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“It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity,”
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.
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.
She smiles up at him and moves her arms gently to keep afloat, and he knows they are both in great danger.
Jimmy was so pleased to be able to eat lunch with neither one of his parents present that he felt light-headed.
P.S., she’d said. I have taken Killer with me to liberate her, as I know she will be happier living a wild, free life in the forest.
:(
It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
Jimmy and Crake took to hanging out together at lunch hour, and then – not every day, they weren’t gay or anything, but at least twice a week – after school.
“Forget it,” says Snowman. “Let’s try again.” Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.
Crake was against the notion of God, or of gods of any kind, and would surely be disgusted by the spectacle of his own gradual deification.
“Crake!” he whimpers. “Why am I on this earth? How come I’m alone? Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?”
But probably it was just an act. It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.
Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy. Stop the Hipocrissy, read the note left at a safe distance.
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,
He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.
He hated being dumped, even though he himself had manoeuvred the event into place.
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
“What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control – like those big green rabbits?” “That would be a problem,” said Crake. “But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
“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.”
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?
He realized he was thinking of Crake as someone he used to know.
Jimmy loved those two words: practically, almost.
If I’d killed Crake earlier,
“What pays for all this?” he asked Crake, as they passed the state-of-the-art Luxuries Mall – marble everywhere, colonnades, cafés, ferns, takeout booths, roller-skating path, juice bars, a self-energizing gym where running on the treadmill kept the light bulbs going, Roman-look fountains with nymphs and sea-gods. “Grief in the face of inevitable death,” said Crake. “The wish to stop time. The human condition.” Which was not very informative, said Jimmy. “You’ll see,” said Crake.
“Immortality,” said Crake, “is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be …”
“I’m counting on you,” he said. Then he slit her throat. Jimmy shot him.
Oh, how to lament? He’s a failure even at that.
“The blue triangle,” it says. Then it begins to flush, to turn red, beginning with the eye. This change is frightening, as if it’s a parrot-shaped light bulb filling up with blood. “I’m going away now,” it says. “No, wait,” Snowman calls, or wants to call. His mouth won’t move. “Don’t go yet! Tell me …” Then there’s a rush of wind, whuff, and Alex is gone, and Snowman is sitting up in his former bed, in the dark, drenched in sweat.
“Don’t be so fucking sentimental,” Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn’t he be sentimental? It wasn’t as if there was anyone around to question his taste.
Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nite.com.
He could have mentioned the change in Crake’s fridge magnets. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he’d thought much about them at the time.
Crake hadn’t been able to eliminate dreams. We’re hard-wired for dreams, he’d said. He couldn’t get rid of the singing either. We’re hard-wired for singing. Singing and dreams were entwined.
“What is this place called?” “It is called home,” said Snowman.
Already the children are destroying the image they made of him, reducing it to its component parts, which they plan to return to the beach. This is a teaching of Oryx, the women tell him: after a thing has been used, it must be given back to its place of origin. The picture of Snowman has done its work: now that the real Snowman is among them once more, there is no reason for the other, the less satisfactory one. Snowman finds it odd to see his erstwhile beard, his erstwhile head, travelling away piecemeal in the hands of the children. It’s as if he himself has been torn apart and scattered.
No, he can’t say any of that. Crake is watching over you, he’ll say. Oryx loves you. Then his eyes close and he feels himself being lifted gently, carried, lifted again, carried again, held.
