Oblivion: Stories
Author: David Foster Wallace
Date: 2004-06-08 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Fiction; Literature; American; Contemporary; Literary Fiction; 21St Century; Philosophy; The United States Of America; Unfinished
Description: In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculpture
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

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Also by David Foster Wallace

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The Broom of the System

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Girl with Curious Hair

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Infinite Jest

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A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 9

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

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Everything and More

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Oblivion 789

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S t o r i e s

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David Foster Wallace

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Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston

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Copyright © 2004 by David Foster Wallace All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic ormechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Little, Brown and Company

Time Warner Book Group

1271 Avenue of the Americas,

New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.

The stories in this book are fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are imaginary. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities are used, they’re used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. No resemblance to anyone or anything real is intended, nor should it be inferred.

Versions of some of these stories first appeared in the following publications, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: AGNI, Black Clock, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, McSweeney’s, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002.

One or two tiny parts of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”

make uncited use of Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators (Delacorte Press, 1988). “The Suffering Channel”’

s snippet of Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is from Swift: Poetical Works, ed.

ISBN: 0-7595-1158-6

First eBook Edition: June 2004

Book designed by Marie Mundaca

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C o n t e n t s

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Mister Sq uishy

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The Soul Is Not a Smithy

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Inc ar nations of Bur ned Children

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Another Pioneer

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Go od Old Neon

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Phil osophy and the Mirr or of Nature

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Oblivion

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The Suffer ing Channel

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For Karen Carlson and Karen Green

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Mister Sq uishy

The Focus Group was then reconvened in another of Reesemeyer 1

Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms. Each 2
member returned his Individual Response Profile packets to the facil-3
itator, who thanked each in turn.The long conference table was equipped 4
with leather executive swivel chairs; there was no assigned seating.

5

Bottled spring water and caffeinated beverages were made available to 6
those who thought they might want them. The exterior wall of the 7
conference room was a thick tinted window with a broad high-altitude 8
view of points NE, creating a spacious, attractive, and more or less 9
natural-lit environment that was welcome after the bland fluorescent 10
enclosure of the testing cubicles. One or two members of the Targeted 11

Focus Group unconsciously loosened their neckties as they settled into 12
the comfortable chairs.

13

There were more samples of the product arranged on a tray at the 14
conference table’s center.

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This facilitator, just like the one who’d led the large Product Test 16
and Initial Response assembly earlier that morning before all the 17
members of the different Focus Groups had been separated into in-18
dividual soundproof cubicles to complete their Individual Response 19

Profiles, held degrees in both Descriptive Statistics and Behavioral 20 sh

Psychology and was employed by Team y, a cutting-edge market 21 reg

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research firm that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had begun using al-2
most exclusively in recent years. This Focus Group’s facilitator was a 3
stout, palely freckled man with an archaic haircut and a warm if some-4
what nervous and complexly irreverent manner. On the wall next to 5
the door behind him was a presentation whiteboard with several Dry 6

Erase markers in its recessed aluminum sill.

7

The facilitator played idly with the edges of the IRPs forms in his 8
folder until all the men had seated themselves and gotten comfortable.

9

Then he said: ‘Right, so thanks again for your part in this, which as I’m 10
pretty sure Mr. Mounce told you this morning is always an important 11
part of deciding what new products get made available to consumers 12
versus those that don’t.’ He had a graceful, practiced way of panning 13
his gaze back and forth to make sure he addressed the entire table, a 14
skill that was slightly at odds with the bashful, somewhat fidgety pre-15
sentation of his body as he spoke before the assembled men. The four-16
teen members of the Focus Group, all male and several with beverages 17
before them, engaged in the slight gestures and expressions of men 18
around a conference table who are less than 100% sure what is going 19
to be expected of them. The conference room was very different in ap-20
pearance and feel from the sterile, almost lablike auditorium in which 21
the PT/IR had been held two hours earlier. The facilitator, who did 22
have the customary pocket-protector with three different colored pens 23
in it, wore a crisp striped dress shirt and wool tie and cocoa-brown 24
slacks, but no jacket or sportcoat. His shirtsleeves were not rolled up.

25

His smile had a slight wincing quality, several members observed, as of 26
some vague diffuse apology. Attached to the breast pocket on the same 27
side of his shirt as his nametag was also a large pin or button embla-28
zoned with the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a 29
plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its 30
eyes squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connoted de-31
light, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon 32
communicated the sort of innocuous facial affect that was almost im-33
possible not to smile back at or feel positive about in some way, and it sh 34
had been commissioned and introduced by one of Reesemeyer Shan-reg 35
non Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the regional 4th Pass Pages

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Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate owner-1
ship and rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich 2
breads and buns into sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack 3
cakes and soft confections of nearly every conceivable kind; and with-4
out any particular messages or associations anyone in Demographics 5
could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on, the crude line-6
drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and 7
demonstrably successful brand icons in American advertising.

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Traffic was brisk on the street far below, and also trade.

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It was, however, not the Mister Squishy brand icon that concerned 10
the carefully chosen and vetted Focus Groups on this bright cold No-11
vember day in 1995. Currently in third-phase Focus Testing was a new 12
and high-concept chocolate-intensive Mister Squishy–brand snack 13
cake designed primarily for individual sale in convenience stores, with 14
twelve-pack boxes to be placed in up-market food retail outlets first in 15
the Midwest and upper East Coast and then, if the test-market data 16
bore out Mister Squishy’s parent company’s hopes, nationwide.

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A total 27 of the snack cakes were piled in a pyramidal display on a 18
large rotating silver tray in the center of the conference table. Each was 19
wrapped in an airtight transpolymer material that looked like paper 20
but tore like thin plastic, the same retail packaging that nearly all US

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confections had deployed since M&M Mars pioneered the composite 22
and used it to help launch the innovative Milky Way Dark line in the 23
late 1980s. This new product’s wrap had the familiar distinctive Mis-24
ter Squishy navy-and-white design scheme, but here the Mister Squishy 25
icon appeared with its eyes and mouth rounded in cartoon alarm be-26
hind a series of microtextured black lines that appeared to be the bars 27
of a jail cell, around two of which lines or bars the icon’s plump and 28
dough-colored fingers were curled in the universal position of inmates 29
everywhere. The dark and exceptionally dense and moist-looking 30
snack cakes inside the packaging were Felonies! ® — a risky and multi-31
valent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern 32
health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/

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sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack. The 34 sh
name’s association matrix included as well the suggestion of adulthood 35 reg

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and adult autonomy: in its real-world rejection of the highly cute, car-2
toonish, n- and oo-intensive names of so many other snack cakes, the 3
product tag ‘Felony!’ was designed and tested primarily for its appeal to 4
the 18–39 Male demographic, the single most prized and fictile demo-5
target in high-end marketing. Only two of the present Focus Group’s 6
members were over 40, and their profiles had been vetted not once but 7
twice by Scott R. Laleman’s Technical Processing team during the in-8
tensive demographic/behavioral voir dire for which Team y Focus 9

Group data was so justly prized.

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Inspired, according to agency rumor, by an R.S.B. Creative Direc-11
tor’s epiphanic encounter with something billed as Death by Choco-12
late in a Near North café, Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing 13
and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or- fondant-chocolate instead of 14
the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! con-15
ceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, 16
and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same.

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A domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered 18
entirely in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin chocolate frosting manufactured 19
with trace amounts of butter, cocoa butter, baker’s chocolate, chocolate 20
liquor, vanilla extract, dextrose, and sorbitol (a relatively high-cost 21
frosting, and one whose butter-redundancies alone required heroic in-22
novations in production systems and engineering — an entire produc-23
tion line had had to be remachined and the lineworkers retrained and 24
production and quality-assurance quotas recalculated more or less 25
from scratch), which high-end frosting was then also injected by high-26
pressure confectionery needle into the 26 × 13mm hollow ellipse in 27
each Felony!’ s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s 28
products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), 29
resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade 30
frosting whose central pocket — given that the thin coat of outer 31
frosting’s exposure to the air caused it to assume traditional icing’s 32
hard-yet-deliquescent marzipan character — seemed even richer, denser, 33
sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most sh 34
rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite reg 35
part. (Hostess’s lead agency Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991–2 double-blind 4th Pass Pages

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Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers 1
actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and 2
eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their 3
tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of 4

R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary 5

Product Development boys.)

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In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access 7
background information re ingredients, production innovations, and 8
even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the fa-9
cilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister 10

Squishy’s snack cake production sequence and the complex adjust-11
ments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line.

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The relevant information was relayed in a skillfully orchestrated QA 13
period, with many of the specified questions supplied by two ostensi-14
ble members of the Targeted Focus Group who were in fact not civil-15
ian consumers at all but employees of Team y assigned to help 16
orchestrate the unconventionally informative QA, and to observe the 17
deliberations of the other twelve men once the facilitator left the room, 18
taking care not to influence the Focus Group’s arguments or verdicts 19
but later adding personal observations and impressions that would 20
help round and flesh out the data provided by the Group Response 21

Data Summary and the digital videotape supplied by what appeared to 22
be a large smoke detector in the conference room’s northwest corner, 23
whose lens and parabolic mike, while mobile and state-of-the-art, in-24
variably failed to catch certain subtle nuances in individual affect as 25
well as low-volume interchanges between adjoining members. One of 26
the UAFs,* a slim young man with waxy blond hair and a complexion 27
whose redness appeared more irritated than ruddy or hale, had been 28
allowed by Team y’s UAF Coordinator to cultivate an eccentric and 29

(to most Focus Group members) irritating set of personal manner-30
isms whose very conspicuousness served to disguise his professional 31

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*Team y’s term for their Focus Groups’ moles was Unintroduced Assistant Facilitators, 34 sh
whose identities were theoretically unknown to the facilitators in pure double-blinds, though in practice they were usually child’s play to spot.

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identity: he had small squeeze bottles of both contact lens lubricant 2
and intranasal saline before him on the table, and not only took writ-3
ten notes on the facilitator’s presentation but did so with a Magic 4

Marker that squeaked loudly and had ink you could smell, and when-5
ever he asked one of his preassigned questions he did not tentatively 6
raise his hand or clear his throat as other UAFs were wont but rather 7
simply tersely barked out, ‘Question:’, as in: ‘Question: is it possible to 8
be more specific about what “natural and artificial flavors” means, and 9
is there any substantive difference between what it really means and 10
what the average consumer is expected to understand it to mean,’

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without any sort of interrogative lilt or expression, his brow furrowed 12
and rimless glasses very askew.

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As any decent small-set univariable probability distribution would 14
predict, not all members of the Targeted Focus Group were attending 15
closely to the facilitator’s explanation of what Mister Squishy and 16

Team y hoped to achieve by leaving the Focus Group alone very 17
shortly in camera to compare the results of their Individual Response 18

Profiles and speak openly and without interference amongst themselves 19
and attempt to come as close as possible to a unanimous univocal Group 20

Response Data Summary of the product along sixteen different radial 21

Preference and Satisfaction axes. A certain amount of this inattention 22
was factored into the matrices of what the TFG’s facilitator had been 23
informed was the actual test underway on today’s nineteenth floor. This 24
secondary (or, ‘nested’) test sought quantifiable data on quote unquote 25

Full-Access manufacturing and marketing information’s effects on 26

Targeted Focus Groups’ perceptions of both the product and its cor-27
porate producer; it was a double-blind series, designed to be replicated 28
along three different variable grids with random TFGs throughout the 29
next two fiscal quarters, and sponsored by parties whose identities 30
were being withheld from the facilitators as (apparently) part of the 31
nested test’s conditions.

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Three of the Targeted Focus Group’s members were staring absently 33
out the large tinted window that gave on a delicately muted sepia view sh 34
of the street’s north side’s skyscrapers and, beyond and between these, reg 35
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severely foreshortened lake. Two of these members were very young 1
men at the extreme left of the demotarget’s x axis who sat slumped in 2
their tilted swivels in attitudes of either reverie or stylized indifference; 3
the third was feeling absently at his upper lip’s little dent.

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The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what 5
seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he 6
were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually re-7
maining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed 8
also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny 9
gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random 10
fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator’s name 11
was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the 12

Focus Group’s fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-13
third were expensive and/or foreign. A twelfth, by far the TFG’s oldest 14
member, had the platinum fob of a quality pocketwatch running diag-15
onally left-right across his vest and a big pink face and the permanent 16
benevolent look in his eyes of someone older who had many grand-17
children and spent so much time looking warmly at them that the ex-18
pression becomes almost ingrained. Schmidt’s own grandfather had 19
lived in a north Florida retirement community where he sat with a 20
plaid blanket on his lap and coughed constantly both times Schmidt 21
had ever been in his presence, addressing him only as Boy. Precisely 22

50% of the room’s men wore coats and ties or had suitcoats or blazers 23
hanging from the back of their chairs, three of which coats were part 24
of an actual three-piece business wardrobe; another three men wore 25
combinations of knit shirts, slacks, and various crew- and turtleneck 26
sweaters classifiable as Business Casual. Schmidt lived alone in a condo-27
minium he had recently refinanced. The remaining four men wore 28
bluejeans and sweatshirts with the logo of either a university or the 29
garment’s manufacturer; one was the Nike Swoosh icon that to 30

Schmidt always looked somewhat Arabic.Three of the four men in con-31
spicuously casual/sloppy attire were the Focus Group’s youngest mem-32
bers, two of whom were among the three making rather a show of not 33
attending closely. Team y favored a loose demographic grid. Two of 34 sh
the three youngest men were under 21. All three of these youngest 35 reg

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members sat back on their tailbones with their legs uncrossed and 2
their hands spread out over their thighs and their faces arranged in the 3
mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once ques-4
tioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning. Schmidt’s initial 5
undergraduate concentration had been in Statistical Chemistry; he 6
still enjoyed the clinical precision of a lab. Less than 50% of the room’s 7
total footwear involved laces. One man in a knit shirt had small brass 8
zippers up the sides of low-cut boots that were shined to a distract-9
ing gleam, another detail possessed of mnemonic associations for 10

Schmidt. Unlike Terry Schmidt’s and Ron Mounce’s, Darlene Lilley’s 11
own marketing background was in computer-aided design; she’d come 12
into Research because she said she’d discovered she was really more of 13
a people person at heart. There were four pairs of eyeglasses in the 14
room, although one of these pairs were sunglasses and possibly not 15
prescription, another with heavy black frames that gave their wearer’s 16
face an earnest aspect above his dark turtleneck sweater. There were 17
two mustaches and one probable goatee. A stocky man in his late twen-18
ties had a sort of sparse, mossy beard; it was indeterminable whether 19
this man was just starting to grow a beard or whether he was the sort 20
of person whose beard simply looked this way. Among the youngest 21
men, it was obvious which were sincerely in need of a shave and which 22
were just affecting an unshaved look. Two of the Focus Group’s mem-23
bers had the distinctive blink patterns of men wearing contact lenses 24
in the conference room’s astringent air. Five of the men were more 25
than 10% overweight, Terry Schmidt himself excluded. His high-26
school PE teacher had once referred to Terry Schmidt in front of his 27
peers as the Crisco Kid, which he had laughingly explained meant fat 28
in the can. Schmidt’s own father, a decorated combat veteran, had re-29
cently retired from a company that sold seed, nitrogen fertilizer, and 30
broad-spectrum herbicides in downstate Galesburg. The affectedly ec-31
centric UAF was asking the men on either side of him, one of whom 32
was Hispanic, whether they’d perhaps care for a chewable vitamin C

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tablet. The Mister Squishy icon also reappeared in the conference sh 34
room as the stylized finials of two fine beige or tan ceramic lamps on reg 35
side tables at either end of the windowless interior wall. There were 4th Pass Pages

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two African-American males in the Targeted Focus Group, one over 1

30, the one under 30 with a shaved head. Three of the men had hair 2
classifiable as brown, two gray or salt/pepper, another three black (ex-3
cluding the African-Americans and the Focus Group’s lone oriental, 4
whose nametag and overwhelming cheekbones suggested either Laos 5
or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — for complex but solid statisti-6
cal reasons, Scott Laleman’s team’s Profile grids specified distributions 7
for ethnicity but not national origin); three could be called blond or 8
fair-haired. These distributions included the UAFs, and Schmidt felt 9
he already had a good idea who this Group’s other UAF was. Rarely 10
did R.S.B. Focus Groups include representatives of the very pale or 11
freckled red-haired physical type, though Foote, Cone & Belding and 12

D.D.B. Needham both made regular use of such types because of 13
certain data suggesting meaningful connections between melanin quo-14
tients and continuous probability distributions of income and prefer-15
ence on the US East Coast, where over 70% of upmarket products 16
tested. Some of the trendy hypergeometric techniques on which these 17
data were based had been called into question by more traditional 18
demographic statisticians, however.

19

By industry-wide convention, Focus Group members received a per 20
diem equal to exactly 300% of what they would receive for jury duty in 21
the state where they resided. The reasoning behind this equation was 22
so old and tradition-bound that no one of Terry Schmidt’s generation 23
knew its origin. It was, for senior test marketers, both an in-joke and a 24
plausible extension of verified attitudes about civic duty and elective 25
consumption, respectively. The Hispanic man to the off-blond UAF’s 26
left, who did not wear a wristwatch, had evidence of large tattoos on 27
his upper arms through the fabric of his dress shirt, which fabric the 28
natural lighting’s tinted hue rendered partly translucent. He was also 29
one of the men with mustaches, and his nametag identified him as 30

NORBERTO, making this the first Norberto to appear in any of the 31
over 845 Focus Groups that Schmidt had led so far in his career as a 32

Statistical Field Researcher for Team y. Schmidt kept his own private 33
records of correlations between product, Client agency, and certain 34 sh
variables in Focus Groups’ constituents and procedures. These were 35 reg

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run through various discriminant-analysis programs on his Apple-2
brand computer at home and the results collected in three-ring 3
binders which he labeled and stored on a set of home-assembled gray 4
steel shelves in the utility room of his condominium. The whole prob-5
lem and project of descriptive statistics was discriminating between 6
what made a difference and what did not. The fact that Scott R. Lale-7
man now both vetted Focus Groups and helped design them was just 8
one more sign that his star was ascending at Team y. The other real 9
comer was A. Ronald Mounce, whose background was also in Techni-10
cal Processing. ‘Question:’ ‘Question:’ ‘Comment:’ One man with a 11
kind of long chinless face wished to know what Felonies!’ retail price 12
was going to be, and he either didn’t understand or disliked Terry 13

Schmidt’s explanation that retail pricing lay outside the purview of the 14

Group’s focus today and was in fact the responsibility of a whole dif-15
ferent R.S.B. research vendor. The reasoning behind the separation of 16
price from consumer-satisfaction grids was technical and parametric 17
and was not included in the putative Full-Access information Schmidt 18
was authorized to share with the Focus Group under the terms of the 19
study. There was one obvious hairweave in the room, as well as two 20
victims of untreated Male Pattern Baldness, both of whom — either 21
interestingly or by mere random chance — were among the Group’s 22
four blue-eyed members.

23

When Schmidt thought of Scott Laleman, with his all-season tan 24
and sunglasses pushed musslessly up on his pale hair’s crown, it was 25
as something with the mindless malevolence of a carnivorous eel or 26
skate, something that hunted on autopilot at extreme depths. The 27

African-American male whose head was unshaved sat with the rigid-28
ity of someone who had back problems and understood the dignity 29
with which he bore them to be an essential part of his character. The 30
other wore sunglasses indoors in such a way as to make some unknown 31
type of statement about himself; there was also no way of knowing 32
whether it was a general statement or one specific to this context. Scott 33

Laleman was only 27 and had come on board at Team y three years sh 34
after Darlene Lilley and two and one-half years after Schmidt himself, reg 35

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who had helped Darlene train Laleman to run chi-square and t distri-1
butions on raw phone-survey data and had taken surprising satisfac-2
tion in watching the boy’s eyes glaze and tan go sallow under the 3
fluorescent banklights of y’s data room, until then one day Schmidt 4
had needed to see Alan Britton personally about something and had 5
knocked and come in and Laleman was sitting in the office’s recliner 6
across the room and he and Britton were both smoking very large ci-7
gars and laughing.

8

The figure that began its free climb up the building’s steadily incres-9
cent north facet just before 11:00 AM was outfitted in tight windproof 10

Lycra leggings and a snug hooded GoreTex sweatshirt w/ fiber-lined 11
hood up and tied tight and what appeared to be mountaineering or 12
rock-climbing boots except that instead of crampons or spikes there 13
were suction cups lining the instep of each boot. Attached to both 14
palms and wrists’ insides were single suction cups the size of a plumber’s 15
helper; the cups’ color was the same shrill orange as hunting jackets 16
and road crews’ hardhats. The Lycra pants’ color scheme was one navy-17
blue leg and one white leg; the sweatshirt and hood were blue with 18
white piping. The mountaineering boots were an emphatic black. The 19
figure moved swiftly and with numerous moist popping suction-noises 20
up the display window of the Gap, a large retail clothier. He then 21
pulled himself up and over onto the narrow ledge at the base of the 22
second-floor window, rose complexly to his feet, affixed his cups, and 23
swarmed up the pane’s thick glass, which gave onto the Gap’s second 24
floor but had no promotional items displayed within. The figure pre-25
sented as lithe and expert. His manner of climbing appeared almost 26
more reptilian than mammalian, you’d have to say. He was halfway up 27
the window of a management consulting firm on the fifth floor when 28
a small crowd of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below.

29

Winds at ground level were light to moderate.

30

In the conference room, the north window’s tint made the north-31
eastern half-cloudy sky seem raw and the froth of the waves on the 32
distant windblown lake look dark; it brindled the sides of the other 33
tall buildings in view, as well, which were all partly in one another’s 34 sh

35 reg

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shadow. Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of 2

Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hairs on one 3
side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or 4
in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and 5
that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these 6
men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassels. One of the 7
youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that 8
even with his legs out splayed and both knees bent his sock-status was 9
unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with 10
tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them. Another of the older men 11
had a mean little slit of a mouth, another a face far too saggy and 12
seamed for his demographic slot. As was often the case, the youngest 13
men’s faces appeared not quite yet fully or humanly formed, with 14
the clean generic quality of products just off the factory floor. Terry 15

Schmidt sometimes sketched his own face’s outlines in caricature form 16
as he spoke on the phone or waited for software programs to run. One 17
of the group’s men had a pear-shaped head, another a diamond- or 18
kite-shaped face; the room’s second-oldest consumer had cropped gray 19
hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect. The 20
men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise 21
on the carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag 22
he kept in his cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one 23
wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just 24
like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern. A small LCD at 25
the bottom of my right scope ran both Real Time and Mission Time.

26

My brief script for the GRDS caucus had been memorized in toto but 27
there was a backup copy on a laminated card just inside my sweater’s 28
sleeve, held in place with small tabs I could release by depressing one 29
of the buttons on my wristwatch, which was really not a watch at all.

30

There was also the emetic prosthesis. The cakes, of which I had al-31
ready made a show of eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth.

32

Terry Schmidt himself was hypoglycemic and could eat only con-33
fections prepared with fructose, aspartame, or very small amounts of sh 34

C H (OH) , and sometimes he felt himself looking at trays of the 6

8

6
reg 35
product with the expression of an urchin at a toystore’s window.

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Down the hall and past the MROP* Division’s green room, in an-1
other R.S.B. conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lil-2
ley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase 3
of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access 4
background. Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had been told which 5
of today’s TFGs represented the nested test’s control group, though it 6
was pretty obvious. You had to work on the upper floors for some time 7
before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s 8
structural design accommodated winds off the lake. ‘Question: just 9
what exactly is polysorbate 80?’ Schmidt was reasonably certain that 10
none of the Focus Group felt the sway. It was not pronounced enough 11
even to cause movement in the coffee in any of the iconized mugs on 12
the table that Schmidt, standing and rotating the Dry Erase marker in 13
his hand in an absent way that connoted both informality and a slight 14
humanizing nervousness in front of groups, could see down into. The 15
conference table was heavy pine with lemonwood inlays and a thick 16
coat of polyurethane, and without the window’s sepia tint there would 17
be blinding pockets of reflected sun that changed angle as one’s own 18
angle with respect to the sun and table changed. Schmidt would also 19
have had to watch dust and tiny clothing fibers swirl in columns of di-20
rect sunlight and fall very gently onto everyone’s heads and upper bod-21
ies, which occurred in even the cleanest conference rooms and was one 22
of Schmidt’s least favorite things about the untinted interiors of cer-23
tain other agencies’ conference rooms around the Loop and metro area.

24

Sometimes when waiting or on Hold on the phone Schmidt would 25
put his finger inside his mouth and hold it there for no good reason he 26
could ever ascertain. Darlene Lilley, who was married and the mother 27
of a large-headed toddler whose photograph adorned her desk and 28
hutch at Team y, had, three fiscal quarters past, been subjected to 29
unwelcome sexual advances by one of the four Senior Research Direc-30
tors who liaisoned between the Field and Technical Processing teams 31
and the upper echelons of Team y under Alan Britton, advances and 32
duress more than sufficient for legal action in Schmidt’s and most of 33

34 sh

* = Market Research Oversight and Planning 35 reg

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the rest of their Field Team’s opinions, which advances she had been 2
able to deflect and defuse in an enormously skillful manner without 3
raising any of the sort of hue and cry that could divide a firm along 4
gender and/or political lines, and things had been allowed to cool 5
down and blow over to such an extent that Darlene Lilley, Schmidt, 6
and the three other members of their Field Team all now still enjoyed 7
a productive working relationship with this dusky and pungent older 8

Senior Research Director, who was now in fact overseeing Field re-9
search on the Mister Squishy–R.S.B. project, and Terry Schmidt was 10
personally somewhat in awe of the self-possession and interpersonal 11
savvy Darlene had displayed throughout the whole tense period, an 12
awe tinged with an unwilled element of romantic attraction, and it is 13
true that Schmidt at night in his condominium sometimes without 14
feeling as if he could help himself masturbated to thoughts of having 15
moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponder-16
ous laminate conference tables of the firms they conducted statistical 17
market research for, and this was a tertiary cause of what practicing so-18
cial psychologists would call his MAM* with the board’s marker as he 19
used a modulated tone of off-the-record confidence to tell the Focus 20

Group about some of the more dramatic travails Reesemeyer Shannon 21

Belt had had with establishing the product’s brand-identity and com-22
ing up with the test name Felony!, all the while envisioning in a more 23
autonomic part of his brain Darlene delivering nothing but the stan-24
dard minimal pre-GRDS instructions for her own Focus Group as she 25
stood in her dark Hanes hosiery and the burgundy high heels she kept 26
at work in the bottom-right cabinet of her hutch and changed out of 27
her crosstrainers into every morning the moment she sat down and 28
rolled her chair with small pretend whimpers of effort over to the 29
hutch’s cabinets, sometimes (unlike Schmidt) pacing slightly in front 30
of the whiteboard, sometimes planting one heel and rotating her foot 31
slightly or crossing her sturdy ankles to lend her standing posture a 32
carelessly demure aspect, sometimes taking her delicate oval eyeglasses 33
off and not chewing on the arm but holding the glasses in such a way sh 34
reg 35

* = Manual Adjusting Mechanism

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and in such proximity to her mouth that one got the idea she could, at 1
any moment, put one of the frames’ arm’s plastic earguards just inside 2
her mouth and nibble on it absently, an unconscious gesture of shyness 3
and concentration at once.

4

The conference room’s carpeting was magenta pile in which wheels 5
left symmetrically distended impressions when one or more of the 6
men adjusted their executive swivel chairs slightly to reposition their 7
legs or their bodies’ relation to the table itself. The ventilation system 8
laid a pale hum over tiny distant street and city noises which the win-9
dow’s thickness itself cut to almost nothing. Each of the Targeted 10

Focus Group’s members wore a blue-and-white nametag with his first 11
name inscribed thereon by hand. 42.8% of these inscriptions were cur-12
sive or script; three of the remaining eight were block capitals, with all 13
the block-cap first names, in a remarkable but statistically meaningless 14
coincidence, beginning with H. Sometimes, too, Schmidt would as it 15
were take a step back inside his head and view the Focus Group as a 16
unit, a right-angled mass of fleshtone busts; he’d observe all the faces 17
at once, qua group, so that nothing but the very broadest commonali-18
ties passed through his filter. The faces were well-nourished, mid- to 19
upscale, neutral, provisionally attentive, the blood-fed minds behind 20
them occupied with their own owners’ lives, jobs, problems, plans, de-21
sires, & c. None had been hungry a day in their lives — this was a core 22
commonality, and for Schmidt this one did ramify. It was rare that the 23
product ever truly penetrated a Focus Group’s consciousness. One of 24
the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never 25
going to have as important a place in a TFG’s minds as it did in the 26

Client’s. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope 27
only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the 28
brand and what was important to consumers. And what was impor-29
tant to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves. What they 30
conceived themselves to be. The Focus Groups made little difference 31
in the long run — the only true test was real sales, in Schmidt’s per-32
sonal opinion. Part of today’s design was to go past lunch and keep the 33
members eating only confections. Assuming a normal breakfasttime 34 sh
prior to arrival, one could expect their blood sugar to start heading 35 reg

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down sharply by 11:30. The ones who ate the most Felonies! would be 2
hit the hardest. Among other symptoms, low blood sugar produces os-3
citance, irritability, lowered inhibitions — their game-faces would be-4
gin to slip a bit. Some of the TFG strategies could be extremely 5
manipulative or even abusive in the name of data. A bleach-alternative 6
detergent’s agency had once hired Team y to convene primipara 7
mothers aged 29 to 34 whose TATs had indicated insecurities at three 8
key loci and to administer questionnaires whose items were designed 9
to provoke and/or heighten those insecurities — Do you ever have 10
negative or hostile feelings towards your child? How often do you feel 11
as if you must hide or deny the fact that your parenting skills are inad-12
equate? Have teachers or other parents ever made remarks about your 13
child which embarrassed you? How often do you feel as if your child 14
looks shabby or unclean in comparison to other children? Have you 15
ever neglected to launder, bleach, mend or iron your child’s clothes be-16
cause of time constraints? Does your child ever seem sad or anxious for 17
no reason you can understand? Can you think of a time when your 18
child appeared to be frightened of you? Does your child’s behavior or 19
appearance ever provoke negative feelings in you? Have you ever said 20
or thought negative things about your child? & c. — which, over 21
eleven hours and six separate rounds of carefully designed question-22
naires, brought the women to such an emotional state that truly in-23
valuable data on how to pitch Cheer Xtra in terms of very deep maternal 24
anxieties and conflicts emerged . . . data that so far as Schmidt had 25
been able to see went wholly unexploited in the campaign the agency 26
had finally sold P. & G. on. Darlene Lilley had later said she had felt 27
like calling the Focus Group’s women and apologizing and letting 28
them know that they’d been totally set up and manhandled, emotion-29
ally speaking.

30

Some of the other products and agencies whose branding cam-31
paigns Terry Schmidt and Darlene Lilley’s Field Team had also 32
worked on for Team y were: Downyflake Waffles for D’Arcy Masius 33

Benton & Bowles, Diet Caffeine Free Coke for Ads Infinitum US, sh 34

Eucalyptamint for Pringle Dixon, Citizens Business Insurance for reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 1 9

Export and Special Export Lite for Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, Winner 1

International’s HelpMe Personal Sound Alarm for Reesemeyer Shan-2
non Belt, Isotoner Comfort-Fit Gloves for PR Cogent Partners, 3

Northern Bathroom Tissue for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and Rhône-4

Poulenc Rorer’s new Nasacort and Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal 5

Spray, also for R.S.B.

6

The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of 7
the ordinary about the two UAFs’ status would be to note that the fa-8
cilitator never once looked fully or directly at them, whereas on the 9
other hand Schmidt did look at each of the other twelve men at vari-10
ous intervals, making brief and candid eye-contact with first one man 11
and then another at a different place around the conference table and 12
so on, a subtle skill (there is no term for it) that often marks those who 13
are practiced at speaking before small groups, Schmidt neither holding 14
any man’s eye for so long as to discomfit nor simply panning automa-15
tonically back and forth and brushing only lightly against each man’s 16
gaze in such a way that the men in the Focus Group might feel as 17
though this representative of Mister Squishy and Felonies! were talk-18
ing merely at them rather than to or with them; and it would have 19
taken a practiced small-group observer indeed to notice that there were 20
two men in the conference room — one being the terse eccentric mem-21
ber surrounded by personal-care products, the other a silent earnest-22
eyed bespectacled man who sat in blazer and turtleneck at the table’s 23
far corner, which latter Schmidt had decided was the second UAF: 24
something a tiny bit too composed about the man’s mien and blink-rate 25
gave him up — on whose eyes the facilitator’s never quite did alight all 26
the way. Schmidt’s lapse here was very subtle, and an observer would 27
have to be both highly experienced and unusually attentive to extract 28
any kind of meaning from it.

29

The exterior figure wore also a mountaineer’s tool apron and a large 30
nylon or microfiber backpack. Visually, he was both conspicuous and 31
complex. On each slim ledge he again appeared to use the suction cups 32
on his right hand and wrist to pull himself lithely up from a supine po-33
sition to a standing position, cruciform, facing inward, hugging the glass 34 sh
with his arms’ cups engaged in order to keep from falling backward as 35 reg

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he raised his left leg and turned the shoe outward to align the instep’s 2
cups with the pane’s reflective surface. The suction cups appeared to be 3
the kind whose vacuum action could be activated and deactivated by 4
slight rotary adjustments that probably took a great deal of practice to 5
learn to perform as deftly as the figure made them look. The backpack 6
and boots were the same color. Most of the passersby who looked up 7
and stopped and accreted into a small watching crowd found their 8
attention most fully involved and compelled by the free climb’s mechan-9
ics. The figure traversed each window by lifting his left leg and right arm 10
and pulling himself smoothly up, then attaching his dangling right leg 11
and left arm and activating their cups’ suction and leaving them to hold 12
his weight while he deactivated the left leg’s and right arm’s suction 13
and moved them up and reactivated their cups. There were high de-14
grees of both precision and economy in the way the figure orchestrated 15
his different extremities’ tasks. The day was very crisp and winds aloft 16
were high; whatever clouds there were moved rapidly across the slim 17
square of sky visible above the tall buildings that flanked the street.

18

The autumn sky itself the sort of blue that seems to burn. People with 19
hats tipped them back on their heads and people without hats shaded 20
their eyes with their gloves as they craned to watch the figure’s progress.

21

The clabbering skies over the lake were not visible from the buildings’

22
rifts or canyon’s base. Also there was one large additional suction cup 23
affixed to the back of the hood with a white Velcro strap. When the 24
figure cleared another ledge and for a moment lay on his side facing 25
out into the chasm below, those onlookers far enough back on the side-26
walk to have some visual perspective could see another large orange 27
suction cup, the hood’s cup’s twin, attached to his forehead by what 28
was presumably also Velcro although this Velcro band must have 29
run beneath the hood. And — there was general assent among the 30
watching group — either reflective goggles or very odd and frighten-31
ing eyes indeed.

32

Schmidt was simply giving the Focus Group a little extra back-33
ground, he said, on the product’s genesis and on some of the market-sh 34
ing challenges it had presented, but he said that in no way shape or reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 1
want to pretend he was giving them anything more than little pieces 1
here and there. Time was tight in the pre-GRDS orientation phase.

2

One of the men sneezed loudly. Schmidt explained that this was be-3
cause Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. wanted to make sure to give the 4

Focus Group a generous interval to convene together in camera and 5
discuss their experiences and assessments of Felonies! as a group, to 6
compare notes if you will, on their own, qua group, without any mar-7
keting researchers yammering at them or standing there observing as 8
if they were psychological guinea pigs or something, which meant that 9

Terry would soon be getting out of their hair and leaving them to 10
perpend and converse in private amongst themselves, and that he 11
wouldn’t be coming back until whatever foreman they elected pushed 12
the large red button next to the room’s lights’ rheostat that in turn ac-13
tivated — the red button did — an amber light in the office down the 14
hall, where Terry Schmidt said he would be twiddling his metaphori-15
cal thumbs waiting to come collect the hopefully univocal Group Re-16
sponse Data Summary packet, which the elected foreman here would 17
be receiving ex post hasto. Eleven of the room’s men had now con-18
sumed at least one of the products on the table’s central tray; five of 19
them had had more than one. Schmidt, who was no longer playing 20
idly with the Dry Erase marker because some of the men’s eyes had 21
begun to follow it in his hand and he sensed it was becoming a dis-22
traction, said he now also proposed to give them just a little of the 23
standard spiel on why after all the solo time and effort they’d all al-24
ready put in on their Individual Response Profiles he was going to ask 25
them to start all over again and consider the GRDS packet’s various 26
questions and scales as a collective. He had a trick for disposing of the 27

Dry Erase marker where he very casually placed it in the slotted tray 28
at the bottom of the whiteboard and gave the pen’s butt a hard flick 29
with his finger, sending it the length of the tray to stop just short of 30
shooting out off the other end altogether, with its cap’s tip almost pre-31
cisely aligned with the tray’s end, which he performed with TFGs 32
about 70% of the time, and did perform now. The trick was even more 33
impressively casual-looking if he performed it while he was speaking; it 34 sh
lent both what he was saying and the trick itself an air of nonchalance 35 reg

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that heightened the impact. Robert Awad himself — this being the 2

Team y Senior Research Director who would later harass and be 3
so artfully defused by Darlene Lilley — had casually performed this 4
little trick in one of his orientation presentations for new Field Team 5
researchers 27 fiscal quarters past. This, Schmidt said, was because one 6
of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s central tenets, one of the 7
things that set them apart from other agencies in their bailiwick and so 8
was of course something in which they took great pride and made 9
much of in their pitches to clients like Mister Squishy and North 10

American Soft Confections Inc., was that IRPs like the 20-page ques-11
tionnaires the men had so kindly filled out in their separate airless cu-12
bicles were of definite but only partial research utility, since corporations 13
whose products had national or even regional distribution depended 14
on appealing not just to individual consumers but also of course it al-15
most went without saying to very large groups of them, groups that 16
were yes comprised of individuals but were nevertheless groups, larger 17
entities or collectives. These groups as conceived and understood by 18
market researchers were strange and protean entities, Schmidt told the 19

Focus Group, whose tastes — referring to groups, or small- m markets 20
as they were known around the industry — whose tastes and whims 21
and predilections were not only as the men in the room were doubtless 22
aware subtle and fickle and susceptible to influence from myriad tiny 23
factors in each individual consumer’s appetitive makeup but were also, 24
somewhat paradoxically, functions of the members of the group’s var-25
ious influences upon one another, all in a set of interactions and recur-26
sively exponential responses-to-responses so complex and multifaceted 27
that it drove statistical demographers half nuts and required a whole 28

Sysplex series of enormously powerful low-temperature Cray-brand 29
supercomputers even to try to model.

30

And if all that just sounded like a lot of marketing doubletalk, Terry 31

Schmidt told the Focus Group with an air of someone loosening his 32
tie after something public’s end, maybe the easiest example of what 33

R.S.B. was talking about in terms of intramarket influences was prob-sh 34
ably say for instance teenage kids and the fashions and fads that swept reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 3
school and college kids and markets such as for instance popular mu-1
sic, clothing fashions, etcetera. If the members saw a lot of teenage 2
kids these days wearing pants that looked way too big for them and 3
rode low and had cuffs that dragged on the ground, for one obvious 4
example, Schmidt said as if plucking an example at random out of the 5
air, or if as was surely the case with some of the more senior men in the 6
room (two, in fact) they themselves had kids who’d taken in the last 7
couple years to suddenly wanting and wearing clothes that were far too 8
big for them and made them look like urchins in Victorian novels even 9
though as the men probably knew all too well, with a grim chuckle, the 10
clothes cost a pretty penny indeed over at the Gap or Structure. And 11
if you wondered why your kid was wearing them of course the major-12
ity of the answer was simply that other kids were wearing them, for of 13
course kids as a demographic market today were notoriously herdlike 14
and their individual choices in consumption were overwhelmingly 15
influenced by other kids’ consumption-choices and so on in a fadlike 16
pattern that spread like wildfire and usually then abruptly and myste-17
riously vanished or changed into something else. This was the most 18
simple and obvious example of the sort of complex system of large 19
groups’ intragroup preferences influencing one another and building 20
exponentially on one another, much more like a nuclear chain reaction 21
or an epidemiological transmission grid than a simple case of each indi-22
vidual consumer deciding privately for himself what he wanted and then 23
going out and judiciously spending his disposable income on it. The 24
wonks in Demographics’ buzzword for this phenomenon was Meta-25
static Consumption Pattern or MCP, Schmidt told the Focus Group, 26
rolling his eyes in a way that invited those who were listening to laugh 27
with him at the statisticians’ jargon. Granted, the facilitator went on, this 28
model he was so rapidly sketching for them was overly simplistic —

29
e.g., it left out advertising and the media, which in today’s hypercom-30
plex business environment sought always to anticipate and fuel these 31
sudden proliferating movements in group choice, aiming for a tipping 32
point at which a product or brand achieved such ubiquitous popular-33
ity that it became like unto actual cultural news and-slash-or fodder 34 sh
for cultural critics and comedians, plus also a plausible placement-prop 35 reg

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for mass entertainment that sought to look real and in-the-now, and 2
so thereupon a product or style that got hot at a certain ideal apex of 3
the MCP graph ceased to require much paid advertising at all, the hot 4
brand becoming as it were a piece of cultural information or an ele-5
ment of the way the market wished to see itself, which — Schmidt 6
gave them a wistful smile — was a rare and prized phenomenon and 7
was considered in marketing to be something like winning the World 8

Series.

9

Of the 67% of the twelve true Focus Group members who were still 10
concentrating on listening closely to Terry Schmidt, two now wore the 11
expressions of men who were trying to decide whether to be slightly 12
offended; both these men were over 40. Also, some of the individual 13
adults across the conference table from one another began to exchange 14
glances, and since (Schmidt believed) these men had no prior ac-15
quaintance or connection on which to base meaningful eye-contact, it 16
seemed probable that the looks were in reaction to the facilitator’s 17
analogy to teen fashion fads. One of the group’s members had classic 18
peckerwood sideburns that came all the way down to his mandibles 19
and ended in sharp points. Of the room’s three youngest men, none 20
were attending closely, and two were still established in postures and 21
facial configurations designed to make this apparent. The third had re-22
moved his fourth Felony! from the table’s display and was dismantling 23
the wrapper as quietly as possible, looking furtively around to deter-24
mine whether anyone cared that he’d exceeded his technical product-25
share. Schmidt, improvising slightly, was saying, ‘I’m talking here 26
about juvenile fads, of course, only because it’s the simplest, most in-27
tuitive sort of example. The marketing people at Mister Squishy know 28
full well that you gentlemen aren’t kids,’ with a small slight smile at the 29
younger members, all three of whom could after all vote, purchase al-30
cohol, and enlist in the armed forces; ‘or nor that there’s anything like 31
a real herd mentality we’re trying to spark here by leaving you alone to 32
confer amongst yourselves qua group. If nothing else, keep in mind 33
that soft-confection marketing doesn’t work this way; it’s much more sh 34
complicated, and the group dynamics of the market are much harder reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 5
math up on the board that we wouldn’t even dream of trying to get you 1
to sit still for.’

2

A single intrepid sporting boat was making its way right to left 3
across the portion of the lake the large window gave out on, and once 4
or twice an automobile horn far below on E. Huron sounded at such 5
insistent length that it intruded on the attention of Terry Schmidt and 6
some of the well-vetted consumers in this conference room, a couple 7
of whom Schmidt had to admit to himself that he felt he might 8
frankly dislike — both of them somewhat older, one the man with the 9
hairweave, something hooded about their eyes, and the way they 10
made little self-satisfied adjustments to parts of themselves and their 11
wardrobes, sometimes in a very concentrated way, as if to communi-12
cate that they were men so important that their attention itself was 13
highly prized, that they were old and experienced hands at sitting in 14
rooms like this having earnest young men with easels and full-color 15
charts make presentations and try to solicit favorable responses from 16
them, and that they were well above whatever mass-consumer LCD

17

Schmidt’s clumsy mime of candid spontaneity was pitched at, that 18
they’d taken cellular phone calls during or in fact even walked out of 19
far more nuanced, sophisticated, assuasive pitches than this. Schmidt 20
had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some per-21
spective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reac-22
tion to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or 23
pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back 24
on their coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was his own inse-25
curity, that he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole en-26
terprise of contemporary marketing and that this sometimes manifested 27
via projection as the feeling that people he was just trying to talk as 28
candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or 29
trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, 30
however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine 31
had somehow colored his whole being and that something essentially 32
shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false 33
or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career —

34 sh
which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team y, or even 35 reg

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all that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner 2
life, and introspected a great deal — but in his personal affairs as well, 3
and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills 4
had metastasized throughout his whole character so that he was now 5
the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a fe-6
male colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart up to her 7
and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her 8
involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and 9
that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she prob-10
ably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could 11
ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfill-12
ing he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to 13
do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a 14
meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations 15
at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably 16
just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some 17
creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy se-18
cretive kind of almost shrine to her in one corner of the unused second 19
bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out 20
of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she 21
passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team y staff meetings, 22
or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 23

1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm 24
over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another 25

Team y Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other 26
side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney–Jaswat & Assoc. had 27
thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, 28

Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost 29
as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to 30
match her lipstick and the small scarlet hairbow she often wore just 31
right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement.

32

The crowd on the sidewalk’s growth was still inconstant. For every 33
two or three passersby who joined the group of onlookers craning up-sh 34
ward, someone else in the crowd suddenly looked at his watch and de-reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 7
the street to keep some type of appointment. From a certain perspec-1
tive the small crowd, then, looked like a living cell engaged in trade 2
and exchange with the linear streetside flows that fed it. There was no 3
evidence that the climbing figure saw the fluctuantly growing mass so 4
far below. He certainly never made any of the motions or expressions 5
people associate with someone at a great height looking down at them.

6

No one in the sidewalk’s group of spectators pointed or yelled; for the 7
most part they just watched. What children there were held their 8
guardians’ hand. There were some remarks and small conversations 9
between adjoining onlookers, but these took place out of the sides of 10
their mouths as all parties looked up at what appeared to be a sheer 11
and sky-high column of alternating glass and prestressed stone. The 12
figure averaged roughly 230 seconds per story; a commuter timed him.

13

Both his backpack and apron looked full of some kind of equipment 14
that caused them to bulge. There were loops along his GoreTex top’s 15
shoulders and also — unless it was a trick of the building’s windows’

16
refracted light — small strange almost nipplelike protuberances at the 17
figure’s shoulders, on his knees’ backs, and in the center of the odd 18
navy-and-white bullseye design at the figure’s seat. The crampons on 19
mountaineering boots can be removed with a small square tool so that 20
they can be sharpened or replaced, a long-haired man supporting an 21
expensive bicycle against his hip told the people around him. He per-22
sonally felt he knew what the protuberances were. New members of 23
the crowd always asked the people around them what was going on, 24
whether they knew anything. The costume was airtight, the guy was 25
inflatable or designed to look that way, the long-haired man said. He 26
appeared to be talking to his bicycle; no one acknowledged him. His 27
pantcuffs were clipped for easy cycling. On every third or fourth floor, 28
the figure paused for a time on his back on the narrow ledge with 29
scrollwork at the cornices, resting. A man who had at one time driven 30
an airport shuttlebus opined that the figure on the ledge looked to be 31
purposely idling, timing out his ascent to conform to some schedule; 32
the child attached to the hand of the woman he said this to looked 33
briefly over at him with his face still upturned. Anyone looking 34 sh
straight down would have seen a shifting collection of several dozen 35 reg

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watching faces with bodies so foreshortened as to be mere suggestions 2
only.

3

‘Probably only up to a certain point,’ Terry Schmidt said then in re-4
sponse to a sort of confirmational question from the tall man with the 5
kite-shaped face and a partly torn tag (two of the room’s six cursive 6
nametags were ripped or sectional, the result of accidents during their 7
removal from the adhesive backing) that read FORREST, a 40ish fel-8
low with large and hirsute hands and a slightly frayed collar, whose air 9
of rumpled integrity — along with two separate questions that had ac-10
tually helped advance the presentation’s agendas — made this fellow 11

Schmidt’s personal choice for foreman. ‘What it is is just that R.S.B.

12
feels your Focus Group responses qua group instead of just as the sum 13
of your personal individual responses is an equally important market 14
research tool for a product like the Felony!. “GRDS as well as IRPs” as 15
we say in the trade,’ with a breeziness he did not feel. One of the 16
younger members — age 22 according to the tiny Charleston code 17
worked into the scrollwork at his nametag’s lower border, and hand-18
some in a generic way — wore a reversed baseball cap and a soft wool 19

V-neck sweater with no shirt underneath, displaying a powerful upper 20
chest and forearms (the sleeves of the sweater were carefully pushed up 21
to reveal the forearms’ musculature in a way designed to look casual, as 22
if the sweater’s arms had been thoughtlessly pushed up in the midst of 23
his thinking hard about something other than himself ), and had 24
crossed his leg ankle-on-knee and slid so far down on his tailbone that 25
his cocked leg was the same height as his chin, thereupon holding the 26
salient knee with his fingers laced in such a way as to apply pressure 27
and make his forearms bulge even more. It had occurred to Terry 28

Schmidt that even though so many home products, from Centrum 29

Multivitamins to Visine AC Soothing Antiallergenic Eye Drops to 30

Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, now came in conspicuous 31
tamperproof packaging in the wake of the Tylenol poisonings of a 32
decade past and Johnson & Johnson’s legendarily swift and conscien-33
tious response to the crisis — pulling every bottle of every variety sh 34
of Tylenol off every retail shelf in America and spending millions on reg 35

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setting up overnight a smooth and hassle-free system for every Tylenol 1
consumer to return his or her bottle for an immediate NQA refund 2
plus an added sum for the gas and mileage or US postage involved in 3
the return, writing off tens of millions in returns and operational costs 4
and recouping untold exponents more in positive PR and consumer 5
goodwill and thereby actually enhancing the brand Tylenol’s associa-6
tion with compassion and concern for consumer wellbeing, a strategy 7
that had made J. & J.’s CEO and their PR vendors legends in a mar-8
keting field that Terry Schmidt had only just that year begun consid-9
ering getting into as a practical and potentially creative and rewarding 10
way to use his double major in Descriptive Statistics + Bv. Psych, the 11
young Schmidt imagining himself in plush conference rooms not un-12
like this one, using the sheer force of his personality and command of 13
the facts to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers that le-14
gitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and 15
economically Good Business, that if, e.g., R. J. Reynolds elected to be 16
forthcoming about its products’ addictive qualities, and GM to be up-17
front in its national ads about the fact that vastly greater fuel efficiency 18
was totally feasible if consumers would be willing to spend a couple 19
hundred dollars more and settle for slightly fewer aesthetic amenities, 20
and shampoo manufacturers to concede that the ‘Repeat’ in their prod-21
uct instructions was hygienically unnecessary, and Tums’ parent General 22

Brands to spend a couple million to announce candidly that Tums-brand 23
antacid tablets should not be used regularly for more than a couple 24
weeks at a time because after that the stomach lining automatically 25
started secreting more HCl to compensate for all the neutralization 26
and made the original stomach trouble worse, that the consequent 27
gains in corporate PR and associations of the brand with integrity and 28
trust would more than outweigh the short-term costs and stock-price 29
repercussions, that yes it was a risk but not a wild or dicelike risk, that 30
it had on its side both precedent cases and demographic data as well as 31
the solid reputation for both caginess and integrity of T. E. Schmidt & 32

Associates, to concede that yes gentlemen he supposed he was in a way 33
asking them to gamble some of their narrow short-term margins and 34 sh

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equity on the humble sayso of Terence Eric Schmidt Jr., whose own 2
character’s clear marriage of virtue, pragmatism, and oracular market-3
ing savvy were his best and final argument; he was saying to these 4
upper-management men in their vests and Cole Haans just what he 5
proposed to have them say to a sorry and cynical US market: Trust Me 6

You Will Not Be Sorry — which when he thinks of the starry-eyed 7
puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, 8

Schmidt experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of 9
embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories 10
objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt’s 11
case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy (the latter 12
the origin of the self-caricature doodling during downtime in his beige 13
cubicle) had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies 14
were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright 15
young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice 16
in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common 17
run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it 18
were central, meaningful — what else could explain the fact that they 19
themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve experienced for 20
the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? — and that they can and 21
will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their 22
unique and central presence in it . . . ; and but so (Schmidt also still 23
declaiming professionally to the TFG all this while) that even though 24
so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof, Mis-25
ter Squishy–brand snack cakes — as well as Hostess, Little Debbie, 26

Dolly Madison, the whole soft-confection industry with its flimsy 27
neopolymerized wrappers and cheap thin cardboard Economy Size 28
containers — were decidedly not tamperproof at all, that it would take 29
nothing more than one thin-gauge hypodermic and 24 infinitesimal 30
doses of KCN, As O , ricin, C H O N , acincetilcholine, botulinus, 2

3

21

22

2

2

31
or even merely Tl or some other aqueous base-metal compound to 32
bring almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee; for 33
even if the soft-confection manufacturers survived the initial horror sh 34
and managed to recover some measure of consumer trust, the relevant reg 35
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Appeal Matrix*, and the costs of reinforcing the Economy packaging 1
or rendering the individual snack cakes visibly invulnerable to a thin-2
gauge hypodermic would push the products out so far right on the de-3
mand curve that mass-market snacks would become economically and 4
emotionally untenable, corporate soft confections going thus the way of 5
hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating, door-to-door sales, & c.

6

At various intervals throughout the pre-GRDS presentation the 7
limbic portions of Schmidt’s brain pursued this line of thinking —

8
while in fact a whole other part of his mind surveyed these memories 9
and fantasies and was simultaneously fascinated and repelled at the 10
way in which all these thoughts and feelings could be entertained in 11
total subjective private while Schmidt ran the Focus Group through its 12
brief and supposedly Full-Access description of Mister Squishy’s place 13
in the soft-confection industry and some of the travails of developing 14
and marketing what these men were experiencing as Felonies! (refer-15
ring offhandedly to nascent plans for bite-sized misdemeanors! [ sic] if 16
the original product established a foothold), at least half the room’s 17
men listening with what’s called half an ear while pursuing their own 18
private lines of thought, and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in 19
the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps 20
showing, unknown and -knowable to one another, and he imagined 21
that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the 22
decorous dance of loneliness he’d watched his mother and father do 23
for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners al-24
lowed each other to see below the berg’s cap’s public mask and con-25
sented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting 26
the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the 27
way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet 28
turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every 29
once in a while sobbing in each other’s arms late at night and pouring 30
out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impo-31
tence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding pro-32
fessional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think 33

34 sh

*also, somewhat confusingly, = MAM

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you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny 2
faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real 3
impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about finally 4
deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc’s of 5
castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own 6
inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog 7
and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and 8
women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than 9
you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside 10
that they were made for something larger and more central and rele-11
vant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-12
caucus and yet at the same time still believed that they could (= the 13
bright young men could) begin to manifest their larger potential for 14
impact and effectiveness by being the very best darn Targeted Focus 15

Group facilitator that Team y and R.S.B. had ever seen, better than 16
the nested-test data they’d seen so far had shown might even be pos-17
sible, establishing via manifest candor and integrity and a smooth 18
informal rhetoric that let their own very special qualities manifest 19
themselves and shine forth such a level of connection and intimacy 20
with a Focus Group that the TFG’s men or women felt, within the 21
special high-voltage field of the relationship the extraordinary facilita-22
tor created, an interest in and enthusiasm for the product and for 23

R.S.B.’s desire to bring the product out into the US market in the very 24
most effective way that matched or even exceeded the agency’s own.

25

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this 26
childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the 27
context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony 28
and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now 29
lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through 30
his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacra-31
ment of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and trans-32
rational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the 33
crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say sh 34
it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 3 3
touchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that 1
reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable 2
of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why 3

Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even 4
usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium’s pic-5
ture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satel-6
lite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from 7
channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was 8
going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 reg-9
ular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending 10
three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming 11
heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene 12

Lilley’s home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one 13
moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just 14
one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or 15
even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and 16
open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more 17
night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan 18
bedroom to lay out the next day’s crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly 19
dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep again once more.

20

Schmidt was sensitive about the way his weight and body fat percent-21
age increased with each passing year, and imagined that there was 22
something about the way he walked that suggested a plump or prissy 23
fat man’s waddle, when in fact his stride was 100% average and unre-24
markable and nobody except Terry Schmidt had any opinions about 25
his manner of walking one way or the other. Sometimes over this last 26
quarter, when shaving in the morning with WLS News and Talk Ra-27
dio on over the intercom, he stopped — Schmidt did — and would 28
look at his face and at the faint lines and pouches that seemed to grow 29
a little more pronounced each quarter and would call himself, directly 30
to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy, the name would come unbidden 31
into his mind, and despite his attempts to ignore or resist it the large 32
subsidiary’s name and logo had become the dark part of him’s latest 33
taunt, so that when he thought of himself now it was as something 34 sh
he called Mister Squishy, and his own face and the plump and wholly 35 reg

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1
innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude 2
and line-drawn and clever in a small way, a design that someone might 3
find some small selfish use for but could never love or hate or ever care 4
to truly even know.

5

Some of the shoppers inside the first-floor display window of the 6

Gap observed the mass of people on the sidewalk craning upward and 7
wondered, naturally, what was up. At the base of the eighth floor, the 8
figure shifted himself carefully around so that he was seated on the 9
ledge facing outward with his bicolored legs adangle. He was 238 feet 10
up in the air. The square of sky directly above him a pilot-light blue.

11

The growing crowd watching the figure’s climb could not discern that 12
there was in turn a growing collection of shoppers inside looking out 13
at them because the building’s glass, which appeared tinted on the in-14
side, was reflective on the outside; it was One Way Glass. The figure 15
now crossed his legs lotus-style on the ledge beneath him, paused, and 16
then in one lithe movement drove himself upright, losing his balance 17
slightly and windmilling his arms to keep from pitching forward off 18
the ledge altogether. There was a brief group-exhalation from the 19
sidewalk’s crowd as the figure now snapped its hooded head back and 20
with a tiny distant wet noise affixed the suction cup at his head’s rear 21
to the window. A couple young men in the crowd cried up at the 22
eighth floor for the figure to jump, but their tone was self-ironic and it 23
was plain that they were simply parodying the typical cry of jaded on-24
lookers to a figure balanced on a slim ledge 240 feet up in a high wind 25
and looking down at a crowd on the plaza’s sidewalk far below. Still, 26
one or two much older people shot optical daggers at the youths who’d 27
shouted; it was unclear whether they knew what self-parody even was.

28

Inside the window of the building’s north facet’s eighth floor — which 29
space happened to comprise the circulation and subscription depart-30
ments of Playboy magazine — the employees’ reaction to the sight of 31
the back of a lithe blue-and-white figure attached to the window by a 32
large suction cup on its head can only be imagined. It was the Gap’s 33
floor manager in Accessories who first called the police, and this merely sh 34
because the press of customers at the window’s display clearly bespoke reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 3 5
of that disturbance was unknown, none of the roving television vans 1
who monitored the city’s police frequencies were alerted, and the scene 2
remained media-free for a good 1500 feet in every direction.

3

What Terry Schmidt sketched from memory for the all-male Focus 4

Group was a small eddy or crosscurrent in the tide that demomarketers 5
called an MCP — these were known as Antitrends, or sometimes 6

Shadow Markets. In the area of corporate snacks, Schmidt pretended 7
to explain, there were two basic ways a new product could position 8
itself in a US market for which health, fitness, nutrition, and attendant 9
indulgence-v.-discipline conflicts had achieved a metastatic status. A 10

Shadow snack simply worked to define itself in opposition to the over-11
all trend against HDL fats, refined carbs, transfatty acids, i.e. against the 12
consumption of what some subgroups variously termed empty calories, 13
sweets, junk food, or in other words the whole brilliantly orchestrated 14
obsession with nutrition and exercise and stress-management that 15
went under the demographic heading Healthy Lifestyles. Schmidt said 16
he could tell from the Focus Group’s faces — whose expressions 17
ranged from sullen distraction in the youngest to a kind of studious 18
anxiety in the older men, faces tinged with the slight guilt-about-guilt 19
that Schemm Halter/Deight’s legendary E. Peter Fish, the mind be-20
hind both shark cartilage and odor-free garlic supplements, had called 21
at a high-priced seminar that both Scott Laleman and Darlene Lilley 22
had attended ‘. . . the knife edge that Healthy Lifestyles Marketing 23
ha[d] to walk along,’ which unfortunate phrase was reproduced by a 24

Hewlett Packard digital projector that cast Fish’s key points in bold-25
fonted outline form against one wall to facilitate effective note-taking 26

(the whole industry seminar business was such bullshit, Terry Schmidt 27
believed, with its leather binders and mission statements and wargame 28
nomenclature, marketing truisms to marketers, who when all was said 29
and done were probably the most plasticly gullible market around, 30
although at the same time there was no disputing E. P. Fish’s im-31
portance or his statements’ weight) — Schmidt said he could tell from 32
their faces that the men knew quite well what Antitrend was about, 33
the Shadow Markets like Punk contra Disco and Cadillacs contra 34 sh
high-mileage compacts and Sun and Apple contra the MS juggernaut.

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He said they could if the men wished talk at some length about the 2
stresses on individual consumers caught between their natural God-3
given herd instincts and their deep fear of sacrificing their natural 4

God-given identities as individuals, and about the way these stresses 5
were tweaked and-slash-or soothed by skillfully engineered trends, 6
and that but then, by sort of the Third Law of Motion of marketing, 7
the MCP trends spawned also their Antitrend Shadows, the spin in-8
side and against the larger spin of in this instance Reduced-Calorie 9
and Fat-Free foods, nutritional supplements, Lowcaf and Decaf, Nutra-10

Sweet and Olestra, jazzercise and liposuction and kava kava, good v.

11
bad cholesterol, free radicals v. antioxidants, time management and 12

Quality Time and the really rather brilliantly managed stress that 13
everyone was made to feel about staying fit and looking good and liv-14
ing long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health 15
and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second, Schmidt then 16
backing off to acknowledge that but of course on the other hand he 17
was aware that the men’s time was valuable and so he’d . . . and here 18
one or two of the older Focus Group members who had wristwatches 19
glanced at them by reflex, and the overstylized UAF’s pager went off 20
by prearrangement, which allowed Schmidt to gesture broadly and 21
pretend to chuckle and to concede that yes yes see their time was valu-22
able, that they all felt it, that they all knew what he was talking about 23
because after all they all lived in it didn’t they, and to say that so in 24
this case it would perhaps suffice just to simply for example utter 25
the illustrative words Jolt Cola, Starbucks, Häagen-Dazs, Ericson’s 26

All Butter Fudge, premium cigars, conspicuously low-mileage urban 27

4WDs, Hammacher Schlemmer’s all-silk boxers, whole Near North 28

Side eateries given over to high-lipid desserts — enterprises in other 29
words that rode the transverse Shadow, that said or sought to say to a 30
consumer bludgeoned by herd-pressures to achieve, forbear, trim the 31
fat, cut down, discipline, prioritize, be sensible, self-parent, that hey, you 32
deserve it, reward yourself, brands that in essence said what’s the use of 33
living longer and healthier if there aren’t those few precious moments sh 34
in every day when you stopped, sat down, and took a few moments of reg 35
hard-earned pleasure just for you? and various myriad other pitches 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 3 7
that aimed to remind the consumer that he was at root an individual, 1
one with individual tastes and preferences and freedom of individual 2
choice, that he was not a mere herd animal who had no choice but to 3
go go go on US life’s digital-calorie-readout treadmill, that there were 4
still some rich and refined and harmless-if-judiciously-indulged-in 5
pleasures out there to indulge in if the consumer’d snap out of his high-6
fiber hypnosis and realize that life was also to be enjoyed, that the un-7
enjoyed life was not worth living, & c. & c. That, as one example, just 8
as Hostess Inc. was coming out with low-fat Twinkies and cholesterol-9
free Ding Dongs, Jolt Cola’s own branders had hung its West Coast 10
launch on the inverted All the Sugar Twice the Caffeine, and that 11
meanwhile the stock of Ericson’s All Butter Fudge and individual 12
bite-sized Fudgees’ parent company US Brands had split three times 13
via D.D.B. Needham’s series of ads that featured people in workout 14
clothes running into each other in dim closets where they’d gone to eat 15

Ericson’s A.B.F. in secret, with all the ingenious and piquant taglines 16
that played against the moment the characters’ mutual embarrassment 17
turned to laughter and a convolved esprit de corps. (Schmidt knew full 18
well that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had lost the US Brands/

19

Ericson account to D.D.B. Needham’s spectacular pitch for a full-out 20

Shadow strategy, and thus that the videotape of his remarks here 21
would raise at least three eyebrows among R.S.B.’s MROP team and 22
would force Robert Awad to behave as though he believed Schmidt 23
hadn’t known anything about the Ericson–D.D.B. Needham thing 24
and to come lean pungently over the wall of Schmidt’s cubicle and try 25
to quote unquote ‘fill in Terry’ on certain facts of life of interagency 26
politics without unduly damaging Schmidt’s morale over the putative 27
boner, and so on.)

28

Nor in fact was the high-altitude figure gazing down at them, the 29
street’s keener onlookers saw — what he was actually doing was look-30
ing down at himself and gingerly removing a shiny packet of what ap-31
peared to be foil or Mylar from his mountaineer’s tool apron and 32
giving it a delicate little towel-like snap to open it out and then reach-33
ing up with both hands and rolling it down over his head and hood 34 sh
and fixing it in place with small snaps or Velcro tabs at his shoulders 35 reg

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and throat’s base. It was some sort of mask, the long-haired cyclist 2
who always carried a small novelty-type spy telescope in his fannypack 3
opined, though except for two holes for eyes and a large one for his 4
forehead’s cup the whole thing appeared too wrinkled and detumesced-5
looking to be able to make out who or what the shapeless arrangement 6
of microtextured lines on the Mylar was supposed to represent, but 7
even at this distance the mask looked frightening, baggy and hydro-8
cephalic and cartoonishly inhuman, and there were now some louder 9
and less self-ironic shouts and cries, and several members of the 10
watching crowd involuntarily stepped back into the street, fouling 11
traffic and causing a brief discordance of horns as the figure placed 12
both hands on his head’s white bag and with something like a wet 13
kissing noise from his skull’s rear suction cup performed a lithe contra 14
face that left him now facing the window with the sagged mask’s nose 15
and lips and forehead’s very orange cup pressed tight against it —

16
again provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy mag-17
azine corporate staff on the glass’s inside — whereupon he now reached 18
around and removed from the backpack what appeared to be a small 19
generator or perhaps scuba-style tank with a slender hoselike attach-20
ment that was either black or dark blue and ended in a strange sort of 21
triangular or arrowhead- or -shaped nozzle or attachment or mor-22
tise, which tank he connected with straps and a harness to the back of 23
his GoreTex top and allowed the dark hose and nozzle to hang unfet-24
tered down over his concentricized rear and the leggings’ tops, so that 25
when he resumed his practiced-looking opposite-leg and -arm climb 26
up the eighth-floor window he now also wore what appeared to be a 27
deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-28
looking tail, and presented an overall sight so complex and unlike any-29
thing from any member of the (now much larger and more diffuse, 30
some still in the street and beginning to roil) crowd’s visual experience 31
that there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individ-32
ual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan 33
their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated sh 34
things the figure might resemble or suggest. A small child in the crowd reg 35
began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot.

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O b l i v i o n 3 9

Now that he appeared less conventionally human, the way the fig-1
ure climbed by moving his left arm/right leg and then right arm/left 2
leg looked even more arachnoid or saurian; in any event he was still 3
just lithe as hell. Some of the shoppers inside the display windows of 4
the Gap had now come out and joined the sidewalk’s crowd. The fig-5
ure scaled the eighth–twelfth floors with ease, then paused while at-6
tached to the thirteenth- (perhaps called the fourteenth-) floor window 7
to apply some kind of adhesive or cleaner to his suction cups. The 8
winds at 425 feet must have been very strong, because his caudal hose 9
swung wildly this way and that.

10

It was also impossible for some people in the front portion of the 11
street and sidewalk’s crowd to resist looking at their own and the 12
whole collective’s reflection in the Gap’s display window. There were 13
no more screams or cries of ‘Jump!’, but among some of the crowd’s 14
younger and more media-savvy members there began to be specula-15
tion about whether this was a PR stunt for some product or service or 16
whether perhaps the climbing figure was one of those renegade urban 17
daredevils who scaled tall buildings and then parachuted to the ground 18
below and submitted to arrest while blowing kisses to network news 19
cameras. The well-known Sears Tower or even Hancock Center would 20
have been a far better high-visibility site for a stunt like this if such a 21
stunt it was, some of them opined. The first two squad cars arrived as 22
the figure — by this time quite small, even through a novelty telescope, 23
and obscured almost wholly from view when he negotiated ledges —

24
was hanging attached by his forehead’s central cup to the fifteenth-25
floor window (or perhaps sixteenth, depending whether the building 26
had a thirteenth floor; some do and some don’t) and appeared to be 27
pulling more items from his nylon pack, fitting them together and us-28
ing both hands to telescope something out to arm’s length and then at-29
taching various other small things to it. It was probably the squad cars 30
and their garish lights at the curb that caused so many other cars on 31

Huron Ave. to slow down or even pull over to see if there’d been a 32
death or an arrest, forcing one of the officers to spend his time trying 33
to control traffic and keep cars moving so that the avenue remained 34 sh
passable. It was an older African-American woman who’d been one of 35 reg

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the very first pedestrians to stop and look up and was now using broad 2
motions of all four limbs to report or re-create for a policeman all she 3
had witnessed up to the present who’d paused to ask whether to the 4
officer’s knowledge the strangely costumed figure’s climb could possi-5
bly be a licensed stunt for a feature film or commercial television or 6
cable program, and this was when it occurred to some of the other 7
spectators that the lithe figure’s climb was conceivably being filmed 8
from the upper stories of one of the other commercial skyscrapers on 9
the street, and that there might in particular be cameras, film crews, 10
and/or celebrities in the tall gray vertiginously flèched older building 11
directly opposite 1101 E. Huron’s north facet; and a certain percentage 12
of the crowd’s rear turned around and began craning and scanning win-13
dows on that building’s south side, none of which were open, although 14
this signified nothing because by City Ordinance 920-1247(d) no 15
commercially zoned structure could possess, nor authorize by terms of 16
lease or contract any lessee to possess, operable windows above the 17
third floor. It was not clear whether this older opposite building’s glass 18
was One Way or not because the angle of the late-morning sun, now 19
almost directly overhead in the street’s slot of sky, caused blinding 20
reflections in that older spired building’s windows, some of which bril-21
liant reflections the windows focused and cast almost like spotlights 22
against the surface of the original building which even now the masked 23
figure with the tank and tail and real or imitation semiautomatic 24
weapon — for verily that is what the new item was, slung over the sub-25
ject’s back at a slight transverse angle so that its unfolded stock rested 26
atop the small blue-and-white tank for what might even conceivably be 27
a miniaturized combat-grade gas mask or even maybe Jaysus help us 28
all if it was a flamethrower or Clancy-grade biochemical aerosol neb-29
ulizer gizmo thing, the officer with the Dept.-issue high-× binoculars 30
reported, using a radio that was somehow attached like an epaulette to 31
his uniform’s shoulder so that he had only to cock his head and touch 32
his left shoulder to be able to confer with other officers, whose blue-33
and-white bored-out Montegos’ sirens could be heard approaching sh 34
from what sounded like Loyola U. — continued to scale, namely 1101
reg 35

E. Huron, so that squares and small rectangles and parallelograms 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 4 1
of high-intensity light swam around him and lit up the sixteenth-1
or seventeenth-floor window he was even then scaling with nerveless 2
ease, the fully automatic–looking M16’s barrel and folded stock in-3
serted through several presewn loops along the left shoulder of his 4

GoreTex top so that he retained full use of his left arm and hand’s 5
cup as he scaled the window and sat once again on the next story’s 6
ledge, the long nozzle arranged beneath him and only a couple feet 7
of it protruding from between his legs and wobbling stiffly in the 8
wind. Reflected light aswim all around him. A group of pigeons or 9
doves on the ledge of the adjoining window was disturbed and took 10
flight across the street and reassembled on a ledge at the exact same 11
height on the opposite building. The figure appeared now to have 12
removed some sort of radio, cellular phone, or handheld recording 13
device from his mountaineer’s apron and to be speaking into it. At no 14
time did he look down or in any way acknowledge the sidewalk and 15
street’s crowds, their shouts and cheers as each window was traversed, 16
or the police cruisers which by this time were parked at several dif-17
ferent angles on the street, all emitting complex light, with two more 18
squad cars now blocking off E. Huron at the major intersections on 19
either side.

20

A C.F.D. truck arrived and firefighters in heavy slickers exited and 21
began to mill about for no discernible reason. There were also no evi-22
dent media vans or rigs or mobile cameras at any time, which struck 23
the savvier onlookers as further evidence that the whole thing could be 24
some sort of licensed prearranged corporate promotion or stunt or 25
ploy. A few arguments ensued, mostly good-natured and inhibited by 26
the number of auditors nearby. A stiff new ground-level breeze carried 27
the smell of fried foods. A foreign couple arrived and began to hawk 28

T-shirts whose silkscreen designs had nothing to do with what was 29
going on. A detachment of police and firefighters entered 1101’s north 30
facet in order to establish a position on the building’s roof, the fire-31
men’s axes and hats causing a small panic in the Gap and causing a 32
jam-up at the building’s revolving door that left a man in Oakley sun-33
glasses slumped and holding his chest or side. Several people in the 34 sh
crowd’s rear cried out and pointed at what they claimed had been 35 reg

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1
movement and/or the flash of lenses on the roof of the opposite build-2
ing. There was counterspeculation in the crowd that the whole thing 3
was maybe designed to maybe only look like a media stunt and that the 4
weapon the figure was now sitting uncomfortably back against was 5
genuine and that the idea was for him to look as eccentric as possible 6
and climb high enough to draw a large crowd and then to spray auto-7
matic fire indiscriminately down into the crowd. The driverless autos 8
along the curb at both sides of the street now had tickets under their 9
windshield wipers. A helicopter could be heard but not seen from the 10
canyon or crevasse the commercial structures made of the street below.

11

One or two fingers of cirrus were now in the sky overhead. Some 12
people were eating vendors’ pretzels and brats, the wind whipping at 13
the paper napkins tucked into their collars. One officer held a bullhorn 14
but seemed unable to activate it. Someone had stepped backward onto 15
the steep curb and injured his ankle or foot; a paramedic attended him 16
as he lay on his topcoat and stared straight upward at the tiny figure, 17
who by this time had gained his feet and was splayed beneath the 18
seventeenth/eighteenth floor, appearing to just stay there, attached to 19
the window and waiting.

20

Terry Schmidt’s father had served in the US armed forces and been 21
awarded a field commission at the age of just 21 and received both the 22

Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and the decorated veteran’s favorite 23
civilian activity in the whole world — you could tell by his face as he 24
did it — was polishing his shoes and the buttons on his five sportcoats, 25
which he did every Sunday afternoon, and the placid concentration on 26
his face as he knelt on newspaper with his tins and shoes and chamois 27
had formed a large unanalyzable part of the young Terry Schmidt’s de-28
termination to make a difference in the affairs of men someday in the 29
future. Which was now: time had indeed slipped by, just as in popular 30
songs, and revealed Schmidt fils to be neither special nor exempt.

31

In the last two years Team y had come to function as what the ad-32
vertising industry called a Captured Shop: the firm occupied a con-33
tractual space somewhere between a subsidiary of Reesemeyer Shannon sh 34

Belt and an outside vendor. Under Alan Britton’s stewardship, Team reg 35
y had joined the industry’s trend toward Captured consolidation and 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 4 3
reinvented itself as more or less the research arm of Reesemeyer Shan-1
non Belt Advertising. Team y’s new status was designed both to limit 2

R.S.B.’s paper overhead and to maximize the tax advantages of Focus 3

Group research, which now could be both billed to Client and written 4
off as an R&D subcontracting expense. There were substantial salary 5
and benefit advantages to Team y (which was structured as an 6
employee-owned S corporation under U.S.T.C. §1361-1379) as well.

7

The major disadvantage, from Terry Schmidt’s perspective, was that 8
there were no mechanisms in place by which a Captured Shop employee 9
could make the horizontal jump to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt itself, 10
within whose MROP division the firm’s marketing research strategies 11
were developed, thereby enabling someone like T. E. Schmidt to con-12
ceivably have at least some sort of impact on actual research design and 13
analysis. Within Team y, Schmidt’s only possible advancement was 14
to the Senior Research Director position now occupied by the same 15
swarthy, slick, gladhanding émigré (with college-age children and a 16
wife who always appeared about to ululate) who had made Darlene 17

Lilley’s professional life so difficult over the past year; and of course 18
even if the Team did vote in such a way as to pressure Alan Britton to 19
ease Robert Awad out and then even if (as would be unlikely to say the 20
least) the thunderingly unexceptional Terry Schmidt were picked and 21
successfully pitched to the rest of Team y’s upper echelon as Awad’s 22
replacement, the SRD position really involved nothing more mean-23
ingful than the supervision of sixteen coglike Field Researchers just 24
like Schmidt himself, plus conducting desultory orientations for new 25
hires, plus of course overseeing the compression of TFGs’ data into 26
various statistically differentiated totals, all of which was done on 27
commercially available software and entailed nothing more significant 28
than adding four-color graphs and a great deal of acronym-heavy jar-29
gon designed to make a survey that any competent tenth-grader could 30
have conducted appear sophisticated and meaningful. Although there 31
were also of course the preliminary lunches and golf and gladhanding 32
with R.S.B.’s MROPs, and the actual three-hour presentation of Field 33

Research results in the larger and more expensively appointed confer-34 sh
ence room upstairs where Awad, his mute and spectrally thin A/V

35 reg

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1
technician, and one chosen member of the relevant Field Team pre-2
sented the numbers and graphs and helped facilitate R.S.B.’s MROPs 3
and Creative and Marketing heads’ brainstorming on the research’s 4
implications for an actual campaign that in truth R.S.B. was already at 5
this stage far too heavily invested in to do anything more than modify 6
some of the more ephemeral or decorative elements of. (Neither 7

Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had ever been selected to assist Bob Awad 8
in these PCAs*, for reasons that in Schmidt’s case seemed all too clear.) 9

Meaning, in other words, without anyone once ever saying it out-10
right, that Team y’s real function was to present to Reesemeyer 11

Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around and present 12
to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC† that R.S.B.

13
had already billed Client in the millions for and couldn’t turn back 14
from even if the actual test data turned out to be resoundingly grim or 15
unpromising, which it was Team y’s unspoken real job to make sure 16
never happened, a job that Team y accomplished simply by targeting 17
so many different Focus Groups and foci and by varying the format 18
and context of the tests so baroquely and by facilitating the different 19

TFGs in so many different modalities that in the end it was child’s play 20
to selectively weight and rearrange the data in pretty much whatever 21
way R.S.B.’s MROP division wanted, and so in reality Team y’s func-22
tion was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation 23
of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random 24
noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would 25
feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which 26
in the present case the Mister Squishy Company itself was already so 27
heavily invested in that it couldn’t possibly turn away from and would 28
in fact have fired R.S.B. if its testing had indicated any substantive 29
problems with, because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very 30
strict normative ratios for R&D marketing costs (= RDM) to produc-31
tion volume (= PV), ratios based on the Cobb-Douglas Function 32
whereby m

RDM( x)

ust, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing, PV( x)

33
sh 34

* = Presentations to Client Agency
reg 35

† = Overall Campaign Concept

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O b l i v i o n 4 5
be 0 < < 1,

RDM( x)

a textbook formula which any first-term MBA stu-1

PV( x)

dent had to memorize in Management Stats, which was in fact where 2

North American Soft Confections Inc.’s CEO had almost surely 3
learned it, and nothing inside the man or at any of the four large US

4
corporations he had helmed since taking his degree from Wharton in 5

1968 had changed; no no all that ever changed were the jargon and 6
mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge 7
blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they 8
could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could 9
prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody 10
once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling 11
what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying 12
aloud — not even Team y’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’

13

Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone 14
to stare at the phone — what was going on or what it meant or what 15
the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it. One 16

R.S.B. Senior Creative Director with his little gray ponytail had been 17
at one upscale café someplace and had ordered one trendy dessert on 18
the same day he was making notes for one Creative Directors’ brain-19
storming session on what to pitch to the Subsidiary PD boys over at 20

North American Soft Confections, and had had one idea, and one or 21
two dozen pistons and gears already machined and set in place in var-22
ious craggy heads at R.S.B. and North American’s Mister Squishy had 23
needed only this one single spark of C H O -inspired passion from 24

12

22

11
an SCD whose whole inflated rep had been based on a concept equat-25
ing toilet paper with clouds and helium-voiced teddy bears and all 26
manner of things innocent of shit in some abstract Ur-consumer’s 27
mind in order to set in movement a machine of which no one single 28
person now — least of all the squishy Mr. T. E. Schmidt, forgetting 29
himself enough almost to pace a little before the conference table’s 30
men and toying dangerously with the idea of dropping the whole in-31
volved farce and simply telling them the truth — could be master.

32

Not surprisingly, the marketing of a conspicuously high-sugar, high-33
cholesterol, Shadow-class snack cake had presented substantially more 34 sh
challenges than the actual kitchenwork of development and production.

35 reg

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1

As with most Antitrend products, the Felony! had to walk a fine line 2
between a consumer’s resentment of the Healthy Lifestyles trend’s as-3
cetic pressures and the guilt and unease any animal instinctively felt 4
when it left the herd — or at least perceived itself as leaving the 5
herd — and the successful Shadow product was one that managed to 6
position and present itself in such a way as to resonate with both these 7
inner drives at once, the facilitator told the Focus Group, using slight 8
changes in intonation and facial expression to place scare quotes 9
around herd. The perfectly proportioned mixture of shame, delight, 10
and secret (literally: closeted) alliance in the Ericson-D.D.B.N. spots 11
was a seminal example of this sort of multivalent pitch, Terry Schmidt 12
said (tweaking Awad again and letting the small secret thrill of it al-13
most make him throw a puckish wink at the smoke detector), as too 14
was Jolt Cola’s brand name’s double entendre of a ‘jolt’ both to the in-15
dividual nervous system and to the tyranny of dilute and innocuous 16
soft drinks in an era of trendy self-denial, as well of course as Jolt’s 17
well-packaged can’s iconic face with its bulging crossed eyes and elec-18
tricized hair and ghastly fluorescent computer-room pallor — for Jolt 19
had worked to position itself as a recreational beverage for digital-era 20
phreaks and dweebs and had managed at once to acknowledge, parody, 21
and evect the computer-dweeb as an avatar of individual rebellion.

22

Schmidt had also adopted one of Darlene Lilley’s signature physical 23

MAMs when addressing TFGs, which was sometimes to put one foot 24
forward with his or her weight on its heel and to lift the remainder of 25
that foot slightly and rotate it idly back and forth along the x axis with 26
the planted heel serving as pivot, which in Lilley’s case was slightly 27
more effective and appealing because a burgundy high heel formed a 28
better pivot than a cocoa-brown cordovan loafer. Sometimes Schmidt 29
had dreams in which he was one of a Focus Group’s consumers being 30
led by Darlene Lilley as she crossed her sturdy ankles or rotated her 31

9DD high heel back and forth along the floor’s x axis, and she had her 32
eyeglasses off, which were small and oval with tortoiseshell-design 33
frames, and was holding them in a MAM such that one of the glasses’

sh 34
delicate arms was in very close proximity to her mouth, and the whole reg 35
dream was Schmidt and the rest of the Focus Group for the nameless 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 4 7
product hovering right on the edge of watching Darlene actually put 1
the glasses’ arm inside her mouth, which she came incrementally 2
closer and closer to doing without ever quite seeming to be aware of 3
what she was doing or the effect it was having, and the feeling of the 4
dream was that if she ever did actually put the plastic arm in her 5
mouth something very important and/or dangerous would happen, 6
and the ambient unspoken tension of the dream’s constant waiting of-7
ten left Schmidt exhausted by the time he awoke and remembered 8
again who and what he was, opening the lightproof curtains.

9

In the morning at the sink’s mirror shaving sometimes Schmidt as 10

Mr. S. would examine the faint lines beginning to appear and to con-11
nect the various dots of pale freckle in meaningless ways on his face, 12
and could envision in his mind’s eye the deeper lines and sags and 13
bruised eye-circles of his face’s predictable future and imagine the 14
slight changes required to shave his 44-year-old cheeks and chin as he 15
stood in this exact spot ten years hence and checked his moles and 16
nails and brushed his teeth and examined his face and did precisely the 17
same series of things in preparation for the exact same job he had been 18
doing now for eight years, sometimes carrying the vision further all 19
the way and seeing his ravaged lineaments and bloblike body propped 20
upright on wheels with a blanket on its lap against some sundrenched 21
pastel backdrop, coughing. So that even if the almost vanishingly un-22
likely were to happen and Schmidt did somehow get tagged to replace 23

Robert Awad or one of the other SRDs the only substantive difference 24
would be that he would receive a larger share of Team y’s after-tax 25
profits and so would be able to afford a nicer and better-appointed 26
condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in and more of the props 27
and surface pretenses of someone truly important but really he 28
wouldn’t be important, he would make no more substantive difference 29
in the larger scheme of things than he did now. The almost-35-year-30
old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delu-31
sion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, 32
not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great 33
hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he’d clung to as ev-34 sh
idence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand 35 reg

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1
ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow ex-2
ceptional and superior to the common run’s — not anymore, since 3
now even the phrase Make a Difference had become a platitude so fa-4
miliar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Coun-5
cil PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used 6

Make a Difference in a Child’s Life and Making a Difference in Your 7

Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the tele-8
phonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer 9

Hotline number in the metro area. And Schmidt, then just at the cusp 10
of 30, at first had rallied himself into what he knew was a classic con-11
sumer delusion, namely that the B.B./B.S. tagline and telephone num-12
ber were a meaningful coincidence and directed somehow particularly 13
at him, and had called and volunteered to act as Big Brother for a boy 14
age 11–15 who lacked significant male mentors and/or positive role 15
models, and had sat through the two three-hour trainings and testi-16
monials with what was the psychological equivalent of a rigid grin, and 17
the first boy he was assigned to as a Big Brother had worn a tiny black 18
leather jacket with fringe hanging from the shoulders’ rear and a red 19
handkerchief tied over his head and was on the tilted porch of his low-20
income home with two other boys also in expensive little jackets, and 21
all three boys had without a word jumped into the back seat of 22

Schmidt’s car, and the one whose photo and heartbreaking file identi-23
fied him as Schmidt’s mentorless Little Brother had leaned forward 24
and tersely uttered the name of a large shopping mall in Aurora some 25
distance west of the city proper, and after Schmidt had driven them on 26
the nightmarish I-88 tollway all the way to this mall and been directed 27
to pull over at the curb outside the main entrance the three boys had 28
all jumped out without a word and run inside, and after waiting at the 29
curb for over three hours without their returning — and after two $40

30
tickets and a tow-warning from the Apex MegaMall Security officer, 31
who was completely indifferent to Schmidt’s explanation that he was 32
here in his capacity as a Big Brother and was afraid to move the car for 33
fear that his Little Brother would come out expecting to see Schmidt’s sh 34
car right where he and his friends had left it and would be traumatized reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 4 9
if it appeared to have vanished just like so many of the other adult male 1
figures in his case file’s history — Schmidt had driven home; and sub-2
sequent telephone calls to the Little Brother’s home were not re-3
turned. The second 11–15-year-old boy he was assigned to was not at 4
home either of the times Schmidt had come for his appointment to 5
mentor him, and the woman who answered the apartment door — who 6
purported to be the boy’s mother although she was of a completely dif-7
ferent race than the boy in the file’s photo, and who the second time had 8
appeared intoxicated — claimed to have no knowledge of the appoint-9
ment or the boy’s whereabouts or even the last time she’d seen him, 10
after which Schmidt had finally acknowledged the delusory nature of 11
the impact that the Ad Council’s PSAs had made on him and had —

12
being now 30 and thus older, wiser, more indurate — given up and 13
gone on about his business.

14

In his spare time Terry Schmidt read, watched satellite television, 15
collected rare and uncirculated US coins, ran discriminant analyses of 16

TFG statistics on his Apple PowerBook, worked in the small home 17
laboratory he’d established in his condominium’s utility room, and 18
power-walked on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills 19
on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness franchise 20
just east of the Prudential Center on Mies van der Rohe Way, where 21
he sometimes also used the sauna. Favoring beige, rust, and cocoa-22
brown in his professional wardrobe, soft and round-faced and vesti-23
gially freckled, with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked 24
pained no matter how real the cheer, Terry Schmidt had been de-25
scribed by one of Scott R. Laleman’s toadies in Technical Processing as 26
looking like a ’70s yearbook photo come to life. Agency MROPs 27
whom Terry’d worked with for years had trouble recalling his name, 28
and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to 29
obscure this fact. Ricin and botulinus were about equally easy to culti-30
vate. Actually they were both quite easy indeed, assuming you were 31
comfortable in a laboratory environment and exercised due care in 32
your procedures. Schmidt himself had personally overheard some of 33
the other young men in Technical Processing refer to Darlene Lilley as 34 sh

35 reg

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1

Lurch or Herman and make fun of her height and physical solidity, and 2
had been outraged enough to have come very very close indeed to con-3
fronting them directly.

4

41.6% of what Schmidt mistakenly believed were the TFG’s twelve 5
true sample consumers were presenting with the classic dilated eyes 6
and shiny pallor of low-grade insulin shock as Schmidt announced 7
that he’d decided to ‘privately confide’ to the men that the product’s 8
original proposed trade name had actually been Devils!, a cognomen 9
designed both to connote the snack cake’s chocolate-intensive compo-10
sition and to simultaneously invoke and parody associations of sin, sin-11
ful indulgence, yielding to temptation, & c., and that considerable 12
resources had been devoted to developing, refining, and target-testing 13
the product inside various combinations of red-and-black individual 14
wrappers with various cartoonishly demonic incarnations of the famil-15
iar Mister Squishy icon, presented here as rubicund and heavy-browed 16
and grinning fiendishly instead of endearingly, before negative test 17
data scrapped the whole strategy. Both Darlene Lilley and Trudi 18

Keener had worked some of these early Focus Groups, which appar-19
ently some inträagency political enemy of the Creative Packaging 20

Director at Reesemeyer Shannon Belt who’d pitched the trade name 21

Devils! had used his (meaning the CPD’s enemy’s) influence with 22

R.S.B.’s MROP coordinator to stock heavily with consumers from 23
downstate IL — a region that as Terry Schmidt knew all too well 24
tended to be Republican and Bible-Beltish — and without going into 25
any of the Medicean intrigues and retaliations that had ended up cost-26
ing three midlevel R.S.B. executives their jobs and resulted in at least 27
one six-figure settlement to forestall WT* litigation (which was the 28
only truly interesting part of the story, Schmidt himself believed, jin-29
gling a pocket’s contents and watching his cordovan rotate slowly from 30

10:00 to 2:00 and back again as straticulate clouds in the lake’s upper 31
atmosphere began to lend the sunlight a pearly cast that the confer-32
ence room’s windows embrowned), the nub was that the stacked 33

Groups’ responses to taglines that included Sinfully Delicious, Demon-sh 34
reg 35

* = Wrongful Termination

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O b l i v i o n 5 1
ically Indulgent, and Why Do You Think It’s Called [in red] Tempta-1
tion?, as well as to video storyboards in which shadowed and voice-2
distorted figures in hoods supposedly confessed to being regular 3
upstanding citizens and consumers who unbeknownst to anyone ‘wor-4
shipped the Devil’ in ‘secret orgies of indulgence,’ had been so uni-5
formly extreme as to produce markedly different Taste and Overall 6

Satisfaction aggregates for the snack cakes on IRPs and GRDSs com-7
pleted before and after exposure to the lines and boards themselves, 8
which after much midlevel headrolling and high-level caucuses had 9
resulted in the present Felonies! ®, with its milder penal and thus rene-10
gade associations designed to offend absolutely no one except maybe 11
anticrime wackos and prison-reform fringes. With the facilitator’s 12
stated point being that please let none of those assembled here today 13
doubt that their judgments and responses and the hard evaluative 14
work they had already put in and would shortly plunge into again qua 15
group in the vital GRDS phase were important or were taken very se-16
riously indeed by the folks over at Mister Squishy.

17

Showing as yet no signs of polypeptide surfeit, a balding blue-eyed 18

30ish man whose tag’s block caps read HANK was staring, from his 19
place at the corner of the conference table nearest Schmidt and the 20
whiteboard, either absently or intently at Schmidt’s valise, which was 21
made of a pebbled black synthetic leather material and happened to be 22
markedly wider and squatter than your average-type briefcase or 23
valise, resembling almost more a doctor’s bag or computer technician’s 24
upscale toolcase. Among the periodicals to which Schmidt subscribed 25
were US News & World Report, Numismatic News, Advertising Age, and 26
the quarterly Journal of Applied Statistics, the last of which was divided 27
into four stacks of three years each and as such supported the sanded 28
pine plank and sodium worklamp that functioned as a laboratory table 29
with various decanters, retorts, flasks, vacuum jars, filters, and Reese-30

Handey–brand alcohol burners in the small utility room that was 31
separated from Schmidt’s condominium’s kitchen by a foldable door 32
of louvered enamel composite. Ricin and its close relative abrin are 33
powerful phytotoxins, respectively derived from castor and jequirity 34 sh
beans, whose attractive flowering plants can be purchased at most 35 reg

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1
commercial nurseries and require just three months of cultivation to 2
yield mature beans, which beans are lima-shaped and either scarlet or 3
a lustrous brown and historically were, Schmidt had gotten that eerie 4

Big Brothers/Big Sisters–like sensation again when he discovered 5
during his careful researches, sometimes employed as rosary beads by 6
medieval flagellants. Castor beans’ seed hulls must be removed by 7
soaking 1–4 oz. of the beans in 12–36 oz. of distilled water with 4–6

8
tablespoons of NaOH or 6–8 ts. of commercial lye (the beans’ natural 9
buoyancy requiring here that they be weighted down with marbles, 10
sterilized gravel, or low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary 11

Trojan condom). After one hour of soaking, the beans can be taken out 12
of solution and dried and the hulls carefully removed by anyone wear-13
ing quality surgical gloves. (NB: Ordinary rubber household gloves are 14
too thick and unwieldy for removing castor hulls.) Schmidt had step-15
by-step instructions stored on both the hard drive and backup disks of 16
his Apple home computer, which possessed a three-hour battery ca-17
pacity and could itself be set up right there on the pine worktable in 18
order to keep a very precise and time-indexed experimental log, which 19
is one of the absolutely basic principles of proper lab procedure. A 20
blender set on Purée is used to grind the hulled beans plus commercial 21
acetone in a 1:4 ratio. Discard blender after use. Pour castor-and-22
acetone mixture into a covered sterile jar and let stand for 72–96

23
hours. Then attach a sturdy commercial coffee filter to an identical jar 24
and pour mixture slowly and carefully through filter. You are not de-25
canting; you’re after what is being filtered out. Wearing two pairs of 26
surgical gloves and at least two standard commercial filtration masks, 27
use manual pressure to squish as much acetone as possible out of the 28
filter’s sediment. Bear down as hard as due caution permits. Weigh the 29
remainder of the filter’s contents and place them in a third sterile jar 30
along with × 4 their weight in fresh CH COCH . Repeat standing, 3

3

31
filtering, and manual squishing process 3–5 times. The residue at the 32
procedures’ terminus will be nearly pure ricin, of which 0.04 mg is 33
lethal if injected directly (note that 9.5–12 times this dose is required sh 34
for lethality through ingestion). Saline or distilled water can be used to reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 5 3
jector, available at better pharmacies everywhere under Diabetes Sup-1
plies. Ricin requires 24–36 hours to produce initial symptoms of severe 2
nausea, vomiting, disorientation, and cyanosis. Terminal VF and circu-3
latory collapse follow within twelve hours. Note that in situ concentra-4
tions under 1.5 mg are undetectable by standard forensic reagents.

5

More than a few among the crowds and police initially used the 6
words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the tank’s deltate nozzle was 7
affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figure’s rear end’s 8
white-and-navy bullseye design. All such expressions of distaste were 9
silenced by the subsequent inflation. First the bottom and belly and 10
thighs ballooned, forcing the figure out from the window and contort-11
ing him slightly to keep his forehead’s cup affixed. The airtight Lycra 12
rounded and became shiny. The long-haired man on Dexedrine patted 13
his bicycle’s slim rear tire and told the young lady he’d lent the field 14
glasses to that he’d figured all along what they (presumably meaning 15
the little protuberances) were. One shoulder’s valve inflated the left 16
arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had 17
become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish. There was no coher-18
ent response from the crowd, however, until a nearly suicidal-looking 19
series of nozzle-to-temple motions from the figure began to fill the 20
head’s baggy mask, the crumpled white Mylar at first collapsing slightly 21
to the left and then coming back up erect as it filled with gas, the face’s 22
array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into something that pro-23
duced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and 24
an almost childlike delight.

25

. . . And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group, had —

26
probably not at all to their disappointment, he said with a tiny pained 27
smile — that the time had now arrived for them to elect a foreman 28
and for Schmidt himself to withdraw and allow the Focus Group’s 29
constituents to take counsel together here in the darkening conference 30
room, to compare their individual responses and opinions of the Taste, 31

Texture, and Overall Satisfaction of Felonies! and to try now together 32
to come up with agreed-upon GRDS ratings for same. In some of the 33
fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact inter-34 sh
course on the firms’ conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself 35 reg

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saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory thrusting 2
motions of the coitus, and was unable to stop himself, and couldn’t 3
help seeing the confused and then distasteful expression that the 4
rhythmic Oh God, thank you s produced on Darlene Lilley’s face even as 5
her glasses fogged and her crosstrainers’ heels drummed thunderously 6
on the table’s surface, and sometimes it almost wrecked the whole fan-7
tasy. If, after time and a reasonable amount of discussion, the Focus 8

Group by chance for whatever reason found that they couldn’t get to-9
gether on a certain specific number to express the whole group’s true 10
feelings, Schmidt told them (by this time three of the men actually had 11
their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who 12
was also emitting tiny low moans, and Schmidt had decided he was 13
going to give this fellow a very low TFG Performance Rating indeed 14
on the evaluations all Team y facilitators had to fill out on UAFs at 15
the end of a research cycle), what he’d ask is that the Focus Group then 16
just go ahead and submit two separate Group Response Data Sum-17
maries, one GRDS comprising each of the numbers on which the Fo-18
cus Group’s two opposed camps had settled — there was no such 19
thing as a hung jury in TFG testing, he said with a grin that he hoped 20
wasn’t rigid or pained — and that if splitting into even two such sub-21
groups proved unfeasible because one or more of the men at the table 22
felt that neither subgroup’s number adequately captured their own in-23
dividual feelings and preferences, why then if necessary three separate 24

GRDSs should be completed, or four, and so on — but with the over-25
all idea being please keep in mind that Team y, Reesemeyer Shannon 26

Belt, and the Mister Squishy Co. were asking for the very lowest pos-27
sible number of separate GRDS responses an intelligent group of dis-28
cerning consumers could come up with today. Schmidt in fact had as 29
many as thirteen separate GRDS packets in the manila folder he now 30
held rather dramatically up as he mentioned the GRDS forms, though 31
he removed only one packet from the folder, since there was no point 32
in proactively doing anything to encourage the Focus Group to atom-33
ize and not unite. The fantasy would of course have been exponentially sh 34
better if it were Darlene Lilley who gasped Thank you, thank you in reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 5 5
aware of this, and of his apparent inability to enforce his preferences 1
even in fantasy. It made him wonder if he even had what convention 2
called a Free Will at all, deep down. Only two of the room’s fifteen total 3
males noticed that there had been no hint of distant window-muffled 4
exterior noise in the conference room for quite some time; neither of 5
these two were actual test subjects. Schmidt knew also that by this 6
time — the exordial presentation had so far taken 23 minutes, but it felt, 7
as always, much longer, and even the more upright and insulin-tolerant 8
members’ restive expressions indicated that they too were feeling hun-9
gry and tired and probably thinking this preliminary background was 10
taking an oppressively long time (when in reality Robert Awad had 11
explicitly told Schmidt that Alan Britton had authorized up to 32

12
minutes for the putatively experimental Full-Access TFG presenta-13
tion, and had said that Terry’s reputation for relative conciseness and 14
smooth preemption of digressive questions and ephemera was one of 15
the reasons he [meaning R. Awad] had selected Schmidt to facilitate the 16
quote unquote experimental TFG’s GRDS phase) — Schmidt also 17
knew that by this time Darlene Lilley’s own Focus Group was in camera 18
and deeply into its own GRDS caucus, and that Darlene was thus 19
back in the R.S.B. Research green room making a brisk cup of Lipton 20
tea in the microwave, what she liked to call her grownup shoes off and 21
resting — one perhaps on its burgundy side — with her briefcase and 22
purse beside one of the comfortable chairs opposite the green room’s 23
four-part viewing screen, Darlene at this moment facing the mi-24
crowave and with her great broad back to the door so that Schmidt 25
would have to sigh loudly or cough or jingle his keys as he came down 26
the hall to the green room in order to avoid making her jump and 27
lay her palm against the flounces of her blouse’s front by ‘com[ing]

28
up behind [her] like that,’ as she’d accused him of doing once dur-29
ing the six-month period when SRD Awad really had been coming 30
up stealthily behind her all the time and her own and everyone 31
else’s nerves were understandably strung out and on edge. Schmidt 32
would shortly then pour a cup of R.S.B.’s strong sour coffee and join 33

Darlene Lilley and today’s so-called experimental project’s other two 34 sh

Field Researchers and perhaps one or two silent and very intense 35 reg

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D a v i d F o s t e r Wa l l a c e

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young R.S.B. Market Research interns in the row of cushioned chairs 2
before the screens, Schmidt next to Lilley and somewhat in the 3
shadow of her very tall hair, and Ron Mounce would as always pro-4
duce a pack of cigarettes, and Trudi Keener would laugh at the way 5

Mounce always made a show of clawing a cigarette desperately out of 6
the pack and lighting it with a tremorous hand, and the fact that nei-7
ther Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley smoked (Darlene had grown up in a 8
household with heavy smokers and was now allergic) would cause a 9
slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the 10
smoke. Schmidt had once swallowed hard in his chair and mentioned 11
the whole smoking issue to Mounce, gallantly claiming the allergy as 12
his own, but since R.S.B. equipped its green room with both ashtrays 13
and exhaust fans and it was eighteen floors down and 100 yards out 14
the Gap’s rear service doors into a small cobbled area where people 15
without private offices gathered on breaks to smoke, it wasn’t the sort 16
of issue that could really be pressed without appearing either like a 17
militant crank or like someone putting on a show of patronizing 18
chivalry for Darlene, who often crossed her legs ankle-on-knee-style 19
and massaged her instep with both hands as she watched her Focus 20

Group’s private deliberations and Schmidt tried to focus on his own 21

TFG. There was never much conversation; the four facilitators were 22
still technically on, ready at any moment to return to their respective 23
groups’ conference rooms if the screen showed their foreman moving 24
to press the button that the Groups were told activated an amber sig-25
nal light.

26

Team y chief Alan Britton, M.S. & J.D., of whom one sensed that 27
no one had ever even once made fun, was an immense and physically 28
imposing man, roughly 6'1" in every direction, with a large smooth 29
shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny 30
close-set features arranged in the invulnerably cheerful expression of a 31
man who had made a difference in all he’d ever tried.

32

In terms of administration there was, of course, the ramified prob-33
lem of taste and/or texture. Ricin, like most phytotoxins, is exceedingly sh 34
bitter, which meant that the requisite 0.4 mg must present for inges-reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 5 7
palatable than the ricin itself: injected through the thin wrapper into 1
the 26 × 13 mm ellipse of fondant at the Felony!’ s hollow center, the 2
distilled water formed a soggy caustic pocket whose contrast with the 3
deliquescent high-lipid filling itself fairly shouted adulteration. Injec-4
tion into the moist flourless surrounding cake itself turned an area the 5
size of a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter into maltilol-flavored sludge.

6

A promising early alternative was to administer six to eight very small 7
injections in different areas of the Felony! and hope that the subject got 8
all or most of the snack cake down (like Twinkies and Choco-Diles, 9
the Felony! was designed to be a prototypical Three-Biter but also to be 10
sufficiently light and saliva-soluble that an ambitious consumer could 11
get the whole thing into his mouth at once, with predictably favorable 12
consequences for IMPCs* and concomitant sales volume) before 13
noticing anything amiss. The problem here was that each injection, 14
even with a fine-gauge hypodermic, produced a puncture of .012 mm 15
diameter (median) in the flimsy transpolymer wrapper, and in home 16
tests of individually packaged cakes at average Midwest–New England 17
humidity levels these punctures produced topical staleness/desiccation 18
within 48–72 hours of shelving. (As with all Mister Squishy products, 19

Felonies! were engineered to be palpably moist and to react with sali-20
vary ptyalin in such a way as to literally ‘melt in the mouth,’ qualities 21
established in very early Field tests to be associated with both fresh-22
ness and a luxe, almost sensual indulgence.†) The botulinus exotoxin, 23

24

* = Intervals of Multiple Product Consumption 25

†The emetic prosthesis consisted of a small polyurethane bag taped under one arm 26
and a tube of ordinary clear plastic running up the rear of the left shoulder blade to 27
emerge from the turtleneck through a small hole just under my chin. The contents of 28
the bag were six of the little cakes mixed with mineral water and real bile harvested by 29
means of OTC emetic first thing this AM. The bag’s power cell and vacuum were engineered for one high-volume emission and two or three smaller spurts and dribbles 30
afterward; they were to be activated by a button on my watch. The material wouldn’t 31
actually be coming out of my mouth, but it was a safe bet that nobody would be look-32
ing closely at the point of exit; people’s automatic reaction is to avert their eyes. The 33

C.P.D.’s transmitter’s clear earpiece was attached to my glasses. The scope’s Mission Time said 24:31 and change, but the presentation already seemed much longer. We 34 sh
were all of us anxious to get down to business already.

35 reg

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being tasteless as well as 97% lethal at .00003 g, was thus rather more 2
practical, though because its source is an anaerobe it must be injected 3
into the direct center of the product’s interior filling, and even the mi-4
croscopic air pocket produced by evacuation of the hypodermic will 5
begin to attack the compound, requiring ingestion within one week 6
for any predictable result. The anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botu-7
linum is simple to culture, requiring only an airtight home-canning jar 8
in which are placed 2–3 ounces of puréed Aunt Nellie–brand beets, 9

1–2 oz. of common cube steak, two tablespoons of fresh topsoil from 10
beneath the noisome pine chips under the lollipop hedges flanking the 11
pretentiously gated front entrance to Briarhaven Condominiums, and 12
enough ordinary tap water (chlorinated OK) to fill the jar to the ab-13
solute top. This being the only exacting part: the absolute top. If the 14
water’s meniscus comes right to the absolute top of the jar’s threaded 15
mouth and the jar’s lid is properly applied and screwed on very tightly 16
w/ vise and wide-mouth Sears Craftsman pliers so as to allow 0.0%

17
trapped O in the jar, ten days on the top shelf of a dark utility closet 2

18
will produce a moderate bulge in the jar’s lid, and extremely careful 19
double-gloved and -masked removal of the lid will reveal a small tan-20
to-brown colony of Clostridium awash in a green-to-tan penumbra of 21
botulinus exotoxin, which is, to put it delicately, a byproduct of the 22
mold’s digestive process, and can be removed in very small amounts 23
with the same hypodermic used for administration. Botulinus had also 24
the advantage of directing attention to defects in manufacturing and/

25
or packaging rather than product tampering, which would of course 26
heighten the overall industry impact.

27

The real principle behind running Field research in which some of 28
the TFGs completed only IRPs and some were additionally convened 29
in juridical groups to hammer out a GRDS was to allow Team y to 30
provide Reesemeyer Shannon Belt with two distinct and statistically 31
complete sets of market research data, thereby allowing R.S.B. to use 32
and evince whichever data best reinforced the research results that 33
they believed Mister Squishy and N.A.S.C. most wanted to see.

sh 34

Schmidt, Darlene Lilley, and Trudi Keener had all been given tacitly reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 5 9
to understand that this same principle informed the experimental 1
subdivision of today’s TFG juries into so-called No-Access and Full-2

Access groups, which latter were to be given what the members were 3
told was special behind-the-scenes information on the genesis, pro-4
duction, and marketing goals of the product — meaning that, whether 5
retroscenic access to marketing agendas created substantive differ-6
ences in the Focus Groups’ mean GRDSs or not, Team y and R.S.B.

7
clearly wanted access to different data fields from which they could 8
pick and choose and use slippery hypergeometric statistical techniques 9
to manipulate as they believed Client saw fit. In the green room, only 10

A. Ronald Mounce, M.S. — who is Robert Awad’s personal mentee 11
and probable heir apparent and is also his mole among the Field Re-12
searchers, whose water cooler chitchat Mounce distills and reports via 13
special #0302 Field Concerns and Morale forms that Awad’s earnest 14
young Administrative Asst. provides Mounce with in the same manila 15
envelopes all the day’s IRP and GRDS packets are distributed to Field 16

Teams in — only Mounce has been told privately that the unconven-17
tional Full- and No-Access Mister Squishy TFG design is in fact part 18
of a larger field experiment that Alan Britton and Team y’s upper 19
management’s secret inner executive circle (said circle incorporated by 20

Britton as a §543 Personal Holding Company under the dummy name 21
y2 Associates) is conducting for its own sub rosa research into TFGs’

22
probable role in the ever more complex and self-conscious marketing 23
strategies of the future. The basic idea, as Robert Awad saw fit to 24
explain to Mounce on Awad’s new catamaran one June day when they 25
were becalmed and drifting four nautical miles off Montrose-Wilson 26

Beach’s private jetties, was that as the ever-evolving US consumer 27
became more savvy and discerning about media and marketing and 28
tactics of product positioning — a sudden insight into today’s average 29
individual consumer mind which Awad explained he had achieved in 30
his health club’s sauna one day after handball when the intellectual 31
property attorney he had just decisively trounced was praising an A.C.

32

Romney–Jaswat campaign for the new carbonated beverage Surge 33
whose tightly demotargeted advertisements everyone had been seeing 34 sh

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all over the metro area that quarter, and remarked (the nude and per-2
spiring intellectual property attorney* had) that he probably found all 3
these modern youth-targeted ads utilizing jagged guitar riffs and epi-4
thets like dude and the whole ideology of rebellion-via-consumption 5
so fascinating and got such a hoot out of them because he himself was 6
so far out of the demographic (using the actual word demographic) for 7
a campaign like Surge’s that even as an amateur he found himself dis-8
interestedly analyzing the ads’ strategies and pitches and appreciating 9
them more like pieces of art or fine pastry than like mere ads, then had 10

(meaning the attorney had, right there in the sauna, wearing only plas-11
tic thongs and a towel wrapped Sikh-style around his head, according to 12

Awad) proceeded casually to deconstruct the strategies and probable 13
objectives of the Surge campaign with such acuity that it was almost 14
as if the fellow had somehow been right there in the room at A.C.

15

Romney–Jaswat’s MROP team’s brainstorming and strategy confabs 16
with Team y, who as Mounce was of course aware had done some 17
first-stage Focus Group work for A.C.R.-J./Coke on Surge six quarters 18
past before the firm’s gradual emigration to R.S.B. as a Captured Shop.

19

Awad, whose knowledge of small craft operation came entirely from a 20
manual he was now using as a paddle, told Mounce that the idea’s gist’s 21
thrust here involved what was known in the industry as a Narrative 22

(or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept of making some new product’s 23
actual marketers’ strategies and travails themselves a part of that product’s 24
essential Story — as in for historic examples that Chicago’s own Keebler 25

Inc.’s hard confections were manufactured by elves in a hollow tree, or 26
that Pillsbury’s Green Giant–brand canned and frozen vegetables 27
were cultivated by an actual giant in his eponymous Valley — but with 28
the added narrative twist or hook now of, say for instance, advertising 29

Mister Squishy’s new Felony! line as a disastrously costly and labor-30
intensive ultra-gourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by be-31
leaguered legions of nerdy admen under the thumb of, say, a tyrannical 32

33

*(who in fact, unbeknownst to Awad, was an old friend and Limited Partnership crony sh 34
of Alan Britton from way back in the previous decade’s Passive-Income Tax Shelter reg 35
heyday)

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mullah-like CEO who was such a personal fiend for luxury-class 1
chocolate that he was determined to push Felonies! into the US market 2
no matter what the cost- or sales-projections, such that (in the proposed 3
campaign’s Story) Mister Squishy’s advertisers had to force Team y 4
to manipulate and cajole Focus Groups into producing just the sort 5
of quote unquote ‘objective’ statistical data needed to greenlight the 6
project and get Felonies! on the shelves, all in other words comprising 7
just the sort of arch and tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes 8

Story designed to appeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined 9
savvy about marketing tactics and ‘objective’ data and to flatter their 10
sense that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete 11
commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprece-12
dentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well nigh impossible 13
to manipulate by any sort of clever multimillion-dollar marketing 14
campaign. This was, as of the second quarter of 1995, a fairly bold 15
and unconventional ad concept, Awad conceded modestly over Ron 16

Mounce’s cries of admiration and excitement, tossing (Mounce did) 17
another cigarette over the catamaran’s side to hiss and bob forever 18
instead of sinking; and Awad further conceded that obviously an enor-19
mous amount of very carefully controlled research would have to be 20
done and analyzed in all sorts of hypergeometric ways before they 21
could even conceive of possibly jumping ship and starting their own 22

R. Awad & Subordinates agency and pitching the idea to various far-23
sighted companies — certain of the US Internet’s new startups, with 24
their young and self-perceivedly renegade top management, looked 25
like a promising market — yes to various forward-looking companies 26
that craved a fresh, edgy, cynicism-friendly corporate image, rather 27
like Subaru’s in the previous decade, or also for example FedEx and 28

Wendy’s in the era when Sedelmaier’s own local crew had come out of 29
nowhere to rule the industry. Whereas in point of fact none of what 30

Robert Awad had brought his mentee four miles out onto the lake to 31
whisper in Mounce’s big pink ear was true or even in any sense real 32
except as the agreed-upon cover narrative to be fed to select Team y 33

SRDs and Field Researchers as part of the control conditions for the 34 sh
really true Field experiment, which Alan Britton and Scott R. Laleman 35 reg

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(there was really no §543-structured y2 Associates; that little fiction 2
was part of the cover narrative that Britton had fed to Bob Awad, who 3
unbeknownst to him [= Awad] was already being gradually eased out 4
in favor of Mrs. Lilley, who Laleman said was a whiz on both Systat 5
and HTML, and on whom [= Darlene Lilley] Britton had had his eye 6
ever since he’d sent Awad around with covert instructions to behave in 7
such a way as to test for faultlines in Field Team morale and the girl’d 8
shown such an extraordinary blend of personal stones and political 9
aplomb in defusing Awad’s stressors) so but yes which field experiment 10

Britton and his mentee Laleman had been told by no less a personage 11
than T. Cordell (‘Ted’) Belt himself was designed to produce data on 12
the way(s) certain received ideas of market research’s purposes affected 13
the way Field Researchers facilitated their Targeted Focus Groups’

14

GRDS phase and thus influenced the material outcome of the TFGs’

15
in camera deliberations and GRDSs. This internal experiment was the 16
second stage of a campaign, Britton had later told Laleman over near-17
zeppelin-sized cigars in his inner office, to finally after all this time 18
start bringing US marketing research into line with the realities of 19
modern hard science, which had proved long ago (science had) that 20
the presence of an observer affects any process and thus by clear im-21
plication that even the tiniest, most ephemeral details of a Field test’s 22
setup can impact the resultant data. The ultimate objective was to 23
eliminate all unnecessary random variables in those Field tests, and of 24
course by your most basic managerial Ockham’s Razorblade this 25
meant doing away as much as possible with the human element, the 26
most obvious of these elements being the TFG facilitators, namely 27

Team y’s nerdy beleaguered Field Researchers, who now, with the 28
coming digital era of abundant data on whole markets’ preferences and 29
patterns available via cybercommerce links, were soon going to be 30
obsolete (the Field Researchers were) anyway, Alan Britton said. A 31
passionate and assuasive rhetor, Britton liked to draw invisible little 32
illustrations in the air with his cigar’s glowing tip as he spoke. The 33
mental image Scott Laleman associated with Alan Britton was of an sh 34
enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it. Laleman reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 6 3
of the boys in Technical Processing when he was sure Mr. B. was 1
nowhere around. Because the whole thing from soup to nuts could 2
soon be done via computer network, as Britton said he was sure he 3
didn’t have to sell Laleman on. Scott Laleman didn’t really even like 4
cigars. Meaning the coming www-dot-slash-hypercybercommerce 5
thing, which there’d already been countless professional seminars on 6
and all of US marketing and advertising and related support industries 7
were terribly excited about. But where most agencies still saw the com-8
ing www primarily as just a new, fifth venue* for high-impact ads, part 9
of your more forward-looking Reesemeyer Shannon Belt–type vision 10
for the coming era involved finding ways to exploit cybercommerce’s 11
staggering research potential as well. Undisplayed little tracking codes 12
could be designed to tag and follow each consumer’s w3 interests and 13
spending patterns — here Laleman once again told Alan Britton what 14
these algorithms were commonly called and averred that he personally 15
knew how to design them; he of course did not tell Britton that he had 16
already secretly helped design some very special little tracking algo-17
rithms for A.C. Romney–Jaswat & Assoc.’s sirenic Chloe Jaswat and 18
that two of these quote unquote Cookies were even at that moment 19
nested deep within Team y’s SMTP/POP protocols. Britton said 20
that Focus Groups and even n-sized test markets could be assembled 21
abstractly via ANOVAs† on consumers’ known patterns, that the TFG

22
vetting was built right in — as in e.g. who showed an interest? who 23
bought the product or related products and from which cybervendor 24
via which link thing? — that not only would there be no voir dire and 25
no archaic per diem expenses but even the unnecessary variable of con-26
sumers even knowing they were part of any sort of market test was 27
excised, since a consumer’s subjective awareness of his identity as a test 28
subject instead of as a true desire-driven consumer had always been one 29

30

31

*(venues 1–4 historically comprising TV, Radio, Print, and Outdoor [= mainly bill-32
boards])

†

33

= ANalysis Of VAriance model, a hypergeometric multiple regression technique 34 sh
used by Team y to establish the statistical relations between dependent and independent variables in market tests.

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of the distortions that market research swept under the rug because 2
they had no way of quantifying subjective-identity-awareness on any 3
known ANOVA. Focus Groups would go the way of the dodo and 4
bison and art deco. Alan Britton had already had versions of this con-5
versation with Scott Laleman several times; it was part of Britton’s way 6
of pumping himself up. Laleman had a vision of himself at a very large 7
and expensive desk, Chloe Jaswat behind him kneading his trapezius 8
muscles, while an enormous macadamia nut sat in a low chair before 9
the desk and pleaded for a livable severance package. Sometimes, on 10
the rare occasions when he masturbated, Laleman’s fantasy involved a 11
view of himself, shirtless and adorned with warpaint, standing with his 12
boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upward at what 13
lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon. That in 14
other words, gesturing with the great red embrous tip, the exact same 15
wonkish technology that Laleman’s boys in Technical Processing now 16
used to run analyses on the TFG paperwork could replace the paper-17
work. No more small-sample testing; no more -risks or variance-error 18
probabilities or 1 confidence intervals or human elements or en-19
tropic noise. Once, in his junior year at Cornell U., Scott R. Laleman 20
had been in an A.C.S. Dept. lab accident and had breathed halon gas, 21
and for several days he went around campus with a rose clamped in his 22
teeth, and tried to tango with anyone he saw, and insisted everybody 23
all call him The Magnificent Enriqué, until several of his fraternity 24
brothers finally all ganged up and knocked some sense back into him, 25
but a lot of people thought he was still never quite the same after the 26
halon thing. For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward-looking vision, the 27
market becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded.

28

And no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests 29
in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings 30
always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters. Team y 31
would become 100% tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured Shop. All 32
they needed was some hard study data showing unequivocally that 33
human facilitators made a difference, that variable elements of their sh 34
appearance and manner and syntax and/or even small personal tics of reg 35
individual personality or attitude affected the Focus Groups’ findings.

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Something on paper, with all the Systat t’s crossed and i’s dotted and 1
even maybe yes a high-impact full-color graph — for these were pro-2
fessional statisticians, after all, the Field Researchers; they knew the 3
numbers didn’t lie; if they saw that the data entailed their own subtrac-4
tion they’d go quietly, some probably even offering to resign, for the 5
good of the Team. Plus then also Laleman pointed out that the study 6
data’d also come in handy if some of them tried to fight it or squeeze 7

Team y for a better severance by threatening some kind of bullshit 8

WT suit. He could almost feel the texture of Mr. B.’s sternum under 9
his heel. Not to mention (said Britton, who sometimes then held the 10
cigar like a dart and jabbed it at the air when stipulating or refining a 11
point) that not all would need to go. The Field men. That some could 12
be kept. Transferred. Retrained to work the machines, to follow the 13

Cookies and run the Systat codes and sit there while it all compiled.

14

The rest would have to go. It was a rough business; Darwin’s tagline still 15
fit. Britton sometimes addressed Scott Laleman as Laddie or Boyo, 16
but of course never once as The Magnificent Enriqué. Mr. B. had ab-17
solutely 0% knowledge of what and who Scott R. Laleman really was 18
inside, as an individual, with a very special and above-average destiny, 19

Laleman felt. He had practiced his smile a great deal, both with and 20
w/o rose. Britton said that the sub rosa experiments’ stressors would, as 21
always in nature and hard science, determine survival. Fitness. As in 22
who fit the new pattern. Versus who made too much difference, see, 23
and where, when push came to shove there in camera. This was all art-24
ful bullshit. Britton poked glowing holes in the air above the desk. To 25
see, he said he meant, how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stim-26
uli, how they responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions. All they 27
needed were the stressors. Nested, high-impact stimuli. Shake them 28
up. Rattle the cage, he said, watch what fell out. This was all really 29
what was known in the game as Giving Someone Enough Rope. The 30
big man leaned back, his smile both warm and expectant. Inviting the 31

Boyo he’d chosen to mentor to brainstorm with him on some possible 32
stressors right here and now. As in with Britton himself, to flesh out 33
the needed tests. No time like now. Scott Laleman felt a kind of vague 34 sh
latent dread as the big man made a show of putting out his Fuente. A 35 reg

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chance to step up to the plate with the big dogs, get a taste of real 2
frontlines creative action. Right here and now. A chance for y’s 3
golden boy to strut his stuff. Impress the boss. Run something up the 4
rampant pole. Anything at all. Spontaneous flow. To brainstorm. The 5
trick was not to think or edit, just let it all fly.* The big man counted 6
down from five and put one hand to his ear and came down with the 7
other hand to point at Scott Laleman as if to signal You’re On the Air, 8
his eyes now two nailheads and tiny mouth turned down. The finger 9
had something dark’s remains in the rim around its nail. Laleman sat 10
there smiling at it, his mind a great flat blank white screen.

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

*Britton knew all about Laleman trying to jew him out to A.C. Romney–Jaswat; who sh 34
did the smug puppy think he was dealing with; Alan S. Britton had been contending reg 35
and surviving when this kid was still playing with his little pink toes.

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The Soul Is Not a Smithy
terence velan would later be decorated in combat in 1
the war in indochina, and had his photograph and a 2
dramatic and flattering story about him in the dis-3
patch, although his whereabouts after discharge and 4
returning to american life were never established by 5
anyone miranda or i ever knew of.

6

7

This is the story of how Frank Caldwell, Chris DeMatteis, Mandy 8

Blemm, and I became, in the city newspaper’s words, the 4 Unwitting 9

Hostages, and of how our strange and special alliance and the trauma 10
surrounding its origin bore on our subsequent lives and careers as 11
adults later on. The repeated thrust of the Dispatch articles was that it 12
was we four, all classified as slow or problem pupils, who had not had 13
the presence of mind to flee the Civics classroom along with the other 14
children, thereby creating the hostage circumstance that justified the 15
taking of life.

16

The site of the original trauma was 4th grade Civics class, second 17
period, at R. B. Hayes Primary School here in Columbus. A very long 18
time ago now. The class had a required seating chart, and all of us had 19
assigned desks, which were bolted to the floor in orderly rows. It was 20 sh

21 reg

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D a v i d F o s t e r Wa l l a c e

1

1960, a time of fervent and somewhat unreflective patriotism. It was a 2
time that is now often referred to as a somewhat more innocent time.

3

Civics was a state-mandated class on the Constitution, the U.S. presi-4
dents, and the branches of government. In the second quarter, we had 5
actually built papier mâché models of the branches of government, 6
with various tracks and paths between them, to illustrate the balance 7
of powers that the Founding Fathers had built into the federal system.

8

I had fashioned the Doric columns of the Judicial Branch out of the 9
cardboard cylinders inside rolls of Coronet paper towels, which was 10
our mother’s preferred brand. It was during the cold and seemingly 11
endless period in March when our regular Civics teacher was absent 12
that we had our Constitution unit and perused the American Consti-13
tution and its various drafts and amendments under the supervision of 14

Mr. Richard A. Johnson, a long-term sub. There was no recognized 15
term for maternity leave then, although Mrs. Roseman’s pregnancy 16
had been obvious since at least Thanksgiving.

17

The Civics classroom at R. B. Hayes consisted of six rows of five 18
desks each. The desks and chairs were bolted securely to each other and 19
to the floor and had hinged, liftable desktops, just as all primary class-20
rooms’ desks tended to in that era before backpacks and bookbags.

21

Inside your assigned desk was where you stored your No. 2 pencils, 22
theme paper, paste, and other essentials of primary school education.

23

It was also where you were required to place your textbook out of view 24
during in-class tests. I can remember that the theme paper of that 25
era was light grey, soft, and slippery, with very wide rules of dotted 26
blue; all assignments completed on this paper came out looking some-27
what blurred.

28

Up to the 6th grade in Columbus, one had an assigned homeroom.

29

This was a specific classroom where you kept your winter coat and 30
rubbers on a hook and a rectangle of newspaper, respectively, along the 31
wall, a pupil’s specific hook designated with a piece of colored con-32
struction paper with your first name and last initial printed in Magic 33

Marker. It was under the lid of your homeroom desktop that you kept sh 34
your central cache of school supplies. At that time, the most grown up reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 6 9
thing about Fishinger Secondary School across the street seemed to be 1
that the upperclassmen there had no homeroom but went from room 2
to room for classes and stored their materials in a locker with a com-3
bination lock whose combination you had to memorize and then de-4
stroy the slip of paper on which the combination was given so that no 5
one could break into your locker. None of this is directly relevant to 6
the story of how the unlikely quartet of myself, Chris DeMatteis, 7

Frankie Caldwell, and the strange and disturbed Mandy Blemm were 8
brought by circumstance to coalesce into what became known more 9
informally as The 4, except perhaps for the fact that Art and Civics 10
were the only two classes for which we left our homeroom. Both of 11
these classes used special facilities and materials, so both had their own 12
quarters and specially trained teachers, and the pupils came to them 13
from their respective homerooms at specified periods. This was, in our 14
case, second period. The single-file line in which we proceeded from 15
homeroom to Mrs. Barrie’s and Mrs. Roseman’s respective Art and 16

Civics rooms was silent, alphabetical, and closely supervised. The very 17
late ’50s and early ’60s were not a time of lax discipline or disorder, 18
which made what occurred in Civics on the day in question all the 19
more traumatic, and caused several of the class’s children (one of 20
whom was Terence Velan, who was perhaps somewhat effete for a boy 21
of that era, and sometimes wore sandals and leather shorts, but was ex-22
tremely good at soccer, and had a father who was a hydraulic engineer 23
from West Germany who had attained American citizenship, and 24
could also roll his eyelids up in such a way as to disclose the mucous 25
membranes of their insides and then walk around the playground like 26
that, which lent him a certain cachet) to transfer out of Hayes Primary 27
for good, as even just being back in the building caused traumatic, per-28
severative memories and emotions.

29

Only much later would I understand that the incident at the chalk-30
board in Civics was likely to be the most dramatic and exciting event 31

I would ever be involved in in my life. As with the case of my father, I 32
think that I am ultimately grateful not to have been aware of this at the 33
time.

34 sh

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my seat was now, to what would have been mrs. roseman’s 2
considerable chagrin, next to the window.

3

4

Mrs. Roseman’s Civics classroom, which had portraits of all 34 U.S.

5
presidents evenly spaced around all four walls just below the ceiling, as 6
well as pulldown relief maps of the thirteen original colonies, the 7

Union and Confederate states circa 1861, and the present United 8

States, including the Hawaiian islands, and steel cabinets filled with 9
additional resources of all kinds, mainly contained a large metal 10
teacher’s desk and black slate chalkboard at the front of the room, and 11

30 total bolted desks and chairs in which we, Miss Vlastos’s 4th grade 12
homeroom class, were alphabetically arrayed in six rows of five pupils 13
each. Mr. Johnson being a sub, we had amused ourselves by altering 14

Mrs. Roseman’s normal seating chart and reversing our assigned rows’

15
east-west placement in the classroom, placing Rosemary Ahearn and 16

Emily-Ann Barr in the first desks of the row nearest the west wall’s 17
coathooks (which were always empty, as Mrs. Roseman’s Civics class-18
room was not anybody’s homeroom) and classroom door, and the lat-19
ter of the Swearingen twins at the front of the easternmost row, next 20
to the first of the east wall’s two large windows, whose heavy shades 21
could be lowered for filmstrips and the occasional historical film. I was 22
in the second to last desk in the easternmost row, which was a logisti-23
cal error that Mrs. Roseman would never have allowed, as I was clas-24
sified as unsatisfactory in Listening Skills as well as its associated 25
category, Following Directions, and every full-time teacher in the first 26
several grades at R. B. Hayes knew that I was a pupil whose assigned 27
seat should be as far away from windows and other sources of possible 28
distraction as possible. All of the school building’s windows had a 29
reticulate wire mesh built directly into the glass in order to make the 30
window harder to break with an errant dodgeball or vandal’s hurled 31
stone. Also, the pupil to my immediate left in the next row in the er-32
satz arrangement was Sanjay Rabindranath, who studied maniacally at 33
all times, and also had exemplary cursive, and was perhaps the single sh 34
best pupil to sit next to during tests in all of R. B. Hayes. The wire reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 7 1
tional row of 12 slender rectangles where the first vertical line of mesh 1
nearly abutted the window’s right border, was designed in part to make 2
the windows less diverting and to minimize the chances that a pupil 3
could become distracted or lost in contemplation of the scene outside, 4
which in Civics in March consisted mostly of grey skies and bare trees’

5
chassis and the ravaged edges of the soccer fields and unfenced ball di-6
amond on which Little League was held each May 21 to August 4.

7

Behind, and much foreshortened — being occluded by Taft Avenue 8
and occupying only three squares at the window’s lower left — was the 9
fenced and regulation-size Fishinger Secondary ballfield, where the 10
big boys played American Legion baseball to keep themselves in peak 11
condition for the high school season. A handful of our school’s win-12
dows were cracked by vandals each spring; there were several exposed 13
rocks in the soccer fields, of which at least half or more could be 14
brought into calibrated view from my seat without any discernible 15
movement of my head. Nearly all of the empty and forlorn ball 16
diamond could be seen with one or two subtle adjustments as well, the 17
infield now mud wherever there wasn’t snow. I am someone who has 18
always possessed good peripheral vision, and for much of Mr. Johnson’s 19
three weeks on the U.S. Constitution, I had primarily attended Civics 20
in body only, my real attention directed peripherally at the fields and 21
street outside, which the window mesh’s calibration divided into dis-22
crete squares that appeared to look quite like the rows of panels com-23
prising cartoon strips, filmic storyboards, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery 24

Comics, and the like. Obviously, this intense preoccupation was lethal 25
in terms of my Listening Skills during second period Civics, in that 26
it led my attention not merely to wander idly, but to actively construct 27
whole linear, discretely organized narrative fantasies, many of which 28
unfolded in considerable detail. That is to say that anything in any 29
way remarkable in the view outside — such as a piece of vivid litter 30
blowing from one wire square to the next, or a city bus flowing stolidly 31
from right to left through the lowest three horizontal columns of 32
squares — became the impetus for privately imagined films’ or car-33
toons’ storyboards, in which each of the remaining squares of the 34 sh
window’s wire mesh could be used to continue and deepen the panels’

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narrative — the ordinary looking C.P.T. bus in reality commandeered 2
by Batman’s then-archnemesis, the Red Commando, who in an inte-3
rior view in successive squares holds hostage, among others, Miss 4

Vlastos, several blind children from the State School for the Blind 5
and Deaf, and my terrified older brother and his piano teacher, 6

Mrs. Doudna, until the moving bus is penetrated by Batman and (be-7
hind his small decorative mask) a markedly familiar looking Robin, 8
through a series of acrobatic rope and grappling hook maneuvers each 9
one of which filled and animated one reticulate square of the window 10
and then was frozen in tableau as my attention moved on to the next 11
panel, and so on. These imagined constructions, which often took up 12
the entire window, were difficult and concentrated work; the truth is 13
that they bore little resemblance to what Mrs. Claymore, Mrs. Taylor, 14

Miss Vlastos, or my parents called daydreaming. At the time of the 15
inciting trauma, I was still nine years old; my tenth birthday would 16
be April 8. Ages seven to nearly ten were also the troubling and upset-17
ting period (particularly for my parents) when I could not, in any 18
strictly accepted sense, read. By which I mean that I could scan a page 19
from From Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of America in Words and Pictures 20

(which was the mandated textbook for all primary school Civics 21
classes statewide at that time) and supply a certain amount of specific 22
quantitative information, such as the exact number of words per page, 23
the exact number of words on each line, and often the word and even 24
letter with the most and the fewest occurrences of use on a given page, 25
for example, as well as the number of occurrences of each word, often 26
retaining this information long after the page had been read, and yet 27

I could not, in the majority of cases, internalize or communicate in 28
any very satisfactory way what the words and their various combi-29
nations were intended to mean (this is my memory of the period, 30
at any rate), with the result that I performed well below average 31
when tested on homework assimilation and reading comprehension.

32

Much to everyone’s relief, the reading problem reversed itself, almost 33
as mysteriously as it had first appeared, somewhere around my tenth sh 34
birthday.

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mr. johnson, originally of nearby urbancrest, was later 1
revealed to have no record of mental disturbance or 2
criminal behavior of any kind, according to press 3
accounts.

4

5

It had last snowed in early March. The classroom window’s east-6
ward view, in other words, was now primarily mud and dirty snow.

7

What sky there was was colorless and rode somewhat low, like some-8
thing sodden or quite tired. The ballfield’s infield was all mud, with 9
only a small hyphen of snow atop the pitcher’s rubber. Usually, 10
throughout second period, the window’s only real movement was litter 11
or a vehicle of some sort on Taft, with the day of the trauma’s excep-12
tion being the appearance of the dogs. It had happened only once be-13
fore, earlier in the Constitution unit, but not again until now. The two 14
dogs entered the window’s upper right grid from a copse of trees to the 15
northeast and proceeded diagonally down towards the northern goal 16
area of the soccer fields. They then began moving in gradually dimin-17
ishing circles around each other, apparently preparing to copulate. A 18
similar scenario had unfolded once before, but then the dogs had not 19
reappeared for some weeks. Their actions appeared to be consistent 20
with those of mating. The larger of the two dogs mounted the other’s 21
back from the rear and wrapped its forelegs around the brindle-22
colored dog’s body and began to thrust repeatedly, taking a series of tiny 23
steps with its rear legs as the other dog attempted to escape. This oc-24
cupied slightly more than one square of the window’s wire mesh. The 25
visual impression was of one large, anatomically complex dog having a 26
series of convulsions. It was not a pretty sight, but it was vivid and 27
compelling. One of the animals was larger, and black with a dun chest 28
element, possibly a rottweiler mix, though it lacked a purebred rott-29
weiler’s breadth of head. The breed of the smaller dog beneath it was 30
unidentifiable. According to my older brother, we had had a dog for a 31
short period when I would have been too young to remember, which 32
had chewed on the base of the piano and the legs of a spectacular 16th 33
century antique Queen Elizabeth dining room table our mother had 34 sh

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discovered at a rummage sale, which was worth over one million dol-2
lars when appraised and caused the family dog to have disappeared 3
one day when my brother came home from nursery school and found 4
both the dog and the table missing, adding that my parents had been 5
very upset about the whole business and that if I ever brought the dog 6
up or asked our mother about it and upset her he would put my fingers 7
in the hinge of the foyer closet and lean with all his weight on the door 8
until all my fingers were so mangled they would have to be amputated 9
and I would be even more hopeless at the piano than I already was.

10

Both my brother and I had been involved in intensive piano instruc-11
tion and recitals at that juncture, though it was only he who had 12
showed true promise, and had continued twice a week with Mrs.

13

Doudna until his own difficulties began to emerge so dramatically in 14
early adolescence. The conjoined dogs were too distant to ascertain 15
whether they had collars or tags, yet close enough that I could make 16
out the expression on the face of the dominant dog above. It was blank 17
and at the same time fervid — the same type of expression as on a hu-18
man being’s face when he is doing something that he feels compul-19
sively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to 20
do it. Rather than mating, it could have been one dog merely asserting 21
its dominance over another, as I later learned was common. It ap-22
peared to last a long time, during which the dog on the receiving end 23
underneath took a number of small, unsteady steps which bore both 24
animals across four different panels of the fourth row down, compli-25
cating the storyboard activity on either side. A collar and tags com-26
prise a valid sign that the dog has a home and owner rather than being 27
a stray animal, which a guest speaker from the Public Health Depart-28
ment in homeroom had explained could be a concern. This was espe-29
cially true of the rabies vaccination tag required by Franklin County 30
ordinance, for obvious reasons. The unhappy but stoic expression on 31
the face of the brindle-colored dog beneath was harder to characterize.

32

Perhaps it was less distinct, or obscured by the window’s protective 33
mesh. Our mother had once described the expression of our Aunt sh 34

Tina, who had profound physical problems, as this — long suffering.

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mary unterbrunner, known also by oehmke and 1
llewellyn’s group on the playground as big bertha, was 2
the only other girl who sometimes ever played with 3
mandy blemm after school hours. my brother, who was 4
in the same class as mandy blemm’s elder sister, brandy, 5
said that the blemms were well known to be a disturbed 6
family, whose father always stayed home all day in just 7
his undershirt, and their yard looked like a junkyard, 8
and their german shepherd would try to kill you if you 9
even came near the blemms’ fence, and that once, when 10
brandy didn’t clean up the dog’s droppings, which was 11
apparently her assigned chore, allegedly the father 12
came angrily staggering out and made her lie down in 13
the yard and put her face in the droppings; my brother 14
said that two different 7th graders had seen this, and 15
it was why brandy blemm (who was also somewhat slow) 16
was known around fishinger secondary as the shit girl, 17
which surely could not have felt good for a girl in her 18
early teen years to be called, no matter how much she 19
did or did not have on the ball.

20

21

The only other time at which Mr. Johnson had substituted for the 22
real teacher in any of my classes had been for two weeks in 2nd grade, 23
when Mrs. Claymore, our homeroom teacher, had been in a traffic ac-24
cident and came back with a large white metal and canvas brace 25
around her neck which no one was allowed to sign, and could not turn 26
her head to either side for the remainder of the school year, after which 27
time she retired to Florida with independent means. As I remember 28
him, Mr. Johnson was of average height for an adult, with the standard 29
crew cut, suit jacket and necktie, and eyeglasses with scholarly black 30
frames that everyone who wore glasses in that day and age wore. Evi-31
dently, he had subbed for several other grades and classes at R. B.

32

Hayes as well. The only time anyone had ever seen him outside school 33
was one time when Denise Kone and her mother saw Mr. Johnson in 34 sh

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the A&P, and Denise said his cart had been full of frozen foods, which 2
her mother had associated with the fact that he was unmarried. I do 3
not recall noticing whether Mr. Johnson wore a wedding band or not, 4
but the Dispatch articles later made no mention of his being survived 5
by a wife after the authorities stormed the classroom. I also do not re-6
member his face except as it existed in a Dispatch photo afterwards, 7
which was evidently taken from one of his own student yearbooks sev-8
eral years prior. Barring some obvious problem or characteristic, most 9
adults’ faces were not easy to attend to closely at that age — their very 10
adultness obscured all other characteristics. To the best of my recollec-11
tion, Mr. Johnson’s was a face whose only memorable characteristic 12
was that it appeared slightly tilted or angled upwards in its position on 13
the front of his head. This was not excessive but only a matter of one 14
or two degrees — imagine holding up a mask or portrait so that it was 15
facing you and then tilting it one or two degrees upwards off of nor-16
mal center. As if, in other words, its eyeholes were now looking slightly 17
upwards. And that this, together with what was either poor posture or 18
a problem involving his neck like Mrs. Claymore, caused Mr. Johnson 19
to look as if he were wincing or slightly recoiling from whatever he was 20
saying. It was not gross or obvious, but both Caldwell and Todd 21

Llewellyn had noticed Mr. Johnson’s wincing quality, too, and re-22
marked on it. Llewellyn said the sub looked like he was scared of his 23
own shadow, like Miles O’Keefe or Gunsmoke’ s Festus (who we all 24
hated — nobody ever wanted to be Festus in re-creations of Gun-25
smoke). On his first day substituting for Mrs. Roseman, he introduced 26
himself to us as Mr. Johnson, writing it on the chalkboard in perfect 27

Palmer cursive as did all teachers of that era; but as his full name re-28
curred so often in the Dispatch for several weeks after the incident, he 29
tends to remain now more in my memory as Richard Allen Johnson, 30

Jr., 31, originally of nearby Urbancrest, which is a small bedroom com-31
munity outside of Columbus proper.

32

According to my brother’s own flights of fancy in childhood, the an-33
tique table we had possessed before I was old enough to be aware of sh 34
anything that was going on had been burled walnut, with a large num-reg 35
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likeness of the face of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) as 1
seen from the right side, and that the disappointment of its loss was 2
part of the reason our father often looked so dispirited on coming 3
home at the end of the day.

4

The easternmost row’s second to last desk had a deep stick figure 5
with a cowboy hat and much oversized six-shooter gouged deeply into 6
it and colored in with ink from some previous 4th grader, obviously 7
the product of much slow, patient effort over the course of that previ-8
ous academic year. Directly ahead of me were the thick neck, upper 9
vertebrae, and severely bobbed hairline of Mary Unterbrunner, whose 10
neck’s pale and patternless freckles I had studied for almost two years, 11
as Mary Unterbrunner (who would later become an administrative 12
secretary at the large women’s detention center in Parma) had also 13
been in my 3rd grade homeroom with Mrs. Taylor, who read the class 14
ghost stories and could play the ukulele and was a great deal of fun as 15
a homeroom teacher so long as you didn’t get on the wrong side of her 16
temper. Mrs. Taylor once hit Caldwell on the back of his hand with 17
her ruler, which she carried in the large kangaroo pocket of her smock, 18
so hard that it swelled up almost like a cartoon hand, and Mrs. Cald-19
well (who knew judo, and who you also did not want to fool around 20
with in terms of her own temper, according to Caldwell) came down 21
to the school to complain to the principal. What teachers and the ad-22
ministration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work 23
of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and con-24
centration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness 25
is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

26

For the sake of the visual interest of the narrative that day, I wish that 27

I could say that each panel of the story that the window generated 28
from the view of the two dogs either mating or struggling for domi-29
nance remained animated, so that by the end of the class the window’s 30
wire mesh squares were all filled with narrative panels like the pictorial 31
stained windows at Riverside Methodist Church, where my brother, 32
mother, and I attended Sunday service each week, along with my 33
father when he felt up to getting up early enough. He often had to 34 sh
work at the office six days a week, and he liked to call Sunday his day 35 reg

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to try to glue what was left of his nerves back together. But that was 2
not how it worked. It would have taken some kind of mental marvel to 3
hold each square’s illustrated tableau in memory throughout the whole 4
narrative of the window, not unlike the backseat game on trips where 5
you and someone else pretend that you’re planning a picnic, and he 6
says one item that will be brought, and you repeat that item and add 7
another, and he repeats the two mentioned previously and adds a 8
third, and you must repeat and then add a fourth which he must re-9
member and repeat, and so on, until each of you is trying to hold a 10
memorized string of 30 or more items in your mind as you each keep 11
adding to it further by turns. This was never a game I excelled at, al-12
though my brother could sometimes perform feats of memory that 13
amazed my parents and may even have frightened them a little, given 14
how he eventually turned out (our father often referred to him as the 15
brains of the outfit). Each square in the window’s mesh filled and re-16
counted its part of the story of the poor unhappy owner of the brindle 17
dog only while that particular square was attended to; it reverted to its 18
natural state of transparency once the entire panel was actuated and 19
filled and the story moved on to the mesh’s next square, in which the 20
little girl whose young and unworldly brindle-colored dog, Cuffie, had 21
dug its way out under the shabby back fence and escaped down to the 22
banks of the Scioto River, wearing a lemon-colored pinafore, pink hair 23
ribbon, and shiny black patent leather shoes with polished buckles, was 24
sitting in her 4th grade Art class making a Playdoh statuette of Cuffie, 25
her dog, all by touch, at the State School for the Blind and Deaf on 26

Morse Rd. She was blind, and her name was Ruth, although her mother 27
and father called her Ruthie and her two older sisters, who played the 28
bassoon, called her Ruthie Toothie because they were trying to con-29
vince her — we see this in three consecutive panels where the sisters, 30
who are older and have the disagreeable expressions and akimbo 31
postures that cruel people in cartoons always have — of how unfortu-32
nately homely she is, due to her terrible overbite, and of how everyone 33
can see it but her, and there is nearly a whole horizontal row of panels sh 34
of Ruth in dark glasses with her little hands over her face, crying over reg 35
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gotten loothie, while the little girl’s poor but kindhearted father, who 1
works as a groundskeeper for a wealthy man in a white metal and 2
canvas brace who owns a lavish mansion in Blacklick Estates with a 3
wrought iron gate and a curving driveway over one mile in length out 4
past Amberly, is driving the family’s old, battered car slowly up and 5
down the cold streets of their shabby neighborhood, calling Cuffie’s 6
name out of the open car window and jingling the brindle dog’s collar 7
and tags. A series of panels in the very top row of mesh squares, which 8
is often reserved for flashbacks and backstory elements that help fill in 9
gaps in the window’s unfolding action, reveals that Cuffie’s collar and 10
vaccination tags have gotten torn off as he wriggles under the Simmons 11
family’s yard’s fence in excitement over seeing the two stray dogs, one 12
black and dun and the other predominantly piebald, that have loped 13
up to the cheap wire fence and urged Cuffie to come join them in some 14
freely roaming dog adventures, the dark one, who in the panel has 15
angled eyebrows and a sinister pencil mustache, crossing his heart over 16
the promise that they won’t go far at all and will be sure and show the 17
trusting Cuffie the way back home again. Much of the specific day’s 18
storyboard, which extends like arms or the radial spikes one often sees 19
around a cartoon sun, involves the split narrative of small, pale, blind 20

Ruth Simmons (who is not bucktoothed in the slightest but is, under-21
standably, not a very good Playdoh sculptor) sitting in her Art for the 22

Blind class wishing desperately that she could know whether or not 23
her father has been successful in finding the dog, Cuffie, who is Ruth 24

Simmons’ faithful canine companion and never chews on anything or 25
makes any trouble for the household and often sits devotedly under the 26
small, wobbly desk the father had found in the trash of the wealthy 27
manufacturer he works for, and which he had brought home and nailed 28
empty spools onto the drawers of for drawer handles, and Cuffie often 29
sits under there resting his nose on Ruth Simmons’ patent leather 30
shoes as she sits in her dark bedroom (it doesn’t matter to blind people 31
whether the lights in a room are on or not) at the desk and does her 32
homework in Braille, while her sisters practice the bassoon or lie in the 33
light on their bedroom’s plush carpeting talking pointlessly about boys 34 sh
or the Everly Brothers on the princess telephone, often tying up the 35 reg

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phone for hours at a time, while the father moonlights at his night job 2
of singlehandedly lifting heavy crates into the rear of delivery trucks, 3
and the family’s mother, an Avon Lady who has never successfully sold 4
even one Avon home product, spends every evening lying splayed and 5
semiconscious on the living room couch, which is missing one of its legs 6
and is propped unsteadily up with a phone book while the father tries 7
to scavenge the right kind of wood to replace the leg, Mr. Simmons 8
being the kind of poor but honest father who makes his living with 9
physical labor rather than poring over facts and figures all day. The top 10
row’s backstory of the window’s large, black and dun dog is somewhat 11
vague, and consists of a few hastily sketched panels involving a low 12
cement building filled with dogs barking in cages, and a back alley in 13
a seedy district in which several garbage cans are overturned and a man 14
in a stained apron is shaking his fist at something we cannot see. Then, 15
in the main row, we see the family’s father getting a demanding phone 16
call from the wealthy owner of the mansion telling him to come back 17
and start priming the large, expensive, gas-driven industrial snowblower 18
for the mansion’s long driveway with lines of small colored lights all 19
along its length like a runway, because the owner’s personal meteorol-20
ogist has said that it’s getting ready to snow again like the absolute 21
dickens. Then we see Ruth Simmons’ mother — whom we have already 22
seen take several pills throughout the day from a small brown prescrip-23
tion bottle in her handbag, by way of another upper row’s backstory —

24
relieving the father and driving the battered family car aimlessly up 25
and down the seedy neighborhood’s streets, very slowly and weaving a 26
bit, as a dense, persistent snow begins to fall and the streetlights begin 27
to glow and the panel’s light turns ashy and sad, the way late afternoon 28
in Columbus in winter so often makes the light seem sad.

29

30
essentially, i had no idea what was going on.

31

32

Just which specific aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights were being cov-33
ered by Mr. Johnson while this story of Ruth Simmons and her lost sh 34

Cuffie filled in panel after panel of the window I cannot say, as by that reg 35
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tended to happen throughout this period. To be fair, this was the reason 1
why Mrs. Roseman and the administration were determined to keep me 2
away from distractions of all kinds — prohibiting Caldwell and I from 3
sitting near each other, for instance. I do not remember even noticing 4
just when it was that the exterior’s dogs broke off their initial attachment 5
and began moving in circles of somewhat different size, sniffing at the 6
ground and the mud of the ballfield’s infield. The temperature outside 7
was an estimated 45 degrees; it was melting that winter’s second to last 8
snow. I do remember that it snowed heavily the next day, March 15, and 9
that, as school was closed on the day after the trauma, we were able to 10
go sledding after several interviews with the Ohio State Police and 11
a special Unit 4 psychologist named Dr. Biron-Maint, who had a 12
strangely configured nose and smelled faintly of mildew, and that later 13
on that day Chris DeMatteis’ sled had tipped to one side and struck a 14
tree, and his forehead had had blood all over it while we all watched 15
him keep touching his forehead and cry in fear at the reality of his own 16
blood. I do not remember what anyone did to help him; we were all 17
likely still in shock. Ruth Simmons’ mother, whose name was Marjorie 18
and had grown up admiring herself in different dresses in the mirror 19
and practicing saying, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘My, what a funny and 20
amusing remark!’ and dreaming of marrying a wealthy doctor and 21
hosting elaborate dinner parties of doctors and their wives in diamond 22
tiaras and fox wraps at their mansion’s beautiful burled walnut dining 23
room table in which she looked almost like a fairy princess under the 24
chandelier’s lights, now, as an adult, looked puffy and dull-eyed and 25
had a perpetually downturned mouth as she drove the battered car.

26

She was smoking a Viceroy and had the windows rolled up and was 27
not even rolling down the window to call, ‘Cuffie!’ as the kindly, long 28
suffering father before her had done. There was backstory above, in 29
which the blind infant Ruth Simmons was lying in her bassinet in her 30
tiny dark glasses holding out her arms and crying for her mother while 31
the mother would stand with a glass with an olive with a toothpick in 32
it and a downturned mouth looking down at the blind baby and then 33
turning and looking at herself in the room’s ancient, cracked mirror 34 sh
and practicing giving a bitter, sardonic little curtsy without spilling her 35 reg

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glass. Usually the baby would give up and stop crying after a while and 2
just make small whimpering noises (this occupied only two or three 3
panels). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Ruth Simmons’ Playdoh fig-4
urine looked almost disfigured, less like a dog than a satyr or Great Ape 5
which something heavy had run over. Her beautiful little snow white 6
face with its dark glasses and hair ribbon is seen tilted upwards several 7
degrees as she offers innocent, childlike prayers for Cuffie’s safe return, 8
praying that her father has perhaps spotted Cuffie huddled inside a 9
tire in one of their seedy neighbors’ unkempt yards, or has spotted 10

Cuffie loping innocently along the side of Maryville Road and has 11
stopped the car in the middle of traffic on the busy thoroughfare and 12
knelt down with open arms by the side of the road for the dog to come 13
running joyfully into his arms, her blind fantasies’ thought-bubbles 14
occupying several of the panels that had previously been taken up by 15
the actual scene of a frightened and limping Cuffie being harried by 16
the two hardened, feral adult dogs along the seedy east bank of the 17

Scioto River, which even in 1960 was already starting to smell bad above 18
the Griggs Dam and had rusty tin cans and abandoned hubcaps scat-19
tered along its east bank by Maryville Road, and which my father said 20
he could remember being able to fish right out of with a string and 21
safety pin circa 1935, in knickers and a straw hat, with his parents in 22
their own straw hats picnicking behind himself and his brother (who 23
was later wounded in Salerno, Italy, in World War II, and had a wooden 24
foot that he could unstrap and take right off with its special enclosing 25
shoe provided by the GI Bill, so the shoe was never empty even when 26
it was in his closet when he went to sleep, and worked for a manufac-27
turer of cardboard dividers for different kinds of shipping containers 28
in Kettering) in the shade of the many beech and buckeye trees that 29
thrived along the Scioto before the University unduly influenced the 30
city fathers into building the Maryville commuter road to more con-31
veniently connect Upper Arlington to the West Side proper. With the 32
faithful dog’s lustrous brown eyes now moist with regret at leaving the 33
yard, and with fear, because Cuffie was now far, far away from home, sh 34
further by far than the young little dog had ever been before. We have reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 8 3
brought him home from the A.S.P.C.A. as a surprise on the previous 1

Good Friday, and had allowed Ruth to bring Cuffie along to Easter 2
services at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church (they were Roman Catholics, 3
as poor people in Columbus often were) in a small wicker basket cov-4
ered with a checkered cloth from which only the dog’s wet, inquisitive 5
little nose had shown, and he had been every bit as quiet as Ruth’s 6
mother had said he better be or else they were all going to have to get 7
up and leave even if it was right in the middle of the services, which 8
for Roman Catholics would have been a terrible sin, even though one 9
of Ruth’s elder sisters had surreptitiously kept poking at one of the 10
puppy’s paws with a hatpin to try to get it to cry out, which it didn’t, 11
none of which Ruth had had any idea about as she sat on the hard 12
wooden pew in her dark glasses, holding the basket in her lap and 13
swinging her little legs with gratitude and joy at having a puppy for a 14
companion (as a rule, the blind have a natural affinity for dogs, whose 15
eyesight is not very good either). And the two feral dogs (whose fur 16
was matted, and their ribcages showed, and the piebald one had a large 17
greenish sore near the base of its tail) were hard and cruel, and showed 18
their teeth at Cuffie whenever he faltered, even when they went 19
through the pools of half-frozen mud and sludge that plashed into the 20
river out of the mouths of huge cement pipes with curse words written 21
on them with spraypaint, and even though Cuffie was just a dog and 22
didn’t have thought-bubbles as you or I do, the look in his soft brown 23
eyes spoke volumes as the piebald dog suddenly leapt up into one of 24
these huge pipes and its matted head and tail with the big sore disap-25
peared, and the larger, black dog began growling at Cuffie to follow 26
into the pipe, which was not gushing but had a trickle of something 27
dark orange and terrible smelling (even to a dog) out of it, and in the 28
next square Cuffie was forced to put his little forelegs up onto the lip of 29
the cement pipe and try to pull his hindquarters up into it with the black 30
dog growling and chewing at his rear tendons. The dog’s illustrated 31
facial expression said it all. It conveyed that Cuffie was very frightened 32
and unhappy and wishing only to be back in the fenced yard wagging 33
its brindle tail and waiting for the tap, tap sound of Ruth’s miniature 34 sh
white cane coming up the sidewalk to greet Cuffie and bring him in to 35 reg

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rub his stomach and whisper to him over and over how beautiful he 2
was and how wonderful his ears and little soft paws smelled, and how 3
lucky they all were to have him, as the black dog leapt easily up onto 4
the lip of the trickling culvert behind Cuffie and, with an ominous 5
look to either side, disappeared into the round black mouth of the 6
pipe, completing the horizontal row.

7

Meanwhile, in the inception of the real incident, Mr. Johnson had 8
evidently just written KILL on the chalkboard. The most obvious flaw 9
in my memory of the incident as a whole is that much of the trauma’s 10
inception unfolded outside my awareness, so intently was I concen-11
trating on the window’s mesh squares, which in the narrative I was fill-12
ing the next row of with panels of the unhappy mother, Mrs. Simmons, 13
weaving the family auto slowly down the snow filled streets of the 14
neighborhood while she plucks at various grey hairs that she is trying 15
to find and get a grip on with tweezers in the rearview mirror, as well 16
as scenes of the father, outdoors in the falling snow, operating a large, 17
gas-operated appliance which looks a little like a power lawnmower 18
but is larger and has twice as many rotating blades, as well as being the 19
distinctive bright orange that sportsmen and hunters normally wear, 20
which is the mansion’s wealthy owner’s company’s trademark color, 21
and is also the color of the special snowpants the owner makes the 22
stoic and uncomplaining father wear, beginning to push the machine 23
through the dense, wet snow of the mansion’s driveway. The driveway 24
is so long that by the time the father has finished snowblowing the 25
whole thing he will have to start back at the beginning again, as the 26
snowfall (which you can also see in the background out the mesh win-27
dow of the State School for the Blind and Deaf classroom, even 28

though little Ruthie obviously is unaware) is becoming heavy and 29
turning into a real snowstorm, with the father’s thought-bubble in one 30
panel saying, ‘Oh, well! It is not so bad, at least I am lucky to have a 31
job, and I am certain that good old Marjorie will find Cuffie in time to 32
bring our pet home in time for Ruthie’s return from school!’ with a pa-33
tient, uncomplaining expression on his face as the loud, heavy appli-sh 34
ance (which the mansion’s owner had patented and his company reg 35
manufactures, which is why he makes Mr. Simmons wear the undig-4th Pass Pages

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nified orange pants) erases the driveway’s white like a chalkboard be-1
ing cleaned with damp paper towels by someone serving out an admin-2
istrative detention. It was thus that I did not literally see or know what 3
began to unfold during the Civics class, although I received the full 4
story so many times from classmates and authorities and the Dispatch 5
that in memory it nearly feels as if I were present as a full witness from 6
the beginning. Dr. Biron-Maint, the administrative psychologist, gave 7
his professional opinion that I was a full witness, but had been too 8
traumatized ( shellshocked was his stated term; each child’s parents re-9
ceived a copy of his evaluation) to be able to acknowledge the memory 10
of it. However crude or erroneous, my role in all legal proceedings af-11
ter the incident was thus limited by Dr. Biron-Maint’s diagnosis, 12
which my mother and father assented to in writing. Such is adult 13
memory’s strangeness, though, that I can still recall in great detail the 14
sight of Dr. Biron-Maint’s nostrils, which were of noticeably different 15
shapes and size, and can remember trying to imagine various things 16
that might have happened to his nose in life or perhaps even in his 17
mother’s stomach as a baby to produce such a marked anomaly. The 18
clinician was very tall, even by adult standards, and I spent much of the 19
required interview looking up at his nostrils and lower jaw. He also 20
smelled the way someone’s bathmat can smell in the summer, though 21

I did not identify this scent as such at the time. To be frank, the con-22
sensus was that Dr. Biron-Maint gave many of us the willies even 23
more than Mr. Johnson, although having to watch something like that 24
would obviously be traumatic for anyone, especially young children.

25

26
later, mr. dematteis was forced out of the wholesale 27
newspaper delivery trade by what chris dematteis said 28
were elements of organized crime that were moving 29
down from cleveland and taking over all newspaper and 30
coin operated vending machine businesses in the state, 31
forcing mr. dematteis to take a job as a taxi dispatcher, 32
but at least chris stopped having to get up so early that 33
he could not stay awake in his classes, and later discov-34 sh
ered a natural talent for manual machine operation in 35 reg

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1
mr. vaughan’s industrial arts class at fishinger, and is 2
now a shop steward at precision tool & die only a few 3
blocks from my own firm’s offices.

4

5

In the midst of writing on the chalkboard, illustrating that the 6
phrase due process of law appears identically in both the Vth and XIVth 7

Amendments, Mr. Richard Allen Johnson inadvertently inserted 8
something else in the phrase, as well — the capital word KILL. Ellen 9

Morrison, Sanjay Rabindranath, and some other of the class’s more 10
diligent pupils, copying down word for word what Mr. Johnson was 11
putting up on the chalkboard, discovered that they had written due 12
process KILL of law and that that, too, was what was on the chalkboard, 13
which Mr. Johnson had stepped one or two steps back from and was 14
looking up in evident puzzlement at what was written there. At least, 15
many classmates later reported this as puzzlement because of the way, 16
even though the sub was facing the chalkboard and thus had his back to 17
the class, his head was now cocked curiously over to the side, not unlike 18
a dog’s when it hears a certain type of high sound, and he remained 19
that way for a moment before shaking his head slightly as if shaking 20
off some confusion and, using the board’s eraser to erase the KILL of 21
law, replaced it with the correct of law. As usual, Chris DeMatteis had 22
his head on his desk in the second row and was asleep, because his 23
father and older brothers ran a newspaper delivery service for news-24
stands and retail vendors covering over a third of the city early in the 25
morning, and often they made DeMatteis get up as early as 3:00 in 26
the morning to pitch in and help, even if it was a school day, and 27

DeMatteis often fell asleep in his classes, especially if it was a sub.

28

Mandy Blemm, who most of the other children at R. B. Hayes knew 29
very little about in terms of the realities of her personal life or history 30

(both I and Tim Applewhite had been placed in Miss Clennon’s slow 31
readers class with Blemm in 3rd grade, although Applewhite later got 32
bused to a special school in Minerva Park, as he just could not read at 33
all — he literally was a slow reader, whereas Blemm and I were not), sh 34
rarely ever even took her book or pencils out in class, and always sat reg 35
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paid attention or completed any of her assignments, until the school 1
authorities reached a point where they became so concerned that they 2
began making plans to have Blemm transferred to Minerva Park as well, 3
at which time she would abruptly begin completing her assignments 4
and being involved in classroom goings on. Then, as soon as the admin-5
istrative heat was off, she would once more revert to just sitting there 6
staring at her desktop or biting dead skin off of the sides of her 7
thumbnail very slowly for the whole class period. She had also been 8
known to eat paste. Everyone was a little afraid of her. At the same 9
time, Frankie Caldwell, who now works in Dayton as a quality control 10
inspector for Uniroyal, had his head down and was drawing something 11
on his theme paper with great precision and intensity. Alison Standish 12

(who later moved away) was absent again. Meanwhile, the Xth Amend-13
ment (the first I–IX are what comprise the familiar Bill of Rights, 14
although the Xth Amendment was adopted simultaneously in 1791) 15
contains the phrase The powers not delegated to the United States by the 16

Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, and so forth, which Mr.

17

Johnson, while at the board, according to Ellen Morrison and every 18
other pupil taking notes, wrote as The powers not delegated KILL to the 19

United States THEM by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it KILL

20

THEM to the States, at which time there was again, evidently, another 21
long classroom silence, during which the pupils all began looking at 22
one another while Mr. Johnson stood with his back to the room at the 23
board with his hand with the yellow chalk hanging at his side and his 24
head again cocked to the side as if he were having trouble hearing or 25
understanding something, without turning around or saying anything, 26
before picking up the board’s eraser once again and trying to continue 27
the lesson on Amendments X and XIII as though nothing unusual had 28
taken place. According to Mandy Blemm, by this time the room was 29
deathly quiet, and many of the pupils had an uneasy expression on their 30
face as they dutifully crossed out the THEM and KILL THEM that 31

Mr. Johnson had initially inserted in the quotation. At this same time, 32
in the window, a terrible series of events was transpiring for Ruth Sim-33
mons’ father, who in a diagonal series of panels in the protective mesh 34 sh
was stoically and uncomplainingly clearing the long black driveway of 35 reg

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snow with the enormous Snow Boy brand device that the owner’s 2
company engineers had invented in his R&D laboratories, which was 3
why he was now so wealthy. This was just the beginning of the era of 4
power lawnmowers and snow removers for ordinary consumers. Mean-5
while, Mrs. Marjorie Simmons’ car was stuck in the street’s heavy 6
snow and was idling with the windows so fogged up that the observer 7
had no idea what she might be doing in there, and Cuffie and the 8
hardbitten feral dogs were presumably still traversing the lengthy 9
industrial pipe that ran from the Scioto River to a large industrial-10
chemical factory on Olentangy River Road, as for several consecutive 11
panels there are depictions of the cement exterior of the pipe but no 12
visible activity or anything exiting the pipe at either end except for the 13
ominous orange trickle into the river. The whole Civics classroom had 14
become very quiet. The total number of words on the chalkboard after 15
the erasures was either 104 or 121, depending on whether one counted 16

Roman numerals as words or not. If asked, I could probably have told 17
you the total number of letters, the most and the least used letters (in 18
the latter case, a tie), as well as a number of different statistical func-19
tions by which the relative frequency of different letters’ appearance 20
could be quantified, although I would not have put any of these data in 21
this way, nor was I even quite aware that I could. The facts about the 22
words were simply there, much the way a knowledge of how your 23
tummy feels and where your arms are are there regardless of whether 24
you’re paying attention to these parts or not. They were simply part of 25
the whole peripheral environment in which I sat. What I was, how-26
ever, wholly aware of was that I was becoming more and more dis-27
turbed by the graphic narrative that was unfolding, square by square, 28
in the window. While compelling and diverting, few of the window’s 29
narratives were ever gruesome or unpleasant. Most had upbeat — if 30
somewhat naive and childish — themes. And it was only on days 31
when there was enough time before the bell rang for the end of Civics 32
that I got to see how they ended. Some carried over from the prior day, 33
but as a practical matter this was rare, as it was difficult to hold all the sh 34
unfolding details in mind for that long.

reg 35

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in childhood, i had no insight whatsoever into my 1
father’s consciousness, nor any awareness of what it 2
might have felt like, inside, to do what he had to sit 3
there at his desk and do every day. in this respect, it 4
was not until many years after his death that i felt i 5
truly knew him.

6

7

In terms of the precise order of events in the Civics classroom, 8
something was now evidently wrong with Mr. Johnson’s face and its 9
expression as the lesson moved on to Amendment XIII. In this same 10
interval, in a series of panels several rows down, the large, orange, gas-11
powered Snow Boy device, which removed snow from driveways by 12
means of a system of rotary blades that chopped the snow into fine 13
particles and then a powerful blower that enhanced the vacuum of the 14
blades’ rotation to throw the snow five, eight, or twelve feet in a high 15
arc to the side of the man operating the machine (the distance of the 16
arc could be controlled by adjusting the angle of the chute by means of 17
three pre-installed pins and holes, not unlike the Howitzer Mark IV

18
artillery used in Korea and elsewhere), stalled. The blizzard’s snow was 19
evidently so heavy and wet that it had clogged the rotating system of 20
eight razor sharp blades, and the Snow Boy’s self-protective choke had 21
stalled the engine (whose turbine was also the blades’ rotor) instead of 22
allowing the engine’s cylinders to overheat and melt the pistons, which 23
would ruin the expensive machine. The Snow Boy was, in this respect, 24
little more than a modified power lawnmower, which our neighbor 25

Mr. Snead was proudly the first on our street to get one of, and had 26
turned it over for the neighborhood children’s inspection after dis-27
abling the spark plugs — he emphasized several times that one must 28
disable the lawnmower’s spark plugs if you were going to place any 29
part of your hands near the blades, which he said rotated at over 30

360 rpm of torque and could slice a man’s hand off before he even 31
knew what was happening — and the window’s side panel’s schematic 32
view of the Snow Boy’s moving parts was based closely on Mr. Snead’s 33
explanation of how his power lawnmower was put together to mow his 34 sh

35 reg

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grass with only a featherlight touch on the controls. (Mr. Snead always 2
wore a tan cardigan sweater, and beneath his surface bonhomie seemed 3
palpably sad, and our mother said that the reason he was so friendly to 4
the neighborhood children and even gave each of us a Christmas pres-5
ent for several years was because he and Mrs. Snead couldn’t have any 6
children of their own, which was sad, and which my brother said pri-7
vately was due to Mrs. Snead’s back alley abortion as a roundheel teen, 8
which at the time I don’t believe I understood enough to feel anything 9
other than sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Snead, both of whom I liked.) As I 10
recall it now, the Sneads’ lawnmower had been orange as well, and 11
much larger than its modern descendants. I did not, though, initially 12
recall the window’s narrative including any explanation of what fate 13
befell the smaller, subordinate feral dog, with the sore, whose name 14
was Scraps, and had run away from home because of the way its owner 15
mistreated it when the tedium and despair of his lower level adminis-16
trative job made him come home empty-eyed and angry and drink 17
several highballs without any ice or even a lime, and later always found 18
some excuse to be cruel to Scraps, who had waited alone at home all 19
day and only wanted some petting or affection or to play tug of war 20
with a rag or dog toy in order to take its mind off of its own bored 21
loneliness, and whose life had been so awful that the backstory cut off 22
abruptly after the second time the man kicked Scraps in the stomach 23
so hard that Scraps couldn’t stop coughing and yet still tried to lick the 24
man’s hand when he picked Scraps up and threw him in the cold 25
garage and locked him in there all night, where Scraps lay alone in a 26
tight ball on the cement floor coughing as quietly as he could. Mean-27
while, in the main narrative row, his mind distracted by concern over 28
his blind daughter’s sadness and the hope that his wife, Marjorie, was 29

OK driving in the blizzard to look for Cuffie, Mr. Simmons, using his 30
blue collar strength to easily turn the stalled Snow Boy device over 31
onto its side, reached into the system of blades and the intake chute in 32
order to clear them of the wet, packed snow that had gotten com-33
pressed in there and jammed the blade. Normally a careful worker who sh 34
paid good attention and followed directions, this time he was so dis-reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 9 1
reaching in, as the schematic panel with an arrow and dotted line at 1
the intact spark plugs showed. Thus, when enough of the packed snow 2
had been removed to allow the rotor to turn freely, the Snow Boy 3
sprang into life on its side while Ruth Simmons’ father had his hand 4
deep inside the intake chute, severing not only Mr. Simmons’ hand but 5
much of his forearm, and badly splintering his forearm’s bone all the 6
way down to the bone marrow, with a horrifying full color spray of red 7
snow and human matter jetting at full force straight up into the air 8

(the Snow Boy being on its side, its chute was now facing straight up-9
wards) and completely blinding Mr. Simmons, whose face was right 10
over the chute. My shock and alarm over what was happening to Ruth 11

Simmons’ father, whom I liked, and felt for, created a sense of shock 12
and numbness that distanced me from the panels’ scene somewhat, 13
and I remember being distanced enough to be able to be on some level 14
aware that the Civics classroom seemed unusually quiet, with not even 15
the little sounds of whispering or coughing that usually made up the 16
room’s ambient noise when the teacher was writing on the chalkboard.

17

The only sound, except for Chris DeMatteis clicking and grinding his 18
rear molars in his sleep, being that of Richard A. Johnson writing on 19
the chalkboard, ostensibly about the XIIIth Amendment’s abolition of 20

Negro slavery, except instead it turned out that he was really writing 21

KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL over and over again on the chalk-22
board (as my own eyes would register just moments later) in capital 23
letters that got bigger and bigger with every letter, and the handwrit-24
ing less and less like the sub’s customary fluid script and more and 25
more frightening and ultimately not even human looking, and not 26
seeming to realize what he was doing or stopping to give any kind of 27
explanation but only cocking his already oddly cocked head further 28
and further over to the side, like somebody struggling might and main 29
against some terrible type of evil or alien force that had ahold of him 30
at the chalkboard and was compelling his hand to write things against 31
his will, and making (I was not conscious of hearing this at the time) a 32
strange, highpitched vocal noise that was something like a scream or 33
moan of effort, except that it was evidently just one note or pitch 34 sh
maintained throughout, and stayed that way, with the sound coming 35 reg

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out for much longer than anyone can normally even hold their breath, 2
while he remained facing the chalkboard so that no one yet could see 3
what his expression looked like, and writing KILL KILL KILL THEM

4

ALL KILL THEM DO IT NOW KILL THEM over and over again, 5
the chalkboard’s handwriting getting more and more jagged and 6
gigantic and spiky, with one part of the board already completely 7
filled with the repetitive phrase. What most credible witnesses seemed 8
to recall most vividly at this point was the classroom’s resultant confu-9
sion and fear — Emily-Ann Barr and Elizabeth Frazier were both 10
crying out and holding on to each other, and Danny Ellsberg, Ray-11
mond Gillies, Yolanda Maldonado, Jan and Erin Swearingen, and sev-12
eral other pupils were whipping themselves back and forth in their 13
bolted seats, and Philip Finkelpearl was preparing to throw up (which 14
was, in those years, his response to any strong stimuli), and Terence 15

Velan was calling for his Stepmutti, and Mandy Blemm was sitting up 16
very rigid and straight and staring with an intently concentrated ex-17
pression at the back of Mr. Johnson’s head as it cocked further and fur-18
ther to the side until it was evidently almost touching his shoulder, 19
with his left arm now straight out to the side and his hand forming a 20
kind of almost claw. And while I was not conscious or attentive to any 21
of this directly — except perhaps that the back of Unterbrunner’s 22
freckled neck in the seat ahead of me at the left periphery of my vision 23
had gone very white and bloodless and her large head was totally rigid 24
and still — in retrospect, I believe that the atmosphere of the class-25
room may have subconsciously influenced the unhappy events of the 26
period’s window’s mesh’s narrative fantasy, which was now more like a 27
nightmare, and was now proceeding radially along several rows and di-28
agonals of panels at once, which required tremendous energy and con-29
centration to sustain. Both the Art class’s deaf children and the other 30
blind children (the latter of whom could not see the statuette, but 31
whose sense of touch was very acute, and could, in a manner of speak-32
ing, see with their hands, and had passed the malformed statuette 33
hand to hand) were ridiculing the statuette of Cuffie and laughing at sh 34

Ruth Simmons, the cruel blind students laughing in a normal way, reg 35
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(those deaf people who are not mute tend to produce a hooting 1
sound — I do not know why this is, but when I was very small, one of 2
the boys who lived on our street had been deaf, and had played with 3
and sometimes gotten into terrible fistfights with my older brother, 4
until eventually their home caught fire in the middle of the night, and 5
several of the family suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation, and 6
they moved away even though their insurance had covered all expenses 7
and repairs, and this boy had often made the characteristic hooting 8
noises) or the mute and uncanny mime of normal laughter’s gestures 9
and expressions, while the school’s Art teacher, who was both deaf and 10
blind, smiled idiotically from her desk at the front of the classroom, un-11
aware that Ruth Simmons was at the weeping center of a laughing, 12
mocking, hooting, cane-waving circle of deaf and blind children, one 13
of whom was tossing Ruth’s figurine up into the air and swinging his 14
slender white cane at it like an American Legion coach hitting fun-15
goes for outfield practice (though with considerably less success); while, 16
in another series of panels further down, Mrs. Marge Simmons’ idling 17
car was now just a large, throbbing, and only vaguely car shaped 18
mound of snow with a peculiar greyish cast to it, as a result of the snow-19
storm’s piling snow having clogged the worn old car’s exhaust outlet 20
and diverted the exhaust to the car’s interior, where, in an interior view, 21
sat the late Marjorie Simmons, still behind the steering wheel, with 22
her mouth and chin smeared all red as she had been applying Avon 23

Acapulco Sunset lipstick when the carbon monoxide of the vent began 24
to attack, forcing her hand into the shape of a claw that smeared lip-25
stick all over her lower face as she gasped and clawed at herself for air, 26
sitting rigidly upright and blue and staring sightlessly into the auto’s 27
rearview mirror while, outside the idling mound, women so bundled 28
up that they could hardly bend over began shoveling easements for 29
their returning husbands into their driveways, and distant sounds of 30
emergency sirens and ambulances began to approach the scene. At the 31
same time, a single, traumatically abrupt panel appeared to depict 32

Scraps, the subordinate, piebald feral dog with the sore, being attacked 33
in the industrial tunnel by swarms of what were either small, tailless 34 sh
rats or gigantic, atomically mutated cockroaches as Cuffie, nearby, 35 reg

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stands frozen with his paws over his eyes in instinctual shock and ter-2
ror, until the tougher, more experienced and dominant feral rottweiler 3
mix saves Cuffie’s life by dragging him by the scruff of the neck into a 4
smaller side tunnel that serves as an escape hatch and led more 5
towards the area of R. B. Hayes Primary and the Fairhaven Knolls golf 6
course that lay just beyond the copse of trees at the window’s rear right 7
horizon. The tableau, complete with the unfortunate piebald dog’s 8
mouth open in agony and a rat or mutated roach abdomen protruding 9
from his eyesocket as the predator’s anterior half consumed his eye and 10
inner brain, was so traumatic that this narrative line was immediately 11
stopped and replaced with a neutral view of the pipe’s exterior. As a 12
result, the lone, nightmarish panel appeared in the window as just a 13
momentary peripheral snapshot or flash of a horrifying scene, much 14
the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams —

15
somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear, and the lack 16
of any time to get any perspective or digest what you are seeing or fit it 17
into the narrative of the dream as a whole, makes it even worse, and of-18
ten a rapid, peripheral flash of something contextless and awful could 19
be the single worst part of a nightmare, and the part that stayed with 20
you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd 21
moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down 22
out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, 23
perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that 24
your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work 25
it out or incorporate it. As if the fragment were not done with you yet, 26
in much the same way that now, so very much later, the most persis-27
tent memories of early childhood consist of these flashes, peripheral 28
tableaux — my father slowly shaving as I pass my parents’ bathroom 29
on the way downstairs, our mother on her knees in a kerchief and 30
gloves by a rosebush out the kitchen’s east window as I fill a water 31
glass, my brother breaking his wrist in a fall off of the jungle gym and 32
the far-off sound of his cries as I drew in the sand with a stick. The pi-33
ano’s casters in their small protective sleeves; his face in the foyer com-sh 34
ing home. Later, when I was in my 20s and courting my wife, the reg 35
traumatic film The Exorcist came out, a controversial film that both of 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 9 5
us found disturbing — and not disturbing in an artistic or thought-1
provoking way, but simply offensive — and walked out of together at 2
just the point where the little girl was mutilating her private areas with 3
a crucifix similar in size and design to the one that Miranda’s parents 4
had on the wall of their front sitting room. In fact, the first moment of 5
what I would consider true affinity and concord that Miranda and I 6
experienced was, as I recall it, in the car on the way home from walk-7
ing out of this film, which we had done mutually, with one quick 8
glance between us in the theatre confirming that our distaste and re-9
jection of the film were in perfect concordance, with an odd thrill in 10
that moment of mutuality that was itself not wholly unsexual, al-11
though in the context of the film’s themes the sexuality of the response 12
was both disturbing and unforgettable. Suffice to say we have not seen 13
it since. And yet the lone moment of The Exorcist that has stayed so 14
emphatically with me over the years consisted only of a few frames, 15
and had precisely this rapid, peripheral quality, and has obtruded at 16
odd moments into my mind’s eye ever since. In the film, Father Kar-17
ras’ mother has died, and he has drunk a bit too much out of grief and 18
guilt (‘I should have been there, I should have been there,’ is his refrain 19
to the other Jesuit, Father Dyer, who is removing his shoes and help-20
ing him into bed), and has a bad dream, which the film’s director 21
depicts with frightening intensity and skill. It was one of our first un-22
accompanied dates, not long after I had started at the firm where I still 23
work — and yet, even now, the interval of this dream sequence re-24
mains vivid to me in nearly every detail. Father Karras’ mother, pale 25
and dressed in funereal black, ascends from an urban subway stop 26
while Father Karras waves desperately at her from across the street, 27
trying to get her attention, but she does not see or acknowledge him 28
and instead turns — moving with the terrible, implacable quality that 29
other people in dreams often have — and descends back down the 30
subway station’s stairway, sinking implacably from view. There is no 31
sound, despite its being a busy street, and the absence of sound is both 32
frightening and realistic — many people’s recollected nightmares are 33
often soundless, with suggestions of thick glass or deep water and 34 sh
these media’s effect on sound. Father Karras is an actor seen in no 35 reg

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other film of the time, so far as I know, with a brooding, Mediter-2
ranean cast to his features, whom another character in the film com-3
pares to Sal Mineo. The dream sequence also includes a lengthy, slow 4
motion view of a Roman Catholic medal falling through the air, as if 5
from a great height, with its thin silver chain undulating in complex 6
shapes as the coin rotates as it slowly falls. The iconography of the 7
falling coin is not complicated, as Miranda pointed out when we dis-8
cussed the film and our reasons for leaving before the exorcism proper.

9

It symbolizes Father Karras’ feelings of impotence and guilt at his 10
mother’s death (she had died alone in her apartment, and it had been 11
three days before someone found her; this type of scenario would 12
make anyone feel guilty), and the blow to Father Karras’ faith in him-13
self as a son and a priest, a blow to his vocation, which must be rooted 14
not only in faith in a god but a belief that the person with the vocation 15
could make some kind of difference and help alleviate suffering and 16
human loneliness, which now, in this case, he has blatantly failed to do 17
with his own mother. Not to mention the classic problem of how a 18
supposedly loving god could permit this terrible outcome, a problem 19
that always arises when people to whom we are connected suffer or die 20

(as well as the secondary backlash of guilt over the buried hostility we 21
often feel towards the memory of parents who have died — an inter-22
val of backstory had shown Father Karras’ mother forcing some kind 23
of unpleasant medicine down his throat with a steel spoon as a child, 24
as well as berating him in Italian for causing her to worry, and once 25
walking silently past the window when he had fallen on rollerskates 26
and skinned his knees and was crying out for her to come out to the 27
sidewalk and help him). Such reactions are common to the point of 28
being nearly universal, and all of this is symbolized by the dream’s 29
slowly falling medallion, which at the sequence’s end lands upon a flat 30
stone in either a cemetery or untended garden, full of moss and spiky 31
undergrowth. Despite the bucolic setting, the air through which the 32
coin falls has been airless and black, the extreme black of nothingness, 33
even as the medallion and chain come to rest on the stone; just as there sh 34
is no sound, there is no background. But spliced very quickly into the reg 35
sequence is a brief flash of Father Karras’ face, terribly transformed.

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The face’s white, reptilian eyes and extrudent cheekbones and root-1
white pallor are plainly demonic — it is the face of evil. This flash of 2
face is extremely brief, probably just enough frames to register on the 3
human eye, and devoid of sound or background, and is gone again and 4
immediately replaced with the Catholic medal’s continued fall. Its very 5
brevity serves to stamp it on the viewer’s consciousness. My wife, it 6
turned out, did not even see the rapid splice of the face — she may 7
have sneezed, or looked away from the screen for a moment. Her in-8
terpretation was that even if the rapid, peripheral image truly had been 9
in the film and not my imagination, it too could be readily interpreted 10
as a symbol of Father Karras subconsciously seeing himself as evil or 11
bad for having allowed his mother to (as he saw it) die alone. I have 12
never forgotten these frames, though — and yet, although I privately 13
disagreed with Miranda’s quick dismissal, I am still far from being cer-14
tain of what the rapid flash of the Father’s transfigured face was meant 15
to mean, nor why it remains so vivid in my memory of our courtship.

16

I think it can only be the incongruous, near instantaneous quality of its 17
appearance, the utter peripheralness of it. For it is true that the most 18
vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur 19
at the periphery of our awareness. Its significance for the story of how 20
those of us who did not flee the Civics classroom in panic became 21
known as the 4 Unwitting Hostages is fairly obvious. In testing, many 22
schoolchildren labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are ob-23
served to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty 24
exercising control or choice over what it is they pay attention to. And 25
yet much the same thing happens in adult life — as we age, many 26
people notice a shift in the objects of their memories. We often can 27
remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than 28
the event itself. This explains the frequent tip-of-the-tongue feeling 29
when trying to convey what is important about some memory or oc-30
currence. Similarly, it is often what makes it so difficult to communi-31
cate meaningfully with others in later life. Often, the most vividly felt 32
and remembered elements will appear at best tangential to someone 33
else — the scent of Velan’s leather shorts as he ran up the aisle, or the 34 sh
very precise double fold at the top of my father’s brown bag lunch, for 35 reg

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instance, or even the peripheral tableaux of little Ruth Simmons gaz-2
ing blindly upwards while a circle of peers castigates her for the Plato 3
figurine and — contiguously in the window but elsewhere in the ac-4
tual narrative — in the woods along the driveway of the estate of the 5
wealthy manufacturer, of Mr. Simmons, her father, staggering blindly 6
in and out of view while holding the stump of his severed hand, groan-7
ing for help as he runs in his vivid snowsuit, and all too often running 8
blindly into the forest’s trees due to his own hurled blood and partic-9
ulate matter’s having rendered him blind, and the whole highspeed 10
tableau is grainy and imperfectly seen because of all of the trees and 11
spiky undergrowth and the driving blizzard and huge drifts of wind 12
driven snow, which Mr. Simmons finally bounces headfirst off of a tree 13
and falls headlong into one of, a massive snowdrift, and disappears all 14
the way up to his boots, one of which is moving spasmodically as he 15
tries to struggle for stable footing, unaware in his shock, pain, loss of 16
blood, and blindness that he is even upside down, while, meanwhile, 17
diagonally down and across, a C.P.D. technician is kneeling on the di-18
lapidated front seat of the Simmons family’s car, drawing a body out-19
line around the place behind the wheel where the rescue team had 20
found the bright blue body of Marjorie Simmons, whose frustrations 21
and disappointments were now all over, and whose body — still hold-22
ing its lipstick, which made a small, sharp looking lump in the white 23
blanket that covered it — was being loaded in the blizzard onto a large 24
ambulance stretcher by two orderlies in white gowns while a C.P.D.

25
detective with snow on his hat talked to the heavily bundled house-26
wives who had been shoveling out their driveways and were now all 27
leaning tiredly on their snowshovels talking to the detective, who was 28
taking notes in a small notebook with a very dull pencil, and whose 29
own fingernails were slightly blue in the cold, and the driving snow 30
made everyone’s eyelashes white, and the two Columbus Public Works 31
workers in large yellow boots who had shoveled Mrs. Simmons’ car 32
out of the igloo-sized mound stood together next to a towtruck, blow-33
ing into their cupped hands and hopping slightly up and down, the sh 34
way people who are both cold and bored often do, facing away from reg 35
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two small boots with fake fur fringe at the ankles poking out, and the 1
house that the two bored C.P.W. workers (one of whom has a red and 2
silver Ohio State U. ski cap on with a buckeye fluffball at the top) are 3
facing without even really seeing it is one of the houses whose backyards 4

(this one’s has a swingset whose swings each have a large, brick-shaped 5
block of snow on them, that has accumulated) abut the copse of elm 6
and fir trees at the edge of Fairhaven Knolls that separates the neigh-7
borhood homes from the R. B. Hayes school ballfield in which even 8
now the dominant rottweiler is again trying to mount the Simmons’

9
lost dog, in the actual field through the classroom window, miming the 10
position and expressions of mating, exhorting the defenseless, long 11
suffering whelp to sit still and endure it or else something really terrible 12
would happen.

13

14
in the light of the political situation of our later ado-15
lescence, one of the most troubling and much discussed 16
aspects of the trauma for those of us of the 4 was that 17
mr. johnson had not appeared to confront, resist, or 18
threaten the armed officers who came forcibly into 19
the room through both the door and the east wall’s 20
windows, but merely continued to write kill over and 21
over again on the chalkboard, which was now so filled 22
that his newer kill, kill them’s overlay and often ob-23
scured his earlier exhortations, finally resulting in lit-24
tle more than an abstract mash of letters on the board.

25
while the jagged length of chalk, the broad arm mo-26
tions, and the proximity of mr. johnson’s briefcase on 27
the desk were cited as the perceived threat to hostage 28
safety that justified the shooting in the eyes of the 29
c.p.d. board of inquiry, the real truth is that it was 30
clearly mr. johnson’s facial expression and sustained 31
high sound, and his complete obliviousness to the offi-32
cers’ commands to drop the chalk and step away with 33
both hands in full view as he copied himself with ever 34 sh
increasing intensity onto the board’s verbal chaos, which 35 reg

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prompted them to open fire. this was the only real 2
truth — they were afraid.

3

4

Of the so-called 4 Hostages, it was only Mandy Blemm and Frank 5

Caldwell (who would later, at Fishinger Secondary, attend both Junior 6
and Senior Prom as a couple, maintaining a steady dating relationship 7
throughout those years in spite of Blemm’s reputation, after which 8

Caldwell enlisted in the U.S. Navy, eventually also serving overseas) 9
who were attentive and aware enough throughout the first part of the 10
incident to recount for DeMatteis and I later how very long it was that 11

Mr. Johnson remained facing and writing jaggedly on the chalkboard 12
while emitting the high, atonal sound while the classroom behind 13
him turned more and more into a bedlam of surreal and nightmarish 14
terror, with some of the children crying and quite a few (Blemm later 15
named them) reverting, under the strain, to early childhood coping 16
mechanisms such as sucking their thumbs, wetting themselves, and 17
rocking slightly in their seats humming disconnected bars of various 18
lullabies to themselves, and Finkelpearl leaned forward over his desk-19
top and threw up, which most of the pupils closest to him appeared to 20
be too mesmerized with fear to even notice. It was in this interval that 21
my own conscious awareness finally left the window’s mesh and re-22
turned to the Civics classroom, which to the best of my memory oc-23
curred right after the chalk in Mr. Johnson’s hand snapped with a loud 24
sound and he stood rigid with both arms out and his head to the side, 25
the sound he produced rising higher and higher in pitch as he turned 26
around very slowly to face the class, his entire body trembling electri-27
cally and his face . . . Mr. Johnson’s face’s character and expression 28
were indescribable. I will never forget it. This was the first part I fully 29
saw of the incident the Dispatch first called Deranged Substitute’s Class-30
room Terror — Mentally Unbalanced Instructor Stricken at Blackboard, 31

Appears ‘Possessed,’ Threatens Mass Murder, Several Pupils Hospitalized, 32

Unit 4 Board Calls Emergency Session, Bainbridge Under Gun (at that 33
time, Dr. Bainbridge was Superintendent of Schools for Unit 4).

sh 34

Philip Finkelpearl’s throwing up was also a factor. There is something reg 35
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serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an almost instant 1
force, and even when my awareness returned in full to the classroom, 2
it was Finkelpearl’s vomitus and the associated sounds and odors of it 3
that I first can recall being struck by. The final frame I remember was 4
when it was revealed in midair, during the ridicule, in a close-up, stop-5
action view as it rose end over end in the air and the wicked boy pre-6
pared to swing his cane, that the true subject of the clay statuette Ruth 7

Simmons had fashioned was, in reality, a human being, who in her dis-8
traught distraction she had given four legs instead of two, despite the 9
crude human features, creating a somewhat monstrous or unnatural 10
image as in Greek myth or The Isle of Dr. Moreau. The import of this 11
detail in the narrative I do not remember, though I recall the detail 12
itself very clearly. Nor can I remember for just how long the Civics 13
classroom remained like that, with Mr. Johnson in extremis with both 14
arms extended outward at the chalkboard (when you’ve been intensely 15
preoccupied, coming back to what is actually happening around you is 16
somewhat like coming out of a movie theatre in the afternoon, when 17
the sunlight and sensory press of the street’s activity nearly stun you), 18
looking simultaneously electrocuted and demonically possessed (there 19
is no other way to describe the way his upturned face was transformed, 20
with its look of both suffering and ghastly exultation, or rather it may 21
have been that the two different expressions alternated so rapidly on 22
his uptilted face that in the mind’s perception they became conjoined), 23
and making that sound, with what Ahearn and Ellsberg and others in 24
the front row said looked like every single hair on Mr. Johnson’s head, 25
neck, wrists, and hands standing straight up, and the children in the 26
classroom sitting bolt upright with many of their eyes bulging out and 27
rolling around and around in their heads like cartoon characters’ eyes, 28
with sheer terror. It was in the midst of this scene that Chris DeMatteis 29
awoke in the rear of his row with a small plaintive shout — which is 30
how he sometimes woke up when he had fallen unconscious in school.

31

In retrospect, my impression is that Chris’s absently panicked cry of 32
awakening is what started the class’s other pupils openly screaming 33
and rising from their desks to begin an hysterical mass exodus from 34 sh
the Civics classroom (rather the way one random infantryman’s firing 35 reg

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his weapon will precipitate the start of a battle when, up to that point, 2
it had been just two tense and ready armies facing each other with 3
weapons drawn but not yet fired), and what wrested my attention from 4
the sight of Philip Finkelpearl’s vomit hanging in strings and clots 5
from the side of his bolted desktop was the sudden simultaneous mass 6
movement of the class’s pupils as all of them except Chris DeMatteis, 7

Frank Caldwell, Mandy Blemm, and I began running for the door of 8
the classroom, which unfortunately was closed, and the mass of chil-9
dren behind Emily-Ann Barr and the fleet Raymond Gillies (a Negro) 10
and the others who had reached the door first and were clawing hyster-11
ically at the knob of the door drove the first children physically into the 12
door with such force that there was a gruesome sound of the impact 13
of someone’s face or head against the thick, frosted glass of the door’s 14
upper half; and, as the door (like all classroom doors of that era) opened 15
inward and there was a rapidly growing mass of panicked children in 16
the way, it seemed a very long time before the door was forced open 17
by someone bulky enough — in hindsight I believe this to have been 18

Gregory Oehmke, who at age ten was already well over 100 pounds 19
and had a neck the same width as his shoulders, and who would also 20
go on to serve overseas, though I base this belief not on directly seeing 21

Oehmke do it but only from noting the brute savagery with which it 22
was yanked open, hitting and scraping several children with the edge 23
of the heavy door as it was forced open, and causing one of the tall 24

Swearingen sisters in roughly the middle of the herd to lose her foot-25
ing and disappear and presumably get badly trampled in the subse-26
quent exodus, for when the noise of the screaming children receded 27
north up the hallway and the door was slowly closing on its pneumatic 28
hinge, and two unidentified sets of hands reached quickly in to grasp 29

Jan Swearingen’s ankles and pull her from the Civics classroom, she 30
did not move or in any way revive as she slid facedown on the check-31
ered tile, leaving a lengthy smear of either her own blood or someone 32
else’s that was already on the floor from some other mishap at the 33
door, the long braids both Swearingen sisters tended to play with and sh 34
even to chew on when distracted or tense trailing behind and missing reg 35
by just inches getting trapped in the crack of the slowly closing door.

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in these later discussions, it also emerged that frankie 1
caldwell had hyperventilated from terror and briefly 2
lost consciousness during the mass exodus. of the 4 un-3
witting hostages, it was only we other three who were 4
actually classified by the school administration as de-5
ficient or slow. that frankie never protested against 6
the press’s error is testimony to the deep embarrass-7
ment that he, too, must have felt at being so afraid.

8

9

For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality 10
of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the 11
dreams involved my father’s life and job and the way he looked when 12
he returned home from work at the end of the day. His arrival was al-13
ways between 5:42 and 5:45, and it was usually I who was the first to 14
see him come through the front door. What occurred was almost 15
choreographic in its routine. He came in already turning in order to 16
press the door closed behind him. He removed his hat and topcoat and 17
hung the coat in the foyer closet; he clawed his necktie loose with two 18
fingers, took the green rubber band off of the Dispatch, entered the liv-19
ing room, greeted my brother, and sat down with the newspaper to wait 20
for my mother to bring him a highball. The nightmares themselves 21
always opened with a wide angle view of a number of men at desks 22
in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall. The desks were arranged in 23
precise rows and columns like the desks of an R. B. Hayes classroom, 24
but these were all more like the large, grey steel desks that the teach-25
ers had at the front of the room, and there were many, many more of 26
them, perhaps 100 or more, each occupied by a man in suit and tie. If 27
there were windows, I do not remember noticing them. Some of the 28
men were older than others, but they were all obviously adults —

29
people who drove, and applied for insurance coverage, and had high-30
balls while they read the paper before dinner. The nightmare’s room 31
was at least the size of a soccer or flag football field; it was utterly silent 32
and had a large clock on each wall. It was also very bright. In the foyer, 33
turning from the front door while his left hand rose to remove his hat, 34 sh
my father’s eyes appeared lightless and dead, empty of everything we 35 reg

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associated with his real persona. He was a kind, decent, ordinary look-2
ing man. His voice was deeply pitched but not resonant. Softspoken, 3
he had a sense of humor that kept his natural reserve from seeming 4
remote or aloof. Even when my brother and I were small, we were 5
aware that he spent more time with us and took the trouble to show us 6
that we were important to him a good deal more than most fathers of 7
that era did. (It was many years before I had any real idea of how our 8
mother felt about him.) The foyer was directly off of the living room, 9
where the piano was, and at that time, I often read or played with my 10
trucks outside of kicking range beneath the piano while my brother 11
practiced his Hanons, and I was often the first to register the sound of 12
my father’s key in the front door. It took only four steps and a brief 13
sockslide into the foyer to be able to see him first as he entered on a 14
wave of outside air. I remember the foyer as dim and cold and smelling 15
of the coat closet, the bulk of which was filled with my mother’s 16
different coats and matching gloves. The front door was heavy and dif-17
ficult to open and close, as if the foyer were somehow pressurized. The 18
door had a small, diamond-shaped window in the center, though we 19
later moved before I was ever tall enough to see out of it. He had to put 20
his side into the door somewhat in order to make it close all the way, 21
and I would not see his face until he turned to remove his hat and coat, 22
but I can recall that the angle of his shoulders as he leaned into the 23
door had the same quality as his eyes. I could not convey this quality 24
now and most assuredly couldn’t have then, but I know that it helped 25
inform the nightmares. His face was not at all like this on weekends 26
off. It is in hindsight that I believe the dreams to have been about adult 27
life. At the time, I knew only their terror — much of the difficulty 28
they complained of in getting me to lie down and go to sleep at night 29
was due to these dreams. Nor could it always have been dusk at 5:42, 30
though that is what I recall its being, and the inrush of outside air he 31
brought with him as cold, and scented with burnt leaves and the sad 32
way the street smelled at twilight, when all of the houses became the 33
same color and all of their porch lights came on like bulwarks against sh 34
something without name. His eyes when he turned from the door reg 35
didn’t scare me, but the feeling was somehow related to being scared.

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Often I still had a truck in my hand. His hat went on the hatrack, his 1
coat shouldered out of, then the coat was folded over his left arm, the 2
closet opened with his right hand, the coat transferred to that hand 3
while the third wooden coathanger from the left is removed with his 4
left hand. There was something about this routine that cast shadows 5
deep down in parts of me I could not access on my own. I knew some-6
thing of boredom by then, of course, at Hayes, and Riverside, or on 7

Sunday afternoons when there was nothing to do — the fidgety type 8
of childhood boredom that is more like worry than despair. But I do 9
not believe I consciously connected the way my father looked at night 10
with the far different and deeper, soul-level boredom of his job, which 11

I knew was actuarial because in 2nd grade everyone in Mrs. Clay-12
more’s homeroom had had to give a short presentation on what our fa-13
ther’s profession was. I knew that insurance was protection that adults 14
applied for in case of risk, and I knew that it had numbers in it because 15
of the documents that were visible in his briefcase when I got to pop 16
its latches and open it for him, and my brother and I had had the 17
building that housed the insurance company’s HQ and my father’s 18
tiny window in its face pointed out to us by our mother from the car, 19
but the actual specifics of his job were always vague. And they re-20
mained so for many years. Looking back, I suspect that there was 21
something of a cover-your-eyes and stop-your-ears quality to my lack 22
of curiosity about just what my father had to do all day. I can remember 23
certain exciting narrative tableaux based around the competitive, 24
almost primitive connotations of the word breadwinner, which had 25
been Mrs. Claymore’s blanket term for our fathers’ occupations. But I 26
do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 27

30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a 28
silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and 29
filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking 30
only occasionally to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries 31
in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north 32
window that looked out on other small office windows in other grey 33
buildings. The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not 34 sh
the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to 35 reg

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explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so 2
that she could reassure you that there was nothing like what you just 3
dreamed in the real world. I knew that he liked to have music or a 4
lively radio program on and audible all of the time at home, or to hear 5
my brother practicing while he read the Dispatch before dinner, but I 6
am certain I did not then connect this with the overwhelming silence 7
he sat in all day. I did not know that our mother’s making his lunch 8
was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild 9
weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a 10
backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees 11
and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he 12
steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of 13
land use stars. My father died of a coronary when I was sixteen, and I 14
can acknowledge, despite the obvious shock and loss, that his passing 15
was less hard to bear than much of what I learned about his life when 16
he was gone. For instance, it was very important to my mother that my 17
father’s burial plot be somewhere where there were at least a few trees 18
in view; and given the logistics of the cemetery and the details of the 19
mortuary contract he’d prepared for them both, this caused a great deal 20
of trouble and expense at a difficult time, which neither my brother 21
nor I saw the point of until years later when we learned about his 22
weekdays and the bench where he liked to eat his lunch. At Miranda’s 23
suggestion, I made a point, one spring, of visiting the site where his lit-24
tle square of grass and trees had been. The area had been refashioned 25
into one of the small and largely unutilized downtown parks that were 26
characteristic of the New Columbus renewal programs of the early 27

’80s, in which there were no longer grass or beech trees but a small, 28
modern children’s play area, with wood chips instead of sand and a 29
jungle gym made entirely of recycled tires. There is also a swingset, 30
whose two empty swings moved back and forth at different rates in the 31
wind the whole time I sat there. For a time in my early adulthood, I 32
had periods of imagining my father sitting on the bench year after 33
year, chewing, and looking at that carved out square of something sh 34
green, always knowing exactly how much time was left for lunch with-reg 35

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out taking his watch out. Sadder still was trying to imagine what he 1
thought about as he sat there, imagining him perhaps thinking about 2
us, our faces when he got home or the way we smelled at night after 3
baths when he came in to kiss us on the top of the head — but the 4
truth is that I have no idea what he thought about, what his internal 5
life might have been like. And that were he alive I still would not 6
know. Or trying (which Miranda feels was saddest of all) to imagine 7
what words he might have used to describe his job and the square and 8
two trees to my mother. I knew my father well enough to know it 9
could not have been direct — I am certain he never sat down or lay be-10
side her and spoke as such about lunch on the bench and the twin 11
sickly trees that in the fall drew swarms of migrating starlings, appear-12
ing en masse more like bees than birds as they swarmed in and 13
weighed down the elms’ or buckeyes’ limbs and filled the mind with 14
sound before rising again in a great mass to spread and contract like a 15
great flexing hand against the downtown sky. Trying thus to imagine 16
remarks and attitudes and tiny half anecdotes that over time conveyed 17
enough to her that she would go through hell and back to have his 18
grave site moved to the premium areas nearer the front gate and its lit-19
tle stand of blue pines. It was not quite a nightmare proper, but neither 20
was it a daydream or fancy. It came when I had been in bed for a time 21
and was beginning to fall asleep but only partway there — the part of 22
the featherfall into sleep in which whatever lines of thought you’ve been 23
pursuing begin now to become surreal around the edges, and then at 24
some point the thoughts themselves are replaced by images and con-25
crete pictures and scenes. You move, gradually, from merely thinking 26
about something to experiencing it as really there, unfolding, a story or 27
world you are part of, although at the same time enough of you remains 28
awake to be able to discern on some level that what you are experienc-29
ing does not quite make sense, that you are on some cusp or edge of true 30
dreaming. Even now, as an adult, I still can consciously recognize that 31

I am starting to fall asleep when my abstract thoughts turn into actual 32
pictures and tiny films, ones whose logic and associations are ever so 33
slightly off — and yet I am always aware of this, of the illogic and my 34 sh

35 reg

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reactions to it. The dream was of a large room full of men in suits and 2
ties seated at rows of great grey desks, bent forward over the papers on 3
their desks, motionless, silent, in a monochrome room or hall under 4
long banks of high lumen fluorescents, the men’s faces puffy and 5
seamed with adult tension and wear and appearing to hang slightly 6
loose, the way someone’s face can go flaccid and loose when he seems 7
to be staring at something without really seeing it. I acknowledge that 8

I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a 9
bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in rote work. It was 10
the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than 11
about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re see-12
ing. Some of the men wore glasses; there were a few small, neatly 13
trimmed mustaches. Some had grey or thinning hair or the large, dark, 14
complexly textured bags beneath their eyes that both our father and 15

Uncle Gerald had. Some of the younger men had wider lapels; most 16
did not. Part of the terror of the dream’s wide angle perspective was 17
that the men in the room appeared as both individuals and a great 18
anonymous mass. There were at least 20 or 30 rows of a dozen desks 19
each, each with a blotter and desklamp and file folders with papers in 20
them and a man in a straightback chair behind the desk, each man 21
with a subtly different style or pattern of necktie and his own slightly 22
distinctive way of sitting and positioning his arms and inclining his 23
head, some feeling at their jaw or forehead or the crease of their tie, or 24
biting dead skin from around their thumbnail, or tracing along their 25
lower lip with their pencil’s eraser or pen’s metal cap. You could tell 26
that the particular styles of sitting and the small, absent habits that in-27
dividualized them had evolved over years or even decades of sitting 28
like this over their job’s work every day, moving purposefully only once 29
in a while to turn a stapled page, or to move a loose page from the left 30
side of an open file folder to the right side, or to close one file folder 31
and slide it a few inches away and then pull another file folder to 32
themselves and open it, gazing down into it as if they were at some ter-33
rible height and the documents were the ground far below. If my sh 34
brother dreamed, we certainly never heard about it. The men’s expres-reg 35

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sions were somehow at once stuporous and anxious, enervated and 1
keyed up — not so much fighting the urge to fidget as appearing to 2
have long ago surrendered whatever hope or expectation causes one to 3
fidget. A few of the chairs’ seat portions had cushions made of cor-4
duroy or serge, one or two of them brightly colored and edged with 5
fringe in such a way that you could tell they had been handmade by a 6
loved one and given as a gift, perhaps for a birthday, and for some rea-7
son this detail was the worst of all. The dream’s bright room was death, 8

I could feel it — but not in any way you could convey or explain to my 9
mother if I cried out in fear and she hurried in. And the idea of ever 10
trying to tell my father about the dream was — even later, after it had 11
vanished as abruptly as the problem with reading — unthinkable. The 12
feeling of telling him about it would have been like coming to our 13

Aunt Tina, one of my mother’s sisters (who, among her other crosses 14
to bear, had been born with a cleft palate that operations had not much 15
been able to help, besides also having a congenital lung condition), and 16
pointing out the cleft palate to Aunt Tina and asking her how she felt 17
about it and how her life had been affected by it, at which even imag-18
ining the look that would come into her eyes was unthinkable. The 19
overall feeling was that these colorless, empty-eyed, long suffering 20
faces were the face of some death that awaited me long before I 21
stopped walking around. Then, when real sleep descended, it becomes 22
a real dream, and I lost the perspective of someone merely looking at 23
the scene and am in it — the lens of perspective pulls suddenly back, 24
and I am one of them, one part of the mass of grey faced men stifling 25
coughs and feeling at their teeth with their tongues and folding the 26
edges of papers down into complex accordion creases and then 27
smoothing them carefully out once more before replacing them in 28
their assigned file folders. And the dream’s perspective’s view slowly 29
moves further and further in until it is primarily me in view, in close-30
up, with a handful of other desks’ men’s faces and upper bodies fram-31
ing me, and the backs of a few photos’ frames and either an adding 32
machine or a telephone at the edge of the desk (mine is also one of the 33
chairs with a handmade cushion). As I can recall it now, in the dream 34 sh

35 reg

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I look neither like my father nor my real self. I have very little hair, and 2
what I do have is wet combed carefully around the sides, and a small 3

Vandyke or maybe goatee, and my face, which is angled downwards at 4
the desktop in concentration, looks as if it has spent the last 20 years 5
pressed hard against something unyielding. And at a certain point in 6
the interval, in the middle of removing a paper clip or opening a desk 7
drawer (there is no sound), I look up and into the lens of the dream’s 8
perspective and stare back at myself, but without any sign of recogni-9
tion on my face, nor of happiness or fright or despair or appeal — the 10
eyes are flat and opaque, and only mine in the way that a very old al-11
bum’s photo of you as a child in a setting you have no memory of is 12
nevertheless you — and in the dream, as our eyes meet, it is impossi-13
ble to know what the adult me is seeing or how I am reacting or if 14
there is anything in there at all.

15

16
still later, another shared and cohesive discomfort 17
among we who constituted the unwitting 4 would con-18
cern the intended meaning of the word them in the re-19
peated imperatives that mr. johnson had first inserted 20
and then finally effaced and obscured the board’s les-21
son with. throughout the incident and its aftermath, 22
everyone concerned had assumed without question that 23
the chalkboard’s them referred to his substitute pupils, 24
and that the involuntary repetitions were some dis-25
turbed part of mr. johnson’s psyche exhorting him to 26
kill us en masse. to the best of my recollection, it was 27
my older brother (who by that time had enlisted in the 28
armed forces by tacit arrangement with the franklin 29
county court of common pleas, and went on to serve in 30
the same regiment in which terence velan would distin-31
guish himself three years later) who first suggested 32
that the imperatives’ them may not have referred to us 33
at all, that it might, rather, have been us who mr. john-sh 34
son’s disturbed part was exhorting, and the them some reg 35
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them could have been meant to be was anyone’s guess —

1
the late sub was hardly in a position to elaborate, my 2
brother’s letter observed.

3

4

I have only general, impressionistic memories of Mrs. Roseman’s 5
classroom itself, which did not, even when nearly empty after the mass 6
exodus, seem all that large. There were either 30 or 32 desks facing due 7
north, and on the north wall was the chalkboard with its jagged mass 8
of 212 overstruck KILL THEM ’s and fragmentary portions of same, 9
as well as the teacher’s assigned desk and a grey steel cabinet just west 10
of the blackboard in which were kept art supplies and Civics related 11
audiovisual aids. The east wall was partly comprised of two large rec-12
tangular windows; the lower half of each was hinged along the sill and 13
could be opened slightly outward in mild weather. In the absence of 14
any imposed tableaux, the reticulate wire mesh gave the windows an 15
institutional quality and contributed to a sense of being encaged. Also, 16
there was the chronological series of U.S. presidents running above the 17
windows’ upper sills up near the ceiling. The ceiling itself was an institu-18
tional drop unit comprised of white asbestos tile, numbering 96 total 19
plus 12 fractional tiles at the south end (the tiles’ dimensions did not 20
divide evenly into the classroom’s length, which I would estimate at 25

21
feet). Two long, fluorescent banks of lights hung a foot or so beneath 22
the false ceiling, supported by struts that I imagine must have been 23
secured to the same metal grillwork on which the drop tiles rested. All 24
acoustic tile of that era was asbestos. The interior walls’ composition 25
appeared to be cinderblock thickly overlaid with multiple coats of paint 26

(possibly as many as four or more coats, so that the uneven texture of 27
the cinderblocks underneath was very much smoothed and occluded), 28
which in the classrooms was an emetic green and in the hallways a 29
type of creamy beige or grey. The tile floor’s pattern was an irregular 30
checkerboard of off-grey and green as well, though a subtly different 31
shade or hue of green, so that it was not clear whether the flooring had 32
been selected to complement the walls or whether the whole thing was 33
a coincidence. I know nothing about when R. B. Hayes was built, or 34 sh
under what arrangements — it was, however, razed during the Carter 35 reg

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1
and Rhodes administrations and a new, supposedly more energy effi-2
cient structure put up in its place. On the Civics classroom’s south wall 3

(which no one but the teacher was able to see because of the way the 4
pupils’ desks all faced) were the room’s clock and attached bell and the 5

P.A. speaker, whose cabinet was wood and its face covered in what ap-6
peared to be some kind of synthetic burlap, and was attached to the 7

Public Address system in the principal’s office.

8

The classroom’s westernmost wall — on which were arrayed the 9
unused coathooks, and against which just lately all of the terrified 10
pupils had been clambering over one another to flee the room as 11

Richard Allen Johnson stood frozen and transported, holding out the 12
cuspate length of chalk like a toy sword — also featured, towards the 13
back, two more freestanding cabinets containing spare or damaged 14
copies of From Sea to Shining Sea . . . , various testing forms and sup-15
plies, construction paper and a large jar of blunt scissors, two wide 16
boxes of filmstrips on governmental and legal systems, and several 17
white woolen wigs and velveteen waistcoats in dark red or plum, with 18
white ruffled plastrons safety-pinned to the lapels, together with a 19
stovepipe hat, a lensless pair of wire spectacles, a collapsible wheelchair 20
and lengthy cigarette holder, and over a dozen small, handheld Amer-21
ican flags (these latter out of date as they contained only 49 stars in 22
the corner), all for use in the annual Presidents’ Day presentation 23
that Mrs. Roseman organized and directed every February, and in 24
which the previous month Chris DeMatteis had portrayed Franklin D.

25

Roosevelt, and Mrs. Roseman had felt ill and faint and had had to 26
direct the entire show sitting down on the little set of steps leading up 27
to the gymnasium’s stage, and in which I had had a dual role, playing 28
a flagwaving supporter of democracy in the audiences for Thomas 29

Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural Address and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg 30

Address, as well as the thunder in the thunderstorm in which Philip 31

Finkelpearl as Benjamin Franklin held a construction paper kite with 32
a piece of string with a large skeleton key on it while Raymond Gillies 33
and I stood just offstage behind the curtain and rolled a large piece of sh 34
industrial tin with pieces of green felt taped over the sharp edges back reg 35
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make it lie flat on the bed, producing a sound much like thunder if 1
heard from the gymnasium’s seats, while Ruth Simmons and Yolanda 2

Maldonado stood with adult supervision on the catwalk above the row 3
of colored lights for the stage and dropped blue and white bolts of 4
construction paper lightning that we had spent an entire class period 5
using rulers to trace the zigzags of and cut out. My father got permis-6
sion to leave work early in order to attend the presentation, and even 7
though our mother was again not feeling up to par and could not join 8
him, we had a fun time later recounting for her all that went on, with 9

Terence Velan in stovepipe hat and woolen beard having memorized 10
the Gettysburg Address and reciting it perfectly while his long beard’s 11
glue detached at one side and began slipping further and further down, 12
until the beard came off altogether at one side and was swinging in the 13
breeze of sixteen furiously waving little flags, and Chris DeMatteis 14
forgetting (or never having had the chance to even study, as he claimed) 15
the bulk of his lines and opting to simply thrust his lower jaw and 16
empty cigarette holder out further and further and to repeat, ‘Fear it-17
self, fear itself,’ over and over (my father claimed it was dozens of 18
times) while, backlit on the stage behind him, Gregory Oehmke and 19
several other boys who had access to their fathers’ helmets and tags 20
charged with broomsticks and aluminum foil bayonets (Llewellyn also 21
brought a sidearm that turned out to be real, even though he claimed 22
the firing pin had been removed, and afterwards he got in trouble, and 23
his father had to come in and talk to Mrs. Roseman) against the pa-24
pier mâché bulwarks of Iwo Jima.

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34 sh

35 reg

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Inc ar nations of Bur ned Children

1

The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the 2
tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the Mommy’s voice 3
gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave 4
onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind 5
him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on 6
the floortile before the stove and the burner’s blue jet and the floor’s 7
pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in 8
his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his 9
chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very 10
wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the 11

Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at 12
him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she 13
was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still 14
in the steaming pool, and the Daddy’s first act was to take the child 15
under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, 16
where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run 17
over the boy’s feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured 18
or flung more cold water over the head and shoulders and chest, want-19
ing first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his sh 20
shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they reg 21
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O b l i v i o n 1 1 5
of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or 1
that he’d ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would 2
freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his own 3
child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they’d 4
become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly 5
around. The tenant side’s door outside hung half off its top hinge and 6
moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway 7
appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came 8
from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, 9
the chest and stomach’s red was fading to pink under the cold water 10
and his feet’s soft soles weren’t blistered that the Daddy could see, but 11
the toddler still made little fists and screamed except maybe now 12
merely on reflex from fear, the Daddy would know he thought it pos-13
sible later, small face distended and thready veins standing out at the 14
temples and the Daddy kept saying he was here he was here, adrena-15
line ebbing and an anger at the Mommy for allowing this thing to 16
happen just starting to gather in wisps at his mind’s extreme rear and 17
still hours from expression. When the Mommy returned he wasn’t sure 18
whether to wrap the child in a towel or not but he wet the towel down 19
and did, swaddled him tight and lifted his baby out of the sink and set 20
him on the kitchen table’s edge to soothe him while the Mommy tried 21
to check the feet’s soles with one hand waving around in the area of 22
her mouth and uttering objectless words while the Daddy bent in and 23
was face to face with the child on the table’s checked edge repeating 24
the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler’s cries but still 25
the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could 26
stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light 27
blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still un-28
der the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much 29
longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy’s side talking singsong at the 30
child’s face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the 31
hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until 32
the first seen wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel’s 33
hem and the parents’ eyes met and widened — the diaper, which when 34 sh
they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered 35 reg

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D a v i d F o s t e r Wa l l a c e

1
cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted 2
slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby’s diaper burned 3
their hand and they saw where the real water’d fallen and pooled and 4
been burning their baby boy all this time while he screamed for them 5
to help him and they hadn’t, hadn’t thought and when they got it off 6
and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God’s first 7
name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned 8
away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both 9
himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now 10
have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny 11
stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the 12
size of a grown man’s thumb that had clutched the Daddy’s thumb in 13
the crib while he’d watched the Daddy’s mouth move in song, his head 14
cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made 15
the Daddy lonesome for in a sideways way. If you’ve never wept and 16
want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a 17
child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the radio’s lady 18
was almost there with him looking down at what they’ve done, though 19
hours later what the Daddy most won’t forgive is how badly he wanted 20
a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in 21
gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a 22
newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck 23
and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic’s ER with 24
the tenant’s door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave 25
but by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t 26
make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest 27
unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth 28
mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew 29
pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self ’s soul 30
so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and 31
down like a yoyo.

32

33
sh 34
reg 35

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Another Pioneer

Nevertheless gentlemen I fear the lone instance I can recall having 1
heard aloud derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said 2
that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude 3
commercial flight while on some type of business trip, the fellow evi-4
dently holding a commercial position that called for frequent air 5
travel. Certain key contextual details remained obscure. Nor, one has-6
tens to admit, did the variant or exemplum contain any formal Annun-7
ciation as such, nor any comme on dit Period of Trial or Supernatural 8

Aid, Trickster Figures, archetypal Resurrection, nor any of certain 9
other recognized elements of the cycle; nevertheless gentlemen I leave 10
it to you to judge for yourselves as of course you each in turn have left 11
it to us as well. As I understood it the man in question was diverted by 12
weather onto the continuation of a United Airlines flight and overheard 13
its narration as part of a lengthier discourse between two passengers 14
seated in the row just ahead of his own. He was, in other words, forced 15
to sit in steerage. It was a continuation of some much longer flight, 16
perhaps even Transatlantic, and the two passengers had evidently been 17
seated together on the flight’s first leg, and were already deep in con-18
versation when he boarded; and the crux here is that the fellow said he 19
missed the first part of whatever larger conversation it was part of.

20 sh

Meaning that there was no enframing context or deictic antecedent as 21 reg

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1
such surrounding the archetypal narrative as of course there is with all of 2
us together here this afternoon. That it appeared to come, as the fellow 3
described it, out of nowhere. Also that he had evidently been seated in 4
the particular medial exit row that is always nearest the wing’s large jet 5
engine, the overwing exit often in I believe on this type of aircraft Row 6

19 or 20, whereat in an evacuation you are required to turn two handles 7
in two separate and opposed directions and supposedly then to some-8
how pull the entire window apparatus out of the jetliner’s fuselage and 9
stow it in some very complicated way all detailed in glyphs on the 10
instructional safety card that on so many commercial airlines is very 11
nearly impossible to interpret with any confidence. With his point being 12
that because of the location’s terrific ambient engine noise throughout 13
the flight he was able to overhear the narrative fragment only because 14
one of the prenominate passengers before him seemed to be either 15
hard of hearing or cognitively challenged in some way, for the some-16
what younger passenger — the one who appeared to be relating and 17
interpreting the cycle’s variant or parable or whatever you may adjudge 18
it to be — seemed to articulate his sentences very slowly and with un-19
usual clarity and distinctness. Which he said come to think of it is also 20
the way people who are not particularly bright or sensitive speak to 21
foreigners, so that perhaps the older passenger was a non-native speaker 22
of English and the narrator was himself not bright. The two never 23
turned round or turned their two heads sufficiently for him to get a 24
real look at them; all there ever was to look at as the narrative unfolded 25
were the rear portions of their heads and necks, which he said appeared 26
average and unremarkable and difficult to extrapolate anything from, 27
which is the way the backs of strangers’ heads on airliners nearly 28
always look. Though of course there are exceptions. From the outset, 29
certain parallels were striking. For it concerned a certain child born in 30
a very primitive paleolithic village somewhere. Just where he did not 31
know; this was undoubtedly a part of the narrative’s protasis or expo-32
sition which he had missed by finding himself forced to fly standby 33
and entering in as it were medias res. On the United leg. The sense he sh 34
got was of a certain extraordinarily primitive, Third World, jungle or reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 1 1 9
terrifically long ago as to be literally paleolithic or perhaps mesolithic, 1
as of course the anthropological origins of genres like this nearly always 2
are. The context in which my friend then subsequently had it related 3
to him by his acquaintance was if possible, he said, even more banal 4
and unexpected than a commercial airline flight, as if somehow the 5
quotidian and as it were modern everydayness of the narrative circum-6
stances made its archetypal parallels even more remarkable. But he 7
also emphasized extremely primitive and paleolithic, in the variant, as in 8
spears and crude lean-tos and pantheistic shamanism and an extremely 9
primitive hunting-and-gathering mode of subsistence; and in a certain 10
isolated village deep in the region’s rain forest apparently a certain child 11
is born who emerges as one of these extraordinarily high-powered, 12
supernaturally advanced human specimens who come along in every 13
culture every once in a great while, as history shows, although he said 14
the younger airline passenger, whom he surmised may have been a cor-15
porate or academic scientist, did not use ‘supernatural’ or ‘messianic’

16
or ‘prophetic’ or any of the other terms the cycle usually reserves for 17
specimens like this, instead using terms such as ‘advanced,’ ‘brilliant,’

18
or ‘ingenious’ and describing the child’s exceptional qualities and career 19
almost exclusively in terms of cognitive ability, raw IQ — because he 20
said apparently at a very young age, an age at which most of the vil-21
lage’s children were just beginning to learn the very basic customs and 22
behaviors that the primitive village expected of its citizens, this two- or 23
perhaps three-year-old child was already evincing an ability to answer 24
absolutely any question put to it. To answer correctly, accurately, com-25
prehensively. Even very difficult or even paradoxical questions. Of 26
course the full range and depth of the child’s interrogatory intelligence 27
were not manifested for some time; thus their emergence serves as the 28
comme on dit Threshold Experience and occupies much of the protasis.

29

That at first the ability seems simply a novelty, something for its 30
parents to so to speak dine out on and amuse the other villagers with, 31
something on the order of, ‘Look: our two-year-old knows how many 32
twigs you have if you hold five twigs and then pick up three more 33
twigs’; until of course one of the parents’ amused neighbors happens to 34 sh
say or ask something that prompts the child to disclose that it also 35 reg

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knows everything culturally important about each different individual 2
twig the man happens to be holding, such as for example the village’s 3
official and idiomatic names for the trees the twigs derived from, and 4
the various pantheistic deities and religious significance of each species 5
of relevant tree, as well as which ones had edible leaves or bark that 6
eased fever if boiled, and so on, including which species’ grain and 7
tensile flexion were especially good for spear shafts and the small phyto-8
toxic darts the villages of this region used with crude reed blowguns to 9
defend themselves against the tropical rain forest’s predacious jaguars, 10
which are apparently the scourge of the paleolithic Third World and 11
the leading statistical cause of death after disease, malnutrition, and 12
intertribal warfare. After which, of course, in short order, after reports 13
of the remarkable twig prelection get about and the parents and other 14
primitive villagers begin regarding the child’s intelligence in a wholly 15
different spirit, it emerges that the child is also fully capable of answer-16
ing all manner of both trivial and also profoundly non-trivial questions, 17
practical questions that bore directly on the village’s subsistence-level 18
quality of life, such as for instance where was the best place to find a 19
certain kind of cassava root, and why were the migrations of a certain 20
species of elk or dik-dik — a species which the village depended for its 21
very life on hunting effectively — more predictable in the rainy season 22
than in the dry season, and why were certain types of igneous rock 23
better for fashioning sharp edges or striking together to produce fire 24
than other types of igneous rock, and so on. And then, of course, sub-25
sequently, in a rather predictable trial-and-error heuristic evolution, it 26
emerges in the action of the protasis that the child’s preternatural bril-27
liance in fact extends even to those questions that are considered by 28
the village supremely important, in other words almost religious-grade 29
questions, questions which — substituting my friend’s own terminology 30
for that of the analytical younger man on the United flight — involved 31
not just cerebration or raw IQ but actual sagacity or virtue or wisdom 32
or as Coleridge would have had it esemplasy, and soon the child is being 33
called upon to adjudicate very complex and multifaceted conflicts, such sh 34
as if two gathering-caste villagers both happened on the same bread-reg 35
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who should get the breadfruit, or for example if a wife failed to con-1
ceive within a certain specified number of lunar or solar cycles did the 2
husband have the right to banish her altogether or did his rights ex-3
tend only to no longer sharing food with her, and so on and so forth —

4
evidently the passenger up ahead provided any number of exemplary 5
questions, some of which were very involved and difficult for either my 6
friend or his acquaintance to reconstruct. The point, however, is that 7
the exceptional child’s answers to these sorts of questions were with-8
out fail so ingeniously apposite and simple and comprehensive and fair 9
that all sides felt justly treated, and often the litigants could not un-10
derstand why they had not thought of such an obviously equitable so-11
lution themselves, and in short order a great many long-standing 12
conflicts are settled and perennial social conundrums resolved; and by 13
this time the entire village had come to revere the child and had col-14
lectively decided that the child must in fact be a special emissary or 15
legate or even incarnation of the primitive Dark Spirits on which their 16
pantheistic religion was primarily based, and some of the village’s 17
shaman and midwife castes — members of what would later become 18
the new social structure’s professional consultant caste — claimed that 19
the child had in fact come spontaneously into incarnated form deep in 20
the circumambient rain forest and had been suckled and protected by 21
divinely mollified jaguars, and that the child’s putative mother and fa-22
ther had in fact simply stumbled onto the child while out gathering 23
cassava roots and were lying about its having been conceived and born 24
in the usual protomammalian way, and were therefore of course also by 25
extension lying about their own legal paternity; and after a great deal 26
of discussion and debate the village exarchs vote to remove the child 27
from the parents’ custody and to make it an as it were ward or depen-28
dent ex officio of the entire village, and to invest the child with some 29
sort of unique unprecedented legal status that was neither minor nor 30
adult nor member of any caste, neither a village exarch nor a thane nor 31
a shaman per se but something entirely else, and with the nominal 32

‘parents’ granted certain special rights and privileges to compensate 33
them for their supplantation by the village in loco — the exarchs ap-34 sh
parently having come in secret to none other than the child itself to 35 reg

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help them structure this whole delicate compromise — and they con-2
struct for the child a special sort of raised wicker dais or platform in 3
the precise geometric center of the village, and they designate certain 4
extremely rigid and precise intervals and arrangements whereby once 5
every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line 6
up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and 7
familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with 8
questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in 9
return to compensate the child for its services with an offering of a 10
plantain or dik-dik haunch or some other item of recognized value, 11
which offering was what the primitive but complex legal arrangement 12
provided for the child to live on and support himself instead of being 13
his alleged parents’ comme on dit ‘dependent.’ The context in which my 14
own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance 15
is unknown to me as anything more than ‘quotidian’ or ‘everyday.’

16

They would all line up before the dais to offer the child a yam, an 17
ampoule of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera, and in return the child 18
would undertake to answer their question. As exempla of this sort of 19
mythopoeic cycle so often go, this arrangement is represented as the 20
origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture. Prior to 21
the child’s evection, everyone had made their own clothes and lean-tos 22
and spears and gathered all and only their own family’s food, and while 23
certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared at equinoctial religious 24
festivals and so forth there was evidently nothing like actual barter or 25
trade until the advent of this child who could and would answer any 26
question put to it. And the small child thereafter lived atop this plat-27
form and never left it — the dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of 28
plantain leaves and a small hollowed-out concavity for a fire and prim-29
itive cooking pot — and apparently the child’s entire childhood was 30
thenceforward spent on the central platform eating and sleeping and 31
sitting for long periods doing nothing, presumably thinking and de-32
veloping, and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days before the villagers 33
would again line up with their respective questions. And as the village’s sh 34
trade-based economy became more modern and complex, one novel reg 35
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the shaman and midwife castes began to cultivate the intellectual or as 1
it were rhetorical skill of structuring a monthly question in such a way 2
as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary child, 3
and they then began to sell or barter these interrogatory skills to ordi-4
nary villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly 5
question, which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms 6
the village’s consultant caste. For instance instead of asking the child 7
something narrowly circumscribed such as, ‘Where in our village’s 8
region of the rain forest should I look for a certain type of edible root?’

9
a professional consultant’s suggestion here might be that his client ask 10
the child something more general along the lines for example of, ‘How 11
can a man feed his family with less effort than we now expend?’ or, 12

‘How might we ensure a store of food that will last our family through 13
periods when available resources are scarce?’ Whereas on the other 14
hand, as the whole enterprise became more sophisticated and special-15
ized, the consultant caste also discovered that maximizing the answer’s 16
value sometimes entailed making a certain question more specific and 17
practical, as in for instance instead of, ‘How can we increase our supply 18
of firewood?’ a more efficacious question here might be, ‘How might a 19
single man move a whole downed tree close to his home so as to have 20
plentiful firewood?’ And evidently some of the village’s new consultant 21
caste developed into rather ingenious interlocutors and managed to 22
design questions of historic cultural importance and value such as, 23

‘When my neighbor borrows my spear, how can I make a record of 24
the loan in order to prove that the spear is mine in case my neighbor 25
suddenly turns round and claims that the spear is his and refuses to 26
return it?’ or, ‘How might I divert water from one of the rain forest’s 27
streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with a jar 28
balanced on her head in order to haul water from the stream the 29
stream might be made to as it were come to us?’ and so forth — here 30
it was not clear whether my friend or his acquaintance were providing 31
their own examples or whether these were actual examples enumerated 32
during the dialogue he overheard on the United flight. He said that 33
certain very general conclusions about the two passengers’ different 34 sh
ages and economic status could be deduced from their respective hair’s 35 reg

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color and cut and their postures and the backs of their necks, but that 2
that was all. That there was no reading material except the seat 3
pocket’s customary in-flight catalogue and safety card, and the wing’s 4
engine’s constant noise would have prevented him from sleeping even 5
had he taken a pill, and that there was literally nothing for him to do 6
but lean ever so subtly forward and try as unobtrusively as possible to 7
make out what the darker-haired young passenger was relating to his 8
less educated seatmate or companion, and to try to interpret it and fit 9
it into some context that would as it were ground the narrative and 10
render it more comme on dit illuminating or relevant to his own con-11
text. And that but at certain points it became unclear what was part of 12
the cycle’s narrative Ding an sich and what were the passenger’s own 13
editorial interpolations and commentary, such as the fact that it was 14
evidently during the child’s decade-long occupancy of the special 15
raised platform that the village’s culture evolved from hunting and 16
gathering to a crude form of agriculture and husbandry, and discov-17
ered as well the principles of the wheel and rotary displacement, and 18
fashioned their first fully enclosed dwellings of willow and yam-19
thatch, and developed an ideographic alphabet and primitive written 20
grammar which allowed for more sophisticated divisions of labor and 21
a crude economic system of trade in various goods and services; and 22
in sum the entire village’s culture, technology, and standard of living 23
undergo a metastatic evolution that would normally have taken thou-24
sands of years and countless paleolithic generations to attain. And, not 25
surprisingly, these quantum leaps arouse a certain degree of fear and 26
jealousy in many of the region’s other paleolithic villages, which are all 27
still in the pantheo-shamanistic, hunting-and-gathering, hunch-round-28
the-fire-when-it’s-cold stage of cultural attainment, and the United 29
flight’s narrative focuses particularly on the reaction of one large and 30
formidable village, which is ruled by a single autocratic shaman in a 31
kind of totalitarian theocracy, and which has also historically domi-32
nated this entire region of the rain forest and exacted tribute from all 33
the other villages, this both because their warriors are so fierce and sh 34
because their autocratic shaman is extremely ancient and politically reg 35
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being at the very least in league with the primitive rain forest’s dia-1
bolical White Spirits — recall that this is an equatorial Third World 2
region, such that here dark colors are apparently associated with life 3
and beneficent spiritual forces and light or whitish colors with death, 4
absence, and pantheism’s evil or malignant spirits, and evidently one 5
reason why the dominant village’s warriors are so formidable is that the 6
shaman forces them to smear themselves with white or light-colored 7
clay or ground talc or some canescent indigenous substance before 8
battle such that according to legend they present the appearance of a 9
regiment of evil spirits or the risen dead coming at one with spears and 10
phytotoxic blowguns, and the sight always so terrifies all the other vil-11
lages’ warriors that they quail and lose heart before battle is even joined, 12
and the dominant village has had no serious opposition since the 13
necromantic shaman took charge many aeons ago. Even so, the more 14
politically astute upper castes of the dominant village eventually become 15
concerned, obviously, about this other village with the messianically 16
brilliant child; they fear that as the child’s village continues to evolve 17
and becomes more and more advanced and sophisticated it will be only 18
a matter of time before some prescient member of the little village’s 19
warrior caste comes before the child and asks, ‘How shall we attack 20
and defeat the village of ————’ (the fellow could not understand 21
or reproduce the airline passenger’s pronunciation of the dominant 22
village’s name, which evidently consisted mostly of glottal clicks and 23
pops) ‘and take their lands and hunting grounds for our own more 24
advanced and sophisticated culture?’ and so on; and a delegation of the 25
bellicose ———— village’s upper-caste citizens finally work up their 26
nerve and appear en masse for an audience with their tyrannical 27
shaman, who it emerges is not only extremely ancient and powerful 28
but is in fact an albino — with all that extreme congenital pallor con-29
notes in this part of the prehistoric world — and who evidently dwells 30
in a small, austerely appointed lean-to just outside the dominant village’s 31
city limits, and spends most of his time conducting private necroman-32
tic rituals that involve playing crude musical arrangements with human 33
tibias and femurs on rows of differently sized human skulls like some 34 sh
sort of ghastly paleolithic marimbas, as well as apparently using skulls 35 reg

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for both his personal stew pot and his commode; and the elite villagers 2
come and make the customary obeisances and offerings and then lay 3
out their concerns about the upstart village’s rapid development under 4
the stewardship of this brilliant juvenile lusus naturae — who by the 5
way we are informed has by this time been presiding hierophantically 6
from his raised central dais for several solar cycles and is now some-7
thing more like ten years old — and they respectfully ask their necro-8
mantic leader whether he’s perhaps had a chance to give any thought 9
to the über child issue and/or might see fit to intervene before the 10
child’s upstart village becomes so advanced that even the predacious 11

———— village’s albescent warriors are no match for it. There are 12
certain intimations that the dominant ———— village’s culture is 13
cannibalistic or else perhaps uses the practice of cannibalizing enemy 14

POWs as a way to further terrify and demoralize rival cultures, but 15
all this is left shadowy and as it were merely suggestive. All he could 16
say for certain was that the flight’s highly analytic narrator was darker-17
haired and — judging from his posture and the distinctively squared-18
off edge of the haircut against the back of his well-tanned neck — both 19
younger and of a higher social or economic station than was the other 20
passenger, who, again, appeared to have some type of auditory or per-21
haps cognitive deficit. Structurally, this scene apparently functions as 22
both the climax of the protasis and the as it were engine of the narra-23
tive’s rising action, because at just this point we are told that the orig-24
inal exemplum splits or diverges here into at least three main epitatic 25
variants. All three versions involve the maleficent shaman’s hearing 26
out the ———— village’s upper-caste citizens’ fears and their pleas 27
for counsel and then conducting a lengthy and very intricate pantheistic 28
ritual in which he boils yams in a special ceremonial skull and reads 29
the rising steam, rather the way certain other primitive cultures read tea 30
leaves or the entrails of poultry in order to divine and inform a certain 31
course of action. In one variant of the epitasis, then, the shaman —

32
whose eyes are described as appearing literally red in just the way certain 33
modern albinistic specimens’ pupils can appear hemean or red —
sh 34
apparently imbibes some melanistic philter or smears himself with reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 1 2 7
and magically transports himself bodily across the region to the upstart 1
village, whereupon he insinuates himself into the long line of villagers 2
waiting to ask their respective questions of the child on the dais, and, 3
upon eventually arriving at the queue’s front, the nigrescently disguised 4
shaman presents the child with the offering of a certain mysterious 5
mutant specimen of breadfruit which has a strange excrescent growth 6
resembling the child’s village’s new crude alphabet’s glyph for ‘growth,’

7

‘fertility,’ ‘wisdom,’ or ‘destiny’ (the village’s written language still wasn’t 8
very advanced or differentiated) on the breadfruit’s side, and then 9
instead of asking his question aloud at high volume, publicly, which 10
had gradually evolved into the custom at these lunar Q&A rituals, the 11
malefic shaman instead leans forward in his jaguar-hide mantle and 12
flowing French Fork and whispers something in the child’s tiny ear —

13
the natives of this region evidently all have very tiny and close-set ears, 14
rather the way the aborigines of other Third World areas developed 15
racially distinctive eyelids, complexions, and so forth — susurrating 16
some question that is completely inaudible to anyone else in the line but 17
which evidently has a profound effect on the child, because directly 18
after the thanatophilic shaman withdraws and melts back into the rain 19
forest the child on the dais closes its eyes and withdraws its conscious-20
ness into some type of meditative catatonic state for weeks or even 21
according to one sub-version of the variant months, refusing to respond 22
to anyone’s questions or to react to or even acknowledge the presence 23
of any of the other villagers; and there are apparently all manner of fur-24
ther sub- and sub-sub-versions of the variant which devote a great 25
deal of narrative time to various speculations and allegations about 26
what it was that the dominant ———— village’s incognito shaman 27
whispered to the child, although all the sub-versions’ theories evidently 28
concur that whatever it was had indeed been in the standard gram-29
matical form of a question and not any sort of declarative statement or 30
apothegm or rhyming mesmeric spell. In the second of the epitasis’s 31
three main variants, the autocratic shaman evidently does not disguise 32
or insinuate himself in any way but rather gathers all the upper-caste 33
citizens of the powerful ———— village as well as a phalanx of at-34 sh
tendants and palanquin carriers and syces and white-painted security 35 reg

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personnel and specialized antijaguar squads and travels with this con-2
tingent en masse through the rain forest to the puericratic village for a 3
full-scale State Visit or Diplomatic Summit, and in this version the 4
epitatic complication is due not to anything the sibilant shaman 5
asks — because evidently the entire Summit consists of nothing but 6
the endless roundabout courtesies and ritual tropes which intervillage 7

State Visits in that region of the rain forest always entail — but rather 8
to some potion or spell affixed to the mutant glyph-excrescent bread-9
fruit which the shaman presents in a decorative parchment papillote to 10
the seated child as one of the State Visit’s countless de rigueur ceremo-11
nial gifts and tokens of esteem, which potion or spell here then causes 12
the child on the dais to close its eyes and enter the aforementioned 13
oneirically catatonic mystical state, rather like a mainframe compiling, 14
and he refuses to answer or acknowledge the villagers’ questions for 15
several lunar cycles. Then in the third, final, and rather more passively 16
modernistic epitatic variant, there is evidently no disguise or State 17

Visit or psychoactive breadfruit; rather in the third version the malefic 18
angekok merely consults the yams’ evaporate and makes elaborate 19
necromantic calculations and finally tells the ———— village’s upper-20
caste supplicants not to worry, that in fact no action is called for, that 21
the actual threat the über child poses is not to them or the ————

22
village’s brutal hegemony over the region, because the child at this 23
point is just on the verge of reaching the sidereal equivalent of eleven 24
years old, which birthday evidently represents the paleolithic Third 25

World’s bar mitzvah or as it were age of majority; and, the albino 26
shaman tells the delegation, any child this preternaturally gifted and 27
exceptional is itself still growing and developing and learning at a geo-28
metric rate and advancing inevitably toward its supernatural entelechy’s 29
fulfillment, and that — this is still the shaman, whose role in this third 30
main variant of the epitasis is almost wholly oracular — and that, 31
ironically, it will be the very questions the child is asked by the increas-32
ingly modernized and sophisticated villagers that will facilitate the 33
wunderkind’s further development into something so supernaturally sh 34
advanced that it will ultimately prove the upstart village’s very undo-reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 1 2 9
because before too long the puericratic villagers will all be back hunting 1
and gathering and worshipping Yam Gods and soiling their loincloths 2
with fear at the sight of an etiolated regiment and coming across with 3
their annual tribute of yams and hides to the hegemonic ————

4
village just as they always have, and so on and so forth; and sure enough 5
in this moodier and somewhat more contemporary third version of the 6
epitasis — in which narratively the malevolent shaman is reduced from 7
a peripeteiac antagonist to a mere vehicle for exposition or foreshad-8
owing, this rather anticipating the function which oracles, sorcerers, 9

Attic choruses, Gaelic coronach, Senecan dumbshows, Plautian pro-10
logues, and chatty Victorian narrators perform in various later cycles’

11
exempla — but nevertheless in the variant’s next scene sure enough, at 12
the precise sidereal moment of the paleolithic equivalent of its eleventh 13
birthday, the child on the central dais spontaneously goes into the 14
same ptotic autisto-mystical withdrawal as in the more structurally 15
conventional variants — although according to the highly analytical 16
younger man on the flight there exist here as well certain even less 17
conventional sub-versions of the third main variant in which there is 18
no mention of any regionally dominant village or shaman or cranial 19
obeah, but rather here it is purportedly the young and extraordinarily 20
comely daughter of an upper-caste villager, who had just died after a 21
lengthy death-pallet scene, who — ‘who’ here meaning the nubile 22
daughter — leans in and whispers the mysterious coup de vieux–type 23
question in the child’s ear; or in another marginal sub-version a mys-24
terious white wasp or possibly trypanosomic bloodsucking fly of genus 25

Glossina flies through the village straight to the center’s raised dais 26
or platform and stings the child on the forehead in the precise spot 27
corresponding to the ajna or sixth Hindic chakra, with the child im-28
mediately thereupon falling into the ptotic and compiling-esque 29
trance — but the crux nevertheless is that in all the myriad variants 30
and sub-versions of the rising action the child’s trance and its essential 31
characteristics are the same, and it is at the point of the child’s psychic 32
withdrawal that all three major competing editions of the epitasis 33
apparently converge again and conclude the as it were Second Act of 34 sh
the exemplum; and what then transpires throughout the catastasis and 35 reg

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various relief scenes and faux-reversals and dal segni and scènes à faire 2
all the way to the narrative’s final catastrophe remains the same in all 3
the putative variants and versions, such that the mythopoeic narrative’s 4
very structure itself moves from initial unity to epitatic trinity to rec-5
onciliation and unity again in the falling action — this observation 6
evidently also inserted by the jetliner’s somewhat pedantic young nar-7
rator, in or on the back of whose scalp as time passed my friend’s 8
acquaintance said he began to think he could discern an unusual patch 9
of gray or prematurely white hair that was of markedly different texture 10
than the surrounding scalp’s hair and seemed if gazed at long enough 11
to comprise some sort of strange intaglial glyph or design, though he 12
was quick to admit that the same phenomenon can occur with clouds 13
or configurations of shadows if one looks intently enough for long 14
periods, and on the United flight there was simply very little else to 15
look at — along, of course, with all the iconic resonance that an 16
apparently One-into-Three-into-One dramatic structure will possess 17
for the Western analytical mind. Nevertheless, when the child comes 18
out of the catatonic trance or chrysalis stage, or resurfaces from medi-19
tating on the implications of whatever it was that the hegemonic 20
shaman or nubile mourner had whispered, or recovers from the first 21
wash of pubescent testosterone, or whatever precisely it was that was 22
going on on the wickerwork dais while the boy sat motionless and in-23
communicado for several lunar cycles — afterward it’s immediately 24
clear that the child has undergone some significant developmental 25
changes, because when he finally does come out of it and opens his 26
eyes and responds to stimuli and resumes answering the cyclic queue 27
of villagers’ questions, evidently he’s now answering in a very different 28
way indeed, and his relationship to the questions and to the villagers 29
and to the village’s developing culture as a whole now comprises a 30
wholly different gestalt. It is the progressively extreme changes in the 31
advanced boy’s relation to as it were both Truth and Culture which 32
constitute the exemplum’s catastasis or crisis or falling action or Third 33

Act. At first, now, the child will sometimes answer a villager’s question sh 34
just as before, but now will also append to this specific answer addi-reg 35
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the child apparently believes his initial answer entails, as if he now 1
understands his answers as part of a much larger network or system of 2
questions and answers and further questions instead of being merely 3
discrete self-contained units of information; and whenever the reawak-4
ened child breaks with previous convention and extemporizes on an 5
answer’s ramifications it evidently sends both cultural and economic 6
shock-waves through the village’s community, because the established 7
custom and norm heretofore has of course been that the child on the 8
dais answers only a question that he is explicitly asked, answering in an 9
almost idiotic, cybernetically literal way, such that — as the pedantic 10
younger man reminded his auditor he’d mentioned in passing during 11
the protasis — such that an entire new caste of interrogatory consul-12
tants had come into being in the village’s economy, consultants whose 13
marketable skill lay in structuring citizens’ questions in such a way as 14
to avoid the so-called G.I.G.O. phenomenon to which questions pre-15
sented to the child before the climactic trance were susceptible, in 16
other words being paid or as it were compensated to ensure that the 17
question posed was not for example something like, ‘Can you tell me 18
where my eldest son’s lost blowgun might be found?’ to which the 19
child would traditionally be wont to answer simply, ‘Yes,’ the boy in-20
tending this answer not to be sarcastic or unhelpful but simply True, 21
operating out of an almost classically binary or comme on dit Boolean 22
paradigm, a crude human computer, and as such susceptible to 23

G.I.G.O., being still after all at heart a child no matter how excep-24
tional or even omniscient, and then the unfortunate villager would have 25
to wait an entire lunar cycle before he could re-pose his question in a 26
more efficacious way, an interrogatory syndrome which the consultant 27
caste had gotten more and more successful at preventing, at higher and 28
higher rates of compensation; but now in the epi — pardon me in the 29
catastasis now the powerful new consultant caste’s whole stock-in-trade 30
becomes useless or unnecessary, because the child’s new incarnation 31
appears now disposed not just to respond to villagers’ questions but to 32
as it were read them, the questions, with ‘read’ evidently being either 33
the passenger’s or my friend’s acquaintance’s term for interpreting, 34 sh
contextualizing, and/or anticipating the ramified implications of a given 35 reg

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question, the metamorphosed post-trance child in other words now 2
trying to involve his queued interlocutors in actual heuristic exchanges 3
or dialogues, violating custom and upsetting the villagers and rendering 4
the consultant caste’s rhetorical or as it were ‘computer programming’

5
skills otiose and sowing the seeds of political unrest and ill will simply 6
by having apparently evolved — the exceptional child has — into a new, 7
suppler, more humanistic and less mechanical kind of intelligence or 8
wisdom, which itself is bad enough but then apparently in the next 9
phase of the child’s heuristic evolution — as either he pubertally 10
matures and develops or else the hemean shaman’s or maiden’s or 11
wasp’s or tsetse fly’s spell takes further hold, depending on the epitatic 12
variant — after a few more lunar cycles the child begins the even more 13
troubling practice of responding to a villager’s question with questions 14
of his own, questions which frequently seem to be irrelevant to the is-15
sue at hand and are often frankly disturbing, for example in one of 16
what the fellow remembered as the numerous examples proffered on 17
the United liner if the question was along the lines of, for instance, ‘My 18
eldest daughter is willful and disobedient; should I follow our local 19
shaman’s recommendation to have her clitoridectomy performed early 20
in order to modify her attitude, or should I wait and allow the man she 21
eventually marries to be the one to order the clitoridectomy as custom 22
dictates?’ the answer would apparently be something quite off the point 23
or even offensive such as, ‘Have you asked your daughter’s mother 24
what she thinks?’ or, ‘What might one suppose to be the equivalent of 25
a clitoridectomy for willful sons?’ or — in the case of the example he 26
apparently heard the most clearly because the auditor either did not 27
catch it or was unable to follow the point and asked the pedantic and 28
analytical young United passenger to repeat it more slowly — the 29
question being, ‘What method of yam propagation is least apt to 30
offend my family’s fields’ jealous and temperamental Yam Gods?’ the 31
catastatic child apparently launches into an entire protodialectical 32
inquiry into just why exactly the interlocutor believes in jealous and 33
temperamental Yam Gods at all, and whether this villager has ever in sh 34
quiet moments closed his eyes and sat very still and gazed deep inside reg 35
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these ill-tempered Yam Gods or whether he’s merely been as it were 1
culturally conditioned from an early age to ape what he has seen his 2
parents and all the other villagers say and do and appear to believe, 3
and whether it has ever late at night or in the humid quiet of the rain 4
forest’s dawn occurred to the questioner that perhaps all these others 5
didn’t really, truly believe in petulant Yam Gods either but were them-6
selves merely aping what they in turn saw everyone else behaving as if 7
they believed, and so on, and whether it was possible — just as a 8
thought-experiment if nothing else — that everyone in the entire vil-9
lage had at some quiet point seen into their hearts’ hearts and realized 10
that their putative belief in the Yam Gods was mere mimicry and so 11
felt themselves to be a secret hypocrite or fraud; and, if so, that what 12
if just one villager of whatever caste or family suddenly stood up and 13
admitted aloud that he was merely following empty custom and did 14
not in his heart of hearts truly believe in any fearsome set of Yam 15

Gods requiring propitiation to prevent drought or decimation by yam-16
aphids: would that villager be stoned to death, or banished, or might 17
his admission not just possibly be met with a huge collective sigh of 18
relief because now everyone else could be spared oppressive inner feel-19
ings of hypocrisy and self-contempt and admit their own inner disbe-20
lief as well; and if, theoretically, all this were to come about, what 21
consequences might this sudden communal admission and relief have 22
for the interlocutor’s own inner feelings about the Yam Gods, for 23
instance was it not theoretically possible that this villager might dis-24
cover, in the absence of any normative cultural requirement to fear and 25
distrust the Yam Gods, that his true religious conception was actually 26
of Yam Gods who were rather kindly and benign and not Yam Gods 27
he had to be fearful of offending or had to try to appease but rather 28

Yam Gods to feel helped, succored, and even comme on dit loved by, 29
and to try to love in return, and freely, this of course assuming that the 30
two of them could come to some kind of agreement on what they 31
meant by ‘love’ in a religious context, in other words agape and so on and 32
so forth . . . the child’s response appearing to become more and more 33
digressive and pæanistic as the conventionally pious villager and the 34 sh
whole rest of the monthly queue stand there with eyes wide and mouths 35 reg

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agape and so on and so forth for quite some time in the example, the 2
more educated passenger’s articulation of the child’s response here be-3
ing clear and distinct but evidently also rather prolix, even when slowly 4
repeated, as well as frequently interrupted with pedantic analytical 5
asides and glosses. The important point here being that, from the cul-6
tural perspective of the paleolithic village’s exarchs and GP shamans, 7
the child has begun to respond to questions not by providing the cus-8
tomary correct answer but now by simply ranting, and no doubt at this 9
point in the exemplum’s falling action the child could simply have been 10
discredited and/or dismissed as having gone insane or been possessed 11
by an insane spirit as a result of the dominant ———— village’s 12
shaman’s whispered question and could — the child could — at this 13
point merely have been as it were deposed, removed from his omphalic 14
dais and divested of his unique legal status and returned to his parents’

15
custody and no longer taken seriously as a hierophantic force . . . were, 16
however, it not for the fact that these more heuristic and less mechan-17
ical so-called rants the child inflicts on his interlocutors have such a 18
terribly profound and troubling effect on them — on the villagers 19
who’d continued queuing patiently up every lunar cycle as was the 20
custom, hoping only to receive some clear, comprehensive answer to a 21
developmentally relevant question — the dialogues and exchanges 22
often now sending questioners staggering back to their lean-tos to lie 23
curled foetally on their sides with rolling eyes and high fevers as their 24
primitive CPUs tried frantically to reconfigure themselves. All of 25
which obviously compounds the fear and unrest the villagers feel toward 26
this new metamorphosed catastatic incarnation of the extraordinary 27
child, and many of them might have stopped lining up every lunar 28
cycle with offerings and questions altogether had the sidereal ritual 29
not become such an entrenched social custom that the villagers feel 30
terrific unease and anxiety at the thought of abandoning it; plus we’re 31
now told that in addition the villagers also have come more and more 32
to fear offending or provoking the child on its raised dais — a child 33
who according to the glyph-haired passenger is by this point fully sh 34
pubescent and developing the broad squat torso, protrusive forehead, reg 35
and hairy extremities of a bona fide paleolithic adult male — and their 4th Pass Pages

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fear and unease is then further increased in the falling action’s third 1
and apparently final stage of the child’s development, in which after 2
several more lunar cycles he begins to act increasingly irritable and 3
captious with the villagers’ questions and now begins responding not 4
with a sincere answer or a further question or even a digressive chau-5
tauqua but now with what often seems a rebuke or complaint, appear-6
ing almost to berate them, asking what on earth made them think that 7
theirs are the really important questions, asking rhetorically what the 8
point of all this is, why must he be consigned to life on a wickerwork 9
platform if all he’s going to be asked are the sort of dull, small, banal, 10
quotidian, irrelevant questions that these squat hirsute tiny-eared 11
villagers line up under a blazing Third World sun all day with offerings 12
in order to pose, asking what makes them think he can help them 13
when they haven’t the slightest idea what they even really need. Asking 14
whether the whole thing might not, in fact, be a waste of everyone’s 15
time. By which point the village’s whole social structure and citizenry, 16
from exarch to lumpen, is in an uproar of cultural disorientation and 17
anxiety and antichild sentiment, an hysteria abetted at every turn by 18
the consultant caste, most of whom are now of course out of work 19
because of the metamorphic changes in the child’s mode or style of 20
answering questions and now have nothing better to do all day than 21
hold seminars for the angry villagers in which for some type of fee the 22
consultants will advance and debate various theories about what exactly 23
has happened to the child and whom or what the child appears to be 24
metamorphosing into and about what it portends for the village that 25
its central dais’s beloved omniscient child has become an agent of dis-26
ruption and cultural anomie; and in the versions with the disguised 27
malefic shaman or the breathtaking daughter of the deceased exarch 28
there are now also some especially costly elite-caste seminars in which 29
the consultants theorize about just what fatal question the dissimilated 30
magus or jeune fille dorée might have whispered into the boy’s hypotro-31
phied ear to cause such a ghastly transformation, with various sub-32
versions’ consultants arguing for every sort of possible question from, 33

‘Why do you put yourself at the service of villagers so much less extra-34 sh
ordinary than yourself?’ to, ‘What sort of Yam Gods and/or Dark 35 reg

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Spirits does someone as supernaturally advanced as yourself believe in, 2
deep inside?’ to the deceptively simple but of course all too plausibly 3
disastrous, ‘Might there ever be any questions you yourself wish to 4
ask?’ — as well as untold other examples which ambient engine and 5
cabin noise obscured, the United flight evidently being filled with 6
weather and turbulence and at least one interval during which it 7
looked as though they were going to be rerouted and forced to land 8
somewhere other than their scheduled destination — but with all the 9
different versions’ and sub-versions’ seminars’ hypothesized questions 10
sharing an essentially recursive quality that bent the child’s cognitive 11
powers back in on themselves and transformed him from messianic to 12
monstrous, and whose lethal involution resonates with malignant-13
self-consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7 to the self-14
devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana to the Medousa’ s reflective 15
demise to Gödelian metalogic; and fewer and fewer villagers begin 16
queuing up before the child’s platform in the village’s center every 17

29.52 days, although they never make so bold as to stop coming alto-18
gether because the villagers are still deeply afraid of offending the 19
child or making him angry, especially after one incident in a recent 20
lunar cycle in which apparently one of the brighter, more ambitious 21
warrior-caste villagers had positioned himself in the very rear of the 22
line and waited until everyone else had had their Q&A exchanges and 23
dispersed and then had — which is to say the warrior-caste villager 24
waited until everyone else had left and then had — had then leaned in 25
and very quietly asked the child what the best strategy might be for 26
attacking and defeating the dominant ———— village’s spectral 27
troops and necromantic shaman and seizing the ———— village’s 28
lands and exacting tribute from them and from all the rain forest’s 29
other primitive villages and establishing their own paleolithic empire 30
over the region, and the child’s answer — which no one hears because 31
the rest of the queue has dispersed, which in retrospect raises questions 32
about how the young, vigorous, essentially dark-haired and patriciate 33
narrator on the United flight justifies including it in the catastasis —
sh 34
but in any event the child’s answer, which the boy evidently leans way reg 35
far forward off the edge of the platform to whisper in the warrior’s tiny 4th Pass Pages

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close-set ear, instantly destroys the warrior’s higher faculties or spirit 1
or soul and drives him hopelessly insane, and the man reels from the 2
dais with his hands over his ears and staggers off into the rain forest 3
and wanders senselessly about making distressed noises until he’s 4
eventually set upon and devoured by the area’s predacious jaguars. This 5
incident sends the first wave of open terror through the village; and, 6
with the demotic fomentation of the lumpen-consultants, the village’s 7
citizens begin truly to hate and fear the child, and there is now more 8
or less a consensus that this preternatural child whom they’d so stupidly 9
revered and depended on and based all their advances and develop-10
ments on the counsel of is, in fact, either one of the thanatotic White 11

Spirits or a duly authorized agent of same, and that it is only a matter 12
of time before someone catches the child in the wrong mood or asks 13
the wrong question and the child says something which destroys the 14
whole village or perhaps even the entire universe (the two being 15
scarcely distinguished in the paleolithic mind); and a quorum of 16
the exarchs officially decides that the child needs to be assassinated 17

A.S.A.P., but they cannot persuade any of the village’s warrior caste to 18
get close enough to the central raised platform or dais or plinth to kill 19
the child, even spear- and/or phytotoxic dart–distance obviously being 20
well within range of the child’s voice and the memory of their late 21
comrade’s fate — namely that of the ambitious warrior who had been 22
driven insane with a single whisper — remaining still quite vivid in 23
the braves’ minds. And thus then there is apparently a brief interval 24
during which a type of Taoist or comme on dit ‘dolce far niente’ or Zenlike 25
constructive-nonaction movement gains ascendancy in the exarchs’

26
counsels, some in the warrior and consultant castes arguing that if the 27
villagers simply all stop lining up with provisions once every lunar cy-28
cle then the child, who has not moved from the central dais in years 29
and has never had occasion to learn even rudimentary hunting-and-30
gathering skills, will inevitably starve to death and so to speak solve 31
their problem for them . . . except it turns out that the child had in fact 32
been farsighted enough to break off and stash a certain portion of all 33
the months and years of offerings under his pallet of plantain leaves —

34 sh
note here please gentlemen that in the catastasis of the first epitatic 35 reg

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1
variant in which the dominant ———— village’s theocratic shaman 2
functions as an antagonist it is at this point revealed via flashback or 3
interpolation that what the disguised sorcerer had in fact whispered 4
into the child’s tiny close-set ear when he reached the front of the 5
queue had been something along the lines of, ‘You, child, who are so 6
gifted and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized 7
the extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your 8
gifts, have transformed you into something you know too well you are 9
not? Surely you have seen that they so revere you precisely because 10
they themselves are too unwise to see your limitations? How long be-11
fore they, too, see what you have seen when gazing deep inside yourself ?

12

Surely it has occurred to you. Surely one such as yourself must know 13
already how terribly fickle the affections of a primitive Third World 14
village can be. But tell me, child: Have you begun yet to be afraid?

15

Have you begun yet then to plan for the day when they wake to a truth 16
you already know: that you are not half so complete as they believe?

17

That the illusion these children have made of you cannot be sustained?

18

Have you, for example, thought yet to break off and secrete a portion 19
of their lavish offerings against the day they awaken to what you 20
already know you are, and turn fickly against you, and then because of 21
their own turning become disoriented and anxious and blame you fur-22
ther for it, see you as the thief of their peace and begin to fear you and 23
hate you in earnest and before long perhaps even cease to bring you of-24
ferings in the hope that you will starve or slink off like the thief they 25
now believe you to be?’ and so forth, which monologue now in a rather 26
oracle-to-Laius-type irony of fate appears in retrospect to have been 27
both sound and fatal advice, although we should note that in certain 28
sub-versions of the other two epitatic variants’ catastases there is no 29
mention whatever of irony or hoarding: the child simply endures the 30
catastrophe of the queues’ and offerings’ end and of his own utter 31
isolation and in effect perverse banishment at the precise center of a 32
village whose center everyone now goes way far out of their way to 33
avoid, the child here enduring alone on the dais for months and sh 34
months, surviving on nothing but his own saliva and the occasional reg 35
nibble of plantain leaf from his pallet — here evidently echoing the 4th Pass Pages

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way certain medieval hagiographies depict their own extraordinarily 1
high-powered, supernaturally advanced subjects as being capable of 2
fasting for months and even years without discomfort — and by this 3
point in the falling action as well the weather had cleared and the fel-4
low said even the noise of the engine seemed to have abated, perhaps 5
because of the United airliner’s initial descent in preparation to touch 6
down, which made it possible to hear at least some of the archetypal 7
catastrophe over the rustling noises of the passengers all gathering 8
their personal effects together and beginning to as it were assemble 9
themselves for disembarkation. Because eventually they left. The village 10
did. When the child failed to starve or leave the dais but merely con-11
tinued to sit there atop it. That at some point the entire community 12
simply gave up and abandoned the village and their tilled fields and 13
centrally heated shelters and chose to strike off en masse into the rain 14
forest and to return to hunting and gathering and sleeping beneath 15
trees and fending off the predacious indigenous jaguars as best they 16
could, such was their fear of what they decided the child had grown to 17
become. The exarchs had organized and assembled them and the exo-18
dus was extremely quiet, and the boy was not at first aware of the mass 19
departure because evidently for some time now all commerce and so-20
cial intercourse among the citizens had been conducted only on the 21
extreme perimeters of the village, well out of earshot of the center’s 22
dais; the boy had not seen a living soul in the center for months. In the 23
humid quiet of dawn, however, the child could detect a difference in 24
the center’s dead stillness: the village had emptied in the night, they 25
were all now spread out and moving, the papoose-laden women keep-26
ing sharp eyes out for edible roots and the hunters searching for dik-27
dik spoor the consultants cast spells to summon, following the herd as 28
they had before the dawn of time. Only a small detachment of elite 29
and lavishly compensated warriors remained behind, and as the sun 30
rose they prepared crude torches and fired the village, the huts’ yam-31
thatch catching easily and the morning breeze spreading the blaze in a 32
great phlogistive hiss as from a dissatisfied crowd; and when they had 33
judged the fire unstoppable the warriors launched their torches like 34 sh
javelins at the village’s center and lit out for the jungle to catch up to 35 reg

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1
the migrating tribe. The hindmost of these warriors, looking back as 2
they ran, claimed to have seen the motionless boy still seated, sur-3
rounded by glassy daylight flames, although apparently a separate vari-4
ant’s catastrophe follows only the tribe’s main body and its forced 5
march into the tropical wilderness and includes only silence and prim-6
itive sounds of exertion until one keen-eyed child, hanging extrorse in 7
its sling on a mother’s back, saw blue hanging smoke in the dense 8
fronds behind them, and low-caste stragglers, turning round at the 9
long column’s rear, could make out the red lace of a fire seen through 10
many layers of trees’ moving leaves, a great rapacious fire that grew and 11
gained ground no matter how hard the high castes drove them.

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33
sh 34
reg 35

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Go od Old Neon

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all 1

I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in 2
other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more compli-3
cated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be 4
liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the 5
idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive 6
wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades 7
and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or 8
varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was al-9
ways scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really 10
hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, 11
once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let 12
me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except 13
maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again. The next time or next 14
thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela 15

Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up 16
under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or what-17
ever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the 18
guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad.

19

This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, self-20 sh
contained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own 21 reg

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1
practice — and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything ex-2
cept who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number 3
two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year.

4

She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent 5
ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as 6
more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could 7
have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand 8
who she was inside.

9

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else 10
then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or 11
whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were 12
happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it 13
did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and 14
added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to 15
talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I 16
mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having 17
made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at 18
only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I 19
was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, 20
whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody be-21
cause it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. —

22
and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much 23
more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of 24
course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and 25
jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and 26
saying things like, ‘ Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has 27
got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all 28
this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or 29
acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have any-30
thing to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with my-31
self for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here 32
are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova 33

Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining sh 34
a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, reg 35
meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 4 3

Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collect-1
ing and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a differ-2
ent girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of 3
thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends 4
about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of 5
them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of 6
jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two 7
months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great 8
deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I 9
tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by 10
the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where 11

I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person 12
dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing 13

I tried.

14

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger 15
mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I re-16
member him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed 17
interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At first I sus-18
pected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was 19
used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem 20
was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepres-21
sants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.

22

I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the 23
pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my prob-24
lem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the 25
first twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in re-26
ality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basi-27
cally showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who 28
stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were to-29
tally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come 30
right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart 31
as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see 32
about me that I hadn’t already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted 33
help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how 34 sh
unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because 35 reg

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1

I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie, 2
even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s 3
all I really was, deep down.

4

Right from the start, what I liked best about the analyst was that his 5
office was a mess. There were books and papers everyplace, and usually 6
he had to clear things off the chair so I could sit down. There was no 7
couch, I sat in an easy chair and he sat facing me in his beat-up old desk 8
chair whose back part had one of those big rectangles or capes of back-9
massage beads attached to it the same way cabbies often put them on 10
their seat in the cab. This was another thing I liked, the desk chair and 11
the fact that it was a little too small for him (he was not a small guy) 12
so that he had to sit sort of almost hunched with his feet flat on the 13
floor, or else sometimes he’d put his hands behind his head and lean 14
way back in the chair in a way that made the back portion squeak 15
terribly when it leaned back. There always seems to be something 16
patronizing or a little condescending about somebody crossing their 17
legs when they talk to you, and the desk chair didn’t allow him to do 18
this — if he ever crossed his legs his knee would have been up around 19
his chin. And yet he had apparently never gone out and gotten himself 20
a bigger or nicer desk chair, or even bothered to oil the medial joint’s 21
springs to keep the back from squeaking, a noise that I know would 22
have driven me up the wall if it had been my chair and I had to spend 23
all day in it. I noticed all this almost right away. The little office also 24
reeked of pipe tobacco, which is a pleasant smell, plus Dr. Gustafson 25
never took notes or answered everything with a question or any of the 26
cliché analyst things that would have made the whole thing too horri-27
ble to keep going back whether it even helped or not. The whole effect 28
was of a sort of likable, disorganized, laid-back guy, and things in there 29
actually did get better after I realized that he probably wasn’t going to 30
do anything to make me quit fencing with him and trying to anticipate 31
all his questions so I could show that I already knew the answer — he 32
was going to get his $65 either way — and finally came out and told 33
him about being a fraud and feeling alienated (I had to use the uptown sh 34
word of course, but it was still the truth) and starting to see myself reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 1 4 5
unhappy. I told him I wasn’t blaming anybody for my being a fraud. I 1
had been adopted, but it was as a baby, and the stepparents who 2
adopted me were better and nicer than most of the biological parents 3

I knew anything about, and I was never yelled at or abused or pres-4
sured to hit .400 in Legion ball or anything, and they took out a sec-5
ond mortgage to send me to an elite college when I could have gone 6
scholarship to U.W.–Eau Claire, etc. Nobody’d ever done anything 7
bad to me, every problem I ever had I’d been the cause of. I was a 8
fraud, and the fact that I was lonely was my own fault (of course his 9
ears pricked up at fault, which is a loaded term) because I seemed to be 10
so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in 11
terms of how it affected people’s view of me and what I needed to do 12
to create the impression of me I wanted them to have. I said I knew 13
what my problem was, what I couldn’t do was stop it. I also admitted 14
to Dr. Gustafson some of the ways I’d been jerking him around early 15
on and trying to make sure he saw me as smart and self-aware, and 16
said I’d known early on that playing around and showing off in analy-17
sis were a waste of time and money but that I couldn’t seem to help 18
myself, it just happened automatically. He smiled at all this, which was 19
the first time I remember seeing him smile. I don’t mean he was sour 20
or humorless, he had a big red friendly face and a pleasant enough 21
manner, but this was the first time he’d smiled like a human being hav-22
ing an actual conversation. And yet at the same time I already saw 23
what I’d left myself open for — and sure enough he says it. ‘If I under-24
stand you right,’ he says, ‘you’re saying that you’re basically a calculat-25
ing, manipulative person who always says what you think will get 26
somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think 27
you want.’ I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically ac-28
curate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I 29
felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be 30
totally open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it’d make me 31
look good in others’ eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, 32
and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part 33
of my brain firing away all the time, as if I were constantly playing 34 sh
chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move 35 reg

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a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move 2
that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in 3
middle school but quit because I couldn’t be as good as I eventually 4
wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know 5
what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get 6
that good, etc. I was laying it on sort of thick in hopes of distracting 7
him from the big insight and question I realized I’d set myself up for.

8

But it didn’t work. He leaned back in his loud chair and paused as if he 9
were thinking hard, for effect — he was thinking that he was going to 10
get to feel like he’d really earned his $65 today. Part of the pause always 11
involved stroking his mustache in an unconscious way. I was reason-12
ably sure that he was going to say something like, ‘So then how were 13
you able to do what you just did a moment ago?,’ in other words mean-14
ing how was I able to be honest about the fraudulence if I was really a 15
fraud, meaning he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical 16
contradiction or paradox. And I went ahead and played a little dumb, 17
probably, to get him to go ahead and say it, partly because I still held 18
out some hope that what he’d say might be more discerning or incisive 19
than I had predicted. But it was also partly because I liked him, and 20
liked the way he seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of 21
being helpful but was trying to exercise professional control over his 22
facial expression in order to make the excitement look more like sim-23
ple pleasantness and clinical interest in my case or whatever. He was 24
hard not to like, he had what is known as an engaging manner. By way 25
of decor, the office wall behind his chair had two framed prints, one 26
being that Wyeth one of the little girl in the wheat field crawling up-27
hill toward the farmhouse, the other a still life of two apples in a bowl 28
on a table by Cézanne. (To be honest, I only knew it was Cézanne be-29
cause it was an Art Institute poster and had a banner with info on a 30

Cézanne show underneath the painting, which was a still life, and 31
which was weirdly discomfiting because there was something slightly 32
off about the perspective or style that made the table look crooked and 33
the apples look almost square.) The prints were obviously there to give sh 34
the analyst’s patients something to look at, since many people like to reg 35
look around or look at things on the wall while they talk. I didn’t have 4th Pass Pages

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any trouble looking right at him most of the time I was in there, 1
though. He did have a talent for putting you at ease, there was no 2
question about it. But I had no illusions that this was the same as hav-3
ing enough insight or firepower to find some way to really help me, 4
though.

5

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the ‘fraudulence para-6
dox’ that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a 7
mathematical logic course in school. I remember this as being a huge 8
undergrad lecture course that met twice a week in an auditorium with 9
the professor up on stage and on Fridays in smaller discussion sections 10
led by a graduate assistant whose whole life seemed to be mathemati-11
cal logic. (Plus all you had to do to ace the class was sit down with the 12
assigned textbook that the prof was the editor of and memorize the 13
different modes of argument and normal forms and axioms of first-14
order quantification, meaning the course was as clean and mechanical 15
as logic itself in that if you put in the time and effort, out popped the 16
good grade at the other end. We only got to paradoxes like the Berry 17
and Russell Paradoxes and the incompleteness theorem at the very end 18
of the term, they weren’t on the final.) The fraudulence paradox was 19
that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive 20
or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt 21
inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the 22
harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so 23
that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person 24
you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a sup-25
posedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, 26
he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that 27
was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite 28
regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, 29
etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even 30
have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t. Discovering the first para-31
dox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, 32
fraudulent person I’d basically been ever since at least the time I was 33
four and lied to my stepdad because I’d realized somehow right in the 34 sh
middle of his asking me if I’d broken the bowl that if I said I did it but 35 reg

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‘confessed’ it in a sort of clumsy, implausible way, then he wouldn’t be-2
lieve me and would instead believe that my sister Fern, who’s my step-3
parents’ biological daughter, was the one who’d actually broken the 4
antique Moser glass bowl that my stepmom had inherited from her bi-5
ological grandmother and totally loved, plus it would lead or induce 6
him to see me as a kind, good stepbrother who was so anxious to keep 7

Fern (whom I really did like) from getting in trouble that I’d be will-8
ing to lie and take the punishment for it for her. I’m not explaining this 9
very well. I was only four, for one thing, and the realization didn’t hit 10
me in words the way I just now put it, but rather more in terms of feel-11
ings and associations and certain mental flashes of my stepparents’

12
faces with various expressions on them. But it happened that fast, at 13
only four, that I figured out how to create a certain impression by 14
knowing what effect I’d produce in my stepdad by implausibly ‘con-15
fessing’ that I’d punched Fern in the arm and stolen her Hula Hoop 16
and had run all the way downstairs with it and started Hula-Hooping 17
in the dining room right by the sideboard with all my stepmom’s an-18
tique glassware and figurines on it, while Fern, forgetting all about her 19
arm and hoop because of her concern over the bowl and other glass-20
ware, came running downstairs shouting after me, reminding me 21
about how important the rule was that we weren’t supposed to play in 22
the dining room. . . . Meaning that by lying in such a deliberately un-23
convincing way I could actually get everything that a direct lie would 24
supposedly get me, plus look noble and self-sacrificing, plus also make 25
my stepparents feel good because they always tended to feel good 26
when one of their kids did something that showed character, because 27
it’s the sort of thing they couldn’t really help but see as reflecting fa-28
vorably on them as shapers of their kids’ character. I’m putting all this 29
in such a long, rushing, clumsy way to try to convey the way I remem-30
ber it suddenly hit me, looking up at my stepfather’s big kindly face as 31
he held two of the larger pieces of the Moser bowl and tried to look 32
angrier than he really felt. (He had always thought the more expensive 33
pieces ought to be kept secure in storage somewhere, whereas my step-sh 34
mom’s view was more like what was the point of having nice things if reg 35
you didn’t have them out where people could enjoy them.) How to ap-4th Pass Pages

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pear a certain way and get him to think a certain thing hit me just that 1
fast. Keep in mind I was only around four. And I can’t pretend it felt 2
bad, realizing it — the truth is it felt great. I felt powerful, smart. It felt 3
a little like looking at part of a puzzle you’re doing and you’ve got a 4
piece in your hand and you can’t see where in the larger puzzle it’s sup-5
posed to go or how to make it fit, looking at all the holes, and then all 6
of a sudden in a flash you see, for no reason right then you could point 7
to or explain to anyone, that if you turn the piece this one certain way 8
it will fit, and it does, and maybe the best way to put it is that in that 9
one tiny instant you feel suddenly connected to something larger and 10
much more of the complete picture the same way the piece is. The 11
only part I’d neglected to anticipate was Fern’s reaction to getting 12
blamed for the bowl, and punished, and then punished even worse 13
when she continued to deny that she’d been the one playing around in 14
the dining room, and my stepparents’ position was that they were even 15
more upset and disappointed about her lying than they were about the 16
bowl, which they said was just a material object and not ultimately im-17
portant in the larger scheme of things. (My stepparents spoke this way, 18
they were people of high ideals and values, humanists. Their big ideal 19
was total honesty in all the family’s relationships, and lying was the 20
worst, most disappointing infraction you could commit, in their view 21
as parents. They tended to discipline Fern a little more firmly than 22
they did me, by the way, but this too was an extension of their values.

23

They were concerned about being fair and having me be able to feel 24
that I was just as much their real child as Fern was, so that I’d feel max-25
imally secure and loved, and sometimes this concern with fairness 26
caused them to bend a little too far over backward when it came to dis-27
cipline.) So that Fern, then, got regarded as being a liar when she was 28
not, and that must have hurt her way more than the actual punishment 29
did. She was only five at the time. It’s horrible to be regarded as a fraud 30
or to believe that people think you’re a fraud or liar. It’s possibly one of 31
the worst feelings in the world. And even though I haven’t really had 32
any direct experience with it, I’m sure it must be doubly horrible when 33
you were actually telling the truth and they didn’t believe you. I don’t 34 sh
think Fern ever quite got over that episode, although the two of us 35 reg

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never talked about it afterward except for one sort of cryptic remark 2
she made over her shoulder once when we were both in high school 3
and having an argument about something and Fern was storming out 4
of the house. She was sort of a classically troubled adolescent —

5
smoking, makeup, mediocre grades, dating older guys, etc. — whereas 6

I was the family’s fair-haired boy and had a killer G.P.A. and played 7
varsity ball, etc. One way to put it is that I looked and acted much bet-8
ter on the surface then than Fern did, although she eventually settled 9
down and ended up going on to college and is now doing OK. She’s 10
also one of the funniest people on earth, with a very dry, subtle sense 11
of humor — I like her a lot. The point being that that was the start of 12
my being a fraud, although it’s not as if the broken-bowl episode was 13
somehow the origin or cause of my fraudulence or some kind of child-14
hood trauma that I’d never gotten over and had to go into analysis to 15
work out. The fraud part of me was always there, just as the puzzle 16
piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you 17
see how it fits. For a while I thought that possibly one or the other of 18
my biological parents had been frauds or had carried some type of 19
fraud gene or something and that I had inherited it, but that was a 20
dead end, there was no way to know. And even if I did, what difference 21
would it make? I was still a fraud, it was still my own unhappiness that 22

I had to deal with.

23

Once again, I’m aware that it’s clumsy to put it all this way, but the 24
point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in 25
the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed him-26
self before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I 27
couldn’t be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraud-28
ulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast 29
thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the 30
middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough 31
material can rush through your head just in the little silences when 32
people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presenta-33
tion that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting sh 34
just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words.

reg 35

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and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so 1
fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from 2
or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they 3
have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-4
word English we all communicate with each other with that it could 5
easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-6
second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem 7
to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native 8
country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to 9
other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re think-10
ing, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and 11
they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too 12
fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely 13
sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given in-14
stant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, 15
realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponen-16
tially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning dur-17
ing that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically 18
die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about 19
people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all 20
that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing 21
where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up 22
at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what 23
people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, 24
chronological series of moments that they add up and call their life-25
time. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say 26
it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a fi-27
nite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re 28
alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life 29
isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my 30
life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunder-31
standings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at 32
the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to 33
form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, 34 sh
which is yet another paradox. Dr. Gustafson — whom I would meet 35 reg

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again later and find out that he had almost nothing to do with the big 2
doughy repressed guy sitting back against his chair’s beads in his River 3

Forest office with colon cancer in him already at that time and him 4
knowing nothing yet except that he didn’t feel quite right down there 5
in the bathroom lately and if it kept on he’d make an appointment to 6
go in and ask his internist about it — Dr. G. would later say that the 7
whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more 8
like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s 9
only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re 10
really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there 11
as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a white-12
cap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean 13
at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the 14
tree it’s part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it.

15

And of course all this time you’ve probably been noticing what 16
seems like the really central, overarching paradox, which is that this 17
whole thing where I’m saying words can’t really do it and time doesn’t 18
really go in a straight line is something that you’re hearing as words 19
that you have to start listening to the first word and then each succes-20
sive word after that in chronological time to understand, so if I’m say-21
ing that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re 22
wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up 23
your increasingly precious time, meaning aren’t I sort of logically con-24
tradicting myself right at the start. Not to mention am I maybe full of 25

B.S. about knowing what happens — if I really did kill myself, how 26
can you even be hearing this? Meaning am I a fraud. That’s OK, it 27
doesn’t really matter what you think. I mean it probably matters to 28
you, or you think it does — that isn’t what I meant by doesn’t matter.

29

What I mean is that it doesn’t really matter what you think about me, 30
because despite appearances this isn’t even really about me. All I’m try-31
ing to do is sketch out one little part of what it was like before I died 32
and why I at least thought I did it, so that you’ll have at least some idea 33
of why what happened afterward happened and why it had the impact sh 34
it did on who this is really about. Meaning it’s like an abstract or sort reg 35
of intro, meant to be very brief and sketchy . . . and yet of course look 4th Pass Pages

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how much time and English it’s seeming to take even to say it. It’s in-1
teresting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it 2
seems to be to convey even the smallest thing. How much time would 3
you even say has passed, so far?

4

One reason why Dr. Gustafson would have made a terrible poker 5
player or fraud is that whenever he thought it was a big moment in the 6
analysis he would always make a production of leaning back in his 7
desk chair, which made that loud sound as the back tilted back and his 8
feet went back on their heels so the soles showed, although he was 9
good at making the position look comfortable and very familiar to his 10
body, like it felt good doing that when he had to think. The whole 11
thing was both slightly overdramatic and yet still likable for some rea-12
son. Fern, by the way, has reddish hair and slightly asymmetrical green 13
eyes — the kind of green people buy tinted contact lenses to get —

14
and is attractive in a sort of witchy way. I think she’s attractive, anyway.

15

She’s grown up to be a very poised, witty, self-sufficient person, with 16
maybe just the slightest whiff of the perfume of loneliness that hangs 17
around unmarried women around age thirty. The fact is that we’re all 18
lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it’s almost a cliché. So yet an-19
other layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself 20
that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I 21
was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow. It’s not special at all, 22
we’ve all got it. In spades. Dead or not, Dr. Gustafson knew more 23
about all this than I, so that he spoke with what came off as genuine 24
authority and pleasure when he said (maybe a little superciliously, 25
given how obvious it was), ‘But if you’re constitutionally false and ma-26
nipulative and unable to be honest about who you really are, Neal’

27

(Neal being my given name, it was on my birth certificate when I got 28
adopted), ‘how is it that you were able to drop the sparring and ma-29
nipulation and be honest with me a moment ago’ (for that’s all it had 30
been, in spite of all the English that’s been expended on just my head’s 31
partial contents in the tiny interval between then and now) ‘about who 32
you really are?’ So it turned out I’d been right in predicting what his 33
big logical insight was going to be. And although I played along with 34 sh
him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak 35 reg

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indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and 2
credulous as everyone else, he didn’t appear to have anything close to 3
the firepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the 4
trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself. Be-5
cause the real truth was that my confession of being a fraud and of 6
having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in or-7
der to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful 8
had itself been kind of manipulative. It was pretty clear that Dr.

9

Gustafson, in order to survive in private practice, could not be totally 10
stupid or obtuse about people, so it seemed reasonable to assume that 11
he’d noticed the massive amount of fencing and general showing off 12

I’d been doing during the first weeks of the analysis, and thus had 13
come to some conclusions about my apparently desperate need to 14
make a certain kind of impression on him, and though it wasn’t totally 15
certain it was thus at least a decent possibility that he’d sized me up as 16
a basically empty, insecure person whose whole life involved trying to 17
impress people and manipulate their view of me in order to compen-18
sate for the inner emptiness. It’s not as if this is an incredibly rare or 19
obscure type of personality, after all. So the fact that I had chosen to be 20
supposedly ‘honest’ and to diagnose myself aloud was in fact just one 21
more move in my campaign to make sure Dr. Gustafson understood 22
that as a patient I was uniquely acute and self-aware, and that there 23
was very little chance he was going to see or diagnose anything about 24
me that I wasn’t already aware of and able to turn to my own tactical 25
advantage in terms of creating whatever image or impression of myself 26

I wanted him to see at that moment. His big supposed insight, then —

27
which had as its ostensible, first-order point that my fraudulence could 28
not possibly be as thoroughgoing and hopeless as I claimed it was, 29
since my ability to be honest with him about it logically contradicted 30
my claim of being incapable of honesty — actually had as its larger, 31
unspoken point the claim that he could discern things about my basic 32
character that I myself could not see or interpret correctly, and thus 33
that he could help me out of the trap by pointing out inconsistencies sh 34
in my view of myself as totally fraudulent. The fact that this insight reg 35
that he appeared so coyly pleased and excited about was not only ob-4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 5 5
vious and superficial but also wrong — this was depressing, much the 1
way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little 2
depressing. A corollary to the fraudulence paradox is that you simulta-3
neously want to fool everyone you meet and yet also somehow always 4
hope that you’ll come across someone who is your match or equal and 5
can’t be fooled. But this was sort of the last straw, I mentioned I’d tried 6
a whole number of different things that hadn’t worked already. So de-7
pressing is a gross understatement, actually. Plus of course the obvious 8
fact that I was paying this guy for help in getting out of the trap and 9
he’d now showed that he didn’t have the mental firepower to do it. So 10

I was now thinking about the prospect of spending time and money 11
driving in to River Forest twice a week just to yank the analyst around 12
in ways he couldn’t see so that he’d think that I was actually less fraud-13
ulent than I thought I was and that analysis with him was gradually 14
helping me see this. Meaning that he’d probably be getting more out 15
of it than I would, for me it would just be fraudulence as usual.

16

However tedious and sketchy all this is, you’re at least getting an 17
idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head. If nothing else, you’re 18
seeing how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this. And I had 19
been this way my whole life, at least from age four onward, as far as I 20
could recall. Of course, it’s also a really stupid and egotistical way to be, 21
of course you can see that. This is why the ultimate and most deeply 22
unspoken point of the analyst’s insight — namely, that who and what 23

I believed I was was not what I really was at all — which I thought was 24
false, was in fact true, although not for the reasons that Dr. Gustafson, 25
who was leaning back in his chair and smoothing his big mustache 26
with his thumb and forefinger while I played dumb and let him feel 27
like he was explaining to me a contradiction I couldn’t understand 28
without his help, believed.

29

One of my other ways of playing dumb for the next several sessions 30
after that was to protest his upbeat diagnosis (irrelevantly, since by this 31
time I’d pretty much given up on Dr. Gustafson and was starting to 32
think of various ways to kill myself without causing pain or making a 33
mess that would disgust whoever found me) by means of listing the 34 sh
various ways I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve 35 reg

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genuine and uncalculating integrity. I’ll spare giving you the whole list 2
again. I basically went all the way back to childhood (which analysts 3
always like you to do) and laid it on. Partly I was curious to see how 4
much he’d put up with. For example, I told him about going from gen-5
uinely loving ball, loving the smell of the grass and distant sprinklers, 6
or the feel of pounding my fist into the glove over and over and yelling 7

‘Hey, batterbatter,’ and the big low red tumid sun at the game’s start 8
versus the arc lights coming on with a clank in the glowing twilight of 9
the late innings, and of the steam and clean burned smell of ironing 10
my Legion uniform, or the feel of sliding and watching all the dust it 11
raised settle around me, or all the parents in shorts and rubber flip-12
flops setting up lawn chairs with Styrofoam coolers, little kids hooking 13
their fingers around the backstop fence or running off after fouls. The 14
smell of the ump’s aftershave and sweat, the little whisk-broom he’d 15
bend down and tidy the plate with. Mostly the feel of stepping up to 16
the plate knowing anything was possible, a feeling like a sun flaring 17
somewhere high up in my chest. And about how by only maybe four-18
teen all that had disappeared and turned into worrying about averages 19
and if I could make All City again, or being so worried I’d screw up 20
that I didn’t even like ironing the uniform anymore before games be-21
cause it gave me too much time to think, standing there so nerved up 22
about doing well that night that I couldn’t even notice the little chuck-23
ling sighs the iron made anymore or the singular smell of the steam 24
when I hit the little button for steam. How I’d basically ruined all the 25
best parts of everything like that. How sometimes it felt like I was 26
actually asleep and none of this was even real and someday out of 27
nowhere I was maybe going to suddenly wake up in midstride. That 28
was part of the idea behind things like joining the charismatic church 29
up in Naperville, to try to wake up spiritually instead of living in this 30
fog of fraudulence. ‘The truth shall set you free’ — the Bible. This was 31
what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane liked to call my holy roller phase. And 32
the charismatic church really did seem to help a lot of the parishioners 33
and congregants I met. They were humble and devoted and charitable, sh 34
and gave tirelessly without thought of personal reward in active service reg 35
to the church and in donating resources and time to the church’s cam-4th Pass Pages

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paign to build a new altar with an enormous cross of thick glass whose 1
crossbeam was lit up and filled with aerated water and was to have var-2
ious kinds of beautiful fish swimming in it. (Fish being a prominent 3

Christ-symbol for charismatics. In fact, most of us who were the most 4
devoted and active in the church had bumper stickers on our cars with 5
no words or anything except a plain line drawing of the outline of a 6
fish — this lack of ostentation impressed me as classy and genuine.) 7

But with the real truth here being how quickly I went from being 8
someone who was there because he wanted to wake up and stop being 9
a fraud to being somebody who was so anxious to impress the congre-10
gation with how devoted and active I was that I volunteered to help 11
take the collection, and never missed one study group the whole time, 12
and was on two different committees for coordinating fund-raising for 13
the new aquarial altar and deciding exactly what kind of equipment 14
and fish would be used for the crossbeam. Plus often being the one in 15
the front row whose voice in the responses was loudest and who waved 16
both hands in the air the most enthusiastically to show that the Spirit 17
had entered me, and speaking in tongues — mostly consisting of d ’s 18
and g’s — except not really, of course, because in fact I was really just 19
pretending to speak in tongues because all the parishioners around me 20
were speaking in tongues and had the Spirit, and so in a kind of fever 21
of excitement I was able to hoodwink even myself into thinking that I 22
really had the Spirit moving through me and was speaking in tongues 23
when in reality I was just shouting ‘Dugga muggle ergle dergle’ over 24
and over. (In other words, so anxious to see myself as truly born-again 25
that I actually convinced myself that the tongues’ babble was real lan-26
guage and somehow less false than plain English at expressing the 27
feeling of the Holy Spirit rolling like a juggernaut right through me.) 28

This went on for about four months. Not to mention falling over 29
backward whenever Pastor Steve came down the row popping people 30
and popped me in the forehead with the heel of his hand, but falling 31
over backward on purpose, not genuinely being struck down by the 32

Spirit like the other people on either side of me (one of whom actually 33
fainted and had to be brought around with salts). It was only when I 34 sh
was walking out to the parking lot one night after Wednesday Night 35 reg

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Praise that I suddenly experienced a flash of self-awareness or clarity 2
or whatever in which I suddenly stopped conning myself and realized 3
that I’d been a fraud all these months in the church, too, and was really 4
only saying and doing these things because all the real parishioners 5
were doing them and I wanted everyone to think I was sincere. It just 6
about knocked me over, that was how vividly I saw how I’d deceived 7
myself. The revealed truth was that I was an even bigger fraud in 8
church about being a newly reborn authentic person than I’d been be-9
fore Deacon and Mrs. Halberstadt first rang my doorbell out of no-10
where as part of their missionary service and talked me into giving it a 11
shot. Because at least before the church thing I wasn’t conning 12
myself — I’d known that I was a fraud since at least age nineteen, but 13
at least I’d been able to admit and face the fraudulence directly instead 14
of B.S.ing myself that I was something I wasn’t.

15

All this was presented in the context of a very long pseudo-argument 16
about fraudulence with Dr. Gustafson that would take way too much 17
time to relate to you in detail, so I’m just telling you about some of the 18
more garish examples. With Dr. G. it was more in the form of a pro-19
longed, multi-session back-and-forth on whether or not I was a total 20
fraud, during which I got more and more disgusted with myself for 21
even playing along. By this point in the analysis I’d pretty much de-22
cided he was an idiot, or at least very limited in his insights into what 23
was really going on with people. (There was also the blatant issue of 24
the mustache and of him always playing with it.) Essentially he saw 25
what he wanted to see, which was just the sort of person I could prac-26
tically eat for lunch in terms of creating whatever ideas or impressions 27
of me I wanted. For instance, I told him about the period of trying jog-28
ging, during which I seemed never to fail to have to increase my pace 29
and pump my arms more vigorously whenever someone drove by or 30
looked up from his yard, so that I ended up with bone spurs and even-31
tually had to quit altogether. Or spending at least two or three sessions 32
recounting the example of the introductory meditation class at the 33

Downers Grove Community Center that Melissa Betts of Settleman, sh 34

Dorn got me to take, at which through sheer force of will I’d always reg 35
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fectly straight long after the other students had all given up and fallen 1
back on their mats shuddering and holding their heads. Right from 2
the first class meeting, even though the small, brown instructor had 3
told us to shoot for only ten minutes of stillness at the outset because 4
most Westerners’ minds could not maintain more than a few minutes 5
of stillness and mindful concentration without feeling so restless and 6
ill at ease that they couldn’t stand it, I always remained absolutely still 7
and focused on breathing my prana with the lower diaphragm longer 8
than any of them, sometimes for up to thirty minutes, even though my 9
knees and lower back were on fire and I had what felt like swarms of 10
insects crawling all over my arms and shooting out of the top of my 11
head — and Master Gurpreet, although he kept his facial expression 12
inscrutable, gave me a deep and seemingly respectful bow and said that 13

I sat almost like a living statue of mindful repose, and that he was im-14
pressed. The problem was that we were also all supposed to continue 15
practicing our meditation on our own at home between classes, and 16
when I tried to do it alone I couldn’t seem to sit still and follow my 17
breath for more than even a few minutes before I felt like crawling out 18
of my skin and had to stop. I could only sit and appear quiet and mind-19
ful and withstand the unbelievably restless and horrible feelings when 20
all of us were doing it together in the class — meaning only when 21
there were other people to make an impression on. And even in class, 22
the truth was that I was often concentrating not so much on following 23
my prana as on keeping totally still and in the correct posture and hav-24
ing a deeply peaceful and meditative expression on my face in case 25
anyone was cheating and had their eyes open and was looking around, 26
plus also to ensure that Master Gurpreet would continue to see me as 27
exceptional and keep addressing me by what became sort of his class 28
nickname for me, which was ‘the statue.’

29

Finally, in the final few class meetings, when Master Gurpreet told 30
us to sit still and focused for only as long as we comfortably could and 31
then waited almost an hour before finally hitting his small bell with 32
the little silver thing to signal the period of meditation’s end, only I 33
and an extremely thin, pale girl who had her own meditation bench 34 sh
that she brought to class with her were able to sit still and focused for 35 reg

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the whole hour, although at several different points I’d get so cramped 2
and restless, with what felt like bright blue fire going up my spine and 3
shooting invisibly out of the top of my head as blobs of color exploded 4
over and over again behind my eyelids, that I thought I was going to 5
jump up screaming and take a header right out the window. And at the 6
end of the course, when there was also an opportunity to sign up for 7
the next session, which was called Deepening the Practice, Master 8

Gurpreet presented several of us with different honorary certificates, 9
and mine had my name and the date and was inscribed in black callig-10
raphy, champion meditator, most impressive western student, 11
the statue. It was only after I fell asleep that night (I’d finally sort of 12
compromised and told myself I was practicing the meditative disci-13
pline at home at night by lying down and focusing on following my 14
breathing very closely as I fell asleep, and it did turn out to be a phe-15
nomenal sleep aid) that while I was asleep I had the dream about the 16
statue in the commons and realized that Master Gurpreet had actually 17
in all likelihood seen right through me the whole time, and that the 18
certificate was in reality a subtle rebuke or joke at my expense. Mean-19
ing he was letting me know that he knew I was a fraud and not even 20
coming close to actually quieting my mind’s ceaseless conniving about 21
how to impress people in order to achieve mindfulness and honor my 22
true inner self. (Of course, what he seemed not to have divined was 23
that in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self, and that the 24
more I tried to be genuine the more empty and fraudulent I ended up 25
feeling inside, which I told nobody about until my stab at analysis with 26

Dr. Gustafson.) In the dream, I was in the town commons in Aurora, 27
over near the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m 28
doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue 29
of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones 30
they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-31
like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on 32
a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and 33
keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and sh 34
cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand.

reg 35

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go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers over and over, 1
and I never seem to sleep or eat or take a shower (the dream takes 2
place in dream time as opposed to waking, chronological time), mean-3
ing I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of cus-4
todian to the statue. I’m not saying it was subtle or hard to figure out.

5

Everybody from Fern, Master Gurpreet, the anorexic girl with her 6
own bench, and Ginger Manley, to people from the firm and some of 7
the media reps we bought time from (I was still a media buyer at this 8
time) all walk by, some several times — at one point Melissa Betts and 9
her new fiancé even spread out a blanket and have a sort of little pic-10
nic in the shade of the statue — but none of them ever look over or say 11
anything. It’s obviously another dream about fraudulence, like the 12
dream where I’m supposedly a big pop star on-stage but all I really do 13
is lip-synch to one of my stepparents’ old Mamas and Papas records 14
that’s on a record player just off-stage, and somebody whose face I 15
can’t ever look over long enough to make out keeps putting his hand in 16
the area of the record as if he’s going to make it skip or scratch, and the 17
whole dream makes my skin crawl. These dreams were obvious, they 18
were warnings from my subconscious that I was hollow and a fraud 19
and it was only a matter of time before the whole charade fell apart.

20

Another of my stepmother’s treasured antiques was a silver pocket-21
watch of her maternal grandfather’s with the Latin respice finem in-22
scribed on the inside of the case. It wasn’t until after she passed away 23
and my stepfather said she’d wanted me to have it that I bothered to 24
look up the term, after which I’d gotten the same sort of crawly feeling 25
as with Master Gurpreet’s certificate. Much of the nightmarish qual-26
ity of the dream about the statue was due to the way the sun raced 27
back and forth across the sky and the speed with which my whole life 28
blew by like that, in the commons. It was obviously also my subcon-29
scious enlightening me as to the meditation instructor’s having seen 30
through me the whole time, after which I was too embarrassed even to 31
go try to get a refund for the Deepening the Practice class, which there 32
was now no way I felt like I could show up for, even though at the 33
same time I also still had fantasies about Master Gurpreet becom-34 sh
ing my mentor or guru and using all kinds of inscrutable Eastern 35 reg

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techniques to show me the way to meditate myself into having a 2
true self . . .

3

. . . Etc., etc. I’ll spare you any more examples, for instance I’ll spare 4
you the literally countless examples of my fraudulence with girls —

5
with the ladies as they say — in just about every dating relationship I 6
ever had, or the almost unbelievable amount of fraudulence and calcu-7
lation involved in my career — not just in terms of manipulating the 8
consumer and manipulating the client into trusting that your agency’s 9
ideas are the best way to manipulate the consumer, but in the inter-10
office politics of the agency itself, like for example in sizing up what 11
sorts of things your superiors want to believe (including the belief 12
that they’re smarter than you and that that’s why they’re your superior) 13
and then giving them what they want but doing it just subtly enough 14
that they never get a chance to view you as a sycophant or yes-man 15

(which they want to believe they do not really want) but instead see you 16
as a tough-minded independent thinker who from time to time bows 17
to the weight of their superior intelligence and creative firepower, etc.

18

The whole agency was one big ballet of fraudulence and of manipulat-19
ing people’s images of your ability to manipulate images, a virtual hall 20
of mirrors. And I was good at it, remember, I thrived there.

21

22

It was the sheer amount of time Dr. Gustafson spent touching and 23
smoothing his mustache that indicated he wasn’t aware of doing it and 24
in fact was subconsciously reassuring himself that it was still there.

25

Which is not an especially subtle habit, in terms of insecurity, since af-26
ter all facial hair is known as a secondary sex characteristic, meaning 27
what he was really doing was subconsciously reassuring himself that 28
something else was still there, if you know what I mean. This was some 29
of why it was no real surprise when it turned out that the overall di-30
rection he wanted the analysis to proceed in involved issues of mas-31
culinity and how I understood my masculinity (my ‘manhood’ in other 32
words). This also helped explain everything from the lost-female-33
crawling and two-testicle-shaped-objects-that-looked-deformed prints sh 34
on the wall to the little African or Indian drum things and little fig-reg 35
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over his desk, plus the pipe, the unnecessary size of his wedding band, 1
even the somewhat overdone little-boy clutter of the office itself. It 2
was pretty clear that there were some major sexual insecurities and 3
maybe even homosexual-type ambiguities that Dr. Gustafson was 4
subconsciously trying to hide from himself and reassure himself about, 5
and one obvious way he did this was to sort of project his insecurities 6
onto his patients and get them to believe that America’s culture had a 7
uniquely brutal and alienating way of brainwashing its males from an 8
early age into all kinds of damaging beliefs and superstitions about 9
what being a so-called ‘real man’ was, such as competitiveness instead 10
of concert, winning at all costs, dominating others through intelli-11
gence or will, being strong, not showing your true emotions, depend-12
ing on others seeing you as a real man in order to reassure yourself of 13
your manhood, seeing your own value solely in terms of accomplish-14
ments, being obsessed with your career or income, feeling as if you 15
were constantly being judged or on display, etc. This was later in the 16
analysis, after the seemingly endless period where after every example 17
of fraudulence I gave him he’d make a show of congratulating me on 18
being able to reveal what I felt were shameful fraudulent examples, 19
and said that this was proof that I had much more of an ability to be 20
genuine than I (apparently because of my insecurities or male fears) 21
seemed able to give myself credit for. Plus it didn’t exactly seem like a 22
coincidence that the cancer he was even then harboring was in his 23
colon — that shameful, dirty, secret place right near the rectum —

24
with the idea being that using your rectum or colon to secretly harbor 25
an alien growth was a blatant symbol both of homosexuality and of the 26
repressive belief that its open acknowledgment would equal disease 27
and death. Dr. Gustafson and I both had a good laugh over this one 28
after we’d both died and were outside linear time and in the process of 29
dramatic change, you can bet on that. ( Outside time is not just an ex-30
pression or manner of speaking, by the way.) By this time in the analy-31
sis I was playing with him the way a cat does with a hurt bird. If I’d had 32
an ounce of real self-respect I would have stopped and gone back to 33
the Downers Grove Community Center and thrown myself on Mas-34 sh
ter Gurpreet’s mercy, since except for maybe one or two girls I’d dated 35 reg

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he was the only one who’d appeared to see all the way through to the 2
core of my fraudulence, plus his oblique, very dry way of indicating 3
this to me betrayed a sort of serene indifference to whether I even un-4
derstood that he saw right through me that I found incredibly impres-5
sive and genuine — here in Master Gurpreet was a man with, as they 6
say, nothing to prove. But I didn’t, instead I more or less conned my-7
self into sticking with going in to see Dr. G. twice a week for almost 8
nine months (toward the end it was only once a week because by then 9
the cancer had been diagnosed and he was getting radiation treat-10
ments every Tuesday and Thursday), telling myself that at least I was 11
trying to find some venue in which I could get help finding a way to be 12
genuine and stop manipulating everybody around me to see ‘the statue’

13
as erect and impressive, etc.

14

Nor however is it strictly true that the analyst had nothing interest-15
ing to say or that he didn’t sometimes provide helpful models or angles 16
for looking at the basic problem. For instance, it turned out that one of 17
his basic operating premises was the claim that there were really only 18
two basic, fundamental orientations a person could have toward the 19
world, (1) love and (2) fear, and that they couldn’t coexist (or, in logi-20
cal terms, that their domains were exhaustive and mutually exclusive, 21
or that their two sets had no intersection but their union comprised all 22
possible elements, or that:

23

‘(∀ x) ((F x → ~ (L x)) & (L x → ~ (F x))) & ~ ((∃ x) (~ (F x) & ~ (L x))’ ), 24
meaning in other words that each day of your life was spent in service 25
to one of these masters or the other, and ‘One cannot serve two 26
masters’ — the Bible again — and that one of the worst things about 27
the conception of competitive, achievement-oriented masculinity that 28

America supposedly hardwired into its males was that it caused a more 29
or less constant state of fear that made genuine love next to impossi-30
ble. That is, that what passed for love in American men was usually 31
just the need to be regarded in a certain way, meaning that today’s 32
males were so constantly afraid of ‘not measuring up’ (Dr. G.’s phrase, 33
with evidently no pun intended) that they had to spend all their time sh 34
convincing others of their masculine ‘validity’ (which happens to also reg 35
be a term from formal logic) in order to ease their own insecurity, 4th Pass Pages

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making genuine love next to impossible. Although it seemed a little bit 1
simplistic to see this fear as just a male problem (try watching a girl 2
stand on a scale sometime), it turns out that Dr. Gustafson was very 3
nearly right in this concept of the two masters — though not in the 4
way that he, when alive and confused about his own real identity, be-5
lieved — and even while I played along by pretending to argue or not 6
quite understand what he was driving at, the idea struck me that 7
maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic in-8
ability to really love, even to genuinely love my stepparents, or Fern, or 9

Melissa Betts, or Ginger Manley of Aurora West High in 1979, whom 10

I’d often thought of as the only girl I’d ever truly loved, though Dr. G.’s 11
bromide about men being brainwashed to equate love with accom-12
plishment or conquest also applied here. The plain truth was that Gin-13
ger Manley was just the first girl I ever went all the way with, and most 14
of my tender feelings about her were really just nostalgia for the feel-15
ing of immense cosmic validation I’d felt when she finally let me take 16
her jeans all the way off and put my so-called ‘manhood’ inside her, 17
etc. There’s really no bigger cliché than losing your virginity and later 18
having all kinds of retrospective tenderness for the girl involved. Or 19
what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane, a research technician I used to see out-20
side of work when I was a media buyer, and had a lot of conflict with 21
toward the end, said, which I don’t think I ever told Dr. G. about, 22
fraudulence-wise, probably because it cut a little too close to the bone.

23

Toward the end she had compared me to some piece of ultra-expensive 24
new medical or diagnostic equipment that can discern more about 25
you in one quick scan than you could ever know about yourself — but 26
the equipment doesn’t care about you, you’re just a sequence of 27
processes and codes. What the machine understands about you doesn’t 28
actually mean anything to it. Even though it’s really good at what it 29
does. Beverly had a bad temper combined with some serious fire-30
power, she was not someone you wanted to have pissed off at you. She 31
said she’d never felt the gaze of someone so penetrating, discerning, 32
and yet totally empty of care, like she was a puzzle or problem I was 33
figuring out. She said it was thanks to me that she’d discovered the dif-34 sh
ference between being penetrated and really known versus penetrated 35 reg

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1
and just violated — needless to say, these thanks were sarcastic. Some 2
of this was just her emotional makeup — she found it impossible to 3
really end a relationship unless all bridges were burned and things got 4
said that were so devastating that there could be no possibility of a 5
rapprochement to haunt her or prevent her moving on. Nevertheless it 6
penetrated, I never did forget what she said in that letter.

7

Even if being fraudulent and being unable to love were in fact ulti-8
mately the same thing (a possibility that Dr. Gustafson never seemed 9
to consider no matter how many times I set him up to see it), being 10
unable to really love was at least a different model or lens through 11
which to see the problem, plus initially it seemed like a promising way 12
of attacking the fraudulence paradox in terms of reducing the self-13
hatred part that reinforced the fear and the consequent drive to try to 14
manipulate people into providing the very approval I’d denied myself.

15

(Dr. G.’s term for approval was validation. ) This period was pretty 16
much the zenith of my career in analysis, and for a few weeks (during 17
a couple of which I actually didn’t see Dr. Gustafson at all, because 18
some sort of complication in his illness required him to go into the 19
hospital, and when he came back he appeared to have lost not only 20
weight but some kind of essential part of his total mass, and no longer 21
seemed too large for his old desk chair, which still squeaked but now 22
not as loudly, plus a lot of the clutter and papers had been straightened 23
up and put in several brown cardboard banker’s boxes against the wall 24
under the two sad prints, and when I came back in to see him the ab-25
sence of mess was especially disturbing and sad, for some reason) it 26
was true that I felt some of the first genuine hope I’d had since the 27
early, self-deluded part of the experiment with Naperville’s Church of 28
the Flaming Sword of the Redeemer. And yet at the same time these 29
weeks also led more or less directly to my decision to kill myself, al-30
though I’m going to have to simplify and linearize a great deal of inte-31
rior stuff in order to convey to you what actually happened. Otherwise 32
it would take an almost literal eternity to recount it, we already agreed 33
about that. It’s not that words or human language stop having any sh 34
meaning or relevance after you die, by the way. It’s more the specific, reg 35
one-after-the-other temporal ordering of them that does. Or doesn’t.

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It’s hard to explain. In logical terms, something expressed in words 1
will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’

2

All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer 3
a question of which one comes first. Or you could say it’s no longer the 4
series of words but now more like some limit toward which the series 5
converges. It’s hard not to want to put it in logical terms, since they’re 6
the most abstract and universal. Meaning they have no connotation, 7
you don’t feel anything about them. Or maybe imagine everything 8
anybody on earth ever said or even thought to themselves all get-9
ting collapsed and exploding into one large, combined, instantaneous 10
sound — although instantaneous is a little misleading, since it implies 11
other instants before and after, and it isn’t really like that. It’s more like 12
the sudden internal flash when you see or realize something — a sud-13
den flash or whatever of epiphany or insight. It’s not just that it hap-14
pens way faster than you could break the process down and arrange it 15
into English, but that it happens on a scale in which there isn’t even 16
time to be aware of any sort of time at all in which it’s happening, the 17
flash — all you know is that there’s a before and an after, and after-18
ward you’re different. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m just trying 19
to give it to you from several different angles, it’s all the same thing. Or 20
you could think of it as being more a certain configuration of light 21
than a word-sum or series of sounds, too, afterward. Which is in fact 22
true. Or as a theorem’s proof — because if a proof is true then it’s true 23
everywhere and all the time, not just when you happen to say it. The 24
thing is that it turns out that logical symbolism really would be the 25
best way to express it, because logic is totally abstract and outside what 26
we think of as time. It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like. That’s 27
why it’s the logical paradoxes that really drive people nuts. A lot of his-28
tory’s great logicians have ended up killing themselves, that is a fact.

29

And keep in mind this flash can happen anywhere, at any time.

30

Here’s the basic Berry paradox, by the way, if you might want an ex-31
ample of why logicians with incredible firepower can devote their 32
whole lives to solving these things and still end up beating their heads 33
against the wall. This one has to do with big numbers — meaning 34 sh
really big, past a trillion, past ten to the trillion to the trillion, way up 35 reg

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there. When you get way up there, it takes a while even to describe 2
numbers this big in words. ‘The quantity one trillion, four hundred 3
and three billion to the trillionth power’ takes twenty syllables to de-4
scribe, for example. You get the idea. Now, even higher up there in 5
these huge, cosmic-scale numbers, imagine now the very smallest 6
number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables. The 7
paradox is that the very smallest number that can’t be described in under 8
twenty-two syllables, which of course is itself a description of this num-9
ber, only has twenty-one syllables in it, which of course is under 10
twenty-two syllables. So now what are you supposed to do?

11

At the same time, what actually led to it in causal terms, though, oc-12
curred during maybe the third or fourth week that Dr. G. was back 13
seeing patients after his hospitalization. Although I’m not going to 14
pretend that the specific incident wouldn’t strike most people as ab-15
surd or even sort of insipid, as causes go. The truth is just that late at 16
night one night in August after Dr. G.’s return, when I couldn’t sleep 17

(which happened a lot ever since the cocaine period) and was sitting 18
up drinking a glass of milk or something and watching television, flip-19
ping the remote almost at random between different cable stations the 20
way you do when it’s late, I happened on part of an old Cheers episode 21
from late in the series’ run where the analyst character, Frasier (who 22
went on to have his own show), and Lilith, his fiancée and also an an-23
alyst, are just entering the stage set of the underground tavern, and 24

Frasier is asking her how her workday at her office went, and Lilith 25
says, ‘If I have one more yuppie come in and start whining to me about 26
how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up.’ This line got a huge laugh 27
from the show’s studio audience, which indicated that they — and so 28
by demographic extension the whole national audience at home as 29
well — recognized what a cliché and melodramatic type of complaint 30
the inability-to-love concept was. And, sitting there, when I suddenly 31
realized that once again I’d managed to con myself, this time into 32
thinking that this was a truer or more promising way to conceive of the 33
problem of fraudulence — and, by extension, that I’d also somehow sh 34
deluded myself into almost believing that poor old Dr. Gustafson had reg 35
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the real truth was probably more that I was continuing to see him 1
partly out of pity and partly so that I could pretend to myself that I was 2
taking steps to becoming more authentic when in fact all I was doing 3
was jerking a gravely ill shell of a guy around and feeling superior to 4
him because I was able to analyze his own psychological makeup so 5
much more accurately than he could analyze mine — the flash of real-6
izing all this at the very same time that the huge audience-laugh 7
showed that nearly everybody in the United States had probably al-8
ready seen through the complaint’s inauthenticity as long ago as when-9
ever the episode had originally run — all this flashed through my head 10
in the tiny interval it took to realize what I was watching and to 11
remember who the characters of Frasier and Lilith even were, mean-12
ing maybe half a second at most, and it more or less destroyed me, 13
that’s the only way I can describe it, as if whatever hope of any way out 14
of the trap I’d made for myself had been blasted out of midair or 15
laughed off the stage, as if I were one of those stock comic characters 16
who is always both the butt of the joke and the only person not to get 17
the joke — and in sum I went to bed feeling as fraudulent, befogged, 18
hopeless and full of self-contempt as I’d ever felt, and it was the next 19
morning after that that I woke up having decided I was going to kill 20
myself and end the whole farce. (As you probably recall, Cheers was an 21
incredibly popular series, and even in syndication its metro numbers 22
were so high that if a local advertiser wanted to buy time on it the slots 23
cost so much that you pretty much had to build his whole local strat-24
egy around those slots.) I’m compressing a huge amount of what took 25
place in my psyche that next-to-last night, all the different realizations 26
and conclusions I reached as I lay there in bed unable to sleep or even 27
move (no single series’ line or audience-laugh is in and of itself going 28
to constitute a reason for suicide, of course) — although to you I imag-29
ine it probably doesn’t seem all that compressed at all, you’re thinking 30
here’s this guy going on and on and why doesn’t he get to the part 31
where he kills himself and explain or account for the fact that he’s 32
sitting here next to me in a piece of high-powered machinery telling 33
me all this if he died in 1991. Which in fact I knew I would from the 34 sh
moment I first woke up. It was over, I’d decided to end the charade.

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1

After breakfast I called in sick to work and stayed home the whole 2
day by myself. I knew that if I was around anyone I’d automatically 3
lapse into fraudulence. I had decided to take a whole lot of Benadryl 4
and then just as I got really sleepy and relaxed I’d get the car up to top 5
speed on a rural road way out in the extreme west suburbs and drive it 6
head-on into a concrete bridge abutment. Benadryl makes me ex-7
tremely foggy and sleepy, it always has. I spent most of the morning on 8
letters to my lawyer and C.P.A., and brief notes to the creative head 9
and managing partner who had originally brought me aboard at Sami-10
eti and Cheyne. Our creative group was in the middle of some very 11
ticklish campaign preparations, and I wanted to apologize for in any 12
way leaving them in the lurch. Of course I didn’t really feel all that 13
sorry — Samieti and Cheyne was a ballet of fraudulence, and I was 14
well out of it. The note was probably ultimately just so that the people 15
who really mattered at S. & C. would be more apt to remember me as 16
a decent, conscientious guy who it turned out was maybe just a little 17
too sensitive and tormented by his personal demons — ‘Almost too 18
good for this world’ is what I seemed to be unable to keep from fanta-19
sizing a lot of them saying after news of it came through. I did not 20
write Dr. Gustafson a note. He had his own share of problems, and I 21
knew that in the note I’d spend a lot of time trying to seem as if I was 22
being honest but really just dancing around the truth, which was that 23
he was a deeply repressed homosexual or androgyne and had no real 24
business charging patients to let him project his own maladjustments 25
onto them, and that the truth was that he’d be doing himself and 26
everybody else a favor if he’d just go over to Garfield Park and blow 27
somebody in the bushes and try honestly to decide if he liked it or not, 28
and that I was a total fraud for continuing to drive all the way in to 29

River Forest to see him and bat him around like a catnip toy while 30
telling myself there was some possible nonfraudulent point to it. (All 31
of which, of course, even if they weren’t dying of colon cancer right in 32
front of you you still could never actually come out and say to some-33
body, since certain truths might well destroy them — and who has sh 34
that right?)

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I did spend almost two hours before taking the first of the Benadryl 1
composing a handwritten note to my sister Fern. In the note I apolo-2
gized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability 3
to love that had precipitated it might cause her and my stepdad (who 4
was still alive and well and now lived in Marin County, California, 5
where he taught part-time and did community outreach with Marin 6

County’s homeless). I also used the occasion of the letter and all the 7
sort of last-testament urgency associated with it to license apologizing 8
to Fern about manipulating my stepparents into believing that she’d 9
lied about the antique glass bowl in 1967, as well as for half a dozen 10
other incidents and spiteful or fraudulent actions that I knew had 11
caused her pain and that I had felt bad about ever since, but had never 12
really seen any way to broach with her or express my honest regret for.

13

(It turns out there are things that you can discuss in a suicide note that 14
would just be too bizarre if expressed in any other kind of venue.) Just 15
one example of such an incident was during a period in the mid-’70s, 16
when Fern, as part of puberty, underwent some physical changes that 17
made her look chunky for a year or two — not fat, but wide-hipped 18
and bosomy and sort of much more broad than she’d been as a pre-19
teen — and of course she was very, very sensitive about it (puberty also 20
being a time of terrible self-consciousness and sensitivity about one’s 21
body image, obviously), so much so that my stepparents took great 22
pains never to say anything about Fern’s new breadth or even ever to 23
bring up any topics related to eating habits, diet and exercise, etc. And 24

I for my own part never said anything about it either, not directly, but 25

I had worked out all kinds of very subtle and indirect ways to torment 26

Fern about her size in such a way that my stepparents never saw any-27
thing and I could never really be accused of anything that I couldn’t 28
then look all around myself with a shocked, incredulous facial expres-29
sion as if I had no idea what she was talking about, such as just a quick 30
raise of my eyebrow when her eyes met mine as she was having a sec-31
ond helping at dinner, or a quick little quiet, ‘You sure you can fit into 32
that?’ when she came home from the store with a new skirt. The one I 33
still remembered the most vividly involved the second-floor hall of our 34 sh

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1
house, which was in Aurora and was a three-story home (including the 2
basement) but not all that spacious or large, meaning a skinny three-3
decker like so many you always see all crammed together along residen-4
tial streets in Naperville and Aurora. The second-floor hallway, which 5
ran between Fern’s room and the top of the stairway on one end and 6
my room and the second-floor bathroom on the other, was cramped 7
and somewhat narrow, but not anywhere close to as narrow as I would 8
pretend that it was whenever Fern and I passed each other in it, with 9

me squashing my back against the hallway wall and splaying my arms 10
out and wincing as if there would barely be enough room for some-11
body of her unbelievable breadth to squeeze past me, and she would 12
never say anything or even look at me when I did it but would just go 13
on past me into the bathroom and close the door. But I knew it must 14
have hurt her. A little while later, she entered an adolescent period 15
where she hardly ate anything at all, and smoked cigarettes and chewed 16
several packs of gum a day, and used a lot of makeup, and for a while 17
she got so thin that she looked angular and a bit like an insect (although 18
of course I never said that), and I once, through their bedroom’s key-19
hole, overheard a brief conversation in which my stepmother said she 20
was worried because she didn’t think Fern was having her normal time 21
of the month anymore because she had gotten so underweight, and 22
she and my stepfather discussed the possibility of taking her to see 23
some kind of specialist. That period passed on its own, but in the letter 24

I told Fern that I’d always remembered this and certain other periods 25
when I’d been cruel or tried to make her feel bad, and that I regretted 26
them very much, although I said I wouldn’t want to seem so egotisti-27
cal as to think that a simple apology could erase any of the hurt 28

I’d caused her when we were growing up. On the other hand, I also 29
assured her that it wasn’t as if I had gone around for years carrying 30
excessive guilt or blowing these incidents out of all proportion. They 31
were not life-altering traumas or anything like that, and in many ways 32
they were probably all too typical of the sorts of cruelties that kids tend 33
to inflict on each other growing up. I also assured her that neither sh 34
these incidents nor my remorse about them had anything to do with reg 35
my killing myself. I simply said, without going into anything like the 4th Pass Pages

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level of detail I’ve given you (because my purpose in the letter was of 1
course very different), that I was killing myself because I was an essen-2
tially fraudulent person who seemed to lack either the character or the 3
firepower to find a way to stop even after I’d realized my fraudulence 4
and the terrible toll it exacted (I told her nothing about the various 5
different realizations or paradoxes, what would be the point?). I also 6
inserted that there was also a good possibility that, when all was said 7
and done, I was nothing but just another fast-track yuppie who 8
couldn’t love, and that I found the banality of this unendurable, largely 9
because I was evidently so hollow and insecure that I had a patholog-10
ical need to see myself as somehow exceptional or outstanding at all 11
times. Without going into much explanation or argument, I also told 12

Fern that if her initial reaction to these reasons for my killing myself 13
was to think that I was being much, much too hard on myself, then 14
she should know that I was already aware that that was the most likely 15
reaction my note would produce in her, and had probably deliber-16
ately constructed the note to at least in part prompt just that reaction, 17
just the way my whole life I’d often said and done things designed to 18
prompt certain people to believe that I was a genuinely outstanding 19
person whose personal standards were so high that he was far too 20
hard on himself, which in turn made me appear attractively modest 21
and unsmug, and was a big reason for my popularity with so many 22
people in all different avenues of my life — what Beverly-Elizabeth 23

Slane had termed my ‘talent for ingratiation’ — but was nevertheless 24
basically calculated and fraudulent. I also told Fern that I loved her 25
very much, and asked her to relay these same sentiments to Marin 26

County for me.

27

Now we’re getting to the part where I actually kill myself. This oc-28
curred at 9:17 PM on August 19, 1991, if you want the time fixed pre-29
cisely. Plus I’ll spare you most of the last couple hours’ preparations 30
and back-and-forth conflict and dithering, which there was a lot of.

31

Suicide runs so counter to so many hardwired instincts and drives that 32
nobody in his right mind goes through with it without going through 33
a great deal of internal back-and-forth, intervals of almost changing 34 sh
your mind, etc. The German logician Kant was right in this respect, 35 reg

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1
human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring.

2

Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just in-3
struments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are them-4
selves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more 5
important than we are. (Although actually being conscious of this is a 6
whole different matter.) So I won’t really even try to describe the sev-7
eral different times that day when I sat in my living room and had a fu-8
rious mental back-and-forth about whether to actually go through 9
with it. For one thing, it was intensely mental and would take an enor-10
mous amount of time to put into words, plus it would come off as 11
somewhat cliché or banal in the sense that many of the thoughts and 12
associations were basically the same sorts of generic things that almost 13
anyone who’s confronting imminent death will end up thinking. As in, 14

‘This is the last time I will ever tie my shoe,’ ‘This is the last time I will 15
look at this rubber tree on top of the stereo cabinet,’ ‘How delicious 16
this lungful of air right here tastes,’ ‘This is the last glass of milk I’ll 17
ever drink,’ ‘What a totally priceless gift this totally ordinary sight of 18
the wind picking trees’ branches up and moving them around is.’ Or, 19

‘I will never again hear the plaintive sound of the fridge going on in 20
the kitchen’ (the kitchen and breakfast nook are right off my living 21
room), etc. Or, ‘I won’t see the sun come up tomorrow or watch the 22
bedroom gradually undim and resolve, etc.,’ and at the same time 23
trying to summon the memory of the exact way the sun comes up over 24
the humid fields and the wet-looking I-55 ramp that lay due east 25
of my bedroom’s sliding glass door in the morning. It had been a hot, 26
wet August, and if I went through with killing myself I wouldn’t ever 27
get to feel the incremental cooling and drying that starts here around 28
mid-September, or to see the leaves turn or hear them rustle along 29
the edge of the courtyard outside S. & C.’s floor of the building on 30

S. Dearborn, or see snow or put a shovel and bag of sand in the trunk, 31
or bite into a perfectly ripe, ungrainy pear, or put a piece of toilet 32
paper on a shaving cut. Etc. If I went in and went to the bathroom and 33
brushed my teeth it would be the last time I did those things. I sat sh 34
there and thought about that, looking at the rubber tree. Everything reg 35

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seemed to tremble a little, the way things reflected in water will trem-1
ble. I watched the sun begin to drop down over the townhouse devel-2
opments going up south of Darien’s corporation limit on Lily Cache 3

Rd. and realized that I would never see the newest homes’ construc-4
tion and landscaping completed, or that the homes’ white insulation 5
wrap with the trade name TYVEK all over it flapping in all the wind 6
out here would one day have vinyl siding or plate brick and color-7
coordinated shutters over it and I wouldn’t see this happen or be able 8
to drive by and know what was actually written there under all the 9
nice exteriors. Or the breakfast nook window’s view of the big farms’

10
fields next to my development, with the plowed furrows all parallel 11
so that if I lean and line their lines up just right they seem to all rush 12
together toward the horizon as if shot out of something huge. You get 13
the idea. Basically I was in that state in which a man realizes that 14
everything he sees will outlast him. As a verbal construction I know 15
that’s a cliché. As a state in which to actually be, though, it’s some-16
thing else, believe me. Where now every movement takes on a kind 17
of ceremonial aspect. The very sacredness of the world as seen (the 18
same kind of state Dr. G. will try to describe with analogies to oceans 19
and whitecaps and trees, you might recall I mentioned this already).

20

This is literally about one one-trillionth of the various thoughts and 21
internal experiences I underwent in those last few hours, and I’ll spare 22
both of us recounting any more, since I’m aware it ends up seeming 23
somewhat lame. Which in fact it wasn’t, but I won’t pretend it was 24
fully authentic or genuine, either. A part of me was still calculating, 25
performing — and this was part of the ceremonial quality of that last 26
afternoon. Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing 27
sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what 28
a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of 29
this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing 30
the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his break-31
fast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the 32
blondwood table’s surface trembling with sunlight and the man’s hand 33
steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this 34 sh

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1
part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evalu-2
ating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming per-3
formance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already 4
been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first 5
saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes 6
like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only 7
to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and 8
even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical 9
when you consider — as I did, sitting there at the breakfast nook —

10
that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an 11
audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet 12
the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes 13
really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very 14
deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to 15
articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or 16
part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem 17
was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my 18
life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and 19
that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s 20
quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very 21
same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been 22
throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of 23
writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing 24
postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious 25
of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), 26
planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and 27
the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds 28
sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steer-29
ing wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as 30
being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it 31
instant.

32

On Lily Cache, the bridge abutments and sides’ steep banks support 33

State Route 4 (also known as the Braidwood Highway) as it crosses sh 34
overhead on a cement overpass so covered with graffiti that most of it reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 1 7 7
you can’t even read. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of graffiti, in my 1
opinion.) The abutments themselves are just off the road and about as 2
wide as this car. Plus the intersection is isolated way out in the country-3
side around Romeoville, ten or so miles south of the southwest suburbs’

4
limits. It is the true boonies. The only homes are farms set way back 5
from the road and embellished with silos and barns, etc. At night in 6
the summer the dew-point is high and there’s always fog. It’s farm 7
country. I’ve never once passed under 4 here without seeming to be the 8
only thing on either road. The corn high and the fields like a green 9
ocean all around, insects the only real noise. Driving alone under 10
creamy stars and a little cocked scythe of moon, etc. The idea was to 11
have the accident and whatever explosion and fire was involved occur 12
someplace isolated enough that no one else would see it, so that there 13
would be as little an aspect of performance to the thing as I could 14
manage and no temptation to spend my last few seconds trying to 15
imagine what impression the sight and sound of the impact might 16
make on someone watching. I was partly concerned that it might be 17
spectacular and dramatic and might look as if the driver was trying to 18
go out in as dramatic a way as possible. This is the sort of shit we waste 19
our lives thinking about.

20

The ground fog tends to get more intense by the second until it 21
seems that the whole world is just what’s in your headlights’ reach.

22

High beams don’t work in fog, they only make things worse. You can 23
go ahead and try them but you’ll see what happens, all they do is light 24
up the fog so it seems even denser. That’s kind of a minor paradox, that 25
sometimes you can actually see farther with low beams than high. All 26
right — and there’s the construction and all the flapping TYVEK

27
wrap on houses that if you really do do it you’ll never see anyone live 28
in. Although it won’t hurt, it really will be instant, I can tell you that 29
much. The fields’ insects are almost deafening. If the corn’s high like 30
this and you watch as the sun sets you can practically watch them rise 31
up out of the fields like some great figure’s shadow rising. Mostly mos-32
quitoes, I don’t know what all they are. It’s a whole insect universe in 33
there that none of us will ever see or know anything about. Plus you’ll 34 sh

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1
notice the Benadryl doesn’t help all that much once you’re under way.

2

That whole idea was probably ill-conceived.

3

All right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through 4
the whole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning 5
what it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants 6
to know. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through 7
with it or not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think 8

I’m going to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one 9
thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know 10
the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes 11
through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let any-12
one know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what 13
seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and 14
yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through 15
one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if 16
we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

17

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you 18
think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infi-19
nitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your 20
life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible after-21
ward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward 22
now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in 23
which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized 24

English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s 25
room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because 26
listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes 27
slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make 28
out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open 29
anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do 30
you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, 31
juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash 32
through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these?

33

Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a sh 34
fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 1 7 9
looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?*

1

The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That 2
it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-3
bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the in-4
finities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you 5
a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a 6
fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know 7
this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know 8
it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the 9
same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of 10
others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not 11

English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

12

13

14

*

15

One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘pres-16
ent’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind 17
it. As if the present were this car — nice car by the way — and the past is the road 18
we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten 19
to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later 20
a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what 21
rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or 22
rate — which we do, it’s the only way you can — 95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a 23
minute, etc. — how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One 24
second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if 25
there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call 26
the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s 27
front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples 28
and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column 29
comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly 30
wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly 31
conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped 32
into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much 33
to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between im-34 sh
pact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain — THE END.

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1

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

2

But it wouldn’t have made you a fraud to change your mind. It 3
would be sad to do it because you think you somehow have to.

4

It won’t hurt, though. It will be loud, and you’ll feel things, but 5
they’ll go through you so fast that you won’t even realize you’re feeling 6
them (which is sort of like the paradox I used to bounce off Gustafson —

7
is it possible to be a fraud if you aren’t aware you’re a fraud?). And the 8
very brief moment of fire you’ll feel will be almost good, like when 9
your hands are cold and there’s a fire and you hold your hands out 10
toward it.

11

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that for-12
ever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe 13
just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective.

14

The big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seem-15
ingly endless back-and-forth between us has come and gone and come 16
again in the very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner, 17
and your stepfather packs some pipe tobacco down with his thumb, 18
and Angela Mead uses an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair 19
off her blouse, and Melissa Betts inhales to respond to something she 20
thinks her husband just said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of 21
idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook 22
and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of 23
himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my 24
death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991, like what 25
sorts of pain or problems might have driven the guy to get in his electric-26
blue Corvette and try to drive with all that O.T.C. medication in 27
his bloodstream — David Wallace happening to have a huge and to-28
tally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and im-29
pressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with 30
the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic 31
and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as 32
well as of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or 33
expression on this guy’s part whenever David Wallace struck out look-sh 34
ing in Legion ball or said something dumb at a party, and of how im-reg 35
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like an actual living person instead of the dithering, pathetically self-1
conscious outline or ghost of a person David Wallace knew himself 2
back then to be. Verily a fair-haired, fast-track guy, whom in the very 3
best human tradition David Wallace had back then imagined as happy 4
and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there 5
was something deeply wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with any-6
body else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to 7
figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even margin-8
ally normal or acceptable U.S. male, all this stuff clanging around in 9

David Wallace ’81’s head every second and moving so fast that he 10
never got a chance to catch hold and try to fight or argue against it or 11
even really even feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in 12
his real parents’ kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the 13
ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right 14
and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his 15
witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs 16
in the grass along the sides of the Legion field (all of whom already 17
probably saw through the sham from the outset anyway, he was pretty 18
sure) — in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the second his 19
lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had 20
seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have 21
driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful 22
way — with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you 23
can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary 24
and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to pro-25
hibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole 26
line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever 27
getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of 28
course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally in-29
describable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than 30
he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental 31
part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it 32
levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’

33

34 sh

[→NMN.80.418]

35 reg

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Phil osophy and the Mirr or of Nature

1

Then just as I was being released in late 1996 Mother won a small 2
product liability settlement and used the money to promptly go get 3
cosmetic surgery on the crow’s feet around her eyes. However the cos-4
metic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her 5
face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times. No doubt 6
you know the way an individual’s face can look in the split second be-7
fore they start to scream. That was now Mother. It turns out that it 8
only takes a minuscule slip of the knife one way or the other in this 9
procedure and now you look like someone in the shower scene of 10

Hitchcock. So then she went and had more cosmetic surgery to try 11
and correct it. But the second surgeon also botched it and the appear-12
ance of fright became even worse. Especially around the mouth this 13
time. She asked for my candid reaction and I felt our relation de-14
manded nothing less. Her crow’s feet indeed were things of the past 15
but now her face was a chronic mask of insane terror. Now she looked 16
more like Elsa Lanchester when Elsa Lanchester first lays eyes on her 17
prospective mate in the 1935 classic of the studio system Bride of 18

Frankenstein. Now after the second botched procedure even dark 19
glasses were no longer of much help as there was still the matter of the sh 20
gaping mouth and mandibular distention and protrudant tendons and reg 21
so forth. So now she was involved in still another lawsuit and when she 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 8 3
regularly took the bus to the attorney she had chosen’s office I would 1
escort her. We rode at the bus’s front in one of the two longer seat areas 2
which are aligned sideways instead of frontally. We had learned 3
through experimental method to not sit further back in the rows of 4
more regular seats which face frontally because of the way certain fel-5
low passengers would visibly react when they board and perform the 6
seemingly reflexive action as they start moving down the aisle to a seat 7
of briefly scanning the faces facing them from the narrow rows of seats 8
extended backward through the bus and would suddenly see Mother’s 9
distended and soundlessly screaming face appearing to gaze back at 10
them in mindless terror. And there were a smattering of such cases and 11
interactions before I applied myself to the problem and evolved a more 12
workable right-angle habitat. Nothing in sources sufficiently explains 13
why people perform the scan of faces when they first board though 14
anecdotally it appears to be a defensive reflex species-wide. Nor am I 15
even a good specimen to sit with if she wanted to be inconspicuous be-16
cause of the way my head physically towers over all others in the crowd.

17

Physically I am a large specimen and have distinctive coloration, to 18
look at me you would never know I have such a studious bend. There 19
also are the goggles worn and specially constructed gloves for field 20
work, it is far from impossible to find specimens on a public bus even 21
though surveys as yet have yielded no fruit. No it is not as if actively 22
speaking I could be said to enjoy riding with her while she exerts all her 23
effort trying to not allow the embarrassment of the chronic expression 24
to make it even more frightened-looking. Or that I can truthfully look 25
forward to sitting in a would-be reception area reading Rotary news-26
letters two times per week. It is not as if I do not have other things and 27
studies to occupy my time. But what is one to do, the terms of my pro-28
bation involve Mother’s sworn statement to assume liability as my cus-29
todian. Yet anyone observing the reality of life together since the 30
second procedure would agree the reality was the other way around 31
because due to despondency and fear of others’ reactions to it she is all 32
but incapable of leaving the house and can answer the attorney’s 33
wheedling summonses to his office only with my presence and protec-34 sh
tion throughout the long ride. Also I have never liked direct sunlight 35 reg

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1
and burn with great ease. This time the attorney smells a windfall 2
profit if and when he can get Mother in a courtroom and let a jury see 3
for itself the consequence of the cosmetic surgeons’ negligence. I also 4
carry a briefcase at all times since my own case. One today would call 5
a briefcase a sematic accessory to warn off potential predators. Since the 6
original negligence I have primarily immunized myself to Mother’s 7
chronic expression of horror but am even so capable of being made un-8
comfortable by some’s reaction to us visually, it takes some getting use 9
to. A bus’s circular steering wheel is not only larger but is set at an an-10
gle of incidence more horizontal than any taxi, private car or police 11
cruiser’s wheel I have seen and the driver turns the wheel with a broad 12
all-body motion which is resemblant of someone’s arm sweeping all 13
the material off a table or surface in a sudden fit of emotion. And the 14
special perpendicular seats in the bus’s anterior segment comprise a 15
good vantage from which to watch the driver wrestle with the bus. Nor 16
did I have anything against the boy in any way. Nor is there anything 17
in any state, county or local ordinance restricting what varieties you 18
can study or stipulating in any way that cultivating more than a certain 19
number thereof constitutes reckless endangerment or a hazard to the 20
community at large. If the appointment is AM then the driver some-21
times keeps a newspaper folded in a hutch by the automatic coin or to-22
ken box which he tries to peruse while idling at stoplights although it 23
is not as if he will get much of his daily reading done in this way. He 24
was only nine which was repeatedly stressed as if his age in any way 25
strengthened any charge of negligence on my part. A common Asian 26
species not only has the sematic ventral insignia but a red line straight 27
down the back, leading to its indigenous name, Red line on back. Stan-28
dardized testing has confirmed that I have both a studious bend and 29
outstanding retention in study which she would not even deny. I have 30
evolved the theory that the driver peruses his newspaper and reluc-31
tantly refolds it and replaces it in the hutch on green to signal the par-32
alyzed dislike he feels about his paid job and a court-appointed 33
psychologist might diagnose the newspaper as a cry for help. Our cus-sh 34
tomary habitat now is the lateral seat that is on the same side as the reg 35
bus’s door minimizing any likelihood that someone boarding will have 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 8 5
a sudden frontal view of her expression. This too being a lesson learned 1
the old-fashioned way. The only lighthearted interlude was that when 2
they brought her the mirror and the first surgery’s bandages came off 3
then one could at first not ascertain whether the face’s expression was 4
a reaction to what she saw in the mirror or if it itself was what she saw 5
and this was the stimulus causing the noises. Mother herself who is a 6
decent-hearted if vain, bitter and timid female specimen but who is 7
not a colossus of the roads of the human intellect, to put it frankly, 8
could herself not ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was the 9
response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to 10
what in the mirror if the response itself was the expression. Causing no 11
end of confusion before they got her sedated. The surgeon was leaning 12
forward against the wall with his face to the wall a behavioral reaction 13
which signaled, Yes there was an objective problem in the surgery’s re-14
sults. The bus is because we have no car, a situation this new attorney 15
says he can now remedy in spades. The whole thing was carefully con-16
tained and screened off and even the state conceded that if he had not 17
been up fiddling around on the roof of someone else’s garage there is 18
no way he could have come in contact with them in any form. This 19
factoring into the terms of probation. At the outset too it was of inter-20
est on the bus to see the way passengers upon catching any glimpse of 21
her expression will by reflex turn to look out whichever of the bus win-22
dows Mother appears to them to be responding to with such facial 23
alarm. Her fear of the phylum arthropodae is long-standing which is 24
why she never ventured in the garage and could contend ignorantia 25
facti excusat, a point of law. Ironically also hence her constant spraying 26
of R - - d© despite my repeatedly advising her that these species are 27
long-resistant to resmethrin and trans-d allethrin. The active ingredi-28
ents in R - - d©. Granted widow bites are a bad way to go because of the 29
potent neurotoxin involved prompting one physician all the way in 30

1935 to comment, I do not recall having seen more abject pain manifested 31
in any other medical or surgical condition whereas the painless loxoceles 32
or recluse toxin only causes necrosis and severe sloughing of the area.

33

Recluses however exhibiting a native aggression which widow species 34 sh
never share unless actively disturbed. Which he did. The bus’s interior 35 reg

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1
is flesh-colored plastic with promotions for legal and medical services 2
arrayed above the windows. Many par Español. The ventilation varies 3
according to such criteria as fullness. The phobia becomes so extreme 4
she will carry a can in her bag of knitting until I always find it before 5
leaving and say firmly, No. In one or two regrettable moments of in-6
sensitivity also I have joked about taking the bus all the way through 7
into Studio City and environs and auditioning Mother as an extra in 8
one of the many films nowadays in which crowds of extras are paid to 9
look upwards in terror of a special effect which is only later inserted into 10
the film through computer-aided design. Which I sincerely regret, af-11
ter all I’m all the support she has. To my mind however it is quite a 12
stretch to say that an area of weakness in a twenty-year-old garage roof 13
equals failing to exercise due diligence or care. Whereas Hitchcock 14
and other classics used only primitive special effects but to more terrify-15
ing results. To say nothing of him trespassing and having no business 16
up there anyhow. In the deposition. To say nothing of claiming that 17
not foreseeing a trespasser falling through a portion of a garage roof 18
and wholesale wrecking a complex and expensive tempered-glass con-19
tainer complex and crushing or otherwise disturbing a great many 20
specimens and inevitably, due to the mishap, leading to some partial 21
decontainment and penetration of the surrounding neighborhood 22
amounts to my failing due exercise of caution. This then being my ar-23
gument for preferring the classics of older film terror. Declining to 24
ever place the briefcase under the seat I keep it on my lap throughout 25
the frequent rides. My position throughout the proceedings was a nat-26
ural deep regret for the kid and his family but that the misfortune of 27
what happened as a result did not justify hysterical or trumped-up 28
charges of any kind. Quality counsel would have been able to translate 29
this reasoning into effective legal language in legal briefs and argu-30
ments in camera. But the reality is counsel proves to be abundant if you 31
are the aggressor but not if you are merely prey, they’re parasites, day-32
time TV is infested with their commercials urging the viewer to wait 33
patiently for the opportunity to attack, handled on a percentage basis, no sh 34
fee of any kind if you are the aggressor! One could see them come right reg 35
out of the woodwork after Mother’s original product liability. Objec-4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 8 7
tively no one even knows how the widow’s neurotoxin works to pro-1
duce such abject pain and suffering in larger mammals, science is baf-2
fled as to evolutionarily what advantage there is for a venom well in 3
excess of required for this unique but common specimen to subdue its 4
prey. Science is often confounded by both the luminous widow and the 5
more average-looking recluse. Plus the ones who say they will really 6
get down in the dirt of the trench and really fight for you are sleazeballs 7
such as this supposed Van Nuys negligence specialist Mother has lined 8
up. From another context the hysteria would have almost been humor-9
ous as any environs as unkempt as our surrounding neighborhood will 10
already be naturally infested with them in all the clutter and run-down 11
homes. Clutter’s abundant shelter being their native element. Speci-12
mens of widely varied size and aggression are to be found in basement 13
corners, beneath shelves of sheds, garages and linen closets, behind 14
large appliances and in the innumerable crevices of cast-away litter 15
and unkempt weeds. Widows in particular favoring ill-lit right angles 16
for their web’s construction. In the right angles of most structures’

17
shaded sides up under the eaves for example in summer months. If you 18
know what to look for. Hence the clear goggles and polyurethane 19
gloves are indispensable even in the shower stall whose right angles 20
can be infested in just so many few absent hours. Widows being long 21
noted as industrious weavers. Or outside the moving bus in the palm 22
trees they stand so naively beneath in the shade to await their buses, 23

Rent a ladder and carefully examine the undersides of those fronds some-24
time! one is tempted to shout through the window. Once conditioned 25
to know what to look for they are often observable everywhere hiding 26
in plain sight. Patience being another hallmark. This habitat and also 27
further inland both contain the more exotic variety of red widow 28
whose ventral hourglass is brown or tan as well as one of the hemi-29
sphere’s two smaller brown or gray species in the further-inland desert 30
regions which prefer arid climes. The red widow’s red lacking however 31
the spellbinding lustre of the familiar household black variety, it is more 32
a dull or dullish red, and they are rare and both specimens escaped in 33
his mishap and have not been reacquired. Here as so often in the 34 sh
arthropod realm the female dominates as well. To be frank Mother’s 35 reg

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1
pain and suffering appeared somewhat inflated in the original product 2
liability claim and in reality she coughs less than during her own de-3
position. Far be it from me to deny her however due to the thickness of 4
blood. Sitting at home in dark glasses as ever knitting while monitoring 5
my activities her mouth parts working idly. Scientifically however a large 6
mammal would have to inhale a great deal of trans-d allethrin for per-7
manent damage to result which as predicted did impact the modesty 8
of her settlement. The true facts are less than a centimeter either way is 9
the difference between smooth youthful eyes and the chronic expression 10
of Vivian Leigh in the shower in the 1960 classic of that name. The 11
briefcase is aerated at select tiny points in each corner and 2.5 dozen 12
polystyrene chocks distributed throughout the interior can protect the 13
contents from jostling or trauma. Her new case’s complexity is exactly 14
how to distribute the liability claim between the original surgeon 15
whose negligence gave her the frightened eyes and forehead and the 16
second whose repair’s callous butchery left her with a chronic mask of 17
crazed suffering and terror that now can fortunately only possibly cause 18
incidents in the case of someone in the opposing lateral seat. Directly 19
behind the driver. Because the sole exposure to liability of Mother’s 20
placement here is that any such individual in the opposing seat hence 21
will have the vantage of gazing frontally at us throughout the ride. And 22
on select occasions such a specimen will, if predisposed by environmen-23
tal conditioning or instinctive temperament, appear to assume that the 24
stimulus causing her expression is me. That with my size and distinctive 25
mark that I have kidnapped this horror-stricken middle-aged female or 26
behaved in a somehow threatening manner toward her saying, Ma’am 27
is there some problem or, Why don’t you just leave the lady alone as she 28
sinks lower in her knitted scarf in self-discomfort over their reaction 29
but my own evolved response is to calmly smile and raise my gloves in 30
puzzled bemusement as if to say, Why who knows for certain why anyone 31
wears the face they do my good fellow let us not leap to conclusions based on 32
incomplete data! Her original liability was that a worker at the assembly 33
plant actually glued a can’s nozzle on facing backward, I submit a sh 34
clear-cut case of failing to exercise due care. The fifth condition of the reg 35
settlement being to never under any circumstances mention the trade 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 8 9
name of the common household spray in any connection to the liability 1
suit which I am resolved to honor on her behalf, the law is the law.

2

Respecting mating I have been on dates but there was insufficient 3
chemistry, Mother is blackly cynical in matters of the heart referring 4
to the entire spectrum of mating rituals as a disaster waiting to happen.

5

Recently as the bus crossed Victory Boulevard as I looked down to 6
check the status I saw accidentally protruding from one of the ventila-7
tion holes at the case’s corner the slender tip of a black jointed foreleg, it 8
was moving about slightly and possessed the same luminous coloration 9
as the rest of the specimens, moving tentatively in an exploratory way.

10

Unseen against the more inorganic black of the briefcase’s side. Unseen 11
by Mother whose reaction’s expression I must lightheartedly say would 12
not change in the least, once you get accustomed it is like a poker face.

13

Even if I opened up the entire case right here on my lap and tipped it 14
out into the central aisle allowing rapid spreading out and penetration 15
of the contained environs. The worse-case scenario only occurring if 16
one confronts some young duo of punks or hostile organisms in the op-17
posing seat whose reaction to Mother might be an aggressive chal-18
lenging stare or aggressive, What the f--k are you looking at. It is for 19
such a case that I am her sematic accessory or escort, with my impos-20
ing size and goggles one can tell beneath the gaping rictus she believes 21

I can protect her which is good.

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34 sh

35 reg

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Oblivion

1

Fortunately, Hope’s stepfather and myself had just completed the 2

‘front’ nine and were washing our balls in the Tenth tee’s device when 3
the thunderstorm broke, and I was able to get him into the Club-house 4
before the worst of the wind and the rain of the storm commenced, 5
and to get the cart checked back in while my stepfather-in-law dried 6
off, changed clothes and telephoned his wife about another adjust-7
ment in his morning schedule due to our having gotten ‘in’ only nine 8
holes. The old fellow had originally wanted to tee off at almost dawn, 9
and I had found myself unable to explain why this could represent a 10
possibly untenable hardship without opening the whole ‘can of worms’

11
of the conflict in front of Hope, who was there at the prior evening’s 12
restaurant’s table as we finalized arrangements; and now, in the Club-13
house vestibule, there was an air of, as it were, ‘triumphant’ grievance 14
in the retired M.D.’s posture at the bank of phones when I found him 15
there, freshly changed except for his visor and spikes, which he had 16
also worn when driving us to the Raritan Club at 7:40 A.M., insisting 17
on our taking his red Saab coupe pace the fact that it was my own ve-18
hicle which had the ‘Member’ parking sticker, resulting in administra-19
tive delays in parking which caused us to miss our scheduled ‘Tee sh 20
time,’ adding to the incompleteness of our round.

reg 21

Then we were seated together, Hope’s stepfather and myself, at a lng 22
window-side table in the club’s 19th Hole Room, picking small salty 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 1 9 1
things out of the table’s bowl as we waited for Jack Bogen’s youngest 1
daughter to bring the draft lagers which ‘Father’ (which is what Hope, 2
together with all of her ‘true’ and ‘step-’ siblings and their respective 3
spouses, addressed him as, though I myself had my own Father in 4

Wilkes Barre, and, in actual practice, made a point of attempting to 5
avoid addressing Dr. Sipe directly whenever possible) had ordered.

6

The old septuagenarian had again made a point of referring to a draft 7

Feigenspan lager as ‘[a] P.O.N.,’ and I had therefore had to explain the 8
slang term’s origins to Audrey Bogen while ‘Father’ examined his Ger-9
man wrist watch and held it to one ear, expressing concern over the 10
rainstorm’s moisture damage and referring once more to the watch’s 11
retail price. Heavy, torrential rain struck the 19th Hole Room’s large 12

‘bay window’ and ran down the leaded panes in lustrous sheets which 13
overlapped complexly, and the sound on the glass and canvas awnings 14
was much like a mechanized or ‘automated’ Car wash; and, with all of 15
the fine, imported wood and dim light and scents of beverages and 16
after shave and hair oil and fine, imported tobaccos and men’s damp 17
sports wear, the 19th Hole felt both warm and cozy and ‘snug’ and yet 18
also somewhat over-confined, not unlike the lap of a dominant adult.

19

It was approximately then that a fresh wave of disorientation and, in a 20
manner of speaking, distorted or ‘altered’ sensory perception from 21
nearly seven months of severe sleep disturbance struck once more, as it 22
had on the Fourth fairway with such embarrassing results, the symp-23
toms and sensations of which were nearly impossible to describe, 24
except perhaps to say that when these periods hit they were not unlike 25
a cerebral earthquake or ‘tsunami,’ an, as it were, ‘neural protest’ or 26

‘-revolt’ against the conditions of emotional stress and chronic sleep 27
deprivation which they had been forced to function under. At the pre-28
sent time, everything in the 19th Hole’s respective colors seemed sud-29
denly to brighten uncontrollably and become over-saturant, the visual 30
environment appeared to faintly pulse or throb, and individual objects 31
appeared, paradoxically, both to recede and become far-away and at 32
the same time to come into an unnatural visual focus and become very, 33
very precisely configured and lined, not unlike scenes in a Victorian oil.

34 sh

(Hope and her younger stepsister, Meredith, had once co-managed a 35 reg

Gallery together in Colts Neck.) The Raritan Club’s distinctive 36 lg

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1
escutcheon and motto, for instance, appeared both to recede and come 2
into an almost excruciant focus on ‘the Hole’’s opposite wall, beneath 3
a perceptually tiny stuffed tarpon whose every imbricate scale seemed 4
outlined or limned in an almost ‘Photo realist’ detail. There was the 5
more quotidian dizziness and nausea, also. I gripped the small maple 6
table’s ‘burled’ or beveled sides in a show of distress as ‘Father’ pored 7
over the contents of the snack bowl, touching the contents of the bowl 8
with his finger as he stirred them about. It was then at which I tried to 9
bring up in conversation to Dr. Sipe (Sipe being my wife’s original or 10

‘maiden’ name), in some kind of ‘male-’ or ‘familial’ confidence, the 11
strange and absurdly frustrating marital conflict between Hope and 12
myself over the issue of my so-called ‘snoring.’

13

Whereupon: ‘Do not even take up my time in mentioning this, as 14
any man knows what an absurd and trivial issue it is compared to many 15
other marital conflicts and problems. In other words, “de minimis non 16
curat,” or, the whole matter is, ultimately, beneath my notice’ — for such 17
was the gist or ‘thrust’ of the dismissive hand gesture which Hope’s 18
stepfather made in response to my broaching of this delicate subject, 19
making the derisive gesture which all of my wife’s other siblings still 20
associate with him from throughout their youths, and which her eldest 21
stepbrother, Paul, a successful entrepreneur in automated, out-sourced 22

Medical and Dental billing, can imitate so uncannily to this day when 23
our families all get together over the Holiday season at Paul and his 24
wife Theresa’s extraordinary vacation home in Sea Girt, where the 25

Winter surf booms against the rocks of the light-house tower which 26
the Coast Guard closed once G.P.S. or ‘satellite’ navigation rendered 27
its functions redundant, and where all of the both ‘true’ and ‘step-’ sib-28
lings and their spouses and families will gather in Norwegian sweaters 29
with insulated thermi of hot cider on the basalt outcroppings amid 30
gulls’ pulsing cries to watch the booming surf and the distant lights 31
of the Point Pleasant ferry moving north-ward up the Inter Coastal 32

Waterway towards Staten Island, the vistas all iron greys and profound 33
maroons and, privately to myself, desolate in the extreme. Consciously sh 34
or otherwise, it is a hand gesture ideally designed to make its recipient reg 35
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and my place in the overall ‘family dynamic’ had never been what one 1
would call well disguised. Audrey Bogen, whom our own Audrey had 2
played closely with as small children before Jack Bogen’s affairs had 3
unraveled and their lives took such dramatically different paths, and 4
was now already an ‘unwed’ mother and a career beverage waitress at 5
the Raritan Club’s 19th Hole (she was, to many of the nubile adoles-6
cents in our own Audrey’s peer circle, a kind of cautionary tale, one 7
of her children being plainly inter-racial), now appeared with our 8

Feigenspan lagers on a small, oaken blonde-wood tray, and Hope’s 9
stepfather exercised a prerogative exclusive to men of advanced age 10
with young women, which was to look frankly and speculatively at the 11
young, voluptuous waitress’s face, uniform and physical body as she set 12
down the frosted steins and stated her intentions to bring us more 13
snack mix. ‘Father’’s advanced age and physical senescence, in other 14
words, making the frankness of his gaze — which, in Wilkes Barre 15
during my own youth, was termed ‘Look[ing] her over’ — appear in-16
genuous, child-like and apparently almost ‘innocent’ or harmless to 17
young women instead of salacious or lewd. This was a quality (or, as it 18
were, lack of it) which I myself was, of course, all too conscious or 19
aware of, since, as our own Audrey had entered the adolescence whose 20
onset, in contemporary times’ girls, seems to become earlier all the 21
time, and had physically ‘matured’ or (in my wife’s phrase) ‘fill[ed] out,’

22
so also, of course, had the other members of the peer group whom she 23

‘hung’ around with or brought to the house or along on seaside vaca-24
tions and\or inland canoe trips in June, July or early August; and, in 25
the case of some of the more prematurely ‘mature’ or voluptuous of 26
these peers, the conflict between the natural urge or instinctual drive 27
to look at them as would any adult, ‘red-blooded’ man, v. the obvious 28
social restrictions erected by my role as their friend’s adoptive father, 29
became, in some cases, so awkward or painful that I could scarcely 30
bring myself to look at or scarcely even to acknowledge them at all, a 31
phenomenon which our Audrey, not surprisingly, rarely even noticed, 32
but which sometimes vexed Hope to the point that once or twice, dur-33
ing marital arguments, she would mock my pained confusion, and 34 sh
would aver that she’d prefer it — or the term she used might more 35 reg

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aptly have been that she would ‘respect’ it more — if I would simply, 2
openly ogle or leer rather than the stricken, affectedly casual avoidance 3
which I feigned as if I expected it to fool anyone with eyes in their head 4
as they watched my sad pantomime with pity and disgust. Because of 5
the severe sleep disturbance, discord with Hope and trouble in my Dept.

6
of the company for which I served as Assistant Systems Supervisor 7

(which provided out-sourced data and document storage facilities and 8
systems for a number of small- and mid-sized insurance providers in 9
the Mid-Atlantic region), my chronic distress had reached the point at 10
which sometimes I felt near tears, which, of course, in the 19th Hole 11
with Hope’s stepfather, would be an unthinkable happen-stance.

12

Sometimes, often while driving, I feared that I was going to have an 13
infarction. Next, in a predictable yet far more disturbing stage of the 14
wave of disorientation, came the appearance of a strange, static, hallu-15
cinatory tableau or mental ‘shot,’ ‘scene,’ Fata morgana or ‘vision’ of a 16
public telephone in an airport or commuter rail terminal’s linear row 17
or ‘bank’ of public phones, ringing. Travelers are hurrying laterally past 18
the row of phones, some bearing or pulling ‘carry on’ luggage and other 19
personal possessions, walking or hurrying past while the telephone, 20
which remains at the center of the view of the scene or tableau, rings 21
on and on, persistently, but is unanswered, with none of the ‘bank’ of 22
phones’ other phones in use and none of the air travelers or commuters 23
acknowledging or even so much as glancing at the ringing phone, about 24
which there is suddenly something terribly ‘moving’ or poignant, 25
forlorn, melancholic or even foreboding, an endlessly ringing and 26
unanswered public phone, all of which appears or seems to occur both 27
endlessly and in, as it were, ‘no-time,’ and is accompanied by an 28
incongruous odor of saffron.

29

Hope’s stepfather, a career Medical executive for Prudential Insur-30
ance, Inc. — or, ‘The Rock,’ as it is often popularly known — as his 31
own father before him evidently was, as well, as well as being a ‘Fourth 32

Ward’ historical district native born and bred, knew Feigenspan lager 33
by its original trademark, ‘Pride of Newark’ (or, ‘P.O.N.’), and made sh 34
rather a point of referring to it in no other way, also affecting to brush reg 35
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city’s ‘working-’men, reaching then into a pocket of his vest and pro-1
ducing his cigar case and clip, as well as his slim, modernistic gold 2
lighter, a gift from his wife (and accordingly inscribed), and commenc-3
ing the ritual of preparing to smoke an expensive Cohiba cigar with 4
his draft lager, gesturing peremptorily in the direction of the bar for an 5
ash-tray, at which juncture I noted once more how exceedingly thin, 6
sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and 7
hand in the air appeared. His ears, which had always been quite large 8
or protrusive, were flushed from recent exertion. When asked if, upon 9
reflection, he thought a cigar this early in the day was perhaps such a 10
good idea, Dr. Sipe, who was due to turn age 76 this coming July 6th 11

(his birth stone was known to be ‘the Ruby’), responded that the sole 12
indicator of his desiring my input on his personal habits would consist 13
in his explicitly coming to me and requesting it, at which I cleared my 14
throat slightly and shrugged or smiled, avoiding Audrey Bogen’s dark 15

(our own Audrey’s being grey-green or, in certain lights, ‘Hazel’) eyes 16
as she placed on the table a small bowl of very shiny nuts and an ash-17
tray of clear glass on whose bottom was reproduced the Raritan Club’s 18
escutcheon, which Dr. Sipe pulled closer and rotated slightly to satisfy 19
some obscure criteria in his ritual for enjoying a cigar. Twice already, I 20
had yawned so violently that a popping noise and sudden, as it were, 21

‘stabbing’ pain manifested just beneath my left ear. ‘Father,’ whose 22
physical health’s minutiae were a topic of endless colloquy among his 23
different children, had apparently suffered a number of tiny, highly 24
localized strokes over the previous several years — or, in the language 25
of Health Plan underwriting, ‘Transient ischemic accidents’ — which 26

Hope’s younger brother, ‘Chip’ (whose actual given name is Chester) 27
had confirmed, in the bland, almost affectless or subdued way evidently 28
characteristic of practicing Neurologists everywhere, were almost ‘Par’

29
for the ‘course’ for a septuagenarian male of Dr. Sipe’s history and con-30
dition, and were, evidently, individually of little account, producing 31
little more in the way of symptomology than transient dizziness or 32
perceptual distortion. Empirically, the evident result of this was that 33

‘Father’ was now one of the particular sort of well to do elderly (or, as 34 sh
some prefer, ‘Senior’) men who appear well preserved and even still 35 reg

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somewhat distinguished from a certain distance away, but whose eyes, 2
on closer proximity, reveal a subtle lack of focus, and whose facial ex-3
pression or affect appears to be, in some subtle but unmistakable way, 4

‘off,’ resulting in a perpetual ‘queer look’ or mien which sometimes 5
frightened his younger grandchildren. (This notwithstanding the fact 6
that our own Audrey, now 19 and Dr. Sipe’s second oldest grandchild, 7
had, on the other hand, never once reported being frightened of or by 8
her ‘Greatfather [a childhood sobriquet which had stuck],’ who had, in 9
turn, addressed Audrey as — sans any detectable trace of irony or 10
awareness — ‘My little Princess,’ and had, together with his wife, 11

‘spoiled’ Audrey with such lavish and excessive indulgence as to some-12
times arouse tensions between Hope and this latest Mrs. Sipe, the two 13
of whom were not [as Hope would have it] the ‘closest of friends’ to 14
begin with. [By mutual and unspoken consensus, our Audrey custom-15
arily addressed Hope as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’ and myself as ‘Randall,’

16

‘Randy,’ or, when angry or trying to make some ironic point in the 17
perennial struggle for youthful control v. independence, as ‘Mr. Napier,’

18

‘Mr. and Mrs. Napier’ or (with decided sarcasm) as ‘the Dynamic 19

Duo.’]) Besides his forehead’s four distracting, pre-cancerous spots, or 20
lesions or ‘keratonesis,’ it was only in recent years, too, that Hope’s 21
stepfather’s mouth had developed the habit of continuing to move 22
slightly after he had ceased speaking, either as if savoring the words’

23
taste or silently reprising them, and these movements sometimes re-24
minded one of some type of small animal which has been struck or run 25
over and continues to writhe wetly in the road-way, which was, to say 26
the least, disconcerting. There is also the issue or matter of ‘Father’’s 27
bowed upper back and consequent jutting head, which causes him to 28
appear to be thrusting his face and mouth forward directly at one in an 29
aggressive, almost predatory fashion, which is also disconcerting, 30
which may be a matter of geriatric posture or disc compression or else 31
the beginning of an actual ‘hunch-back’ or ‘hump,’ which he is evi-32
dently very vain and sensitive about and which no one in the ‘family’ is 33
ever under any circumstances permitted to mention except his wife, sh 34
who will suddenly touch or push at his jutting head impatiently and reg 35
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makes everyone at the table uncomfortable. Then an extremely brief 1
and almost ‘strobe’-like associative tableau in which Hope’s stepfather 2
and herself, at some past or distantly prior point in time, are seated 3
together in an unfamiliar coupe or sports car which is speeding along 4
a rural or markedly under-maintained inland State route in the sultry 5
light of August or late July, and an interior scene of a somewhat 6
younger and unescharotic ‘Father,’ with his iron grey hair, small, cruel 7
mustache and thin, calf-skin gauntlets or ‘driving’ gloves, driving the 8
vehicle, as well as views of the exterior vistas and divided center or me-9
dian line distending and rushing past at an unnatural rate of speed, as 10
if the vehicle were traveling far too fast for extant road conditions, and 11
of a younger and noticeably more lissome and voluptuous Hope apply-12
ing facial products in the small, inset mirror of the sun shade or visor 13
as ‘Father,’ posture erect and distinguished and gazing stolidly ahead at 14
the road, assures her that it isn’t so much dislike or ‘disapproval’ of the 15
fellow per se, while the powerful vehicle recedes up ahead in the radi-16
ant late Summer haze, the whole brief tableau or interior ‘vision’ or 17
shot so rapid and incongruous that it can only be truly, as it were, ‘seen’

18
in retrospect.

19

According to my own pocket watch, no more than five or six min-20
utes had passed since we had first entered the 19th Hole. The rain 21
against the window’s convex and mullioned and glass window came in 22
what now appeared to be vascular or peristaltic ‘pulses’ or ‘waves,’ and 23
during the brief, rhythmic lulls or troughs of these, one could make out 24
the Eighteenth fairway’s ‘dog leg’’s copse of trees being bent and wrung 25
by the storm’s violent winds, as well as tiny and fore-shortened golfing 26
foursomes running hard for their carts or the Pro-shop’s shelter, their 27
shoes’ spikes producing the exaggeratedly high stride of men almost 28
running in place. Those wearing hats held them down with one hand.

29

The 19th Hole’s long, mahogany bar and tables began gradually to fill 30
as more and more men chased in off various parts of the course by the 31
storm came in to get warm and wait out the rain before going home to 32
whatever was left of their families. ‘Father’’s hand trembled as he ma-33
nipulated the clip, which supposedly required great precision. Much of 34 sh
the more recent entrants’ conversation appeared to concern lightning 35 reg

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1
and inquiring whether anyone had seen or heard lightning on the 2
course, as well as whom among the Raritan Club’s regular members 3
might still be ‘out there.’ Many of the men’s faces appeared unusually 4
smooth and pinkened, their color high from the adrenaline of sudden 5
flight. Actuarially speaking, lightning kills an average of over 300

6
denizens of Western industrialized nations per annum, more than the 7
average number of accidental deaths due either to recreational boating 8
or insect stings combined, and a substantial number of these electro-9
cutions occur on the nation’s golf courses.

10

Since our Audrey had graduated as Salutatorian of her class and left 11
the ‘nest’ of home for her freshman collegiate year at out-of-State 12

Bryn Mawr (although she calls home faithfully once or twice a week) 13
the previous Autumn, my wife and myself ’s marriage’s single major 14
conflict has now been over the fact that she now suddenly claims that 15

I ‘snore,’ and that this alleged ‘snoring’ was preventing or depriving her 16
of much needed sleep. I will, for instance, be lying quietly supine upon 17
my back with my forearms and hands arranged across my chest (which 18
is the customary way I prepare to gradually relax and fall asleep), and 19
our bedroom upstairs will be pleasantly dark and quiet, with refracted 20
lights from the light traffic on the quiet or ‘tree muffled’ residential 21
intersection below running slowly across the bedroom walls and elon-22
gating, distending or collapsing interestingly at the north and east 23
walls’ angles, myself gradually relaxing and descending in peaceful 24
increments towards a good night’s sleep, until Hope suddenly cries out 25
angrily in the darkness, claiming that my ‘snoring’ is making it impos-26
sible for her to fall asleep, and insisting that I either turn on to my side 27
or else leave and go sleep in the ‘Guest’ bedroom (which is what, by 28
unspoken agreement, Audrey’s former childhood bedroom is now 29
referred to by us as) and to ‘for God’s sake’ grant her some ‘peace.’ This 30
now occurs almost nightly — more than once on certain nights — and 31
is intensely frustrating and upsetting. In my relaxed state, the sudden 32
vehemence of her crying out floods my nervous system with adrena-33
line, cortisol or other stress related hormones, and the violence with sh 34
which she thrashes up to a seated position in her bed — as well as a reg 35
note of deep vexation or even hostility in her voice, as if this were an 4th Pass Pages

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issue which had been silently aggravating her for years and she had 1
finally come to the end of her ‘rope’ or ‘last straw’ with it — produces 2
in myself a set of natural, physiological ‘stress’ responses which, subse-3
quently, make it nearly impossible for me to fall asleep, sometimes for 4
hours or even more.

5

In the past, particularly during head colds, or in some calendar 6
years’ Summer months when the ‘pollen count’ is high and my hay 7
fever is active or severe (I suffer from hay fever, and as a boy, in Wilkes 8

Barre, my sister [whose allergies were even more severe than my own, 9
as well as suffering from congenital asthma] and myself had to be 10
brought by our mother twice a week to the local pediatrician for al-11
lergy shots for several years), I have, admittedly, suffered occasional 12
bouts of snoring which have disturbed or awakened Hope in the 13
course of our marriage. But these past bouts or episodes had always 14
been easily resolved by her gently suggesting that I roll on to my side, 15
which I always, immediately and without objection, did, often resolv-16
ing the problem without either of us even coming fully awake — the 17
whole exchange was friendly, and so unexceptionable that Hope could 18
often compel me to roll over without awakening me or getting either 19
of us ‘worked up’ or aggravated.

20

Thus it was not, I had originally planned to aver either during the 21

‘back’ nine or in the 19th Hole, that I claimed, as do some husbands, 22
never to ‘snore,’ nor that I am unwilling to roll to one side or the other 23
or to take reasonable steps to accommodate Hope when something has 24
caused me every once in a great while to rasp, cough, gurgle, wheeze or 25
breathe in any way obstructedly in sleep. Rather, that the true, more 26
vexing or ‘paradoxical’ source of the present marital conflict is that I, in 27
reality, am not yet truly even asleep at the times my wife cries out sud-28
denly now about my ‘snoring’ and disturbing her nearly every night 29
since our Audrey’s departure from home. It is very nearly always 30
within no more than roughly an hour of our retiring (after reading in 31
our beds for approximately one half hour, which is something of a 32
marital ‘ritual’ or custom), at which time I am still lying in bed on my 33
back with my arms arranged and my eyes either closed or relaxedly 34 sh
watching the walls’ and ceiling’s angles and distending exterior lights 35 reg

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through the blinds, continuing to be aware of every sound but slowly 2
relaxing and ‘unwinding’ and descending gradually towards falling 3
asleep, but not yet in fact asleep. When she now cries out.

4

The real issue, in other words, is that it is Hope (who is well known 5
for falling asleep the moment she has closed her current ‘livre de chevet,’

6
replaced it on her night-stand and struck the light in the brushed steel 7
sconce above her bed — as opposed to myself, who have been a diffi-8
cult and somewhat, as it were, ‘fragile’ or ‘delicate’ sleeper from child-9
hood onwards) who is, in point of fact, asleep at these junctures, and 10
dreaming, said dreams evidently consisting, at least in part, of the 11
somewhat paradoxical belief and perception that I myself am asleep 12
and am ‘snoring’ loudly enough to — as she puts it — ‘wake the dead.’

13

I do, of course, have my personal faults, as do all or most husbands; 14
but ‘snoring’ during the year’s cold weather months (like most, my hay 15
fever is seasonal or, more technically, an ‘Auto-immune system’ response 16
to certain classes of pollen) is not one of them. Not, of course, that it 17
would even necessarily constitute an actual ‘fault’ as such, as it would 18
not be an action which I was performing ‘consciously’ or had any 19
voluntary control over. But I do not. Nor am I in the habit of being 20
incorrect or confused about whether I myself am asleep or not — and 21
it is an established fact in our marriage that it takes me far longer to 22
truly fall asleep than it does Hope or my erstwhile first wife (we had 23
joked about it together many times), as well as longer to fully awaken.

24

Hope, in particular, moves quickly and easily between states of con-25
sciousness which, for me, are — due, perhaps, to professional stress —

26
somewhat of a struggle. One could point to, for instance, the fact that 27
it is nearly always myself who drives when driving any apprecia-28
ble distance as a couple, or that it is frequently I who must rouse 29
or shake her gently awake at the shore, or in front of the Home enter-30
tainment room’s television, or often at the end of a long piece of music 31
or theater.

32

Since the prior Autumn, however, there simply has been no reason-33
ing with her on this point. She steadfastly avows, in other words, that sh 34
my putative ‘snoring’ is a waking reality instead of her own dream. And reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 0 1
such a way that I am myself jolted up-right, with adrenaline coursing 1
through my system (just as when the telephone rings at night, its sig-2
nal or ‘ring’ now piercing in a way which daylight never makes it), 3
there is in her ‘snoring’ complaint a note of near hysteria which makes 4
it perfectly evident that she has been asleep, or else has been in the 5
type of semi-waking, oneiric state in which some people ‘“talk” in their 6
sleep,’ confabulating past and present and truth and dream, and ‘be-7
lieving’ it all in such a way that there is simply no reasoning with 8
someone in such a state.

9

And yet I have largely refused to patronize or placate her about 10
something which simply was not true. There are, even in marriage, 11
limits. After an initial period last Autumn in which I would attempt to 12
argue or reason with Hope ‘in situ’ in the darkened bedroom, inform-13
ing her that I was in reality not yet asleep and to simply go back to 14
sleep and forget all about it, that she was only dreaming (a response 15
which so irked and provoked her, however, that her voice would begin 16
to rise sharply in such a ‘tone’ as to so upset me that any chance of real 17
sleep would then be impossible for the next several hours), I then, sub-18
sequently, attempted or tried refusing to respond ‘in situ’ or to in any 19
way acknowledge her complaints that I was keeping her awake, in-20
stead waiting for the morning of the next day to remonstrate that I had 21
not yet even been asleep, and to mildly observe that her agitated 22
dreams of my ‘snoring’ were becoming worse and more frequent, and 23
to urge her to make some sort of appointment and perhaps inquire 24
about a prescription. And yet Hope has been wholly obdurate and un-25
yielding on this point, insisting that it was I who was ‘the one who’s 26
asleep,’ and that if I could or would not acknowledge this, my refusal 27
to ‘trust’ her indicated that I must be ‘angry at [her]’ over something, 28
or perhaps unconsciously wished to ‘hurt’ her, and that if anyone 29
around here needed to ‘make an appointment’ it was myself, which ac-30
cording to Hope I would not hesitate to do if my respect and concern 31
for her even slightly outweighed my own selfish insistence on being 32

‘right.’ Worse, on certain mornings, was when she, as it were, ‘took a 33
page’ from her ‘true’ or biological sibling, Vivian (a twice divorced 34 sh

‘halogen’ blonde and devotee of numerous so-called ‘Support’ or ‘self 35 reg

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help’ groups and movements, to whom Hope was extremely close be-2
fore their ‘falling out’)’s lexicon and accused me of being ‘in denial,’ an 3
accusation any denial of which was held, of course, to be evidence in its 4
own favor, maddeningly. Once or twice, however, in the early Winter 5
months, I admittedly yielded and did, with a frustrated groan or sigh, 6
take my own bed’s bedding down the hall to the ‘Guest’ bedroom and 7
attempt to ‘drop off ’ or sleep there amidst all of the frilled pastels, saf-8
fron joss and boxed detritus of our Audrey’s recent adolescence, lying 9
perfectly still and motionless and scarcely breathing, and straining to 10
hear, down the hall, any sounds of Hope perhaps once again sitting 11
up-right and accusing a now empty or unoccupied bed of ‘snoring’ and 12

‘keeping [her] awake’ — which would be indisputable proof of just 13
who was asleep and who merely the innocent subject of someone else’s 14
dream of being kept awake. Lying there alone, I envisioned something 15
like myself hearing the vexed cries and complaints and arising in-16
stantly to quickly traverse the hallway, bursting through our bedroom 17
door with something resembling a triumphant ‘Aha!’ — so filled with 18
frustrated and aggrieved hormones, however, and devoting so much 19
effort and close concentration to vigilantly listening for any sound or 20
movement from our bedroom, that I got scarcely one iota or ‘wink’ of 21
sleep the entire night in Audrey’s former bed, and yet had, neverthe-22
less, to still arise and go forth to attempt to stagger through my pro-23
fessional responsibilities at work and both sides of the lengthy commute 24
the following day with my entire body, mind and psyche on the edge 25
of what felt to be nearly complete collapse. It was, I was, of course, 26
aware, perhaps petty to be so fixated on vindication or ‘proof,’ but, 27
by this point of the conflict, I was often nearly ‘not’ or ‘beside’ myself 28
with frustration, choler or anger and fatigue. One must understand (as 29
it was my original intention to attempt to explain to her stepfather) 30
that though, as in any marriage, Hope and I had had our fair share of 31
conflicts and difficult marital periods, the evident vehemence, anger 32
and persecution with which she now dismissed my protests of being 33
awake at the crucial junctures of alleged ‘snoring’ were unprecedented, sh 34
and, for the first several weeks of the dreams and accusations, I was reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 0 3
a more difficult time of it adjusting to our Audrey’s ‘leav[ing] the nest’

1
than it had at first appeared ( pace that it had been Hope, even more 2
than Audrey herself, who had insisted or ‘lobbied’ for an out-of-State 3
college, the relatively nearby Bryn Mawr and Sarah Lawrence Colleges 4
having been Audrey and myself ’s tacitly agreed upon choices as a 5
compromise or [in the language of insurance regulation] ‘Technical 6
compliance’ with this priority), and that this difficulty or grief was 7
manifesting itself as sleep disruptions and unconscious or misdirected 8
anger or ‘blame’ at myself. (Audrey is Hope’s child by her first, short 9
lived marriage, but was no more than a toddler when Naomi and my-10
self ’s own divorce was declared ‘Final, a mensa et thoro’ and Hope and 11
myself were free to marry, which occurred sixteen years ago this com-12
ing August 9th. For all practical purposes, she is, essentially, ‘my’

13
daughter as well, and I too found her physical absence and the house’s 14
strange new silence and schedules and the gamut of readjustments dif-15
ficult, as well, as I tried to repeatedly reassure Hope.) After some fur-16
ther time had passed, however, and all attempts to discuss the conflict 17
rationally or induce Hope to consider even the mere possibility that it 18
was she, not myself, who was in reality asleep when the alleged ‘snor-19
ing’ problem manifested itself led only to a further entrenchment or 20

‘hardening’ in her own position — the essence of her position being 21
that I myself was being irrationally ‘stubborn’ and ‘untrusting’ of what 22
she could plainly hear with her own two ears — I essentially ceased, 23
then, to say or do anything in the way of ‘in situ’ response or objection 24
when she would suddenly sit violently up in bed across the room (her 25
face often inhuman and spectral in the bedroom’s faint light because 26
of the white emollient cream she wore to bed during the cold, dry 27
months of the year, and distorted unpleasantly by vexation and choler) 28
to accuse me of ‘snoring horribly’ and demanding that I roll over at 29
once or be exiled again to Audrey’s former bed. Instead, I would now 30
lie perfectly still, silent and motionless, my eyes closed, pantomiming 31
a deeply sleeping man who could not hear or in any way acknowledge 32
her, until eventually her pleas and vituperations trailed drowsily off 33
and she would settle back with a deep and pointed sigh. Then I would 34 sh
continue to lie supine and motionless in my pale blue flannel or acetate 35 reg

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sleep wear, still and silent as a ‘tomb,’ waiting silently for Hope’s 2
breathing to change and for the slight, small chewing or grinding 3
sounds she produced in sleep to indicate that she had once more fallen 4
back to sleep. Even then, however, sometimes she now once again 5
bolts awake only moments later, once again sitting up to accuse me of 6

‘snoring’ and angrily demanding that I do something to halt or impede 7
it so that she might finally have some ‘peace’ and be able to sleep.

8

By this point in time, the Spring thunderstorm’s downpour had re-9
ceded or ebbed to the point that individual droplets’ impacts’ sounds 10
were individually countable against the striped canvas awnings of the 11

19th Hole’s large bay windows — meaning being discretely audible, 12
but in sum arrhythmic and not what one would term pleasant or 13
soothing; the larger drops sounded almost eerie or, as it were, almost 14

‘brutal’ in their impact’s force. Inside, Hope’s father was leaning back 15
and slightly to the side in his heavy ‘captain’s’ chair, running the fine 16
cigar over his upper lip in order to savor the aroma as he searched in a 17
side pocket (this is what is making him lean; it is not a distortion) for 18
his clip’s special monogrammed case. Without informing Hope (an 19
omission which was, I confess, petty, and that I was in all likelihood 20
unwilling, by that point in the conflict, to give her the ‘satisfaction’ of 21
it), I, during my annual Physical exam, requested a referral from our 22

P.P.O.’s Health Plan’s ‘Primary care’ physician to one of the Plan’s des-23
ignated ‘Ear, Nose and Throat’ specialists, who then subsequently ex-24
amined my nasal passages, sinus cavities, trachea, adenoids and ‘soft’

25
palate, and pronounced that he saw no evidence of anything unusual 26
or out of the ordinary. I later, however, made the mistake of ‘throwing’

27
this clean bill of health ‘up’ in Hope’s ‘face’ during one of the increas-28
ingly heated and upsetting arguments (these often occurring over the 29
following morning’s breakfast) respecting the so-called ‘snoring’ issue, 30
whereupon Hope seized on my failure to have told her about the 31

‘E., N. & T.’ referral as evidence that I ‘. . . kn[e]w the snoring [was]

32
real,’ and was secretly concerned about it, and that I had been unwill-33
ing to tell her about the appointment in advance for fear that the spe-sh 34
cialist’s diagnosis would identify something amiss in my ‘soft’ palate or reg 35
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‘snoring [was] real’ and that all of my accusations that she was asleep 1
and simply dreaming that I was snoring had been merely so much self 2
serving ‘denial’ and ‘projection’ of the problem on to the ‘victim’ of 3
it (referring to, of course, herself ). These brief, bitter arguments —

4
which came in waves or clusters throughout the Winter- and early 5

Spring months, and most often tended to occur or ‘erupt’ at breakfast, 6
fueled by a sleepless night and anxiety about facing the demands of the 7
coming day on insufficient sleep, and were often so bitter and upset-8
ting that I would then go through the subsequent commute and the 9
first several hours of work in some type of emotional daze, mentally 10

‘re-playing’ the argument and conceiving of new ways to present or 11
arrange evidence or catch Hope in a logical contradiction, sometimes 12
going so far as to interrupt work in order to jot these ideas or cutting 13
rejoinders down in the margins of my professional Day-planner for 14
possible future use — were terrifying in their sudden heat and the 15
speed with which they escalated in intensity and ‘spleen,’ as well as 16
in the way Hope’s dry, dark, narrow, increasingly haggard face across 17
the breakfast nook sometimes becomes nearly unrecognizable to me, 18
twisted, distorted and even somewhat repellent in its anger and stony 19
suspicion; and, for my part, I must confess that, at least once or twice, 20

I had felt an actual urge to strike or shove her or up-end the nook’s 21
breakfast hutch or table with rage, so ‘beside myself ’ with irrational 22
rage had I been ‘driven’ by the strange, stony, bitter and irrational ob-23
durance with which she would flatly refuse to consider — to acknowl-24
edge even the bare possibility, despite all of the reasonable rebuttals, 25
rejoinders, reasoned arguments, evidence, facts not in dispute and cita-26
tions of precedent (there had, in the course of our marriage, been other 27
conflicts in which Hope had been utterly convinced of the validity 28
of her position, but had had to acquiesce in the face of subsequent 29
proof that she had, in point of fact, been wrong, and had then had to 30
apologize) which I advanced — that it was I who was awake and she 31
who was — ‘just possibly’ — asleep, and that the ‘snoring’ issue was in 32
point of fact in reality ‘[her] issue’ and was in fact capable of real reso-33
lution only by her ‘making [some kind of Medical, or even psychiatric]

34 sh
appointment.’ My hands sometimes literally trembled or shook with 35 reg

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1
frustration and fatigue related disorientation as I started my vehicle, 2
with a series of rapid, indistinct and unwelcome ‘images’ or hallucina-3
tory distortions often also moving in rapid, arrhythmic succession 4
across my ‘mind’s eye’ as I undertook my commute north up the Gar-5
den State Parkway. (In one of the most heated and upsetting of these 6
arguments, I had only brought up the Ear, Nose and Throat examina-7
tion as evidence that at least I, unlike Hope, was willing to entertain at 8
least the possibility that I was somehow wrong and might in reality be 9
somehow truly ‘snoring,’ and thus that any workable compromise or 10
resolution was going to be impossible unless there was at least some 11
slight mutuality about our willingness to concede, pace the information 12
of our senses, at least the ‘theoretical possibility’ that we might be 13
wrong about just who was asleep and dreaming and\or ‘snoring’ and 14
who was not.)

15

Also, by this point in time, our routine (or, ‘ritual’) for preparing to 16
retire and go to sleep in the bedroom had also often become almost in-17
describably tense and unpleasant. Hope often would not acknowledge 18
or speak to me, and when, from my side of the room, I ‘caught her eye’

19
as she was emerging from her clothes closet or the washroom or ap-20
plying emollient at her beige enamel ‘Vanity’ ensemble’s lighted mir-21
rors, her expression was often that of someone regarding a distasteful 22
stranger. (Hope’s stepfather and stepsisters, Meredith and Denise [or, 23
more familiarily, ‘Donni’], are also accomplished at this expression, as 24

I first noted upon my first or initial introduction to her family, which 25
occurred at a dinner at Dr. Sipe and his wife’s large, Victorian style 26
home in the historical ‘Fourth Ward’ district of West Newark, in the 27
course of which, at two different points, ‘Father’ asked me some type 28
of personal or biographical question and then, in the midst of my at-29
tempt to reply, interrupted in order to publicly indicate that he was be-30
coming impatient or wished that I would ‘Cut to the chase’ in a 31
blunter or apparently more time efficient way.) Often, by the time the 32
bedroom’s lights are now extinguished, I will have become so over-33
wrought and tense that any likely prospect of falling asleep in the near sh 34
future vanished altogether, despite the fact that I was often now so reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 2 0 7
exhausted as to literally tremble and my vision, as mentioned, regularly 1
went in and out of different states of exaggerated focus, depth and ab-2
stract flux or ‘retroussage’ — for instance, the way Audrey Bogen’s once 3
fresh, voluptuous and innocent face seemed to tremble or shudder on 4
the edge of exploding into abstract shards when she brought Dr. Sipe’s 5
ash-tray, which was formed of heavy, black glass and emblazoned with 6
the Raritan Club’s heraldic crest and Latin motto — ‘Resurgam!’ — in 7
virid red.

8

As well, of course, as the fact that the absurd ephemeracy, triviality 9
and obvious displacement or projection of the whole ‘snoring’ conflict —

10
of which, between Hope and myself, only I seemed truly aware or 11
frustrated at the absurdity and irrelevance of the whole conflict —

12
made it that much worse. I myself simply could not believe that Hope 13
and myself ’s relationship at this crucial, ‘Empty nest’ point in our 14
marriage could founder on such a trivial issue, one which, even in 15
far less happy or viable unions than our own, must, for the most 16
part, be resolved or ‘worked through’ rather early on. Like conflicts 17
concerning, for instance, partners’ differing communicative ‘styles,’

18
amounts of time spent together as opposed to physically apart, divi-19
sion of responsibilities for household tasks and so forth, mutual com-20
patibility of sleeping ‘styles’ and arrangements is simply part of the 21
domestic compromise of living with a spouse, as, of course, almost 22
every man of any worldly experience knows. I could not, for several 23
weeks or even months, even bring myself to raise the issue of the con-24
flict with personal friends or family. It simply seemed too silly to 25
credit. I even went so far as to try consulting or ‘seeing’ a professional 26

Couple counselor — again, an action undertaken on my own and, as it 27
were, ‘sub-rosa,’ as I knew quite well Hope’s, her stepfather’s, and the 28
bulk of her true and adoptive family’s (with the exception of Vivian, 29
whose allegedly ‘Recovered’ memories and hysterical public accusations 30
at the extended family’s Holiday get-together at Paul and Theresa’s 31
extraordinary vacation home off the Manasquan inlet had led to herself 32
and Hope’s ‘falling out’ and to the entire extended family’s unspoken 33
prohibition of any mention of the entire subject, besides which were 34 sh

35 reg

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1

Dr. Sipe’s own sentiments respecting the issue of ‘therapy’’s eligibility 2
as a Medical expense for the purposes of Health Care plans and 3

‘Managed Care,’ which were well known and vociferous) feelings vis à 4
vis the ‘therapy’ issue, and knew also, by that point, that Hope’s flat, 5
tight-mouthed refusal, were I to broach the issue, even to consider 6

‘seeing’ the counselor with me as a ‘couple’ would frustrate and aggra-7
vate me all over again, and simply escalate or further the scope of the 8
marital conflict — only, there-upon, to my considerable chagrin, to re-9
peatedly have, suffer or endure a series of ‘therapeutic’ exchanges such 10
as, in substance, the following:

11

‘But snoring is not really the issue, Randall, is it?’

12

‘But I never for one moment suggested that it was the real issue.’

13

‘After all, hay fever or no, lots of men snore.’

14

‘And were I one of them [meaning someone who ‘snored’ even dur-15
ing seasons when hay fever was not a factor], I would submit [mean-16
ing to Hope’s accusations] without hesitation.’

17

‘Why is it so important to you whether you snore or not?’

18

‘The whole point is that it is not important to me. That is my entire 19
point. If I were, in point of actual fact, “snoring,” I’d have no trouble 20
admitting it, assuming responsibility and taking any reasonable steps 21
necessary in order to address the alleged problem.’

22

‘I’m afraid I still don’t understand. How can you even know for cer-23
tain whether you snore or not? If you are snoring, then by definition 24
you’re asleep.’

25

‘But [attempting to respond] . . .’

26

‘I mean, who can know?’

27

‘But [becoming more and more frustrated by this point in time]

28
that’s the whole point, which I have tried here to explain I don’t even 29
know how many times already: it is precisely when I am not in fact yet 30
even asleep that she accuses me.’

31

‘Why are you getting so upset? Do you have some special stake in 32
the issue of whether you snore?’

33

‘If I am, as you put it, getting “upset,” it is perhaps because I am sh 34
somewhat irked, impatient or frustrated with these types of exchanges.

reg 35

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The whole point is that I emphatically do not have a stake in the so-1
called “snoring” issue. The point is that if I were in fact “snoring,” I 2
would admit it and simply roll over on to my side or even offer to go 3
sleep in Audrey’s bed and not think twice about the issue beyond a cer-4
tain natural regret that I had in any way disturbed or “compromised”

5

Hope’s rest. But I do, however, know that one must be asleep to 6

“snore,” and that I know when I am truly asleep and when I am not, 7
and that what I do have a “stake” in is refusing to placate someone who 8
is being not just irrational but blindly stubborn and obtuse in accusing 9
me of something which I must be asleep in order to be guilty of when 10
in fact I am not yet asleep, due largely to how tense and exhausted I am 11
from the whole absurd conflict in the first place.’

12

The P.P.O.’s counselor, who appeared to be in, at most, his mid- or 13
late 30s, and wore spectacles, had a large forehead which was domed 14
in such a way as to suggest deep thoughtfulness, an appearance which 15
was, it increasingly emerged, misleading.

16

‘And is there no chance — just for the sake, Randall, of argument —

17
no chance or possibility, however remote, that you yourself might be 18
being, as you put it, in any way stubborn or blind about this conflict in 19
you and Mrs. Napier’s relationship?’

20

‘Now I must confess to becoming frustrated or even, if I might say 21
so, somewhat annoyed or exasperated, as the whole point, the entire 22
root of the unfairness and my frustration or even anger with Hope, is 23
that I myself am willing to examine this possibility. That it is myself 24
who am here, examining it, as you can plainly see. Do you see my wife 25
here? Is she willing to come “lay [the problem] out” and look at it with 26
a disinterested party?’

27

‘And can I ask why the thing with the fingers?’

28

‘But no, Ed [the P.P.O.’s counselor all but insisting on being ad-29
dressed by his first name], if I may, the fact is that Hope is even now 30
returning home from Exercise class or the cosmetician and is very 31
probably in the tub stewing privately over the conflict and fortifying 32
her position and preparing for another endless round of the conflict 33
whenever she next dreams that I am keeping her awake and robbing 34 sh

35 reg

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1
her of her youth, vivacity and daughterly charms, while at the same 2
moment I myself sit here in an unventilated office being asked whether 3

I might be “blind.”’

4

‘So, if I am hearing you accurately, the real issue is fairness. Your 5
wife is not being fair.’

6

‘The real issue is that it’s bizarre, surreal, an almost literal “waking 7
nightmare.” My wife is now no one I know. She’s claiming to know 8
better than I myself whether I’m even awake. It’s less unfair than 9
seemingly almost totally insane. I know whether I’m sitting here hav-10
ing these exchanges. I know I am not dreaming this. To doubt this is 11
insane. But this, to all appearances, is what she’s doing.’

12

‘Mrs. Napier might deny that you are really even here right now, 13
you feel.’

14

‘That isn’t the point. The issue of my actually being here or not is 15
merely an analogy intended to high-light the fact of my knowing 16
whether or not I am asleep, just as you do. To doubt this would be the 17
road to insanity, would it not? Might we agree on that much?’

18

‘Randall, here let me reassure you once again that I am not in any 19
way disagreeing with you, but simply trying to make certain I under-20
stand this. When you are asleep, can you really actually know that you 21
are asleep?’ . . . And so on and so forth. My hands often ached from 22
gripping the vehicle’s steering wheel as I then resumed or continued 23
the commute home along the Garden State Parkway from the Couple 24
counselor’s office in a small collection (or, ‘complex’) of Medical and 25

Dental buildings in suburban Red Bank. More generally, I began often 26
to worry or fear that I would succumb to sleep deprivation or fatigue 27
and might fall asleep at the wheel and drift across or ‘jump’ the median 28
into on-coming traffic, as I had all too often seen the tragic aftermath 29
of in my many years of commuting.

30

Then, while seated with Dr. Sipe at the table in what Raritan Club 31
members often refer to as simply ‘19’ or ‘the Hole,’ another unwilled or 32
involuntary interior tableau or, as it were, hallucinatory ‘shot’ or scene 33
of myself standing, as a boy or small child, on a precarious or slanted sh 34
surface at the foot of something resembling a ladder or rope ladder or reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 1 1
trailing down from some point in the gloom above, beyond or atop the 1
great, stone icon or statue or ‘bust’ of someone too massively huge and 2
ill lit for the face to be seen overhead (or, ‘made out’), I myself standing 3
precariously on a rise in the statue’s great granite lap with one or both 4
hands clutching or grasping the end of the rope, peering up, as well as 5
with someone far larger behind me’s hand heavy upon my shoulder 6
and back and a dominant or ‘booming’ voice from the darkness of the 7
great stone head overhead repeatedly commanding ‘Up,’ and the hand 8
pushing or shaking and saying ‘For God . . .’ and\or ‘. . . Hope’ several 9
times. ‘Father’ — whose area of professional expertise at The Pruden-10
tial is (or, rather, was) something called ‘Demographic Medicine,’ which 11
involved his evidently not ever once, during his entire career, physically 12
touching a patient — had always regarded me as a bit of a bore and\or 13
ninny, someone at once obtrusive and irrelevant, the human equivalent 14
of a house fly or pinched nerve, and has made precious little effort to 15
disguise this, although as a ‘Greatfather’ he has always been exception-16
ally doting and kind to our Audrey, which with Hope and myself goes 17
a long way. When he concentrates on the clipped end to get it alight, 18
he appears briefly strabismic or ‘cross eyed,’ and the hand holding the 19
lighter shakes badly, and in that instant he appears every bit his age or 20
more. The excised tip was nowhere in view. The whole room seemed 21
somehow menacingly coiled. He and I both looked at the red end as 22
he held the silver Ronson to it and drew and exhaled, trying to light it 23
in a durable way. His wrists and hands were yellowish and somewhat 24
freckled, not unlike a corn- or ‘tortilla’-chip, and the size of the flame 25
and Cohiba made his very dry, narrow, furrowed, hunched and out-26
thrust face appear smaller and more distant than in reality it was; and 27
this effect was not a visual distortion or hallucination but a common 28
and simple ‘Illusion of perspective,’ not unlike a Renaissance horizon.

29

The true flame was the one in the middle. Feigenspan’s slight tannic 30
bitterness being also traditional. (The following, as well, being also 31
typical of the exchanges with the second Couple counselor in his ster-32
ile, generic office in suburban Red Bank:

33

‘And it is not possible that some of these hallucinations you feel 34 sh
as though you are experiencing might be auditory? That you are 35 reg

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D a v i d F o s t e r Wa l l a c e

1
sometimes rasping or snoring and do not realize it because you are, as 2
you put it, hallucinating?’

3

‘But I know when I am hallucinating. The photograph of your wife 4
and daughter or perhaps conceivably stepdaughter or niece here on 5
your desk — the daughter’s face is beginning ever so slightly to whirl 6
and distend. That is a hallucination. I mean “hallucination” in the very 7
broadest sense. These are not hallucinations which mimic reality or 8
can be confused with it. Sometimes, for instance, trying to shave in the 9
mirror, my visage will appear to have an extra eye in the center of my 10
forehead, whose pupil is sometimes rotated or “set” on its “side” like a 11
cat or nocturnal predator’s, or occasionally our Audrey’s chest on Par-12
ents’ Weekend at Bryn Mawr’s two breasts will go up and down in her 13
sweater like pistons and her head is surrounded by a halo or, as it were, 14

“nimbus” of animated Disney characters. When these hallucinations 15
occur, I am able to say to myself, “Randall, you are hallucinating 16
slightly due to chronic sleep deprivation compounded by discord and 17
chronic stress.”’

18

‘But they must still be frightening. I know they would certainly 19
frighten me.’

20

‘The point is that I know when I’m hallucinating and when I’m not, 21
just as I also quite obviously know when I’m asleep or not.’) At which 22
juncture an additional momentary, hallucinatory ‘flash’ or vision of our 23

Audrey supine in a beached canoe and myself straining piston-like 24
above her, my face whirling and beginning to distend as the tableau or 25

Fata morgana shifts almost immediately back to the present day’s 19th 26

Hole or ‘the Hole,’ with our Audrey — now 19 and burgeoned into 27
full woman-hood or the ‘Age of consent’ — in her familiar saffron 28
bustier, ‘Capri’ style pants and white, elbow length gloves now moving 29
smoothly or languidly among the tables, stools and chairs, languidly 30
serving high-balls to wet men. Nor should one omit to add that Jack 31

Vivien was now there, as well, at the window-side table in the 19th Hole 32
with myself and Dr. Sipe, also with a beverage and seated on ‘Father’’s 33
right or ‘off ’ side. Jack Vivien wore none of the customary golfer’s sh 34
jacket or visor, as well as appearing dry, unhurried and, as always, col-reg 35
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‘Golf shoes’ (the traditional shoe’s sole’s 0.5 inch steel or iron spikes 1
being the culprit or component which conducts electricity with such 2

‘hair raising’ efficacy. The public course’s resident ‘Pro’ in Wilkes 3

Barre, in my boyhood, for instance, was once struck and killed in-4
stantly by lightning, and my own Father had been in the trio of other 5
golfers who had bravely remained in the open with the stricken light-6
ning victim until a physician could be summoned and arrive, the ‘Pro’

7
lying prone and blackened and still holding the Twelfth hole’s flag 8

[whose pole, or ‘pin,’ like traditional golfers’ spikes, was, in that era, 9
still comprised of conductive metal] in his smoking fist.), and here the 10
logistics of his entrance or ‘logic’ of the ‘coincidence’ which brought 11
him, dry and, as it were, ‘bright eyed’ ( Jack Vivien having bright or ‘ex-12
pressive’ eyes in a markedly large, broad, if somewhat flat or immobile 13
or ‘expressionless’ [with the exception of the animated, ‘thoughtful’

14
eyes] face, as well as a sharp, dark ‘Van Dyke’ style beard which served 15
to compensate or de-emphasize the somewhat unusual qualities of his 16
mouth’s size and position), to our table in ‘the Hole’ at this precise 17
point in time is somewhat unclear and, in retrospect, contrived or, as 18
it were, ‘suspicious.’ It is, for example, unlikely that Jack Vivien and 19

Hope’s stepfather knew one another, as not only was ‘Father’ not a 20
member of the Raritan Club and had played as a ‘Guest’ only once or 21
twice prior to this time, but in reality Jack (or, more formally, ‘Chester’) 22

Vivien served as a high ranking Employee Assistance executive at my 23
own company (whose physical plant, or, ‘Nerve center’ was located 24
in Elizabeth), a company which ‘Father’ had made rather a point, 25
numerous times, of implying or characterizing as so ephemeral or 26
unimportant to the region’s insurance industry as to have caused him 27
never once to have encountered or ‘heard one word about’ it through-28
out his entire tenure at ‘The Rock.’ Nor did Hope’s stepfather appear 29
to speak to, look at or in any way to acknowledge the presence of Jack 30

Vivien (whom, through his role in the recent ‘snoring’ issue’s attempted 31
resolution, I had gotten acquainted with rather well) as he got the 32
thing finally alight and leaned back at a slight smoker’s angle in his 33

‘captain’s’ chair, smoking slowly and joining Jack Vivien (whose circu-34 sh
moral balbo or ‘Van Dyke’ was, admittedly, frankly and incongruously 35 reg

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1

‘merkin-esque’ or pudendal in appearance, I myself being far from 2
the only person in Systems to remark this) in looking appraisingly at 3
me as I covered first one eye and then the other (a well known ‘home-4
remedy’ for common optical illusions). It was clearly evident that 5

‘Father’ did not ‘approve of ’ or like what he currently saw: an, as it were, 6

‘second string’ son-in-law with a mediocre Handicap and background 7
in addition to a trivial or undistinguished career, one whose personal 8
affairs were in disarray and appeared potentially ‘on the rocks’ over a 9
conflict this trivial and absurd with a wife who was, herself, clearly 10
merely suffering from either the ‘Empty nest’ syndrome, early symp-11
toms of the climacteric or mere incubi or bad dreams (more clinically 12
known as ‘Night terrors’), and yet could not manage to be assertive, 13
assuasive or ‘man’ enough to convince her that these natural and de 14
minimis causes were at their so-called ‘impasse’’s core, and who now 15
seemed all too obviously to be working up the courage or ‘nerve’ to ask 16

‘Father’ himself to use his paternal influence or authority over Hope 17

( pace that he was, of course, when convenient, merely or ‘just’ her step-18
father, and in his pale eyes was what sometimes looked or appeared to 19
be the terrible stepfatherly knowledge of what our Audrey could have 20
been to me, perhaps as Hope — as well as Vivian [as she had ‘hysteri-21
cally’ claimed to have later been professionally helped to ‘Recover’

22
unconscious memories of ] — had once served as or been to himself; 23
and it was not at all difficult to conceive almost at will a low angle im-24
age or vision or nightmarish ‘shot’ of his prone face just above, engorged 25
and straining, one well freckled right hand clamped tight over Hope 26
or Vivian [the two of whom appear almost ‘interchangeably’ alike in 27
childhood photos] beneath him’s open mouth, and his crushing weight 28
thoroughly and terribly adult) to intercede in the conflict, though it 29
was neither the old man’s ‘place’ nor remote intention to do so, as any-30
one with any discernment or ‘eyes with which to see’ should be capable 31
of seeing.

32

More specifically, it had been Chester A. (or, ‘Jack’) Vivien — age: 33

‘Mid 50s,’ Handicap: ‘11,’ marital status: ‘Unknown,’ and the Director sh 34
of Employee Assistance Programs for Advanced Data Capture (our reg 35
company’s legal name)’s Elizabeth operations — to whose coveted, 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 2 1 5
corner office I’d finally gone with my ‘hat in hand’ in order to confide 1
the entire absurd, seemingly quotidian or banal, conjugal ‘snoring’ im-2
passe, and its escalating impact on my marriage, health and ability to 3
function productively in my Dept. within Systems. This had been the 4
prior March. Though his résumé included an ‘advanced’ or Graduate 5
degree in the field of industrial psychology from Cornell University 6

(which is located in northern or ‘up-State’ New York), Jack Vivien was 7
no mere counselor or ‘front line’ staff for Advanced Data Capture’s 8

‘E.A.P.’ (as it is often known) program, but rather had been deliber-9
ately hired away from Weyerhauser Paper, Inc.’s Brunswick operation 10
several years prior in order to specifically manage and oversee the en-11
tire ‘E.A.P.’ program, and now served also as ‘Administrative liaison’

12
for the company’s P.P.O. Group Health Plan program, which evi-13
dently required considerable managerial and accounting expertise, as 14
well. Jack Vivien and I had always gotten ‘on’ and enjoyed a mutual 15
regard. We were frequently (when his chronic lower back condition 16
permitted) in the same flight at company tournaments during warm 17
weather months, and sometimes enjoyed light conversation together 18
in the cart on Par 4s and\or 5s while waiting for other members of our 19
foursome to locate an errant ball or ‘hole out’ on the hole’s green. More 20
importantly, it was Jack Vivien who, in late March, had subsequently 21
suggested or ‘Throw[n] out [the] idea [of ]’ the reportedly highly re-22
spected Edmund R. and Meredith R. Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic, 23
which, he said, was affiliated or ensconced within the teaching hos-24
pital affiliated with Rutgers University in ‘in-State’ Brunswick, as a 25
possible option. It had also been Jack — as opposed to either of the 26
supposedly ‘expert,’ professional Couple counselors I had gone to 27
some lengths to consult or ‘see,’ in desperation, some months prior —

28
who had made an almost immediate ‘impression’ by quickly ‘Cut[ting]

29
to the chase’ and inquiring — somewhat ‘leadingly’ or ‘rhetorically,’

30
but without condescension or a sense of being patronized — whether 31

I myself, on balance, would prefer to prevail or ‘win’ in the conflict and 32
be vindicated as ‘innocent’ or ‘right,’ on one hand, or would rather in-33
stead have Hope and myself ’s marriage back on track and to once 34 sh
more derive pleasure in one another’s company and affections and to 35 reg

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resume its being possible to get enough uninterrupted sleep at night to 2
be able to function effectively and feel more like ‘[my]self again.’

3

The specific proposal, respecting which Hope agreed to at least 4

‘hear [me] out’ on a morning of low skies and light mist which made 5
the small, decorative, ‘bay window’’s light in our breakfast nook appear 6
shadowless and unreal and appeared to exaggerate the haggardness of 7
our exhausted faces, was as follows: that if Hope would consent to at-8
tend Rutgers’ Edmund R. and Meredith R. Darling Sleep Clinic with 9
me and place ourselves in the trained and respected Clinic’s Sleep re-10
searchers’ experienced hands, then, if the results of the Sleep Clinic’s 11
study of our sleep patterns served, in any substantive way, form or 12
manner to confirm her perceptions and beliefs in the dispute over my 13

‘snoring,’ then I myself would move immediately back into our Audrey’s 14
former agapemone or ‘Guest’ room down the hall and consent to follow 15
the Medical staff ’s recommendations about treating my then presum-16
ably bona fide ‘snoring.’ (It is true, as a child, that I myself had evidently 17
sucked or ‘nursed at’ my own thumb while asleep for such an extended 18
period of time during my childhood that our family’s pediatrician in 19

Wilkes Barre had finally directed my parents to coat or paint the nail 20
of my thumb with an aversive tasting prescription lacquer or, as it 21
were, ‘nail’ polish each night before retiring — at least, such was my 22

Father’s stated recollection of anything unusual or out of the ordinary 23
in my childhood sleep habits. [The Darling Sleep Clinic staff had re-24
quired Hope and myself to fill out exhaustive, preliminary or ‘Intake’

25
reports on our present and past sleep patterns, including data as far 26
back as possible, including, if possible, childhood.]) 27

On his own, ‘personal’ time, over the course of several appointments 28
and interchanges in his comfortably appointed ‘E.A.P.’ program office, 29

Jack Vivien, despite his own ponderous work load, had helped me to 30
prepare carefully for the presentation of this ‘last ditch’ proposal, dur-31
ing which I made certain to keep my facial expression and vocal tone 32
non-accusatory and neutral other than a certain level of undisguised 33
exhaustion (the previous night had been a particularly difficult or ‘bad’

sh 34
one, with numerous awakenings and accusations). The suggestion of reg 35
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breakfast nook, which, no doubt (as Jack Vivien predicted), made the 1
proposal more impactful, was, in most respects, sincere or ‘heart-felt,’

2
although not, obviously, in the way Hope (who, too, appeared to have 3
aged several whole years over the preceding Winter along with myself 4

[though I would never have given voice to this observation aloud —

5
be ‘Father’’s opinions on our marriage as they may, I do know enough 6
about the dynamics of a solid marriage to discern the difference be-7
tween honesty and mere brutality, and that tact and circumspection 8
play as large a part in an intimate relation as candor and ‘soul baring,’

9
if not more], and who often complained that chronic lack of sleep [al-10
though she often was asleep; what she was, in reality, actually feeling 11
the effects and complaining of were traumatic dreams or ‘Night ter-12
rors,’ though I, of course, once again kept my own counsel on these 13
matters] produced a distracting ‘sound’ [or, rather, a mild aural hallu-14
cination — I literally bit my tongue in restraint when she discussed 15
this putative ‘sound’] which mimicked the tone of a ‘Tuning fork’ or 16
well rung bell) appeared to believe, her face, over the table’s center-17
piece, grapefruit and dry toast, flirting at times with vortical abstrac-18
tion and pulses of virid color but managing to retain or ‘hang on’ to its 19
visual or optical integrity or cohesion in the drained grey morning 20
light in a way which seemed almost stubborn. Small framed and sharp 21
featured, with a swart or tanned complexion and high-lighted hair in 22
a tall ‘Bouffante’ which stood aloof and unchanging above the shifting 23
tides of coiffure fashion, Hope’s strong will and refusal to be anyone 24
other than ‘who’ and ‘what’ she was had been one of the original 25
attractions between her and myself; and at this point, even during 26
my exhausted presentation of the ‘last resort’ of the Edmund R. and 27

Meredith R. Darling Sleep Clinic, I can even now remember remem-28
bering that I had never forgotten this, or been unmoved by her ‘inner 29
fire,’ or ceased to (in my ‘way’) ‘love’ and find her desirable despite the 30
fact that, even prior to the enervating dissolution of the present con-31
flict, the intervening recent years had not been, as the saying goes, 32

‘kind’ with respect to Hope’s gynecic or womanly charms or appeal, al-33
though, in her own case, the spoliations of time have not resulted in 34 sh
the swelling, puddling, thickening or bloated effects of the aging 35 reg

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process in both her stepsisters and (to a somewhat lesser extent) my-2
self. Once voluptuous to the point of being nearly ‘Ruben-esque,’

3

Hope’s own aging or anility’s type has established itself as being pri-4
marily one now consisting of ‘weazening’ or desiccation, her skin 5
toughening and becoming in places leathery in appearance, her dark 6
tan permanent and her teeth, neck’s tendons and extremities’ joints ap-7
pearing protrusive in a way they once never did. In brief, her over-all 8
mien has taken on a lupine or predatory aspect, and what was once her 9
eyes’ well known ‘twinkle’ has become a mere avidity. (None of this is, 10
of course, in any way surprising or ‘unnatural’ — air and time have 11
simply done to my wife what they also ‘do’ to bread and hung laundry.

12

Indeed, we must all come to terms with our own actuarial plight, so to 13
speak, of which the ‘Empty nest’ is such a vivid mile post along the 14
way of.) The natural but nevertheless terrible reality — albeit unspo-15
ken of in any viable union, over time — is that, by this point in our 16
marriage, Hope was already de facto or practically speaking unsexed, 17
an, as the saying goes withered vine or bloom, and this somehow all 18
the worse or ‘more so’ for all of her scrupulous devotion to self care and 19
youthful desiderata, just as so many of her own other bloated or desic-20
cant circle of friends and Book and Horticulture clubs’ middle aged 21
wives and divorcées who habitually congregate together around the 22

Raritan Club’s pool throughout the Summer season are obsessed by, as 23
well: the Exercise classes and caloric regimes, emollients and toners, 24

Yoga, supplements, tanning or (albeit rarely mentioned) Surgical ‘work’

25
or procedures — all the willful clinging to the same nubile or ‘virgo 26
intacta’ vivacity which their own daughters unknowingly serve to mock 27
as they latterly blossom. (In fact, pace her natural verve and ‘esprit fort,’

28
it was often all too easy a matter to remark the pain in Hope’s eyes and 29
her mouth’s crimped or ‘pinched’ set when watching or within the 30
purview of our Audrey’s later, increasingly mature and comely peer cir-31
cle, an anile grief so easily then transferred or ‘projected’ as anger onto 32
myself for merely owning eyes with which to see and be naturally af-33
fected by.) One is, in fact, hard pressed to regard it as coincidental that sh 34
all of these blossoming girls and daughters were, almost without ex-reg 35
ception, all dispatched to ‘out-of-State’ colleges, as with each passing 4th Pass Pages

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year the mere physical sight of them became for their mothers a living 1
rebuke.

2

The actual ‘beds’ for the sleep patients and their cases’ accrued data 3
at the Darling Sleep Clinic were directly side by side, but were also 4
markedly narrow, and possessed of thin, extremely firmly reinforced 5
mattresses, as well as only one sheet and ‘medium weight’ acrylic blan-6
ket despite the sterile chill of the Sleep chamber. The diagnostic regi-7
men — which took no little time and negotiations with our P.P.O. to 8
secure coverage or ‘authorization’ concerning which — consisted of 9

Hope and myself ’s making the slightly over 90 mile (with myself, as 10
usual, at the wheel while Hope dozed with her Travel pillow against 11
the passenger side door) drive, via ‘I’-195 and State routes 9 and 18, 12
one Wednesday evening per week, to Rutgers-Brunswick Memorial 13

Hospital, and there ‘checking in’ at the institution’s Fourth floor’s 14

Neurology\Somnology Dept., which contained the Edmund R. and 15

Meredith R. Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic, whose reputation in the 16
industry truly was, according to both Jack Vivien and other sources, 17

‘top-flight.’ The Sleep specialist (or, ‘Somnologist’) in charge of our 18
case, a large, mild mannered, burly, heavily set fellow with a lead col-19
ored crew cut and what appeared to be an extraordinary number of 20
keys on a promotional ‘Parke Davis, Inc.’ key ring — his manner 21
pleasant in the neutral, subdued and punctilious way of morticians and 22
certain types of Horticulture lecturers — appeared also to have what 23

Hope later remarked was little or no discernible neck or throat per se, 24
his head appearing to sit or, as it were, ‘rest’ directly upon his shoul-25
ders, which I pointed out may have only been an illusion or effect 26
caused by the high collar of the Somnologist’s white Medical or ‘lab’

27
coat, which most of the other Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic’s staff on 28
duty wore, as well, with laminated and ‘photo-’ Identification cards 29
clipped (or, in A.D.C.’s Systems Dept.’s more familiar argot or par-30
lance, ‘gator clipped’) to the breast pocket. Select members of the 31

Somnologist’s technical staff (or, ‘Sleep team’) conducted our formal 32

‘Intake interview,’ with the M.D. himself then acting as docent or 33
guide in briefly showing Hope and myself around the Darling Sleep 34 sh

Clinic facility, which appeared to consist of four or more small, self 35 reg

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contained ‘Sleep chambers’ which were surrounded on all sides by 2
soundless, clear, thick or ‘Plexi-’glass walls, sophisticated audio- and 3
video recording devices, and neurological monitoring equipment. Dr.

4

Paphian’s office itself was adjoined to the Clinic’s centrally located 5

‘Nerve-’ or ‘Command center,’ in which professional Somnologists, 6

Neurologists, aides, technicians and attendants could observe the oc-7
cupants of the different Sleep chambers on a wide variety of ‘Infra-8
red’ monitors and ‘brain’ wave measurement and display equipment.

9

Every staff and ‘Sleep team’ member also wore white, noiseless shoes 10
with gum or rubber soles, and the insubstantial blankets on each 11
chamber’s bed were also either spotlessly white or else pastel or ‘sky-’

12

(or, ‘electric-’) blue. Also, the Darling Sleep Clinic’s system of ‘halo-13
gen’ based, track- or cove style, overhead lighting was white and com-14
pletely shadowless (which is to say, no one in the facility appeared to 15
cast any shadow, which, together with the funereal quiet, Hope felt, 16
she said, lent a somewhat ‘dreamy’ or dream-like aspect to the atmo-17
sphere of the place) and made everyone appear sallow or ill, as well as 18
its being markedly chilly in the Sleep chamber. The Somnologist ex-19
plained that relatively cool temperatures conduced to both human 20
sleep and to the complex measurements of brain wave activity which 21
the Clinic’s sophisticated equipment was designed to monitor, ex-22
plaining that different types and levels of ‘E.E.G.’ (or, ‘brain’) waves 23
corresponded to several unique and distinct different levels or ‘stages’

24
of wakefulness and sleep, including the popularly known ‘R.E.M.-’ or 25

‘Paradoxical stage’ in which the voluntary muscles were paralyzed and 26
dreams occurred. Each of the majority of his many keys was encased 27
around the ‘head’ with a rubber or plastic casement, which, I hypoth-28
esized, cut down on the overall noise factor of the huge ring of keys 29
when the Somnologist walked or stood holding the keys in his slightly 30
moving palm in a way suggesting heft or the gauging of weight while 31
he spoke, which was evidently his primary ‘nervous’ or unconscious 32
habit. (Later, at the outset of the initial drive back home [before be-33
ginning, as was her usual wont, to doze or ‘nod’ against her side’s sh 34
door], Hope posited that there seemed to her to be something re-reg 35

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assuring, trustworthy or [in Hope’s own term] ‘substantial’ about a fel-1
low with this many keys [with myself, for my own part, keeping to my-2
self the fact that my own associations anent the keys were somewhat 3
more janitorial].)

4

By arrangement, Hope and myself were to attend the Sleep Clinic 5
once per week, on Wednesdays, for a total duration of from four to six 6
weeks, sleeping over-night in the Sleep chamber under close observa-7
tion. Much of the Intake data collection process concerned Hope and 8
myself ’s nocturnal routines or ‘rituals’ surrounding retiring and prepar-9
ing for sleep (these said ‘rituals’ being both common to and unique or 10
distinctive of most married couples, the Sleep specialist explained), in 11
order that these logistics and practices might be ‘re-created’ — with 12
the obvious exception of any physically intimate or sexual routines, the 13

Somnologist inserted, clinically evincing no discernible embarrass-14
ment or ‘shyness’ as Hope avoided my glance — as closely as possible 15
on these ‘over-nights,’ as we prepared to sleep under observation. In 16
separate Dressing rooms, we first changed in to light green hospital 17
gowns and disposable slippers, then proceeded in tandem to our as-18
signed Sleep chamber, Hope using one hand to keep the long vertical 19

‘slit’ or incision or ‘cleft’ at the rear of her gown clenched shut over her 20
bottom. Neither the gowns nor the high intensity lighting were what 21
anyone would term ‘flattering’ or ‘modest’ — and Hope, as a woman, 22
later remonstrated to me that she had felt somewhat demeaned or 23

‘violated’ to be sleeping under thin coverlets with nameless persons 24
observing her through a glass partition. (Frequent remarks or com-25
plaints like this were argumentative ‘bait’ to which I refused to re-26
spond or engage on the long, return rides home so early the following 27
morning, where I would hurriedly shave, change clothes and prepare 28
for the by now torturous, ‘peak hour’ commute up to Elizabeth for a 29
full day of work. A frequent habit of Hope’s was sometimes to seem-30
ingly agree or acquiesce to a proposal and wait to give voice to her ob-31
jections until the ‘agreed upon’ course of action was under way, at 32
which time what would have been reasonable caveats and reservations 33
now emerged as being merely pointless carping. I had, however, by this 34 sh

35 reg

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1
point in the conflict, learned to suppress frustration, indignation or 2
even pointing out that the time for such complaints being productive 3
had long passed, as pointing this out inevitably leads to the sort of 4
conjugal argument or ‘clash of wills’ in which there can be no winner.

5

One should also insert, as I had done to Chester [or ( “For God’s sake” ), 6

‘Jack’] Vivien, that our respective make-ups were such that conflict or 7
argument was more difficult or ‘harder’ on myself than on either 8

Hope, Naomi or Audrey, all of whom seemed to have a comparatively 9
easy time of ‘shaking off ’ the adrenaline and upset of a heated ex-10
change.) We were instructed or encouraged to bring our personal hy-11
giene or grooming products from home, and to use (first Hope doing 12
so, then myself, just as at home) a private washroom and to undergo 13
our personal hygiene ‘rituals’ in preparation for sleep (with, however, 14

Hope eschewing her facial emollient, hair net, moisturizer and gloves 15
due to the observers and panoply of ‘low light’ cameras, despite in-16
structions to mimic, as closely as possible, our at home routines). Aides 17
or attendants subsequently affixed white, circular ‘E.E.G.’ patches or 18

‘leads’ — whose conductive gels were extremely chilly and ‘queer’ feel-19
ing, Hope observed — to our heads’ temples, foreheads, upper chests 20
and arms, whereupon we then lay carefully or ‘gingerly’ down along 21
the lengths of the Sleep chamber’s parallel beds, careful to avoid tan-22
gling the complex nests of wires which led from the leads to a grey 23
chassised ‘relay’ or ‘induction’ monitor which hummed quietly in the 24

Sleep chamber’s north-east corner. The ‘Sleep team’ technicians —

25
some of whom, it emerged, were enrolled Medical students at nearby 26

Rutgers University — wore the customary noiseless, white foot wear 27
and ‘lab’ coats unbuttoned over casual or ‘mufti’ clothing. Somewhat 28
surprisingly, three of our Sleep chamber’s apparently ‘glass’ walls were, 29
upon being inside them, revealed to be, in reality, mirrored, such that 30
we could not, from inside, see any of the technicians or recording 31
equipment, while the fourth or final wall’s interior comprised a so-32
phisticated, ‘Wall sized’ video screen or ‘projection’ of various com-33
monly relaxing or soporific vistas, ‘scenes’ or tableaux: fields of nodding sh 34
wheat, trickling streams, Winter spruces trimmed in fresh snow, small reg 35
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so forth in this vein. The twin beds’ mattress and lone pillows were also 1
revealed to be layered in a plastic compound which crinkled audibly 2
under any movement, which I personally found distracting and some-3
what unsanitary. The beds also contained metal railings along the sides 4
which appeared rather higher and more substantial than the rails or 5
sides one is accustomed to associating with a more typical ‘Hospital’

6
bed. Our case’s assigned Somnologist — Dr. Paphian, with his afore-7
mentioned subdued countenance and short, ‘salt and pepper’ hair-cut 8
and sessile head — explained that some patients’ particular sleep dys-9
functions involved somnambulism or certain frenetic or even poten-10
tially violent movements in the midst of sleep, and that the 24.5 inch 11
brushed steel railings affixed to the chambers’ beds’ sides had been 12
mandated by the Sleep Clinic’s insurance underwriter.

13

Also — as light reading for an average of 20 to 30 minutes before 14

Hope customarily struck the elevated sconce’s light above her bed at 15
home was a fairly firmly established part of our marriage’s routine for 16
preparing to retire — Hope and myself spent, for three consecutive 17

Wednesdays in a row, 20 or more minutes sitting awkwardly up in the 18
narrow and ‘crib’-like (because of the high lateral railings) beds with 19
only a crinkling institutional pillow for back support, ostensibly ‘read-20
ing’ in our respective beds in the Sleep chamber as we did at home, 21
each holding our current ‘livre de chevets’ of choice, which Hope had 22
brought in her Book club bag from home, but which were here, in this 23
artificial setting, mere ‘props,’ and I did little more than absently turn 24
the pages of Kurt Eichenwald’s Serpent on the Rock, as the idea of re-25
laxing or ‘winding down’ while covered in E.E.G. leads and extrudent 26
wires and fully reflected in three of the small room’s walls was some-27
what farcical or absurd; but I was — in what remained close if sub-rosa 28

‘consultation’ with Jack Vivien — determined now to go through the 29
experiment in full technical compliance, and not to complain, demur 30
or give Hope any cause to suspect or think that I was not fully pre-31
pared to go through with my side of the ‘bargain.’ (Sometimes, never-32
theless, admittedly, for instance when driving — particularly along the 33
daily commute via the Garden State Parkway, or west-ward via 195, 34 sh
the ‘Jersey’ Turnpike, and ‘I’-276 around metropolitan Philadelphia’s 35 reg

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1
northern border to the campus of out-of-State Bryn Mawr, to there-2
upon park the vehicle along Montgomery Avenue and upwardly 3
observe the lights of our Audrey’s Freshman dormitory [or, more for-4
mally, ‘Ardmore House,’ in honor of a Nineteenth century college 5
benefactor, and designed or ‘done up’ in the steep, grey, vertiginous, 6
crenellated tower or ‘Martello’ style of a medieval era fortress] room on 7
the tower or ‘keep’’s Fourth floor’s north-east corner come on or off as 8
she moved about the room with her room-mate or prepared to retire 9
or undress — I become so distraught, melancholic or consumed with 10
over-whelming anguish or ‘dread’ for no apparent or discernible reason 11

[the feeling, unrelated to the sleep deprivation whose symptoms I 12
knew so well by that point in time, seems to come ‘out of nowhere’ and 13
arise, as it were, out of some profound, unconscious, psychic void or 14

‘hole’] that I consider intentionally ‘jumping’ the median into on-15
coming traffic. This fear, on average, will last just a moment or two.) 16

Despite, however, my nervousness or excitement at the prospect of 17
objective verification of my ‘side’ of the dispute, my life-long custom 18
or habit of lying supine on my back with my elbows bent and hands 19
atop one another upon my chest made relaxing as the Sleep chamber’s 20
soothing vistas and harsh lights were extinguished from somewhere 21
outside the chamber somewhat more straightforward for myself as op-22
posed to Hope, whose habit (unlike our Audrey, who tends to curl 23
somewhat ‘foetally’ on her right side, and often appears to awaken in 24
precisely the same position in which she had originally lost conscious-25
ness) is to fall asleep procumbent or ‘prone,’ with her arms splayed and 26
her head rotated or, as it were, almost ‘twisted’ violently to the side, as 27
though some great, unwelcome weight were pressing her down from 28
behind and above (a position which most adults would find noticeably 29
uncomfortable), and she complained to the ‘Sleep team’ that it would 30
be nearly impossible for her to fall truly asleep when supine and fac-31
ing, as it were, ‘up’ as the E.E.G. leads and wires seemed to dictate.

32

Nevertheless, she subsequently did (as usual) fall promptly asleep; and, 33
on our second Wednesday ‘over-night’ in the Sleep chamber, neither sh 34
she nor ‘Dr. Paphian’ (the Sleep specialist’s cognomen or sur-name) reg 35
ever again referred to her vehement protests of the week prior.

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As previously mentioned, our diagnostic protocol dictated our trav-1
eling to and ‘checking in’ to sleep together at the Darling Memorial 2

Sleep Clinic once per week for a possible time frame of up to six 3
weeks, with Hope and myself ’s brains’ respective wave patterns moni-4
tored and any untoward movements, sounds or awakenings recorded 5
on state of the art Infra-red or ‘low light’ videotape (Hope often made 6
a point of verifying the audio’s quality, as well, while I gazed neutrally 7
at the Fourth wall’s screen’s relaxing tableaux), which would be ana-8
lyzed by our Somnologist and eventually form the basis for a medical 9
diagnosis and recommended course of treatment. I myself, of course, 10
as previously mentioned, was looking forward with some anticipation 11
to the recordings’ empirical verification of the fact that, when Hope 12
cried out in vexation to accuse me once again of ‘snoring,’ my E.E.G.

13
waves would indicate that, not only was I myself not truly asleep, but 14
that, on the contrary, Hope’s own brain ‘reading’ would prove conclu-15
sively that it was, in reality, she herself who at that time was actually 16
asleep and had dreamt, hallucinated or otherwise ‘fantasized’ the un-17
pleasant noises which she so steadfastly believed were ‘robbing’ her of 18
her sleep, health, youth and ability to trust that she and myself were ‘on 19
the same wave length’ enough anymore to make our marriage anything 20
more than a sexless sham, especially now that Audrey was no longer at 21
home to ‘preoccupy’ me or serve as the ‘focus of [my] affections’ (this 22
among the charges which Hope had levied in the vindictive heat of the 23
very worst morning arguments respecting the conflict and our whole 24
viability as a marriage and putative ‘family’).

25

As it eventuated, however, it only took the P.P.O.’s authorized min-26
imum (or, ‘Floor’) of three weeks for an administrative aide or facto-27
tum at the Darling Clinic to page me in my small Systems Dept. office 28
at the work-place (he had apparently called our home phone number, 29
as well, but Hope had been either [as was more and more frequently 30
the case] ‘out’ or else asleep [she openly napped, despite the Clinic’s 31
informational material at the outset’s clear instructions against diurnal 32
napping for patients with any type of sleep related condition]) to in-33
form me that the Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic’s administration, in 34 sh
conjunction with Dr. Paphian and the rest of the ‘Sleep team’ in charge 35 reg

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1
of Hope and myself ’s case, now felt that they had enough accrued data 2
to offer a firm diagnosis and a recommended course of any ‘treatments 3
or procedures [deemed] indicated.’ This official diagnosis was to be 4
proffered the following week (on, for scheduling reasons, a Monday 5
morning) in a small Conference room off the ‘main’ or central corridor 6
or hallway of the hospital’s Fourth floor’s unusual, stelliform or ‘dia-7
mond’ shaped floor plan or ‘lay-out,’ a small, brightly lit room with one 8
all too familiar ‘Goya’ among the more generic or commercial Impres-9
sionist prints on the wall, and a round, maple or wood grain table with 10
matching ‘captain’s’ chairs whose seats’ and arm rests’ padding was a 11
dark and somewhat over-saturant red in color. Like so much of the rest 12
of the Darling Memorial Clinic, this room was also markedly chilly (the 13
more so as we had driven down, amidst peak morning traffic, in a severe 14
storm, with high winds and heavy precipitation, only then to find that 15

Rutgers-Brunswick Hospital’s indoor parking garage’s vehicle entrance 16
was emblazoned with a sign reading, ‘LOT FULL.’ Both our over-17
coats were, as a result, sodden, and dripped on the Conference room’s 18
floor, as well as the fact that Hope — whose morbid, long-standing 19
fear of ‘violent’ storms had prevented her from sleeping or napping 20
throughout the stressful commute — was, as a result, in a particularly 21
foul, obdurate temper), and was equipped or outfitted with an illumi-22
nated wall mount appliance or device for reading X-rays and ‘M.R.I.’

23
images, as well as a large video- and\or audio Monitor on a rolling 24

‘stand’ or cart of reinforced aluminum or iron, painted an institutional 25
brown and with each leg terminating in a small ‘caster’ or wheel for mo-26
bility. Everyone in the Conference room appeared to have disposable, 27
styrofoam cups of coffee or tea which sat on the table at our respective 28
places, and steamed. Having, due to anticipation or ‘nerves,’ gotten lit-29
tle or no sleep the prior night, both my glasses and vest felt too tight 30
once again, and all sounds appeared to amplify or ‘ramify’ somewhat, 31
but with the room only moving slightly in and out of exaggerant visual 32
focus and hue. Each time I yawned, however, produced a sharp bloom 33
or flower of pain in my ear. My trouser cuffs and garters being wet, as sh 34
well, and Hope’s tall coiffure being somewhat canted to the right, and reg 35
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have torn from the easel and discarded in medias res, as well. Also 1
around the table, a small, dark, unfamiliar, ‘saucer’ eyed, Hispanic man 2
with chloasmatic or pre-cancerous lesions on the backs of his hands, his 3

‘business attire’ or suit of fine, dark grey wool, the knot of his tie the size 4
of a toddler’s head. The sound of a hand-held hammer. The sound of 5
a Driving range. The sound of a nail gun and portable air compressor.

6

Of one or more rotary or ‘power’ saws. The sound of a Saab with mild 7
turbo lag. The sound of impacting rain and wipers on High. The sound 8
of a blender making frozen drinks, of coins in a Prudential ‘Executive-’

9
or ‘Senior Management’ lounge’s vending machine. Of a lengthy putt 10
being ‘made’ or ‘drained’ in the cup’s shallow hole. The sound of strug-11
gles and muffled breathing and a male- or ‘Father’ figure’s whispered 12
grunts and shushing. Some type of construction, maintenance or re-13
lated activity was under way some distance along the central corridor 14
or hallway, in the evident direction of the actual Darling Clinic’s Sleep 15
chambers and observational ‘Nerve’ center, and the emphatic sounds 16
of a hammer started and stopped without discernible rhythm. I suf-17
fered or experienced a rapid and terrible flash or ‘strobe-’lit interior 18
vision of a prone female figure wrapped in clear plastic industrial 19
sheeting, which cleared almost instantly. Around the table with Hope 20
and myself were seated or ‘arrayed’ the Somnologist with his ever 21
present array of keys and white, ‘lab’ soutane or coat, two somewhat 22
younger technicians or aides who were also members of our case’s 23

‘Sleep team,’ and a finely arrayed, male, Hispanic or, perhaps, ethni-24
cally Cuban, Medical administrative professional, who was explained 25
to be present representing Rutgers-Brunswick Memorial Hospital’s 26
periodic ‘Review’ or evaluation of the Darling Memorial Clinic’s diag-27
nostic procedures and activities. The cart’s Monitor — attended by a 28
young, female ‘Sleep team’ technician with no discernible wedding 29
band and a severely pulled back brunette hair-style, who also carried a 30
collection of various tapes and files associated with Hope and myself ’s 31
case, one of which she apparently activated via a hand-held or ‘remote’

32
device — now displayed my own name, date, and personal eight digit 33

‘P.P.O. Number’ (as well as a specially assigned ‘D.S.C.’ [for ‘Darling 34 sh

Sleep Clinic’] Number) beneath a template of four evenly spaced, 35 reg

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1
horizontal lines, not unlike a musical score’s, between which moved a 2
jagged or erratic line of white light which signified my own ‘brain’

3
waves, which had evidently been recorded through the conductive 4

E.E.G. leads throughout our nights in the Sleep chamber. The waves’

5
white ‘line’ was discomfiting, being palsied, bumpy and arrhythmic 6
rather than regular or consistent, as well as being trended with dra-7
matic troughs and spikes or ‘nodes’ suggestive in appearance of an 8
arrhythmic heart or financially troubled or erratic ‘Cash flow’ graph.

9

Also, not unlike a series of Hewlett-Packard HP9400B mainframes 10
arrayed in sequence for co-sequential (or, in A.D.C.’s nomenclature, 11

‘Sysplex’) data processing, a digital display in the monitor’s upper left 12
corner displayed the elapsed time along several minutely calibrated 13
temporal gradients.

14

As the entire ‘Sleep team’ knew from our Intake data, my wife’s own 15
morbid fear of insomnia or sleep deprivation was long-standing.

16

When, for instance, our Audrey was, as a child, ill or anxious respect-17
ing bad dreams or phantasms, it was often I who ‘sat’ up with her so 18
that Hope could, as she would have it, ‘try to’ sleep.

19

Meanwhile, the initial ‘result’ or ‘diagnosis’ proffered by the Sleep 20
specialist was, in a word, shocking and wholly unexpected. On each of 21
the five or six occasions when special, ‘low light’ video equipment had 22
recorded Hope sitting suddenly up-right and accusing me of ‘snoring,’

23
as well as on the evidently at least two of these recorded instances 24
when I had audibly rejoined that I was not even yet asleep and thus 25
could not logically be ‘guilty’ of the accusation, the Sleep specialist —

26
aided in his presentation by the youthfully severe technician’s laser 27
pointer and her ‘remote’ device’s ability to halt or ‘freeze’ the Monitor’s 28
display in order to draw the table’s attention to a certain time specific 29
interval in the E.E.G. — averred or affirmed ipse dixit that in fact I 30
had, indeed, been, clinically speaking — despite my belief or percep-31
tion of being fully conscious — ‘technically asleep,’ predominantly in 32
the Second or Third of the four well known levels or ‘stages’ of sleep, 33
which the Somnologist once again outlined or glossed. As the rest of sh 34
the table and ‘Sleep team’ looked on, the Somnologist (who, as usual, reg 35
held and unconsciously ‘toyed with’ his ponderous, Parke-Davis key 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 2 2 9
ring) delivered this verdict with all the clinical objectivity of modern 1
science, and took pains to make it clear once again that he was empir-2
ically neutral in the marital discord and took neither one ‘side’ in the 3
dispute nor the other. Nevertheless, I felt, upon the putative ‘diagno-4
sis’’s initial delivery, a spasm or ‘wave’ of both anger and disbelief, 5
which caused one of my first unconscious or ‘reflexive’ thoughts to be 6
that Dr. Paphian et alia were in fact on Hope’s ‘side,’ and that she had 7
somehow induced the Darling Clinic to alter the testing data to some-8
how indicate that I was asleep when I knew very well (meaning, every 9
bit as well as I knew I was seated there in that Conference room, grip-10
ping the blood colored arms of the chair in disbelief ) I was not. Mean-11
while, my physical demeanor betrayed none of this admittedly irrational 12
suspicion, but rather only shock and surprise — my jaw quite literally 13

‘dropped,’ and for a brief interval of time I was so non-plussed that I 14
did not think or have the ‘presence of mind’ to ask about any parallel 15
results indicated by the study and E.E.G.’s aural or audio portion —

16
meaning, in other words, whether or not it was also confirmed that my 17
being ‘technically asleep’ was or was not accompanied by audible ‘snor-18
ing.’ (Here I also, it should be inserted, had an erection or ‘Boner’ at 19
this time [my first in several months], the origins and associations of 20
which were, in my disoriented state, wholly unknown; the indirect 21
cause may have been the sudden surge of adrenal- or stress-related 22
hormones caused by the findings’ sudden shock.) 23

There were, following this alleged ‘diagnosis,’ approximately two to 24
four seconds of collective silence, punctuated by the noise of construc-25
tion activities, rain striking the Conference room’s west window, and a 26
ringing telephone somewhere deeper within the administrative offices 27
of the Darling Memorial Sleep Clinic. My quondam or former first 28
wife, Naomi, never accepted the fact that I did not want children with 29
her; I was afraid of ‘repeating the cycle.’ Also, my pager was vibrating.

30

Hope’s own facial expression or mien, upon the Sleep specialist’s news, 31
was the somewhat exaggeratedly ‘bland’ or ‘unreactive’ one which I 32
knew so well from other marital embarrassments, an affect which sig-33
nified that she was experiencing a sense of bitter vindication or tri-34 sh
umph, but was disguising or effacing her pleasure in order to appear to 35 reg

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1
be taking the ‘high-road’ in the conflict, as well as to avoid my pos-2
sibly accusing her of vindictive triumph, as well as to show a lack of 3
any surprise and to attempt to make clear that she had ‘never’ had or 4
entertained the ‘slightest doubt’ that she was in the right in the dispute 5
over the conflict, and that the Somnologist was now merely confirming 6
what she had in reality ‘kn[own] all along.’ Only a certain slight gleam 7
or avidity in Hope’s pale eyes betrayed her surprise and triumph at my 8
stunned disbelief at the Sleep team’s apparent Medical diagnosis or 9

‘ruling.’ The sound of the ringing telephone, seemingly unanswered, 10
continued on in this brief, silent interval prior to the young, forbid-11
dingly nubile or ‘paphian’ technician’s there-upon ejecting, inserting 12
and manually adjusting or ‘re-setting’ the Monitor’s display as the bland, 13
phlegmatic Somnologist’s diagnosis now shifted its focus to my wife’s 14
own E.E.G. measurement’s recorded ‘brain’ waves, which, on the 15

Monitor, to Hope and myself ’s inexpert or ‘lay’ eyes, appeared indis-16
tinguishable from my own display, except, of course, for the difference 17
of its now being Hope’s own name and P.P.O. and Darling Clinic 18

‘Patient code’ numbers displayed beneath the template whose palsied, 19
erratic line now signified Hope’s brain’s electrical activity during this 20
calibrated time frame. These particular areas, Dr. Paphian averred 21
between several sudden, conspicuous, screaming or ‘shrieking’ sounds 22
from a ‘power’ saw or router somewhere down the corridor (there was 23
also the ambient smell of freshly cut wood, as well as industrial plastic, 24
in addition to the Hispanic’s pungent cologne and Hope’s customary 25
brand of ‘JOY’), pointing out with the salacious technician’s hand-26
held pointer distinctive spikes or ‘nodes’ in the erratic line of Hope’s 27

‘brain’ waves, indicated — to (as it, so to speak, ‘goes,’ quite obviously, 28

‘without saying’) both of our further surprise — that not merely my-29
self but Hope, as well, had herself evidently also been verifiably or em-30
pirically asleep during the recorded time periods when she allegedly 31

‘heard’ my ‘snoring’ (while, in addition or concurrently, due possibly ei-32
ther to extreme fatigue or adrenaline, I myself was also experiencing at 33
the same time a radically compressed or seemingly accelerated sensu-sh 34
ous mnemonic tableau [or, as it were, interior ‘clip’] of my memories of reg 35
teaching Audrey to operate ‘her’ [although registered, for insurance 4th Pass Pages

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purposes, in Dr. and Mrs. Sipe’s legal name] new Mazda coupe’s five 1
speed ‘stick’ transmission in a Lower Squankum parking lot filled with 2
myriad parallel angled lines, Audrey’s fulgent auburn hair untied or 3

‘down’ and chewing some type of bright blue gum, the compartment 4
awash in sunlight and her yearly Christmas saffron bath gel’s scent, 5
the noisome sound of her breathing and shapes of her leg as she 6
worked the relevant pedals up and down, the sotto voce profanities 7
when we lugged, bucked or stalled with soft squeals and bit lip and —

8

[ “Do stop” ] — and thus, in the renewed, brief, ‘stunned’ silence after 9
the M.D.’s second diagnosis, I myself forgot to feel triumph, ‘vindica-10
tion’ or even any confusion at the apparent or paradoxical sleep ‘ver-11
dict’’s reversal. My heart had, as it were, ‘sunk’ several inches; I missed 12
our Audrey terribly; I wanted now to go alone to help her pack and 13

Withdraw and be borne back home [notwithstanding my foot’s by 14
now being almost numb or ‘asleep,’ I could and would not uncross my 15
legs], to drive at rates well in excess of the posted limit and to storm 16
the out-of-State dormitory or ‘castle’ or ‘enceinte’ or machicolated ban-17
ishment’s donjon’s fortifications and to pound, smite or ring its massive, 18
oaken front door’s bell in the middle or wee hours of the night and 19
loudly say, avow or cry aloud what may and must never even be remotely 20
thought or ‘dreamt of ’ [unlike, it went without saying, ‘Father’]. I felt 21
very nearly over-whelmingly fatigued, melancholy, worn down and 22
desolate or ‘alone,’ and my wet bottom or prostate throbbed, as well, 23
gripping the burled arms’ sides in order to sit up erect), with the more 24
pronounced or ‘acute’ E.E.G. spiking, verifiably associated with each 25
time interval just prior to her sitting bolt up-right and crying out, 26
clearly indicating — ‘almost textbook’ being the Sleep specialist’s term 27
of professional admiration for Hope’s E.E.G.’s distinctive ‘Theta’

28
wave’s spikes or ‘nodes’ — Hope’s being, at each crucial, accusatory 29
juncture, in ‘stage Four,’ the well known ‘Paradoxical’ stage of sleep 30
associated with muscular paralysis, rapid eye movement and oneiric 31
dreaming. From the inner construction area, two distinct hammers’

32
rapid sounds of impact overlapped or ‘mated’ briefly for a moment, 33
one then ceasing and the other seeming to grow more vehement 34 sh
in compensation. I then either imagined, hallucinated or witnessed 35 reg

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Dr. ‘Desmondo-Ruiz’’s — the large eyed Latin administrator’s or 2
compère’s — mouth mouth, very distinctly, the word ‘Su-i-cide,’ sans any 3
emergent sound. Hope, meanwhile, leaning slightly and somewhat 4
aggressively forward over tightly crossed legs in her chair, was asking 5
the Sleep specialist, Dr. Paphian, in her familiarily brittle or affectedly 6
composed and unreactive way, to please allow her to ‘get [her] facts 7
straight here’: was the Sleep team saying that it was her husband Mr.

8

Napier here who was, in point of fact, asleep and truly snoring, or that 9
in reality it was ‘[Hope]’ who was asleep and dreaming (or, ‘fantasizing’

10
or, ‘making up’) the whole snoring issue ‘out,’ as it were, of ‘thin air’? I 11
myself remaining seated erect (or, “. . . up! ”) with my legs tightly crossed 12
and neutrally covering first one eye and then the other, meanwhile.

13

At this juncture, the Somnologist — knowing, as he did, only the 14
bare outline or ‘skeleton’ of the unprecedented marital discord which 15
the alleged ‘snoring’ issue which had brought us to his Memorial 16

Clinic had precipitated between Hope and myself, and evidently mis-17
apprehending my somnolent or dolorous cast of countenance as am-18
bivalence or an insouciant passivity or ‘apathy’ (Hope’s own mien, 19
meanwhile, had gone ominously rigid or ‘hard’ in the face of this sud-20
den apparent diagnostic ‘volte face’ or reversal and the M.D.’s evident 21
vindication of my own long held claims that the specific episodes of 22

‘snoring’ which had so aggrieved her were, strictly speaking, in fact the 23

‘unreal’ products of either a dream or the ‘loosened associations’ of 24
nocturnal or oneiric ‘Night terrors,’ precisely as I had claimed repeti-25
tively throughout the previous cold weather months’ traumatic and 26
devitalizing conflict, the vessels and tendons in her neck flaring invol-27
untarily and her narrow, somewhat lupine and leathery face’s every 28
line, fissure, wrinkle, seam, pleat, lesion, pouch or ‘flaw’ standing out as 29
if starkly high-lighted in the muscular rigidity of her expression; she 30
looked, for a moment, literally decades above and beyond her true age, 31
and I could well imagine the oblivious or unwilled affront which our 32

Audrey’s own ‘dewy’ or epithelial complexion must have presented to 33

Hope before her banishment out-of-State, Audrey comprising an, as it sh 34
were, walking compendium of all the daughterly charms Hope so reg 35
feared acknowledging were now ‘behind’ her. [See, for instance, the 4th Pass Pages

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prior early Spring’s ‘Elective’ or ‘non-essential’ and hence uncovered 1
out-patient procedure to have the Varicose veins removed or erased 2
from the rear of her bottom and legs’ upper portion, her convalescence 3
from which was plainly so rebarbative and, frankly, sad or pathetic in 4
its impotent vanity and, as it were, ‘denial’ of what had, in fact, long 5
ceased to make any substantive difference. ( “not start this again my” )]), 6
now felt absently or ‘unconsciously’ at his forehead’s keratoses, and — in 7
yet still another apparent, confusing or ‘paradoxical’ diagnostic reversal 8

( pace his phlegmatic or sanguine demeanor, the Somnologist’s ‘bed 9
side manner’ left something to be desired, Hope and I had both 10
agreed) — averred (meaning, the Sleep specialist now averred) that, 11
yes, technically speaking, my wife’s accusations as to ‘snoring,’ while 12
based on (in his terms) ‘interior, dreamed experience’ as opposed to 13

‘exterior sensory input,’ nonetheless were, in a Medical or scientific 14
sense, ‘technically’ correct. With the large collection or ‘ring’ of in-15
sulated keys now in his left hand, and addressing some type of facial 16
signal or ‘cue’ to the nubile technician, the neutrally objective Somnol-17
ogist stated that the ‘low’ or Infra-red light videotape of two such 18

‘Fourth-’ or ‘Paradoxical’ sleep stage intervals immediately prior to 19

Hope’s loud accusations of my ‘snoring’ would, he said, confirm that I 20
myself had indeed, within these intervals, been engaged in the ‘oc-21
cluded’ or, more formally, ‘nasopharyngeal’ respiration commonly re-22
ferred to among the lay populace as ‘snoring,’ this being a transient or 23
recurrent phenomenon or condition often common to males over 40

24
or more, Dr. Paphian explained — particularly in those whose noctur-25
nal posture was, by habit (like myself ’s), supine as opposed to prone, 26
lateral or ‘foetal’ — and occurring predominantly in human sleep’s me-27
dial or ‘deep’ stages Two and Three of sleep. Apparently, however, the 28

‘Fourth-’ or ‘Paradoxical’ stage’s paralysis of certain key laryngeal muscle 29
groups rendered actual ‘snoring’ as or while one actively dreamt during 30

R.E.M.- or ‘dream’ sleep physiologically impossible. All the Sleep spe-31
cialist’s information was concise and bore directly on the matter at 32
hand. My wife, meanwhile, was massaging her temples in order to sig-33
nify stress or impatience. The Conference room’s somewhat subordi-34 sh
nate or ‘junior’ aide to the Somnologist’s Sleep team — a roughly 35 reg

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college age young man (or, in today’s more popular nomenclature, 2

‘Dude’) who wore, beneath his unbuttoned and not altogether spotless 3
or sterile ‘lab’ coat, a pink, faded, red or fuchsia cotton ‘tee’ shirt on 4
whose front appeared the line drawing or caricature of a nameless but 5
somehow ‘naggingly’ familiar or famous person’s stymied or confused 6
looking face, below which, on the garment’s fabric, appeared the state-7
ment or caption, ‘MY WIFE SAYS I’M INDECISIVE, BUT I’M NOT SO

8

SURE,’ which was almost certainly not meant to be taken seriously or 9
at ‘face’ value but was, rather, some form of droll or ironic sally — now 10
returned from his brief hiatus from the Conference room with a small, 11
boxed set of ordinary or ‘commercial’ VHS type videotapes, which 12
were labeled in black, felt tip ink, ‘R.N.’ and ‘H.S.-N.,’ along with 13

Hope and myself ’s respective P.P.O. and D.M.C. ‘Patient codes’ and 14
the dates of the relevant Wednesday nights during which the actual 15
filmed sleep ‘experiments’ had been held or conducted; and this youth 16
and the ( “only hurt a tiny” ) Somnologist conferred together over a 17
brushed steel or aluminum Medical chart holder respecting precisely 18
which tape to ‘load’ and\or ‘cue’ in order to empirically verify the 19

Somnologist’s diagnosis of Hope’s accusations’ ultimately unreal, 20
oneiric or ‘Paradoxical’ content. Hope, at this point, leaning once more 21
slightly forward and furiously twitching or ‘joggling’ one high heeled 22
shoe of her crossed legs, posited or inquired whether, from the sum 23
total of the Clinic’s diagnostic data, it might be thus possible that ‘he’

24

(meaning, I myself ) could somehow be deeply asleep and ‘snoring’ in 25
the Sleep chamber’s bed and yet could simultaneously be dreaming the 26
precise ‘sensation’ or ‘experience’ of being still somehow, as it were, still 27
fully ‘awake’ in the narrow, firmly reinforced Clinic bed, a possibility 28
which (Hope suggested) would account for my sincere or heartfelt 29

‘denials’ of having been asleep whenever she finally ‘[couldn’t] stand it’

30
and cried aloud in order to wake me — to which, interjecting some-31
what irritatedly in response, I myself pointed out the obvious ‘hole’ or 32
logical flaw in Hope’s theory’s scenario, and asked the Somnologist to 33
stipulate once again, for, as it were, the ‘record,’ that, according to his sh 34
explanations respecting the well known stages of human sleep, I phys-reg 35
ically could not be ‘snoring’ when ( “dreaming” ) dreaming, since, by 4th Pass Pages

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O b l i v i o n 2 3 5
basic logic, if I were, a., literally ‘dreaming’ that I was awake, I would, 1
b., be, by definition, in the ‘Fourth-’ or ‘Paradoxical’ stage of sleep, and 2
thus, c., due to the ‘Paradoxical’ stage’s well known laryngeal paralysis, 3

I could, d., not be producing the rasping, gurgling or ‘nasopharyngeal’

4
snoring sounds which in fact Hope had herself in reality only dreamt 5
that she’d heard me producing in situ. Both Hope’s shoes, gloves and 6
expensive purse or hand bag matched perfectly in regards to color and 7
constituent leather texture; she also always smelled quite fine. It was in 8
or around this point that the lissome, mature, voluptuous but some-9
what severe or ‘forbidding’ technician began to insert or ‘load’ a given, 10
selected videotape in to a receptacle or ‘slot’ or ‘hole’ in the Monitor’s 11
rear, and — utilizing a sheet of coded ( “Please!” ) Somnological data and 12
the hand-held remote — to begin to ‘cue’ the ‘low’ light recording to the 13
relevant stage Four or ‘Paradoxical’ interval just prior to (one would 14
presume, based on the Sleep specialist’s ‘prolegomenon’ or gloss [physio-15
logically, I myself still remained ‘At attention,’ one might say]) a sudden, 16
aggrieved and high volume accusation of ‘snoring’ on my wife’s part.

17

Whether seemingly somewhat forebodingly or not, both all exterior 18
or extraneous noise and my own neglected pager itself — as well as the 19
swart, handsomely dressed Medical administrator’s audible imbiba-20
tion or ‘slurping’ of his hot tea (a personal pet peeve of mine since 21
childhood, followed as it was by the somewhat affected knuckle across 22
the upper lip) — appeared at this point in time to cease, producing a 23
sudden and somewhat dramatic or unsettling silence or distended 24

‘pause.’ Meanwhile, on the room’s Monitor, the video recording, which 25
formed or comprised a diptych or ‘Split screen’ image, showed Hope 26
and myself ’s darkened Sleep chamber in a low amber light which was 27
evidently distinctive of the appearance of low light film, the screen’s 28
upper left and right corners displaying both the relevant date and 29

‘0204’ (or, 2:04 A.M. in scientific or ‘Zulu time’) along with each suc-30
cessive second and decimal increments of same, with the (from our 31
perspective) dextral or right hand side of the video display being com-32
prised of a sustained, Infra-red close up (or, ‘tight shot’) of myself in 33
the bed, deeply asleep, supine on my back with my hands on my chest, 34 sh
and — far more unsettlingly — of my own face, asleep. I myself had, 35 reg

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1
not, of course, surprisingly, never seen or observed my own ‘uncon-2
scious’ face prior to this time; and, in the Monitor’s diptych’s recto or, 3
as it were, right or ‘starboard’ portion’s unblinking close up, it was now 4
revealed as being not a face I in any way recognized or ‘knew,’ with its 5
slack jaw and protrusive jowls, hands on my chest spiderishly twitch-6
ing, lips fishily loose or agape; and, although there was (to the Sleep 7
team’s consternation and whispered colloquy among the aides and 8
technicians at the Monitor’s rear, with which there was evidently some 9
technical ‘glitch’ or malfunction) no audible sound (Hope, gazing in 10
rigid fascination or horror at the dextral display right along-side my-11
self, herself was silently ‘frozen’ [or, ‘paralyzed’ ( “or hurt you if ” )] in mid 12
gesture, her pupils quite large and liquidly black), the flaccid mien, 13
gaping mouth, slack jaw and puddled and quivering jowls I’d never 14

‘envisioned’ lying down (for, as with most husbands, I had, of course, 15
only seen my face when seated or standing erect at the mirror, as in 16
shaving, removing unwanted nasal or auricular hairs, masturbating 17
with a saffron scented under-garment, tightening the knot of my tie 18
and so forth), as well as, despite the recording’s defective audio por-19
tion’s absence of sound, the variably changing shapes and contortions 20
of my unconsciously open mouth in the close up sleeping shot or wee 21
hour ‘scene,’ as Hope and myself watched in rigid fascination (as when 22
passing the wreckage and prone, twisted figures of a vehicular accident 23
or ‘Crime scene’), signifying or ‘meaning,’ in other words, that the dis-24
tinctive, alternating shapes of my image’s mouth’s slack lips, as well as 25
the small bubbles of saliva or spit which alternately formed and dis-26
solved at my open mouth’s corners (there was labial ‘film’ or paste in 27
those corners, as well, gummy and sepia colored, distending slightly 28
as my mouth changed shape), signified undeniably that sounds and 29
noises of which I had no conscious or ‘voluntary’ awareness were in 30
fact escaping my throat and mouth — no one with eyes could deny 31
it — and, as the video camera’s focus ‘tightened’ or closed further in on 32
my wholly unfamiliar, inhuman, unconscious visage, I either saw, hal-33
lucinated, ‘imagined’ (Hope at this juncture still rigidly or foetally sh 34

‘frozen,’ open mouthed and saucer eyed, as both the forbidding tech-reg 35
nician and Latin executive began to peel their respective faces off in a 4th Pass Pages

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‘top down’ fashion or manner, beginning at each temple and pulling 1
downwards with sharp, emphatic, peeling or ‘tugging’ motions, the 2

Cuban’s foreign wrist watch and hands a mass of amber lesions) or ac-3
tually watched or literally ‘witnessed’ one sleeping eyelid open just a 4
crack, ever so slightly, allowing a minuscule sliver or ray or ‘blade’ of 5
light — as in, for instance, under a dark bedroom’s closed door when 6
the hallway light outside is illuminated or ‘turned on’ as a heavy, famil-7
iar nocturnal tread slowly ascends the Victorian staircase to the bed-8
room door — from the rapidly moving and unconscious eye below, 9
seeing as well in the Split screen’s right- or ‘off ’ side’s shot my own wet 10
mouth and slack, soft and spreading cheeks now begin to distend in a 11

‘grinningly’ familiar and sensual or even predatory facial ex 12

“up. Wake up, for the love of.”

13

“God. My God I was having.”

14

“Wake up.”

15

“Having the worst dream.”

16

“I should certainly say you were.”

17

“It was awful. It just went on and on.”

18

“I shook you and shook you and.”

19

“Time is it.”

20

“It’s nearly — almost 2:04. I was afraid I might hurt you if I prod-21
ded or shook any harder. I couldn’t seem to rouse you.”

22

“Is that thunder? Did it rain?”

23

“I was beginning to really worry. Hope, this cannot go on. When are 24
we going to make that appointment?”

25

“Wait — am I even married?”

26

“Please don’t start all this again.”

27

“And who’s this Audrey?”

28

“Just go on back to sleep now.”

29

“And what’s that — Daddy?”

30

“Just lie back down.”

31

“What’s wrong with your mouth?”

32

“You are my wife.”

33

“None of this is real.”

34 sh

“It’s all all right.”

35 reg

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1

1.

2

3

‘But they’re shit.’

4

‘And yet at the same time they’re art. Exquisite pieces of art. They’re 5
literally incredible.’

6

‘No, they’re literally shit is literally what they are.’

7

Atwater was speaking to his associate editor at Style. He was at the 8
little twin set of payphones in the hallway off the Holiday Inn restau-9
rant where he’d taken the Moltkes out to eat and expand their side of 10
the whole pitch. The hallway led to the first floor’s elevators and rest-11
rooms and to the restaurant’s kitchen and rear area.

12

At Style, editor was more of an executive title. Those who did actual 13
editing were usually called associate editors. This was a convention 14
throughout the BSG subindustry.

15

‘If you could just see them.’

16

‘I don’t want to see them,’ the associate editor responded. ‘I don’t 17
want to look at shit. Nobody wants to look at shit. Skip, this is the 18
point: people do not want to look at shit.’

19

‘And yet if you —’

sh 20

‘Even shit shaped into various likenesses or miniatures or whatever reg 21
it is they’re alleging they are.’

lg 22

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Skip Atwater’s intern, Laurel Manderley, was listening in on the 1
whole two way conversation. It was she whom Atwater’d originally 2
dialed, since there was simply no way he was going to call the associ-3
ate editor’s head intern’s extension on a Sunday and ask her to accept a 4
collect call. Style’ s whole editorial staff was in over the weekend be-5
cause the magazine’s Summer Entertainment double issue was booked 6
to close on 2 July. It was a busy and extremely high stress time, as Lau-7
rel Manderley would point out to Skip more than once in the subse-8
quent debriefing.

9

‘No, no, but not shaped into, is the thing. You aren’t — they come 10
out that way. Already fully formed. Hence the term incredible.’ Atwater 11
was a plump diminutive boy faced man who sometimes unconsciously 12
made a waist level fist and moved it up and down in time to his stressed 13
syllables. A small and bell shaped Style salaryman, energetic and com-14
petent, a team player, unfailingly polite. Sometimes a bit overfastidious 15
in presentation — for example, it was extremely warm and close in the 16
little Holiday Inn hallway, and yet Atwater had not removed his blazer 17
or even loosened his tie. The word among some of Style’ s snarkier in-18
terns was that Skip Atwater resembled a jockey who had retired young 19
and broken training in a big way. There was doubt in some quarters 20
about whether he even shaved. Sensitive about the whole baby face 21
issue, as well as about the size and floridity of his ears, Atwater was 22
unaware of his reputation for wearing nearly identical navy blazer and 23
catalogue slacks ensembles all the time, which happened to be the 24
number one thing that betrayed his Midwest origins to those interns 25
who knew anything about cultural geography.

26

The associate editor wore a headset telephone and was engaged in 27
certain other editorial tasks at the same time he was talking to Atwater.

28

He was a large bluff bearish man, extremely cynical and fun to be 29
around, as magazine editors often tend to be, and known particularly 30
for being able to type two totally different things at the same time, a 31
keyboard under each hand, and to have them both come out more or 32
less error free. Style’ s editorial interns found this bimanual talent fasci-33
nating, and they often pressed the associate editor’s head intern to get 34 sh
him to do it during the short but very intense celebrations that took 35 reg

36 lg

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place after certain issues had closed and everyone had had some drinks 2
and the normal constraints of rank and deportment were relaxed a bit.

3

The associate editor had a daughter at Rye Country Day School, 4
where a number of Style’ s editorial interns had also gone, as adoles-5
cents. The typing talent thing was also interesting because the associ-6
ate editor had never actually written for Style or anyone else — he had 7
come up through Factchecking, which was technically a division of Le-8
gal and answered to a whole different section of Style’ s parent company.

9

In any event, the doubletime typing explained the surfeit of clicking 10
sounds in the background as the associate editor responded to a pitch 11
he found irksome and out of character for Atwater, who was normally 12
a consummate pro, and knew quite well the shape of the terrain that 13

Style’ s what in the world feature covered, and had no history of in-14
stability or substance issues, and rarely even needed much rewriting.

15

The editorial exchange between the two men was actually very 16
rapid and clipped and terse. The associate editor was saying: ‘Which 17
think about it, you’re going to represent how? You’re going to propose 18
we get photos of the man on the throne, producing? You’re going to 19
describe it?’

20

‘Everything you’re saying is valid and understandable and yet all I’m 21
saying is if you could see the results. The pieces themselves.’ The two 22
payphones had a woodgrain frame with a kind of stiff steel umbilicus 23
for the phone book. Atwater had claimed that he could not use his 24
own phone because once you got far enough south of Indianapolis and 25

Richmond there were not enough cellular relays to produce a reliable 26
signal. Due to the glass doors and no direct AC, it was probably close 27
to 100 degrees in the little passage, and also loud — the kitchen was 28
clearly on the other side of the wall, because there was a great deal of 29
audible clatter and shouting. Atwater had worked in a 24 hour restau-30
rant attached to a Union 76 Truck ’n Travel Plaza while majoring in 31
journalism at Ball State, and he knew the sounds of a short order 32
kitchen. The name of the restaurant in Muncie had been simply: EAT.

33

Atwater was facing away from everything and more or less concave, sh 34
hunched into himself and the space of the phone, as people on pay-reg 35
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little shelf where the slim GTE directory for Whitcomb–Mount 1

Carmel–Scipio and surrounding communities rested. The technical 2
name of the Holiday Inn’s restaurant, according to the sign and 3
menus, was Ye Olde Country Buffet. Hard to his left, an older couple 4
was trying to get a great deal of luggage through the hallway’s glass 5
doors. It was only a matter of time before they figured out that one 6
should just go through and hold the doors open for the other. It was 7
early in the afternoon of 1 July 2001. You could also hear the associate 8
editor sometimes talking to someone else in his office, which wasn’t 9
necessarily his fault or a way to marginalize Atwater, because other 10
people were always coming in and asking him things.

11

A short time later, after splashing some cold water on his ears and 12
face in the men’s room, Atwater reemerged through the hallway’s 13
smeared doors and made his way through the crowds around the 14
restaurant’s buffet table. He had also used the sink’s mirror to pump 15
himself up a little — periods of self exhortation at mirrors were usually 16
the only time he was fully conscious of the thing that he did with his 17
fist. There were red heat lamps over many of the buffet’s entrees, and a 18
man in a partly crumpled chef ’s hat was slicing prime rib to people’s 19
individual specs. The large room smelled powerfully of bodies and hot 20
food. Everyone’s face shone in the humidity. Atwater had a short man’s 21
emphatic, shoulder inflected walk. Many of the Sunday diners were 22
elderly and wore special sunglasses with side flaps, the inventor of 23
whom was possibly ripe for a witw profile. Nor does one hardly ever 24
see actual flypaper anymore. Their table was almost all the way in 25
front. Even across the crowded dining room it was not hard to spot 26
them seated there, due to the artist’s wife, Mrs. Moltke, whose great 27
blond head’s crown was nearly even with the hostess’s lectern. Atwater 28
used the head as a salient to navigate the room, his own ears and fore-29
head flushed with high speed thought. Back at Style’ s editorial offices 30
on the sixteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center in New York, mean-31
while, the associate editor was speaking with his head intern on the in-32
tercom while he typed internal emails. Mr. Brint Moltke, the proposed 33
piece’s subject, was smiling fixedly at his spouse, possibly in response 34 sh
to some remark. His entree was virtually untouched. Mrs. Moltke was 35 reg

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removing mayo or dressing from the corner of her mouth with a pinkie 2
and met Atwater’s eye as he raised both arms: 3

‘They’re very excited.’

4

[

5

6

Part of the reason Atwater had had to splash and self exhort in the air-7
less little men’s room off the Holiday Inn restaurant was that the toll 8
call had actually continued for several more minutes after the journal-9
ist had said ‘. . . pieces themselves,’ and had become almost heated at 10
the same time that it didn’t really go anywhere or modify either side of 11
the argument, except that the associate editor subsequently observed 12
to his head intern that Skip seemed to be taking the whole strange 13
thing more to heart than was normal in such a consummate pro.

14

‘I do good work. I find it and I do it.’

15

‘This is not about you or whether you could bring it in well,’ the as-16
sociate editor had said. ‘This is simply me delivering news to you 17
about what can happen and what can’t.’

18

‘I seem to recollect somebody once saying no way the parrot could 19
ever happen.’ Here Atwater was referring to a prior piece he’d done for 20

Style.

21

‘You’re construing this as an argument about me and you. What this 22
is really about is shit. Excrement. Human shit. It’s very simple: Style 23
does not run items about human shit.’

24

‘But it’s also art.’

25

‘But it’s also shit. And you’re already tasked to Chicago for some-26
thing else we’re letting you look at because you pitched me, that’s al-27
ready dubious in terms of the sorts of things we can do. Correct me if 28

I’m mistaken here.’

29

‘I’m on that already. It’s Sunday. Laurel’s got me in for tomorrow all 30
day. It’s a two hour toot up the interstate. The two are a hundred and 31
ten percent compatible.’ Atwater sniffed and swallowed hard. ‘You 32
know I know this area.’

33

The other Style piece the associate editor had referred to concerned sh 34

The Suffering Channel, a wide grid cable venture that Atwater had reg 35

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gotten Laurel Manderley to do an end run and pitch directly to the 1
editor’s head intern for what in the world. Atwater was one of 2
three full time salarymen tasked to the witw feature, which received 3

.75 editorial pages per week, and was the closest any of the BSG week-4
lies got to freakshow or tabloid, and was a bone of contention at the 5
very highest levels of Style. The staff size and large font specs meant 6
that Skip Atwater was officially contracted for one 400 word piece 7
every three weeks, except the juniormost of the witw salarymen had 8
been on half time ever since Eckleschafft-Böd had forced Mrs. Anger 9
to cut the editorial budget for everything except celebrity news, so in 10
reality it was more like three finished pieces every eight weeks.

11

‘I’ll overnight photos.’

12

‘You will not.’

13

As mentioned, Atwater was rarely aware of the up and down fist 14
thing, which as far as he could recall had first started in the pressure 15
cooker environs of the Indianapolis Star. When he became aware he 16
was doing it, he sometimes looked down at the moving fist without 17
recognition, as if it were somebody else’s. It was one of several lacunae 18
or blind spots in Atwater’s self concept, which in turn were part of why 19
he inspired both affection and mild contempt around the offices of 20

Style. Those he worked closely with, such as Laurel Manderley, saw 21
him as without much protective edge or shell, and there were clearly 22
some maternal elements in Laurel’s regard for him. His interns’ ten-23
dency to fierce devotion, in further turn, caused some at Style to see 24
him as a manipulator, someone who complicitly leaned on people in-25
stead of developing his own inner resources. The former associate ed-26
itor in charge of the magazine’s society pages feature had once 27
referred to Skip Atwater as an emotional tampon, though there were 28
plenty of people who could verify that she had been a person with all 29
kinds of personal baggage of her own. As with institutional politics 30
everywhere, the whole thing got very involved.

31

Also as mentioned, the editorial exchange on the telephone was in 32
fact very rapid and compressed, with the exception of one sustained 33
pause while the associate editor conferred with someone from Design 34 sh

35 reg

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about the shape of a pull quote, which Atwater could overhear clearly.

2

The several beats of silence after that, however, could have meant al-3
most anything.

4

‘See if you get this,’ the associate editor said finally. ‘How about if I 5
say to you what Mrs. Anger would say to me were I hypothetically as 6
enthused as you are, and gave you the OK, and went up to the ed 7
meeting and pitched it for let’s say 10 September. Are you out of your 8
mind. People are not interested in shit. People are disgusted and re-9
pelled by shit. That’s why they call it shit. Not even to mention the 10
high percentage of fall ad pages that are food or beauty based. Are you 11
insane. Unquote.’ Mrs. Anger was the Executive Editor of Style and 12
the magazine’s point man with respect to its parent company, which 13
was the US division of Eckleschafft-Böd Medien.

14

‘Although the inverse of that reasoning is that it’s also wholly com-15
mon and universal,’ Atwater had said. ‘Everyone has personal experience 16
with shit.’

17

‘But personal private experience.’ Though technically included in 18
the same toll call, this last rejoinder was part of a separate, subsequent 19
conversation with Laurel Manderley, the intern who currently manned 20

Atwater’s phone and fax when he was on the road, and winnowed and 21
vetted research items forwarded by the shades in Research for what 22
in the world, and interfaced for him with the editorial interns. ‘It’s 23
done in private, in a special private place, and flushed. People flush so 24
it will go away. It’s one of the things people don’t want to be reminded 25
of. That’s why nobody talks about it.’

26

Laurel Manderley, who like most of the magazine’s high level interns 27
wore exquisitely chosen and coordinated professional attire, permitted 28
herself a small diamond stud in one nostril that Atwater found slightly 29
distracting in face to face exchanges, but she was extremely shrewd 30
and pragmatic — she had actually been voted Most Rational by the 31

Class of ’96 at Miss Porter’s School. She was also all but incapable of 32
writing a simple declarative sentence and thus could not, by any dark 33
stretch of the imagination, ever be any kind of rival for Atwater’s sh 34
salaryman position at Style. As he had with perhaps only one or two reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 4 5
her out, and welcomed her input so long as it was requested, and often 1
spent large blocks of time on the phone with her, and had shared with 2
her certain elements of his personal history, including pictures of the 3
four year old schipperke mixes who were his pride and joy. Laurel 4

Manderley, whose father controlled a large number of Blockbuster 5

Video franchises throughout western Connecticut, and whose mother 6
was in the final push toward certification as a Master Gardener, was 7
herself destined to survive, through either coincidence or premonition, 8
the tragedy by which Style would enter history two months hence.

9

Atwater rubbed his nose vertically with two fingers. ‘Well, some 10
people talk about it. You should hear little boys. Or men, in a locker 11
room setting: “Boy, you wouldn’t believe the dump I took last night.”

12

That sort of thing.’

13

‘I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to imagine that’s what men 14
talk to each other about.’

15

‘It’s not as if it comes up all that often,’ Atwater conceded. He did 16
feel a little uneasy talking about this with a female. ‘My point is that 17
the whole embarrassment and distaste of the issue is the point, if it’s 18
done right. The transfiguration of disgust. This is the UBA.’ UBA was 19
their industry’s shorthand for upbeat angle, what hard news organs 20
would call a story’s hook. ‘The let’s say unexpected reversal of embar-21
rassment and distaste. The triumph of creative achievement in even 22
the unlikeliest places.’

23

Laurel Manderley sat with her feet up on an open file drawer of 24

Atwater’s desk, holding her phone’s headset instead of wearing it.

25

Slender almost to the point of clinical intervention, she had a promi-26
nent forehead and surprised eyebrows and a tortoiseshell barrette and 27
was, like Atwater, extremely earnest and serious at all times. She had 28
interned at Style for almost a year, and knew that Skip’s only real weak-29
ness as a BSG journalist was a tendency to grand abstraction that was 30
usually not hard to bring him back to earth on and get him to tone 31
down. She knew further that this tendency was a form of compensation 32
for what Skip himself believed was his chief flaw, an insufficient sense 33
of the tragic which an editor at the Indiana Star had accused him of at 34 sh
an age when that sort of thing sank deep out of sight in the psyche and 35 reg

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became part of your core understanding of who you are. One of Laurel 2

Manderley’s profs at Wellesley had once criticized her freshman essays 3
for what he’d called their tin ear and cozening tone of unearned con-4
fidence, which had immediately become dark parts of her own self 5
concept.

6

‘So go write a Ph.D. thesis on the guy,’ she had responded. ‘But do 7
not ask me to go to Miss Flick and make a case for making Style read-8
ers hear about somebody pooping little pieces of sculpture out of their 9
butt. Because it’s not going to happen.’ Laurel Manderley now nearly 10
always spoke her mind; her cozening days were behind her. ‘I’d be 11
spending credibility and asking Ellen to spend hers on something 12
that’s a lost cause.

13

‘You have to be careful what you ask people to do,’ she had said.

14

Sometimes privately a.k.a. Miss Flick, Ellen Bactrian was the what 15
in the world section’s head intern, a personage who was not only the 16
associate editor’s right hand but who was known to have the ear of 17
someone high on Mrs. Anger’s own staff on the 82nd floor, because 18

Ellen Bactrian and this executive intern often biked down to work to-19
gether from the Flatiron district on the extraordinary bicycle paths 20
that ran all the way along the Hudson to almost Battery Park. It was 21
said that they even had matching helmets.

22

For complicated personal and political reasons, Skip Atwater was 23
uncomfortable around Ellen Bactrian and tried to avoid her whenever 24
possible.

25

There were a couple moments of nothing but background clatter on 26
his end of the phone.

27

‘Who is this guy, anyhow?’ Laurel Manderley had asked. ‘What sort 28
of person goes around displaying his own poo?’

29

30

2.

31

32

Indiana storms surprise no one. You can see them coming from half a 33
state away, like a train on a very straight track, even as you stand in the sh 34
sun and try to breathe. Atwater had what his mother’d always called a reg 35
weather eye.

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Seated together in the standard Midwest attitude of besotted amia-1
bility, the three of them had passed the midday hours in the Moltkes’

2
sitting room with the curtains drawn and two rotating fans that picked 3

Atwater’s hair up and laid it down and made the little racks’ magazines 4
riffle. Laurel Manderley, who was something of a whiz at the cold call, 5
had set this initial meeting up by phone the previous evening. The 6
home was half a rented duplex, and you could hear its aluminum sid-7
ing tick and pop in the assembling heat. A window AC chugged 8
gamely in one of the interior rooms. The off white Roto Rooter van in 9
the driveway had signified the Moltkes’ side of the ranch style twin; 10

Laurel’s Internet directions to the address had been flawless as usual.

11

The cul de sac was a newer development with abrasive cement and en-12
gineering specs still spraypainted on the curbs. Only the very western 13
horizon showed piling clouds when Atwater pulled up in the rented 14

Cavalier. Some of the homes’ yards had not yet been fully sodded.

15

There were almost no porches as such. The Moltkes’ side’s front door 16
had had a US flag in an angled holder and an anodized cameo of per-17
haps a huge black ladybug or some kind of beetle attached to the 18
storm door’s frame, which one had to back slightly off the concrete 19
slab in order to open. The slab’s mat bid literal welcome.

20

The sitting room was narrow and airless and done mostly in green 21
and a tawny type of maple syrup brown. It was thickly carpeted 22
throughout. The davenport, chairs, and end tables had plainly been ac-23
quired as a set. A bird emerged at intervals from a catalogue clock; a 24
knit sampler over the mantel expressed conventional wishes for the 25
home and its occupants. The iced tea was kneebucklingly sweet. An 26
odd stain or watermark marred the room’s east wall, which Atwater 27
educed was the load bearing wall that the Moltkes shared with the du-28
plex’s other side.

29

‘I think I speak for a lot of folks when I want to know how it works.

30

Just how you do it.’ Atwater was in a padded rocker next to the televi-31
sion console and thus faced the artist and his wife, who were seated 32
together on the davenport. The reporter had his legs crossed comfort-33
ably but was not actually rocking. He had spent a great deal of prelimi-34 sh
nary time chatting about the area and his memories of regional features 35 reg

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and establishing a rapport and putting the Moltkes at ease. The recorder 2
was out and on, but he was also going with a stenographer’s notebook 3
because it made him look a little more like the popular stereotype of 4
someone from the press.

5

You could tell almost immediately that something was off about the 6
artist and/or the marriage’s dynamics. Brint Moltke sat hunched or 7
slumped with his toes in and his hands in his lap, a posture reminis-8
cent of a scolded child, but at the same time smiling at Atwater. As in 9
smiling the entire time. It was not an empty professional corporate 10
smile, but the soul effects were similar. Moltke was a thickset man 11
with sideburns and graying hair combed back in what appeared to be 12
a lopsided ducktail. He wore Sansabelt slacks and a dark blue knit shirt 13
with his employer’s name on the breast. You could tell from the dents 14
in his nose that he sometimes wore glasses. A further idiosyncrasy that 15

Atwater noted in Gregg shorthand was the arrangement of the artist’s 16
hands: their thumbs and forefingers formed a perfect lap level circle, 17
which Moltke held or rather somehow directed before him like an 18
aperture or target. He appeared to be unaware of this habit. It was a 19
gesture both unsubtle and somewhat obscure in terms of what it signi-20
fied. Combined with the rigid smile, it was almost the stuff of night-21
mares. Atwater’s own hands were controlled and well behaved — his 22
tic with the fist was entirely a private thing. The journalist’s childhood 23
hay fever was back with a vengeance, but even so he could not help de-24
tecting the Old Spice scent which Mr. Moltke emitted in great shim-25
mering waves. Old Spice had been Skip’s own father’s scent and, 26
reportedly, his father’s father’s before him.

27

The pattern of the davenport’s upholstery, Skip Atwater also knew 28
firsthand, was called Forest Floral.

29
f

30

31

The witw associate editor’s typing feats were just one example of the 32
various leveling traditions and shticks and reversals of protocol that 33
made Style’ s parties and corporate celebrations the envy of publishing sh 34
interns throughout Manhattan. These fetes took place on the six-reg 35

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teenth floor and were usually open bar; some were even catered. The 1
normally dry and insufferable head of Copyediting did impressions of 2
various US presidents smoking dope that had to be seen to be be-3
lieved. Given the right kinds of vodka and flame source, a senior re-4
ceptionist from Haiti could be prevailed upon to breathe fire. A very 5
odd senior paralegal in Permissions, who showed up to the office in 6
foul weather gear nearly every day no matter what the forecast, turned 7
out to have been in the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, 8
and organized revues that could get kind of risqué. Some of the interns 9
got bizarrely dressed up; nails were occasionally done in White Out.

10

Mrs. Anger’s executive intern had once worn a white leather suit with 11
outrageous fringe and a set of cap pistols in a hiphugger belt and hol-12
ster accessory. A longtime supervisor of shades used Crystal Light, 13

Everclear, skinned fruit, and an ordinary office paper shredder to pro-14
duce a libation she called Last Mango in Paris. The interns’ annual er-15
satz awards show at the climax of Oscars Week often had people on 16
the floor — one year they’d gotten Gene Shalit to appear. And so on 17
and so forth.

18

Of arresting and demotic party traditions, however, none was so 19
prized as Mrs. Anger’s annual essay at self parody for the combination 20

New Year’s and closing of the Year’s Most Stylish People double issue 21
bash. Bedecked in costume jewelry, mincing and fluttering, affecting a 22
falsetto and lorgnette, holding her head in such a way as to produce a 23
double chin, tottering about with a champagne cocktail like one of 24
those anserine dowagers in Marx Brothers films. It would be difficult 25
to convey this routine’s effect on morale and esprit. The rest of the 26
publishing year, Mrs. Anger was a figure of near testamental awe and 27
dread, serious as a heart attack. A veteran of Fleet Street and two sep-28
arate R. Murdoch startups, wooed over from Us in 1994 under terms 29
that were industry myth, Mrs. Anger had managed to put Style in the 30
black for the first time in its history, and was said to enjoy influence at 31
the very highest levels of Eckleschafft-Böd, and had worn one of the 32
first Versace pantsuits ever seen in New York, and was nobody’s fool 33
whatsoever.

34 sh

35 reg

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f

2

3

Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing 4
pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or 5
worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen.

6

Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a 7
person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and 8

Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with 9
descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none 10
of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then con-11
ceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of the allure was atavistic, he 12
acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking 13
cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally 14
seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales 15
before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, 16

Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of nega-17
tive beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellent. In an-18
other, he had compared her face and throat to whatever canids see in 19
the full moon that makes them howl. The associate editor would never 20
see one jot of material like this, obviously. Some BSG salarymen built 21
their pieces gradually from the ground up. Atwater, trained originally 22
as a background man for news dailies, constructed his own witw 23
pieces by pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous 24
waterfall of prose which was then filtered more and more closely down 25
to 400 words of commercial sediment. It was labor intensive, but it was 26
his way. Atwater had colleagues who were unable even to start without 27
a Roman numeral outline. Style’ s daytime television specialist could 28
compose his pieces only on public transport. So long as salarymen’s 29
personal quotas were filled and deadlines met, the BSG weeklies 30
tended to be respectful of people’s processes.

31

When as a child he had misbehaved or sassed her, Mrs. Atwater had 32
made little Virgil go and cut from the fields’ edge’s copse the very 33
switch with which she’d whip him. For most of the 1970s she had sh 34
belonged to a splinter denomination that met in an Airstream trailer reg 35
on the outskirts of Anderson, and she did spareth not the rod. His lg 36

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father had been a barber, the real kind, w/ smock and pole and rat tail 1
combs in huge jars of Barbicide. Save the odd payroll data processor at 2

Eckleschafft-Böd US, no one east of Muncie had access to Skip’s true 3
given name.

4

Mrs. Moltke sat with her spine straight and ankles crossed, her 5
huge smooth calves cream white and unmarred by veins and the over-6
all size and hue of what Atwater wrote were museum grade vases and 7
funereal urns of the same antiquity in which the dead wore bronze 8
masks and whole households were interred together. Her platter sized 9
face was expressive and her eyes, though rendered small by the encas-10
ing folds of fat, were intelligent and alive. An Anne Rice paperback lay 11
face down on the end table beside her fauxfrosted beverage tumbler 12
and a stack of Butterick clothing patterns in their distinctive bilingual 13
sleeves. Atwater, who held his pen rather high on the shaft, had al-14
ready noted that her husband’s eyes were flat and immured despite his 15
constant smile. The lone time that Atwater had believed he was seeing 16
his own father smile, it turned out to have been a grimace which pre-17
saged the massive infarction that had sent the man forward to lie 18
prone in the sand of the horseshoe pit as the shoe itself sailed over the 19
stake, the half finished apiary, a section of the simulation combat tar-20
get range, a tire swing’s supporting limb, and the backyard’s pineboard 21
fence, never to be recovered or even ever seen again, while Virgil and 22
his twin brother had stood there wide eyed and red eared, looking back 23
and forth from the sprawled form to the kitchen window’s screen, 24
their inability to move or cry out feeling, in later recall, much like the 25
paralysis of bad dreams.

26

The Moltkes had already shown him the storm cellar and its liter-27
ally incredible display, but Atwater decided to wait until he truly 28
needed to visit the bathroom to see where the actual creative transfig-29
urations took place. He felt that asking to be shown the bathroom as 30
such, and then examining it while they watched him do so, would be 31
awkward and unseemly. In her lap, the artist’s wife had some kind of 32
garment or bolt of orange cloth in which she was placing pins in a 33
complicated way. A large red felt apple on the end table held the sup-34 sh
ply of pins for this purpose. She filled her whole side of the davenport 35 reg

36 lg

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and then some. One could feel the walls and curtains warming as the 2
viscous heat outside beset the home. After one of the lengthy and un-3
comfortable attacks of what felt like aphasia that sometimes afflicted 4
him with incidentals, Atwater was able to remember that the correct 5
term for the apple was simply: pin cushion. One reason it was so dis-6
comfiting was that the detail was irrelevant. Likewise the twinge of 7
abandonment he noticed that he felt whenever the near fan rotated 8
back away from him. On the whole, though, the journalist’s spirits 9
were good. Part of it was actual art. But there was also something that 10
felt solid and kind of invulnerable about returning to one’s native area 11
for legitimate professional reasons. He was unaware that the cadences 12
of his speech had already changed.

13

After one or two awkward recrossings of his leg, Atwater had found 14
a way to sit, with his weight on his left hip and the padded rocker held 15
still against that weight, so that his right thigh formed a stable surface 16
for taking notes. His iced tea, pebbled with condensation, was on a 17
plastic coaster beside the cable converter box atop the television con-18
sole. Atwater was particularly drawn to two framed prints on the wall 19
above the davenport, matched renderings of retrievers, human eyed 20
and much ennobled by the artist, each with some kind of dead bird in 21
its mouth.

22

‘I think I speak for a lot of folks when I say how curious I am to 23
know how you do it,’ Atwater said. ‘Just how the whole thing works.’

24

There was a three beat pause in which no one moved or spoke and 25
the fans’ whines harmonized briefly and then diverged once more.

26

‘I realize it’s a delicate subject,’ Atwater said.

27

Another stilted pause, only slightly longer, and then Mrs. Moltke 28
signaled the artist to answer the man by swinging her great dimpled 29
arm out and around and striking him someplace about the left breast 30
or shoulder, producing a meaty sound. It was a gesture both practiced 31
and without heat, and Moltke’s only visible reaction, after angling 32
hard to starboard and then righting himself, was to search within and 33
answer as honestly as he could.

sh 34

The artist said, ‘I’m not sure.’

reg 35

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f

1

2

The fliptop stenographer’s notebook was partly for effect, but it was 3
also what Skip Atwater had gotten in the habit of using out in the field 4
for background at the start of his career, and its personal semiotics and 5
mojo were profound; he was comfortable with it. He was, as a matter 6
of professional persona, old school and low tech. Today’s was a very 7
different journalistic era, however, and in the Moltkes’ sitting room his 8
tiny professional tape recorder was also out and activated and resting 9
atop a stack of recent magazines on the coffee table before the daven-10
port. Its technology was foreign and featured a very sensitive built 11
in microphone, though the unit also gobbled AAA cells, and the 12
miniature cassettes for it had to be special ordered. BSG magazines as 13
a whole being litigation conscious in the extreme, a Style salaryman 14
had to submit all relevant notes and tapes to Legal before his piece 15
could even be typeset, which was one more reason why the day of an 16
issue’s closing was so fraught and stressful, and why editorial staff and 17
interns rarely got a whole weekend off.

18

Moltke’s fingers’ and thumbs’ unconscious ring had naturally come 19
apart when Amber had smacked him and he’d gone over hard against 20
the davenport’s right armrest, but now it was back as they all sat in the 21
dim green curtainlight and smiled at one another. What might have 22
sounded at first like isolated gunshots or firecrackers were actually new 23
homes’ carapaces expanding in the heat all up and down the Willkie 24
development. No analogy for the digital waist level circle or aperture or 25
lens or target or orifice or void seemed quite right, but it struck Atwater 26
as definitely the sort of tic or gesture that meant something — the way 27
in dreams and certain kinds of art things were never merely things but 28
always seemed to stand for something else that you couldn’t quite put 29
a finger on — and the journalist had already shorthanded several re-30
minders to himself to consider whether the gesture was some kind of 31
unconscious visible code or might be a key to the question of how to 32
represent the artist’s conflicted response to his extraordinary but also 33
undeniably controversial and perhaps even repulsive talent.

34 sh

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The recorder’s battery indicator showed a strong clear red. Amber 2
occasionally leaned forward over her sewing materials to check the 3
amount of audiotape remaining. Once more, Atwater thanked the 4
artist and his wife for opening their home to him on a Sunday, ex-5
plaining that he had to head on up to Chicago for a day or two but 6
then would be back to start in on deep background if the Moltkes de-7
cided to give their consent. He had explained that the type of person-8
ality driven article that Style was interested in running would be 9
impossible without the artist’s cooperation, and that there would be no 10
point in his taking up any more of their time after today if Mr. and 11

Mrs. Moltke weren’t totally on board and as excited about the piece as 12
everyone over at Style was. He had addressed this statement to the 13
artist, but it had been Amber Moltke’s reaction he noted.

14

On the same coffee table between them, beside the magazines and 15
tape recorder and a small vase of synthetic marigolds, were three art-16
works allegedly produced through ordinary elimination by Mr. Brint 17

F. Moltke. The pieces varied slightly in size, but all were arresting in 18
their extraordinary realism and the detail of their craftsmanship —

19
although one of Atwater’s notes was a reminder to himself to consider 20
whether a word like craftsmanship really applied in such a case.

21

The sample pieces were the very earliest examples that Mrs. Moltke 22
said she’d been able to lay hands on; they had been out on the table 23
when Atwater arrived. There were literally scores more of the artworks 24
arranged in vaguely familiar looking glass cases in the unattached 25
storm cellar out back, an environment that seemed strangely perfect, 26
though Atwater had seen immediately how difficult the storm cellar 27
would be for any of Style’ s photographers to light and shoot properly.

28

By 11:00 AM, he was mouthbreathing due to hay fever.

29

Mrs. Moltke periodically fanned at herself in a delicate way and said 30
she did believe it might rain.

31

When Atwater and his brother had been in the eighth grade, the fa-32
ther of a family just up the road in Anderson had run a length of gar-33
den hose from his vehicle’s exhaust pipe to the interior and killed sh 34
himself in the home’s garage, after which the son in their class and reg 35
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that had seemed both creepy and courageous; and something in the 1
hydraulics of Brint Moltke’s smile on the davenport reminded Skip 2

Atwater of the Haas family’s smile.

3

4
f

5

Omitted through oversight above: Nearly every Indiana community 6
has some street, lane, drive, or easement named for Wendell L.

7

Willkie, b. 1892, GOP, favorite son.

8

9
f

10

The recorder’s tiny tape’s first side had been almost entirely filled by 11

Skip Atwater answering Mrs. Moltke’s initial questions. It had be-12
come evident pretty quickly whose show this was, in terms of any sort 13
of piece, on their end. Chewing a piece of gum with tiny motions of 14
her front teeth in the distinctive Indiana style, Mrs. Moltke had re-15
quested information on how any potential article would be positioned 16
and when it was likely to run. She had asked about word counts, col-17
umn inches, boxes, leader quotes, and shared templates. Hers was the 18
type of infantly milky skin on which even the lightest contact would 19
leave some type of blotch. She had used terms like conferral, serial 20
rights, and sic vos non vobis, which latter Skip did not even know. She 21
had high quality photographs of some of the more spectacular art-22
works in a leatherette portfolio with the Moltkes’ name and address 23
embossed on the cover, and Atwater was asked to provide a receipt for 24
the portfolio’s loan.

25

The tape’s second side, however, contained Mr. Brint Moltke’s own 26
first person account of how his strange and ambivalent gift had first 27
come to light, which emerged — the account did — after Atwater had 28
phrased his query several different ways and Amber Moltke had finally 29
asked the journalist to excuse them and removed her husband into one 30
of the home’s rear rooms, where they took inaudible counsel together 31
while Atwater circumspectly chewed the remainder of his ice. The re-32
sult was what Atwater later, in his second floor room at the Holiday 33

Inn, after showering, applying crude first aid to his left knee, and 34 sh
struggling unsuccessfully to move or reverse the room’s excruciating 35 reg

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1
painting, had copied into his steno as certainly usable in some part or 2
form for deep background/UBA, particularly if Mr. Moltke, who had 3
appeared to warm to the task or at least to come somewhat alive, could 4
be induced to repeat its substance on record in a sanitized way: 5

6

‘It was on a field exercise in basic [training in the US Army, in 7
which Moltke later saw action in Kuwait as part of a maintenance 8
crew in Operation Desert Storm], and the fellows on shitter [la-9
trine, hygienic] detail — [latrine] detail is they soak the [military 10
unit’s solid wastes] in gas and burn it with a [flamethrower] —

11
and up the [material] goes and in the fire one of the fellows saw 12
something peculiar there in amongst the [waste material] and 13
calls the sergeant over and they kick up a [fuss] because at first 14
they’re thinking somebody tossed something in the [latrine] for a 15
joke, which is against regs, and the sergeant said when he found 16
out who it was he was going to crawl up inside the [responsible 17
party’s] skull and look out his eyeholes, and they made the [la-18
trine] detail [douse] the fire and get it [the artwork] out and 19
come to find it weren’t a[n illicit or unpatriotic object], and they 20
didn’t know whose [solid waste] it was, but I was pretty sure it was 21
mine [because subj. then reports having had prior experiences of 22
roughly same kind, which renders entire anecdote more or less 23
pointless, but could foreseeably be edited out or massaged].’

24

25

3.

26

27

The Mount Carmel Holiday Inn regretfully had neither scanner nor 28
fax for guests’ outgoing use, Atwater had been informed at the desk by 29
a man whose blazer was nearly identical to his own.

30

Temperatures had fallen and the sodium streetlights come on by 31
themselves as Skip Atwater drove the artist and his spouse home from 32

Ye Olde Country Buffet with a styrofoam box of leavings for a dog 33
he’d seen no sign of; and the great elms and locusts were beginning to sh 34
yaw and two thirds of the sky to be stacked with enormous muttering reg 35
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great unseen hand. Mrs. Moltke was in the back seat, and there was a 1
terrible noise as the car hit the driveway’s grade. Blinds that had been 2
open on the duplex’s other side were now closed, though there was still 3
no vehicle in that side’s drive. The other side’s door had a US flag as 4
well. As was also typical of severe weather conditions in the area, a 5
gray luminescence to the light made everything appear greasy and un-6
real. The rear of the artist’s company van listed a toll free number to 7
dial if one had any concerns about the employee’s driving.

8

It had emerged that the nearest Kinko’s was in the nearby community 9
of Scipio, which was only a dozen miles east on SR 252 but could be 10
somewhat confusing to get around in because of indifferent signage.

11

Scipio evidently also had a Wal Mart. It was Amber Moltke who sug-12
gested that they leave the artist to watch his Sunday Reds game in 13
peace the way he liked to and proceed together in Atwater’s rented 14

Chevrolet to that Kinko’s, and decide together which photos to scan in 15
and forward, and to also go on and talk turkey in more depth respect-16
ing Skip’s article on the Moltkes for Style. Atwater, whose fear of the 17
region’s weather was amply justified by childhood experience, was un-18
sure about either driving or using the Moltke’s land line to call Laurel 19

Manderley during an impending storm that he was pretty sure would 20
show up at least yellow on Doppler radar — though on the other hand 21
he was not all that keen about returning to his room at the Holiday 22

Inn, whose wall had an immovable painting of a clown that he found 23
almost impossible to look at — and the journalist ended up watching 24
half an inning of the first Cincinnati Reds game he had seen in a decade 25
while sitting paralyzed with indecision on the Moltkes’ davenport.

26

27
f

28

Besides the facts that she walked without moving her arms and in gen-29
eral reminded him unpleasantly of the girl in Election, the core reason 30
why Atwater feared and avoided Ellen Bactrian was that Laurel Man-31
derley had once confided to Atwater that Ellen Bactrian — who had 32
been in madrigals with Laurel Manderley for a year of their overlap at 33

Wellesley, and at the outset of Laurel’s internship more or less took the 34 sh
younger woman under her wing — had told her that in her opinion 35 reg

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Skip Atwater was not really quite as spontaneous a person as he liked 2
to seem. Nor was Atwater stupid, and he was aware that his being so 3
disturbed over what Ellen Bactrian apparently thought of him was 4
possible evidence that she might actually have him pegged, that he 5
might be not only shallow but at root a kind of poseur. It was not 6
exactly the nicest thing Laurel Manderley had ever done, and part of 7
the fallout was that she was now in a position where she had to act 8
as a sort of human shield between Atwater and Ellen Bactrian, who 9
was responsible for a lot of the day to day administration of what in 10
the world; and to be honest, it was a situation that Atwater some-11
times exploited, and used Laurel’s guilt over her indiscretion to get her 12
to do things or to use her personal connections with Ellen Bactrian in 13
ways that weren’t altogether right or appropriate. The whole thing 14
could sometimes get extremely complicated and awkward, but Laurel 15

Manderley for the most part simply bowed to the reality of a situation 16
she had helped create, and accepted it as a painful lesson in respecting 17
certain personal lines and boundaries that turned out to be there for a 18
reason and couldn’t be crossed without inevitable consequences. Her 19
father, who was the sort of person who had favorite little apothegms 20
that could sometimes get under one’s skin with constant repetition, 21
liked to say, ‘Education is expensive,’ and Laurel Manderley felt she 22
was now starting to understand how little this saying had really to do 23
with tuition or petty complaint.

24
f

25

26

Because of some sort of hassle between Style and its imaging tech ven-27
dor over the terms of the service agreement, the fax machine that Skip 28

Atwater shared with one other full time salaryman had had both a de-29
funct ringer and a missing tray for over a month. Laurel Manderley 30
was in stocking feet at Atwater’s console formatting additional back-31
ground on The Suffering Channel when the fax machine’s red incom-32
ing light began blinking behind her. The Kinko’s franchise in Scipio 33

IN had no scanner, but it did have a digital faxing option that was sh 34
vastly better than an ordinary low pixel fax. The images Atwater was reg 35
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feeder, coiled slightly, detached, and floated in a back and forth fash-1
ion to the antistatic carpet. It would be almost 6:00 before she broke 2
for a raisin and even saw them.

3

4
f

5

The first great grape sized drops were striking the windshield as the 6
severely canted car left Scipio’s commercial district, made two left 7
turns in rapid succession, and proceeded out of town on a numbered 8
county road whose gravel was so fresh it fairly gleamed in the gather-9
ing stormlight. Mrs. Moltke was navigating. Atwater now wore a 10
mushroom colored Robert Talbott raincoat over his blazer. As was 11

SOP for Indiana storms, there were several minutes of high winds and 12
tentative spatters, followed by a brief eerie stillness that had the qual-13
ity of an immense inhalation as gravel clattered beneath their chassis.

14

Then fields and trees and cornrows’ furrows all vanished in a sheet of 15
sideways rain that sent vague tumbling things across the road ahead 16
and behind. It was like nothing anyone east of Cleveland has ever 17
seen. Atwater, whose father had been a Civil Defense volunteer during 18
the F4 tornado that struck parts of Anderson in 1977, enjoined Amber 19
to try to find something on the AM band that wasn’t just concussive 20
static. With the car’s front seat unit moved all the way back to accom-21
modate her, Atwater had to strain way out to reach the pedals, which 22
made it difficult to lean forward anxiously and scan upward for assem-23
bling funnels. The odd hailstone made a musical sound against the 24
rental’s hood. The great myth is that the bad ones don’t last long.

25

Amber Moltke directed Atwater through a murine succession of 26
rural roads and even smaller roads off those roads until they were on 27
little more than the ghost of a two track lane that cut through great 28
whipping tracts of Rorschach shrubbery. Her instructions came pri-29
marily in the form of slight motions of her head and left hand, which 30
were all she could move within the confines of her safety belt and har-31
ness, against which latter her body strained in several different places 32
with resultant depressions and folds. Atwater’s face was the same color 33
as his raincoat by the time they reached their destination, some gap or 34 sh
terminus in the foliage which Amber explained was actually a kind of 35 reg

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crude mesa whose vantage overlooked a large nitrogen fixative factory, 2
whose complex and emberous lights at night were an attraction county-3
wide. All that was visible at present was the storm working against the 4

Cavalier’s windshield like some sort of berserk car wash, but Atwater 5
told Mrs. Moltke that he certainly appreciated her taking time out to 6
let him absorb some of the local flavor. He watched her begin trying to 7
disengage her seat’s restraint system. The ambient noise was roughly 8
equivalent to midcabin on a jetliner. There was, he could detect, a slight 9
ammonial tang to the area’s air.

10

Atwater had, by this point, helped Amber Moltke into the vehicle 11
three separate times and out of it twice. Though technically fat, she 12
presented more as simply huge, extrudent in all three dimensions. At 13
least a half foot taller than the journalist, she managed to seem both 14
towering and squat. Her release of the seat belt produced an effect not 15
unlike an impact’s airbag. Atwater’s notebook already contained a de-16
scription of Mrs. Moltke’s fatness as being the smooth solid kind as 17
opposed to the soft plumpness or billowing aspect or loose flapping fat 18
of some obese people. There was no cellulite, no quivery or pendent or 19
freehanging parts — she was enormous and firm, and fair the same 20
way babies are. A head the size of a motorcycle tire was topped by a 21
massive blond pageboy whose bangs were thick and not wholly even, 22
receding into a complexly textured bale of curls in the rear areas. In the 23
light of the storm she seemed to glow; the umbrella she carried was 24
not for rain. ‘I so much as get downwind of the sun and I burn,’ had 25
been Amber’s explanation to Skip as the artist/husband held the great 26
flowered thing out at arms’ length to spread it in the driveway and 27
then angle it up over the car’s rear door just so.

28

]

29

30

Many of Style’ s upper echelon interns convened for a working lunch at 31

Chambers Street’s Tutti Mangia restaurant twice a week, to discuss is-32
sues of concern and transact any editorial or other business that was 33
pending, after which each returned to her respective mentor and re-sh 34
layed whatever was germane. It was an efficient practice that saved the reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 2 6 1
magazine’s paid staffers a great deal of time and emotional energy.

1

Many of the interns at Monday’s lunches traditionally had the Niçoise 2
salad, which was outrageously good here.

3

They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near 4
the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front 5
to do so in the striped awning’s shade. Which management was happy 6
to do — conjoin the tables. It was an interesting station to serve or sit 7
near. The Style interns all still possessed the lilting inflections and 8
vaguely outraged facial expressions of adolescence, which were in 9
sharp contrast to their extraordinary table manners and to the brisk 10
clipped manner of their gestures and speech, as well as to the fact that 11
their outfits’ elements were nearly always members of the same color 12
family, a very adult type of coordination that worked to convey a for-13
mal and businesslike tone to each ensemble. For reasons with origins 14
much farther back in history than anyone at the table could have spec-15
ulated about, a majority of the editorial interns at Style traditionally 16
come from Seven Sisters colleges. Also at the table was one very plain 17
but self possessed intern who worked with the design director up in 18

Style’ s executive offices on the 82nd floor. The two least conservatively 19
dressed interns were senior shades from Research and also always 20
wore, unless the day was really overcast, dark glasses to cover the red 21
rings their jobs’ goggles left around their eyes, which were slow to fade.

22

It was also true that no fewer than five of the interns at the working 23
lunch on 2 July were named either Laurel or Tara, although it’s not as 24
if people can help what their names are.

25

Laurel Manderley, who tended to favor very soft simple lines in 26
business attire, wore a black Armani skirt and jacket ensemble with 27
sheer hose and an objectively stunning pair of Miu Miu pumps that 28
she’d picked up for next to nothing at a flea market in Milan the pre-29
vious summer. Her hair was up and had a lacquer chopstick through 30
the chignon. Ellen Bactrian often took a noon dance class on Mon-31
days and was not at today’s working lunch, though four of the other 32
associate editors’ head interns were there, one sporting a square cut 33
engagement ring so large and garish that she made an ironic display of 34 sh

35 reg

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having to support her wrist with the other hand in order to show it 2
around the table, which occasioned some snarky little internal emails 3
back at Style over the course of the rest of the day.

4

Skip Atwater’s bizarre and quixotic pitch for a witw piece on some 5
sort of handyman who purportedly excreted pieces of fine art out of his 6
bottom in Indiana, while not the most pressing issue on this closing day 7
for what was known as SE2, was certainly the most arresting and con-8
troversial. The interns ended up hashing out what came to be called the 9
miraculous poo story in some detail, and the discussion was lively and far 10
ranging, with passions aroused and a good deal of personal background 11
information laid on the table, some of which would alter various power 12
constellations in subtle ways that would not even emerge until prelim-13
inary work on the 10 September issue commenced later in the month.

14

At one point during the lunch, an editorial intern in a charcoal gray 15

Yamamoto pantsuit related an anecdote of her fiancé’s, with whom she 16
had apparently exchanged every detail of their sexual histories as a 17
condition for maximal openness and trust in their upcoming marriage.

18

The anecdote, which the intern amused everyone by trying at first to 19
phrase very delicately, involved her fiancé, as an undergraduate, per-20
forming cunnilingus on what was at that time one of Swarthmore’s 21
most beautiful and widely desired girls, with zero percent body fat 22
and those great pillowy lips that were just then coming into vogue, 23
when evidently she had, suddenly and without any warning . . . well, 24
farted — the girl being gone down on had — and not at all in the sort 25
of way you could minimize or blow off, according to the fiancé later, 26
but rather ‘one of those strange horrible hot ones that are so totally aw-27
ful and rank.’ The anecdote appeared to strike some kind of common 28
chord or nerve: most of the interns at the table were laughing so hard 29
they had to put their forks down, and some held their napkins to their 30
mouths as if to bite them or hold down digestive matter. After the 31
laughter tailed off, there was a brief inbent communal silence while the 32
interns — most of whom were quite intelligent and had had excep-33
tionally high board scores, particularly on the analytical component —
sh 34
tried to suss out just why they had all laughed and what was so funny reg 35
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just perfect about the editorial intern’s jacket’s asymmetrical cut, both 1
incongruous and yet somehow inevitable, which was why Yamamoto 2
was generally felt to be worth every penny. At the same time, it was 3
common knowledge that there was something in the process or chem-4
icals used in commercial dry cleaning that was unfriendly to Yamamo-5
tos’ particular fabrics, and that they never lay or hung or felt quite so 6
perfect after they’d been dry cleaned a couple times; so there was al-7
ways a kernel of tragedy to the pleasure of wearing Yamamoto, which 8
may have been a deeper part of its value. A more recent tradition was 9
that the more senior of the interns usually enjoyed a glass of pinot gri-10
gio. The intern said that her fiancé tended to date his sexual adulthood 11
as commencing with that incident, and liked to say that he had ‘lost 12
literally about twenty pounds of illusions in that one second,’ and was 13
now exceptionally, almost unnaturally comfortable with his body and 14
bodies in general and their private functions, rarely even closing the 15
bathroom door now when he went in there for what the intern referred 16
to as big potty.

17

A fellow witw staff intern, who also roomed with Laurel Man-18
derley and three other Wellesleyites in a basement sublet near the 19

Williamsburg Bridge, related a vignette that her therapist had once 20
shared with her about dating his wife, whom the therapist had origi-21
nally met when both of them were going through horrible divorces, 22
and of their going out to dinner on one of their early dates and com-23
ing back and sitting with glasses of wine on her sofa, and of she all of 24
a sudden saying, ‘You have to leave,’ and he not understanding, not 25
knowing whether she was kicking him out or whether he’d said some-26
thing inappropriate or what, and she finally explaining, ‘I have to take 27
a dump and I can’t do it with you here, it’s too stressful,’ using the ac-28
tual word dump, and of so how the therapist had gone down and stood 29
on the corner smoking a cigarette and looking up at her apartment, 30
watching the light in the bathroom’s frosted window go on, and si-31
multaneously, one, feeling like a bit of an idiot for standing out there 32
waiting for her to finish so he could go back up, and, two, realizing that 33
he loved and respected this woman for baring to him so nakedly the 34 sh
insecurity she had been feeling. He had told the intern that standing 35 reg

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on that corner was the first time in quite a long time he had not felt 2
deeply and painfully alone, he had realized.

3

Laurel Manderley’s caloric regimen included very precise rules on 4
what parts of her Niçoise salad she was allowed to eat and what she 5
had to do to earn them. At today’s lunch she was somewhat preoccu-6
pied. She had as yet told no one about any photos, to say nothing of 7
any unannounced overnight package; and Atwater, who had spent the 8
morning commuting to Chicago, made it a principle never to take cel-9
lular calls while he drove.

10

The longtime girl Friday for the associate editor of surfaces, 11
which was the section of Style that focused on health and beauty, had 12
also been among the first of the magazine’s interns not to bother chang-13
ing into pumps on arrival but instead to wear, normally with a high 14
end Chanel or DKBL suit, the same crosstrainers she had commuted 15
in, which somehow for some strange reason worked, and had for a 16
time split the editorial interns into two opposed camps regarding of-17
fice footwear. She had also at some point spent a trimester at Cam-18
bridge, and still spoke with a slight British accent, and asked generally 19
now whether anyone else who traveled abroad much had noticed that 20
in German toilets the hole into which the poop is supposed to disap-21
pear when you flush is positioned way in front, so that the poop just 22
sort of lies there in full view and there’s almost no way you can avoid 23
looking at it when you get up and turn around to flush. Which she ob-24
served was so almost stereotypically German, almost as if you were 25
supposed to study and analyze your poop and make sure it passed 26
muster before you flushed it down. Here a senior shade who seemed 27
always to make it a point to wear something garishly retro on Mon-28
days inserted a reminiscence about first seeing the word fahrt in 29
great block letters on signs all over Swiss and German rail stations, on 30
childhood trips, and how she and her stepsisters had spent whole long 31

Eurail rides cracking one another up by making childish jokes about 32
travelers’ various fahrts. Whereas, the surfaces head intern contin-33
ued with a slight cold smile at the shade’s interruption, whereas in sh 34

French toilets, though, the hole tended to be way in the back so that reg 35
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elegant and tasteful as possible . . . although in France there was also 1
the whole bidet issue, which many of the interns agreed always struck 2
them as weird and kind of unhygienic. There was then a quick anec-3
dote about someone’s once having asked a French concierge about the 4
really low drinking fountain in the salle de bains, which also struck a 5
nerve of risibility at the table.

6

At different intervals, two or three of the interns who smoked 7
would excuse themselves briefly and step out to smoke and then re-8
turn — Tutti Mangia’s management had made it clear that they didn’t 9
really want like eight people at a time out there under the awning.

10

‘So then what about the US toilets here, with the hole in the mid-11
dle and all this water so it all floats and goes around and around in a 12
little dance before it goes down — what’s up with that?’

13

The design director’s intern wore a very simple severe Prada jacket 14
over a black silk tee. ‘They don’t always go around and around. Some 15
toilets are really fast and powerful and it’s gone right away.’

16

‘Maybe up on eighty-two it is!’ Two of the newer staff interns 17
leaned slightly toward each other as they laughed.

18

Laurel Manderley’s roommate, who at Wellesley had played both field 19
hockey and basketball and was a national finalist for a Marshall, asked 20
how many of those at the table had had to read those ghastly pieces of 21

Swift’s in Post Liz Lit where he went on and on about women taking 22
a crap and how supposedly traumatic it was for the swain when he 23
found out that his beloved went to the bathroom like a normal human 24
being instead of whatever sick mommy figure Swift liked to make 25
women into, quoting the actual lines, ‘“Send up an excremental Smell/

26

To taint the Parts from whence they fell/the Pettycoats and Gown 27
perfume/And waft a Stink round every Room,”’ which a few people 28
hazarded to say that it was maybe a little bit disturbing that Siobhan 29
had seemingly memorized this . . . and thereupon the latter part of 30
the discussion turned more toward intergender bathroom habits and 31
the various small traumas of cohabitation with a male partner, or even 32
just when you reached the stage where one or the other of you were 33
staying over a lot, and the table conversation broke up into a certain 34 sh
number of overlapping smaller exchanges while some people ordered 35 reg

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different kinds of coffee and Laurel Manderley sucked abstractedly on 2
an olive pit.

3

‘If you ask me, there’s something sketchy about a guy whose bath-4
room is all full of those little deodorizers and scented candles. I always 5
tend to think, here’s somebody who kind of denies his own humanity.’

6

‘It’s bad news if it’s a big deal either way. It’s never a good sign.’

7

‘But you don’t want him totally uninhibited, don’t get me wrong.’

8

‘Because if he’s going around farting in front of you or something, it 9
means on some level he’s thinking you’re just one of the guys, and 10
that’s always bad news.’

11

‘Because then how long before he’s sitting there on the couch all day 12
farting and telling you to go get him a beer?’

13

‘If I’m out in the kitchen and Pankaj wants a beer or something, he 14
knows he better say please.’

15

The shade who wore Pucci and two other research interns were ev-16
idently going with three guys from Forbes to some kind of infamous 17
annual Forbes house party on Fire Island over the holiday weekend, 18
which, since the Fourth was on Wednesday this year, meant the fol-19
lowing weekend.

20

‘I don’t know,’ the thumb’s head intern said. ‘My parents pass gas 21
in front of each other. There’s something sweet about it, like it’s just 22
another part of life together. They’ll keep right on talking or whatever 23
as if nothing happened.’ the thumb was the name of the section of 24

Style that contained mini reviews of film and television, as well as cer-25
tain types of commercial music and books, each review accompanied 26
by a special thumb icon whose angle conveyed visually how positive 27
the assessment was.

28

‘Although that in itself shows there’s something different about it. If 29
you sneeze or yawn, there’s something said. A fart, though, is always 30
ignored, even though everybody knows what’s just happened.’

31

Some interns were laughing; some were not.

32

‘The silence communicates some kind of unease about it.’

33

‘A conspiracy of silence.’

sh 34

‘Shannon was on some friend of a friend thing at the Hat with some reg 35
awful guy in she said an XMI Platinum sweater, with that awful lg 36

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Haverford type of jaunty misogyny, that was going on and on about why 1
do girls always go to the bathroom together, like what’s up with that, 2
and Shannon looks at the guy like what planet did you just land from, 3
and says well it should be obvious we’re doing cocaine in there, is why.’

4

‘One of those guys where you’re like, hello, my eyes are up here. ’

5

‘Carlos says in some cultures the etiquette actually calls for passing 6
gas in some situations.’

7

‘The well known Korean thing about you burp to say thank you.’

8

‘My parents had this running joke — they called a fart an intruder.

9

They’d look at each other over the paper and be, like, “I do believe 10
there’s an intruder present.”’

11

Laurel Manderley, who had had an idea, was rooting through her 12

Fendi for her personal cell.

13

‘My mom would just about drop over dead if anybody ever cut one 14
in front of her. It’s just not even imaginable.’

15

A circulation intern named Laurel Rodde, who as a rule favored 16

DKNY, and who wasn’t exactly unpopular but no one felt like they 17
knew her very well despite all the time they all spent with one another, 18
and who usually barely said a word at the working lunches, suddenly 19
said: ‘You know, did anybody when they were little ever have this thing 20
where you think of your shit as sort of like your baby and sometimes 21
want to hold it and talk to it and almost cry or feel guilty about flush-22
ing it and dream sometimes of your shit in a little sort of little stroller 23
with a bonnet and bottle and still sometimes in the bathroom look at 24
it and give a little wave like, bye bye, as it goes down, and then feel a 25
void?’ There was an uncomfortable silence. Some of the interns looked 26
at one another out of the corner of their eye. They were at a stage 27
where they were now too adult and socially refined to respond with a 28
drawn out semicruel ‘Oooo-kaaaay,’ but you could tell that a few of 29
them were thinking it. The circulation intern, who’d gone a bit pink, 30
was bent to her salad once more.

31

32

[

33

Citing bridgework, Atwater again declined the half piece of gum that 34 sh

Mrs. Moltke offered. All the parked car’s windows ran in a way that 35 reg

36 lg

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would have been pretty had there been more overall light. The rain 2
had steadied to the point where he could just barely discern the outline 3
of a large sign in the distance below, which Amber had told him 4
marked the nitrogen fixative factory’s entrance.

5

‘The man’s conflicted, is all,’ Mrs. Moltke said. ‘He’s about the most 6
private man you’d ever like to see. In the privy I mean.’ She chewed her 7
gum well, without extraneous noises. She had to be at least 6'1". ‘It 8
surely weren’t like that at my house growing up, I can tell you. It’s a 9
matter of how folks grow up, wouldn’t you say?’

10

‘This is fascinating,’ Atwater said. They had been parked at the lit-11
tle road’s terminus for perhaps ten minutes. The tape recorder was 12
placed on his knee, and the subject’s wife now reached over across her-13
self and turned it off. Her hand was large enough to cover the recorder 14
and also make liberal contact with his knee on either side. Atwater still 15
had the same pants size he’d had in college, though these slacks were 16
obviously a great deal newer. In the low barometric pressure of the 17
storm, he was now entirely stuffed up, and was mouth breathing, 18
which caused his lower lip to hang outward and made him look even 19
more childlike. He was breathing rather more rapidly than he was 20
aware of.

21

It was not clear whether Amber’s small smile was for him or herself 22
or just what. ‘I’m going to tell you some background facts that you 23
can’t write about, but it’ll help you understand our situation here.

24

Skip — can I call you Skip?’

25

‘Please do.’

26

Rain beat musically on the Cavalier’s roof and hood. ‘Skip, between 27
just us two now, what we’ve got here is a boy whose folks beat him wit-28
less all through growing up. That whipped on him with electric cords 29
and burnt on him with cigarettes and made him eat out in the shed 30
when his mother thought his manners weren’t up to snuff for her high 31
and mighty table. His daddy was all right, it was more his mother. One 32
of this churchy kind that’s so upright and proper in church but back 33
at home she’s crazy evil, whipped her own children with cords and I sh 34
don’t know what all.’ At the mention of church, Atwater’s facial expres-reg 35
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Moltke’s voice was low in register but still wholly feminine, with a 1
quality that cut through the rain’s sound even at low volume. It re-2
minded Atwater somewhat of Lauren Bacall at the end of her career, 3
when the aged actress had begun to look more and more like a scalded 4
cat but still possessed of a voice that affected one’s nervous system in 5
profound ways, as a child.

6

The artist’s wife said: ‘I know that one time when he was a boy that 7
she came in and I think caught Brint playing with himself maybe, and 8
made him come down in the sitting room and do it in front of them, 9
the family, that she made them all sit there and watch him. Do you fol-10
low what I’m saying, Skip?’

11

The most significant sign of an approaching tornado would be a 12
greenish cast to the ambient light and a sudden drop in pressure that 13
made one’s ears pop.

14

‘His daddy didn’t outright abuse him, but he was half crazy,’ Amber 15
said, ‘a deacon. A man under great pressure from his own demons that 16
he wrestled with. And I know one time Brint saw her take and beat a 17
little baby kittycat to death with a skillet for messing on the kitchen 18
floor. When he was in his high chair, watching. A little kittycat. Well,’

19
she said. ‘What do you suppose a little boy’s toilet training is going to 20
be like with folks like that?’

21

Nodding vigorously being one of his tactics for drawing people out 22
in interviews, Atwater was nodding at almost everything the subject’s 23
wife was saying. This, together with the fact that his arms were still out 24
straight before him, lent him a somnambulist aspect. Wind gusts 25
caused the car to shimmy slightly in the clearing’s mud.

26

By this time, Amber Moltke had shifted her mass onto her left 27
haunch and brought her great right leg up and was curled kittenishly 28
in such a way as to incline herself toward Atwater, gazing at the side of 29
his face. She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red. Her leg was like 30
something you could slide down into some kind of unimaginable 31
chasm. The chief outward sign that Atwater was affected one way or 32
the other by the immense sexual force field around Mrs. Moltke was 33
that he continued to grip the Cavalier’s steering wheel tightly with 34 sh
both hands and to face directly ahead as though still driving. There 35 reg

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was very little air in the car. He had an odd subtle sense of ascent, as if 2
the car were slightly rising. There was no real sign of any type of over-3
head view, or even of the tiny road’s dropoff to SR 252 and the nitro-4
gen works that commenced just ahead — he was going almost entirely 5
on Mrs. Moltke’s report of where they were.

6

‘This is a man, now, that will leave the premises to break wind. That 7
closes the privy door and locks it and turns on the exhaust fan and this 8
little radio he’s got, and runs water, and sometimes puts a rolled up 9
towel in the crack of the door when he’s in there doing his business.

10

Brint I mean.’

11

‘I think I understand what you’re saying.’

12

‘Most times he can’t do his business if there’s somebody even there.

13

In the house. The man thinks I believe him when he says he’s going to 14
just go driving around.’ She sighed. ‘So Skip, this is a very very shy in-15
dividual in this department. He’s wounded inside. He wouldn’t hardly 16
say boo when I first met him.’

17

Following college, Skip Atwater had done a year at IU-Indianapolis’s 18
prestigious grad journalism program, then landed a cub spot at the 19

Indianapolis Star, and there had made no secret of his dream of some-20
day writing a syndication grade human interest column for a major 21
urban daily, until the assistant city editor who’d hired him told Skip in 22
his first annual performance review, among other things, that as a jour-23
nalist Atwater struck him as being polished but about two inches deep.

24

After which performance review Atwater had literally run for the 25
privacy of the men’s room and there had struck his own chest with his 26
fist several times because he knew that at heart it was true: his fatal 27
flaw was an ineluctably light, airy prose sensibility. He had no innate 28
sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things 29
that made human beings’ misfortunes significant to one another. He 30
was all upbeat angle. The editor’s blunt but kindly manner had made 31
it worse. Atwater could write a sweet commercial line, he’d acknowl-32
edged. He had compassion, of a certain frothy sort, and drive. The 33
editor, who always wore a white dress shirt and tie but never a jacket, sh 34
had actually put his arm around Atwater’s shoulders. He said he liked reg 35

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Skip enough to tell him the truth, because he was a good kid and just 1
needed to find his niche. There were all different kinds of reporting.

2

The editor said he had acquaintances at USA Today and offered to 3
make a call.

4

Atwater, who also possessed an outstanding verbal memory, re-5
tained almost verbatim the questions Laurel Manderley had left him 6
with on the phone at Ye Olde Country Buffet after he’d summarized 7
the morning’s confab and characterized the artist as catatonically in-8
hibited, terribly shy, scared of his shadow, and so forth. What Laurel 9
had said didn’t yet add up for her in the story was how the stuff got 10
seen in the first place: ‘What, he gives it to somebody? This catatoni-11
cally shy guy calls somebody into the bathroom and says, Hey, look at 12
this extraordinary thing I just pooped out of me? I can’t see anybody 13
over age six doing that, much less somebody that shy. Whether it’s a 14
hoax or not, the guy’s got to be some kind of closet exhibitionist,’ she’d 15
opined. Every instinct Atwater possessed had since been crying out 16
that this was the piece’s fulcrum and UBA, the universalizing element 17
that made great soft news go: the conflict between Moltke’s extreme 18
personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus his in-19
voluntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of 20
personal expression or art. Everyone experienced this conflict on some 21
level. Though lurid and potentially disgusting, the mode of production 22
in this case simply heightened the conflict’s voltage, underlined the 23
stakes in bold, made it at once deep and accessible for Style readers, 24
many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the 25
salarymen knew.

26

Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some 27
years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and 28
ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he 29
was off base this increasingly was — which in retrospect was partly why, 30
in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attrac-31
tive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors 32
in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he 33
was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.

34 sh

35 reg

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f

2

3

Only the third shift attendant knew that R. Vaughn Corliss slept so 4
terribly, twining in and out of the sheets with bleatings of the purest 5
woe, foodlessly chewing, sitting up and looking wildly about, feeling at 6
himself and moaning, crying out that no he wouldn’t go there, not 7
there not again no please. The high concept mogul was always up with 8
the sun, and his first act after stripping the bed and placing his break-9
fast order was to erase the disk of the bedroom’s monitor. A selected 10
few nights’ worth of these disks the attendant had slipped in during 11
deep sleep and copied, however, as a de facto form of unemployment 12
insurance, since Corliss’s temper and caprice were well known; and the 13
existence of these pirate disks was also known to certain representa-14
tives of Eckleschafft-Böd whose business it was to know such things.

15

It was only if, after sheep, controlled breathing, visualizing IV pen-16
tothal drips, and mentally reviewing in close detail a special collector’s 17
series of photographs of people on fire entitled People on Fire, Corliss 18
still could not fall or fall back asleep that he’d resort to the failsafe: 19
imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or 20
even ever seen all assembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist 21
image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss’s own.

22

In the morning, the reinvented high concept cable entrepreneur’s 23
routine was invariant and always featured a half hour of pretend row-24
ing on a machine that could simulate both resistance and crosscurrent, 25
a scrupulously Fletcherized breakfast, and a session of the 28 lead fa-26
cial biofeedback in which microelectric sensors were affixed to indi-27
vidual muscle groups and exhaustive daily practice yielded the ability 28
to form, at will, any of the 216 facial expressions common to all known 29
cultures. Corliss was in constant contact via headset cellular through-30
out this regimen.

31

Unlike most driven business visionaries he was not, when all was 32
said and done, an unhappy man. He felt sometimes an odd complex 33
emotion that, when broken down and examined in quiet reflection, re-sh 34
vealed itself to be self envy, which appears near the top of certain reg 35

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joy. The sense Skip Atwater had gotten, after a brief and highly struc-1
tured interface with Corliss for a witw piece on the All Ads cable 2
channel in 1999, was that the producer’s reclusive, eccentric persona 3
was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom 4

Atwater had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was 5
in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected 6
an hermetic torment for reasons which Atwater’s notebooks contained 7
several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article 8
published in Style.

9

10
f

11

Atwater and Mrs. Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each 12
other’s air; the Cavalier’s glass surfaces were almost entirely steamed 13
over. At the same time, an imperfection in its gasket’s seal was allow-14
ing rain droplets to enter and move in a complex system of paths down 15
his window. These branching paths and tributaries were in the left pe-16
riphery of the journalist’s vision; Amber Moltke’s face loomed vividly 17
in the right. Unlike Mrs. Atwater, the artist’s wife had a good firm 18
chin with no wattles, though her throat’s girth was extraordinary —

19

Atwater could not have gotten around it with both hands.

20

‘The shyness and woundedness must be complex, though,’ the jour-21
nalist said. ‘Given that the pieces are public. Publicly displayed.’ He 22
had already amassed a certain amount of technical detail about the 23
preparation of the displays, back at the Moltkes’ duplex. The pieces 24
were not varnished or in any way chemically treated. They were, how-25
ever, sprayed lightly with a fixative when fresh or new, to help preserve 26
their shape and intricate detail — evidently some of the man’s early 27
work had become cracked or distorted when allowed to dry com-28
pletely. Atwater knew that freshly produced pieces of art were placed 29
on a special silver finish tray, an heirloom of some sort from Mrs.

30

Moltke’s own family, then covered in common kitchen plastic wrap 31
and allowed to cool to room temperature before the fixative was ap-32
plied. Skip could imagine the steam from a fresh new piece fogging 33
the Saran’s interior and making it difficult to see the thing itself until 34 sh
the wrap was removed and discarded. Only later, in the midst of all the 35 reg

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editorial wrangling over his piece’s typeset version, would Atwater 2
learn that the fixative in question was a common brand of aerosol 3
styling spray whose manufacturer advertised in Style.

4

Amber gave a brief laugh. ‘We’re not exactly talking the big time.

5

Two bean festivals and the DAR craft show.’

6

‘Well, and of course the fair.’ Atwater was referring to the Franklin 7

County Fair, which like most county fairs in eastern Indiana was held 8
in June, quite a bit earlier than the national average. The reasons for 9
this were complicated, agricultural, and historically bound up with 10

Indiana’s refusal to participate in Daylight Savings Time, which caused 11
no end of hassles for certain commodities markets at the Chicago 12

Board of Trade. Atwater’s own childhood experiences had been of the 13

Madison County Fair, held during the third week of each June on the 14
outskirts of Mounds State Park, but he assumed that all county fairs 15
were roughly similar. He had unconsciously begun to do the thing 16
with his fist again.

17

‘Well, although the fair ain’t exactly your big time either.’

18

Also from childhood experience, Skip Atwater knew that the slight 19
squeaks and pops one could hear when Amber laughed were from dif-20
ferent parts of her complex foundation garment as they strained and 21
moved against one another. Her kneesized left elbow now rested on 22
the seat back between them, leaving her left hand free to play and 23
make tiny languid motions in the space between her head and his. A 24
head nearly twice the size of Atwater’s own. Her hair was wiglike in 25
overall configuration, but it had a high protein luster no real wig could 26
ever duplicate.

27

His right arm still rigidly out against the Cavalier’s wheel, Atwater 28
turned his head a few more degrees toward her. ‘This, though, will be 29
very public. Style is about as public as you can get.’

30

‘Well, except for TV.’

31

Atwater inclined his head slightly to signify concession. ‘Except 32
for TV.’

33

Mrs. Moltke’s hand, with its multiple different rings, was now sh 34
within just inches of the journalist’s large red right ear. She said: ‘Well, reg 35

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body in town that hasn’t looked at Style or People or one of you all.’ The 1
hand moved as if it were under water. ‘Sometimes it’s hard keeping you 2
all straight. After your girl there called, I said to Brint it was a man 3
coming over from People when I was telling him to go on and get 4
cleaned up for company.’

5

Atwater cleared his throat. ‘So you see my point, then, which in no 6
way forms any sort of argument against the piece or Mr. Moltke’s —’

7

‘Brint.’

8

‘Against Brint’s consenting to the piece.’ Atwater would also every 9
so often give a small but vigorous all body shiver, involuntary, rather 10
like a wet dog shaking itself, which neither party commented on. Bits 11
of windblown foliage hit the front and rear windshields and remained 12
for a moment or two before they were washed away. The sky could really 13
have been any color at all and there would be no way to know. Atwater 14
now tried to rotate his entire upper body toward Mrs. Moltke: ‘But he 15
will need to know what he’s in for. If my editors give the go ahead, 16
which I should again stress I have every confidence they ultimately 17
will, one condition is likely to be the presence of some sort of medical 18
authority to authenticate the . . . circumstances of creation.’

19

‘You’re saying in there with him?’ The gusts of her breath seemed to 20
strike every little cilium on Atwater’s cheek and temple. Her right hand 21
still covered the recorder and several inches of Atwater’s knee on either 22
side. Her largo pulse was visible in the trembling of her bust, which was 23
understandably prodigious and also now pointed Atwater’s way. Prob-24
ably no more than four inches separated the bust from his right arm, 25
which was still held out stiffly and attached to the steering wheel. At-26
water’s other fist was pumping like mad down beside the driver’s door.

27

‘No, no, not necessarily, but probably right outside, and ready to 28
perform various tests and procedures on the . . . on it the minute Mr.

29

Moltke, Brint, is finished. Comes out with it.’ Another intense little 30
shiver.

31

Amber gave another small mirthless laugh.

32

‘I’m sure you know what I mean,’ Atwater said. ‘Temperature and 33
constitution and the lack of any sort of sign of any human hand or tool 34 sh
or anything employed in the . . . process of the . . .’

35 reg

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1

‘And then it’ll come out.’

2

‘The piece, you mean,’ Atwater said. She nodded. In a way that 3
made no physical sense given their respective sizes, Atwater’s eyes 4
seemed now to be exactly level with hers, and without being aware of 5
it he blinked whenever she did, though her hand’s small circles often 6
supervened.

7

Atwater said: ‘As I’ve said, I have every confidence that yes, it will.’

8

At the same time, the journalist was also trying not to indulge him-9
self by imagining Laurel Manderley’s reaction to the faxed reproduc-10
tions of the artist’s pieces as they slowly emerged from the machine.

11

He felt that he knew almost all the different permutations her face 12
would go through.

13

Nor was it clear whether Mrs. Moltke was looking at his ear or at 14
the underwater movements of her own hand up next to the ear. ‘And 15
what you’re saying is then, why, to get ready, because once it comes out 16
nothing will be the same. Because there’ll be attention.’

17

‘I would think so, yes.’ He tried to turn a little further. ‘Of various 18
different kinds.’

19

‘You’re saying other magazines. Or TV, the Internet.’

20

‘It’s often difficult to predict the forms of public attention or to 21
know in advance what —’

22

‘But after this kind of amount of attention you’re saying there might 23
be art galleries wanting to handle it. For sale. Do art galleries do auc-24
tions, or they just put it out with a price sticker on it and folks come 25
and shop, or what all?’

26

Atwater was aware that this was a very different type and level of 27
exchange than the morning’s confab in the Moltkes’ home. It was hard 28
for him not to feel that Amber might be patronizing him a bit, play-29
ing up to a certain stereotype of provincial naiveté — he did this him-30
self in certain situations at Style. At the same time, he felt that to some 31
extent she was sincere in deferring to him because he lived and worked 32
in New York City, the cultural heart of the nation — Atwater was 33
absurdly gratified by this kind of thing. The whole geographical defer-sh 34
ence issue could get very complicated and abstract. At the right periph-reg 35
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the air near his ear was actually the cartography of that ear, its spirals 1
and intending whorls. Sensitive from childhood about his ears’ size 2
and hue, Atwater had worn either baseball caps or knit caps all the way 3
through college.

4

Ultimately, the journalist’s failure to think the whole thing through 5
and decide just how to respond was itself a form of decision. ‘I think 6
they do both,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes there are auctions. Sometimes a 7
special exhibit, and potential buyers will come for a large party on the 8
first day, to meet the artist. Often called an art opening.’ He was fac-9
ing the windshield again. The rain came no less hard but the sky 10
looked perhaps to be lightening — although, on the other hand, the 11
steam of their exhalations against the window was itself whitish and 12
might act as some type of optical filter. At any rate, Atwater knew that 13
it was often at the trailing end of a storm front that funnels developed.

14

‘The initial key,’ he said, ‘will be arranging for the right photographer.’

15

‘Some professional type shots, you mean.’

16

‘The magazine has both staff photographers and freelancers the 17
photo people like to use for various situations. The politics of influ-18
encing them as to which particular photographer they might send all 19
gets pretty involved, I’m afraid.’ Atwater could taste his own carbon 20
dioxide in the car’s air. ‘The key will be producing some images that 21
are carefully lit and indirect and tasteful and yet at the same time 22
emphatic in being able to show what he’s able to . . . just what he’s 23
achieved.’

24

‘Already. You mean the doodads he’s come out with already.’

25

‘There will be no way to even pitch it at the executive level without 26
real photos, I don’t think,’ Atwater said.

27

For a moment there was only the wind and rain and a whisking 28
sound of microfiber, due to Atwater’s fist.

29

‘You know what’s peculiar? Is sometimes I can hear it and then 30
other times not,’ Amber said quietly. ‘That you said up to home you 31
were from back here, and sometimes I can hear it and then other times 32
you sound more . . . all business, and I can’t hear it in you at all.’

33

‘I’m originally from Anderson.’

34 sh

‘Up by Muncie you mean. Where all the big mounds are.’

35 reg

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1

‘Anderson’s got the mounds, technically. Though I went to school in 2

Muncie, at Ball State.’

3

‘There’s some more right here, up to Mixerville off the lake. They 4
still say they don’t know who all made those mounds. They just know 5
they’re old.’

6

‘The sense I get is there are still competing theories.’

7

‘Dave Letterman on the TV talks about Ball State all the time, that 8
he was at. He’s from here someplace.’

9

‘He graduated long before I got there, though.’

10

She did touch his ear now, though her finger was too large to fit 11
inside or trace the auricle’s whorls and succeeded only in occluding 12

Atwater’s hearing on that side, so that he could hear his own heartbeat 13
and his voice seemed newly loud to him over the rain: 14

‘But with the operative question being whether he’ll do it.’

15

‘Brint,’ she said.

16

‘Respecting the subject of the piece.’

17

‘If he’ll sit still for it you mean.’

18

The finger kept Atwater from turning his head, so that he could not 19
see whether Mrs. Moltke was smiling or had made a deliberate sally or 20
just what. ‘Since he’s so agonizingly shy, as you’ve explained. You 21
must — he’s got to be able to see already that it will be, to some extent, 22
a bit invasive.’ Atwater was in no way acknowledging the finger in his 23
ear, which did not move or turn but simply stayed there. The feeling of 24
queer levitation persisted, however. ‘Invasive of his privacy, of your pri-25
vacy. And I don’t exactly get the sense, which I respect, that Mr.

26

Moltke burns to share his art with the world, or necessarily to get a lot 27
of personal exposure.’

28

‘He’ll do it,’ Amber said. The finger withdrew slightly but was still 29
in contact with his ear. The very oldest she could possibly be was 28.

30

The journalist said: ‘Because I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s an 31
extraordinary thing and an extraordinary story, but Laurel and I are 32
going to have to go right to the mat with the Executive Editor to se-33
cure a commitment to this piece, and it would make things really awk-sh 34
ward if Mr. Moltke suddenly demurred or deferred or got cold feet or reg 35
decided it was all just too private and invasive a process.’

lg 36

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She did not ask who Laurel was. She was wholly on her left flank 1
now, her luminous knee up next to her hand on the Daewoo unit, and 2
only the bunched hem of his raincoat separating her knee and his, her 3
great bosom crushed and jutting and its heartbeat’s quiver bringing 4
one breast within inches of the Talbott’s shawl collar. He kept envi-5
sioning her having to strike or swat the artist before he’d respond to 6
the simplest query. And the strange fixed grin, which probably would 7
not photograph well at all.

8

Again the artist’s wife said: ‘He’ll do it.’

9

Unbeknownst to Atwater, the Cavalier’s right hand tires were now 10
sunk in mud almost to the valves. What he felt as an occult force rotat-11
ing him up and over toward Mrs. Moltke in clear contravention of the 12
most basic journalistic ethics was in fact simple gravity: the compartment 13
was now at a 20 degree angle. Wind gusts shook the car like a maraca, 14
and the journalist could hear the sounds of thrashing foliage and 15
windblown debris doing God knew what to the rental’s paint.

16

‘I have no doubt,’ the journalist said. ‘I think I’m just trying to de-17
termine for myself why you’re so sure, although obviously I’m going to 18
defer to your judgment because he is your husband and if anyone 19
knows another’s heart it’s obviously —’

20

What he felt in the first instant to be Mrs. Moltke’s hand over his 21
mouth turned out to be her forefinger held to his lips, chin, and lower 22
jaw in an intimate shush. Atwater could not help wondering whether 23
it was the same finger that had just been in his ear. Its tip was almost 24
the width of both of his nostrils together.

25

‘He will because he’ll do it for me, Skip. Because I say.’

26

‘Mn srtny gld t—’

27

‘But go on and ask it.’ Mrs. Moltke backed the finger off a bit. ‘We 28
should get it out here up front between us. Why I’d want my husband 29
known for his shit.’

30

‘Though of course the pieces are so much more than that,’ Atwater 31
said, his eyes appearing to cross slightly as he gazed at the finger. An-32
other compact shiver, a whisking sound of fabric and his forehead run-33
ning with sweat. The cinnamon heat and force of her exhalations like 34 sh
one of the heating grates along Columbus Circle where coteries of 35 reg

36 lg

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homeless sat in the winter in fingerless gloves and balaklava hoods, 2
their eyes flat and pitiless as Atwater hurried past. He had to engage 3
the car’s battery in order to crack his window, and a burst of noise from 4
the radio made him jump.

5

Amber Moltke appeared very still and intent. ‘Still and all, though,’

6
she said. ‘To have your TV reporters or Dave Letterman or that skinny 7
one real late at night making their jokes about it, and folks reading in 8

Style and thinking about Brint’s bowel, about him sitting there in the 9
privy moving his bowel in some kind of special way to make some-10
thing like that come out. Because that’s his whole hook, Skip, isn’t it.

11

Why you’re here in the first place. That it’s his shit.’

12

]

13

14

It turned out that a certain Richmond IN firm did a type of specialty 15
shipping where they poured liquid styrene around fragile items, pro-16
ducing a very light form fitting insulation. The Federal Express outlet 17
named on the box’s receipt, however, was in Scipio IN, which was also 18
featured in the address on the Kinko’s cover sheet that had accompa-19
nied Sunday’s faxed photos, which faxes the next morning’s Fed Ex 20
rendered more or less moot or superfluous, so that Laurel Manderley 21
couldn’t quite see why Atwater’d gone to the trouble.

22

At Monday’s working lunch, Laurel Manderley’s deceptively simple 23
idea with respect to the package’s contents had been to hurry back and 24
place them out on Ellen Bactrian’s desk before she returned from her 25
dance class, so that they would be sitting there waiting for her, and not 26
to say a word or try to prevail on Ellen in any way, but simply to let the 27
pieces speak for themselves. This was, after all, what her own salary-28
man appeared to have done, giving Laurel no warning whatsoever that 29
art was on the way.

30

]

31

32

The following was actually part of a lengthy telephone conversation on 33
the afternoon of 3 July between Laurel Manderley and Skip Atwater, sh 34
the latter having literally limped back to the Mount Carmel Holiday reg 35

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Inn after negotiating an exhaustive and nerve wracking series of in situ 1
authenticity tests at the artist’s home.

2

‘And what’s with that address, by the way?’

3

‘Willkie’s an Indiana politician. The name is ubiquitous here. I think 4
he may have run against Truman. Remember the photo of Truman 5
holding up the headline?’

6

‘No, I mean the half. What, fourteen and a half Willkie?’

7

‘It’s a duplex,’ Atwater said.

8

‘Oh.’

9

There had been a brief silence, one whose strangeness might have 10
been only in retrospect.

11

‘Who lives on the other side?’

12

There had been another pause. It was true that both salaryman and 13
intern were extremely tired and discombobulated by this point.

14

The journalist said: ‘I don’t know yet. Why?’

15

To which Laurel Manderley had no good answer.

16

17

[

18

In the listing Cavalier, at or about the height of the thunderstorm, 19

Atwater shook his head. ‘It’s more than that,’ he said. He was, to all 20
appearances, sincere. He appeared genuinely concerned that the 21
artist’s wife not think his motives exploitative or sleazy. Amber’s finger 22
was still right near his mouth. He told her it was not yet entirely clear 23
to him how she viewed her husband’s pieces or understood the extra-24
ordinary power they exerted. Rain and debris notwithstanding, the 25
windshield was too steamed over for Atwater to see that the view of 26

SR 252 and the fixative works was now tilted 30 or more degrees, like 27
a faulty altimeter. Still facing forward with his eyes rotated way over to 28
the right, Atwater told the artist’s wife that his journalistic motives 29
had been mixed at first, maybe, but that verily he did now believe.

30

When they’d taken him through Mrs. Moltke’s sewing room and out 31
back and pulled open the angled green door and led him down the raw 32
pine steps into the storm cellar and he’d seen the pieces all lined up in 33
graduated tiers that way, something had happened. The truth was he’d 34 sh

35 reg

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1
been moved, and he said he’d understood then for the first time, de-2
spite some prior exposure to the world of art through a course or two 3
in college, how people of discernment could say they felt moved and 4
redeemed by serious art. And he believed this was serious, real, bona 5
fide art, he told her. At the same time, it was also true that Skip At-6
water had not been in a sexually charged situation since the previous 7

New Year’s annual YMSP2 party’s bout of drunken fanny photocopy-8
ing, when he’d gotten a glimpse of one of the circulation interns’ pu-9
denda as she settled on the Canon’s plexiglass sheet, which afterward 10
was unnaturally warm.

11
f

12

13

Registered motto of Chicago IL’s O Verily Productions, which for 14
complicated business reasons appeared on its colophon in Portuguese: 15

16
consciousness is nature’s nightmare

17
f

18

19

Amber Moltke, however, pointed out that if conventionally produced, 20
the pieces would really be just small reproductions that showed a great 21
deal of expression and technical detail, that what made them special in 22
the first place was what they were and how they came out fully formed 23
from her husband’s behind, and she again asked rhetorically why on 24
earth she would want these essential facts highlighted and talked 25
about, that they were his shit — pronouncing the word shit in a very 26
flat and matter of fact way — and Atwater admitted that he did won-27
der about this, and that the whole question of the pieces’ production 28
and how this rendered them somehow simultaneously both more and 29
less natural than conventional artworks seemed dizzyingly abstract 30
and complex, and that but in any event there would almost inevitably 31
be some elements that some Style readers would find distasteful or in-32
vasive in an ad hominem way, and confessed that he did wonder, both 33
personally and professionally, whether it wasn’t possible that Mr. or at sh 34
least Mrs. Moltke wasn’t perhaps more ambivalent about the terms of reg 35
public exposure than she was allowing herself to realize.

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And Amber inclined even closer to Skip Atwater and said to him 1
that she was not. That she’d thought on the whole business long and 2
hard at the first soybean festival, long before Style even knew that Mr.

3
and Mrs. B. F. Moltke of Mount Carmel even existed. She turned 4
slightly to push at her mass of occipital curls, which had tightened 5
shinily in the storm’s moist air. Her voice was a dulcet alto with some-6
thing almost hypnotic in the timbre. There were tiny random frag-7
ments of spindrift rain through the window’s opened crack, and a 8
planar flow of air that felt blessed, and the front seat’s starboard list be-9
came more severe, which as he rose so very slowly gave Atwater the 10
sensation that either he was physically enlarging or Mrs. Moltke was 11
diminishing somewhat in relative size, or at any rate that the physical 12
disparity between them was becoming less marked. It occurred to 13

Atwater that he could not recall when he had eaten last. He could not 14
feel his right leg anymore, and his ear’s outer flange felt nearly aflame.

15

Mrs. Moltke said how she’d thought about it and realized that most 16
people didn’t even get such a chance, and that this here was hers, and 17

Brint’s. To somehow stand out. To distinguish themselves from the 18
great huge faceless mass of folks that watched the folks that did stand 19
out. On the TV and in venues like Style. In retrospect, none of this 20
turned out to be true. To be known, to matter, she said. To have church 21
or Ye Olde Buffet or the new Bennigan’s at the Whitcomb Outlet Mall 22
get quiet when her and Brint came in, and to feel people’s eyes, the 23
weight of their gaze. That it made a difference someplace when they 24
came in. To pick up a copy of People or Style at the beautician’s and see 25
herself and Brint looking back out at her. To be on TV. That this was 26
it. That surely Skip could understand. That yes, despite the overall 27
dimness of Brint Moltke’s bulb and a lack of personal verve that almost 28
approached death in life, when she’d met the drain technician at a 29
church dance in 1997 she’d somehow known that he was her chance.

30

His hair had been slicked down with aftershave and he’d worn white 31
socks with his good suit, and had missed a belt loop, and yet she’d 32
known. Call it a gift, this power — she was different and marked to 33
someday stand out and she’d known it. Atwater himself had worn white 34 sh
socks with dress slacks until college, when his fraternity brothers had 35 reg

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1
finally addressed the issue in Mock Court. His right hand still grip-2
ping the steering wheel, Atwater’s head was now rotated just as far as 3
it would go in order to look more or less directly into Amber’s great 4
right eye, whose lashes ruffled his hair when she fluttered them. No 5
more than a quarter moon of tire now showed above the mud on each 6
of the right side’s wheels.

7

What Amber appeared now to be confiding to him in the rented 8

Cavalier struck Atwater as extremely open and ingenuous and naked.

9

The sheer preterite ugliness of it made its admission almost beautiful, 10

Atwater felt. Bizarrely, it did not occur to him that Amber might be 11
speaking to him as a reporter instead of a fellow person. He knew that 12
there was an artlessness about him that helped people open up, and 13
that he possessed a measure of true empathy. It’s why he considered 14
himself fortunate to be tasked to what in the world rather than en-15
tertainment or beauty/fashion, budgets and prestige notwithstanding.

16

The truth is that what Amber Moltke was confiding seemed to Atwater 17
very close to the core of the American experience he wanted to capture 18
in his journalism. It was also the tragic conflict at the heart of Style and 19
all soft organs like it. The paradoxical intercourse of audience and 20
celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary 21
people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, 22
celebrities. That wasn’t quite it. An odd thing was that his fist often 23
stopped altogether when he thought abstractly. It was more the deeper, 24
more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a 25
part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives 26
versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew — as 27
did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it 28
was never said aloud — that this was the single great informing conflict 29
of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the 30
great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root 31
of everything — of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of 32
movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he 33
thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that sh 34
celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate aware-reg 35
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celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain 1
number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at a BSG), and they 2
were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which 3
made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually 4
functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of 5
themselves.

6

There had been eye contact between the journalist and Amber 7

Moltke this whole time, and by now Atwater could also look down, as 8
it were, to see the complex whorls and parts in the young wife’s hair 9
and the numerous clips and plastic clamps that were buried in its lus-10
trous mass. There was still the occasional ping of hail. And it was also 11
the world altering pain of accepting one’s individual flaws and limita-12
tions and the tautological unattainability of our dreams and the dim 13
indifference in the eyes of the circulation intern one tries, at the stroke 14
of the true millennium, to share one’s ambivalence and pain with. Most 15
of these latter considerations occurred during a brief diversion from the 16
exchange’s main thread into something having to do with professional 17
sewing and tatting and customized alterations, which evidently was 18
what Amber did out of her home to help supplement her husband’s 19
income from TriCounty Roto Rooter: ‘There’s not a fiber swatch or 20
pattern in this world I cannot work with, that’s another gift it pleased 21

God to bestow and I’m thankful, it’s restful and creative and keeps me 22
out of trouble, these hands are not ever idle’ — she holding up for one 23
moment an actual hand, which could likely have gone all the way 24
around Atwater’s head and still been able to touch finger to thumb.

25

Skip Atwater’s one and only serious involvement ever had been with 26
a medical illustrator for the Anatomical Monograph Company, which 27
was located off the Pendleton Pike just outside Indianapolis proper, 28
specializing in intricate exploded views of the human brain and upper 29
spine, as well as in lower order ganglia for neurological comparison.

30

She had been only 5'0", and toward the relationship’s end Atwater 31
hadn’t cared one bit for the way she had looked at him when he un-32
dressed or got out of the shower. One evening he’d taken her to a Ruth’s 33

Chris and had almost a hallucination or out of body experience in which 34 sh
he’d viewed himself écorché style from her imagined perspective as he 35 reg

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1
ate, his jaw muscles working redly and esophagus contracting to move 2
bits of bolus down. Only days later had come the shattering perfor-3
mance review from the Star’ s assistant city editor, and Skip’s life had 4
changed forever.

5

]

6

7

Early Tuesday morning was the second time ever that Laurel Mander-8
ley had ascended to the executive offices of Style magazine, which re-9
quired getting out and transferring to a whole different elevator at the 10

70th floor. By prior arrangement, Ellen Bactrian had gone up first and 11
verified that the coast was clear. The sun was barely up yet. Laurel 12

Manderley was alone in the elevator, wearing dark wool slacks, very 13
plain Chinese slippers, and a matte black Issey Miyake shirt that was 14
actually made of paper but looked more like some type of very fine 15
opaque tulle. She looked pale and a little unwell; she was not wearing her 16
facial stud. Through some principle of physics she didn’t understand, 17
the box in her arms felt slightly heavier when the elevator was in mo-18
tion. Its total weight was only a few pounds at most. Apparently Ellen 19

Bactrian’s commuting routine with the executive intern was a purely 20
informal one whereby they always met up at some certain spot just north 21
of the Holland Tunnel to bike down together, but if either one wasn’t 22
at the spot at the designated time, the other just rode on ahead. The 23
whole thing was very laid back. The interior of the first elevator was 24
brushed steel; the one up from 70 had inlaid paneling and a console 25
with tiny directories next to each floor’s button. The entire trip took 26
over five minutes, although the elevators themselves were so fast that 27
some of the executive staff wore special earplugs for the rapid ascent.

28

Her only other time up had been with two other new interns and 29
the witw associate editor, as part of general orientation, and in the el-30
evator the associate editor had put his arms up over his head and made 31
his hands sharp like a diver’s and said: ‘Up, up, and away.’

32

[

33
sh 34

Ever since he was a little boy, a deep perfusive flush to Atwater’s ears reg 35
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working to process disparate thoughts and impressions much faster 1
than its normal rate. At these times one could actually feel heat com-2
ing off the ear itself, which may have accounted for the rapid self fan-3
ning motions that the immense, creamily etiolated seamstress made as 4
she came back on topic and shared the following personal experience.

5

The daytime television celebrity Phillip Spaulding of Guiding Light 6
had, at some past point that Amber didn’t specify, made a live pro-7
motional appearance at the opening of a Famous Barr store at Rich-8
mond’s Galleria Mall, and she and a girlfriend had gone to see him, 9
and Amber said she had realized then that her deepest and most life 10
informing wish, she realized, was to someday have strangers feel about 11
her mere appearance someplace the way she had felt, inside, about get-12
ting to stand near enough to Phillip Spaulding (who was evidently a 13
serious hottie indeed, despite something strange or strangely formed 14
about the cartilage of his nose so that it looked like the tip almost had 15
a little dimple or cleft like you’d more normally see on a human chin, 16
which Amber and her girlfriend had decided they ultimately found 17
cute, and made Phillip Spaulding even more of a hottie because it 18
made him look more like a real human being instead of the almost too 19
perfect mannequins these serials sometimes thought folks wanted to 20
see all the time) to reach out between all the other people there and ac-21
tually touch him if she’d wanted to.

22

Skip Atwater, in the course of an involved argument with himself 23
later about whether he had more accurately engaged in or been subject to 24
an act of fraternization with a journalistic subject, would identify this 25
moment as the crucial fulcrum or tipping point of the whole exchange.

26

Already tremendously keyed up and abstracted by Mrs. Moltke’s 27
confidences, he found himself nearly overcome by the ingenuous 28
populism of the Phillip Spaulding anecdote, and wished to activate 29
his tiny tape recorder and, if Amber wouldn’t repeat the vignette, to 30
at least get her to allow him to repeat and record its gist on tape, along 31
with the date and approximate time — not that he would ever use 32
it for this or any other piece, but just for his own record of a completely 33
perfect representative statement of what it was like to be one of the 34 sh
people to and for whom he wished his work in Style to try to speak, 35 reg

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as something to help provide objective dignification of his work and to 2
so to speak hold up shieldlike against the voices in his head that 3
mocked him and said all he really did was write fluff pieces for a mag-4
azine most people read in the bathroom. What happened was that 5

Atwater’s attempts to subtly work his fingers under Amber’s right 6
hand and pry the hand up off the tape recorder on his knee were, 7
in retrospect, evidently interpreted as an attempt at handholding or 8
some other kind of physical affection, and apparently had a profound 9
effect on Mrs. Moltke, for it was then that she brought her great head 10
all the way around between Atwater’s face and the steering wheel, 11
and they were kissing — or rather Atwater was kissing at the left 12
corner of Amber Moltke’s lip, while her mouth covered nearly the 13
entire right side of the journalist’s face all the way to the earlobe.

14

The fluttering motions of his hands as they beat ineffectually at her 15
left shoulder were no doubt similarly misperceived as passion. The 16
movements of Amber’s rapid disrobing then began to cause the 17
rented sedan to heave this way and that, and drove its starboard side 18
even more deeply into the overlook’s mud, and a very muffled set 19
of what could have been either screams or cries of excitement began 20
to issue from the tilted vehicle; and anyone trying to look in either 21
side’s window would have been unable to see any part of Skip Atwater 22
at all.

23

24

4.

25

26

In New York it starts out as a puzzling marginal entry, 411 on Dish, 27

105 on Metro Cable. Viewers find it difficult to tell whether it’s sup-28
posed to be commercial or Community Access or what. At first it’s just 29
montages of well known photos involving anguish or pain: a caved in 30

Jackie next to LBJ as he’s sworn in on the plane, that agonized Viet-31
cong with the pistol to his head, the naked kids running from napalm.

32

There’s something about seeing them one right after another. A 33
woman trying to bathe her thalidomide baby, faces through the wire at sh 34

Belsen, Oswald crumpled around Ruby’s fist, a noosed man as the mob reg 35
begins to hoist, Brazilians on the ledge of a burning highrise. A loop 4th Pass Pages

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of 1,200 of these, four seconds per, running 5:00 PM–1:00 AM EST; 1
no sound; no evident ads.

2

A venture capital subsidiary of Televisio Brasilia underwrites The 3

Suffering Channel’s startup, but you cannot tell that, watching, at first.

4

The only credits are photo ©s and a complicated glyph for O Verily 5

Productions. After a few weeks, stage one TSC also streams on the 6

Web at OVP.com\suff.~vide. The legalities of the video are more tor-7
tuous, and it takes almost twice as long as projected for TSC stage two, 8
in which the still photo series is gradually replaced by video clips in a 9
complex loop that expands by four to five new segments per day, de-10
pending. Still in the planning phase, TSC stage three is tentatively 11
scheduled for experimental insertion during autumn ’01 Sweeps, al-12
though, as is SOP with creative enterprises everywhere, there’s always 13
flexibility and room to maneuver built in.

14

Like nearly all members of the paid press, Skip Atwater watched a 15
good deal of satellite TV, much of it marginal or late night, and knew 16
the O Verily glyph quite well. He still had contacts among R. Vaughn 17

Corliss’s support staff because of the All Ads All The Time Channel 18
piece, which O Verily had ended up regarding as a fortuitous part of 19
its second wave marketing. The AAATC was still up and pulling in 20
a solid cable share, although response to the insertion of real paid ads 21
within the stream of artifact ads had not had the dynamic impact on 22
revenues that O Verily’s prospectus had promised it very well might.

23

Like many viewers, Atwater had been able to tell almost immediately 24
which ads in the loops were paid spots and which were aesthetic ob-25
jects, and regarded them accordingly, sometimes zapping out the paid 26
ads altogether. And while the differences between an ad as entertain-27
ment and an ad that really tried to sell something were fascinating to 28
academics, and had helped to galvanize the whole field of Media 29

Studies in the late 1990s, they did little for the All Ads Channel’s 30
profitability. This was one reason why O Verily had had to outsource 31
capitalization for The Suffering Channel, which was in turn why TSC

32
had almost immediately begun positioning itself for acquisition by a 33
major corporation — the Brazilian VCs had required a 24 percent 34 sh
return on a two year window, meaning that O Verily Productions 35 reg

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1
would retain only nominal creative control if its revenues did not reach 2
a certain floor, which R. Vaughn Corliss had never, from the very start, 3
had any intention of allowing to occur.

4

In Chicago, O Verily Productions operated out of north side facili-5
ties just a few blocks down Addison from WGN’s great uplink tower, 6
past which landmark Skip Atwater’s rented Cavalier yawed and 7
squeaked — pulling severely to the right from a bent transaxle that 8
had worn one tire nearly bald on the trip up Interstate 65, and with the 9
driver’s side door bowed dramatically out from inside as if from some 10
horrific series of impacts, about which neither Hertz Inc. nor Style’s 11

Accounting staff would be pleased at all — on 2 July at 10:10 AM, 12
nearly two hours late, because it had turned out that any highway 13
speed over 45 mph produced a sound like a great deal of loose change 14
rattling around inside the vehicle’s engine.

15

As of June ’01, The Suffering Channel was in the late stages of ac-16
quisition by AOL Time Warner, which was itself in Wall Street freefall 17
and involved in talks with Eckleschafft-Böd over a putative merger that 18
would in reality constitute E-Böd white knighting AOL TW against 19
hostile takeover from a consortium of interests led by MCI Premium.

20

The Suffering Channel’s specs were thus already in the Eckleschafft-21

Böd pipeline, and it had required less than an hour of email finagling 22
for Laurel Manderley to acquire certain variably relevant portions of 23
them on behalf of her salaryman.

24
f

25

Subj:

Re: Condidential

26

Date:

6/24/01 10:31:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time

27

Content-Type:

text/html; charset = us-ascii

28

From:

k_böttger@ecklbdus.com

29

To:

l_manderle@stylebsgmag.com

30

<!DOCTYPE html PRIV “-// W2C//DTD HTML 3.01 Transitional//EN”> 31

Totalp CT: 6

32

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

33

Descramble-Content Reference: 122-XXX-idvM32XX

<head>
sh 34

<title><title>
reg 35

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<head>

1

Condidential

2

Product: The Suffering Channel

3

Type: Reality/Gaper

4

Desc. of Product: Real life still and moving images of most intense available 5
moments of human anguish

Production Lic.: O Verily Productions, Chicago and Waukegan, Ill 6

FCC Lic. Var. Status: [see Attachments, below]

7

Current Distribution: Regional/ test through Dish (Chic., NYC), Dillard Cable 8

(NE, SE grid), Video Sodalvo (Braz), Webstream at OVP.com\suff.~vd 9

Proposed Distribution: National via TWC Premium Options package (est.

10

2002), TWC and AOL key = SUFFERCH

11

Proposed Carryable Rate: Subsc. = $0.95 monthly stack on TWC Premium 12

Options (= 1.2% increase) w/ prorate 22.5% per subscr. mo. 1-12. Variable 13
projected prorate from Arbitron/Hale subsc Sweeps thereafter (standard) (Note: tracks MCI Premium’s Adult Film Channel rate variance per prorate —

14
see attached AFC spreadsheet from MCI source SS2-B4, below) 15

Bkg on O Verily Prod: CEO & Creative Executive, V. Corliss, 41, b. Gurnee, 16

Ill, BA, Emerson College, MBA & JD, Pepperdine Univ. 3 yrs assoc producer, 17

Dick Clark Prod./NBC, TV ’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes. 3 yrs line producer, 18

Television Program Enterprises, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Runaway 19
with the Rich and Famous. 3 yrs exec prod., O.V.P., Surprise Wedding! I-III, 20

Shocking Moments in Couples Counseling! I-II, 2.5 years exec producer, All 21

Ads All The Time Channel [see Attachments, below]

Current O.V.P. Assets, Including Capital Equipment and Receivables: [See 22

Attached LLC filing and spreadsheets, below] (Note: At counsel re photo and 23
video permissions, releases [see USCC/F §212, vi-xlii in Attachments]: 24

Reudenthal and Voss, P.C., Chicago and NY [see Attachments]

25

Precis of Sample Tape, 2-21-01 [Enclosure, acquisition specs Attached], 26

Contents:

27

(1) Low light security video, mothers of two children, aged 7 and 9, with 28
late stage cancer, Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, 29

Independence, Mo.

30

(2) High light security video, 10 year old male owner (dog), elderly male 31
owner (dog), adult female owner (cats) on Free Euthanasia Day, Maddox Co. Humane Society, Maddox, Ga.

32

(3) High light instructional video, 50 year old male coming abruptly awake 33
on table during abdominal surgery, requires physical restraint. Audio 34 sh
quality very high. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass.

35 reg

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(4a) Handheld video, electroshock interrogation of adolescent male subject, 1

Chambre d’Interrogation, Cloutier Prison, Cameroon (subtitles).

2

(4b) Appended low light video (quality poor), video clip (4a) is shown to 3
subject’s relatives (pres. parents?), one of whom is revealed as real 4
subject of the interrogation (subtitles, facial closeups digitally 5
enhanced).

6

(5) Covert (?) low light video, Catholic Outreach Services support group 7
for families of victims of murder/violent crime, San Luis Obispo, Cal 8

[rights pending, see Attachments].

9

(6) High light legal liability video, stage 4 root canal and crown procedure 10
for 46 year old female allergic to all anesthetics, Off. Dahood Chaterjee 11

DDS, East Stroudsburg, Penn.

12

(7) Unused BBC2 shoulder mount video clip of Necklace Party, Transvaal Civil Province C7, Pretoria, South Afr (audio excellent).

13

(8) Handheld video, middle aged Rwandan (?) couple murdered by group 14
w/ agric. implements (no audio, facial closeups digitally enhanced).

15

(9) Handheld video, shark attack and attempts at resuscitation on 18(?) 16
year old surfer, Stinson Beach, Cal [rights pending, see Attachments].

17

(10) High light videotaped suicide note and handgun suicide of 60 year 18
old patent attorney, Rutherford, NJ.

19

(11) High light legal liability video, intake and assessment interview of 20

28 year old suicidal female, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Newton, Mass.

21

(12) Low light security video, parents identify remains of 13 year old raped/

22
dec. child, Emerson County Coroner’s Office, Brentley, Tx.

23

(13) Webcam digital video, gang rape in dormitory room of 22 year old 24
female designing real time My Life Web Site for college course, Lam-25
buth University, Jackson, Tenn (video quality/FPS poor, high gain audio 26
excellent, some faces digitally obscured [see Attachments]).

27

(14) High light security video, change of dressing for 3rd degree female (?) burn patient, Josephthal Memorial Hospital Burns Unit, Lawrence, Kan.

28

(15) Unused Deutsch 2DF shoulder mount video clip of Cholera Dispensary, 29

Chang Hua Earthquake Zone, PRC.

30

2-01 Arbitron Rate for 1st Loop Serial Broadcast: 6.2 ± .6

31

2-01 Arbitron Rate for 2nd Loop Serial Broadcast: 21.0 ± .6

32

33

. . . and so forth.

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f

1

2

Ellen Bactrian had them out and arranged on Mrs. Anger’s desk when 3
the executive intern came in carrying her bicycle at 7:10. Three of the 4
pieces were upright, one more base intensive and kind of spread out.

5

Each sat on its own blank sheet of typing paper; it was the 20 pound 6
rag bond used for executive letters and memos at Style. The pieces 7
were in no particular order. The two editorial interns were in match-8
ing chairs in the room’s two far corners. Ellen Bactrian had short dark 9
blond hair and an arc of studs along the rim of one ear that every so of-10
ten caught the light just right and flashed. On the wall near the office 11
door, a large photorealist portrait depicted Mrs. Anger in a glove tight 12

Saint Laurent suit and what almost looked like the kind of Capezio 13
pumps professional dancers wore.

14

The executive intern, who had been student body president at both 15

Choate and Vassar, always wore form fitting bike shorts for the com-16
mute and then changed in the executive lounge. It was another sign of 17
her overall favor and influence that Mrs. Anger let her store the bicy-18
cle in her office, which locked. The executive intern’s arrival that 19
morning was ever so slightly late, because the SE2 issue had finally 20
closed the previous day. Mrs. Anger herself rarely rolled in much be-21
fore 9:30.

22

The executive intern stood there still holding her bike, which 23
weighed only eight and a half pounds, and staring at the pieces while 24
the smile she’d come in with emptied out. She was acknowledged as 25
more or less defining the standard of excellence for interns at Style. At 26
least 5'10" in flats, with long auburn tresses that shone in even the 27
meanest fluorescence, she managed to seem at once worldly and ethe-28
real, and moved through the corridors and semiattached cubicles of 29
the magazine like a living refutation of everything Marx ever stood for.

30

‘We decided you needed to see them,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘before 31
anybody said anything to anybody one way or the other.’

32

‘Great glittering God.’ The executive intern’s front teeth emerged 33
and pressed lightly on her lower lip. She had unconsciously assumed 34 sh

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the same position that Skip Atwater and Ellen Bactrian and many of 2
the patrons of the soybean festivals and fair had — standing several 3
feet away, her posture somewhat S shaped because of the twin im-4
pulses to approach and recoil. She had on a brain shaped helmet and a 5

Vassar sweatshirt with the collar and cuffs removed and the white 6
flocking of the interior allowed to show. Her athletic shoes had special 7
attachments that evidently clipped to the racing bike’s pedals. The 8
shadow she cast back against the wall was complex and distended.

9

‘Are they something?’ Laurel Manderley said quietly. She and Ellen 10

Bactrian had brought in some additional lamps from the conference 11
room next door because something about the overhead lights hit the 12
fixative wrong and produced glare. Each of the pieces was fully and 13
evenly lit. The executive office area was much quieter and more digni-14
fied than the sixteenth floor, but also a bit cool and stiff, Laurel 15
thought.

16

The executive intern still held the bicycle. ‘You didn’t actually . . . ?’

17

‘They’re sort of laminated. Don’t worry.’ Laurel Manderley had ap-18
plied the additional fixative herself per instructions relayed through 19

Skip Atwater, who was even then boarding a commuter flight to 20

Muncie out of Midway. Laurel Manderley, who had also handled the 21
whole rental car exchange unpleasantness, knew his timetable to the 22
minute. She had declined the optional thing with the Saran, though.

23

She felt like she might literally faint at any time.

24

‘So was I jerking you off, or what?’ Ellen Bactrian asked the execu-25
tive intern.

26

Laurel Manderley made a little ta da gesture: ‘It’s the miraculous poo.’

27

One of her bicycle’s wheels still idly turned, but the executive intern’s 28
eyes had not once moved. She said: ‘Something isn’t even the word.’

29
f

30

31

Established fact: Almost no adult remembers the details or psychic 32
fallout of her own toilet training. By the time one might have cause to 33
want to know, it has been so long that you have to try asking your par-sh 34
ents — which rarely works, because most parents will deny not only reg 35
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with your toilet training. Such denials are basic psychological protec-1
tion, since parenting can sometimes be a nasty business. All these phe-2
nomena have been exhaustively researched and documented.

3

R. Vaughn Corliss’s most tightly held secret vision or dream, dating 4
from when he was just beginning to detach from Leach and TPE and 5
to conceive of reinventing himself as a force in high concept cable: a 6
channel devoted wholly to images of celebrities shitting. Reese With-7
erspoon shitting. Juliette Lewis shitting. Michael Jordan shitting.

8

Longtime House Minority Whip Dick Gephardt shitting. Pamela 9

Anderson shitting. George F. Will, with his bow tie and pruny mouth, 10
shitting. Former PGA legend Hale Irwin shitting. Stones bassist Ron 11

Wood shitting. Pope John Paul shitting as special attendants hold his 12
robes’ hems up off the floor. Leonard Maltin, Annette Bening, 13

Michael Flatley, either or both of the Olsen twins, shitting. And so on.

14

Helen Hunt. The Price Is Right’s Bob Barker. Tom Cruise. Jane Pauley.

15

Talia Shire. Yasser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, Michael J. Fox. Former 16

HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros. The idea of real time footage of 17

Martha Stewart perched shitting amid the soaps and sachets and color 18
coordinated linens of her Connecticut estate’s master bathroom was so 19
powerful that Corliss rarely allowed himself to imagine it. It was not a 20
soporific conceit. It was also, obviously, private. Tom Clancy, Margaret 21

Atwood, bell hooks. Dr. James Dobson. Beleaguered IL Governor 22

George Ryan. Peter Jennings. Oprah. He told no one of this dream.

23

Nor of his corollary vision of the images beamed into space, digitally 24
sequenced for maximum range and coherence, and of advanced alien 25
species studying this footage in order to learn almost everything nec-26
essary about planet earth circa 2001.

27

He wasn’t a madman; it could never fly. Still, though. There was 28

Reality TV, which Corliss himself had helped lay the ground floor of, 29
and the nascent trend toward absorbing celebrities into the matrix of 30
violation and exposure that was Reality: celebrity bloopers, celebrities 31
showing you around their homes, celebrity boxing, celebrity political 32
colloquy, celebrity blind dating, celebrity couples counseling. Even serv-33
ing time at Leach’s TPE, Corliss could see that the logic of such pro-34 sh
gramming was airtight and led inexorably to the ultimate exposures: 35 reg

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celebrity major surgical procedures, celebrity death, celebrity autopsy.

2

It only seemed absurd from outside the logic. How far along the final 3
arc would Slo Mo High Def Full Sound Celebrity Defecation be?

4

How soon before the idea ceased being too loony to mention aloud, to 5
float as a balloon before the laughing heads of Development and Le-6
gal? Not yet, but not never. They’d laughed at Murdoch in Perth, once, 7

Corliss knew.

8

Laurel Manderley was the youngest of four children, and her toilet 9
training, which commenced around 30 months, had been casual and 10
ad hoc and basically no big deal. The Atwater brothers’ own had been 11
early, brutal, and immensely effective — it was actually during toilet 12
training that the elder twin had first learned to pump his left fist in self 13
exhortation.

14

Little Roland Corliss, whose nanny was an exponent of a small and 15
unapologetically radical splinter of the Waldorf educational move-16
ment, had experienced no formal toilet training at all, but rather just 17
the abrupt unexplained withdrawal of all diapers at age four. This 18
was the same age at which he had entered Holy Calvary Lutheran 19

Preschool, where unambiguous social consequences motivated him to 20
learn almost immediately what toilets were for and how to use them, 21
rather like the child who is rowed way out and then taught to swim the 22
old fashioned way.

23
f

24

25

BSG is magazine industry shorthand for the niche comprising People, 26

Us, In Style, In Touch, Style, and Entertainment Weekly. (For demo-27
graphic reasons, Teen People is not usually included among the BSGs.) 28

The abbreviation stands for big soft glossy, with soft in turn meaning 29
the very most demotic kind of human interest.

30

As of July 2001, three of the six major BSGs are owned by 31

Eckleschafft-Böd Medien A.G., a German conglomerate that con-32
trols nearly 40 percent of all US trade publishing.

33

Like the rest of the mainstream magazine industry, each of the BSG
sh 34
weeklies subscribes to an online service that compiles and organizes all reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 2 9 7
of which submissions roughly 8 percent ever actually run in the major 1
news dailies. A select company of editorial interns, known sometimes 2
as shades because of the special anodized goggles required by OSHA 3
for intensive screen time, is tasked to peruse this service.

4

Skip Atwater, who was one of the rare and old school BSG journal-5
ists who actually pitched pieces as well as receiving assignments, was 6
also one of the few paid staffers at Style who bothered to review the 7
online service for himself. As a practical matter, he did so only when 8
he was not in the field, and then usually at night, after his dogs had 9
again gone to sleep, sitting up in his Ball State Cardinals cap with a 10
glass of ale and operating his home desktop according to instructions 11
which Laurel Manderley’s predecessor had configured as a special 12
template that fit along the top of the unit’s keyboard. An AP stringer 13
out of Indianapolis, filing from the Franklin County Fair on what was 14
alleged to be the second largest Monte Cristo sandwich ever assem-15
bled, had included a curio about displays of extremely intricate and 16
high class figurines made out of what the stringer had spelled fasces.

17

The objets d’art themselves were not described — they had been ar-18
rayed in glass cases that were difficult to get near because of the crowds 19
around them, and people’s hands and exhalations had apparently 20
smeared the glass so badly that even when you did finally shoulder 21
your way up close the interiors were half obscured. Later, Skip Atwater 22
would learn that these slanted glass cabinets were acquired from the 23
tax sale of a failed delicatessen in Greensburg IN, which for decades 24
had had a small and anomalous Hasidic community.

25

It was a word padding aside in a throwaway item unflagged by any 26
of Style’ s shades, and from his own native experience Atwater was dis-27
posed to assume that the things were probably crude little Elvises or 28

Earnhardts made of livestock waste . . . except the display banner’s al-29
legedly quoted Hands Free Art Crafts caught his eye. The phrase ap-30
peared to make no sense unless automation were involved, which, as 31
applied to livestock waste, would be curious indeed. Curiosity, of 32
course, being more or less Skip Atwater’s oeuvre with regard to what 33
in the world. Not curiosity as in tabloid or freakshow, or rather all 34 sh
right sometimes borderline freakshow but with an upbeat thrust. The 35 reg

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content and tone of all BSGs were dictated by market research and 2
codified down to the smallest detail: celebrity profiles, entertainment 3
news, hot trends, and human interest, with human interest represent-4
ing a gamut in which the occasional freakshow item had a niche —

5
but the rhetoric was tricky. BSGs were at pains to distinguish them-6
selves from the tabloids, whose target market was wholly different.

7

Style’ s witw items were people centered and always had to be both 8
credible and uplifting, or latterly there at least had to be ancillary ele-9
ments that were uplifting and got thumped hard.

10

Atwater could thump with the best. And he was old school and en-11
ergetic: he ran down two or three possible witw stories for every one 12
that got written, and pitched things, and could rewrite other men’s 13
copy if asked to. The politics of rewrites could get sticky, and interns 14
often had to mediate between the salarymen involved, but Atwater 15
was known around Style’ s editorial offices as someone who could both 16
rewrite and get rewritten without being an asshole about it. At root, 17
his reputation with staffers and interns alike was based in this: his con-18
sistent failure to be an asshole. Which could, of course, be a double 19
edged sword. He was seen as having roughly the self esteem of a 20
prawn. Some at Style found him fussy or pretentious. Others ques-21
tioned his spontaneity. Sometimes the phrase queer duck was used.

22

There was the whole awkward issue of his monotone wardrobe. The 23
fact that he actually carried pictures of his dogs in his wallet was either 24
endearing or creepy, depending whom you asked. A few of the sharper 25
interns intuited that he’d had to overcome a great deal in himself in or-26
der to get this far.

27

He knew just what he was: a professional soft news journalist. We 28
all make our adjustments, hence the term well adjusted. A babyfaced 29
bantam with ears about which he’d been savagely teased as a boy —

30

Jughead, Spock, Little Pitcher. A polished, shallow, earnest, productive, 31
consummate corporate pro. Over the past three years, Skip Atwater had 32
turned in some 70 separate pieces to Style, of which almost 50 saw print 33
and a handful of others ran under rewriters’ names. A volunteer fire sh 34
company in suburban Tulsa where you had to be a grandmother to join.

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tell their amazing stories. Drinking and boating: The other DUI. Just 1
who really was Slim Whitman. This Grass Ain’t Blue — Kentucky’s 2
other cash crop. He Delivers — 81 year old obstetrician welcomes the 3
grandchild of his own first patient. Former Condit intern speaks out.

4

Today’s forest ranger: He doesn’t just sit in a tower. Holy Rollers —

5

Inline skateathon saves church from default. Eczema: The silent epi-6
demic. Rock ’n’ Roll High School — Which future pop stars made the 7
grade? Nevada bikers rev up the fight against myasthenia gravis. Head 8
of the Parade — From Macy’s to the Tournament of Roses, this float 9
designer has done them all. The All Ads All The Time cable channel.

10

Rock of Ages — These geologists celebrate the millennium in a whole 11
new way. Sometimes he felt that if not for his schipperkes’ love he 12
would simply blow away and dissipate like milkweed. The women who 13
didn’t get picked for Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire: Where did 14
they come from, to what do they return. Leapin’ Lizards — The Gulf 15

Coast’s new alligator plague. One Lucky Bunch of Cats — A termi-16
nally ill Lotto winner’s astounding bequest. Those new home cottage 17
cheese makers: Marvel or ripoff ? Be(-Happy-)Atitudes — This Or-18
ange County pastor claims Christ was no sourpuss. Dramamine and 19

NASA: The untold story. Secret documents reveal Wallis Simpson 20
cheated on Edward VIII. A Whole Lotta Dough — Delaware teen 21
sells $40,000 worth of Girl Scout cookies . . . and isn’t finished yet!

22

For these former agoraphobics, home is not where the heart is. Con-23
tra: The thinking person’s square dance.

24

At the same time, it was acknowledged that Atwater’s best had 25
sometimes been those pieces he ran down himself and pitched, items 26
that often pushed the BSG envelope. For 7 March ’99, Atwater had 27
submitted the longest witw piece ever done for Style, on the case of a 28

U. Maryland professor murdered in his apartment where the only wit-29
ness was the man’s African gray parrot, and all the parrot would repeat 30
was ‘Oh God, no, please no’ and then gruesome noises, and on the vet-31
erinary hypnotist that the authorities had had working with the parrot 32
to see what more they could get out of it. The UBA here had been the 33
hypnotist and her bio and beliefs about animal consciousness, the cen-34 sh
tral tensions being was she just a New Age loon along the lines of 35 reg

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Beverly Hills pet therapists or was there really something to it, and if 2
the parrot was hypnotizable as advertised and sang then what would 3
be its evidentiary status in court.

4

Very early every morning of childhood, Mrs. Atwater’s way of wak-5
ing her two boys up was to stand between their beds and clap her 6
hands loudly together, not stopping until their feet actually touched 7
the bedroom floor, which now floated in the depths of Virgil Atwater’s 8
memory as a kind of sardonic ovation. Hopping Mad — This triple 9
amputee isn’t taking health care costs lying down. The meth lab next 10
door! Mrs. Gladys Hine, the voice behind over 1,500 automated 11
phone menus. The Dish — This Washington D.C. caterer has seen 12
it all. Computer solitaire: The last addiction? No Sweet Talkin’ —

13

Blue M&Ms have these consumers up in arms. Dallas commuter’s 14
airbag nightmare. Menopause and herbs: Exciting new findings. Fat 15

Chance — Lottery cheaters and the heavyweight squad that busts 16
them. Seance secrets of online medium Duwayne Evans. Ice sculpture: 17

How do they do that?

18

Atwater’s best regarded piece ever so far, 3 July ’00: A little girl in 19

Upland CA had been born with an unpronounceable neurological 20
condition whereby she could not form facial expressions, normal and 21
healthy in every way with blond pigtails and a corgi named Skipper 22
except her face was a flat staring granite mask, and the parents were 23
starting a foundation for the incredibly over 5,000 other people world-24
wide who couldn’t form normal facial expressions, and Atwater had 25
run down, pitched, and landed 2,500 words for a piece only half of 26
which was back matter, plus another two columns’ worth of multiple 27
photos of the girl reclined expressionless in her mother’s lap, stony and 28
staring under raised arms on a roller coaster, and so forth. Atwater had 29
finally gotten the go ahead from the bimanual associate editor on the 30

Suffering Channel piece because he’d done the ’99 witw fluffer on the 31

All Ads All The Time Channel, which was also O Verily, and could 32
truthfully posit a rapport with R. Vaughn Corliss, whose eccentric 33
recluse persona formed a neat human hook — although the associate sh 34
editor had said that where Atwater was ever going to find the UBA in reg 35

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the TSC story was anyone’s guess and would stretch Atwater’s skill set 1
to the limit.

2

3

5.

4

5

The first of the dreams Laurel Manderley found so disturbing had oc-6
curred the same night that the digital photos of Brint Moltke’s work 7
had appeared on the floor below the fax and she had felt the queer 8
twin impulses both to bend and get them and to run as fast as she 9
could from the cubicle complex. An ominous vatic feeling had per-10
sisted throughout the rest of the evening, which was doubly unsettling 11
to Laurel Manderley, because she normally believed about as much in 12
intuition and the uncanny as US Vice President Dick Cheney did.

13

She lay late at night in the loft, her bunkmate encased in Kiehl’s 14
cream beneath her. The dream involved a small house that she some-15
how knew was the one with the fractional address that belonged to the 16
lady and her husband in Skip Atwater’s miraculous poo story. They 17
were all in there, in the like living room or den, sitting there and either 18
not doing anything or not doing anything Laurel Manderley could 19
identify. The creepiness of the dream was akin to the fear she’d some-20
times felt in her maternal grandparents’ summer home in Lyford Cay, 21
which had certain closet doors that opened by themselves whenever 22

Laurel was in the room. It wasn’t clear what Mr. and Mrs. Moltke 23
looked like, or wore, or what they were saying, and at one point there 24
was a dog standing in the middle of the room but its breed and even 25
color were unclear. There was nothing overtly surreal or menacing in 26
the scene. It seemed more like something generic or vague or tenta-27
tive, like an abstract or outline. The only specifically strange thing was 28
that the house had two front doors, even though one of them wasn’t in 29
the front but it was still a front door. But this fact could not begin to 30
account for the overwhelming sense of dread Laurel Manderley felt, 31
sitting there. There was a premonition of not just danger but evil.

32

There was a creeping, ambient evil present, except even though pres-33
ent it was not in the room. Like the second front door, it was somehow 34 sh

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both there and not. She couldn’t wait to get out, she had to get out.

2

But when she stood up with the excuse of asking to use the bathroom, 3
even in the midst of asking she couldn’t stand the feeling of evil and 4
began running for the door in stocking feet in order to get out, but it 5
was not the front door she ran for, it was the other door, even though 6
she didn’t know where it was, except she must know because there it 7
was, with a decorative and terribly detailed metal scarab over the knob, 8
and whatever the overwhelming evil was was right behind it, the door, 9
but for some reason even as she’s overcome with fear she’s also reach-10
ing for the doorknob, she’s going to open it, she can see herself start-11
ing to open it — and that’s when she wakes. And then almost the 12
totally exact same thing happens the next night, and she’s afraid now 13
that if she has it again then the next time she’ll actually open the front 14
door that isn’t in front . . . and her fear of this possibility is the only 15
thing she can put her finger on in trying to describe the dream to 16

Siobhan and Tara on the train ride home Tuesday night, but there’s no 17
way to convey just why the two front door thing is so terrifying, since 18
she herself can’t even rationally explain it.

19
f

20

21

The Moltkes were childless, but their home’s bathroom lay off a 22
narrow hallway whose east wall was hung with framed photos of Brint 23
and Amber’s friends’ and relatives’ children, as well as certain shots of 24
the Moltkes themselves as youngsters. The presence in this hallway of 25

Atwater, a freelance photographer who wore a Hawaiian shirt and 26
smelled strongly of hair cream, and a Richmond IN internist whom 27

Ellen Bactrian had personally found and engaged had already dis-28
arranged some of the photos, which now hung at haphazard angles 29
and revealed partial cracks and an odd set of bulges in the wall’s sur-30
face. There was one quite extraordinary shot of Amber at what had to 31
have been her wedding’s reception, radiant in white brocade and hold-32
ing the cake’s tiered platform in one hand while with the other she 33
brought the cutter to bear. And what at first glance had looked like sh 34
someone else was a Little League photo of Moltke himself, in uniform reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 3 0 3
and holding an aluminum bat, the artist perhaps nine or ten and his 1
batting helmet far too large. And so on.

2

Atwater’s new rental car, a pointedly budget Kia that even he felt 3
cramped in, sat in the Moltke’s driveway with the MD’s Lincoln 4

Brougham just behind it. Moltke’s company van was parked in the du-5
plex’s other driveway, which bespoke some kind of possible arrange-6
ment with the other side’s occupant that Atwater, who felt more than 7
a little battered and conflicted and ill at ease in Mrs. Moltke’s pres-8
ence, had not yet thought to inquire about. The artist’s wife had ob-9
jected strenuously to a procedure that she said both she and her 10
husband found distasteful and degrading, and was now in her sewing 11
room off the kitchen, whence the occasional impact of her foot on an 12
old machine’s treadle shook the hallway and caused the freelance pho-13
tographer to have to readjust his light stands several different times.

14

The internist appeared to stand frozen in the gesture of a man look-15
ing at his watch. The photographer, for whom Atwater had had to wait 16
over three hours in the Delaware County Airport, sat Indian style in a 17
litter of equipment, picking at the carpet’s nap like a doleful child. A 18
large and very precise French curl of hair was plastered to the man’s fore-19
head with Brylcreem, whose scent was another of Skip Atwater’s child-20
hood associations, and he knew it was the heat of the arc lights that 21
made the hair cream smell so strong. The journalist’s left knee now 22
ached no matter which way he distributed his weight. Every so often he 23
pumped his fist at his side, but it was in a tentative and uninspired way.

24

In the wake of a slow moving front, the area’s air was clear and dry 25
and the sky a great cobalt expanse and Tuesday’s overall weather both 26
hot and almost autumnally crisp.

27

The Moltkes’ home’s bathroom door, a fiberboard model with inte-28
rior hinges, was shut and locked. From its other side issued the sound 29
of the sink and tub’s faucets intermixed with snatches of conservative 30
talk radio. Her husband was an intensely private and skittish bath-31
room individual, Mrs. Moltke had explained to the MD and photog-32
rapher, due without doubt to certain abuses he’d suffered as a tiny 33
child. Negotiations over the terms of authentication had taken place in 34 sh

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1
the home’s kitchen, and she had laid all this out with Mr. Moltke sit-2
ting right there beside her — Atwater had watched the man’s hands 3
instead of his face while Amber declaimed about her husband’s bath-4
room habits and childhood trauma. Today she wore a great faded 5
denim smock thing and seemed to loom in the periphery of Atwater’s 6
sight no matter where he looked, rather like the sky when one’s outside.

7

At one point in the negotiations, Atwater had needed to use the 8
bathroom and had gone in there and seen it. He really had had to go; 9
it had not been a pretense. The Moltkes’ toilet was in a small de facto 10
alcove formed by the sink’s counter and the wall that comprised the 11
door jamb. The room smelled exquisitely of mildew. He could see that 12
the wall behind the sink and toilet was part of the same east load 13
bearer that ran along the hallway and sitting room and conjoined the 14
duplex’s other side. Atwater preferred a bathroom whose facilities were 15
a bit farther from the door, for privacy’s sake, but he could see that the 16
only way to accomplish this here would have been to place the shower 17
unit where the toilet now was, which given this shower’s unusual size 18
would be impossible. It was difficult to imagine Amber Moltke backing 19
herself into this slender recess and settling carefully on the white oval 20
seat to eliminate. Since the east wall also held the interior plumbing 21
for all three of the room’s fixtures, it stood to reason that the bathroom 22
on the other side of the duplex abutted this one, and that its own 23
plumbing also lay within the wall. For a moment, nothing but an in-24
grained sense of propriety kept Atwater from trying to press his ear to 25
the wall next to the medicine cabinet to see whether he could hear 26
anything. Nor would he ever have allowed himself to open the 27

Moltkes’ medicine cabinet, or to root in any serious way through the 28
woodgrain shelves above the towel rack.

29

The toilet itself was a generic American Standard, its white slightly 30
brighter than the room’s walls and tile. The only noteworthy details 31
were a large crack of some sort on the unpadded seat’s left side and a 32
rather sluggish flushing action. The toilet and area of floor around it 33
appeared very clean. Atwater was also the sort of person who always sh 34
made sure to put the seat back down when he was finished.

reg 35

Evidently, Ellen Bactrian’s brain trust had decided against present-lg 36

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O b l i v i o n 3 0 5
ing a short list of specific works or types of pieces they wanted the 1
artist to choose from. The initial pitch that Laurel Manderley had 2
been directed to instruct Atwater to make was that both the MD and 3
photographer would be set up in there with Brint Moltke while he 4
produced whatever piece he felt moved on this day to create. As pre-5
dicted, Amber declared this totally unacceptable. The proffered com-6
promise, then, was the presence of just the MD (which in fact was all 7
they’d wanted in the first place, Style having no possible use for in me-8
dias photos). Mrs. Moltke, however, had nixed this as well — Brint 9
had never produced an artwork with anyone else in the room. He was, 10
she iterated once more, an incorrigibly private bathroom person.

11

During the parts of her presentation he’d already heard, the journal-12
ist noted in Gregg shorthand that the home’s kitchen was carpeted 13
and deployed a green and burgundy color scheme in its walls, counters, 14
and cabinets, that Mrs. Amber Moltke must almost certainly have had 15
some type of school or community theater experience, and that the 16
broad plastic cup from which the artist had occasionally sipped coffee 17
was from the top of a Thermos unit that was not itself in evidence. Of 18
these observations, only the second had any bearing on the piece that 19
would eventually run in Style magazine’s final issue.

20

What had especially impressed Ellen Bactrian was Laurel Mander-21
ley’s original suggestion that Skip pick up a portable fax machine at 22
some Circuit City or Wal Mart on the way down from Muncie with 23
the photographer — whose equipment had required the subcompact’s 24
seats to be moved forward as far as they would go, and who not only 25
smoked in the nonsmoking rental but had this thing where he then 26
fieldstripped each cigarette butt and put the remains carefully in the 27
pocket of his Hawaiian shirt — and that the unit be hooked up to the 28

Moltkes’ kitchen phone, which had a clip outlet and could be switched 29
back and forth from phone to fax with no problem. This allowed the 30

MD, whose negotiated station was finally fixed at just outside the 31
bathroom door, to receive the piece fresh (‘hot off the griddle’ had 32
been the photographer’s phrase, which had caused the circle of 33

Moltke’s digital mudra to quiver and distend for just a moment), to 34 sh
perform his immediate field tests, and to fax the findings directly to 35 reg

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D a v i d F o s t e r Wa l l a c e

1

Laurel Manderley, signed and affixed with the same medical autho-2
rization number required by certain prescriptions.

3

‘You understand that Style is going to have to have some corrobora-4
tion,’ Atwater had said. This was at the height of the ersatz negotia-5
tions in the Moltkes’ kitchen. He chose not to remind Amber that this 6
entire issue had already been hashed out in the enmired Cavalier two 7
days prior. ‘It’s not a matter of whether the magazine trusts you or not.

8

It’s that some readers are obviously going to be skeptical. Style cannot 9
afford to look overcredulous or like a dupe to even a fraction of its 10
readers.’ He did not, in the kitchen, refer to the BSGs’ concern with 11
distinguishing themselves from tabloids, though he did say: ‘They 12
can’t afford to let this look like a tabloid story.’

13

Both Amber Moltke and the photographer had been eating pieces 14
of a national brand coffee cake that could evidently be heated in the 15
microwave without becoming runny or damp. Her forkwork was deft 16
and delicate and her face as broad across as two of Skip’s own placed 17
somehow side by side.

18

‘Maybe we should just go on and let some tabloid do it, then,’ she 19
had replied coolly.

20

Atwater said: ‘Well, should you decide to do that, then yes, credibil-21
ity ceases to be an issue. The story gets inserted between Delta Burke’s 22
all fruit diet and reports of Elvis’s profile in a photo of Neptune. But 23
no other outlet picks up the story or follows it up. Tabloid pieces don’t 24
enter the mainstream.’ He said: ‘It’s a delicate balance of privacy and 25
exposure for you and Brint, I’m aware. You’ll obviously have to make 26
your own decision.’

27

Later, waiting in the narrow and redolent hallway, Atwater noted in 28

Gregg that at some point he and Amber had ceased even pretending 29
to include the artist in the kitchen’s whole back and forth charade.

30

And that the way his damaged knee really felt was this: ignominious.

31
f

32

33

‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was standing next to the sh 34
trayless fax machine, and the editorial intern who had regaled the pre-reg 35
lg 36

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O b l i v i o n 3 0 7
vious day’s working lunch with the intracunnilingual flatus vignette 1
was seated at the other witw salaryman’s console a few feet away.

2

Today the editorial intern — whose first name also happened to be 3

Laurel, and who was a particularly close friend and protégé of Ellen 4

Bactrian — wore a Gaultier skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck of very 5
soft looking ash gray cashmere.

6

‘Your own saliva,’ said Laurel Manderley. ‘You’re swallowing it all 7
the time. Is it disgusting to you? No. But now imagine gradually filling 8
up a juice glass or something with your own saliva, and then drinking 9
it all down.’

10

‘That really is disgusting,’ the editorial intern admitted.

11

‘But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s 12
outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes 13
gross.’

14

‘Are you suggesting it’s somehow the same thing with poo?’

15

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think with poo, it’s more like as long 16
as it’s inside us we don’t think about it. In a way, poo only becomes poo 17
when it’s excreted. Until then, it’s more like a part of you, like your in-18
ner organs.’

19

‘It’s maybe the same way we don’t think about our organs, our livers 20
and intestines. They’re inside all of us —’

21

‘They are us. Who can live without intestines?’

22

‘But we still don’t want to see them. If we see them, they’re auto-23
matically disgusting.’

24

Laurel Manderley kept touching at the side of her nose, which felt 25
naked and somewhat creepily smooth. She also had the kind of sick 26
headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her 27
eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature 28
connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even 29
woozier. She said: ‘But partly we don’t like seeing them because if 30
they’re visible, that means there’s something wrong, there’s a hole or 31
some kind of damage.’

32

‘But we also don’t even want to think about them,’ the other Laurel 33
said. ‘Who sits there and goes, Now the salad I ate an hour ago is 34 sh

35 reg

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1
entering my intestines, now my intestines are pulsing and squeezing 2
and moving the material along?’

3

‘Our hearts pulse and squeeze, and we don’t mind thinking about 4
our heart.’

5

‘But we don’t want to see it. We don’t even want to see our blood.

6

We faint dead away.’

7

‘Not menstrual blood, though.’

8

‘True. I was thinking more of like a blood test, seeing the blood in 9
the tube. Or getting a cut and seeing the blood come out.’

10

‘Menstrual blood is disgusting, but it doesn’t make you lightheaded,’

11

Laurel Manderley said almost to herself, her large forehead crinkled 12
with thought. Her hands felt as though they were shaking even 13
though she knew no one else could see it.

14

‘Maybe menstrual blood is ultimately more like poo. It’s a waste 15
thing, and disgusting, but it’s not wrong that it’s all of a sudden out-16
side of you and visible, because the whole point is that it’s supposed to 17
get out, it’s something you want to get rid of.’

18

‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Your skin isn’t disgusting to 19
you, right?’

20

‘Sometimes my skin’s pretty disgusting.’

21

‘That’s not what I mean.’

22

The other editorial intern laughed. ‘I know. I was just kidding.’

23

‘Skin’s outside of us,’ Laurel Manderley continued. ‘We see it all the 24
time and there’s no problem. It’s even aesthetic sometimes, as in so and 25
so’s got beautiful skin. But now imagine, say, a foot square section of 26
human skin, just sitting there on a table.’

27

‘Eww.’

28

‘Suddenly it becomes disgusting. What’s that about?’

29

The editorial intern recrossed her legs. The ankles above her sling-30
back Jimmy Choos were maybe ever so slightly on the thick side, but 31
she had on the sort of incredibly fine and lovely silk hose that you’re 32
lucky to be able to wear even once without totally ruining them. She 33
said: ‘Maybe again because it implies some kind of injury or violence.’

sh 34

The fax’s incoming light still had not lit. ‘It seems more like the skin reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 3 0 9
tril again. ‘You decontextualize it and take it off the human body and 1
suddenly it’s disgusting.’

2

‘I don’t even like thinking about it, to be honest.’

3

4
f

5

‘I’m just telling you I don’t like it.’

6

‘Between you and I, I’d say I’m starting to agree. But it’s out of our 7
hands now, as they say.’

8

‘You’re saying you’d maybe prefer it if I hadn’t gone to Miss Flick 9
with them,’ Laurel Manderley said on the telephone. It was late Tues-10
day afternoon. At certain times, she and Atwater used the name Miss 11

Flick as a private code term for Ellen Bactrian.

12

‘There was no other way to pitch it, I know. I know that,’ Skip 13

Atwater responded. ‘Whatever’s to blame is not that. You did what I 14
think I would have asked you to do myself if I’d had my wits about 15
me.’ Laurel Manderley could hear the whispery whisk of his waist 16
level fist. He said: ‘Whatever culpability is mine,’ which did not make 17
that much sense to her. ‘Somewhere some core part of it got past me 18
on this one, I think.’

19

The Style journalist had been seated on the bed’s edge on a spread 20
out towel, checking the status of his injured knee. In the privacy of 21
his motel room, Atwater was sans blazer and the knot of his necktie 22
was loosened. The room’s television was on, but it was tuned to the 23

Spectravision base channel where the same fragment of song played 24
over and over and the recorded voice of someone who was not Mrs.

25

Gladys Hine welcomed you to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn and 26
invited you to press Menu in order to see options for movies, games, 27
and a wide variety of in room entertainment, over and over; and 28

Atwater had evidently misplaced the remote control (which in Holiday 29

Inns tends to be very small) required for changing the channel or at 30
the very least muting it. The left leg of his slacks was rolled neatly up 31
to a point above the knee, every second fold reversed to prevent creas-32
ing. The television was a nineteen inch Symphonic on a swiveling base 33
that was attached to the blondwood dresser unit facing the bed. It was 34 sh
the same second floor room he had checked into on Sunday — Laurel 35 reg

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Manderley had somehow gotten Accounting to book the room straight 2
through even though Atwater had spent the previous night in a 3

Courtyard by Marriott on Chicago’s near north side, for which motel 4
the freelance photographer was even now bound, at double his normal 5
daily rate, in preparation for tomorrow’s combined coverage spectacle.

6

On the wall above the room’s television was a large framed print of 7
someone’s idea of a circus clown’s face and head constructed wholly 8
out of vegetables. The eyes were olives and the lips peppers and the 9
cheeks’ spots of color small tomatoes, for example. Repeatedly, on both 10

Sunday and today, Atwater had imagined some occupant of the room 11
suffering a stroke or incapacitating fall and having to lie on the floor 12
looking up at the painting and listening to the base channel’s nine sec-13
ond message over and over, unable to move or cry out or look away. In 14
some respects, Atwater’s various tics and habitual gestures were de-15
signed to physicalize his consciousness and to keep him from morbid 16
abstractions like this — he wasn’t going to have a stroke, he wouldn’t 17
have to look at the painting or listen to the idiot tune over and over 18
until a maid came in the next morning and found him.

19

‘Because that’s the only reason. I thought you knew she’d sent them.’

20

‘And if I’d called in on time as I should have, we’d both have known 21
and there would have been no chance of misunderstanding.’

22

‘That’s nice, but it’s not really my point,’ Laurel Manderley said.

23

She was seated at Atwater’s console, absently snapping and unsnap-24
ping a calfskin barrette. As was SOP with Skip and his interns, this 25
telephone conversation was neither rapid nor clipped. It was shortly 26
before 3:30 and 4:30 respectively, since Indiana does not adhere to the 27

DST convention. Laurel Manderley would later tell Skip that she had 28
been so tired and unwell on Tuesday that she’d felt almost translucent, 29
and plus was upset that she would have to come in on the Fourth, to-30
morrow, in order to mediate between Atwater and Ellen Bactrian re 31
the so called artist’s appearance on The Suffering Channel’s inaugural 32
tableau vivant thing, all of which had been literally thrown together in 33
hours. It was not the way either of them normally worked.

sh 34

Nor had Style ever before sought to conjoin two different pieces in reg 35
process. It was this that signified to Skip Atwater that either Mrs.

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Anger or one of her apparatchiks had taken a direct hand. That he felt 1
no discernible trace of either vindication or resentment about this was 2
perhaps to his credit. What he did feel, suddenly and emphatically in 3
the midst of the call, was that he might well be working for Laurel 4

Manderley someday, that it would be she to whom he pitched pieces 5
and pleaded for additional column inches.

6

For Laurel Manderley’s own part, what she later realized she had 7
been trying to do in the Tuesday afternoon telephone confab was 8
to communicate her unease about the miraculous poo story without 9
referring to her dream of spatial distortion and creeping evil in the 10

Moltke couple’s home. In the professional world, one does not invoke 11
dreams in order to express reservations about an ongoing project. It 12
just doesn’t happen.

13

Skip Atwater said: ‘Well, she did have my card. I gave her my card, 14
of course. But not our Fed Ex number. You know I’d never do that.’

15

‘But think — they got here Monday morning. Yesterday was 16

Monday.’

17

‘She spared no expense.’

18

‘Skip,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Fed Ex isn’t open on Sunday.’

19

The whisking sound stopped. ‘Shit,’ Atwater said.

20

‘And I didn’t even call them for the initial interview until almost 21

Saturday night.’

22

‘And Fed Ex isn’t apt to be open Saturday night, either.’

23

‘So the whole thing is just very creepy. So maybe you need to ask 24

Mrs. Moltke what’s going on.’

25

‘You’re saying she must have sent the pieces before you’d even 26
called.’ Atwater was not processing verbal information at his usual 27
rate. One thing he was sure of was that he now had absolutely zero in-28
tention of telling Laurel Manderley about the potentially unethical 29
fraternization in the Cavalier, which was also why he could say noth-30
ing to her of the whole knee issue.

31

A person who tended to have very little conscious recall of his own 32
dreams, Atwater today could remember only the previous two nights’

33
sensation of being somehow immersed in another human being, of 34 sh
having that person surround him like water or air. It did not exactly 35 reg

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take an advanced clinical degree to interpret this dream. At most, Skip 2

Atwater’s mother had been only three fifths to two thirds the size 3
of Amber Moltke, although if you considered Mrs. Atwater’s size as it 4
would appear to a small child, much of the disparity then vanished.

5

After the telephone conversation, seated there on the bed’s protec-6
tive towel, one of the other things that kept popping unbidden into 7

Atwater’s mind was the peculiar little unconscious signifier that Brint 8

Moltke made when he sat, the strange abdominal circle or hole that he 9
formed with his hands. He’d made the sign again today, in the home’s 10
kitchen, and Atwater could tell it was something Mr. Brint Moltke 11
did a lot — it was in the way he sat, the way all of us have certain little 12
trademark styles of gesturing when we speak or arranging various 13
parts of our bodies when seated. In what he felt was his current state, 14

Atwater’s mind seemed able only to return to the image of the gesture 15
again and again; he could get no further with it. In a similar vein, every 16
time he had made a shorthand note to himself to inquire about the 17
other side of the Moltkes’ duplex, he would then promptly forget it.

18

His stenographer’s notebook later turned out to include a half dozen 19
such notations. The clown’s teeth were multicolored kernels of what 20

Atwater’s folks had called Indian corn, its hair a spherical nimbus of 21
corn chaff, which happened to be the single most allergenic substance 22
known to man. And yet at the same time the hands’ circle seemed also 23
a kind of signal, something that the artist perhaps wished to commu-24
nicate to Atwater but didn’t know how or was not even fully aware he 25
wished to. The strange blank fixed smile was a different matter — it 26
too was unsettling, but the journalist never felt that it might be trying 27
to signify anything beyond itself.

28

Atwater had never before received any kind of sexual injury. The 29
discoloration was chiefly along the leg’s outside, but the swelling in-30
volved the kneecap, and this was clearly what was causing the real 31
pain. The area of bruising extended from just below the knee to the 32
lower thigh; certain features of the car door’s armrest and window’s 33
controls were directly imprinted in the bruise’s center and already yel-sh 34
lowing. The knee had felt constricted in his slacks’ left leg all day. It reg 35
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tact. Atwater examined it, breathing through his teeth. He felt the dis-1
tinctive blend of repulsion and fascination nearly all people feel when 2
examining a diseased or injured part of themselves. He also had the 3
feeling that the knee now somehow existed in a more solid and em-4
phatic way than the rest of him around it. It was something like the 5
way he used to feel at the mirror in the bathroom as a boy, examining 6
his protuberant ears from all different angles. The room was on the 7

Holiday Inn’s second level and opened onto an exterior balcony that 8
overlooked the pool; the cement stairs up had also hurt the knee. He 9
couldn’t straighten his leg out all the way. In the afternoon light, his 10
calf and foot appeared pale and extremely hairy, perhaps abnormally 11
hairy. There were also spatial issues. He had allowed it to occur to him 12
that the bruising was actually trapped blood leaking from injured 13
blood vessels under the skin, and that the changes in color were signs 14
of the trapped blood decomposing under the skin and of the human 15
body’s attempts to deal with the decaying blood, and as a natural result 16
he felt lightheaded and insubstantial and ill.

17

He was not so much injured as sore and more or less pummeled 18
feeling elsewhere, as well.

19

Another childhood legacy: When anything painful or unpleasant 20
happened to his body, Skip Atwater often got the queer sense that he 21
was in fact not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped 22
area of space itself, impenetrable but empty, with a certain vacuous 23
roaring sensation we tend to associate with empty space. The whole 24
thing was very private and difficult to describe, although Atwater had 25
had a long and interesting off the record conversation about it with the 26

Oregon multiple amputee who’d organized a series of high profile 27
anti HMO events in 1999. It also now occurred to him for the first 28
time that ‘gone in the stomach,’ which was a regional term for nausea 29
he’d grown up with and then jettisoned after college, turned out to be 30
a much more acute, concise descriptor than all the polysyllables he and 31
the one legged activist had hurled at one another over the whole inte-32
rior spatial displacement epiphenomenon.

33

There was something essentially soul killing about the print of the 34 sh
vegetable head clown that had made Atwater want to turn it to the 35 reg

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wall, but it was bolted or glued and could not be moved. It was really 2
on there, and Atwater now was trying to consider whether hanging a 3
bath towel or something over it would or would not perhaps serve to 4
draw emotional attention to the print and make it an even more op-5
pressive part of the room for anyone who already knew what was under 6
the towel. Whether the painting was worse actually seen or merely, so 7
to speak, alluded to. Standing angled at the bathroom’s exterior sink 8
and mirror unit, it occurred to him that these were just the sorts of 9
overabstract thoughts that occupied his mind in motels, instead of the 10
arguably much more urgent and concrete problem of finding the tele-11
vision’s remote control. For some reason, the controls on the TV itself 12
were inactive, meaning that the remote was the only way to change 13
channels or mute the volume or even turn the machine off, since the 14
relevant plug and outlet were too far behind the dresser to reach and 15
the dresser unit, like the excruciating print, was bolted to the wall and 16
could not be budged. There was a low knocking at the door, which 17

Atwater did not hear over the repetitive tune and message because he 18
was at the sink with the water running. Nor could he remember for 19
certain whether it was heat or cold that was effective for swelling after 20
almost 48 hours, though it was common knowledge that ice was what 21
was indicated directly after. What he eventually decided was to pre-22
pare both a hot and a cold compress, and to alternate them, his left fist 23
moving in self exhortation as he tried to recall his childhood scouting 24
manual’s protocol for contusions.

25

The second level’s ice machine roared without cease in a large util-26
ity closet next to Atwater’s room. His tie reknotted but the left leg 27
of his slacks still rolled way up, the journalist had the Holiday Inn’s 28
distinctive lightweight ice bucket in his hand when he opened the 29
door and stepped out into the ambient noise and chlorine smell of the 30
balcony. His shoe nearly came down in the message before he saw it 31
and stopped, one foot suspended in air, aware at the same time that 32
chlorine was not the only scent in the balcony’s wind. The “HELP

33

ME” was ornate and calligraphic, quotation marks sic. In overall de-sh 34
sign, it was not unlike the cursive HAPPY BIRTHDAY VIRGIL AND
reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 3 1 5
ties’ cakes of his experience. But it was not made of icing. That much 1
was immediately, emphatically clear.

2

Holding the bucket, his ears crimson and partly denuded leg still 3
raised, the journalist was paralyzed by the twin urges to examine the 4
message’s workmanship more closely and to get far away as quickly as 5
possible, perhaps even to check out altogether. He knew that great 6
force of will would be required to try to imagine the various postures 7
and contractions involved in producing the phrase, its detached and 8
plumb straight underscoring, the tiny and perfectly formed quotation 9
marks. Part of him was aware that it had not yet occurred to him to 10
consider what the phrase might actually mean or imply in this context.

11

In a sense, the content of the message was obliterated by the over-12
whelming fact of its medium and implied mode of production. The 13
phrase terminated neatly at the second E’s serif; there was no tailing 14
off or spotting.

15

A faint human sound made Atwater look hard right — an older 16
couple in golfing visors stood some yards off outside their door, look-17
ing at him and the balcony’s brown cri de coeur. The wife’s expression 18
pretty much said it all.

19

20

[

21

All salarymen, staff, and upper level interns at Style had free corporate 22
memberships to the large fitness center located on the second under-23
ground level of the WTC’s South Tower. The only expense was a 24
monthly locker fee, which was well worth it if you didn’t want to 25
schlep a separate set of exercise clothing along with you to the offices 26
every day. Two of the facility’s walls were lined with mirrored plate.

27

There were no windows, but the center’s cardio fitness area was replete 28
with raised banks of television monitors whose high gain audios could 29
be accessed with ordinary Walkman headphones, and the channels 30
could be changed via touchpad controls that were right there on the 31
consoles of all the machines except the stationary bicycles, which 32
themselves were somewhat crude and used mainly for spinning 33
classes, which were also offered gratis.

34 sh

At midday on Tuesday 3 July, Ellen Bactrian and Mrs. Anger’s 35 reg

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executive intern were on two of the elliptical training machines along 2
the fitness center’s north wall. Ellen Bactrian wore a dark gray Fila 3
unitard with Reebok crosstrainers. There was a neoprene brace on her 4
right knee, but it was mostly prophylactic, the legacy of a soccer injury 5
at Wellesley three seasons past. Multicolored fairy lights on the ma-6
chines’ sides spelled out the brand name of the elliptical trainers. The 7
executive intern, in the same ensemble she’d worn for biking in to the 8

Style offices that morning, had programmed her machine to the same 9
medium level of difficulty as Ellen Bactrian’s, as a kind of courtesy.

10

It being the lunch hour, the center’s cardio fitness area was almost 11
fully occupied. Every elliptical trainer was in use, though only a few of 12
the interns were using headsets. The nearby StairMasters were used 13
almost exclusively by midlevel financial analysts, all of whom had 14
bristly cybernetic haircuts. Not for over 40 years had the crewcut and 15
variations upon it been so popular; a surfaces item on the phenom 16
was not long in the offing.

17

Certain parts of a four way internal email exchange Tuesday morn-18
ing had concerned what specified type(s) of piece the magazine should 19
require the Indianan to produce under tightly controlled circum-20
stances in order to verify that his abilities were not a hoax or some 21
tasteless case of idiot savantism. The fourth member of this exchange 22
had been the photo intern whose mammoth engagement ring at Tutti 23

Mangia had occasioned so much cattiness during yesterday’s SE2

24
closing. Some of the specs proposed for the authenticity test were: A 25

0.5 reproduction of the Academy Awards’ well known Oscar statuette, 26

G. W. F. Hegel’s image of Napoleon as the world spirit on horseback, a 27

WWII Pershing tank with rotating turret, any coherently identifiable 28
detail from Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, a buck with a twelve point rack, 29
either the upper or lower portion of the ancient Etruscan Mars of Todi, 30
and the well known tableau of several US Marines planting the flag on 31
an Iwo Jiman atoll. The idea of any sort of Crucifixion or Pietà type 32
piece was flamed the moment it was proposed. Although Skip Atwater 33
had not yet been given his specific marching orders, Mrs. Anger’s exec-sh 34
utive intern and Ellen Bactrian were both currently leaning toward a reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 3 1 7
skirts are blown upward by some type of vent in the sidewalk and the 1
expression on her face is, to say the least, intimately familiar to readers 2
of Style.

3

Some of the internal email exchange’s topics and arguments had 4
carried over into various different lunchtime colloquies and brain-5
storming sessions, including the present one in the World Trade Cen-6
ter’s corporate fitness facility, which proceeded more or less naturally 7
because an axiom of elliptical cardio conditioning is that your target 8
heartrate and respiration are to stay just at the upper limit of what al-9
lows for normal conversation.

10

‘But is the physical, so to speak handmade character of a piece of art 11
part of the artwork’s overall quality?’

12

That is, in elliptical training you want your breathing to be deep 13
and rapid but not labored — Ellen Bactrian’s rhetorical question took 14
only a tiny bit longer to get out than a normal, at rest rhetorical 15
question.

16

The executive intern responded: ‘Do we all really value a painting 17
more than a photograph anymore?’

18

‘Let’s say we do.’

19

The executive intern laughed. ‘That’s almost a textbook petitio 20
principii.’ She actually pronounced principii correctly, which almost 21
no one can do.

22

‘A great painting certainly sells for more than a great photograph, 23
doesn’t it?’

24

The executive intern was silent for several broad quadular move-25
ments of the elliptical trainer. Then she said: ‘Why not just say rather 26
that Style’ s readership would not have a problem with the assumption 27
that a good painting or sculpture is intrinsically better, more human 28
and meaningful, than a good photo.’

29

Often, editorial brainstorming sounds like an argument, but it 30
isn’t — it’s two or more people thinking aloud in a directed way. Mrs.

31

Anger herself sometimes referred to the brainstorming process as di-32
lation, but this was a vestige of her Fleet Street background, and no 33
one on her staff aped the phrase.

34 sh

A woman about their mothers’ age was exhibiting near perfect 35 reg

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1
technique on a rowing machine in the mirror, mouthing the words to 2
what Ellen Bactrian thought she recognized as a Venetian bacarole.

3

The other rowing machine was vacant. Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But now, 4
if we agree the human element’s key, then does the physical process or 5
processes by which the painting is produced, or any artwork, have any-6
thing to do with the artwork’s quality?’

7

‘By quality you’re still referring to how good it is.’

8

It is difficult to shrug on an elliptical trainer. ‘Good quote unquote.’

9

‘Then the answer again is that what we’re interested in is human in-10
terest, not some abstract aesthetic value.’

11

‘And yet isn’t the point that they’re not mutually exclusive? How 12
about all Picasso’s affairs, or the thing with van Gogh’s ear?’

13

‘Yes, but van Gogh didn’t paint with his ear.’

14

By habit, Ellen Bactrian avoided looking directly at their side by 15
side reflections in the mirrored wall. The executive intern was at least 16
three inches taller than she. The sounds of all the young men’s legs 17
working the StairMasters were at certain points syncopated, then not, 18
then gradually syncopated again. The two editorial interns’ move-19
ments on the elliptical trainers, on the other hand, appeared synchro-20
nized down to the smallest detail. Each of them had a bottle of water 21
with a sports cap in her elliptical trainer’s special receptacle, although 22
they were not the same brands of bottled water. The fitness center’s 23
sonic environment was basically one large, complex, and rhythmic 24
pneumatic clank.

25

Between breaths, an ever so slightly peevish or impatient tone en-26
tered Ellen Bactrian’s voice: ‘Then, say, the My Left Foot guy who 27
painted with his left foot.’

28

‘Or the idiot savant who can reproduce Chopin after one hearing,’

29
the executive intern said. This was an indirect bit of massaging on her 30
part, since there had been a witw profile of just such an idiot savant in 31
an issue the previous summer — the piece’s UBA was that the retarded 32
man’s mother had battled heroically to keep him out of an institution.

33

Under the diffused high lumen lights of the cardio fitness area, the sh 34
executive intern’s quads and delts seemed like something out of an ad-reg 35
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O b l i v i o n 3 1 9
respectable body fat percentage, but around the executive intern she 1
often felt squat and dumpy. An unhealthy part of her sometimes sus-2
pected that the executive intern liked exercising with her because it 3
made her, the executive intern, feel comparatively even more willowy 4
and scintillant and buff. What neither Ellen Bactrian nor anyone else 5
at Style knew was that the executive intern had had a dark period in 6
preparatory school during which she’d made scores of tiny cuts in the 7
tender skin of her upper arms’ insides and then squeezed reconstituted 8
lemon juice into the cuts as penance for a long list of personal short-9
comings, a list she had tracked daily in her journal in a special numer-10
ical key code that was totally unbreakable unless you knew exactly 11
which page of The Bell Jar the code’s numbers were keyed to. Those 12
days were now behind her, but they were still part of who the executive 13
intern was.

14

‘Yes,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘although, although I’m no art critic, 15

Skip’s guy’s pieces are also artworks of surpassing quality and value in 16
their own right.’

17

‘Although of course all the readers will get to see is photos —’

18

‘Maybe.’ Both interns laughed briefly. The issue of publishable pho-19
tos had been one they’d all agreed that morning to table — there were, 20
as the witw associate editor sometimes liked to quip, bigger fish on 21
the front burner.

22

Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Although remember that even photos, if 23

Amine’s to be believed, if absolutely properly lit and detailed so 24
that —’

25

‘Except hold on, answer this — does this person have to actually be 26
familiar with something to represent it the way he does?’

27

Both women were at a node of their computerized workout and 28
were breathing almost heavily now. Amine Tadic´ was Style magazine’s 29
associate photo editor; her head intern had served as her proxy in the 30
morning’s email confab.

31

Ellen Bactrian said: ‘What do you mean?’

32

‘According to Laurel, this is a person with maybe like a year or two 33
of community college. How on earth would he know Boccioni’s 34 sh

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, or what Anubis’s head looks like?’

35 reg

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1

‘Or for that matter which side the Liberty Bell’s crack’s on.’

2

‘I sure didn’t know it.’

3

Ellen Bactrian laughed. ‘Laurel did. Or she said she did — obvi-4
ously she could have looked it up.’ Ellen Bactrian was also, on her own 5
time, trying to learn how to type completely different things with each 6
hand, à la the what in the world section’s associate editor, for 7
whom she had certain feelings that she knew perfectly well were SOP

8
transference for an intelligent, ambitious woman her age, since the as-9
sociate editor was both seductive and a textbook authority figure.

10

Ellen Bactrian liked the associate editor’s wife quite a lot, actually, and 11
so took great pains to keep the whole bimanual thing in perspective.

12

The executive intern was able to reach down and hydrate without 13
breaking rhythm, which on an elliptical trainer takes a great deal of 14
practice. ‘I’m saying: Does the man have to see or know something in 15
order to represent it? Produce it? Let’s say that if he does and it’s all to-16
tally conscious and intentional, then he’s a real artist.’

17

‘But if he doesn’t —’

18

‘Which is why the unlikeliness of a Roto Rooter guy from Nowhere 19

Indiana knowing futurism or the Unique Forms is relevant,’ the execu-20
tive intern said, wiping her forehead with a terry wristband.

21

‘If he doesn’t, it’s some kind of, what, a miracle? Idiot savantry?

22

Divine intervention?’

23

‘Or else some kind of extremely sick fraud.’

24

Fraud was a frightening word to them both, for obvious reasons.

25

One consequence of getting Mrs. Anger’s executive intern in on the 26
miraculous poo story was that Eckleschafft-Böd US’s Legal people 27
were now involved and devoting resources to the piece in a way that 28

Laurel Manderley and Ellen Bactrian could never have caused, even 29
given the witw associate editor’s own background in Legal. BSG

30
weeklies rarely broke stories or covered anything that other media 31
hadn’t already premasticated. The prospect was both exciting and 32
frightful.

33

The executive intern said: ‘Or else maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe sh 34
his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn’t.’

reg 35

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O b l i v i o n 3 2 1

‘Is it the colon that determines the whole shape and configuration 1
and everything of the . . . you know?’

2

The executive intern made a face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want 3
to think about it.’

4

‘What is the colon, anyhow? Is it part of the intestines or is it tech-5
nically its own organ?’

6

Ellen Bactrian’s and the executive intern’s fathers were both MDs in 7

Westchester County NY, though the two men practiced different 8
medical specialties and had never met. The executive intern periodi-9
cally reversed the direction of her elliptical trainer’s pedals, working 10
her quadriceps and calves instead of the hamstrings and lower gluteals.

11

Her facial expression throughout these periods of reversal was both in-12
tent and abstracted.

13

‘Either way,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘it’s obviously human interest right 14
out the wazoo.’ She then related the anecdote that Laurel Manderley 15
had shared with her in the elevators on the way back down from the 16

82nd floor early that morning, about the DKNY clad circulation in-17
tern at lunch telling everybody that she sometimes pretended her 18
waste was a baby and then expecting them to relate or to think her 19
candor was somehow hip or brave.

20

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of two syncopated 21
elliptical trainers. Then the executive intern said: ‘There’s a way to do 22
this.’ She blotted momentarily at her upper lip with the inside of her 23
wristband. ‘Joan would say we’ve been thinking about this all wrong.

24

We’ve been thinking about the subject of the piece instead of the an-25
gle for the piece.’ Joan referred to Mrs. Anger, the Executive Editor of 26

Style.

27

‘The UBA’s been a problem from the start,’ Ellen Bactrian said.

28

‘What I told —’

29

The executive intern interrupted: ‘There doesn’t have to be a strict 30

UBA, though, because we can take the piece out of what in the 31
world and do it in society pages. Is the miraculous poo phenomenon 32
art, or miracle, or just disgusting.’ She seemed not to be aware that her 33
limbs’ forward speed had increased; she was now forcing her workout’s 34 sh

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program instead of following it. society pages was the section of 2

Style devoted to soft coverage of social issues such as postnatal 3
depression and the rain forest. According to the magazine’s editorial 4
template, sp items ran up to 600 words as opposed to witw’s 400.

5

Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning we include some bites from credible 6
sources who think it is disgusting. We have Skip create controversy in 7
the piece itself.’ It was true that her use of Atwater’s name in the re-8
mark was somewhat strategic — there were complex turf issues in-9
volved in altering a piece’s venue within the magazine, and Ellen 10

Bactrian could well imagine the witw associate editor’s facial expres-11
sion and some of the cynical jokes he might make in order to mask his 12
hurt at being shut out of the story altogether.

13

‘No,’ the executive intern responded. ‘Not quite. We don’t create the 14
controversy, we cover it.’ She was checking her sports watch even 15
though there were digital clocks right there on the machines’ consoles.

16

Both women had met or exceeded their target heartrate for over half 17
an hour.

18

A short time later, they were in the little tiled area where people 19
toweled off after a shower. At this time of day, the locker room was 20
steamy and extremely crowded. The executive intern looked like 21
something out of Norse mythology. The hundreds of tiny parallel scars 22
on the insides of her upper arms were all but invisible. It is a fact of life 23
that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a func-24
tion of who and what they are. The executive intern was saying: ‘The 25
real angle is about coverage. Style is not foisting a gross or potentially 26
offensive story on its readers. Rather, Style is doing soft coverage on a 27
controversial story that already exists.’

28

Ellen Bactrian had two towels, one of which she had wrapped 29
around her head in an immense lavender turban. ‘So Atwater will just 30
rotate over and do it for society pages, you’re saying? Or will Gene-31
vieve want to send in her own salaryman?’ Genevieve was the given 32
name of the new associate editor in charge of society pages, with 33
whom Ellen Bactrian’s overman had already locked horns several sh 34
times in editorial meetings.

reg 35

The executive intern had inclined her head over to the side and was 4th Pass Pages

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combing out a shower related tangle with her fingers. As was some-1
thing of an unconscious habit, she bit gently at her lower lip in con-2
centration. ‘I’m like ninety percent sure this is the way to go,’ she said.

3

‘ Style is covering the human element of a controversy that’s already 4
raging.’ At this point, they were at their rented lockers, which, in 5
contradistinction to those on the men’s side, were full length in order 6
to facilitate hanging. Painstakingly modified with portable inset shelv-7
ing and adhesive hooks, both the women’s locker units were small 8
marvels of organization.

9

Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning it will need to be done somewhere 10
else first. society pages covers the coverage and the controversy.’

11

She favored Gaultier pinstripe slacks and sleeveless cashmere tops 12
that could be worn either solo or under a jacket. So long as the slacks 13
and top were in the same color family, sleeveless could still be all 14
business — Mrs. Anger had taught them all that.

15

In what appeared to be another unconscious habit, the executive in-16
tern sometimes actually pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead 17
when she was thinking especially hard. In a way, it was her version of 18

Skip Atwater’s capital flush. The opinion of nearly all the magazine’s 19
other interns was that the executive intern was operating on a level 20
where she didn’t have to be concerned about things like color families 21
or maintaining a cool professional demeanor.

22

‘But it can’t be too big,’ she said.

23

‘The piece, or the venue?’ Ellen Bactrian always had to pat the ear 24
with all the studs in it dry with a disposable little antibiotic cloth.

25

‘We don’t want Style readers to already know the story. This is the 26
tricky part. We want them to feel as if Style is their first exposure to a 27
story whose existence still precedes their seeing it.’

28

‘In a media sense, you mean.’

29

The executive intern’s skirt was made of several dozen men’s neck-30
ties all stitched together lengthwise in a complicated way. She and a 31

Mauritanian exchange student in the thumb who wore hallucinato-32
rily colored tribal garb were the only two interns at Style who could get 33
away with this sort of thing. It was actually the executive intern, at a 34 sh
working lunch two summers past, who had originally compared Skip 35 reg

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Atwater to a jockey who’d broken training, though she had said it in a 2
light and almost affectionate way — coming from her, it had not 3
sounded cruel. Over Memorial Day weekend, she had actually been a 4
guest of Mrs. Anger at her summer home in Quogue, where she had 5
reportedly played mahjongg with none other than Mrs. Hans G. Böd.

6

Her future seemed literally without limit.

7

‘Yes, though again, it’s delicate,’ the executive intern said. ‘Think of 8
it as not unlike the Bush daughters, or that thing last Christmas on 9

Dodi’s driver.’ These were rough analogies, but they did convey to Ellen 10

Bactrian the executive intern’s basic thrust. In a broad sense, the cover 11
the extant story angle was one of the standard ways BSGs distin-12
guished themselves from both hard news glossies and the tabloids. On 13
another level, Ellen Bactrian was also being informed that the overall 14
piece was still her and the what in the world associate editor’s baby; 15
and the executive intern’s repeated use of terms like tricky and delicate 16
was designed both to flatter Ellen Bactrian and to apprise her that her 17
editorial skill set would be amply tested by the challenges ahead.

18

Gaultier slacks held their crease a great deal better if your hanger 19
had clips and they could hang from the cuffs. The voluptuous humid-20
ity of the locker room was actually good for the tiny wrinkles that 21
always accumulated through the morning. Unbeknownst to Ellen 22

Bactrian, lower level interns often referred to her and the executive in-23
tern in the same hushed and venerative tones. A constant sense that 24
she was insufficient and ever at risk of exposing her incompetence was 25
one of the ways Ellen Bactrian kept her edge. Were she to learn that 26
she, too, was virtually assured of a salaried offer from Style at her in-27
ternship’s end, she would literally be unable to process the informa-28
tion — it might well send her over the edge, the executive intern 29
knew. The way the girl now pressed at her forehead in unconscious 30
imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core in-31
security the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her 32
along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming 33
rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling Ellen Bactrian sh 34
how the miraculous poo story should be structured so that everyone reg 35
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nurturers of talent Mrs. Anger had ever seen — and she herself had 1
interned under Katharine Graham, back in the day.

2

‘So it can’t be too big,’ Ellen Bactrian was saying, first one hand 3
against the locker and then the other as she adjusted her Blahniks’

4
straps. She now spoke in the half dreamy way of classic brainstorming.

5

‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just 6
enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a 7
controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out 8
in the shape of Anubis’s head.’ Her hair had almost completely air 9
dried already.

10

The executive intern’s belt for the skirt was two feet of good double 11
hemp nautical rope. Her sandals were Laurent, open toe heels that 12
went with nearly anything. She tied the ankles’ straps with half hitches 13
and began to apply just the tiniest bit of clear gloss. Ellen Bactrian had 14
now turned and was looking at her:

15

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

16

Their eyes met in the compact’s little mirror, and the executive in-17
tern smiled coolly. ‘Your salaryman’s already out there. You said he’s 18
shuttling between the two pieces already, no?’

19

Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But is there actual suffering involved?’ She was 20
already constructing a mental flow chart of calls to be made and 21
arrangements undertaken and then dividing the overall list between 22
herself and Laurel Manderley, whom she now considered a bit of a 23
pistol.

24

‘Well, listen — can he take orders?’

25

‘Skip? Skip’s a consummate pro.’

26

The executive intern was adjusting the balloon sleeves of her blouse.

27

‘And according to him, the miraculous poo man is skittish on the story?’

28

‘The word Laurel says Skip used was excruciated.’

29

‘Is that even a word?’

30

‘It’s apparently totally the wife’s show, in terms of publicity. The 31
artist guy is scared of his own shadow — according to Laurel, he’s 32
sitting there flashing Skip secret signs like No, please God, no.’

33

‘So how hard could it be to represent this to Atwater’s All Ads person 34 sh
as comprising bona fide suffering?’

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Ellen Bactrian’s mental flow charts often contained actual boxes, 2

Roman numerals, and multiarrow graphics — that’s how gifted an 3
administrator she was. ‘You’re talking about something live, then.’

4

‘With the proviso that of course it’s all academic until this after-5
noon’s tests check out.’

6

‘But do we know for sure he’ll even go for it?’

7

The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just 8
gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it 9
might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect: 10

‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.

11

12

6.

13

14

In what everyone at the next day’s working lunch would agree was a 15
masterstroke, the special limousine that arrived at 5:00 AM Wednes-16
day to convey the artist and his wife to Chicago was like something 17
out of a Style reader’s dream. Half a city block long, white the way 18
cruise ships and bridal gowns are white, it had a television and wet bar, 19
opposing seats of cordovan leather, noiseless AC, and a thick glass 20
shield between passenger compartment and driver that could be raised 21
and lowered at the touch of a button on the woodgrain panel, for pri-22
vacy. To Skip Atwater, it looked like the hearse of the kind of star for 23
whom the whole world stops dead in its tracks to mourn. Inside, the 24

Moltkes faced each other, their knees almost touching, the artist’s 25
hands obscured from view by the panels of his new beige sportcoat.

26

The salaryman’s Kia trailing at a respectful distance, the limousine 27
proceeded at dawn through the stolid caucasian poverty of Mount 28

Carmel. There were only faint suggestions of faces behind its win-29
dows’ darkened glass, but whoever was awake to see the limousine 30
glide by could tell that whoever was in there looking out saw every-31
thing afresh, like coming out of a long coma.

32
f

33
sh 34

O Verily was, understandably, a madhouse. The time from initial pitch reg 35
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stage three at 8:00 PM CDT on 4 July, ten weeks ahead of schedule, 1
with three tableaux vivant. There were five different line producers, 2
and all of them were very busy indeed.

3

It was not Sweeps Week; but as the saying goes in cable, every week 4
is Sweeps Week.

5

A 52 year old grandmother from Round Lake Beach IL had a 6
growth in her pancreas. The needle biopsy w/ CAT assist at Rush 7

Presbyterian would be captured live by a remote crew; so would the ac-8
tivities of the radiology MD and pathologist whose job was to stain 9
the sample and determine whether the growth was malignant. The 10
segment entailed two separate freelance crews, all of whom were IA 11
union and on holiday double time. The second part of the feed would 12
be split screen. In something of a permissions coup, they’d have the 13
woman’s face for the whole ten minutes it took for the stain to set and 14
the pathologist to scope it. She and her husband would be looking at 15
a monitor on which the pathology crew’s real time feed would be dis-16
played — viewers would get to see the verdict and her reaction to it at 17
the same time.

18

Finding just the right host for the segments’ intros and voiceovers 19
was an immense headache, given that nearly every plausible candi-20
date’s agent was off for the Fourth, and that whomever The Suffering 21

Channel cast they were then all but bound to stick with for at least 22
one stage three cycle. Finalists were still being auditioned as late as 23

3:00 PM — and Style magazine’s Skip Atwater, in a move whose judg-24
ment was later questioned all up and down the editorial line, ended up 25
devoting a good part of his time, attention, and shorthand notes to 26
these auditions, as well as to a lengthy and somewhat meandering 27

Q&A with an assistant to the Reudenthal and Voss associate tasked to 28
the day’s multiform permissions and releases.

29

In 1996, an unemployed arc welder was convicted of abducting and 30
torturing to death a Penn State coed named Carole Ann Deutsch.

31

Over four hours of high quality audiotape had been recovered from 32
the suspect’s apartment and entered into evidence at trial. Voiceprint 33
analysis confirmed that the screams and pleadings on the tapes —

34 sh
which were played for the jury, though not in open court — belonged 35 reg

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1
to the victim. This tableau’s venue was a hastily converted OVP con-2
ference room. For the first time, Carole Ann Deutsch’s widowed fa-3
ther, of Glassport PA, would listen to selections from those tapes.

4

There with him for support are the associate pastor from Mr.

5

Deutsch’s church and an APA certified trauma counselor whose sun-6
burn, only hours old, presents some ticklish problems for the seg-7
ment’s makeup coordinator.

8

Longtime People’s Court moderator Doug Llewellyn hosts. After 9
lengthy and sometimes heated negotiations — during which at one 10
point Mrs. Anger herself had to be contacted at home and enjoined to 11
speak directly by cell to R. Vaughn Corliss, which Ellen Bactrian later 12
said made her just about want to curl up and die — representatives of 13
both the ACLU and the League of Decency are on hand for brief in-14
terviews by Skip Atwater of Style.

15

It is a clear Lucite commode unit atop a ten foot platform of tempered 16
glass beneath which a video crew will record the real time emergence 17
of either an iconically billowing and ecstatic Monroe or a five to seven 18
inch Winged Victory of Samothrace, depending on dramatic last minute in-19
structions. Suspended from the studio’s lighting grid to a position di-20
rectly before the commode unit, a special monitor taking feed from 21
below will give the artist visual access to his own production for the 22
first time ever in his career. He believes what he sees will be public.

23

In point of fact, the piece’s physical emergence will not really be 24
broadcast. The combined arguments of Style’ s Ellen Bactrian and the 25

Development heads of O Verily Productions finally persuaded Mr.

26

Corliss it would be beyond the pale. Instead, the artist’s wife has been 27
interviewed on tape respecting Brint Moltke’s abusive childhood and 28
the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in 29
his unchosen art. Edited portions of this interview will compose the 30
voiceover as TSC viewers watch the artist’s face in the act of creation, 31
its every wince and grimace captured by the special camera hidden 32
within the chassis of the commode’s monitor.

33

A consciência é o pesadelo da natureza.

sh 34

It is, of course, malignant. Subsequently, though, Carole Ann reg 35

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tapes than in justifying his appearance on the broadcast itself. His pur-1
pose for being here is to inform the public of what victims’ loved ones 2
go through, to humanize the process and raise awareness. He repeats 3
this several times, but at no point does he share how he feels or what 4
he feels he’s gone through just now, listening. In the context of what he 5
and the viewers have just heard, Mr. Deutsch’s reaction comes off as 6
almost obscenely abstract and disengaged. On the other hand, Doug 7

Llewellyn’s own evident humanity and ad lib skill in getting everyone 8
through the segment testify to the soundness of his casting.

9

A slow chain pulls the commode assembly up an angled plane until 10
the unit locks into place atop its Lucite pipe. Mrs. Moltke’s been al-11
lowed in the control room. Virgil ‘Skip’ Atwater and the Reudenthal 12
and Voss paralegal are back against one wall, out of the arc lights’

13
wash, the journalist’s whole face flushed with ibuprofen and hands 14
folded monkishly over his abdomen. At the base of the plane, Style’s 15
freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in 16
the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is 17
nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn’s wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss.

18

The Malina blanket for the artist’s lap and thighs, however, is the last 19
minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an ap-20
prentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone 21
would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There’s 22
also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level cam-23
era and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of 24
its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes 25
what is known in the industry as feedback glare — the artist in such a 26
case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amor-27
phous light.

28

29

30

31

32

33

34 sh

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A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

1

David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The 2

Broom of the System, the story collections Brief Interviews with Hideous 3

Men and Girl with Curious Hair, the book of essays A Supposedly Fun 4

Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and, most recently, Everything and More.

5

His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, 6
the Paris Review, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a 7

MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Re-8
view’ s Aga Khan Prize and John Train Prize for Humor, and the 9

O. Henry Award. He evidently lives in California.

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19
sh 20
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Table of Contents

- Book designed by Marie Mundaca
- 3
- 67
- 1 1 4
- 1 1 7
- 1 4 1
- 1 82
- 190
- 238