Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,140

need for privacy on the one hand versus his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of personal expression or art. Everyone experienced this conflict on some level. Though lurid and potentially disgusting, the mode of production in this case simply heightened the conflict’s voltage, underlined the stakes in bold, made it at once deep and accessible for Style readers, many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the salarymen knew.

Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.

Only the third shift attendant knew that R. Vaughn Corliss slept so terribly, twining in and out of the sheets with bleatings of the purest woe, foodlessly chewing, sitting up and looking wildly about, feeling at himself and moaning, crying out that no he wouldn’t go there, not there not again no please. The high concept mogul was always up with the sun, and his first act after stripping the bed and placing his breakfast order was to erase the disk of the bedroom’s monitor. A selected few nights’ worth of these disks the attendant had slipped in during deep sleep and copied, however, as a de facto form of unemployment insurance, since Corliss’s temper and caprice were well known; and the existence of these pirate disks was also known to certain representatives of Eckleschafft-Böd whose business it was to know such things.

It was only if, after sheep, controlled breathing, visualizing IV pentothal drips, and mentally reviewing in close detail a special collector’s series of photographs of people on fire entitled People on Fire, Corliss still could not fall or fall back asleep that he’d resort to the failsafe: imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or even ever seen all assembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss’s own.

In the morning, the reinvented high concept cable entrepreneur’s routine was invariant and always featured a half hour of pretend rowing on a machine that could simulate both resistance and crosscurrent, a scrupulously Fletcherized breakfast, and a session of the 28 lead facial biofeedback in which microelectric sensors were affixed to individual muscle groups and exhaustive daily practice yielded the ability to form, at will, any of the 216 facial expressions common to all known cultures. Corliss was in constant contact via headset cellular throughout this regimen.

Unlike most driven business visionaries he was not, when all was said and done, an unhappy man. He felt sometimes an odd complex emotion that, when broken down and examined in quiet reflection, revealed itself to be self envy, which appears near the top of certain Maslovian fulfillment pyramids as a rare and culturally specific form of joy. The sense Skip Atwater had gotten, after a brief and highly structured interface with Corliss for a WITW piece on the All Ads cable channel in 1999, was that the producer’s reclusive, eccentric persona was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom Atwater had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected an hermetic torment for reasons which Atwater’s notebooks contained several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article published in Style.

Atwater and Mrs. Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each other’s air; the Cavalier’s glass surfaces were almost entirely steamed over. At the same time, an imperfection in its gasket’s seal was allowing rain droplets to enter and move in a complex system of paths down his window. These branching paths and tributaries were in the left periphery of the journalist’s vision; Amber Moltke’s face loomed vividly in the right. Unlike Mrs. Atwater, the artist’s wife had a good firm chin with no wattles, though her throat’s girth was extraordinary—Atwater could not have gotten around it with both hands.

‘The shyness and woundedness must be complex, though,’ the journalist said. ‘Given that the pieces are public. Publicly displayed.’ He had already amassed a certain amount of technical detail