Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,17

hand he was aware that the men’s time was valuable and so he’d . . . and here one or two of the older Focus Group members who had wristwatches glanced at them by reflex, and the overstylized UAF’s pager went off by prearrangement, which allowed Schmidt to gesture broadly and pretend to chuckle and to concede that yes yes see their time was valuable, that they all felt it, that they all knew what he was talking about because after all they all lived in it didn’t they, and to say that so in this case it would perhaps suffice just to simply for example utter the illustrative words Jolt Cola, Starbucks, Häagen-Dazs, Ericson’s All Butter Fudge, premium cigars, conspicuously low-mileage urban 4WDs, Hammacher Schlemmer’s all-silk boxers, whole Near North Side eateries given over to high-lipid desserts—enterprises in other words that rode the transverse Shadow, that said or sought to say to a consumer bludgeoned by herd-pressures to achieve, forbear, trim the fat, cut down, discipline, prioritize, be sensible, self-parent, that hey, you deserve it, reward yourself, brands that in essence said what’s the use of living longer and healthier if there aren’t those few precious moments in every day when you stopped, sat down, and took a few moments of hard-earned pleasure just for you? and various myriad other pitches that aimed to remind the consumer that he was at root an individual, one with individual tastes and preferences and freedom of individual choice, that he was not a mere herd animal who had no choice but to go go go on US life’s digital-calorie-readout treadmill, that there were still some rich and refined and harmless-if-judiciously-indulged-in pleasures out there to indulge in if the consumer’d snap out of his high- fiber hypnosis and realize that life was also to be enjoyed, that the unenjoyed life was not worth living, & c. & c. That, as one example, just as Hostess Inc. was coming out with low-fat Twinkies and cholesterol-free Ding Dongs, Jolt Cola’s own branders had hung its West Coast launch on the inverted All the Sugar Twice the Caffeine, and that meanwhile the stock of Ericson’s All Butter Fudge and individual bite-sized Fudgees’ parent company US Brands had split three times via D.D.B. Needham’s series of ads that featured people in workout clothes running into each other in dim closets where they’d gone to eat Ericson’s A.B.F. in secret, with all the ingenious and piquant taglines that played against the moment the characters’ mutual embarrassment turned to laughter and a convolved esprit de corps.(Schmidt knew full well that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had lost the US Brands/Ericson account to D.D.B. Needham’s spectacular pitch for a full-out Shadow strategy, and thus that the videotape of his remarks here would raise at least three eyebrows among R.S.B.’s MROP team and would force Robert Awad to behave as though he believed Schmidt hadn’t known anything about the Ericson-D.D.B. Needham thing and to come lean pungently over the wall of Schmidt’s cubicle and try to quote unquote ‘fill in Terry’ on certain facts of life of interagency politics without unduly damaging Schmidt’s morale over the putative boner, and so on.)

Nor in fact was the high-altitude figure gazing down at them, the street’s keener onlookers saw—what he was actually doing was looking down at himself and gingerly removing a shiny packet of what appeared to be foil or Mylar from his mountaineer’s tool apron and giving it a delicate little towel-like snap to open it out and then reaching up with both hands and rolling it down over his head and hood and fixing it in place with small snaps or Velcro tabs at his shoulders and throat’s base. It was some sort of mask, the long-haired cyclist who always carried a small novelty-type spy telescope in his fannypack opined, though except for two holes for eyes and a large one for his forehead’s cup the whole thing appeared too wrinkled and detumesced- looking to be able to make out who or what the shapeless arrangement of microtextured lines on the Mylar was supposed to represent, but even at this distance the mask looked frightening, baggy and hydrocephalic and cartoonishly inhuman, and there were now some louder and less self-ironic shouts and cries, and several members of the watching crowd involuntarily stepped back into the street, fouling traffic and causing a brief discordance of horns as the figure placed both hands on his head’s white bag and with something like a wet