Or did he know he wouldn’t be able to withhold the formula for the vaccine, once the CorpSeCorps got to work on him? How long had he been planning this? Could it be that Uncle Pete, and possibly even Crake’s own mother, had been trial runs? With so much at stake, was he afraid of failure, of being just one more incompetent nihilist? Or was he tormented by jealousy, was he addled by love, was it revenge, did he just want Jimmy to put him out of his misery? Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who’d thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?
And so on and so forth, spinning the emotional wheels and sucking down the hootch until he could blank himself out.
Meanwhile, the end of a species was taking place before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens, joining the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl, the long, long list. Oh, big points, Grandmaster.
Sometimes he’d turn off the sound, whisper words to himself. Succulent. Morphology. Purblind. Quarto. Frass. It had a calming effect.
Site after site, channel after channel went dead. A couple of the anchors, news jocks to the end, set the cameras to film their own deaths—the screams, the dissolving skins, the ruptured eyeballs and all. How theatrical, thought Jimmy. Nothing some people won’t do to get on TV.
“You cynical shit,” he told himself. Then he started to weep.
“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.
Once in a while he considered killing himself—it seemed mandatory—but somehow he didn’t have the required energy. Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nite.com. Under the circumstances, the here and now, it was a gesture that lacked elegance. He could imagine Crake’s amused contempt, and the disappointment of Oryx: But Jimmy! Why do you give up? You have a job to do! You promised, remember?
Perhaps he failed to take seriously his own despair.
Finally there was nothing more to watch, except old movies on DVD. He watched Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo. He wants more, don’t you, Rocco? Yeah, that’s it, more! That’s right, I want more. Will you ever get enough? Or else he watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Flapflapflap, eek, screech. You could see the strings where the avian superstars were tied to the roof. Or he watched Night of the Living Dead. Lurch, aargh, gnaw, choke, gurgle. Such minor paranoias were soothing to him.
Then he’d turn it off, sit in front of the empty screen. All the women he’d ever known would pass in front of his eyes in the semi-darkness. His mother too, in her magenta dressing gown, young again. Oryx came last, carrying white flowers. She looked at him, then walked slowly out of his field of vision, into the shadows where Crake was waiting.
These reveries were almost pleasurable. At least while they were going on everyone was still alive.
He knew this state of affairs couldn’t continue much longer. Inside Paradice proper, the Crakers were munching up the leaves and grasses faster than they could regenerate, and one of these days the solar would fail, and the backup would fail too, and Jimmy had no idea about how to fix those things. Then the air circulation would stop and the doorlock would freeze, and both he and the Crakers would be trapped inside, and they’d all suffocate. He had to get them out while there was still time, but not too soon or there would still be some desperate people out there, and desperate would mean dangerous. What he didn’t want was a bunch of disintegrating maniacs falling on their knees, clawing at him: Cure us! Cure us! He might be immune from the virus—unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him—but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.
Anyway, how could he have the heart to stand there and say: Nothing can save you?
In the half-light, in the dank, Snowman wanders from space to space. Here for instance is his office. His computer sits on the desk, turning a blank face to him like a discarded girlfriend encountered by chance at a party. Beside the computer are a few sheets of paper, which must have been the last he’d ever written. The last he’d ever write. He picks them up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he’d once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record—to set down in black and white, with smudges—for the edification of a world that no longer existed?
To whom it may concern, Jimmy had written, in ballpoint rather than printout: his computer was fried by then, but he’d persevered, laboriously, by hand. He must still have had hope, he must still have believed that the situation could be turned around, that someone would show up here in the future, someone in authority; that his words would have a meaning then, a context. As Crake had once said, Jimmy was a romantic optimist.
I don’t have much time, Jimmy had written.
Not a bad beginning, thinks Snowman.
I don’t have much time, but I will try to set down what I believe to be the explanation for the recent [extraordinary events] catastrophe. I have gone through the computer of the man known here as Crake. He left it turned on—deliberately, I believe—and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand-selected by Crake [and subsequently eliminated], and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product. There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves. For the success of the plan, time was of the essence. Social disruption was maximized, and development of a vaccine effectively prevented. Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to [his assisted suicide] death.
Although various staff members of the BlyssPluss project contributed to JUVE on a piecework basis, it is my belief that none, with the exception of Crake, was cognizant of what that effect would be. As for Crake’s motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps…
Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy’s speculations might have been on the subject of Crake’s motives, they had not been recorded.
Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It’s the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles. 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.
Remnant
On the second Friday of March—he’d been marking off the days on a calendar, god knows why—Jimmy showed himself to the Crakers for the first time. He didn’t take his clothes off, he drew the line at that. He wore a set of standard-issue Rejoov khaki tropicals, with mesh underarms and a thousand pockets, and his favourite fake-leather sandals. The Crakers gathered around him, gazing at him with quiet wonder: they’d never seen textiles before. The children whispered and pointed.