Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

Then his father would put them all through an awkward excuse about why this really, really special and important date had somehow just slid out of his head, and ask Jimmy if everything was okay, and send him an e-birthday card—the OrganInc standard design with five winged pigoons doing a conga line and Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True —and come up with a gift for him the day after, a gift that would not be a gift but some tool or intelligence-enhancing game or other hidden demand that he measure up. But measure up to what? There was never any standard; or there was one, but it was so cloudy and immense that nobody could see it, especially not Jimmy. Nothing he could achieve would ever be the right idea, or enough. By OrganInc’s math-and-chem-and-applied-bio yardstick he must have seemed dull normal: maybe that was why his father stopped telling him he could do much better if he’d only try, and switched to doling out secretly disappointed praise, as if Jimmy had a brain injury.

So Snowman has forgotten everything else about Jimmy’s tenth birthday except the rakunk, brought home by his father in a carry-cage. It was a tiny one, smallest of the litter born from the second generation of rakunks, the offspring of the first pair that had been spliced. The rest of the litter had been snapped up immediately. Jimmy’s father made out that he’d had to spend a great deal of his time and throw his weight around and pull a lot of strings to get hold of this one, but all the effort had been worth it for this really, really special day, which had just happened as usual to fall on the day before.

The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of one of the OrganInc biolab hotshots. There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God. A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around—who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth? Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those. But the rakunks caught on as pets, inside OrganInc. They hadn’t come in from the outside world—the world outside the Compound—so they had no foreign microbes and were safe for the pigoons. In addition to which they were cute.

The little rakunk let Jimmy pick it up. It was black and white—black mask, white stripe down its back, black and white rings around its fluffy tail. It licked Jimmy’s fingers, and he fell in love with it.

“No smell to it, not like a skunk,” said Jimmy’s father. “It’s a clean animal, with a nice disposition. Placid. Racoons never made good pets once they were grown up, they got crabby, they’d tear your house to pieces. This thing is supposed to be calmer. We’ll see how the little guy does. Right, Jimmy?”

Jimmy’s father had been apologetic towards him lately, as if he’d punished Jimmy for something Jimmy hadn’t done and was sorry about it. He was saying Right, Jimmy? a bit too much. Jimmy didn’t like that—he didn’t like being the one handing out the good marks. There were a few other moves of his father’s he could do without as well—the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son , in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope. Jimmy had done enough faking himself so he could spot it in others, most of the time. He stroked the little rakunk and didn’t answer.

“Who’s going to feed it and empty the litter box?” said Jimmy’s mother. “Because it won’t be me.” She didn’t say this angrily, but in a detached, matter-of-fact voice, as if she was a bystander, someone on the sidelines; as if Jimmy and the chore of taking care of him, and his unsatisfactory father, and the scufflings between her and him, and the increasingly heavy baggage of all their lives, had nothing to do with her. She didn’t seem to get angry any more, she didn’t go charging out of the house in her slippers. She had become slowed-down and deliberate.

“Jimmy hasn’t asked you to. He’ll do it himself. Right, Jimmy?” said his father.

“What are you going to call it?” said his mother. She didn’t really want to know, she was getting at Jimmy in some way. She didn’t like it when he warmed up to anything his father gave him. “Bandit, I suppose.”

That was exactly the name Jimmy had been thinking of, because of the black mask. “No,” he said. “That’s boring. I’m calling him Killer.”

“Good choice, son,” said his father.

“Well, if Killer wets on the floor, be sure you clean it up,” said his mother.

Jimmy took Killer up to his room, where it made a nest in his pillow. It did have a faint smell, strange but not unpleasant, leathery and sharp, like a bar of designer soap for men. He slept with his arm crooked around it, his nose next to its own small nose.

It must have been a month or two after he got the rakunk that Jimmy’s father changed jobs. He was headhunted by NooSkins and hired at the second-in-command level—the Vice level, Jimmy’s mother called it. Ramona the lab tech from OrganInc made the move with him; she was part of the deal because she was an invaluable asset, said Jimmy’s father; she was his right-hand man. (“Joke,” he would say to Jimmy, to show that he knew Ramona wasn’t really a man. But Jimmy knew that anyway.) Jimmy was more or less glad he might still be seeing Ramona at lunch—at least she was someone familiar—even though his lunches with his father had become few in number and far between.

NooSkins was a subsidiary of HelthWyzer, and so they moved into the HelthWyzer Compound. Their house this time was in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with an arched portico and a lot of glazed earth-tone tiles, and the indoor pool was bigger. Jimmy’s mother called it “this barn.” She complained about the tight security at the HelthWyzer gates—the guards were ruder, they were suspicious of everyone, they liked to strip search people, women especially. They got a kick out of it, she said.

Jimmy’s father said she was making a big deal about nothing. Anyway, he said, there’d been an incident only a few weeks before they’d moved in—some fanatic, a woman, with a hostile bioform concealed in a hairspray bottle. Some vicious Ebola or Marburg splice, one of the fortified hemorrhagics. She’d nuked a guard who’d unwisely had his face mask off, contrary to orders but because of the heat. The woman had been spraygunned at once and neutralized in a vat of bleach, and the poor guard had been whisked into HotBioform and stuck into an isolation room, where he’d dissolved into a puddle of goo. No greater damage done, but naturally the guards were jumpy.

Jimmy’s mother said that didn’t change the fact that she felt like a prisoner. Jimmy’s father said she didn’t understand the reality of the situation. Didn’t she want to be safe, didn’t she want her son to be safe?

“So it’s for my own good?” she said. She was cutting a piece of French toast into even-sided cubes, taking her time.

“For ou r own good. For us.”

“Well, I happen to disagree.”

“No news there,” said Jimmy’s father.

According to Jimmy’s mother their phones and e-mail were bugged, and the sturdy, laconic HelthWyzer housecleaners that came twice a week—always in pairs—were spies. Jimmy’s father said she was getting paranoid, and anyway they had nothing to hide, so why worry about it?

The HelthWyzer Compound was not only newer than the OrganInc layout, it was bigger. It had two shopping malls instead of one, a better hospital, three dance clubs, even its own golf course. Jimmy went to the HelthWyzer Public School, where at first he didn’t know anyone. Despite his initial loneliness, that wasn’t too bad. Actually it was good, because he could recycle his old routines and jokes: the kids at OrganInc had become used to his antics. He’d moved on from the chimpanzee act and was into fake vomiting and choking to death—both popular—and a thing where he drew a bare-naked girl on his stomach with her crotch right where his navel was, and made her wiggle.