Year of the Flood: Novel (21 page)

41

Jimmy and I started doing our homework together. He was really nice about helping me with the parts I didn’t know. Because of all that memorizing we’d had to do at the Gardeners, I could stare at a lesson and then see everything inside my head, like a picture. So although it was hard for me and I felt I was way behind, I started to catch up quite fast.

Because he was two years ahead of me, Jimmy wasn’t in any of my classes except for Life Skills, which was supposed to help you structure your life, once you had one. They mixed up the age groups in Life Skills so we could benefit from sharing our different life experiences, and Jimmy traded desks so he was sitting right behind me. “I’m your bodyguard,” he whispered, which made me feel safe.

We went to my place to do our homework if Lucerne wasn’t there; if she was, we went to Jimmy’s. I liked Jimmy’s place better because he had a pet rakunk — it was a new splice, half skunk but without the smell, half raccoon but without the aggression. Her name was Killer; she was one of the first ones they’d made. When I picked her up, she liked me right away.

Jimmy’s mother seemed to like me as well, though the first time she saw me she looked at me very hard with her stern blue eyes and asked me how old I was. I liked her all right too, although she smoked too much, which made me cough. Nobody at the Gardeners smoked, or at least not cigarettes. She worked on a computer a lot, but I couldn’t figure out what she did on it, because she didn’t have a job. His father was hardly ever there — he was at the labs, figuring out how to transplant human stem cells and DNA into pigs, to grow new human pieces. I asked Jimmy what pieces, and he said kidneys, but maybe it was lungs too — in the future you’d be able to get your very own pig made, with second copies of everything. I knew what the Gardeners would think of that: they would think it was bad, because of having to kill the pigs.

Jimmy had seen these pigs: their nickname was pigoon, like pig balloon, because they were so big. The double-organ methods were proprietary secrets, he said: extra valuable. “Aren’t you worried some foreign Corps will kidnap your dad and squeeze the secrets out of his brain?” I said. That was happening more often: they kept it out of the news, but there was gossip at HelthWyzer. Sometimes they got the kidnapped scientists back, sometimes they didn’t. The security was getting tighter and tighter.

After doing our homework Jimmy and I would hang out at the HelthWyzer mall and play tame video games and drink Happicappuchinos. The first time, I told him Happicuppa was the brew of evil so I couldn’t drink it, and he laughed at me. The second time I made an effort, and it tasted delicious, and soon I wasn’t thinking too much about the evilness of it.

After a while Jimmy talked to me about Wakulla Price. He said she was the first girl he’d ever been in love with, but when he’d asked her to get serious with him she’d said they could only be friends. I knew that part already, but I said that was too bad, and Jimmy said he’d been a puddle of dog vomit for weeks and he still hadn’t got over it.

Then he asked if I had a boyfriend back in the pleebs, and I said yes — which wasn’t true — but since I had no way of getting back there I’d decided to forget about him because that was the best thing to do if you wanted someone you couldn’t have. Jimmy was really sympathetic about my lost boyfriend, and he squeezed my hand. Then I felt guilty for telling such a lie; but I wasn’t sorry about the squeezing.

By this time I had a diary — all the girls at school had them, it was a retro craze: people could hack your computer, but they couldn’t hack a paper book. I wrote all of this down in my diary. It was like talking to someone. I didn’t even think that writing things down was that dangerous any more: I guess that shows how far away from the Gardeners I’d grown already. I kept my diary in the closet, inside a stuffed bear, because I didn’t want Lucerne snooping on me. The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them.

Then a new boy came to HelthWyzer High. His name was Glenn, and as soon as I saw him I knew he was the same Glenn who’d come to the Tree of Life on the Saint Euell’s Week when Amanda and I had walked him over with that jar of honey to visit Pilar. I thought he gave me a little nod — did he recognize me? I hoped not, because I didn’t want him to start talking about where he’d seen me last. What if the CorpSeCorps were still trying to track down Lucerne’s pretend sex-slaver? What if they found Zeb through me and he ended up without his parts, in a freezer? That was a horrifying thought.

But surely even if he did remember me, Glenn wouldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t want them finding out about Pilar and the Gardeners and whatever he’d been doing with them. I was sure it was something illegal, or why would Pilar have sent Amanda and me away? It must have been to protect us.

Glenn acted like he didn’t care about anybody, him and his black T-shirts. But after a while Jimmy started hanging out with him, and then I wasn’t seeing so much of Jimmy.

“What do you do with that Glenn? He’s creepy,” I said one afternoon when we were doing our homework on the school library computers. Jimmy said they only played three-dimensional chess or online video games, at his place or else at Glenn’s. I thought they were probably watching porn — most of the guys did, and a lot of girls too — so I asked what games. Barbarian Stomp, he said — that was a war game. Blood and Roses was like Monopoly, only you had to corner the genocide and atrocity market. Extinctathon was a trivia game you played with extinct animals.

“Maybe I could come over one day and play too,” I said, but he didn’t go for that. So I guessed that they really were watching porn.

Then a really bad thing happened: Jimmy’s mother disappeared. Not kidnapped, they said: she’d gone on her own. I heard Lucerne talking about it to Frank: it seemed that Jimmy’s mother had made off with a lot of crucial data, so the CorpSeCorps were all over Jimmy’s house like a rash. And since Jimmy was such a buddy of mine, said Lucerne, they might soon be swarming all over us as well. Not that we had anything to hide. But it would be a nuisance.

I texted Jimmy right away and said how sorry I was about his mother, and was there anything I could do. He wasn’t at school, but he texted me later that week, then came over to my place. He was very depressed. It was bad enough that his mother was gone, he said, but also the CorpSeCorps had asked his dad to help them with their inquiries, which meant that his dad was carted off in a black solarvan; and now two female CorpSers were snooping around the house and asking him a lot of stupid questions. Worst of all, Jimmy’s mother had stolen Killer to let her loose in the wild — she’d left him a note about it. But the wild was totally wrong for Killer, because she’d be eaten by bobkittens.

“Oh Jimmy,” I said. “That’s terrible.” I put my arms around him and hugged him: he was sort of crying. I started crying too, and we stroked each other carefully, as if both of us had broken arms or diseases, and then we slid tenderly into my bed, still holding on to each other as if we were drowning, and we started kissing each other. I felt I was helping Jimmy and he was helping me at the same time. It was like a feast day back at the Gardeners, when we’d do everything in a special way because it was in honour of something. That’s what this was like: it was
in honour.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Jimmy said.

Oh Jimmy, I thought. I’m putting Light around you.

42

After that first time I felt very happy, as if I was singing. Not a doleful song, more like a bird song. I loved being in bed with Jimmy, it made me feel so safe to have his arms around me, and it was amazing to me how slippery and silky one skin felt against another skin. The body has a wisdom of its own, Adam One used to say: he’d been talking about the immune system, but it was true in another way. That wisdom wasn’t merely like singing, it was like dancing, only better. I was in love with Jimmy, and I had to believe that Jimmy was just as in love with me.

I wrote in my diary: JIMMY. Then I underlined it in red and drew a red heart. I still distrusted writing enough not to put in everything that was happening, but each time we had sex I drew another heart and coloured it in.

I wanted to phone Amanda and tell her about it, even though Amanda had said once that people telling you about their sex was as boring as people telling you about their dreams. But when I went into my closet and took out my plush tiger, the purple phone was no longer there.

I felt cold all over. My diary was still inside the bear, where I’d hidden it. But I had no phone.

Then Lucerne came into my room. She said, didn’t I know that any phone inside the Compound had to be registered, so people couldn’t phone out industrial secrets? It was a crime to have an unregistered phone, and the CorpSeCorps could track such phones. Didn’t I know that?

I shook my head. “Can they tell who was called?” I said. She said they could trace the number, which could be really bad news for the callers at both ends. She didn’t say,
really bad news,
she said,
unfortunate consequences.

Then she said that despite my obvious belief that she was a bad mother, she did have my best interests at heart. For instance, if she happened to find a purple phone with a frequently called number, she might leave a text message at that called number, such as “Dump it!!” So if they did locate that second phone, it would be inside a dumpster. And she herself would dispose of the purple one. And now she was going to play golf, and she hoped I would think very carefully about what she’d just said.

I did think very carefully. I thought,
Lucerne went out of her way to save Amanda. She must’ve known that’s who I was phoning. But she hates Amanda. So really, Lucerne went out of her way to save Zeb: despite everything, she still loves him.

Now that I was in love with Jimmy I had more sympathy for Lucerne and the way she used to behave around Zeb. I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn’t even know would be helped by it. The example he used was of someone being killed by a virus and then eaten by vultures. I hadn’t liked that comparison, but the general idea was true; because here was Lucerne, sending that text message because she loved Zeb, but as a side effect saving Amanda, which hadn’t been her original intention. So Adam One was right.

But meanwhile I’d lost touch with Amanda. I felt very sad about that.

Jimmy and I still did our homework together. Sometimes we really did do it, when there were other people around. The rest of the time we didn’t. It would take us about a minute to get out of our clothes and into each other, and Jimmy would be running his hands all over me and saying I was so slender, like a sylph — he liked words like that, not that I always knew what they meant. He said sometimes he felt like a child molester. Later I’d write down some of the things he’d said, as if they were prophecies.
Jimmy is so great he said Im a silf.
I didn’t care that much about spelling, only about the feeling.

I loved him so much. But then I made a mistake. I asked him if he was still in love with Wakulla or did he love me instead? I shouldn’t have asked that. He waited too long to answer and then he said, Did it matter? I wanted to say yes, but instead I said no. Then Wakulla Price moved to the West Coast, and Jimmy got moody and went back to spending more time with Glenn than he spent with me. So that was the answer, and it made me very unhappy.

Despite that we were still having sex, though not very often — the red hearts in my diary were getting farther and farther apart. Then I saw Jimmy by accident at the mall with this foul-mouthed older girl called LyndaLee, who was rumoured to be going through all the boys at school, one by one but fast, like eating soynuts. Jimmy had his hand right on her ass, and then she pulled down his head and kissed him. It was a long, wet kiss. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of Jimmy with her, and I remembered something Amanda once said about diseases, and I thought, Whatever LyndaLee’s got, I’ve got too. And I went home and threw up, and cried, and then I got into my big white bathtub and had a warm bath. But it wasn’t much comfort.

Jimmy didn’t know I knew about him and LyndaLee. A few days later he asked if he could come over as usual, and I said yes. I wrote in my diary,
Jimmy you nosy brat I know your reading this, I hate it just because I fucked you doesn’t mean I like you so STAY OUT!
Two red lines under
hate,
three under
stay out.
Then I left the diary on the top of my dresser. Your enemies could use your writing against you, I thought, but also you could use it against them.

After the sex I took a shower by myself, and when I came out, Jimmy was reading my diary, and said why did I hate him all of a sudden? So I told him. I used words I’d never said out loud before, and Jimmy said he was wrong for me, he was incapable of commitment because of Wakulla Price, she’d turned him into an emotional dumpster, but maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched. And I asked exactly how many that would be? I couldn’t stand it that he would just include me in a big basket of girls, as if we were peaches or turnips. Then he said he really liked me as a person, which was why he was being honest with me, and I told him to get stuffed. So we broke up on bad terms.

The stretch of time after that was very dark. I wondered what I was doing on the Earth: no one would care much if I wasn’t on it any more. Maybe I should cast away what Adam One called my husk and transform into a vulture or a worm. But then I remembered how the Gardeners used to say,
Ren, your life is a precious gift, and where there is a gift there is a Giver, and when you’ve been given a gift you should always say thank you.
So that was some help.

Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.

What I did next wasn’t good, and I’m still ashamed of it. I walked up to Glenn in the cafeteria — it took a lot of courage because Glenn was so cool he was practically frozen. And I asked him if he’d like to hang out with me. What I had in mind was that I’d have sex with Glenn, and Jimmy would find out and be wrecked. Not that I wanted sex with Glenn, it would be like shagging a salad server. Kind of flat and wooden.

Glenn said, “Hang out?” in a puzzled way. “Aren’t you with Jimmy?” I said it was over, and anyway it was never serious because Jimmy was such a clown. Then I blurted out the next thing that came into my head.

“I saw you with the Gardeners, at the Tree of Life,” I said. “Remember? I was the one who walked you over to see Pilar. With that honey?” He looked alarmed, and said we should get a Happicappuchino and talk.

We did talk. We talked a lot. We hung out in the mall so much that kids started saying we were a thing, but we weren’t — it was never a romance. What was it then? I guess Glenn was the only person at HelthWyzer I could talk to about the Gardeners, and it was the same for him — that was the bond. It was like being in a secret club. Maybe Jimmy was never my twin at all — maybe it was Glenn. Which is a strange thought, because he was a strange guy. More like a cyborg, which was what Wakulla Price used to call him. Were we friends? I wouldn’t even call it that. Sometimes he looked at me as if I was an amoeba, or some problem he was solving in Nanobioforms.

Glenn already knew quite a lot about the Gardeners, but he wanted to know more. What it was like to live with them every day. What they did and said, what they really believed. He’d get me to sing the songs, he’d want me to repeat what Adam One said in his Saint and Feast Day speeches: Glenn never laughed at them the way Jimmy would have if I’d ever done that for him. Instead he’d ask things like, “So, they think we should use nothing except recycled. But what if the Corps stopped making anything new? We’ll run out.” Sometimes he’d ask me more personal things, like “Would you eat animals if you were starving?” and “Do you think the Waterless Flood is really going to happen?” But I didn’t always know the answers.

He’d talk about other things too. One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn’t have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn’t be a single person, it would be the technological connections. I said, you mean like coding and splicing, and he said, “Something like that.”

Once he asked me if I thought God was a cluster of neurons, and if so, whether people having that cluster had been passed down by natural selection because it conferred a competitive edge, or whether maybe it was just a spandrel, such as having red hair, which didn’t matter one way or another to your survival chances. A lot of the time I felt way out of my depth with him, so I’d say, “What do you think?” He always had an answer to that.

Jimmy did see us together at the mall, and he did seem taken aback; though not for long, because I caught him giving Glenn a thumbs-up, as if saying,
Go for it, buddy, be my guest!
As if I was his property and he was sharing.

Jimmy and Glenn graduated two years before I did and went off to college. Glenn went to Watson-Crick with all the brainiacs, and Jimmy went to the Martha Graham Academy, which was for kids with no math and science potential. So at least I didn’t have to watch Jimmy at school any more, coming on to this or that new girl. But it was almost worse with Jimmy not there than with him there.

I put in the next two years somehow. My marks were poor, and I didn’t think I’d get in anywhere for college — I’d end up as a minimumwage meat slave, working at SecretBurgers or somewhere like that. But Lucerne pulled some strings. I heard her talking about it to one of her golf-club friends: “She’s not stupid, but that cult experience ruined her motivation, so the Martha Graham Academy is the best we could do.” So I’d be in the same space with Jimmy: that made me so nervous I felt sick.

The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said,
Be careful what you write.
There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I’d drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.

Part of me thought I would find Jimmy again at Martha Graham, and he would say it was me he’d loved all along, and could we get back together, and I’d forgive him and everything would be wonderful, the way it had been at first. But the other part of me realized that the chances of that were nothing. Adam One used to say that people can believe two opposite things at the same time, and now I knew it was true.