Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,18

kissing noise from his skull’s rear suction cup performed a lithe contra face that left him now facing the window with the sagged mask’s nose and lips and forehead’s very orange cup pressed tight against it—again provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy magazine corporate staff on the glass’s inside—whereupon he now reached around and removed from the backpack what appeared to be a small generator or perhaps scuba-style tank with a slender hoselike attachment that was either black or dark blue and ended in a strange sort of triangular or arrowhead- or D-shaped nozzle or attachment or mortise, which tank he connected with straps and a harness to the back of his GoreTex top and allowed the dark hose and nozzle to hang unfettered down over his concentricized rear and the leggings’ tops, so that when he resumed his practiced-looking opposite-leg and -arm climb up the eighth-floor window he now also wore what appeared to be a deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-looking tail, and presented an overall sight so complex and unlike anything from any member of the (now much larger and more diffuse, some still in the street and beginning to roil) crowd’s visual experience that there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest. A small child in the crowd began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot.

Now that he appeared less conventionally human, the way the figure climbed by moving his left arm/right leg and then right arm/left leg looked even more arachnoid or saurian; in any event he was still just lithe as hell. Some of the shoppers inside the display windows of the Gap had now come out and joined the sidewalk’s crowd. The figure scaled the eighth-twelfth floors with ease, then paused while attached to the thirteenth- (perhaps called the fourteenth-) floor window to apply some kind of adhesive or cleaner to his suction cups. The winds at 425 feet must have been very strong, because his caudal hose swung wildly this way and that.

It was also impossible for some people in the front portion of the street and sidewalk’s crowd to resist looking at their own and the whole collective’s reflection in the Gap’s display window. There were no more screams or cries of ‘Jump!’, but among some of the crowd’s younger and more media-savvy members there began to be speculation about whether this was a PR stunt for some product or service or whether perhaps the climbing figure was one of those renegade urban daredevils who scaled tall buildings and then parachuted to the ground below and submitted to arrest while blowing kisses to network news cameras. The well-known Sears Tower or even Hancock Center would have been a far better high-visibility site for a stunt like this if such a stunt it was, some of them opined. The first two squad cars arrived as the figure—by this time quite small, even through a novelty telescope, and obscured almost wholly from view when he negotiated ledges—was hanging attached by his forehead’s central cup to the fifteenth-floor window (or perhaps sixteenth, depending whether the building had a thirteenth floor; some do and some don’t) and appeared to be pulling more items from his nylon pack, fitting them together and using both hands to telescope something out to arm’s length and then attaching various other small things to it. It was probably the squad cars and their garish lights at the curb that caused so many other cars on Huron Ave. to slow down or even pull over to see if there’d been a death or an arrest, forcing one of the officers to spend his time trying to control traffic and keep cars moving so that the avenue remained passable. It was an older African-American woman who’d been one of the very first pedestrians to stop and look up and was now using broad motions of all four limbs to report or re-create for a policeman all she had witnessed up to the present who’d paused to ask whether to the officer’s knowledge the strangely costumed figure’s climb could possibly be a licensed stunt for a feature film or commercial television or cable program, and this was when it occurred to some of the other spectators that the lithe figure’s climb was conceivably being