Jimmy's father had been apologetic towards him lately, as if he'd punished Jimmy for something Jimmy hadn't done and was sorry about it. He was saying Right, Jimmy? a bit too much.
Jimmy didn't like that - he didn't like being the one handing out the good marks. There were a few other moves of his father's he could do without as well - the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope. Jimmy had done enough faking himself so he could spot it in others, most of the time. He stroked the little rakunk and didn't answer.
"Who's going to feed it and empty the litter box?" said Jimmy's mother. "Because it won't be me." She didn't say this angrily, but in a detached, matter-of-fact voice, as if she was a bystander, someone on the sidelines; as if Jimmy and the chore of taking care of him, and his unsatisfactory father, and the scufflings between her and him, and the increasingly heavy baggage of all their lives, had nothing to do with her. She didn't seem to get angry any more, she didn't go charging out of the house in her slippers. She had become slowed-down and deliberate.
"Jimmy hasn't asked you to. He'll do it himself. Right, Jimmy?" said his father.
"What are you going to call it?" said his mother. She didn't really want to know, she was getting at Jimmy in some way. She didn't like it when he warmed up to anything his father gave him. "Bandit, I suppose."
That was exactly the name Jimmy had been thinking of, because of the black mask. "No," he said. "That's boring. I'm calling him Killer."
"Good choice, son," said his father.
"Well, if Killer wets on the floor, be sure you clean it up," said his mother.
Jimmy took Killer up to his room, where it made a nest in his pillow. It did have a faint smell, strange but not unpleasant, leathery and sharp, like a bar of designer soap for men. He slept with his arm crooked around it, his nose next to its own small nose.
~
It must have been a month or two after he got the rakunk that Jimmy's father changed jobs. He was headhunted by NooSkins and hired at the second-in-command level - the Vice level, Jimmy's mother called it. Ramona the lab tech from OrganInc made the move with him; she was part of the deal because she was an invaluable asset, said Jimmy's father; she was his right-hand man. ("Joke," he would say to Jimmy, to show that he knew Ramona wasn't really a man. But Jimmy knew that anyway.) Jimmy was more or less glad he might still be seeing Ramona at lunch - at least she was someone familiar - even though his lunches with his father had become few in number and far between.
NooSkins was a subsidiary of HelthWyzer, and so they moved into the HelthWyzer Compound. Their house this time was in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with an arched portico and a lot of glazed earth-tone tiles, and the indoor pool was bigger. Jimmy's mother called it "this barn." She complained about the tight security at the HelthWyzer gates - the guards were ruder, they were suspicious of everyone, they liked to strip search people, women especially. They got a kick out of it, she said.
Jimmy's father said she was making a big deal about nothing. Anyway, he said, there'd been an incident only a few weeks before they'd moved in - some fanatic, a woman, with a hostile bioform concealed in a hairspray bottle. Some vicious Ebola or Marburg splice, one of the fortified hemorrhagics. She'd nuked a guard who'd unwisely had his face mask off, contrary to orders but because of the heat. The woman had been spraygunned at once and neutralized in a vat of bleach, and the poor guard had been whisked into HotBioform and stuck into an isolation room, where he'd dissolved into a puddle of goo. No greater damage done, but naturally the guards were jumpy.
Jimmy's mother said that didn't change the fact that she felt like a prisoner. Jimmy's father said she didn't understand the reality of the situation. Didn't she want to be safe, didn't she want her son to be safe?
"So it's for my own good?" she said. She was cutting a piece of French toast into even-sided cubes, taking her time.
"For our own good. For us."
"Well, I happen to disagree."
"No news there," said Jimmy's father.
According to Jimmy's mother their phones and e-mail were bugged, and the sturdy, laconic HelthWyzer housecleaners that came twice a week - always in pairs - were spies. Jimmy's father said she was getting paranoid, and anyway they had nothing to hide, so why worry about it?
The HelthWyzer Compound was not only newer than the OrganInc layout, it was bigger. It had two shopping malls instead of one, a better hospital, three dance clubs, even its own golf course. Jimmy went to the HelthWyzer Public School, where at first he didn't know anyone. Despite his initial loneliness, that wasn't too bad. Actually it was good, because he could recycle his old routines and jokes: the kids at OrganInc had become used to his antics. He'd moved on from the chimpanzee act and was into fake vomiting and choking to death - both popular - and a thing where he drew a bare-naked girl on his stomach with her crotch right where his navel was, and made her wiggle.
He no longer came home for lunch. He got picked up by the school's combo ethanol-solarvan in the morning and returned by it at night. There was a bright and cheerful school cafeteria with balanced meals, ethnic choices - perogies, felafels - and a kosher option, and soy products for the vegetarians. Jimmy was so pleased to be able to eat lunch with neither one of his parents present that he felt light-headed. He even put on some weight, and stopped being the skinniest kid in class. If there was any lunchtime left over and nothing else going on, he could go to the library and watch old instructional CD-ROMs. Alex the parrot was his favourite, from Classics in Animal Behaviour Studies. He liked the part where Alex invented a new word - cork-nut, for almond - and, best of all, the part where Alex got fed up with the blue-triangle and yellow-square exercise and said, I'm going away now. No, Alex, you come back here! Which is the blue triangle - no, the blue triangle? But Alex was out the door. Five stars for Alex.
One day Jimmy was allowed to bring Killer to school, where she - it was now officially a she - made a big hit. "Oh Jimmy, you are so lucky," said Wakulla Price, the first girl he'd ever had a crush on. She stroked Killer's fur, brown hand, pink nails, and Jimmy felt shivery, as if her fingers were running over his own body.
Jimmy's father spent more and more time at his work, but talked about it less and less. There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle-and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.
The rewards in the case of success would be enormous, Jimmy's father explained, doing the straight-talking man-to-man act he had recently adopted with Jimmy. What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can? NooSkins for Olds, said the snappy logo. Not that a totally effective method had been found yet: the dozen or so ravaged hopefuls who had volunteered themselves as subjects, paying no fees but signing away their rights to sue, had come out looking like the Mould Creature from Outer Space - uneven in tone, greenish brown, and peeling in ragged strips.
But there were other projects at NooSkins as well. One evening Jimmy's father came home late and a little drunk, with a bottle of champagne. Jimmy took one look at this and got himself out of the way. He'd hidden a tiny mike behind the picture of the seashore in the living room and another one behind the kitchen wall clock - the one that gave a different irritating bird call for every hour - so he could listen in on st
uff that was none of his business. He'd put the mikes together in the Neotechnology class at school; he'd used standard components out of the mini-mikes for wireless computer dictating, which, with a few adjustments, worked fine for eavesdropping.
"What's that for?" said the voice of Jimmy's mother. She meant the champagne.
"We've done it," said Jimmy's father's voice. "I think a little celebration is in order." A scuffle: maybe he'd tried to kiss her.
"Done what?"
Pop of the champagne cork. "Come on, it won't bite you." A pause: he must be pouring it out. Yes: the clink of glasses. "Here's to us."
"Done what? I need to know what I'm drinking to."
Another pause: Jimmy pictured his father swallowing, his Adam's apple going up and down, bobbity-bobble. "It's the neuro-regeneration project. We now have genuine human neo-cortex tissue growing in a pigoon. Finally, after all those duds! Think of the possibilities, for stroke victims, and ..."
"That's all we need," said Jimmy's mother. "More people with the brains of pigs. Don't we have enough of those already?"
"Can't you be positive, just for once? All this negative stuff, this is no good, that's no good, nothing's ever good enough, according to you!"
"Positive about what? That you've thought up yet another way to rip off a bunch of desperate people?" said Jimmy's mother in that new slow, anger-free voice.
"God, you're cynical!"
"No, you are. You and your smart partners. Your colleagues. It's wrong, the whole organization is wrong, it's a moral cesspool and you know it."
"We can give people hope. Hope isn't ripping off!"
"At NooSkins' prices it is. You hype your wares and take all their money and then they run out of cash, and it's no more treatments for them. They can rot as far as you and your pals are concerned. Don't you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do? Making life better for people - not just people with money. You used to be so ... you had ideals, then."
"Sure," said Jimmy's father in a tired voice. "I've still got them. I just can't afford them."
A pause. Jimmy's mother must've been mulling that over. "Be that as it may," she said - a sign that she wasn't going to give in. "Be that as it may, there's research and there's research. What you're doing - this pig brain thing. You're interfering with the building blocks of life. It's immoral. It's ... sacrilegious."
Bang, on the table. Not his hand. The bottle? "I don't believe I'm hearing this! Who've you been listening to? You're an educated person, you did this stuff yourself! It's just proteins, you know that! There's nothing sacred about cells and tissue, it's just ..."
"I'm familiar with the theory."
"Anyway it's been paying for your room and board, it's been putting the food on your table. You're hardly in a position to take the high ground."
"I know," said Jimmy's mother's voice. "Believe me, that is one thing I really do know. Why can't you get a job doing something honest? Something basic."
"Like what and like where? You want me to dig ditches?"
"At least your conscience would be clean."
"No, yours would. You're the one with the neurotic guilt. Why don't you dig a few ditches yourself, at least it would get you off your butt. Then maybe you'd quit smoking - you're a one-woman emphysema factory, plus you're single-handedly supporting the tobacco companies. Think about that if you're so ethical. They're the folks who get six-year-olds hooked for life by passing out free samples."
"I know all that." A pause. "I smoke because I'm depressed. The tobacco companies depress me, you depress me, Jimmy depresses me, he's turning into a ..."
"Take some pills if you're so fucking depressed!"
"There's no need for swearing."
"I think maybe there is!" Jimmy's father yelling wasn't a complete novelty, but combined with the swearing it got Jimmy's full attention. Maybe there would be action, broken glass. He felt afraid - that cold lump in his stomach was back again - but he also felt compelled to listen. If there was going to be a catastrophe, some final collapse, he needed to witness it.
Nothing happened though, there was just the sound of footsteps going out of the room. Which one of them? Whoever it was would now come upstairs and check to make sure Jimmy was asleep and hadn't heard. Then they could tick off that item on the Terrific Parenting checklist they both carted around inside their heads. It wasn't the bad stuff they did that made Jimmy so angry, it was the good stuff. The stuff that was supposed to be good, or good enough for him. The stuff they patted themselves on the backs for. They knew nothing about him, what he liked, what he hated, what he longed for. They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe, not a numbers person, but you couldn't have everything you wanted and at least he wasn't a total washout. At least he wasn't a drunk or an addict like a lot of boys his age, so touch wood. He'd actually heard his dad say that: touch wood, as if Jimmy was bound to fuck up, wander off the tracks, but he just hadn't got around to it yet. About the different, secret person living inside him they knew nothing at all.
He turned off his computer and unplugged the earphones and doused the lights and got into bed, quietly and also carefully, because Killer was in there already. She was down at the bottom, she liked it there; she'd taken to licking his feet to get the salt off. It was ticklish; head under the covers, he shook with silent laughter.
Hammer
~
Several years passed. They must have passed, thinks Snowman: he can't actually remember much about them except that his voice cracked and he began to sprout body hair. Not a big thrill at the time except that it would have been worse not to. He got some muscles too. He started having sexy dreams and suffering from lassitude. He thought about girls a lot in the abstract, as it were - girls without heads - and about Wakulla Price with her head on, though she wouldn't hang out with him. Did he have zits, was that it? He can't remember having any; though, as he recalls, the faces of his rivals were covered in them.
Cork-nut, he'd say to anyone who pissed him off. Anyone who wasn't a girl. No one but him and Alex the parrot knew exactly what cork-nut meant, so it was pretty demolishing. It became a fad, among the kids at the HelthWyzer Compound, so Jimmy was considered medium-cool. Hey, cork-nut!
His secret best friend was Killer. Pathetic, that the only person he could really talk to was a rakunk. He avoided his parents as much as possible. His dad was a cork-nut and his mother was a drone. He was no longer frightened by their negative electrical field, he simply found them tedious, or so he told himself.
At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against them. He'd draw eyes on each of his index-finger knuckles and tuck his thumbs inside his fists. Then, by moving the thumbs up and down to show the mouths opening and closing, he could make these two hand-puppets argue together. His right hand was Evil Dad, his left hand was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit, Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom's cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemorrhoids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered. This lunchroom show of his was a hit; a crowd would collect, with requests. Jimmy, Jimmy - do Evil Dad! The other kids had lots of variations and routines to suggest, filched from the private lives of their own parental units. Some of them tried drawing eyes on their own knuckles, but they weren't as good at the dialogue.
Jimmy felt guilty sometimes, afterwards, when he'd gone too far. He shouldn't have had Righteous Mom weeping in the kitchen because her ovaries had burst; he shouldn't have done that sex scene with the Monday Special Fish Finger, 20% Real Fish - Evil Dad falling upon it and tearing it apart with lust because Righteous Mom was sulking inside an empty Twinkies package and wouldn't come out. Those skits were undignified, though that alone wouldn't have stopped him. They were also too close to an uncomfortable t
ruth Jimmy didn't want to examine. But the other kids egged him on, and he couldn't resist the applause.
"Was that out of line, Killer?" he would ask. "Was that too vile?" Vile was a word he'd recently discovered: Righteous Mom was using it a lot these days.
Killer would lick his nose. She always forgave him.
One day Jimmy came home from school and there was a note on the kitchen table. It was from his mother. He knew as soon as he saw the writing on the outside - For Jimmy, underlined twice in black - what sort of note it would be.
Dear Jimmy, it said. Blah blah blah, suffered with conscience long enough, blah blah, no longer participate in a lifestyle that is not only meaningless in itself but blah blah. She knew that when Jimmy was old enough to consider the implications of blah blah, he would agree with her and understand. She would be in contact with him later, if there was any possibility. Blah blah search will be conducted, inevitably; thus necessary to go into hiding. A decision not taken without much soul-searching and thought and anguish, but blah. She would always love him very much.
Maybe she had loved Jimmy, thinks Snowman. In her own manner. Though he hadn't believed it at the time. Maybe, on the other hand, she hadn't loved him. She must have had some sort of positive emotion about him though. Wasn't there supposed to be a maternal bond?
P.S., she'd said. I have taken Killer with me to liberate her, as I know she will be happier living a wild, free life in the forest.
Jimmy hadn't believed that either. He was enraged by it. How dare she? Killer was his! And Killer was a tame animal, she'd be helpless on her own, she wouldn't know how to fend for herself, everything hungry would tear her into furry black and white pieces. But Jimmy's mother and her ilk must have been right, thinks Snowman, and Killer and the other liberated rakunks must have been able to cope just fine, or how else to account for the annoyingly large population of them now infesting this neck of the woods?