Margaret Atwood - Oryx And Crake

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margaret atwood

Nan A. Talese

Doubleday

New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Quotes

Mango ~ Flotsam ~ Voice

Bonfire ~ OrganInc Farms ~ Lunch

Nooners ~ Downpour

Rakunk ~ Hammer ~ Crake ~ Brainfrizz ~ HottTotts

Toast ~ Fish ~ Bottle

Oryx ~ Birdcall ~ Roses ~ Pixieland Jazz

Sveltana ~ Purring ~ Blue

SoYummie ~ Happicuppa ~ Applied Rhetoric ~ Asperger’s U. ~ Wolvogs ~

Hypothetical ~ Extinctathon

Hike ~ RejoovenEsense ~ Twister

Vulturizing ~ AnooYoo ~ Garage ~ Gripless

Pigoons ~ Radio ~ Rampart

Pleebcrawl ~ BlyssPluss ~ MaddAddam ~ Paradice ~ Crake in Love ~ Take

out ~ Airlock

Bubble ~ Scribble ~ Remnant

Idol ~ Sermon

Footprint

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By Margaret Atwood

For my family

I could perhaps like others have astonished you

with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose

to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest

manner and style; because my principal design

was to inform you, and not to amuse you.

Jonathan Swift,

Gulliver’s Travels

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of

the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter,

but all was miracle and leaping from the

pinnacle of a tower into the air?

Virginia Woolf,

To the Lighthouse

Mango

Snowman

wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave

after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of

heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep.

On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange

how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette

against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon. The shrieks of

the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of

rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic.

Out of habit he looks at his watch – stainless-steel case, burnished aluminum band, still

shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is

what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence

of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

“Calm down,” he tells himself. He takes a few deep breaths, then scratches his bug bites,

around but not on the itchiest places, taking care not to knock off any scabs: blood

poisoning is the last thing he needs. Then he scans the ground below for wildlife: all

quiet, no scales and tails. Left hand, right foot, right hand, left foot, he makes his way

down from the tree. After brushing off the twigs and bark, he winds his dirty bedsheet

around himself like a toga. He’s hung his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap on a

branch overnight for safekeeping; he checks inside it, flicks out a spider, puts it on.

He walks a couple of yards to the left, pisses into the bushes. “Heads up,” he says to the

grasshoppers that whir away at the impact. Then he goes to the other side of the tree,

well away from his customary urinal, and rummages around in the cache he’s

improvised from a few slabs of concrete, lining it with wire mesh to keep out the rats

and mice. He’s stashed some mangoes there, knotted in a plastic bag, and a can of

Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, and a precious half-bottle of Scotch – no, more

like a third – and a chocolate-flavoured energy bar scrounged from a trailer park, limp

and sticky inside its foil. He can’t bring himself to eat it yet: it might be the last one

he’ll ever find. He keeps a can opener there too, and for no particular reason an ice pick;

and six empty beer bottles, for sentimental reasons and for storing fresh water. Also his

sunglasses; he puts them on. One lens is missing but they’re better than nothing.

He undoes the plastic bag: there’s only a single mango left. Funny, he remembered

more. The ants have got in, even though he tied the bag as tightly as he could. Already

they’re running up his arms, the black kind and the vicious little yellow kind. Surprising

what a sharp sting they can give, especially the yellow ones. He rubs them away.

“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 can’t recall ever having read such a thing,

but that means nothing. There are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where

memory used to be. Rubber plantations, coffee plantations, jute plantations. (What was

jute?) They would have been told to wear solar topis, dress for dinner, refrain from

raping the natives. It wouldn’t have said raping. Refrain from fraternizing with the

female inhabitants. Or, put some other way . . .

He bets they didn’t refrain, though. Nine times out of ten.

“In view of the mitigating,” he says. He finds himself standing with his mouth open,

trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to

eat the mango.

Flotsam

the white beach, ground-up coral and broken bones, a group of the children are

walking. They must have been swimming, they’re still wet and glistening. They should

be more careful: who knows what may infest the lagoon? But they’re unwary; unlike

Snowman, who won’t dip a toe in there even at night, when the sun can’t get at him.

Revision: especially at night.

He watches them with envy, or is it nostalgia? It can’t be that: he never swam in the sea

as a child, never ran around on a beach without any clothes on. The children scan the

terrain, stoop, pick up flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some

items, discarding others; their treasures go into a torn sack. Sooner or later – he can

count on it – they’ll seek him out where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet, hugging

his shins and sucking on his mango, in under the shade of the trees because of the

punishing sun. For the children – thick-skinned, resistant to ultraviolet – he’s a creature

of dimness, of the dusk.

Here they come now. “Snowman, oh Snowman,” they chant in their singsong way.

They never stand too close to him. Is that from respect, as he’d like to think, or because

he stinks?

(He does stink, he knows that well enough. 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.)

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, “Oh Snowman, what have we found?” They

lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a

chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container,

empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted

remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There’s no way of explaining to

them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say,

because it’s always the same.

“These are things from before.” He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between

pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

“Will they hurt us?” Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic

bottles of bleach. Booby traps from the past. He’s considered to be an expert on

potential accidents: scalding liquids, sickening fumes, poison dust. Pain of odd kinds.

“These, no,” he says. “These are safe.” At this they lose interest, let the sack dangle. But

they don’t go away: they stand, they stare. Their beachcombing is an excuse. Mostly

they want to look at him, because he’s so unlike them. Every so often they ask him to

take off his sunglasses and put them on again: they want to see whether he has two eyes

really, or three.

“Snowman, oh Snowman,” they’re singing, less to him than to one another. To them his

name is just two syllables. They don’t know what a snowman is, they’ve never seen

snow.

It was one of Crake’s rules that no name could be chosen for which a physical

equivalent – even stuffed, even skeletal – could not be demonstrated. No unicorns, no

griffins, no manticores or basilisks. But those rules no longer apply, and it’s given

Snowman a bitter pleasure to adopt this dubious label. The Abominable Snowman –

existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike

ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing

footprints. Mountain tribes were said to have chased it down and killed it when they had

the chance. They were said to have boiled it, roasted it, held special feasts; all the more

exciting, he supposes, for bordering on cannibalism.

For present purposes he’s shortened the name. He’s only Snowman. He’s kept the

abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.

After a few moments of hesitation the children squat down in a half-circle, boys and

girls together. A couple of the younger ones are still munching on their breakfasts, the

green juice running down their chins. It’s discouraging how grubby everyone gets

without mirrors. Still, they’re amazingly attractive, these children – each one naked,

each one perfect, each one a different skin colour – chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream,

honey – but each with green eyes. Crake’s aesthetic.

They’re gazing at Snowman expectantly. They must be hoping he’ll talk to them, but he

isn’t in the mood for it today. At the very most he might let them see his sunglasses, up

close, or his shiny, dysfunctional watch, or his baseball cap. They like the cap, but don’t

understand his need for such a thing – removable hair that isn’t hair – and he hasn’t yet

invented a fiction for it.

They’re quiet for a bit, staring, ruminating, but then the oldest one starts up. “Oh

Snowman, please tell us – what is that moss growing out of your face?” The others

chime in. “Please tell us, please tell us!” No nudging, no giggling: the question is

serious.

“Feathers,” he says.

They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such

a short time – two months, three? He’s lost count – they’ve accumulated a stock of lore,

of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he’s forgotten how to fly and the

rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to

wrap himself up. No: he’s cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps

himself up because he’s missing his man thing, and he doesn’t want us to see. That’s

why he won’t go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater

and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over

the sea, and now he is all alone.

“I want feathers too,” says the youngest. A vain hope: no beards on the men, among the

Children of Crake. Crake himself had found beards irrational; also he’d been irritated by

the task of shaving, so he’d abolished the need for it. Though not of course for

Snowman: too late for him.

Now they all begin at once. “Oh Snowman, oh Snowman, can we have feathers too,

please?”

“No,” he says.

“Why not, why not?” sing the two smallest ones.

“Just a minute, I’ll ask Crake.” He holds his watch up to the sky, turns it around on his

wrist, then puts it to his ear as if listening to it. They follow each motion, enthralled.

“No,” he says. “Crake says you can’t. No feathers for you. Now piss off.”

“Piss off? Piss off?” They look at one another, then at him. He’s made a mistake, he’s

said a new thing, one that’s impossible to explain. Piss isn’t something they’d find

insulting. “What is piss off?”

“Go away!” He flaps his sheet at them and they scatter, running along the beach.

They’re still not sure whether to be afraid of him, or how afraid. He hasn’t been known

to harm a child, but his nature is not fully understood. There’s no telling what he might

do.

Voice

“Now

I’m alone,” he says out loud. “All, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea.” One

more scrap from the burning scrapbook in his head.

Revision: seashore.

He feels the need to hear a human voice – a fully human voice, like his own. Sometimes

he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion – his idea of a hyena, his idea of a lion. He

used to watch old

DVD

s of such creatures when he was a child: those animal-behaviour

programs featuring copulation and growling and innards, and mothers licking their

young. Why had he found them so reassuring?

Or he grunts and squeals like a pigoon, or howls like a wolvog: Aroo! Aroo! Sometimes

in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming,

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards.

He stands up and raises his arms to stretch, and his sheet falls off. He looks down at his

body with dismay: the grimy, bug-bitten skin, the salt-and-pepper tufts of hair, the

thickening yellow toenails. Naked as the day he was born, not that he can remember a

thing about that. So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they

aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion

of sex.

“Don’t even think about it,” he tells himself. Sex is like drink, it’s bad to start brooding

about it too early in the day.

He used to take good care of himself; he used to run, work out at the gym. Now he can

see his own ribs: he’s wasting away. Not enough animal protein. A woman’s voice says

caressingly in his ear, Nice buns! It isn’t Oryx, it’s some other woman. Oryx is no

longer very talkative.

“Say anything,” he implores her. She can hear him, he needs to believe that, but she’s

giving him the silent treatment. “What can I do?” he asks her. “You know I . . .”

Oh, nice abs! comes the whisper, interrupting him. Honey, just lie back. Who is it?

Some tart he once bought. Revision, professional sex-skills expert. A trapeze artist,

rubber spine, spangles glued onto her like the scales of a fish. He hates these echoes.

Saints used to hear them, crazed lice-infested hermits in their caves and deserts. Pretty

soon he’ll be seeing beautiful demons, beckoning to him, licking their lips, with red-hot

nipples and flickering pink tongues. Mermaids will rise from the waves, out there

beyond the crumbling towers, and he’ll hear their lovely singing and swim out to them

and be eaten by sharks. Creatures with the heads and breasts of women and the talons of

eagles will swoop down on him, and he’ll open his arms to them, and that will be the

end. Brainfrizz.

Or worse, some girl he knows, or knew, will come walking towards him through the

trees, and she’ll be happy to see him but she’ll be made of air. He’d welcome even that,

for the company.

He scans the horizon, using his one sunglassed eye: nothing. The sea is hot metal, the

sky a bleached blue, except for the hole burnt in it by the sun. Everything is so empty.

Water, sand, sky, trees, fragments of past time. Nobody to hear him.

“Crake!” he yells. “Asshole! Shit-for-brains!”

He listens. The salt water is running down his face again. He never knows when that

will happen and he can never stop it. His breath is coming in gasps, as if a giant hand is

clenching around his chest – clench, release, clench. Senseless panic.

“You did this!” he screams at the ocean.

No answer, which isn’t surprising. Only the waves, wish-wash, wish-wash. He wipes

his fist across his face, across the grime and tears and snot and the derelict’s whiskers

and sticky mango juice. “Snowman, Snowman,” he says. “Get a life.”

Bonfire

Once

upon a time, Snowman wasn’t Snowman. Instead he was Jimmy. He’d been a

good boy then.

Jimmy’s earliest complete memory was of a huge bonfire. He must have been five,

maybe six. He was wearing red rubber boots with a smiling duck’s face on each toe; he

remembers that, because after seeing the bonfire he had to walk through a pan of

disinfectant in those boots. They’d said the disinfectant was poisonous and he shouldn’t

splash, and then he was worried that the poison would get into the eyes of the ducks and

hurt them. He’d been told the ducks were only like pictures, they weren’t real and had

no feelings, but he didn’t quite believe it.

So let’s say five and a half, thinks Snowman. That’s about right.

The month could have been October, or else November; the leaves still turned colour

then, and they were orange and red. It was muddy underfoot – he must have been

standing in a field – and it was drizzling. The bonfire was an enormous pile of cows and

sheep and pigs. Their legs stuck out stiff and straight; gasoline had been poured onto

them; the flames shot up and out, yellow and white and red and orange, and a smell of

charred flesh filled the air. It was like the barbecue in the backyard when his father

cooked things but a lot stronger, and mixed in with it was a gas-station smell, and the

odour of burning hair.

Jimmy knew what burning hair smelled like because he’d cut off some of his own hair

with the manicure scissors and set fire to it with his mother’s cigarette lighter. The hair

had frizzled up, squiggling like a clutch of tiny black worms, so he’d cut off some more

and done it again. By the time he was caught, his hair was ragged all along the front.

When accused he’d said it was an experiment.

His father had laughed then, but his mother hadn’t. At least (his father said) Jimmy’d

had the good sense to cut the hair off before torching it. His mother said it was lucky he

hadn’t burnt the house down. Then they’d had an argument about the cigarette lighter,

which wouldn’t have been there (said his father) if his mother didn’t smoke. His mother

said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he’d have used

matches.

Once the fight got going Jimmy felt relieved, because he’d known then that he wouldn’t

be punished. All he had to do was say nothing and pretty soon they’d forget why they’d

started arguing in the first place. But he also felt guilty, because look what he’d made

them do. He knew it would end with a door being slammed. He scrunched down lower

and lower in his chair with the words whizzing back and forth over his head, and finally

there was the bang of the door – his mother this time – and the wind that came with it.

There was always a wind when the door got slammed, a small puff – whuff! – right in

his ears.

“Never mind, old buddy,” said his father. “Women always get hot under the collar.

She’ll cool down. Let’s have some ice cream.” So that’s what they did, they had

Raspberry Ripple in the cereal bowls with the blue and red birds on them that were

handmade in Mexico so you shouldn’t put them in the dishwasher, and Jimmy ate his all

up to show his father that everything was okay.

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. He could have used a few theories on that.

The next day his father took him to a haircut place where there was a picture of a pretty

girl in the window with pouty lips and a black T-shirt pulled down off one shoulder,

glaring out through smudgy charcoal eyes with a mean stare and her hair standing up

stiff like quills. Inside, there was hair all over the tiled floor, in clumps and wisps; they

were sweeping it up with a push broom. First Jimmy had a black cape put on him, only

it was more like a bib, and Jimmy didn’t want that, because it was babyish. The haircut

man laughed and said it wasn’t a bib, because who ever heard of a baby with a black bib

on? So it was okay; and then Jimmy got a short all-over cut to even out the ragged

places, which maybe was what he’d wanted in the first place – shorter hair. Then he had

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摘要：

margaretatwoodNanA.TaleseDoubledayNewYorkLondonTorontoSydneyAucklandContentsTitlePageDedicationQuotes1Mango~Flotsam~Voice2Bonfire~OrganIncFarms~Lunch3Nooners~Downpour4Rakunk~Hammer~Crake~Brainfrizz~HottTotts5Toast~Fish~Bottle6Oryx~Birdcall~Roses~PixielandJazz7Sveltana~Purring~Blue8SoYummie~Happicupp...

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