting things together than his father gave him credit for. At first he’d taken the foam mattress up there, but he had to toss it when it began to mildew, and to smell tantalizingly of tomato soup.

The plastic tarp on the lean-to was torn away during an unusually violent storm. The bed frame remains, however; he can still use it at noon. He’s found that if he stretches out on it flat on his back, with his arms spread wide and his sheet off, like a saint arranged ready for frying, it’s better than lying on the ground: at least he can get some air on all the surfaces of his body.

From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can’t reach the word. He can’t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space.

“It’s only the heat,” he tells himself. “I’ll be fine once it rains.” He’s sweating so hard he can almost hear it; trickles of sweat crawl down him, except that sometimes the trickles are insects. He appears to be attractive to beetles. Beetles, flies, bees, as if he’s dead meat, or one of the nastier flowers.

The best thing about the noon hours is that at least he doesn’t get hungry: even the thought of food makes him queasy, like chocolate cake in a steam bath. He wishes he could cool himself by hanging out his tongue.

Now the sun is at full glare; the zenith, it used to be called. Snowman lies splayed out on the grillwork of the bed, in the liquid shade, giving himself up to the heat. Let’s pretend this is a vacation! A schoolteacher’s voice this time, perky, condescending. Ms. Stratton Call-Me-Sally, with the big butt. Let’s pretend this, let’s pretend that. They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. Let’s pretend I’m here with you, big butt and all, getting ready to suck your brains right out your dick.

Is there a faint stirring? He looks down at himself: no action. Sally Stratton vanishes, and just as well. He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

He might whittle, for instance. Make a chess set, play games with himself. He used to play chess with Crake but they’d played by computer, not with actual chessmen. Crake won mostly. There must be another knife somewhere; if he sets his mind to it, goes foraging, scrapes around in the leftovers, he’d be sure to find one. Now that he’s thought of it he’s surprised he hasn’t thought of it before.

He lets himself drift back to those after-school times with Crake. It was harmless enough at first. They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others. Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all used parallel strategies: you had to see where you were headed before you got there, but also where the other guy was headed. Crake was good at those games because he was a master of the sideways leap. Jimmy could sometimes win at Kwiktime Osama though, as long as Crake played the Infidel side.

No hope of whittling that kind of game, however. It would have to be chess.

Or he could keep a diary. Set down his impressions. There must be lots of paper lying around, in unburned interior spaces that are still leak-free, and pens and pencils; he’s seen them on his scavenging forays but he’s never bothered taking any. He could emulate the captains of ships, in olden times—the ship going down in a storm, the captain in his cabin, doomed but intrepid, filling in the logbook. There were movies like that. Or castaways on desert islands, keeping their journals day by tedious day. Lists of supplies, notations on the weather, small actions performed—the sewing on of a button, the devouring of a clam.

He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life some structure.

But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who’ll come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman can make no such assumptions: he’ll have no future reader, because the Crakers can’t read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past.

A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiralling towards his chest. It’s a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.

The caterpillar pauses, feeling around in the air with its blunt head. Its huge opaque eyes look like the front end of a riot-gear helmet. Maybe it’s smelling him, picking up on his chemical aura. “We are not here to play, to dream, to drift,” he says to it. “We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.”

Now, what atrophying neural cistern in his brain did that come from? The Life Skills class, in junior high. The teacher had been a shambling neo-con reject from the heady days of the legendary dot.com bubble, back in prehistory. He’d had a stringy ponytail stuck to the back of his balding head, and a faux-leather jacket; he’d worn a gold stud in his bumpy, porous old nose, and had pushed self-reliance and individualism and risk-taking in a hopeless tone, as if even he no longer believed in them. Once in a while he’d come out with some hoary maxim, served up with a wry irony that did nothing to reduce the boredom quotient; or else he’d say, “I coulda been a contender,” then glare meaningfully at the class as if there was some deeper-than-deep point they were all supposed to get.

Double-entry on-screen bookkeeping, banking by fingertip, using a microwave without nuking your egg, filling out housing applications for this or that Module and job applications for this or that Compound, family heredity research, negotiating your own marriage-and-divorce contracts, wise genetic match-mating, the proper use of condoms to avoid sexually transmitted bioforms: those had been the Life Skills. None of the kids had paid much attention. They either knew it already or didn’t want to. They’d treated the class as a rest hour. We are not here to play, to dream, to drift. We are here to practise Life Skills.

“Whatever,” says Snowman.

Or, instead of chess or a journal, he could focus on his living conditions. There’s room for improvement in that department, a lot of room. More food sources, for one thing. Why didn’t he ever bone up on roots and berries and pointed-stick traps for skewering small game, and how to eat snakes? Why had he wasted his time?

Oh honey, don’t beat yourself up! breathes a female voice, regretfully, in his ear.

If only he could find a cave, a nice cave with a high ceiling and good ventilation and maybe some running water, he’d be better off. True, there’s a stream with fresh water a quarter of a mile away; at one place it widens into a pool. Initially he’d gone there to cool off, but the Crakers might be splashing around in it or resting on the banks, and the kids would pester him to go swimming, and he didn’t like being seen by them without his sheet. Compared to them he is just too weird; they make him feel deformed. If not people, there might well be animals: wolvogs, pigoons, bobkittens. Watering holes attract carnivores. They lie in wait. They slaver. They pounce. Not very cozy.

The clouds are building, the sky darkening. He can’t see much through the trees but he senses the change in light. He slides off into half-sleep and dreams of Oryx, floating on her back in a swimming pool, wearing an outfit that appears to be made of delicate white tissue-paper petals. They spread out around her, expanding and contracting like the valves of a jellyfish. The pool is painted a vibrant pink. She smiles up at him and moves her arms gently to keep afloat, and he knows they are both in great danger. Then there’s a hollow booming sound, like the door of a great vault shutting.

Downpour

He awakes to thunder and a sudden wind: the afternoon storm is upon him. He scrambles to his feet, grabs his sheet. Those howlers can come on very fast, and a metal bed frame in a thunderstorm is no place to be. He’s built himself an island of car tires back in the woods; it’s simply a matter of crouching on them, keeping their insulation between himself and the ground until the storm is over. Sometimes there are hailstones as big as golf balls, but the forest canopy slows their fall.

He reaches the pile of tires just as the storm breaks. Today it’s only rain, the usual deluge, so heavy the impact turns the air to mist. Water sluices down onto him as the lightning sizzles. Branches thrash around overhead, rivulets amble along the ground. Already it’s cooling down; the scent of freshly washed leaves and wet earth fills the air.

Once the rain has slowed to a drizzle and the rumbles of thunder have receded, he slogs back to his cement-slab cache to collect the empty beer bottles. Then he makes his way to a jagged concrete overhang that was once part of a bridge. Beneath it there’s a triangular orange sign with the black silhouette of a man shovelling. Men at Work, that used to mean. Strange to think of the endless labour, the digging, the hammering, the carving, the lifting, the drilling, day by day, year by year, century by century; and now the endless crumbling that must be going on everywhere. Sandcastles in the wind.

Runoff is pouring through a hole in the side of the concrete. He stands under it with his mouth open, gulping water full of grit and twigs and other things he doesn’t want to think about—the water must have found a channel through derelict houses and pungent cellars and clotted-up ditches and who knows what else. Then he rinses himself off, wrings out his sheet. He doesn’t get himself very clean this way, but at least he can shed the surface layer of grime and scum. It would be useful to have a bar of soap: he keeps forgetting to pick one up during his pilfering excursions.

Lastly he fills up the beer bottles. He should get himself a better vessel, a Thermos or a pail—something that would hold more. Also the bottles are awkward: they’re slippery and hard to position. He keeps imagining he can still smell beer inside them, though it’s only wishful thinking. Let’s pretend this is beer.

He shouldn’t have brought that up. He shouldn’t torture himself. He shouldn’t dangle impossibilities in front of himself, as if he were some caged, wired-up lab animal, trapped into performing futile and perverse experiments on his own brain.

Get me out! he hears himself thinking. But he isn’t locked up, he’s not in prison. What could be more out than where he is?

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he says, in the snivelling child’s voice he reverts to in this mood. “Things happened, I had no idea, it was out of my control! What could I have done? Just someone, anyone, listen to me please!”

What a bad performance. Even he isn’t convinced by it. But now he’s weeping again.

It is important, says the book in his head, to ignore minor irritants, to avoid pointless repinings, and to turn one’s mental energies to immediate realities and to the tasks at hand. He must have read that somewhere. Surely his own mind would never have come up with pointless repinings, not all by itself.

He wipes his face on a corner of the sheet. “Pointless repinings,” he says out loud. As often, he feels he has a listener: someone unseen, hidden behind the screen of leaves, watching him slyly.