Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,110

niece here on your desk—the daughter’s face is beginning ever so slightly to whirl and distend. That is a hallucination. I mean “hallucination” in the very broadest sense. These are not hallucinations which mimic reality or can be confused with it. Sometimes, for instance, trying to shave in the mirror, my visage will appear to have an extra eye in the center of my forehead, whose pupil is sometimes rotated or “set” on its “side” like a cat or nocturnal predator’s, or occasionally our Audrey’s chest on Parents’ Weekend at Bryn Mawr’s two breasts will go up and down in her sweater like pistons and her head is surrounded by a halo or, as it were, “nimbus” of animated Disney characters. When these hallucinations occur, I am able to say to myself, “Randall, you are hallucinating slightly due to chronic sleep deprivation compounded by discord and chronic stress.”’

‘But they must still be frightening. I know they would certainly frighten me.’

‘The point is that I know when I’m hallucinating and when I’m not, just as I also quite obviously know when I’m asleep or not.’) At which juncture an additional momentary, hallucinatory ‘flash’ or vision of our Audrey supine in a beached canoe and myself straining piston-like above her, my face whirling and beginning to distend as the tableau or Fata morgana shifts almost immediately back to the present day’s 19th Hole or ‘the Hole,’ with our Audrey—now 19 and burgeoned into full woman-hood or the ‘Age of consent’—in her familiar saffron bustier, ‘Capri’ style pants and white, elbow length gloves now moving smoothly or languidly among the tables, stools and chairs, languidly serving high-balls to wet men. Nor should one omit to add that Jack Vivien was now there, as well, at the window-side table in the 19th Hole with myself and Dr. Sipe, also with a beverage and seated on ‘Father’’s right or ‘off’ side. Jack Vivien wore none of the customary golfer’s jacket or visor, as well as appearing dry, unhurried and, as always, collected or unflustered, although he nevertheless still wore his spikes or ‘Golf shoes’ (the traditional shoe’s sole’s 0.5 inch steel or iron spikes being the culprit or component which conducts electricity with such ‘hair raising’ efficacy. The public course’s resident ‘Pro’ in Wilkes Barre, in my boyhood, for instance, was once struck and killed instantly by lightning, and my own Father had been in the trio of other golfers who had bravely remained in the open with the stricken lightning victim until a physician could be summoned and arrive, the ‘Pro’ lying prone and blackened and still holding the Twelfth hole’s flag [whose pole, or ‘pin,’ like traditional golfers’ spikes, was, in that era, still comprised of conductive metal] in his smoking fist.), and here the logistics of his entrance or ‘logic’ of the ‘coincidence’ which brought him, dry and, as it were, ‘bright eyed’ (Jack Vivien having bright or ‘expressive’ eyes in a markedly large, broad, if somewhat flat or immobile or ‘expressionless’ [with the exception of the animated, ‘thoughtful’ eyes] face, as well as a sharp, dark ‘Van Dyke’ style beard which served to compensate or de-emphasize the somewhat unusual qualities of his mouth’s size and position), to our table in ‘the Hole’ at this precise point in time is somewhat unclear and, in retrospect, contrived or, as it were, ‘suspicious.’ It is, for example, unlikely that Jack Vivien and Hope’s stepfather knew one another, as not only was ‘Father’ not a member of the Raritan Club and had played as a ‘Guest’ only once or twice prior to this time, but in reality Jack (or, more formally, ‘Chester’) Vivien served as a high ranking Employee Assistance executive at my own company (whose physical plant, or, ‘Nerve center’ was located in Elizabeth), a company which ‘Father’ had made rather a point, numerous times, of implying or characterizing as so ephemeral or unimportant to the region’s insurance industry as to have caused him never once to have encountered or ‘heard one word about’ it throughout his entire tenure at ‘The Rock.’ Nor did Hope’s stepfather appear to speak to, look at or in any way to acknowledge the presence of Jack Vivien (whom, through his role in the recent ‘snoring’ issue’s attempted resolution, I had gotten acquainted with rather well) as he got the thing finally alight and leaned back at a slight smoker’s angle in his ‘captain’s’ chair, smoking slowly and joining Jack Vivien (whose circumoral balbo or ‘Van Dyke’ was, admittedly,