Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

By this time Zeb had magic fingers: he could play code the way Mozart played the piano, he could warble in cuneiform, he could waltz through firewalls like a tiger of old leaping through a flaming circus hoop without singeing a whisker. He could slip into the PetrOleum Church accounting — both sets of books, the official set and the actual one — in a few swift moves, and he did, on a regular basis. This went on for a couple of years, as the.09 per cents piled up, and Zeb grew taller and sprouted more body hair, and worked out in the gym at CapRock Prep, where he took care to keep in the middle of the bell curve gradeswise, especially in IT, so that his extraterrestrial hacking talents would not be suspected.

In six months he would graduate, and what then? He had some notions, but so did his parental overseers. The Rev had made it known that through his connections he could get Zeb a coveted job in the northern oil desert, driving one of the humungous machines that wrangled oil-rich bituminous gravel. It would make a man of Zeb, he said, leaving the possible definition of man floating in the air between them. (Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?) Also, the money was good. Then, when he’d done that for a while, Zeb could decide on what calling he wished to pursue.

There were three subtexts to this: 1) The Rev wanted Zeb to go very far away because he was beginning to be afraid of him, and rightly so. 2) With any luck, Zeb would get lung cancer, or a third eye, or scales like an armadillo: the air up there was so toxic you mutated in about a week.

And 3) Zeb was not brilliant. Not like Adam, who — in the hopes that he would carry on in the old man’s fraudchurch biz — had been sent to Spindletop U. and had majored in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology; this last, as far as Zeb could see, required you to learn biology in order to disprove it. That took a certain kind of intellectual adroitness, a kind — it was implied — that Zeb lacked. Galley slave would be more his level.

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Trudy. “You should be so grateful to your father for taking all that trouble. Not every boy has a father like yours.”

Smile, Zeb ordered himself. “I know,” he said. The word smile meant “carving knife” in Greek. He’d found that on the web, when he wasn’t decapitating historical figures.

Zeb missed Adam when he wasn’t there, and he suspected it was mutual. Who else could they talk to about the improbable sublayers of their lives? Who else could do a hilarious word-for-word imitation of the Rev’s Prayer to Saint Lucic-Lucas, to whom God had revealed the Holy Oil?

When they were apart they avoided text messages, phone calls, or anything else with an electronic signal: the internet, as was well known, leaked like a prostate cancer patient, and the Rev was most likely snooping, if not on Adam, at least on Zeb. But when Adam would come back for vacations it was old-home week. Zeb would welcome him with an amphibian in the shoe or an arthropod in the cufflink box or a burr or two artfully stuck onto the inside of his Y-fronts, though they were getting too old for this kind of japery, so it was more of a nostalgia thing.

Then they’d go out onto the tennis court and pretend to play a game, and murmur together in brief snatches across the net, comparing notes. Zeb would want to know if Adam had got laid yet, a question that was skilfully evaded. Adam would want to know how much money Zeb had skimmed off from the Church and sequestered in his secret stowaway accounts, since it was their firm plan to disappear from the Rev’s charmed circle once they had sufficient funds.

It was Adam’s last vacation before graduating. Zeb was sitting at the Rev’s home office desk monitor with a pair of medical latex gloves on, humming under his breath, while Adam stood watch at the window in case the Rev’s gas-guzzling tycoon car or Trudy’s Hummerette drove up.

“You’ve got Schillizzi’s hands,” Adam said to him in that neutral way he had. Was it admiration or merely observation?

“Schillizzi?” said Zeb. “Hot crap, the botulistic old bugger’s embezzling again, only this is a lot more! Look at this!”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear,” said Adam in his mildest voice.

“Stuff yourself,” said Zeb cheerfully. “And he’s stashing it in a bank account in Grand Cayman!”

“Schillizzi was a well-known white-hat twentieth-century safecracker,” said Adam, who was interested in history, unlike Zeb. “He never used explosives, only his hands. He was legendary.”

“I bet the old fart’s planning a jump,” said Zeb. “Here today, then zap, and the next morning he’s sucking up martinis on a tropical beach and renting lick-your-cleft bimbettes, leaving the fuckin’ faithful out in the cold with their pants down.”

“Not in Grand Cayman, he won’t,” said Adam. “They’re mostly underwater. But those banks have relocated to the Canaries; there are more mountains there. Only they’ve kept the Grand Cayman corporate names. Preserving a tradition, I suppose.”

“Wonder if he’ll take Trusty Fusty Trudy with him?” said Zeb. Adam’s knowledge of banking surprised him, but then Adam’s knowledge of a lot of things surprised him. It was hard to know what Adam knew.

“He won’t take Trudy,” said Adam. “She’s becoming too financially demanding. She suspects what he’s up to.”

“You know this how?”

“An educated guess,” said Adam. “The body language. She’s giving him the narrow eyes at breakfast, when he’s not looking. She’s nagging him about vacations, and when are they going to take one. Also she’s feeling held back in her interior decoration ambitions: note her on-show collection of wallpaper samples and paint chips. She’s tired of playing the angel wife for the benefit of the congregation. She feels she’s helped to create the domestic surplus, and she wants more scope.”

“Like Fenella,” said Zeb. “She wanted more scope too. At least she got out early.”

“Fenella didn’t get out,” said Adam in his neutral voice. “She’s under the rock garden.”

Zeb turned in the Rev’s ergonomic swivel chair. “She’s what?”

“Here they come,” said Adam. “Both at once, it’s a convoy. Power down.”

“Say that again,” said Zeb once they were on the tennis court and safely out of hearing. Neither of them was much good at tennis, but they pretended to practise. They stood side by side, serving balls over the net or, more often, into it. Their rooms were bugged — Zeb had discovered that years ago, and enjoyed feeding misinformation into his desk lamp and then looping it back to himself via the Rev’s computer — but it was best to play dumb by leaving the bugs where they were.

“Under the rock garden,” said Adam. “That’s where Fenella is.”

“You’re sure?”

“I watched them burying her,” said Adam. “From the window. They didn’t see me.”

“This wasn’t a … you didn’t dream it?” said Zeb. “You must’ve been fucking fetal!” Adam gave him the fisheye: not only did he not approve of obscenity, he never seemed to get used to it. “I mean, really young,” Zeb amended. “Kids make stuff up.” For once he was shaken: he could barely think straight.

If Adam’s story was true — and why would he invent this? — it changed Zeb’s whole view of himself. Fenella had shaped his story about his past, and also the one about his future, but suddenly Fenella was a skeleton: she’d been dead all along. So, no secret helper waiting out there: he’d never had one. There was no understanding family member he would someday locate, once he’d found the Exit sign and unlocked the invisible locks and cut his way out of the Rev’s chicken-hawk-wired coop. He was flying a wing-damaged solo, all alone except for his joined-at-the-head-wound brother, who could well turn pious on him for real, he had the talent. Then Zeb himself would be drifting in Voidsville, out in the cold and dark, like a torn-loose astronaut in one of those old five-tomato space flics. He slammed a ball into the net.