Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,12

a sort of personal signature or statement.

The crowd on the sidewalk’s growth was still inconstant. For every two or three passersby who joined the group of onlookers craning upward, someone else in the crowd suddenly looked at his watch and detached from the collective and hurried off either northward or across the street to keep some type of appointment. From a certain perspective the small crowd, then, looked like a living cell engaged in trade and exchange with the linear streetside flows that fed it. There was no evidence that the climbing figure saw the fluctuantly growing mass so far below. He certainly never made any of the motions or expressions people associate with someone at a great height looking down at them. No one in the sidewalk’s group of spectators pointed or yelled; for the most part they just watched. What children there were held their guardians’ hand. There were some remarks and small conversations between adjoining onlookers, but these took place out of the sides of their mouths as all parties looked up at what appeared to be a sheer and sky-high column of alternating glass and prestressed stone. The figure averaged roughly 230 seconds per story; a commuter timed him. Both his backpack and apron looked full of some kind of equipment that caused them to bulge. There were loops along his GoreTex top’s shoulders and also—unless it was a trick of the building’s windows’ refracted light—small strange almost nipplelike protuberances at the figure’s shoulders, on his knees’ backs, and in the center of the odd navy-and-white bullseye design at the figure’s seat. The crampons on mountaineering boots can be removed with a small square tool so that they can be sharpened or replaced, a long-haired man supporting an expensive bicycle against his hip told the people around him. He personally felt he knew what the protuberances were. New members of the crowd always asked the people around them what was going on, whether they knew anything. The costume was airtight, the guy was inflatable or designed to look that way, the long-haired man said. He appeared to be talking to his bicycle; no one acknowledged him. His pantcuffs were clipped for easy cycling. On every third or fourth floor, the figure paused for a time on his back on the narrow ledge with scrollwork at the cornices, resting. A man who had at one time driven an airport shuttlebus opined that the figure on the ledge looked to be purposely idling, timing out his ascent to conform to some schedule; the child attached to the hand of the woman he said this to looked briefly over at him with his face still upturned. Anyone looking straight down would have seen a shifting collection of several dozen watching faces with bodies so foreshortened as to be mere suggestions only.

‘Probably only up to a certain point,’ Terry Schmidt said then in response to a sort of confirmational question from the tall man with the kite-shaped face and a partly torn tag (two of the room’s six cursive nametags were ripped or sectional, the result of accidents during their removal from the adhesive backing) that read FORREST, a 40ish fellow with large and hirsute hands and a slightly frayed collar, whose air of rumpled integrity—along with two separate questions that had actually helped advance the presentation’s agendas—made this fellow Schmidt’s personal choice for foreman. ‘What it is is just that R.S.B. feels your Focus Group responses qua group instead of just as the sum of your personal individual responses is an equally important market research tool for a product like the Felony!. “GRDS as well as IRPs” as we say in the trade,’ with a breeziness he did not feel. One of the younger members—age 22 according to the tiny Charleston code worked into the scrollwork at his nametag’s lower border, and handsome in a generic way—wore a reversed baseball cap and a soft wool V-neck sweater with no shirt underneath, displaying a powerful upper chest and forearms (the sleeves of the sweater were carefully pushed up to reveal the forearms’ musculature in a way designed to look casual, as if the sweater’s arms had been thoughtlessly pushed up in the midst of his thinking hard about something other than himself), and had crossed his leg ankle-on-knee and slid so far down on his tailbone that his cocked leg was the same height as his chin, thereupon holding the salient knee with his fingers laced in such a way