"Onopa-Camping" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)faculty/student code engraved over the gates since the turn of the Twenty-first
Century: Am as cognis non corpus (emphasis on non). He wasn't sure, but he guessed that if the university got wind of the trip, he could be fired before the sun went down on Bloomington, maybe even jailed--then conceivably visited in his cell by Acura with a DNA-altering cake. He'd settled in his office chair and heard Ghia with a dreamy resigned smile, thinking of Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson, of Shelley running off with fourteen-year-old girls, of Dylan Thomas and Vassar coeds, the diseased pleasures of earlier centuries. "See, when I won the permit, I realized that all the ideas I have about Nature came from your class," Ghia'd told him. "Oh, I've done all the virtual games, even camped with Girl Scouts over in the Hoosier Dome But I've never even been to Six Flags Over Yellowstone, much less on an ecotour. All those ideas from your class I can't really understand just by myself. You know, like Nature as 'the guide, the guardian of your heart?' 'Tintern Abbey,' right? Professor Dugan . . .?" The Midwestern afternoon light, yellowish-gray this high in the Humanities Highrise, gave a weird cast to the holopix of Kalalau she'd brought along ('no greater destination in all of ecotourism'). Still Hawaii looked nice. "Call me Max. The semester's over now. It'll make it easier for me to fantasize." "Max. So now I have a chance to get the experience behind the ideas, to understand them really. I need you there to help." "Perfect. She'll understand absolutely," Ghia'd said. "I mean your being with me is actually a requirement now. See, if I can't make a practical connection between the ideas from your class and my real experience, there's no authenticity, no fulfillment. I don't wind up with a legitimate education." Her innocent face was crossed by a dark look. "Your fiancee'll be aware that it's my legal right to require interpretive completion of my coursework. From you. If you look in the student/faculty conduct code? Section four, paragraph six? The one they added last year?" "Gimme a minute?" he'd asked. As Ghia wandered along his collection of antique Twentieth Century books shoved among the storage cubes in the adjoining media room, Max punched up Acura's home number on the keyboard of his desk terminal -- she'd be starting dinner--toggled video on. "Well," Acura conceded from her kitchen, whacking a turkey sausage on the cutting board with unusual vigor, "your ex-student happens to be right. You have a pedagogical responsibility; the Dean can fire you if you don't go with her. That's now the law." Max tried to look piously dismayed. Acura waved the knife around, splatting turkey product on the kitchen wall, on her suit, on the blue tie he'd bought her for Law Day. When the screen went blank he remembered the times he'd smiled at Ghia in class, a distant longing in his heart -- well, maybe not his heart. Had |
|
|