Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,159

from morbid abstractions like this—he wasn’t going to have a stroke, he wouldn’t have to look at the painting or listen to the idiot tune over and over until a maid came in the next morning and found him.

‘Because that’s the only reason. I thought you knew she’d sent them.’

‘And if I’d called in on time as I should have, we’d both have known and there would have been no chance of misunderstanding.’

‘That’s nice, but it’s not really my point,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was seated at Atwater’s console, absently snapping and unsnapping a calfskin barrette. As was SOP with Skip and his interns, this telephone conversation was neither rapid nor clipped. It was shortly before 3:30 and 4:30 respectively, since Indiana does not adhere to the DST convention. Laurel Manderley would later tell Skip that she had been so tired and unwell on Tuesday that she’d felt almost translucent, and plus was upset that she would have to come in on the Fourth, tomorrow, in order to mediate between Atwater and Ellen Bactrian re the so called artist’s appearance on The Suffering Channel’s inaugural tableau vivant thing, all of which had been literally thrown together in hours. It was not the way either of them normally worked.

Nor had Style ever before sought to conjoin two different pieces in process. It was this that signified to Skip Atwater that either Mrs. Anger or one of her apparatchiks had taken a direct hand. That he felt no discernible trace of either vindication or resentment about this was perhaps to his credit. What he did feel, suddenly and emphatically in the midst of the call, was that he might well be working for Laurel Manderley someday, that it would be she to whom he pitched pieces and pleaded for additional column inches.

For Laurel Manderley’s own part, what she later realized she had been trying to do in the Tuesday afternoon telephone confab was to communicate her unease about the miraculous poo story without referring to her dream of spatial distortion and creeping evil in the Moltke couple’s home. In the professional world, one does not invoke dreams in order to express reservations about an ongoing project. It just doesn’t happen.

Skip Atwater said: ‘Well, she did have my card. I gave her my card, of course. But not our Fed Ex number. You know I’d never do that.’

‘But think—they got here Monday morning. Yesterday was Monday.’

‘She spared no expense.’

‘Skip,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Fed Ex isn’t open on Sunday.’

The whisking sound stopped. ‘Shit,’ Atwater said.

‘And I didn’t even call them for the initial interview until almost Saturday night.’

‘And Fed Ex isn’t apt to be open Saturday night, either.’

‘So the whole thing is just very creepy. So maybe you need to ask Mrs. Moltke what’s going on.’

‘You’re saying she must have sent the pieces before you’d even called.’ Atwater was not processing verbal information at his usual rate. One thing he was sure of was that he now had absolutely zero intention of telling Laurel Manderley about the potentially unethical fraternization in the Cavalier, which was also why he could say nothing to her of the whole knee issue.

A person who tended to have very little conscious recall of his own dreams, Atwater today could remember only the previous two nights’ sensation of being somehow immersed in another human being, of having that person surround him like water or air. It did not exactly take an advanced clinical degree to interpret this dream. At most, Skip Atwater’s mother had been only three fifths to two thirds the size of Amber Moltke, although if you considered Mrs. Atwater’s size as it would appear to a small child, much of the disparity then vanished.

After the telephone conversation, seated there on the bed’s protective towel, one of the other things that kept popping unbidden into Atwater’s mind was the peculiar little unconscious signifier that Brint Moltke made when he sat, the strange abdominal circle or hole that he formed with his hands. He’d made the sign again today, in the home’s kitchen, and Atwater could tell it was something Mr. Brint Moltke did a lot—it was in the way he sat, the way all of us have certain little trademark styles of gesturing when we speak or arranging various parts of our bodies when seated. In what he felt was his current state, Atwater’s mind seemed able only to return to the image of the gesture again and again; he could get no further with it. In a