Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

He turned off his computer and unplugged the earphones and doused the lights and got into bed, quietly and also carefully, because Killer was in there already. She was down at the bottom, she liked it there; she’d taken to licking his feet to get the salt off. It was ticklish; head under the covers, he shook with silent laughter.

Several years passed. They must have passed, thinks Snowman: he can’t actually remember much about them except that his voice cracked and he began to sprout body hair. Not a big thrill at the time except that it would have been worse not to. He got some muscles too. He started having sexy dreams and suffering from lassitude. He thought about girls a lot in the abstract, as it were—girls without heads—and about Wakulla Price with her head on, though she wouldn’t hang out with him. Did he have zits, was that it? He can’t remember having any; though, as he recalls, the faces of his rivals were covered in them.

Cork-nut , he’d say to anyone who pissed him off. Anyone who wasn’t a girl. No one but him and Alex the parrot knew exactly what cork-nut meant, so it was pretty demolishing. It became a fad, among the kids at the HelthWyzer Compound, so Jimmy was considered medium-cool. Hey, cork-nut!

His secret best friend was Killer. Pathetic, that the only person he could really talk to was a rakunk. He avoided his parents as much as possible. His dad was a cork-nut and his mother was a drone. He was no longer frightened by their negative electrical field, he simply found them tedious, or so he told himself.

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against them. He’d draw eyes on each of his index-finger knuckles and tuck his thumbs inside his fists. Then, by moving the thumbs up and down to show the mouths opening and closing, he could make these two hand-puppets argue together. His right hand was Evil Dad, his left hand was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit, Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom’s cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemorrhoids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered. This lunchroom show of his was a hit; a crowd would collect, with requests. Jimmy, Jimmy—do Evil Dad! The other kids had lots of variations and routines to suggest, filched from the private lives of their own parental units. Some of them tried drawing eyes on their own knuckles, but they weren’t as good at the dialogue.

Jimmy felt guilty sometimes, afterwards, when he’d gone too far. He shouldn’t have had Righteous Mom weeping in the kitchen because her ovaries had burst; he shouldn’t have done that sex scene with the Monday Special Fish Finger, 20% Real Fish—Evil Dad falling upon it and tearing it apart with lust because Righteous Mom was sulking inside an empty Twinkies package and wouldn’t come out. Those skits were undignified, though that alone wouldn’t have stopped him. They were also too close to an uncomfortable truth Jimmy didn’t want to examine. But the other kids egged him on, and he couldn’t resist the applause.

“Was that out of line, Killer?” he would ask. “Was that too vile?” Vile was a word he’d recently discovered: Righteous Mom was using it a lot these days.

Killer would lick his nose. She always forgave him.

One day Jimmy came home from school and there was a note on the kitchen table. It was from his mother. He knew as soon as he saw the writing on the outside— For Jimmy , underlined twice in black—what sort of note it would be.

Dear Jimmy , it said. Blah blah blah, suffered with conscience long enough, blah blah, no longer participate in a lifestyle that is not only meaningless in itself but blah blah. She knew that when Jimmy was old enough to consider the implications of blah blah , he would agree with her and understand. She would be in contact with him later, if there was any possibility. Blah blah search will be conducted, inevitably; thus necessary to go into hiding. A decision not taken without much soul-searching and thought and anguish, but blah . She would always love him very much.

Maybe she had loved Jimmy, thinks Snowman. In her own manner. Though he hadn’t believed it at the time. Maybe, on the other hand, she hadn’t loved him. She must have had some sort of positive emotion about him though. Wasn’t there supposed to be a maternal bond?

P.S. , she’d said. I have taken Killer with me to liberate her, as I know she will be happier living a wild, free life in the forest.

Jimmy hadn’t believed that either. He was enraged by it. How dare she? Killer was his! And Killer was a tame animal, she’d be helpless on her own, she wouldn’t know how to fend for herself, everything hungry would tear her into furry black and white pieces. But Jimmy’s mother and her ilk must have been right, thinks Snowman, and Killer and the other liberated rakunks must have been able to cope just fine, or how else to account for the annoyingly large population of them now infesting this neck of the woods?

Jimmy had mourned for weeks. No, for months. Which one of them was he mourning the most? His mother, or an altered skunk?

His mother had left another note. Not a note—a wordless message. She’d trashed Jimmy’s father’s home computer, and not only the contents: she’d taken the hammer to it. Actually she’d employed just about every single tool in Jimmy’s father’s neatly arranged and seldom-used Mr. Home Handyman tool box, but the hammer seemed to have been her main weapon of choice. She’d done her own computer too, if anything more thoroughly. Thus neither Jimmy’s father nor the CorpSeCorps men who were soon all over the place had any idea of what coded messages she might have been sending, what information she may or may not have downloaded and taken out with her.

As for how she’d got through the checkpoints and the gates, she’d said she was going for a root canal procedure, to a dentist in one of the Modules. She’d had the paperwork, all the necessary clearances, and the backstory was real: the root canal specialist at the HelthWyzer dental clinic had toppled over with a heart attack and his replacement hadn’t arrived, so they were contracting out. She’d even made a genuine appointment with the Module dentist, who’d billed Jimmy’s dad for the time when she hadn’t shown up. (Jimmy’s dad refused to pay, because it wasn’t his missed appointment; he and the dentist had a shouting match about it later, over the phone.) She hadn’t packed any luggage, she’d been smarter than that. She’d booked a CorpSeCorps man as protection in the taxi ride from the sealed bullet-train station through the short stretch of pleebland that had to be crossed before reaching the perimeter wall of the Module, which was the usual thing to do. No one questioned her, she was a familiar sight and she had the requisition and the pass and everything. No one at the Compound gate had looked inside her mouth, though there wouldn’t have been much to see: nerve pain wouldn’t have shown.

The CorpSeCorps man must have been in cahoots with her, or else he’d been done away with; in any case he didn’t come back and he was never found. Or so it was said. That really stirred things up. It meant there had been others involved. But what others, and what were their goals? It was urgent that these matters be clarified, said the Corps guys who grilled Jimmy. Had Jimmy’s mother ever said anything to him, the Corpsmen asked?

Like, what did they mean by anything ? said Jimmy. There were the conversations he’d overheard on his mini-mikes, but he didn’t want to talk about those. There were the things his mother rambled on about sometimes, about how everything was being ruined and would never be the same again, like the beach house her family had owned when she was little, the one that got washed away with the rest of the beaches and quite a few of the eastern coastal cities when the sea-level rose so quickly, and then there was that huge tidal wave, from the Canary Islands volcano. (They’d taken it in school, in the Geolonomics unit. Jimmy had found the video simulation pretty exciting.) And she used to snivel about her grandfather’s Florida grapefruit orchard that had dried up like a giant raisin when the rains had stopped coming, the same year Lake Okeechobee had shrunk to a reeking mud puddle and the Everglades had burned for three weeks straight.