Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,168

Deutsch’s father discomfits everyone by seeming less interested in the tapes than in justifying his appearance on the broadcast itself. His purpose for being here is to inform the public of what victims’ loved ones go through, to humanize the process and raise awareness. He repeats this several times, but at no point does he share how he feels or what he feels he’s gone through just now, listening. In the context of what he and the viewers have just heard, Mr. Deutsch’s reaction comes off as almost obscenely abstract and disengaged. On the other hand, Doug Llewellyn’s own evident humanity and ad lib skill in getting everyone through the segment testify to the soundness of his casting.

A slow chain pulls the commode assembly up an angled plane until the unit locks into place atop its Lucite pipe. Mrs. Moltke’s been allowed in the control room. Virgil ‘Skip’ Atwater and the Reudenthal and Voss paralegal are back against one wall, out of the arc lights’ wash, the journalist’s whole face flushed with ibuprofen and hands folded monkishly over his abdomen. At the base of the plane, Style’s freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn’s wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss. The Malina blanket for the artist’s lap and thighs, however, is the last minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an apprentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare—the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, the story collections Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair, the book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and, most recently, Everything and More. His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize and John Train Prize for Humor, and the O. Henry Award. He evidently lives in California.

* Team Δy’s term for their Focus Groups’ moles was Unintroduced Assistant Facilitators, whose identities were theoretically unknown to the facilitators in pure double-blinds, though in practice they were usually child’s play to spot.(back to text)

* = Market Research Oversight and Planning(back to text)

* = Manual Adjusting Mechanism(back to text)

* also, somewhat confusingly, = MAM(back to text)

* = Presentations to Client Agency(back to text)

† = Overall Campaign Concept(back to text)

* = Wrongful Termination(back to text)

* = Intervals of Multiple Product Consumption(back to text)

† The emetic prosthesis consisted of a small polyurethane bag taped under one arm and a tube of ordinary clear plastic running up the rear of the left shoulder blade to emerge from the turtleneck through a small hole just under my chin. The contents of the bag were six of the little cakes mixed with mineral water and real bile harvested by means of OTC emetic first thing this AM. The bag’s power cell and vacuum were engineered for one high-volume emission and two or three smaller spurts and dribbles afterward; they were to be activated by a button on my watch. The material wouldn’t actually be coming out of my mouth, but it was a safe bet that nobody would be looking closely at the point of exit; people’s automatic reaction is to avert their eyes. The C.P.D.’s transmitter’s clear earpiece was attached to my glasses. The scope’s Mission Time said 24:31 and change, but the presentation already seemed much longer. We were all of us anxious to get down to business already.(back to text)

* (who in fact, unbeknownst to Awad, was an old friend and Limited Partnership crony of Alan Britton from way back in the previous decade’s Passive-Income Tax Shelter heyday)(back to text)

* (venues 1-4 historically comprising TV, Radio, Print, and Outdoor [= mainly billboards])(back to text)

† = ANalysis Of VAriance model, a hypergeometric multiple regression technique used by Team Δy to establish the statistical relations between dependent and independent variables in market tests.(back to text)

* Britton knew all about Laleman trying to jew him out to A.C. Romney-Jaswat; who did the smug puppy think he was dealing with; Alan S. Britton had been contending and surviving when this kid was still playing with his little pink toes.(back to text)

* One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate—which we do, it’s the only way you can—95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.—how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END.(back to text)