Free The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood

came the Corpsmen after each one, asking who Aunt Monica was. Jimmy said he didn’t know. He didn’t think his mother was in any of the countries the stamps were from, because she was way smarter than that. She must have got other people to mail them for her. Didn’t she trust him? Evidently not. He felt he’d disappointed her, he’d failed her in some crucial way. He’d never understood what was required of him. If only he could have one more chance to make her happy.
    “I am not my childhood,” Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can’t turn them off, he can’t change the subject, he can’t leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. They’d had that in grade school. Religion of the Week.
All right, class, now quiet as mice, that means you, Jimmy. Today we’re going to pretend we live in India, and we’re going to do a mantra. Won’t that be fun? Now let’s all choose a word, a different word, so we can each have our own special mantra
.
    “Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones.
Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious
. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Crake
   ~
    A few months before Jimmy’s mother vanished, Crake appeared. The two things happened in the same year. What was the connection? There wasn’t one, except that the two of them seemed to get on well together. Crake was among the scant handful of Jimmy’s friends that his mother liked. Mostly she’d found his male pals juvenile, his female ones airheaded or sluttish. She’d never used those words but you could tell.
    Crake though, Crake was different. More like an adult, she’d said; in fact, more adult than a lot of adults. You could have an objective conversation with him, a conversation in which events and hypotheses were followed through to their logical conclusions. Not that Jimmy ever witnessed the two of them having such a conversation, but they must have done or else she wouldn’t have said that. When and how did these logical, adult conversations take place? He’s often wondered.
    “Your friend is intellectually honourable,” Jimmy’s mother would say. “He doesn’t lie to himself.” Then she’d gaze at Jimmy with that blue-eyed, wounded-by-him look he knew so well. If only
he
could be like that – intellectually honourable. Anotherbaffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing.
Jimmy would do better at intellectual honourableness if only he would try harder
. Plus, if he had any fucking clues about what the fuck it meant.
    “I don’t need supper,” he’d tell her yet again. “I’ll just grab a snack.” If she wanted to do that wounded thing she could do it for the kitchen clock. He’d fixed it so the robin said
hoot
and the owl said
caw caw
. Let her be disappointed with them for a change.
    He had his doubts about Crake’s honourableness, intellectual or otherwise. He knew a bit more about Crake than his mother did.
    When Jimmy’s mother took off like that, after the rampage with the hammer, Crake didn’t say much. He didn’t seem surprised or shocked. All he said was that some people needed to change, and to change they needed to be elsewhere. He said a person could be in your life and then not in it any more. He said Jimmy should read up on the Stoics. That last part was mildly aggravating: Crake could be a little too instructive sometimes, and a little too free with the
shoulds
. But Jimmy appreciated his calmness and lack of nosiness.
    Of course Crake wasn’t Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n’s instead of the usual spelling? “My dad liked music,” was Crake’s explanation, once Jimmy got around