The MaddAddam Trilogy (111 page)

Toby stays in her cubicle, trying to nap but sulking instead. No sulking allowed, she tells herself. No wound-licking. She can’t even be certain that there’s a wound to lick. Though she does feel wounded.

Late afternoon, after the rain. Nobody’s around, with the exception of Crozier and Manatee, standing sentinel. Toby’s kneeling in the garden, killing slugs. It’s an act that would once have made her feel guilty –
For are not Slugs God’s creatures too
, Adam One would say,
with as much claim to breathe the air, as long as they do it somewhere else in a place that is more congenial for them than our Edencliff Rooftop Garden?
But right now killing them serves as an outlet for her. An outlet for what? She doesn’t wish to ponder that.

Worse, she finds herself editorializing.
Die, evil slug!
She drops each plucked slug into a tin can with wood ash and water in the bottom. They’d used salt earlier, but there’s little of that to spare. Perhaps a swift blow with a flat rock would be kinder to the slugs – the wood ash must be painful – but she’s not in the mood to weigh the relative kindness of slug execution methods.

She yanks out a weed.
How thoughtlessly we label and dismiss God’s Holy Weeds! But
Weed
is simply our name for a plant that annoys us by getting in the way of our Human plans. Consider how useful and indeed edible and delicious so many of them are!

Right. Not this one. Ragweed, from the look of it. She tosses it onto the pile of discards.

“Hey there, Death Squad,” says a voice. It’s Zeb, grinning down at her.

Toby scrambles to her feet. Her hands are dirty; she doesn’t know what to do with them. Has he been sleeping in until now, or what? She can’t ask what happened with Swift Fox, or if anything did: she refuses to sound like a shrew.

“I’m glad you came back safe,” she says. And she is glad, more glad than she can say, but even to herself her voice sounds fake.

“Me too,” he says. “Trip was more than I bargained for. Wiped me out, slept like a log, must be getting old.”

Is this a coverup? How suspicious can she get? “I missed you,” she says. There. Was that so hard?

He grins more. “Counted on that,” he says. “Brought you something.” It’s a compact, with a small round mirror.

“Thank you,” she says. She manages a smile. Is it a guilt gift, an apology? The roses for the wife after the husband’s furtive tumble with the office co-worker? But she’s not a wife.

“Got you some paper too. Couple of school notebooks, drugstore still carried them, I guess for pleeb kids who couldn’t afford the Wi-Fi tabs. Couple of rollerball pens, pencils. Felt markers.”

“How did you know I wanted those?” she says.

“I worked with a mind reader, once upon a time,” he says. “Cursive’s a Gardener skill, right? Figured you’d want to be keeping track of the days. Hey, what about a hug?”

“I’d get you all muddy,” she says, relenting, smiling.

“I’ve been dirtier.”

How could she not put her arms around him, despite her slug-slippery fingers?

And the sun is shining, and there are bees, among the yellow squash flowers. “You know what I really need?” she says to Zeb’s smoky beard. “Some reading glasses. And a hive.”

“Consider them yours.” There’s a pause. “I wanted you to look at this.”

From inside his sleeve he pulls out a shoe: a sandal. It’s handmade, with recycled materials: tire-tread sole, bicycle inner tube straps, silver duct tape accents. Although earth-stained, it’s not very worn. “Gardener,” Toby says. She remembers the fashion well, or rather the lack of it. Then she qualifies: “Or maybe it is. Not that other people didn’t make those, I guess.”

Already she has a picture in her head: Adam One and the surviving Gardeners, hunkered down in one of their Ararat hidey holes – the old mushroom-growing cellars, for instance – cobbling away by candlelight at their handcrafted sandals like a burrowful of elves, nibbling on their stores of honey and soybits while above their heads the cities flamed and collapsed and the human race melted away to nothingness. She wants so much to believe it that it can’t possibly be true.

“Where did you find it?” she asks.

“Near the piglet kill,” Zeb says. “I didn’t show the others.”

“You think it’s Adam. You think he’s still alive. You think he left this for you – or for someone – on purpose.” These aren’t questions.

“So do you,” says Zeb. “You think it too.”

“Don’t hope too much,” she says. “Hope can ruin you.”

“Okay. You’re right. But still.”

“If you’re right,” she says, “wouldn’t Adam be looking for you?”

Blacklight Headlamp

You don’t need to tell them a story every time. Come with me, instead. You can skip a night.

I already skipped one night. I can’t disappoint them too much. They might leave here and go back to the beach, and then they’d be easy to attack. Those Painballers would … I’d never forgive myself if …

Okay. But make it short?

I’m not sure that’s possible. They ask a lot of questions.

Tell them to piss off.

They wouldn’t understand that. They think piss is a good thing. Like
fuck –
they think there’s an invisible entity called Fuck. A helper of Crake’s in time of need. And of Jimmy’s, because they heard him saying
Oh fuck
.

I’m with them. Fuck! An invisible entity! A helper in time of need! Dead right!

They want to hear a story about him. About him and you, actually. The two of you, having boyish adventures. You’re both stars at the moment. They’ve been pestering me about it, that story.

Can I listen in?

No. You’d laugh.

See this mouth? Virtual duct tape! If I had some Krazy Glue, I could … Hey, I could glue my mouth to your …

Don’t be so warped.

Life is warped. I’m just in synch.

Thank you for the fish.

See, I am wearing the red hat, and I have listened to the round shiny thing I wear on my arm.

Tonight I will tell you the story of Zeb and Fuck. As you have asked me to do.

Once Zeb had left his home, where his father and his mother were not kind to him, he wandered around in the chaos. He did not know where to go next, and he did not know where his brother, Adam, was, who was his only friend and helper.

Yes, Fuck was his friend and helper too, but he could not be seen.

No, that is not an animal over there in the dark behind the shrub. That is Zeb. He is not laughing, he is coughing.

So, Zeb’s brother, Adam, was his only friend and helper that he could see and touch. Was Adam lost? Had he been stolen away? Zeb did not know, and that made him feel sad.

But Fuck kept him company and gave him advice. Fuck lived in the air and flew around like a bird, which was how he could be with Zeb one minute, and then with Crake, and then also with Snowman-the-Jimmy. He could be in many places at once. If you were in trouble and you called to him –
Oh Fuck! –
he would always be there, just when you needed him. And as soon as you said his name, you would feel better.

Yes, Zeb does have a bad cough. But you do not need to purr on him right now.

Yes, it would be good to have a friend and helper like Fuck. I wish I had one too.

No, Fuck is not my helper. I have a different helper, whose name is Pilar. She died, and took the form of a plant, and now she lives with the bees.

Yes, I talk to her even if I can’t see her. But she is not quite so … she is not so abrupt as Fuck. She is less like thunder, and more like a breeze.

I will tell you the story of Pilar some other time.

So Zeb wandered deeper and deeper into dangerous places, where there were a great many bad men doing cruel and hurtful things. And then he came to a place where they cooked and ate the Children of Oryx, which he knew was wrong. And when he called on Fuck for advice, Fuck told him he had to leave that place. And then he lived in some houses with water all around, and he came to know a snake. But
it was dangerous there; and he said, Oh Fuck! And Fuck flew through the air, and spoke to Zeb, and said he would help Zeb get away safely.

That’s enough of the story for tonight. You already know that Zeb got away safely because he’s sitting right over there, isn’t he? And he’s very happy to be hearing this story. That is why he is laughing now, and not coughing any more.

Thank you for saying good night. I am happy to know that you want me to sleep soundly, without bad dreams.

Good night to you, as well.

Yes, good night.

Good night!

That’s enough. You can stop saying good night now.

Thank you.

One day Zeb woke up next to Wynette, the SecretBurgers meatslinger, and realized that she smelled like grilled patties and stale cooking oil. As he did himself, granted, but that was different, because it always is, says Zeb, when it’s your own smell. But it’s not what you want the object of your lust to smell like. This is a primate thing, it’s basic, they’ve done the tests. Ask any of the MaddAddamite biogeeks here.

And the onions, don’t forget them, and the gruesome red sauce in squeeze bottles the customers craved so much it most likely had crack in it. When things got energetic and there was a brawl, someone would always go for that red sauce and start squirting it around. Then it would get mixed in with the scalp-wound splatter blood and you couldn’t tell whether someone was bleeding to death or had only been doused with red sauce.

The way that combo of smells would seep into their clothing and hair and even the skin pores was unavoidable, working where the two of them did. You couldn’t wash off that stink even when there was shower water available, and it didn’t blend too well with the cheap glop Wynette would rub on herself to neutralize it: Delilah, it was called, in lotion and cologne forms both, and it was heavy going, like wading through a sea of dying lilies, or a clutch of elderly church-women of the kind that populated the Church of PetrOleum. Those two smells – the SecretBurgers, the Delilah – were okay if you were really hungry or really horny, or both. But not so sweet otherwise.

Fuck, Zeb thought, lying there newly awakened that morning and inhaling the dire potpourri. There’s no future in this.

Or if there was a future, it was a negative one, because in addition to smelling funny Wynette was getting nosy. In the name of love and getting to know and understand the real, total him, she wanted to explore his deeper depths, figuratively speaking. She wanted his lid off. If she pried too hard – if she unwrapped one after another of his flimsy cover stories, which he hadn’t constructed with enough care, he realized, and he vowed to do better next time he conned someone – if she did the unwrapping, there was nothing very convincing immediately underneath. And then if she kept going, she might make some guesses about where he’d come from and who he’d been originally, and then it would only be a matter of time before she weaselled on him so she could collect whatever greyland reward must be on offer, out there in the word-of-mouth rat networks of the pleeblands.

Zeb had no doubt that there was such a reward. There might even be some of his biometrics circulating, such as photos of his ears, and animated silhouettes of his walk, and his schooltime thumbprints. Wynette wasn’t connected gangwise so far as he knew, and luckily she was too poor to own a
PC
or a tab. But there was cheap netstuff available on time-rental in cafés, and she might do some identity surfing if he pissed her off enough.

Already she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through the magic of his first-contact-with-aliens puppy-on-speed gonadal enthusiasm. Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters – no discrimination. They’re like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they’ll bonk anything with a cavity, and Wynette had been the beneficiary in Zeb’s case. Not to brag, but during their nightly tangles her eyes had rolled so far up into her head that she looked like the undead half the time, and the amplified rockband noises she made had caused thumping and banging both from the alcohol store on the ground floor and from whatever nestful of mournful wage slaves lived above them.

But now she was mistaking Zeb’s animal energies for something more profound. She wanted post-hump chat. She wanted them to share their essences, on a spiritual level. She was starting to ask things like, were her breasts big enough, and did this colour of lime green look good on her, and why weren’t they doing it twice a night the way they did at first? Questions that mantrapped you any way you
answered. These nightly interrogation sessions were becoming wearisome. Maybe, Zeb concluded, his feelings for Wynette hadn’t been true love after all.

“Don’t look at me like that. I was really young. And don’t forget, I’d been improperly socialized,” says Zeb.

“Look at you like what?” says Toby. “It’s darker than the inside of a goat. You can’t see me.”

“I can feel the glacial chill of your stone-cold gaze.”

“I just feel sorry for her, that’s all,” says Toby.

“No, you don’t. If I’d stayed with her, I wouldn’t be here with you, right?”