"Oryx and Crake"

[fiefoe]

Humans bio-engineered themselves into a brave new world in Margaret Atwood's distopian novel. I'm mostly okay with how things went but for how Oryx was treated throughout the book. So much victimhood was piled onto her.

• “It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity,” he says out loud. He has the feeling he’s quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another.
• He’s rank, he’s gamy, he reeks like a walrus – oily, salty, fishy – not that he’s ever smelled such a beast. But he’s seen pictures.)
• For present purposes he’s shortened the name. He’s only Snowman. He’s kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.
• Women, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes – mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father’s take on things. But men’s body temperatures were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned, not when he was little, except when his dad said, “Chill out.” Why weren’t they? Why nothing about the hot collars of men? Those smooth, sharp-edged collars with their dark, sulphurous, bristling undersides.
• A disease, she continued in that calm, stretched voice, a disease got into you and changed things inside you.
• Also, to set the queasy at ease, it was claimed that none of the defunct pigoons ended up as bacon and sausages: no one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their own.
• His mother would be carefully dressed, her lipstick smile an echo of the jelly smile on the sandwich, and she would be all sparkling attention, for him and his silly stories, looking at him directly, her eyes bluer than blue. What she reminded him of at such times was a porcelain sink: clean, shining, hard.
• From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can’t reach the word. He can’t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space.
• Double-entry on-screen bookkeeping, banking by fingertip, using a microwave without nuking your egg, filling out housing applications for this or that Module and job applications for this or that Compound, family heredity research, negotiating your own marriage-and-divorce contracts, wise genetic match-mating, the proper use of condoms to avoid sexually transmitted bioforms: those had been the Life Skills.
• Jimmy’s mother persists as a clear image, full colour, with a glossy white paper frame around her like a Polaroid, but he can recall his father only in details: the Adam’s apple going up and down when he swallowed, the ears backlit against the kitchen window, the left hand lying on the table, cut off by the shirt cuff. His father is a sort of pastiche.
• 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.
• 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.
• The two hormone-sodden love bunnies might have had the decency to do it in the garage, instead of rubbing Jimmy’s nose in it all the time. They made him feel invisible. Not that he wanted to feel anything else.
• “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.
• 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.
• Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn’t count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul’s magnificence, they were called in the game... The exchange rates – one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids – were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers – the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.
• Sometimes she’d read scenes from old plays out loud, taking all the parts, while sitting on the can with her retro-look bell-bottom jeans around her ankles. This was how Jimmy first encountered Shakespeare – through Anna K.’s rendition of Macbeth.
  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death,
• They were supposed to look like that, he thought; if they stopped the action, a walking stick would come in from offside and prod them. This was a feature of the site. There were at least three layers of contradictory make-believe, one on top of the other. I want to, I want to not, I want to.
• The Children of Oryx, the Children of Crake. He’d had to think of something. Get your story straight, keep it simple, don’t falter: this used to be the expert advice given by lawyers to criminals in the dock. _Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk.
• the Crakers can’t help peeking. The spectacle of depravity is of interest even to them, it seems, purified by chlorophyll though they are.
• Especially the girls, said Oryx. They would only get married and make more children, who would then have to be sold in their turn. Sold, or thrown into the river, to float away to the sea; because there was only so much food to go around.
• Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.”
  “How do you account for that?” said Jimmy.
  “Imagination,” said Crake. “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac... But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.”
  “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?”
  “You could call it hope. That, or desperation.”
• Uncle En gave Oryx a hard candy, in the shape of a tiny lemon. She sucked it for a while and then took it out to keep. She had no pocket so she held it in her sticky fingers. That night she comforted herself by licking her own hand.
• Oryx said that Uncle En really knew his business, because children would believe other children about punishments more readily than they would believe adults. Adults threatened to do things they never did, but children told what would happen. Or what they were afraid would happen. Or what had happened already, to them or to other children they’d known.
• “Can I listen to your watch?” said Oryx with her shy smile. Instead of, was what she meant. Instead of marrying you, instead of answering your question, instead of being your real child.
• He’d tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he’d shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more – he was convinced – he loved her.
• More often than not she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself – herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.
• She would never tell him. Why did this drive him so crazy? “It wasn’t real sex, was it?” he asked. “In the movies. It was only acting. Wasn’t it?”
  “But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.”
• When jumping off a bridge, clench your bum so the water won’t rush up your anus. When drowning in quicksand, take a ski pole. Great advice!
• Crake allotted the special piss to men only; he said they’d need something important to do, something that didn’t involve childbearing, so they wouldn’t feel left out. Woodworking, hunting, high finance, war, and golf would no longer be options, he’d joked.
• Also it’s their habit to say nothing while performing their task: they need to concentrate, to make sure their urine lands in exactly the right place. Each has his own three feet of borderland, his own area of responsibility. It’s quite a sight: like the women, these men – smooth-skinned, well-muscled – look like statues, and grouped like this they resemble an entire Baroque fountain.
• He’s getting to be a bit of a leader, that one. Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. _First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s always gone.
• He finds the caecotrophs revolting, consisting as they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and reswallowed two or three times a week. This had been another boy-genius concept on the part of Crake. He’d used the vermiform appendix as the base on which to construct the necessary organ, reasoning that at an earlier evolutionary stage, when the ancestral diet had been higher in roughage, the appendix must have fulfilled some such function. But he’d stolen the specific idea from the Leporidae, the hares and rabbits, which depend on caecotrophs rather than on several stomachs like the ruminants.
• Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen – a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say, Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.
• there’s no more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and the act. Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females – just as male penguins present round stones, said Crake, or as the male silverfish presents a sperm packet. At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs.
• It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war. Sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders. Now it’s more like an athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp.
• Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself.
• Small male frogs – it’s been documented – discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.”...
  “So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”...
  “Female artists are biologically confused,” said Crake.
• The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction.
• No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked – events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate. <> There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.
• Window-dressing was what he’d be doing, at best – decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2- D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematics courses – Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology, and the rest... The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses
• But why would he be stupid enough to give up his grey rainy-day allure – the crepuscular essence, the foggy aureole, that had attracted them to him in the first place? <> “I’m a lost cause,” he would tell them. “I’m emotionally dyslexic.” He would also tell them they were beautiful and they turned him on. True enough, no falsehood there, he always meant it. He would also say that any major investment on their part would be wasted on him, he was an emotional landfill site, and they should just enjoy the here and now.
• He took care to do this in a hopeless voice: being loved by him was a poison pill, it was spiritually toxic, it would drag them down to the murky depths where he himself was imprisoned, and it was because he loved them so much that he wanted them out of harm’s way, i.e., out of his ruinous life. Some of them saw through it – Grow up, Jimmy! – but on the whole, how potent that was.
• No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”
  “This is horrible,” said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.
  “Picture the sea-anemone body plan,” said Crake. “That helps.”
• Jimmy was becoming annoyed by Crake’s way of introducing him – “This is Jimmy, the neurotypical” – but he knew better than to show it. Still, it seemed to be like calling him a Cro-Magnon or something.
• “That would be a problem,” said Crake. “But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
  “Meaning what?” said Jimmy. He wasn’t paying close attention, he was worrying about the ChickieNobs and the wolvogs. Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
  “Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”
  “Them?”
  “Nature and God.”
• “HelthWyzer,” said Crake. “They’ve been doing it for years. There’s a whole secret unit working on nothing else. Then there’s the distribution end. Listen, this is brilliant. They put the hostile bioforms into their vitamin pills
• “All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”
• Some exotic splice: in a few years they’ll be overwhelmed. Or else they’ll spread, make inroads, choke out the native plants. Who can tell which? The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.
• Most of the glass is in the sink, but he’s careful where he places his feet: like a horse, his life now depends on them. If he can’t walk, he’s rat food.
• She’d had to reinvent herself, she told Jimmy, the original Barb having been so bulldozed by her abusive, white-trash, sugar-overdosed family that she’d been nothing but a yard-sale reject, like a wind chime made of bent forks or a three-legged chair. <> This had been her appeal for Jimmy, for whom “yard sale” was in itself an exotic concept: he’d wanted to mend her, do the repairs, freshen up the paint.
• Soon, said the artists, ignoring him, there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed. People would creep along through this tubing, single file, stark naked, their only view the asshole of the one before them in the line, their urine and excrement flowing down through vents in the floor, until they were randomly selected by a digitalized mechanism, at which point they would be sucked into a side tunnel, ground up, and fed to the others through a series of nipple-shaped appendages on the inside of the tube. The system would be self-sustaining and perpetual, and would serve everybody right.
• “If you know one century, you know them all,” said the man.
  “But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.”
  “Exactly!” said the man
• he hadn’t been stranded in such a sexual desert since he was eight. Amanda Payne shimmered in the past like a lost lagoon, its crocodiles for the moment forgotten.
• Then they’d load this hypothetical wonderkid up with their bloated expectations until the poor tyke burst under the strain. Jimmy didn’t envy him.
  (He envied him.)
• Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?
• Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkkk.
• In the fading pink light the pigoons waiting for him down below look like miniature plastic figurines, bucolic replicas from a child’s playbox. They have the rosy tint of innocence, as many things do at a distance. It’s hard to imagine that they wish him ill.
• Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
• or another day of word-mongering.
• “They’re the splice geniuses,” said Crake. “The ones that were pulling those capers, the asphalt-eating microbes, the outbreak of neon-coloured herpes simplex on the west coast, the ChickieNob wasps and so on.”
• “They were anti-Compound. Still are, probably. But after the Second World War in the twentieth century, the Allies invited a lot of German rocket scientists to come and work with them, and I can’t recall anyone saying no. When your main game’s over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.”
• As for immunity from microbes, what had until now been done with drugs would soon be innate. <> Compared to the Paradice Project, even the BlyssPluss Pill was a crude tool, although it would be a lucrative interim solution. In the long run, however, the benefits for the future human race of the two in combination would be stupendous.
• They were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money.
• When the slugs begin to talk there’s no time to lose.
• Or else he watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Flapflapflap, eek, screech. You could see the strings where the avian superstars were tied to the roof. Or he watched Night of the Living Dead. Lurch, aargh, gnaw, choke, gurgle. Such minor paranoias were soothing to him.
• Snowman marvelled at his own facility: he was dancing gracefully around the truth, light-footed, light-fingered.
• Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them – who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop?
• On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird of prey. After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
• He pees on the grasshoppers, watches with nostalgia as they whir away. Already this routine of his is entering the past, like a lover seen from a train window, waving goodbye, pulled inexorably back, in space, in time, so quickly.