Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

Oh, you know. (Shrug, look away, change subject.)

It wasn’t all acting.

Only Oryx had not been impressed by this dire, feathered mother of his. So Jimmy, your mother went somewhere else? Too bad. Maybe she had some good reasons. You thought of that? Oryx had neither pity for him nor self-pity. She was not unfeeling: on the contrary. But she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was that the hook—that he could never get from her what the others had given him so freely? Was that her secret?

Crake and Jimmy kept in touch by e-mail. Jimmy whined about Martha Graham in what he hoped was an entertaining way, applying unusual and disparaging adjectives to his professors and fellow students. He described the diet of recycled botulism and salmonella, sent lists of the different multi-legged creatures he’d found in his room, moaned about the inferior quality of the mood-altering substances for sale in the dismal student mall. Out of self-protection, he concealed the intricacies of his sex life except for what he considered the minimum of hints. ( These babes may not be able to count to ten, but hey, who needs numeracy in the sack? Just so long as they think it’s ten, haha, joke, . )

He couldn’t help boasting a little, because this seemed to be—from any indications he’d had so far—the one field of endeavour in which he had the edge over Crake. At HelthWyzer, Crake hadn’t been what you’d call sexually active. Girls had found him intimidating. True, he’d attracted a couple of obsessives who’d thought he could walk on water, and who’d followed him around and sent him slushy, fervent e-mails and threatened to slit their wrists on his behalf. Perhaps he’d even slept with them on occasion; but he’d never gone out of his way. Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

The girls Jimmy accumulated had found Crake more than a little creepy, and it had made Jimmy feel superior to come to his defence. “He’s okay, he’s just on another planet,” was what he used to say.

But how to know about Crake’s present circumstances? Crake divulged few factoids about himself. Did he have a roommate, a girlfriend? He never mentioned either, but that meant nothing. His e-mail descriptions were of the campus facilities, which were awesome—an Aladdin’s treasure-trove of bio-research gizmos—and of, well, what else? What did Crake have to say in his terse initial communications from the Watson-Crick Institute? Snowman can’t remember.

They’d played long drawn-out games of chess though, two moves a day. Jimmy was better at chess by now; it was easier without Crake’s distracting presence, and the way he had of drumming his fingers and humming to himself, as if he already saw thirty moves ahead and was patiently waiting for Jimmy’s tortoiselike mind to trundle up to the next rook sacrifice. Also, Jimmy could look up grandmasters and famous games of the past on various Net programs, in between moves. Not that Crake wasn’t doing the same thing.

After five or six months Crake loosened up a bit. He was having to work harder than at HelthWyzer High, he wrote, because there was a lot more competition. Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger’s U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude—these were not your sharp dressers—and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour.

More than at HelthWyzer? asked Jimmy.

Compared to t his place, HelthWyzer was a pleebland, Crake replied. It was wall-to-wall NTs.

NTs?

Neurotypicals.

Meaning?

Minus the genius gene.

So, are you a neurotypical? Jimmy asked the next week, having had some time to think this over. Also to worry about whether he himself was a neurotypical, and if so, was that now bad, in the gestalt of Crake? He suspected he was, and that it was.

But Crake never answered that one. This was his way: when there was a question he didn’t want to address, he acted as if it hadn’t been asked.

You should come and see this joint , he told Jimmy in late October of their sophomore year. Give yourself a lifetime experience. I’ll pretend you’re my dull-normal cousin. Come for Thanksgiving Week.

The alternative for Jimmy was turkey with the parental-unit turkeys, joke, haha, , said Jimmy, and he wasn’t up for that; so it would be his pleasure to accept. He told himself he was being a pal and doing Crake a favour, for who did lone Crake have to visit with on his holidays, aside from his boring old australopithecine not-really-an-uncle Uncle Pete? But also he found he was missing Crake. He hadn’t seen him now for more than a year. He wondered if Crake had changed.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course—Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there—but he’d taken a position on that. He’d write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigour.

For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks, ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.

Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered—at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power—an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.

He compiled lists of old words too—words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today’s world, or toady’s world , as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers. ( Typo , the profs would note, which showed how alert they were.) He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lode stone, saturnine, adamant. He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

One of his term papers—for his Applied Rhetoric course—was titled “Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear,” and it supplied him with a great stand-up routine for use in the student pubs. He’d quote snatches of this and that— Improve Your Self-Image ; The Twelve-Step Plan for Assisted Suicide ; How to Make Frie nds and Influence People; Flat Abs in Five Weeks ; You Can Have It All ; Entertaining Without a Maid ; Grief Management for Dummies —and the circle around him would crack up.