Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,130
afflicted him with incidentals, Atwater was able to remember that the correct term for the apple was simply: pin cushion. One reason it was so discomfiting was that the detail was irrelevant. Likewise the twinge of abandonment he noticed that he felt whenever the near fan rotated back away from him. On the whole, though, the journalist’s spirits were good. Part of it was actual art. But there was also something that felt solid and kind of invulnerable about returning to one’s native area for legitimate professional reasons. He was unaware that the cadences of his speech had already changed.
After one or two awkward recrossings of his leg, Atwater had found a way to sit, with his weight on his left hip and the padded rocker held still against that weight, so that his right thigh formed a stable surface for taking notes. His iced tea, pebbled with condensation, was on a plastic coaster beside the cable converter box atop the television console. Atwater was particularly drawn to two framed prints on the wall above the davenport, matched renderings of retrievers, human eyed and much ennobled by the artist, each with some kind of dead bird in its mouth.
‘I think I speak for a lot of folks when I say how curious I am to know how you do it,’ Atwater said. ‘Just how the whole thing works.’
There was a three beat pause in which no one moved or spoke and the fans’ whines harmonized briefly and then diverged once more.
‘I realize it’s a delicate subject,’ Atwater said.
Another stilted pause, only slightly longer, and then Mrs. Moltke signaled the artist to answer the man by swinging her great dimpled arm out and around and striking him someplace about the left breast or shoulder, producing a meaty sound. It was a gesture both practiced and without heat, and Moltke’s only visible reaction, after angling hard to starboard and then righting himself, was to search within and answer as honestly as he could.
The artist said, ‘I’m not sure.’
The fliptop stenographer’s notebook was partly for effect, but it was also what Skip Atwater had gotten in the habit of using out in the field for background at the start of his career, and its personal semiotics and mojo were profound; he was comfortable with it. He was, as a matter of professional persona, old school and low tech. Today’s was a very different journalistic era, however, and in the Moltkes’ sitting room his tiny professional tape recorder was also out and activated and resting atop a stack of recent magazines on the coffee table before the davenport. Its technology was foreign and featured a very sensitive built in microphone, though the unit also gobbled AAA cells, and the miniature cassettes for it had to be special ordered. BSG magazines as a whole being litigation conscious in the extreme, a Style salaryman had to submit all relevant notes and tapes to Legal before his piece could even be typeset, which was one more reason why the day of an issue’s closing was so fraught and stressful, and why editorial staff and interns rarely got a whole weekend off.
Moltke’s fingers’ and thumbs’ unconscious ring had naturally come apart when Amber had smacked him and he’d gone over hard against the davenport’s right armrest, but now it was back as they all sat in the dim green curtainlight and smiled at one another. What might have sounded at first like isolated gunshots or firecrackers were actually new homes’ carapaces expanding in the heat all up and down the Willkie development. No analogy for the digital waist level circle or aperture or lens or target or orifice or void seemed quite right, but it struck Atwater as definitely the sort of tic or gesture that meant something—the way in dreams and certain kinds of art things were never merely things but always seemed to stand for something else that you couldn’t quite put a finger on—and the journalist had already shorthanded several reminders to himself to consider whether the gesture was some kind of unconscious visible code or might be a key to the question of how to represent the artist’s conflicted response to his extraordinary but also undeniably controversial and perhaps even repulsive talent.
The recorder’s battery indicator showed a strong clear red. Amber occasionally leaned forward over her sewing materials to check the amount of audiotape remaining. Once more, Atwater thanked the artist and his wife for opening their home to him on a Sunday, explaining