"You never know," said Crake.
"You never know what?"
"What is reality?"
"Bogus!"
There was an assisted-suicide site too - nitee-nite.com, it was called - which had a this-was-your-life component: family albums, interviews with relatives, brave parties of friends standing by while the deed was taking place to background organ music. After the sad-eyed doctor had declared that life was extinct, there were taped testimonials from the participants themselves, stating why they'd chosen to depart. The assisted-suicide statistics shot way up after this show got going. There was said to be a long lineup of people willing to pay big bucks for a chance to appear on it and snuff themselves in glory, and lotteries were held to choose the participants.
Crake grinned a lot while watching this site. For some reason he found it hilarious, whereas Jimmy did not. He couldn't imagine doing such a thing himself, unlike Crake, who said it showed flair to know when you'd had enough. But did Jimmy's reluctance mean he was a coward, or was it just that the organ music sucked?
These planned departures made him uneasy: they reminded him of Alex the parrot saying I'm going away now. There was too fine a line between Alex the parrot and the assisted suicides and his mother and the note she'd left for him. All three gave notice of their intentions; then all vanished.
Or they would watch At Home With Anna K. Anna K. was a self-styled installation artist with big boobs who'd wired up her apartment so that every moment of her life was sent out live to millions of voyeurs. "This is Anna K., thinking always about my happiness and my unhappiness," was what you'd get as you joined her. Then you might watch her tweezing her eyebrows, waxing her bikini line, washing her underwear. 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,
read Anna K. She was a terrible ham, but Snowman has always been grateful to her because she'd been a doorway of sorts. Think what he might not have known if it hadn't been for her. Think of the words. Sere, for instance. Incarnadine.
"What is this shit?" said Crake. "Channel change!"
"No, wait, wait," said Jimmy, who had been seized by - what? Something he wanted to hear. And Crake waited, because he did humour Jimmy sometimes.
Or they would watch the Queek Geek Show, which had contests featuring the eating of live animals and birds, timed by stopwatches, with prizes of hard-to-come-by foods. It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie.
Or they would watch porn shows. There were a lot of those.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
To access the more disgusting and forbidden sites - those for which you had to be over eighteen, and for which you needed a special password - Crake used his Uncle Pete's private code, via a complicated method he called a lily-pad labyrinth. He'd construct a winding pathway through the Web, hacking in at random through some easy-access commercial enterprise, then skipping from lily pad to lily pad, erasing his footprints as he went. That way when Uncle Pete got the bill he couldn't find out who'd run it up.
Crake had also located Uncle Pete's stash of high-grade Vancouver skunkweed, kept in orange-juice cans in the freezer; he'd take out about a quarter of the can, then mix in some of the low-octane carpet sweepings you could buy at the school tuck shop for fifty bucks a baggie. He said Uncle Pete would never know because he never smoked except when he wanted to have sex with Crake's mother, which - judging from the number of orange-juice cans and the rate at which they were getting used up - wasn't often. Crake said Uncle Pete got his real kicks at the office, bossing people around, whipping the wage slaves. He used to be a scientist, but now he was a large managerial ultra-cheese at HelthWyzer, on the financial end of things.
So they'd roll a few joints and smoke them while watching the executions and the porn - the body parts moving around on the screen in slow motion, an underwater ballet of flesh and blood under stress, hard and soft joining and separating, groans and screams, close-ups of clenched eyes and clenched teeth, spurts of this or that. If you switched back and forth fast, it all came to look like the same event. Sometimes they'd have both things on at once, each on a different screen.
These sessions would take place for the most part in silence, except for the sound effects coming from the machines. It would be Crake who'd decide what to watch and when to stop watching it. Fair enough, they were his computers. He might say, "Finished with that?" before changing. He didn't seem to be affected by anything he saw, one way or the other, except when he thought it was funny. He never seemed to get high, either. Jimmy suspected he didn't really inhale.
Jimmy on the other hand would wobble homewards, still fuzzy from the dope and feeling as if he'd been to an orgy, one at which he'd had no control at all over what had happened to him. What had been done to him. He also felt very light, as if he were made of air; thin, dizzying air, at the top of some garbage-strewn Mount Everest. Back at home base, his parental units - supposing they were there, and downstairs - never seemed to notice a thing.
"Getting enough to eat?" Ramona might say to him. She'd interpret his mumble as a yes.
HottTotts
~
Late afternoons were the best time for doing these things at Crake's place. Nobody interrupted them. Crake's mother was out a lot, or in a hurry; she worked as a diagnostician at the hospital complex. She was an intense, square-jawed, dark-haired woman with not much of a chest. On the rare occasions when Jimmy had been there at the same time
as Crake's mother, she hadn't said much. She'd dug around in the kitchen cupboards for something that would pass as a snack for "you boys," as she called the two of them. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of her preparations - the dumping of stale crackers onto a plate, the sawing up of chewy orange-and-white-marbled hunks of cheesefood - and stand stock-still, as if she could see someone else in the room. Jimmy had the impression she couldn't remember his name; not only that, she couldn't remember Crake's name either. Sometimes she would ask Crake if his room was tidy, though she never went in there herself.
"She believes in respecting a child's privacy," said Crake, straight-faced.