Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,26

the Taste, Texture, and Overall Satisfaction of Felonies! and to try now together to come up with agreed-upon GRDS ratings for same. In some of the fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact intercourse on the firms’ conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory thrusting motions of the coitus, and was unable to stop himself, and couldn’t help seeing the confused and then distasteful expression that the rhythmic Oh God, thank yous produced on Darlene Lilley’s face even as her glasses fogged and her crosstrainers’ heels drummed thunderously on the table’s surface, and sometimes it almost wrecked the whole fantasy. If, after time and a reasonable amount of discussion, the Focus Group by chance for whatever reason found that they couldn’t get together on a certain specific number to express the whole group’s true feelings, Schmidt told them (by this time three of the men actually had their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who was also emitting tiny low moans, and Schmidt had decided he was going to give this fellow a very low TFG Performance Rating indeed on the evaluations all Team Δy facilitators had to fill out on UAFs at the end of a research cycle), what he’d ask is that the Focus Group then just go ahead and submit two separate Group Response Data Summaries, one GRDS comprising each of the numbers on which the Focus Group’s two opposed camps had settled—there was no such thing as a hung jury in TFG testing, he said with a grin that he hoped wasn’t rigid or pained—and that if splitting into even two such subgroups proved unfeasible because one or more of the men at the table felt that neither subgroup’s number adequately captured their own individual feelings and preferences, why then if necessary three separate GRDSs should be completed, or four, and so on—but with the overall idea being please keep in mind that Team Δy, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and the Mister Squishy Co. were asking for the very lowest possible number of separate GRDS responses an intelligent group of discerning consumers could come up with today. Schmidt in fact had as many as thirteen separate GRDS packets in the manila folder he now held rather dramatically up as he mentioned the GRDS forms, though he removed only one packet from the folder, since there was no point in proactively doing anything to encourage the Focus Group to atomize and not unite. The fantasy would of course have been exponentially better if it were Darlene Lilley who gasped Thank you, thank you in rhythm to the damp lisping slapping sounds, and Schmidt was well aware of this, and of his apparent inability to enforce his preferences even in fantasy. It made him wonder if he even had what convention called a Free Will at all, deep down. Only two of the room’s fifteen total males noticed that there had been no hint of distant window-muffled exterior noise in the conference room for quite some time; neither of these two were actual test subjects. Schmidt knew also that by this time—the exordial presentation had so far taken 23 minutes, but it felt, as always, much longer, and even the more upright and insulin-tolerant members’ restive expressions indicated that they too were feeling hungry and tired and probably thinking this preliminary background was taking an oppressively long time (when in reality Robert Awad had explicitly told Schmidt that Alan Britton had authorized up to 32 minutes for the putatively experimental Full-Access TFG presentation, and had said that Terry’s reputation for relative conciseness and smooth preemption of digressive questions and ephemera was one of the reasons he [meaning R. Awad] had selected Schmidt to facilitate the quote unquote experimental TFG’s GRDS phase)—Schmidt also knew that by this time Darlene Lilley’s own Focus Group was in camera and deeply into its own GRDS caucus, and that Darlene was thus back in the R.S.B. Research green room making a brisk cup of Lipton tea in the microwave, what she liked to call her grownup shoes off and resting—one perhaps on its burgundy side—with her briefcase and purse beside one of the comfortable chairs opposite the green room’s four-part viewing screen, Darlene at this moment facing the microwave and with her great broad back to the door so that Schmidt would have to sigh loudly or cough or jingle his keys as he came down the hall