Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

But everyone’s parents moaned on about stuff like that. Remember when you could drive anywhere? Remember when everyone lived in the pleeblands? Remember when you could fly anywhere in the world, without fear? Remember hamburger chain s, always real beef, remember hot-dog stands? Remember before New York was New New York? Remember when voting mattered? It was all standard lunchtime hand-puppet stuff. Oh it was all so great once. Boohoo. Now I’m going into the Twinkies package. No sex to night!

His mother was just a mother, Jimmy told the CorpSeCorps man. She did what mothers did. She smoked a lot.

“She belong to any, like, organizations? Any strange folk come to the house? She spend a lot of time on the cellphone?”

“Anything you could help us out with, we’d appreciate it, son,” said the other Corpsman. It was the son that clinched it. Jimmy said he didn’t think so.

Jimmy’s mother had left some new clothes for him, in the sizes she said he would soon grow into. They were sucky, like the clothes she always bought. Also they were too small. He put them away in a drawer.

His father was rattled, you could tell; he was scared. His wife had broken every rule in the book, she must’ve had a whole other life and he’d had no idea. That sort of thing reflected badly on a man. He said he hadn’t kept any crucial information on the home computer she’d wrecked, but of course he would have said that, and there was no way of proving otherwise. Then he’d been debriefed, elsewhere, for quite a long time. Maybe he was being tortured, as in old movies or on some of the nastier Web sites, with electrodes and truncheons and red-hot nails, and Jimmy worried about that and felt bad. Why hadn’t he seen it all coming and headed it off, instead of playing at mean ventriloquism?

Two cast-iron CorpSeCorps women had stayed in the house while Jimmy’s father was away, looking after Jimmy, or so it was called. A smiling one and a flat-faced one. They made a lot of phone calls on their ether cells; they went through the photo albums and Jimmy’s mother’s closets, and tried to get Jimmy to talk. She looks really pretty. You think she had a boyfriend? Did she go to the pleeblands much? Why would she go there, said Jimmy, and they said some people liked to. Why, said Jimmy again, and the flat-faced one said some people were twisted, and the smiling one laughed and blushed, and said you could get things out there you couldn’t get in here. What sorts of things, Jimmy wanted to ask, but he didn’t because the answer might entangle him in more questions, about what his mother liked or might want to get. He’d done all of his betrayal of her in the HelthWyzer High lunchroom, he wasn’t going to do any more.

The two of them cooked terrible leathery omelettes in an attempt to throw Jimmy off guard by feeding him. After that didn’t work, they microwaved frozen dinners and ordered in pizza. So, your mother go to the mall a lot? Did she go dancing? I bet she did. Jimmy wanted to slug them. If he’d been a girl he could have burst into tears and got them to feel sorry for him, and shut them up that way.

After Jimmy’s dad came back from wherever he’d been taken, he’d had counselling. He looked like he needed it, his face was green and his eyes were red and puffy. Jimmy had counselling too, but it was a waste of time.

You must be unhappy that your mother’s gone.

Yeah, right.

You mustn’t blame yourself, son. It’s not your fault she left.

How do you mean?

It’s okay, you can express your emotions.

Which ones would you like me to express?

No need to be host ile, Jimmy, I know how you feel.

So, if you already know how I feel, why are you asking me , and so on.

Jimmy’s dad told Jimmy that they two fellows would just have to forge ahead the best way they could. So they did forge ahead. They forged and they forged, they poured out their own orange juice in the morning and put the dishes in the dishwasher when they remembered, and after a few weeks of forging Jimmy’s dad lost his greenish tint and started playing golf again.

Underneath you could tell he wasn’t feeling too shabby, now that the worst was over. He began whistling while he shaved. He shaved more. After a decent interval Ramona moved in. Life took on a different pattern, which involved bouts of giggly, growly sex going on behind doors that were closed but not soundproof, while Jimmy turned his music up high and tried not to listen. He could have put a bug in their room, taken in the whole show, but he had a strong aversion to that. Truth to tell, he found it embarrassing. Once there was a difficult encounter in the upstairs hall, Jimmy’s father in a bath towel, ears standing out from the sides of his head, jowls flushed with the energy of his latest erotic tussle, Jimmy red with shame and pretending not to notice. The two hormone-sodden love bunnies might have had the decency to do it in the garage, instead of rubbing Jimmy’s nose in it all the time. They made him feel invisible. Not that he wanted to feel anything else.

How long had they been going at it? Snowman wonders now. Had the two of them been having it off behind the pigoon pens in their biosuits and germ-filtering face masks? He doesn’t think so: his father was a nerd, not a shit. Of course you could be both: a nerdy shit, a shitty nerd. But his father (or so he believes) was too awkward and bad at lying to have become involved in full-fledged treachery and betrayal without Jimmy’s mother noticing.

Though maybe she had noticed. Maybe that was why she’d fled, or part of the reason. You don’t take a hammer—not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench—to a guy’s computer without being quite angry.

Not that she hadn’t been angry in general: her anger had gone way beyond any one motive.

The more Snowman thinks about it, the more he’s convinced that Ramona and his father had refrained. They’d waited till Jimmy’s mother had buggered off in a splatter of pixels before toppling into each other’s arms. Otherwise they wouldn’t have done so much earnest, blameless gazing at each other in André’s Bistro at OrganInc. If they’d been having a thing already they’d have been brusque and businesslike in public, they’d have avoided each other if anything; they’d have had quick and dirty trysts in grungy corners, weltering around in their own popped buttons and stuck zippers on the office carpet, chewing each other’s ears in car parks. They wouldn’t have bothered with those antiseptic lunches, with his father staring at the tabletop while Ramona liquefied the raw carrots. They wouldn’t have salivated on each other over the greenery and pork pies while using young Jimmy as a human shield.

Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He’s a grown-up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them?

(He blames them.)

Ramona sat Jimmy down and gazed at him with her big black-fringed smudgy sincere eyes, and told him that she knew this was very hard on him and it was a trauma for them all, it was hard on her too, though maybe he, you know, might not think so, and she was aware that she couldn’t replace his real mother but she hoped, maybe they could be buddies? Jimmy said, Sure, why not , because apart from her connection with his father he liked her well enough and wanted to please her.

She did try. She laughed at his jokes, a little late sometimes—she was not a word person, he reminded himself—and sometimes when Jimmy’s father was away she microwaved dinner for just herself and Jimmy; lasagna and Caesar salad were her staples. Sometimes she would watch DVD movies with him, sitting beside him on the couch, making them a bowl of popcorn first, pouring melted butter substitute onto it, dipping into it with greasy fingers she’d lick during the scary parts while Jimmy tried not to look at her breasts. She asked him if there was anything he wanted to ask her about, like, you know. Her and his dad, and what had happened to the marriage. He said there wasn’t.