Margaret Atwood - Moral Disorder and Other Stories

M y 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.

BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

FICTION
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
Murder in the Dark (1983)
Bluebeards Egg (1983)
The Handmaids Tale (1985)
Cats Eye (1988)
Wilderness Tips (1991)
Good Bones (1992)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
The Year of the Flood (2009)

FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree (1978)
Annas Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds (1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)

NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
Days of the Rebels 18151840 (1977)
Second Words (1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 19822004 (2004)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

POETRY
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (1966)
The Animals in That Country (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (1971)
You Are Happy (1974)
Selected Poems (1976)
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Interlunar (1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 19761986 (1986)
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
The Door (2007)

M argaret 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.

Atwoods work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaids Tale and Cats Eye both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the Governor Generals Award; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Governor Generals 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 Generals 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 lOrdre 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.

I ts morning. For now, night is over. Its time for the bad news. I think of the bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four schoolteacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness, pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing as the sun comes up exactly where to drop them. On me, for one.

At our place, the bad news arrives in the form of the bad-news paper. Tig brings it up the stairs. Tigs real name is Gilbert. Its impossible to explain nicknames to speakers of foreign languages, not that I have to do this much.

They just killed the leader of the interim governing council, Tig announces. Its not that hes impervious to bad news: on the contrary. Hes angular, he has less body fat than I do and therefore less capacity to absorb, to cushion, to turn the calories of bad news and it does have calories, it raises your blood pressure into the substance of his own body. I can do that, he cant. He wants to pass the bad news on as soon as possible get it off his hands, like a hot potato. Bad news burns him.

Im still in bed. Im not really awake. I was doing a little wallowing. I was enjoying this morning until now. Not before breakfast, I say. I do not add, You know I cant handle it this early in the day. Ive added that before; its had only an intermittent effect. After this long together, both of our heads are filled with such minor admonitions, helpful hints about the other person likes and dislikes, preferences and taboos. Dont come up behind me like that when Im reading. Dont use my kitchen knives. Dont just strew things. Each believes the other should respect this frequently reiterated set of how- to instructions, but they cancel each other out: if Tig must respect my need to wallow mindlessly, free of bad news, before the first cup of coffee, shouldnt I respect his need to spew out catastrophe so he himself will be rid of it?

Oh. Sorry, he says. He shoots me a reproachful look. Why must I disappoint him like this? Dont I know that if he cant tell the bad news, to me, right now, some bilious green bad-news gland or bladder inside him will burst and hell get peritonitis of the soul? Then Ill be sorry.