Rakunk

He does have a listener: it’s a rakunk, a young one. He can see it now, its bright eyes peering out at him from under a bush.

“Here girl, here girl,” he says to it coaxingly. It backs away into the underbrush. If he worked at it, if he really tried, he could probably tame one of those, and then he’d have someone to talk to. Someone to talk to was nice, Oryx used to tell him. “You should try it sometime, Jimmy,” she’d say, kissing him on the ear.

“But I talk to you,” he’d protest.

Another kiss. “Do you?”

When Jimmy was ten he’d been given a pet rakunk, by his father.

What did his father look like? Snowman can’t get a fix on it. Jimmy’s mother persists as a clear image, full colour, with a glossy white paper frame around her like a Polaroid, but he can recall his father only in details: the Adam’s apple going up and down when he swallowed, the ears backlit against the kitchen window, the left hand lying on the table, cut off by the shirt cuff. His father is a sort of pastiche. Maybe Jimmy could never get far enough away from him to see all the parts at once.

The occasion for the gift of the rakunk must have been his birthday. He’s repressed his birthdays: they weren’t a matter for general celebration, not after Dolores the live-in Philippina left. When she was there, she’d always remember his birthday; she’d make a cake, or maybe she’d buy one, but anyway there it would be, a genuine cake, with icing and candles – isn’t that true? He clutches on to the reality of those cakes; he closes his eyes, conjures them up, hovering all in a row, their candles alight, giving off their sweet, comforting scent of vanilla, like Dolores herself.

His mother on the other hand could never seem to recall how old Jimmy was or what day he was born. He’d have to remind her, at breakfast; then she’d snap out of her trance and buy him some mortifying present – pyjamas for little kids with kangaroos or bears on them, a disk nobody under forty would ever listen to, underwear ornamented with whales – and tape it up in tissue paper and dump it on him at the dinner table, smiling her increasingly weird smile, as if someone had yelled Smile! and goosed her with a fork.

Then his father would put them all through an awkward excuse about why this really, really special and important date had somehow just slid out of his head, and ask Jimmy if everything was okay, and send him an e-birthday card – the OrganInc standard design with five winged pigoons doing a conga line and Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True – and come up with a gift for him the day after, a gift that would not be a gift but some tool or intelligence-enhancing game or other hidden demand that he measure up. But measure up to what? There was never any standard; or there was one, but it was so cloudy and immense that nobody could see it, especially not Jimmy. Nothing he could achieve would ever be the right idea, or enough. By OrganInc’s math-and-chem-and-applied-bio yardstick he must have seemed dull normal: maybe that was why his father stopped telling him he could do much better if he’d only try, and switched to doling out secretly disappointed praise, as if Jimmy had a brain injury.

So Snowman has forgotten everything else about Jimmy’s tenth birthday except the rakunk, brought home by his father in a carry-cage. It was a tiny one, smallest of the litter born from the second generation of rakunks, the offspring of the first pair that had been spliced. The rest of the litter had been snapped up immediately. Jimmy’s father made out that he’d had to spend a great deal of his time and throw his weight around and pull a lot of strings to get hold of this one, but all the effort had been worth it for this really, really special day, which had just happened as usual to fall on the day before.

The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of one of the OrganInc biolab hotshots. There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God. A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around – who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth? Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those. But the rakunks caught on as pets, inside OrganInc. They hadn’t come in from the outside world – the world outside the Compound – so they had no foreign microbes and were safe for the pigoons. In addition to which they were cute.

The little rakunk let Jimmy pick it up. It was black and white – black mask, white stripe down its back, black and white rings around its fluffy tail. It licked Jimmy’s fingers, and he fell in love with it.

“No smell to it, not like a skunk,” said Jimmy’s father. “It’s a clean animal, with a nice disposition. Placid. Racoons never made good pets once they were grown up, they got crabby, they’d tear your house to pieces. This thing is supposed to be calmer. We’ll see how the little guy does. Right, Jimmy?”

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 stuff 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 neocortex 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.