Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,164
Forms is relevant,’ the executive intern said, wiping her forehead with a terry wristband.
‘If he doesn’t, it’s some kind of, what, a miracle? Idiot savantry? Divine intervention?’
‘Or else some kind of extremely sick fraud.’
Fraud was a frightening word to them both, for obvious reasons. One consequence of getting Mrs. Anger’s executive intern in on the miraculous poo story was that Eckleschafft-Böd US’s Legal people were now involved and devoting resources to the piece in a way that Laurel Manderley and Ellen Bactrian could never have caused, even given the WITW associate editor’s own background in Legal. BSG weeklies rarely broke stories or covered anything that other media hadn’t already premasticated. The prospect was both exciting and frightful.
The executive intern said: ‘Or else maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn’t.’
‘Is it the colon that determines the whole shape and configuration and everything of the . . . you know?’
The executive intern made a face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it.’
‘What is the colon, anyhow? Is it part of the intestines or is it technically its own organ?’
Ellen Bactrian’s and the executive intern’s fathers were both MDs in Westchester County NY, though the two men practiced different medical specialties and had never met. The executive intern periodically reversed the direction of her elliptical trainer’s pedals, working her quadriceps and calves instead of the hamstrings and lower gluteals. Her facial expression throughout these periods of reversal was both intent and abstracted.
‘Either way,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘it’s obviously human interest right out the wazoo.’ She then related the anecdote that Laurel Manderley had shared with her in the elevators on the way back down from the 82nd floor early that morning, about the DKNY clad circulation intern at lunch telling everybody that she sometimes pretended her waste was a baby and then expecting them to relate or to think her candor was somehow hip or brave.
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of two syncopated elliptical trainers. Then the executive intern said: ‘There’s a way to do this.’ She blotted momentarily at her upper lip with the inside of her wristband. ‘Joan would say we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been thinking about the subject of the piece instead of the angle for the piece.’ Joan referred to Mrs. Anger, the Executive Editor of Style.
‘The UBA’s been a problem from the start,’ Ellen Bactrian said. ‘What I told —’
The executive intern interrupted: ‘There doesn’t have to be a strict UBA, though, because we can take the piece out of WHAT IN THE WORLD and do it in SOCIETY PAGES. Is the miraculous poo phenomenon art, or miracle, or just disgusting.’ She seemed not to be aware that her limbs’ forward speed had increased; she was now forcing her workout’s program instead of following it. SOCIETY PAGES was the section of Style devoted to soft coverage of social issues such as postnatal depression and the rain forest. According to the magazine’s editorial template, SP items ran up to 600 words as opposed to WITW’s 400.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning we include some bites from credible sources who think it is disgusting. We have Skip create controversy in the piece itself.’ It was true that her use of Atwater’s name in the remark was somewhat strategic—there were complex turf issues involved in altering a piece’s venue within the magazine, and Ellen Bactrian could well imagine the WITW associate editor’s facial expression and some of the cynical jokes he might make in order to mask his hurt at being shut out of the story altogether.
‘No,’ the executive intern responded. ‘Not quite. We don’t create the controversy, we cover it.’ She was checking her sports watch even though there were digital clocks right there on the machines’ consoles. Both women had met or exceeded their target heartrate for over half an hour.
A short time later, they were in the little tiled area where people toweled off after a shower. At this time of day, the locker room was steamy and extremely crowded. The executive intern looked like something out of Norse mythology. The hundreds of tiny parallel scars on the insides of her upper arms were all but invisible. It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. The executive intern was saying: ‘The real angle is about coverage. Style is not foisting a gross or potentially offensive