Once he’d read, 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. Her name had been Brenda. Cute, a gum-chewer, sat in front of him in Life Skills class. She’d had a solar-battery robodog on her dresser that barked, fetched a plastic bone, and lifted its leg to pee yellow water. It’s always struck him how the toughest and most bitchy girls had the schmaltziest, squishiest doodads in their bedrooms.
The vanity table holds the standard collection of firming creams, hormone treatments, ampoules and injections, cosmetics, colognes. In the half-light that comes through the slatted blinds these things gleam darkly, like a still life muted with varnish. He sprays himself with the stuff in one of the bottles, a musky scent he hopes might cut the other smells in here. Crack Cocaine, its label says in raised gold lettering. He thinks briefly about drinking it, but remembers he has the bourbon.
Then he bends down to take stock of himself in the oval mirror. He can’t resist the mirrors in the places he breaks into, he sneaks a peek at himself every chance he has. Increasingly it’s a shock. A stranger stares back at him, bleary-eyed, hollow-cheeked, pocked with bug-bite scabs. He looks twenty years older than he is. He winks, grins at himself, sticks out his tongue: the effect is truly sinister. Behind him in the glass the husk of the woman in the bed seems almost like a real woman; as if at any moment she might turn towards him, open her arms, whisper to him to come and get her. Her and her pixie hair.
Oryx had a wig like that. She liked to dress up, change her appearance, pretend to be different women. She’d strut around the room, do a little strip, wiggle and pose. She said men liked variety.
“Who told you that?” Jimmy asked her.
“Oh, someone.” Then she laughed. That was right before he scooped her up and her wig fell off… Jimmee! But he can’t afford to think about Oryx right now.
He finds himself standing in the middle of the room, hands dangling, mouth open. “I have been unintelligent,” he says out loud.
Next door there’s a child’s room, with a computer in gay red plastic, a shelf of teddy bears, a wallpaper frieze of giraffes, and a stash of CDs containing—judging from the pictures on them—some extremely violent computer games. But there’s no child, no child’s body. Maybe it died and was cremated in those first few days when cremations were still taking place; or maybe it was frightened when its parents keeled over and began gurgling blood, and it ran away somewhere else. Maybe it was one of the cloth and bone bundles he passed on the streets outside. Some of them were quite small.
He locates the linen closet in the hall and exchanges his filthy sheet for a fresh one, this time not plain but patterned with scrolls and flowers. That will make an impression among the Craker kids. “Look,” they’ll say. “Snowman is growing leaves!” They wouldn’t put it past him. There’s a whole stack of clean sheets in the closet, neatly folded, but he takes only the one. He doesn’t want to weight himself down with stuff he doesn’t really need. If he has to he can always come back for more.
He hears his mother’s voice telling him to put the discarded sheet into the laundry hamper—old neurological pathways die hard—but he drops it onto the floor instead and goes back downstairs, into the kitchen. He hopes he’ll find some canned food there, soy stew or beans and fake wieners, anything with protein in it—even some vegetables would be nice, ersatz or not, he’ll take anything—but whoever smashed the window also cleaned out the cupboard. There’s a handful of dry cereal in a plastic snap-top container, so he eats that; it’s unadulterated junk-gene cardboard and he has to chew it a lot and drink some water to get it down. He finds three packets of cashew nuts, snac-pacs from the bullet train, and gobbles one of them immediately; it isn’t too stale. There’s also a tin of SoyOBoy sardines. Otherwise there’s only a half-empty bottle of ketchup, dark brown and fermenting.
He knows better than to open the refrigerator. Some of the smell in the kitchen is coming from there.
In one of the drawers under the counter there’s a flashlight that works. He takes that, and a couple of candle ends, and some matches. He finds a plastic garbage bag, right where it should be, and puts everything into it, including the sardines and the other two packs of cashews, and the bourbon and the soap and aspirin. There are some knives, not very sharp; he chooses two, and a small cooking pot. That will come in handy if he can find something to cook.
Down the hallway, tucked in between the kitchen and the utility room, there’s a small home office. A desk with a dead computer, a fax, a printer; also a container with plastic pens, a shelf with reference books—a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bartlett’s, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The striped-pyjamas guy upstairs must have been a word person, then: a RejoovenEsense speechwriter, an ideological plumber, a spin doctor, a hairsplitter for hire. Poor bugger, thinks Snowman.
Beside a vase of withered flowers and a framed father-and-son snapshot—the child was a boy then, seven or eight—there’s a telephone scratch pad. Scrawled across the top page are the words GET LAWN MOWED. Then, in smaller, fainter letters, Call clinic… The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it both. Snowman can picture the guy figuring it out as he looked down at his own moving hand. He must have been an early case, or he wouldn’t still have been worrying about his lawn.
The back of his neck prickles again. Why does he have the feeling that it’s his own house he’s broken into? His own house from twenty-five years ago, himself the missing child.
Twister
Snowman makes his way through the curtained demi-light of the living room to the front of the house, plotting his future course. He’ll have to try for a house richer in canned goods, or even a mall. He could camp out there overnight, up on one of the top shelving racks; that way he could take his time, bag only the best. Who knows? There may still be some chocolate bars. Then, when he knows he’s covered the nutrition angle, he can head for the bubble-dome, pilfer the arsenal. Once he’s got a functional spraygun in his hands again he’ll feel a lot safer.
He throws his stick out through the broken window, then climbs out himself, taking care not to rip his new flowered sheet or cut himself or tear his plastic bag on the jagged glass. Directly across from him on the overgrown lawn, cutting off access to the street, there’s a quintuplet of pigoons, rooting around in a small heap of trash he hopes is only clothing. A boar, two sows, two young. When they hear him they stop feeding and lift their heads: they see him, all right. He raises his stick, shakes it at them. Usually they bolt if he does that—pigoons have long memories, and sticks look like electroprods—but this time they stand their ground. They’re sniffing in his direction, as if puzzled; maybe they smell the perfume he sprayed on himself. The stuff could have analogue mammalian sex pheromones in it, which would be just his luck. Trampled to death by lustful pigoons. What a moronic finish.
What can he do if they charge? Only one option: scramble back through the window. Does he have time for that? Despite the stubby legs carrying their enormous bulk, the damn things can run very fast. The kitchen knives are in his garbage bag; in any case they’re too short and flimsy to do much damage to a full-sized pigoon. It would be like trying to stick a paring knife into a truck tire.