Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,123

God I was having.”

“Wake up.”

“Having the worst dream.”

“I should certainly say you were.”

“It was awful. It just went on and on.”

“I shook you and shook you and.”

“Time is it.”

“It’s nearly—almost 2:04. I was afraid I might hurt you if I prodded or shook any harder. I couldn’t seem to rouse you.”

“Is that thunder? Did it rain?”

“I was beginning to really worry. Hope, this cannot go on. When are we going to make that appointment?”

“Wait—am I even married?”

“Please don’t start all this again.”

“And who’s this Audrey?”

“Just go on back to sleep now.”

“And what’s that—Daddy?”

“Just lie back down.”

“What’s wrong with your mouth?”

“You are my wife.”

“None of this is real.”

“It’s all all right.”

THE SUFFERING CHANNEL

1.

‘But they’re shit.’

‘And yet at the same time they’re art. Exquisite pieces of art. They’re literally incredible.’

‘No, they’re literally shit is literally what they are.’

Atwater was speaking to his associate editor at Style. He was at the little twin set of payphones in the hallway off the Holiday Inn restaurant where he’d taken the Moltkes out to eat and expand their side of the whole pitch. The hallway led to the first floor’s elevators and restrooms and to the restaurant’s kitchen and rear area.

At Style, editor was more of an executive title. Those who did actual editing were usually called associate editors. This was a convention throughout the BSG subindustry.

‘If you could just see them.’

‘I don’t want to see them,’ the associate editor responded. ‘I don’t want to look at shit. Nobody wants to look at shit. Skip, this is the point: people do not want to look at shit.’

‘And yet if you —’

‘Even shit shaped into various likenesses or miniatures or whatever it is they’re alleging they are.’

Skip Atwater’s intern, Laurel Manderley, was listening in on the whole two way conversation. It was she whom Atwater’d originally dialed, since there was simply no way he was going to call the associate editor’s head intern’s extension on a Sunday and ask her to accept a collect call. Style’s whole editorial staff was in over the weekend because the magazine’s Summer Entertainment double issue was booked to close on 2 July. It was a busy and extremely high stress time, as Laurel Manderley would point out to Skip more than once in the subsequent debriefing.

‘No, no, but not shaped into, is the thing. You aren’t—they come out that way. Already fully formed. Hence the term incredible.’ Atwater was a plump diminutive boy faced man who sometimes unconsciously made a waist level fist and moved it up and down in time to his stressed syllables. A small and bell shaped Style salaryman, energetic and competent, a team player, unfailingly polite. Sometimes a bit overfastidious in presentation—for example, it was extremely warm and close in the little Holiday Inn hallway, and yet Atwater had not removed his blazer or even loosened his tie. The word among some of Style’s snarkier interns was that Skip Atwater resembled a jockey who had retired young and broken training in a big way. There was doubt in some quarters about whether he even shaved. Sensitive about the whole baby face issue, as well as about the size and floridity of his ears, Atwater was unaware of his reputation for wearing nearly identical navy blazer and catalogue slacks ensembles all the time, which happened to be the number one thing that betrayed his Midwest origins to those interns who knew anything about cultural geography.

The associate editor wore a headset telephone and was engaged in certain other editorial tasks at the same time he was talking to Atwater. He was a large bluff bearish man, extremely cynical and fun to be around, as magazine editors often tend to be, and known particularly for being able to type two totally different things at the same time, a keyboard under each hand, and to have them both come out more or less error free. Style’s editorial interns found this bimanual talent fascinating, and they often pressed the associate editor’s head intern to get him to do it during the short but very intense celebrations that took place after certain issues had closed and everyone had had some drinks and the normal constraints of rank and deportment were relaxed a bit. The associate editor had a daughter at Rye Country Day School, where a number of Style’s editorial interns had also gone, as adolescents. The typing talent thing was also interesting because the associate editor had never actually written for Style or anyone else—he had come up through Factchecking, which was