Pixieland Jazz

One day a different man came, one they’d never seen before – a tall thin man, taller than Uncle En, with ill-fitting clothes and a pock-marked face – and said that all of them would have to come with him. Uncle En had sold his flower business, this man said; the flowers, and the flower-sellers, and everything else. He’d gone away, he’d moved to a different city. So this tall man was the boss now.

A year or so later, Oryx was told – by a girl who’d been with her the first weeks in the room with the mattresses, and had turned up again in her new life, her life of movie-making – that this wasn’t the real story. The real story was that Uncle En had been found floating in one of the city’s canals with his throat cut.

This girl had seen him. No, that was wrong – she hadn’t seen him, but she knew somebody who had. There was no doubt about who it was. His stomach was puffed up like a pillow, his face was bloated, but it was Uncle En all right. He had no clothes on – someone must have taken them. Maybe someone else, not the one who’d cut his throat, or maybe the same one, because what use did a corpse have for good clothes like his? No watch on him either. “No money,” the girl had said, and she’d laughed. “No pockets, so no money!”

“There were canals in this city?” Jimmy asked. He thought maybe that would give him a clue as to which city it had been. In those days he’d wanted to know whatever it was possible to know, about Oryx, about anywhere she’d been. He’d wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He’d tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he’d shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more – he was convinced – he loved her.

“Oh yes, there were canals,” Oryx said. “The farmers used them, and the flower-growers, to get to the markets. They tied up their boats and sold what they had right there, right at the quays. That was a pretty sight, from a distance. So many flowers.” She looked at him: she could often tell what he was thinking. “But a lot of cities have canals,” she said. “And rivers. The rivers are so useful, for the garbage and the dead people and the babies that get thrown away, and the shit.” Although she didn’t like it when he swore, she sometimes liked to say what she called bad words herself, because it shocked him. She had a large supply of bad words once she got going. “Don’t worry so much, Jimmy,” she added more gently. “It was a long time ago.” More often than not she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself – herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.

So Uncle En had ended up in the canal. He’d been unlucky. He hadn’t paid off the right people, or he hadn’t paid them off enough. Or maybe they’d tried to buy his business and the price was too low and he wouldn’t do it. Or his own men had sold him out. There were many things that could have happened to him. Or maybe it was nothing planned – just an accident, a random killing, just a thief. Uncle En had been careless, he’d gone out walking by himself. Though he wasn’t a careless man.

“I cried when I heard about it,” said Oryx. “Poor Uncle En.”

“Why are you defending him?” Jimmy asked. “He was vermin, he was a cockroach!”

“He liked me.”

“He liked the money!”

“Of course, Jimmy,” said Oryx. “Everyone likes that. But he could have done much worse things to me, and he didn’t do them. I cried when I heard he was dead. I cried and cried.”

“What worse things? What much worse?”

“Jimmy, you worry too much.”

The children were herded out of the room with the grey mattresses, and Oryx never saw it again. She never saw most of the other children again. They were divided up, and one went this way and one that. Oryx was sold to a man who made movies. She was the only one of them that went with the movie man. He told her she was a pretty little girl and asked how old she was, but she didn’t know the answer to that. He asked her wouldn’t she like to be in a movie. She’d never seen a movie so she didn’t know whether she would like it or not; but it sounded like an offer of a treat, so she said yes. By this time she was good at knowing when yes was the expected answer.

The man drove her in a car with some other girls, three or four, girls she didn’t know. They stayed overnight at a house, a big house. It was a house for rich people; it had a high wall around it with broken glass and barbed wire on the top, and they went in through a gate. Inside, it had a rich smell.

“What do you mean, a rich smell?” Jimmy asked, but Oryx couldn’t say. Rich was just a thing you learned to tell. The house smelled like the better hotels she’d been in: many different foods cooking, wooden furniture, polishes and soap, all those smells mixed in. There must have been flowers, flowering trees or bushes nearby, because that was some of the smell. There were carpets on the floor but the children didn’t walk on them; the carpets were in a big room, and they went past the open door and looked in and saw them. They were blue and pink and red, such beauty.

The room they were put in was next to the kitchen. Perhaps it was a storeroom, or it had been one: there was the smell of rice and of the bags it was packed in, though no rice was in that room then. They were fed – better food than usual, said Oryx, there was chicken in it – and told not to make any noise. Then they were locked in. There were dogs at that house; you could hear them outside in the yard, barking.

The next day some of them went in a truck, in the back of a truck. There were two other children, both girls, both of them small like Oryx. One of them had just come from a village and missed her people there, and cried a lot, silently, hiding her face. They were lifted up into the back of the truck and locked in, and it was dark and hot and they got thirsty, and when they had to pee they had to do it in the truck because there was no stopping. There was a little window though, up high, so some air got in.

It was only a couple of hours, but it seemed like more because of the heat and the darkness. When they got to where they were going they were handed over to another man, a different one, and the truck drove off.

“Was there any writing on it? The truck?” asked Jimmy, sleuthing.

“Yes. It was red writing.”

“What did it say?”

“How would I know?” said Oryx reproachfully.

Jimmy felt foolish. “Was there a picture, then?”

“Yes. There was a picture,” said Oryx after a moment.

“A picture of what?”

Oryx thought. “It was a parrot. A red parrot.”

“Flying, or standing?”

“Jimmy, you are too strange!”

Jimmy held on to it, this red parrot. He kept it in mind. Sometimes it would appear to him in reveries, charged with mystery and hidden significance, a symbol free of all contexts. It must have been a brand name, a logo. He searched the Internet for Parrot, Parrot Brand, Parrot Inc., Redparrot. He found Alex the cork-nut parrot who’d said I’m going away now, but that was no help to him because Alex was the wrong colour. He wanted the red parrot to be a link between the story Oryx had told him and the so-called real world. He wanted to be walking along a street or trolling through the Web, and eureka, there it would be, the red parrot, the code, the password, and then many things would become clear.

The building where the movies were made was in a different city, or it might have been in a different part of the same city, because the city was very big, said Oryx. The room she stayed in with the other girls was in that building too. They almost never went outside, except up onto the flat roof sometimes when the movie was to be made up there. Some of the men who came to the building wanted to be outside while the movie was being filmed. They wanted to be seen, and at the same time they wanted to be hidden: the roof had a wall around it. “Maybe they wanted God to see them,” said Oryx. “What do you think, Jimmy? They were showing off to God? I think so.”

These men all had ideas about what should be in their movie. They wanted things in the background, chairs or trees, or they wanted ropes or screaming, or shoes. Sometimes they would say, Just do it, I’m paying for it, or things like that, because everything in these movies had a price. Every hair bow, every flower, every object, every gesture. If the men thought up something new, there would have to be a discussion about how much that new thing ought to cost.

“So I learned about life,” said Oryx.

“Learned what?” said Jimmy. He shouldn’t have had the pizza, and the weed they’d smoked on top of that. He was feeling a little sick.

“That everything has a price.”

“Not everything. That can’t be true. You can’t buy time. You can’t buy . . .” He wanted to say love, but hesitated. It was too soppy.

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”

“Not me,” said Jimmy, trying to joke. “I don’t have a price.”

Wrong, as usual.

Being in a movie, said Oryx, was doing what you were told. If they wanted you to smile then you had to smile, if they wanted you to cry you had to do that too. Whatever it was, you had to do it, and you did it because you were afraid not to. You did what they told you to do to the men who came, and then sometimes those men did things to you. That was movies.

“What sort of things?” said Snowman.

“You know,” said Oryx. “You saw. You have the picture of it.”

“I only saw that one,” said Snowman. “Only the one, with you in.”

“I bet you saw more with me in. You don’t remember. I could look different, I could wear different clothes and wigs, I could be someone else, do other things.”

“Like what else? What else did they make you do?”

“They were all the same, those movies,” said Oryx. She’d washed her hands, she was painting her nails now, her delicate oval nails, so perfectly shaped. Peach-coloured, to match the flowered wrapper she was wearing. Not a smudge on her. Later on she would do her toes.

It was less boring for the children to make the movies than to do what they did the rest of the time, which was nothing much. They watched cartoons on the old DVD in one of the rooms, mice and birds being chased around by other animals that could never catch them; or they brushed and braided one another’s hair, or they ate and slept. Sometimes other people came to use the space, to make different kinds of movies. Grown-up women came, women with breasts, and grown-up men – actors. The children could watch them making those movies if they didn’t get in the way. Though sometimes the actors objected because the little girls would giggle at their penises – so big, and then sometimes, all of a sudden, so small – and then the children had to go back into their room.

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 . . .”

“Did they ever what?”

“They didn’t. Not when you were that young. They couldn’t have.”

“Please, Jimmy, tell me what you are asking.” Oh, very cool. He wanted to shake her.

“Did they rape you?” He could barely squeeze it out. What answer was he expecting, what did he want?

“Why do you want to talk about ugly things?” she said. Her voice was silvery, like a music box. She waved one hand in the air to dry the nails. “We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It’s not good for you.”

She would never tell him. Why did this drive him so crazy? “It wasn’t real sex, was it?” he asked. “In the movies. It was only acting. Wasn’t it?”

“But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.”