Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

"What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves."

"But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman.

"In a simple order," said the man.

"With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude."

"They like to hear about the before and the after," said the man. "It's the art of the possible. But with no guarantees, of course."

"You showed great insight into the process," the woman said. "In your dissertation. We found it very mature."

"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, as if Jimmy had just solved the riddle of the universe in one blinding flashbulb of light. He got a finger-cracking handshake from the man; from the woman he got a warm but vulnerable smile, which left him wondering whether or not she was married. The pay at AnooYoo wasn't that great, but there might be other advantages.

That evening he told Amanda Payne about his good fortune. She'd been carping about money lately - or not carping, but she'd inserted a few pointed remarks about pulling your own weight into the prolonged and intent silences that were her specialty - so he thought she'd be pleased. Things hadn't been that good in the sack lately, ever since his ChickieNobs blunder, in fact. Maybe they'd pick up now, in time for a heartfelt, plangent, and action-filled finale. Already he was rehearsing his exit lines: I'm not what you need, you deserve better, I'll ruin your life, and so forth. But it was best to work up to these things, so he elaborated on his new job.

"Now I'll be able to bring home the bacon," he concluded in what he hoped was a winsome but responsible tone.

Amanda wasn't impressed. "You're going to work where?" was her comment; point being, as it unfolded, that AnooYoo was a collection of cesspool denizens who existed for no other reason than to prey on the phobias and void the bank accounts of the anxious and the gullible. It seemed that Amanda, until recently, had had a friend who'd signed up for an AnooYoo five-month plan, touted as being able to cure depression, wrinkles, and insomnia all at the same time, and who'd pushed herself over the edge - actually, over the windowsill of her ten-storey-up apartment - on some kind of South American tree bark.

"I could always turn them down," said Jimmy, when this tale had been told. "I could join the ranks of the permanently unemployed. Or, hey, I could go on being a kept man, like now. Joke! Joke! Don't kill me!"

Amanda was more silent than ever for the next few days. Then she told him she'd unblocked herself artistically: the next key word for the Vulture Sculpture had come to her.

"And what

's that?" said Jimmy, trying to sound interested.

She looked at him speculatively. "Love," she said.

AnooYoo

~

Jimmy moved into the junior apartment provided for him in the AnooYoo Compound: bedroom in an alcove, cramped kitchenette, reproduction 1950s furniture. As a dwelling place it was only a small step up from his dorm room at Martha Graham, but at least there was less insect life. He discovered quite soon that, corporately speaking, he was a drudge and a helot. He was to cudgel his brains and spend ten-hour days wandering the labyrinths of the thesaurus and cranking out the verbiage. Then those above would grade his offerings, hand them back for revision, hand them back again. What we want is more ... is less ... that's not quite it. But with time he improved, whatever that meant.

Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier. It was his task to describe and extol, to present the vision of what - oh, so easily! - could come to be. Hope and fear, desire and revulsion, these were his stocks-in-trade, on these he rang his changes. Once in a while he'd make up a word - tensicity, fibracionous, pheromonimal - but he never once got caught out. His proprietors liked those kinds of words in the small print on packages because they sounded scientific and had a convincing effect.

He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos that came from above telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him because they'd been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYoo was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.

His social life was - for the first time in many years - a zero: 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. Why had he abandoned her so casually? Because he'd been looking forward to the next in the series. But the woman interviewer from AnooYoo about whom he'd had such hopes was never seen again, and the other women he encountered, at the office or in the AnooYoo bars, were either mean-minded eye-the-target sharks or so emotionally starved even Jimmy avoided them as if they were quagmires. He was reduced to flirting with waitpersons, and even they turned a cold shoulder. They'd seen fast-talking youngsters like him before, they knew he had no status.

In the company cafe he was a new boy, alone once more, starting over. He took to eating SoyOBoy burgers in the Compound mall, or taking out a greasy box of ChickieNobs Nubbins to munch on while working overtime at his computer terminal. Every week there was a Compound social barbecue, a comprehensive ratfuck that all employees were expected to attend. These were dire occasions for Jimmy. He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel; he loitered on the edges gnawing on a burned soydog and silently ripping apart everyone within eyesight. Saggy boobs, ran the thought balloon in his head. Bunfaced tofubrain. Thumbsucking posterboy. Fridgewoman. Sell his granny. Wobble-bummed bovine. Bladderheaded jerk.

He got the occasional e-mail from his father; an e-birthday card perhaps, a few days later than his real birthday, something with dancing pigoons on it, as if he were still eleven. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True. Ramona would write him chatty, dutiful messages: no baby brother for him yet, she'd say, but they were still "working on it." He did not wish to visualize the hormone-sodden, potion-ridden, gel-slathered details of such work. If nothing "natural" happened soon, she said, they'd try "something else" from one of the agencies - Infantade, Foetility, Perfectababe, one of those. Things had changed a lot in the field since Jimmy came along! (Came along, as if he hadn't actually been born, but had just sort of dropped by for a visit.) She was doing her "research," because of course they wanted the best for their money.

Terrific, thought Jimmy. They'd have a few trial runs, and if the kids from those didn't measure up they'd recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs - perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn. 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.)

Ramona invited Jimmy for the holidays, but he had no wish to go, so he pleaded overwork. Which was the truth, in a way, as he'd come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?

After a while he was granted a promotion. Then he could buy new toys. He got himself a better DVD player, a gym suit that cleaned itself overnight due to sweat-eating bacteria, a shirt that displayed e-mail on its sleeve while giving him a little nudge every time he had a message, shoes that changed colour to match his outfits, a talking toaster. Well, it was company. Jimmy, your toast is done. He upgraded to a better apartment.

Now that he was climbing up the ladder he found a woman, and then another one, and another one after that. He no longer thought of these women as girlfriends: now they were lovers.