Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

In secret, in the night, he yearned for Killer. Also—in some corner of himself he could not quite acknowledge—for his real, strange, insufficient, miserable mother. Where had she gone, what danger was she in? That she was in danger of some sort was a given. They’d be looking for her, he knew that, and if he were her he wouldn’t want to be found.

But she’d said she would contact him, so why wasn’t she doing it? After a while he did get a couple of postcards, with stamps from England, then Argentina. They were signed Aunt Monica , but he knew they were from her. Hope you’re well , was all they said. She must have known they’d be read by about a hundred snoops before ever getting to Jimmy, and that was right, because along came the Corpsmen after each one, asking who Aunt Monica was. Jimmy said he didn’t know. He didn’t think his mother was in any of the countries the stamps were from, because she was way smarter than that. She must have got other people to mail them for her.

Didn’t she trust him? Evidently not. He felt he’d disappointed her, he’d failed her in some crucial way. He’d never understood what was required of him. If only he could have one more chance to make her happy.

“I am not my childhood,” Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can’t turn them off, he can’t change the subject, he can’t leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. They’d had that in grade school. Religion of the Week. All right, class, now quiet as mice, that means you, Jimmy. Today we’re going to pretend we live in India, and we’re going to do a mantra. Won’t that be fun? Now let’s all choose a word, a different word, so we can each have our own special mantra.

“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance . Norn . Serendipity . Pibroch . Lubricious . When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

A few months before Jimmy’s mother vanished, Crake appeared. The two things happened in the same year. What was the connection? There wasn’t one, except that the two of them seemed to get on well together. Crake was among the scant handful of Jimmy’s friends that his mother liked. Mostly she’d found his male pals juvenile, his female ones airheaded or sluttish. She’d never used those words but you could tell.

Crake though, Crake was different. More like an adult, she’d said; in fact, more adult than a lot of adults. You could have an objective conversation with him, a conversation in which events and hypotheses were followed through to their logical conclusions. Not that Jimmy ever witnessed the two of them having such a conversation, but they must have done or else she wouldn’t have said that. When and how did these logical, adult conversations take place? He’s often wondered.

“Your friend is intellectually honourable,” Jimmy’s mother would say. “He doesn’t lie to himself.” Then she’d gaze at Jimmy with that blue-eyed, wounded-by-him look he knew so well. If only he could be like that—intellectually honourable. Another baffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing. Jimmy would do better at intellectual honourableness if only he would try harder. Plus, if he had any fucking clues about what the fuck it meant.

“I don’t need supper,” he’d tell her yet again. “I’ll just grab a snack.” If she wanted to do that wounded thing she could do it for the kitchen clock. He’d fixed it so the robin said hoot and the owl said caw caw . Let her be disappointed with them for a change.

He had his doubts about Crake’s honourableness, intellectual or otherwise. He knew a bit more about Crake than his mother did.

When Jimmy’s mother took off like that, after the rampage with the hammer, Crake didn’t say much. He didn’t seem surprised or shocked. All he said was that some people needed to change, and to change they needed to be elsewhere. He said a person could be in your life and then not in it any more. He said Jimmy should read up on the Stoics. That last part was mildly aggravating: Crake could be a little too instructive sometimes, and a little too free with the should s. But Jimmy appreciated his calmness and lack of nosiness.

Of course Crake wasn’t Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n’s instead of the usual spelling? “My dad liked music,” was Crake’s explanation, once Jimmy got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. “He named me after a dead pianist, some boy genius with two n’s.”

“So did he make you take music lessons?”

“No,” said Crake. “He never made me do much of anything.”

“Then what was the point?

“Of what?”

“Of your name. The two n’s.”

“Jimmy, Jimmy,” said Crake. “Not everything has a point.”

Snowman has trouble thinking of Crake as Glenn, so thoroughly has Crake’s later persona blotted out his earlier one. The Crake side of him must have been there from the beginning, thinks Snowman: there was never any real Glenn, Glenn was only a disguise. So in Snowman’s reruns of the story, Crake is never Glenn, and never Glenn-alias-C rake or Crake/Glenn , or Glenn, later Crake . He is always just Crake, pure and simple.

Anyway Crake saves time, thinks Snowman. Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?

Crake turned up at HelthWyzer High in September or October, one of those months that used to be called autumn . It was a bright warm sunny day, otherwise undistinguished. He was a transfer, the result of some headhunt involving a parental unit: these were frequent among the Compounds. Kids came and went, desks filled and emptied, friendship was always contingent.

Jimmy wasn’t paying much attention when Crake was introduced to the class by Melons Riley, their Hoodroom and Ultratexts teacher. Her name wasn’t Melons—that was a nickname used among the boys in the class—but Snowman can’t remember her real name. She shouldn’t have bent down so closely over his Read-A-Screen, her large round breasts almost touching his shoulder. She shouldn’t have worn her NooSkins T-shirt tucked so tightly into her zipleg shorts: it was too distracting. So that when Melons announced that Jimmy would be showing their new classmate Glenn around the school, there was a pause while Jimmy scrambled to decipher what it was she’d just said.

“Jimmy, I made a request,” said Melons.

“Sure, anything,” said Jimmy, rolling his eyes and leering, but not taking it too far. There was some class laughter; even Ms. Riley gave him a remote, unwilling smile. He could usually get round her with his boyish-charm act. He liked to imagine that if he hadn’t been a minor, and she his teacher and subject to abuse charges, she’d have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.

Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.

When Jimmy got around to focusing on Crake, he wasn’t too cheered. Crake was taller than Jimmy, about two inches; thinner too. Straight brown-black hair, tanned skin, green eyes, a half-smile, a cool gaze. His clothes were dark in tone, devoid of logos and visuals and written commentary—a no-name look. He was possibly older than the rest of them, or trying to act it. Jimmy wondered what kinds of sports he played. Not football, nothing too brawny. Not tall enough for basketball. He didn’t strike Jimmy as a team player, or one who would stupidly court injury. Tennis, maybe. (Jimmy himself played tennis.)