Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  “Was he nice?” I said. “The Indian?” There were no pictures of him, I was sure of that.

  “I expect so,” said my mother. “He brought his tennis whites. And a tennis racquet.”

  “Why would he do that?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said my mother.

  But I knew. This young man from India must have thought he was going to the country – to what was meant by that word, once, in other places. He’d had in mind an English country house, where he could do a spot of shooting and riding and have tea on the lawn, and stroll among the herbaceous borders, and play some tennis.

  He must have had an education to have qualified as one of the boys at the Lab, so he would have been from a wealthy and well-placed Indian family, with a lot of servants. The family would have thought him eccentric to have taken up the study of insects, but still, many of good family in England – such as Darwin – had done so in the past.

  They had not however done so in a wilderness of this kind. How had this young Indian man wandered so far afield, across to a new continent and then right to the edge of the known world?

  “What year was it?” I said. “Was it during the War? Was I born yet?” But my mother couldn’t remember.

  It was around this time – when she was still walking, when she’d begun to fall down – that she told me another thing she’d never told me before. She was having a recurring dream, she said; the same dream over and over. It frightened her and made her sad, although she didn’t say this.

  In the dream she was alone in the woods, walking by herself beside a small river. She wasn’t exactly lost, but no one else was around – none of the people who ought to have been there. Not our father, not my brother, not me; none of her own brothers and sisters, or her friends or parents. She didn’t know where they’d gone. Everything was very silent: no birds, no sound of water. Nothing above but the empty blue sky. She came to a high logjam across the river; it was blocking the path. She had to climb up on the slippery logs, hauling herself hand over hand, up and up and up, toward the air.

  “And then what?” I said.

  “That’s all there is to it,” she said. “It wakes me up. But then I have the same dream all over again.”

  One question to ask would be about the dream – why was she having it? I used to wonder that. But the other question – one I’ve thought of only now – would have to be: Why did she tell me about it?

  Another strange thing. Tucked into an envelope with some loose photos of the lake, and the rowboat, and the Lab – those not selected for pasting – I found a few pages from one of her diaries. She had not burned each and every page, therefore; she had saved a few. She had chosen them, torn them out, preserved them from destruction. But why these? I studied them carefully, but I couldn’t figure it out. No dramatic events had occurred, no responses of any note had been recorded. Was it a message, left so I could find it? Was it an oversight? Why save a page with nothing written on it but “A perfectly beautiful day!!!”?

  Now it’s four years later, and my mother is much older. “We live a long time,” she said once, meaning the women in her family. Then she said, “After you’re ninety, you age ten years for every year.” She foresaw herself getting fainter and fainter, more and more papery, more and more whispery, and this is what has happened to her. She still smiles, though. And she can still hear, through the one good ear.

  I turn her head away from the pillow so I can talk to her. “It’s me,” I say. She smiles. She doesn’t say much any more.

  “Do you remember Dick and Nell?” I begin. The two horses, usually dependable.

  No response. Her smile flickers out. I’ll have to pick another story. “Do you remember the Indian?” I say.

  A pause. “What Indian?”

  “The Indian who came to the Lab one year. When you were living up north, remember? He came from India. He had a tennis racquet. You told me about him.”

  “Did I?”

  No hope for the Indian. He will not be resurrected, not today. I try something else. “Do you remember Cam and Ray? You’ve got some pictures of them, in your photo album. They had bicycles. Remember them?”

  A long pause. “No,” says my mother at last. She never lies.

  “They slept in a tent,” I say, “with their feet sticking out. You took their picture. Cam died young. He had a condition.”

  She turns her head on the pillow, closing off her good ear. She shuts her eyes. That is the end of the conversation. She’s back inside, way back, back in the time of legend. What’s she doing? Where is she? Is she galloping through the trees on horseback, is she fighting the storm? Is she herself again?

  The fate of the boys is now up to me. Also that of the young man from India. I picture him getting off the little train, hauling an enormous leather valise, with his tennis racquet in its press under his arm. What would have been inside the valise? Beautiful silk shirts. Fine cashmere jackets. Casually elegant shoes.

  He crunches downhill on the gravel, toward the village dock. Then he stands there. His dismay – which has been deepening with every mile he’s travelled, through forests and more forests, past bogs where dead spruce stand knee-deep in water, black and naked as if burned, through gaps blasted out of the granite bedrock, past lakes as blue and blank as closed windows, then through more forests and more bogs and past more lakes – this dismay settles over him like a net. His soul feels the pull of the empty space before him: of the trees and trees and trees, of the rocks and rocks and rocks, of the bottomless water. He’s in danger of evaporating.

  Clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes are already attacking him. He wants to turn and run after the retreating train, calling to it to stop, to save him, to take him home, or at least to a city, but he can’t do that.

  From the Lab – not that he knows yet where the Lab is – a motorboat has set out. Not a launch, nothing fancy. A crude wooden boat, handmade. He’s seen similar boats, but not in rich places. The boat grinds toward him over the flat water, which glares with the light from the descending sun. In the boat sits a man who is obviously a peasant: stubby in shape, wearing a battered felt hat, an old khaki jacket, and – he now sees – a peasant’s wide but crafty grin. This is the servitor sent out to help him with his valise. Perhaps the country house with the lawns and tennis courts is concealed in the forest, around that hill, or the next one, the other one more or less like it.

  The man in the boat is my father. He’s been chopping wood, and after that – having bailed out the boat, which has a slow leak – he’s had a short, sharp wrestle with the motor, which is started by pulling on a greasy piece of rope. He has a two-day beard; tree sap and oil darken his broad hands and splotch his clothing. He cuts the motor, leaps onto the dock, hitches up the boat in one motion, then strides toward the Indian, grimy hand outstretched.

  The Indian man stands paralyzed: it’s a crisis of manners. Surely he cannot be expected to shake the hand of this manual labourer, who is now welcoming him, and heaving his valise into the filthy boat, and manhandling his tennis racquet, and inviting him to dinner, and promising him a fish. A fish? What does he mean by a fish? Now my father is saying he’s sure the boys will make him comfortable in their tent – a tent? What sort of tent? Who are these boys? What is happening?

  I sometimes think about that Indian man and his northern ordeal. He must have gone back to India. Surely he would have high-tailed it for home as soon as he could get decently free. He would have had a story or two to tell, about the blackflies and the log-cabin Lab, and the two young barbarians with their bare feet sticking out of their tent.

  I give the parts of the barbarians to Cam and Ray because I want them to have more of a story – more of a story than I know, and more than they probably had. I give them the task of jollying along the deracinated but educated Indian, slapping him on the back perhaps, telling him it will be okay, it will be fine. They’ll take him fishing, give him some fly dope, tell him a few bear stories. Maybe they’ll fix up a slee
ping place for him inside the Lab itself, so he won’t be so jittery: the first sound of a loon at night can be a shock. They’ll show him their pipes; then they’ll show him their bicycles as well, making a point of their own foolishness in having brought such next-to-useless vehicles into the forest so he himself won’t feel like an idiot about the tennis racquet.

  All of that will give them something to do. I want them to step forward, out of the ranks of the extras. I want them to have speaking parts. I want them to shine.

  There they are now, set in motion. The two of them are bounding downhill to the dock at the Lab; they greet the Indian man, they take his hand and help him out of the boat. The sun is low, the clouds in the west are orangey pink: tomorrow will be a fine day, though possibly – says my father, heaving the leather valise out of the boat, then clambering onto the dock and squinting at the sky – there will be some wind.

  Cam picks up the valise; Ray is lighting his pipe. Someone has made a joke. What about? I can’t hear. Now all three of them – Cam, and Ray, and the elegant Indian – are walking along the dock. My father follows behind, carrying – for some reason – a red metal gas can. The red stands out brilliantly against the dark green of the forest.

  The Indian man looks back over his shoulder: he alone can sense me watching. But he doesn’t know it’s me: because he’s nervous, because he’s in a strange place, he thinks it’s the forest, or the lake itself. Then they all climb the hill, up toward the Lab, and vanish among the trees.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to all who helped with this book, including early readers of some of the stories, Jess Atwood Gibson and Graeme Gibson; to my agents, Phoebe Larmore, Vivienne Schuster, and Diana MacKay; to my editors, Nan Talese of Doubleday U.S.A., Liz Calder of Bloomsbury U.K., and Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart, Canada; to Heather Sangster, tireless copy editor; to Lucia Cino and Laura Stenberg of O.W. Toad; to Penny Kavanaugh; to Sarah Cooper and Michael Bradley; to Coleen Quinn, to John Notarianni and Scott Silke, to Gene Goldberg, and to Joel Rubinovich and Sheldon Shoib; to Alice Lima; and, again, to Eileen Allen and Melinda Dabaay.

  I would also like to thank Ruth, Harold, and Lenore; Matthew and Graeme the Younger; Max, Bonnie, and Finn; Xandra Bingley; and Paulette Jiles, who is a horse whisperer but is by no means a character in this book.

  Some of these stories have appeared in the following magazines:

  “The Bad News”: The Guardian, 2005; Playboy, 2006.

  “The Art of Cooking and Serving”: Toronto Life, 2005; New Statesman, 2005.

  “The Entities”: Toronto Life, 2006.

  “The Labrador Fiasco” first appeared, in a slightly different form, as a Bloomsbury Quid in 1996. The true story related within this story may be found in its original version in The Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, published in 1905 by Fleming H. Revell Company, and reprinted by Breakwater Books, Newfoundland, in 1977.

  “The Boys at the Lab”: Zoetrope: All-Story, 2006.

  The title of this book, Moral Disorder, was the title of the novel Graeme Gibson was writing in 1996, when he decided to stop writing novels. I use it here with his kind permission.

  Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

  Atwood’s work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye – both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Oryx and Crake, a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Orange Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent books of fiction are The Tent, Moral Disorder, and The Year of the Flood.

  Atwood is the recipient of numerous honours such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., and Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from the University of Oxford in England.

  Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.