Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

“Oh Jimmy.” A sigh. “So that is what you have in mind. I saw that, on TV. Why do you worry about a man like that? He was so old he was almost dead.”

“No, but did he?”

“No one made me have sex in a garage. I told you.”

“Okay, revision: no one made you, but did you have it anyway?”

“You don’t understand me, Jimmy.”

“But I want to.”

“Do you?” A pause. “These are such good soyafries. Just imagine, Jimmy—millions of people in the world never ate fries like this! We are so lucky!”

“Tell me.” It must have been her. “I won’t get mad.”

A sigh. “He was a kind man,” said Oryx, in a storytelling voice. Sometimes he suspected her of improvising, just to humour him; sometimes he felt that her entire past—everything she’d told him—was his own invention. “He was rescuing young girls. He paid for my plane ticket, just like it said. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. You should like him!”

“Why should I like such a hypocritical sanctimonious bastard? You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I did, Jimmy. Now leave it alone.”

“How long did he keep you locked in the garage?”

“It was more like an apartment,” said Oryx. “They didn’t have room in their house. I wasn’t the only girl they took in.”

“They?”

“Him and his wife. They were trying to be helpful.”

“And she hated sex, is that it? Is that why she put up with you? You were getting the old goat off her back?”

Oryx sighed. “You always think the worst of people, Jimmy. She was a very spiritual person.”

“Like fuck she was.”

“Don’t swear, Jimmy. I want to enjoy being with you. I don’t have very much time, I have to go soon, I need to do some business. Why do you care about things that happened so long ago?” She leaned over him, kissed him with her Nubbin-smeared mouth. Ungu ent, unctuous, sumptuous, voluptuous, salacious, lubricious, delicious, went the inside of Jimmy’s head. He sank down into the words, into the feelings.

After a while he said, “Where are you going?”

“Oh, someplace. I’ll call you when I get there.” She never would tell him.

Now comes the part that Snowman has replayed in his head time after time. If only haunts him. But if only what? What could he have said or done differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much.

Don’t go. Stay here. At least that way they would have been together. She might even have survived—why not? In which case she’d be right here with him, right now.

I just want some takeout. I’m just going to the mall . I need some air. I need a walk.

Let me come with you. It’s not safe.

Don’t be silly! There’s guards everywhere. They all know who I am. Who’s safer than me?

I have a gut feeling.

But Jimmy’d had no gut feeling. He’d been happy that evening, happy and lazy. She’d arrived at his door an hour earlier. She’d just come from being with the Crakers, teaching them a few more leaves and grasses, so she was damp from the shower. She was wearing some sort of kimono covered with red and orange butterflies; her dark hair was braided with pink ribbon, coiled up and pinned loosely. The first thing he’d done when she’d arrived at his door, hurrying, breathless, brimming with joyous excitement or a very good imitation of it, was to unpin her hair. The braid went three times around his hand.

“Where’s Crake?” he whispered. She smelled of lemons, of crushed herbs.

“Don’t worry, Jimmy.”

“But where?”

“He’s outside Paradice, he went out. He had a meeting. He doesn’t want to see me when he comes back, he said he would be thinking tonight. He never wants sex when he’s thinking.”

“Do you love me?”

That laugh of hers. What had it meant? Stupid question. Why ask? You talk too much. Or else: What is love? Or possibly: In your dreams .

Then time passed. Then she was pinning her hair up again, then slipping on her kimono, then tying it with the sash. He stood behind her, watching in the mirror. He wanted to put his arms around her, take off the covering she’d just put back on, start all over again.

“Don’t go yet,” he said, but it was never any use saying don’t go yet to her. When she’d decided a thing, she was on her way. Sometimes he felt he was merely a house call on a secret itinerary of hers—that she had a whole list of others to be dealt with before the night was over. Unworthy thoughts, but not out of the question. He never knew what she was doing when she wasn’t with him.

“I’m coming back right away,” she said, slipping her feet into her little pink and red sandals. “I’ll bring pizza. You want any extras, Jimmy?”

“Why don’t we dump all this crap, go away somewhere?” he said on impulse.

“Away from here? From Paradice? Why?”

“We could be together.”

“Jimmy, you’re funny! We’re together now!”

“We could get away from Crake,” said Jimmy. “We wouldn’t have to sneak around like this, we could…”

“But Jimmy.” Wide eyes. “Crake needs us!”

“I think he knows,” said Jimmy. “About us.” He didn’t believe this; or he believed it and not, both at the same time. Surely they’d been more and more reckless lately. How could Crake have missed it? Was it possible for a man that intelligent in so many ways to be acutely brain-damaged in others? Or did Crake have a deviousness that outdid Jimmy’s own? If so, there were no signs.

Jimmy had taken to sweeping his room for bugs: the hidden mini-mikes, the micro-cams. He’d known what to look for, or so he thought. But there’d been nothing.

There were signs, Snowman thinks. There were signs and I missed them.

For instance, Crake said once, “Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?”

“You mean, commit euthanasia?” said Jimmy. “Like putting down your pet turtle?”

“Just tell me,” said Crake.

“I don’t know. What kind of love, what kind of pain?”

Crake changed the subject.

Then, one lunchtime, he said, “If anything happens to me, I’m depending on you to look after the Paradice Project. Any time I’m away from here I want you to take charge. I’ve made it a standing order.”

“What do you mean, anything?” said Jimmy. “What could happen?”

“You know.”

Jimmy thought he meant kidnapping, or being whacked by the opposition: that was a constant hazard, for the Compound brainiacs. “Sure,” he said, “but one, your security’s the best, and two, there’s people in here much better equipped than I am. I couldn’t head up a thing like this, I don’t have the science.”

“These people are specialists,” said Crake. “They wouldn’t have the empathy to deal with the Paradice models, they wouldn’t be any good at it, they’d get impatient. Even I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t begin to get onto their wavelength. But you’re more of a generalist.”

“Meaning?”

“You have a great ability to sit around not doing much of anything. Just like them.”

“Thanks,” said Jimmy.

“No, I’m serious. I want—I’d want it to be you.”

“What about Oryx?” said Jimmy. “She knows the Crakers a lot better than I do.” Jimmy and Oryx said Crakers , but Crake never did.

“If I’m not around, Oryx won’t be either,” said Crake.

“She’ll commit suttee? No shit! Immolate herself on your funeral pyre?”

“Something like that,” said Crake, grinning. Which at the time Jimmy had taken both as a joke and also as a symptom of Crake’s truly colossal ego.