Oryx and Crake: #1 by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2003-07-15T04:04:45+00:00

Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window-dressing was what he’d be doing, at best – decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2- D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematics courses – Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology, and the rest – he’d have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite – one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the middle – with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God’s Gardeners T-shirts, which – due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants – stank even when freshly laundered.

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room – none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans – she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

He’d complained about that to Student Services, and after a few tries – Student Services at Martha Graham was notoriously grumpy, staffed as it was by burnt-out TV-series actors who could not forgive the world for their plunge from marginal fame – he got himself moved to a single room. (First my sandals, then my underwear. Next it’ll be me. The woman is a pyromaniac, let me rephrase that, she is reality-challenged in a major way. You wish to see the concrete evidence of her crotchwear auto-da-fé? Look into this tiny envelope. If you see me next in an urn, gritty ashes, couple of teeth, you want the responsibility? Hey, I’m the Student here and you’re the Service. Here it is, right on the letterhead, see? I’ve e-mailed this to the president.)

(This is not what he actually said, of course. He knew better than that. He smiled, he presented himself as a reasonable human being, he enlisted their sympathy.)

After that, after he got his new room, things were a little better.

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