They washed a lot—that was important. They took showers with a bucket. They were supposed to be pure-looking. On a bad day when there was no business they would get tired and restless, and then they would argue and fight. Sometimes they’d be given a toke or a drink to calm them down—beer, maybe—but no hard drugs, those would shrivel them up; and they weren’t allowed to smoke. The man in charge—the big man, not the man with the camera—said they shouldn’t smoke because it would make their teeth brown. They did smoke sometimes anyway, because the man with the camera might give them a cigarette to share.
The man with the camera was white, and his name was Jack. He was the one they mostly saw. He had hair like frayed rope and he smelled too strong, because he was a meat-eater. He ate so much meat! He didn’t like fish. He didn’t like rice either, but he liked noodles. Noodles with lots of meat.
Jack said that where he came from the movies were bigger and better, the best in the world. He kept saying he wanted to go home. He said it was only pure dumb chance he wasn’t dead—that this fucking country hadn’t killed him with its lousy food. He said he’d almost died from some disease he’d got from the water and the only thing that had saved him was getting really, really pissed, because alcohol killed germs. Then he had to explain to them about germs. The little girls laughed about the germs, because they didn’t believe in them; but they believed about the disease, because they’d seen that happen. Spirits caused it, everyone knew that. Spirits and bad luck. Jack had not said the right prayers.
Jack said he would get sick more often from the rotten food and water, only he had a really strong stomach. He said you needed a strong stomach in this business. He said the videocam was antique-roadshow junk and the lights were poor so no wonder everything looked like cheap shit. He said he wished he had a million dollars but he’d pissed all his money away. He said he couldn’t hold on to money, it slid off him like water off a greased whore. “Don’t be like me when you grow up,” he would say. And the girls would laugh, because whatever else happened to them they would never be like him, a rope-haired clownish giant with a cock like a wrinkly old carrot.
Oryx said she had many chances to see that old carrot up close, because Jack wanted to do movie things with her when there were no movies. Then he would be sad and tell her he was sorry. That was puzzling.
“You did it for nothing?” said Jimmy. “I thought you said everything has a price.” He didn’t feel he’d won the argument about money, he wanted another turn.
Oryx paused, lifting the nail-polish brush. She looked at her hand. “I traded him,” she said.
“Traded him for what?” said Jimmy. “What did that pathetic prick of a loser have to offer?”
“Why do you think he is bad?” said Oryx. “He never did anything with me that you don’t do. Not nearly so many things!”
“I don’t do them against your will,” said Jimmy. “Anyway you’re grown up now.”
Oryx laughed. “What is my will?” she said. Then she must have seen his pained look, so she stopped laughing. “He taught me to read,” she said quietly. “To speak English, and to read English words. Talking first, then reading, not so good at first, and I still don’t talk so good but you always have to start somewhere, don’t you think so, Jimmy?”
“You talk perfectly,” said Jimmy.
“You don’t need to tell lies to me. So that is how. It took a long time, but he was very patient. He had one book, I don’t know where he got it but it was a book for children. It had a girl in it with long braids, and stockings—that was a hard word, stockings—who jumped around and did whatever she liked. So this is what we read. It was a good trade, because, Jimmy, if I hadn’t done it I couldn’t be talking to you, no?”
“Done what?” said Jimmy. He couldn’t stand it. If he had this Jack, this piece of garbage, in the room right now he’d wring his neck like a wormy old sock. “What did you do for him? You sucked him off?”
“Crake is right,” said Oryx coldly. “You do not have an elegant mind.”
Elegant mind was just mathtalk, that patronizing jargon the math nerds used, but it hurt Jimmy anyway. No. What hurt was the thought of Oryx and Crake discussing him that way, behind his back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He ought to know better than to speak so bluntly to her.
“Now maybe I wouldn’t do it, but I was a child then,” said Oryx more softly. “Why are you so angry?”
“I don’t buy it,” said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?
“You don’t buy what?”
“Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap.”
“If you don’t want to buy that, Jimmy,” said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, “what is it that you would like to buy instead?”
Jack had a name for the building where the movies went on. He called it Pixieland. None of the children knew what that meant—Pixieland—because it was an English word and an English idea, and Jack couldn’t explain it. “All right, pixies, rise and shine,” he’d say. “Candy time!” He brought candies for them as a treat, sometimes. “Want a candy, candy?” he’d say. That also was a joke, but they didn’t know what it meant either.
He let them see the movies of themselves if he felt like it, or if he’d just been doing drugs. They could tell when he’d been shooting or snorting, because he was happier then. He liked to play pop music while they were working, something with a bounce. Upbeat, he called it. Elvis Presley, things like that. He said he liked the golden oldies, from back when songs had words. “Call me sentimental,” he said, causing puzzlement. He liked Frank Sinatra too, and Doris Day: Oryx knew all the words to “Love Me or Leave Me” before she had any idea what they meant. “Sing us some pixieland jazz,” Jack would say, and so that was what Oryx would sing. He was always pleased.
“What was this guy’s name?” said Jimmy. What a jerk, this Jack. Jack the jerk, the jerkoff. Name-calling helped, thought Jimmy. He’d like to twist the guy’s head off.
“His name was Jack. I told you. He told us a poem about it, in English. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack has got a big candlestick.”
“I mean his other name.”
“He didn’t have another name.”
Working was what Jack called what they did. Working girls, he called them. He used to say, Whistle while you work. He used to say, Work harder. He used to say, Put some jazz into it. He used to say, Act like you mean it, or you want to get hurt? He used to say, Come on, sex midgets, you can do better. He used to say, You’re only young once.
“That’s all,” said Oryx.
“What do you mean, that’s all?”
“That’s all there was,” she said. “That’s all there was to it.”
“What about, did they ever…”