Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,32

Dy’s golden boy to strut his stuff. Impress the boss. Run something up the rampant pole. Anything at all. Spontaneous flow. To brainstorm. The trick was not to think or edit, just let it all fly.* The big man counted down from five and put one hand to his ear and came down with the other hand to point at Scott Laleman as if to signal You’re On the Air, his eyes now two nailheads and tiny mouth turned down. The finger had something dark’s remains in the rim around its nail. Laleman sat there smiling at it, his mind a great flat blank white screen.

THE SOUL IS NOT A SMITHY

TERENCE VELAN WOULD LATER BE DECORATED IN COMBAT IN THE WAR IN INDOCHINA, AND HAD HIS PHOTOGRAPH AND A DRAMATIC AND FLATTERING STORY ABOUT HIM IN THE dispatch, ALTHOUGH HIS WHEREABOUTS AFTER DISCHARGE AND RETURNING TO AMERICAN LIFE WERE NEVER ESTABLISHED BY ANYONE MIRANDA OR I EVER KNEW OF.

This is the story of how Frank Caldwell, Chris DeMatteis, Mandy Blemm, and I became, in the city newspaper’s words, the 4 Unwitting Hostages, and of how our strange and special alliance and the trauma surrounding its origin bore on our subsequent lives and careers as adults later on. The repeated thrust of the Dispatch articles was that it was we four, all classified as slow or problem pupils, who had not had the presence of mind to flee the Civics classroom along with the other children, thereby creating the hostage circumstance that justified the taking of life.

The site of the original trauma was 4th grade Civics class, second period, at R. B. Hayes Primary School here in Columbus. A very long time ago now. The class had a required seating chart, and all of us had assigned desks, which were bolted to the floor in orderly rows. It was 1960, a time of fervent and somewhat unreflective patriotism. It was a time that is now often referred to as a somewhat more innocent time. Civics was a state-mandated class on the Constitution, the U.S. presidents, and the branches of government. In the second quarter, we had actually built papier mâché models of the branches of government, with various tracks and paths between them, to illustrate the balance of powers that the Founding Fathers had built into the federal system. I had fashioned the Doric columns of the Judicial Branch out of the cardboard cylinders inside rolls of Coronet paper towels, which was our mother’s preferred brand. It was during the cold and seemingly endless period in March when our regular Civics teacher was absent that we had our Constitution unit and perused the American Constitution and its various drafts and amendments under the supervision of Mr. Richard A. Johnson, a long-term sub. There was no recognized term for maternity leave then, although Mrs. Roseman’s pregnancy had been obvious since at least Thanksgiving.

The Civics classroom at R. B. Hayes consisted of six rows of five desks each. The desks and chairs were bolted securely to each other and to the floor and had hinged, liftable desktops, just as all primary classrooms’ desks tended to in that era before backpacks and bookbags. Inside your assigned desk was where you stored your No. 2 pencils, theme paper, paste, and other essentials of primary school education. It was also where you were required to place your textbook out of view during in-class tests. I can remember that the theme paper of that era was light grey, soft, and slippery, with very wide rules of dotted blue; all assignments completed on this paper came out looking somewhat blurred.

Up to the 6th grade in Columbus, one had an assigned homeroom. This was a specific classroom where you kept your winter coat and rubbers on a hook and a rectangle of newspaper, respectively, along the wall, a pupil’s specific hook designated with a piece of colored construction paper with your first name and last initial printed in Magic Marker. It was under the lid of your homeroom desktop that you kept your central cache of school supplies. At that time, the most grown up thing about Fishinger Secondary School across the street seemed to be that the upperclassmen there had no homeroom but went from room to room for classes and stored their materials in a locker with a combination lock whose combination you had to memorize and then destroy the slip of paper on which the combination was given so that no one could break into your