Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

“That’s what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food.”

“Did he jump, or what?” said Jimmy. Crake didn’t seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.

“It was the general opinion,” said Crake. “He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word suicide . They said ‘your father’s accident.’”

“Sorry about that,” said Jimmy.

“Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really supportive .” Crake said supportive like a quote. “She said, besides being my dad’s boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I’d ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be resolved for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me—tell me all about how my father had problems .”

“Meaning your dad was a nutbar,” said Jimmy.

Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. “Yeah. But he wasn’t. He was acting worried lately, but he didn’t have problems . He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I’d have known.”

“You think he maybe fell off?”

“Fell off?”

“Off the overpass.” Jimmy wanted to ask what he’d been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Was there a railing?”

“He was kind of uncoordinated,” said Crake, smiling in an odd way. “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”

“You get along with him?”

Crake paused. “He taught me to play chess. Before it happened.”

“Well, I guess not after ,” said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn’t like that at all.

How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?

No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked—events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate.

There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.

At the end of that vacation, Crake went off to Watson-Crick and Jimmy to Martha Graham. They shook hands at the bullet-train station.

“See you around,” said Jimmy.

“We’ll e-mail,” said Crake. Then, noticing Jimmy’s dejection, he said, “Come on, you did okay, the place is famous.”

“Was famous,” said Jimmy.

“It won’t be that bad.”

Crake was wrong, for once. Martha Graham was falling apart. It was surrounded—Jimmy observed as the train pulled in—by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials—sheets of tin, slabs of plywood—and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass shut out.

The security at the Martha Graham gateway was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls—scrawled all over with faded graffiti—could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf. Inside them, the Bilbao-ripoff cast-concrete buildings leaked, the lawns were mud, either baked or liquid depending on the season, and there were no recreational facilities apart from a swimming pool that looked and smelled like a giant sardine can. Half the time the air conditioning in the dorms didn’t work; there was a brownout problem with the electrical supply; the food in the cafeteria was mostly beige and looked like rakunk shit. There were arthropods in the bedrooms, families and genera various, but half of them were cockroaches. Jimmy found the place depressing, as did—it seemed—everyone there with any more neural capacity than a tulip. But this was the hand life had dealt him, as his dad had said during their awkward goodbye, and now Jimmy would just have to play it as well as he could.

Right, Dad, Jimmy had thought. I’ve always known I could count on you for really, really sage advice.

The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role—said the bronze plaque—as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion. Every once in a while the statue got its tits decorated or steel wool glued onto its pubic region—Jimmy himself had done some of this glueing—and so comatose was the management that the ornaments often stayed up there for months before they were noticed. Parents were always objecting to this statue—poor role model, they’d say, too aggressive, too bloodthirsty, blah blah—whereupon the students would rally to its defence. Old Martha was their mascot, they’d say, the scowl, the dripping head and all. She represented life, or art, or something. Hands off Martha. Leave her alone.

The Academy had been set up by a clutch of now-dead rich liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York as an Arts-and-Humanities college at some time in the last third of the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the Performing Arts—acting, singing, dancing, and so forth. To that had been added Film-making in the 1980s, and Video Arts after that. These things were still taught at Martha Graham—they still put on plays, and it was there Jimmy saw Macbeth in the flesh and reflected that Anna K. and her Web site for peeping Toms had done a more convincing job of Lady Macbeth while sitting on her toilet.

The students of song and dance continued to sing and dance, though the energy had gone out of these activities and the classes were small. Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century—no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status. Theatrical events had dwindled into versions of the singalong or the tomato bombardment or the wet T-shirt contest. And though various older forms had dragged on—the TV sitcom, the rock video—their audience was ancient and their appeal mostly nostalgic.

So a lot of what went on at Martha Graham was like studying Latin, or book-binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything, though every once in a while the college president would subject them to some yawner about the vital arts and their irresistible reserved seat in the big red-velvet amphitheatre of the beating human heart.

As for Film-making and Video Arts, who needed them? Anyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted, or digitally alter old material, or create new animation. You could download one of the standard core plots and add whatever faces you chose, and whatever bodies too. Jimmy himself had put together a naked Pride and Prejudice and a naked To the Lighthouse , just for laughs, and in sophomore VizArts at HelthWyzer he’d done The Maltese Falcon , with costumes by Kate Greenaway and depth-and-shadow styling by Rembrandt. That one had been good. A dark tonality, great chiaroscuro.