Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

“But here’s the scammiest part. Yes, the ice had mostly melted; yes, some polar bears had starved, but the rest of them were drifting southwards, mating up with the grizzlies, from which they’d separated themselves a mere two hundred thousand years ago. So you’d get bears that were white with brown patches or bears that were brown with white patches, or all brown or all white, but whatever was on the outside was no predictor of temperament: the pizzlies would avoid you most of the time, like grizzlies; the grolars would attack you most of the time, like polar bears. You never knew which kind any given bear might be. What you did know was that you didn’t want your ’thopter to fall out of the air over bear country.”

As Zeb’s had just done.

“You stupid fuck,” he said again to Chuck. “And whoever hired you is a double stupid fuck,” he added, not that they were listening. Or — he had a sudden nasty thought — maybe they were.

Everything was going fine at Bearlift until Chuck turned up. Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough …

“Unlike at any other time,” says Toby.

“You laughing at me? Victim of a confused youth due to parental abuse? Plus, I grew too fast?”

“Would I laugh?”

“Matter of fact, you would,” says Zeb. “Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.”

Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough, but nobody at Bearlift Central seemed to know or care: half of them were in trouble themselves, so it was Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

The chores were straightforward: load up the edible refuse, in Whitehorse or Yellowknife, sometimes maybe Tuk, where the Beaufort Sea offshore oilrig tankers dumped their garbage when they weren’t tipping it illegally. The oilrigs still produced a lot of real-animal-protein leftovers in those days because nothing was too good for the tanker crews. Pork — they ate a lot of pork byproducts — and chicken, or something next door to it. When it was labmeat it was top grade, camouflaged in sausages or meatloaf so you really couldn’t tell.

You’d pack the postmeal slops into the ’thopter, then grab a beer, then fly the ’thopter to the Bearlift drop locations, hover while dumping off the loads, fly back. Nothing to it except mind-numbing boredom unless there was bad weather or mechanical failure. In that case you’d have to set the ’thopter down while trying to give the mountain-sides a miss, then wait out the weather or kick your heels until Repair showed up. Then repeat. Pretty routine. The worst of it was listening to the green-nosed furfucker sermonizing that went on in the Bearlift-town bars when you were trying to get spongefaced on the crapulous booze they hauled in there and dispensed by the vatful.

Apart from that, it was eat, sleep, and on a good day have a tussle with one or another of the girl staff, though Zeb had to be careful about that because some of them were snarly and others were taken, and he tried to stay out of brawls, never having seen any percentage in rolling around under bar stools with some enraged moron who considered he’d staked eternal twat rights because of his pre-eminent cock and his dimples, and who might have a knife. Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance. Some guys hid their Glocks and other name brands, dug them in under stones in case of dire need, but for the same reason they were unlikely to be carrying. Though not every law and declaration was respected up there in the boonies. Things in the north were always a little fuzzy around the edges, law-wise. So you never knew.

Anyway, the girls. If there was a Back Off sign on a little or big or medium-sized set of cheeks, he always backed off. But if someone crept into his dorm room under cover of darkness, who was he to whimper? He’d been told since a child that he had the morals of a sowbug, and he hated to defeat expectations, in addition to which rejecting a girl’s overture would be hurtful to her self-esteem. Some of those wouldn’t have stood up too well under the light, but one of them had an amazing floppy ass, and another one had a set of boobs like two bowling balls in a string bag, and …

“Too much information,” says Toby.

“Don’t be jealous,” says Zeb. “They’re dead now. You can’t be jealous of a bunch of dead women.”

Toby says nothing. The lush corpse of Zeb’s one-time lover, Lucerne, floats in the air between them, unseen, unmentioned, and certainly unburied as far as Toby is concerned.

“Alive is better than dead,” says Zeb.

“No contest there,” says Toby. “But on second thought you never know till you’ve tried.”

Zeb laughs. “You have an amazing ass too,” he says. “Not floppy, though. Compact.”

“Tell about Chuck,” says Toby.

Chuck entered Bearlift Central as though tiptoeing into a forbidden room while pretending he had a right to be there. Furtive but assertive. To Zeb’s mind, his clothes were too new. They looked as if Chuck had just come from one of those crispy outfitter shops, zippers and Velcro and flaps all over, like some kind of kinky video puzzle game. Undo this man, find the leprechaun, win a prize. Never trust a man with new clothes.

“But clothes have to be new sometimes,” says Toby. “Or they did back then. They weren’t created old.”

“Real men know how to dirty up their clothes in about one second,” says Zeb. “They writhe around in mud. Apart from the clothes, his teeth were too big and white. When I see those kinds of teeth, I always want to give them a gentle tap with a bottle. See if they’re fake, watch them shatter. My dad, the Rev, had teeth like that. He used whitener on them. The teeth plus his tan made him look like some kind of light-up deep-sea devilfish or else a long-dead horse’s head in a desert. It was worse when he smiled than when he didn’t.”

“Back off on the childhood,” says Toby. “You’ll get woeful.”

“Woe, your foe? Say no to woe? Don’t preach at me, babe.”

“It works for me. Backing off woe.”

“You sure about that?”

“So, Chuck.”

“So. There was something about his eyes. Chuck’s eyes. Laminated eyes. Hard and shiny. They had a sort of transparent lid over them.”

The first time Chuck appeared at the canteen table with his tray and said, “Mind if I join you?” he scanned Zeb, an overall back-and-forth of those laminated eyes. Like scanning a barcode.

Zeb glanced up at him. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. He gave an all-purpose grunt and continued work on his rubbery conundrum of a sausage. You’d have expected Chuck to start with personal questions — where you from, how’d you get here, and so forth — but he didn’t. His opening ploy was Bearlift. He said what a great org it was, but since that got no nodding and yupping from Zeb, he intimated that he was only there because he’d hit a bad patch in his life and was, you know, keeping quiet for a while, until things blew over.

“What’d you do, pick your nose?” said Zeb, and Chuck gave a dead-horse-teeth laugh. He said that he guessed Bearlift was for guys who, you know, sort of like the Foreign Legion, and Zeb said the foreign what, and that was the end of that one.

Not that he could shake the guy by being rude. Chuck backed off, but he still managed to be ever-present. Zeb would be at the bar labouring away at the next morning’s hangover and all of a sudden there would be Chuck, buddying up, offering to get the next round. Go to the can, take a leak, and there would be Chuck, materializing like ectoplasm, taking a leak two stalls down; or Zeb would be sliding round the corner in the seedier part of Whitehorse and, guess what, Chuck would be sliding round the next corner over. He most likely went through Zeb’s stuff in Zeb’s broom closet of a room when Zeb wasn’t in it.