Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

She was right back into her bossy mode, and I knew that if I hung around with her much longer I’d be nine years old again, and she’d have the same hold on me, only more so because however awful things might be for me in my life they’d always be worse in hers, and she’d have a victim hammerlock on me. I said I really had to run, and she said, “Yeah, right,” and then she said I hadn’t changed at all, I was still just as much of a simpy lightweight as I’d ever been.

Years later – when I was already working at Scales and Tails – I saw onscreen that Bernice had been spraygunned in a raid on a Gardeners safe house. That was after the Gardeners had been outlawed. Though being outlawed wouldn’t have stopped Bernice; she was a person with the courage of her convictions. I had to admire her for that – for the convictions, and also for the courage – because I never really felt I had either one.

There was a close-up of her dead face, looking more gentle and peaceful than I’d ever seen her look in life. Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought – kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges – that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she’d grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she’d been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.

Before that conversation with Bernice when she’d talked about her former roommate, I’d been half expecting to see Jimmy – in a classroom, at the Happicuppa, or just walking somewhere. But now I felt he must be very close by. He was right around the corner, or on the other side of a window; or I’d wake up one morning and there he would be, right beside me, holding my hand and looking at me the way he used to do when we first got together. It was like being haunted.

Maybe I’ve imprinted on Jimmy, I thought. Like a baby duck hatching out of an egg and the first thing it sees is a weasel, so that’s what it follows around for the rest of its life. Which is likely to be short. Why did it have to be Jimmy who was the very first person I’d fallen in love with? Why couldn’t it have been someone with a better character? Or at least a less fickle person. A more serious person, not so given to playing the fool.

The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t get interested in anyone else. There was a hole in my heart that only Jimmy could fill. I know that’s a country-and-western thing to say – I’d heard enough of that kind of worldly music on my Sea/H/Ear Candy by then – but it’s the only way I can explain it. And it isn’t that I wasn’t aware of Jimmy’s faults, because I was.

I did see Jimmy eventually, of course. The campus wasn’t huge, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. I saw him in the distance, and he saw me, but he didn’t come rushing over. He stayed in the distance. He didn’t even wave, he looked away as if he hadn’t seen me. So if I’d been waiting for the answer to the question I was always asking myself – Does Jimmy still love me? – I had it now.

Then I met a girl in Dance Calisthenics – Shayluba somebody – who’d been with Jimmy for a while. She said it was great at first, but he started saying how he was really bad for her, he was incapable of commitment because of the girlfriend he’d had in high school. They were too young, it ended badly, and he’d been an emotional dumpster ever since, but maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched.

“Was her name Wakulla Price?” I asked.

“No, actually,” said Shayluba. “It was you. He pointed you out.”

Jimmy, what a fraud and bullshitting liar you are, I thought. But then I thought, What if it’s true? What if I’d crapped up Jimmy’s life just as much as he’d crapped up mine?

I tried to forget all about him. But somehow I couldn’t. Beating myself up over Jimmy had become a bad habit with me, like biting your nails. Every once in a while I’d see him drifting past in the distance, which was like having just one cigarette when you’re trying to quit – it starts you off again. Not that I was ever a smoker.

I’d been at Martha Graham for almost two years when I got some really terrible news. Lucerne called me and said that my biofather, Frank, had been kidnapped by a rival Corp somewhere to the east of Europe. The Corps over there were always trying to poach on our Corps – their undercover thugs were even more cut-throat than ours, and they had an advantage because they were better at languages and could pretend to be immigrants. We couldn’t do that to them, because why would we immigrate there?

They’d bagged Frank right inside the Compound – in the men’s room of his lab building, said Lucerne – and shipped him out in a Zizzy Froots delivery van; then they’d carted him across the Atlantic Ocean in an airship wrapped up in gauze bandages and disguised as a patient recovering from a facelift. Worse, they’d sent back a DVD of him in a drugged-looking state, confessing that HelthWyzer had been sticking a slow-acting but incurable gene-spliced disease germ inside their supplements so they could make a lot of money on the treatments. It was blackmail pure and simple, said Lucerne – they’d trade Frank for a couple of the formulas they wanted, most notably the ones for the slow-acting diseases; and, in addition, they wouldn’t make the incriminating DVD public. But otherwise, they’d said, Frank’s head would have to kiss his body goodbye.

HelthWyzer had done a cost-benefit analysis, said Lucerne, and they’d decided the disease germs and formulas were worth more to them than Frank was. As for the adverse publicity, they could squelch it at source, since the media Corps controlled what was news and what wasn’t. And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing. So HelthWyzer wasn’t going to pay up. They said they regretted Lucerne ’s loss, but it wasn’t their policy to give in to blackmail demands, as that would encourage more kidnappings, which were numerous enough as it was.

Therefore Lucerne had lost her top-wife position at HelthWyzer, and the house along with it, and under the circumstances, which were unfortunate, she’d decided to move to the CryoJeenyus Compound and take up housekeeping with a very nice man she’d met through the golf club, whose name was Todd. And she certainly hoped I wouldn’t go overboard with grief about Frank the way I went overboard on all my other emotions.

CryoJeenyus. What a scam that place was. You paid to get your head frozen when you died in case someone in the future invented a way to regrow a body onto your neck, though the kids at HelthWyzer used to joke that they didn’t freeze anything but head shells because they’d already scooped out the neurons and transplanted them into pigs. They made a lot of gruesome jokes like that at HelthWyzer High, though you never knew whether they were actually jokes.

The upshot was – Lucerne continued – that money was tight. Todd wasn’t a senior vice-president, he was only an accounts manager and he had three young children of his own to support who would have to take priority over me, and she could hardly ask Todd to pay for me in addition to everything else he was paying for. So I would have to stop coasting along at college, and leave Martha Graham, and take responsibility for myself.

I was out of the nest in one swift kick. Not that I was ever in much of a nest: I’d always been on the edge of the ledge with Lucerne.

This is Irony, I thought. I’d learned about Irony in Dance Theatrics. There was Lucerne, who’d told a slanderous whopper about being kidnapped, and now poor Frank, my biofather, really had been kidnapped, and probably murdered as well. It was clear that Lucerne didn’t feel much of anything about that. As for me, I didn’t know what to feel.