Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,34

become distracted or lost in contemplation of the scene outside, which in Civics in March consisted mostly of grey skies and bare trees’ chassis and the ravaged edges of the soccer fields and unfenced ball diamond on which Little League was held each May 21 to August 4. Behind, and much foreshortened—being occluded by Taft Avenue and occupying only three squares at the window’s lower left—was the fenced and regulation-size Fishinger Secondary ballfield, where the big boys played American Legion baseball to keep themselves in peak condition for the high school season. A handful of our school’s windows were cracked by vandals each spring; there were several exposed rocks in the soccer fields, of which at least half or more could be brought into calibrated view from my seat without any discernible movement of my head. Nearly all of the empty and forlorn ball diamond could be seen with one or two subtle adjustments as well, the infield now mud wherever there wasn’t snow. I am someone who has always possessed good peripheral vision, and for much of Mr. Johnson’s three weeks on the U.S. Constitution, I had primarily attended Civics in body only, my real attention directed peripherally at the fields and street outside, which the window mesh’s calibration divided into discrete squares that appeared to look quite like the rows of panels comprising cartoon strips, filmic storyboards, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Comics, and the like. Obviously, this intense preoccupation was lethal in terms of my Listening Skills during second period Civics, in that it led my attention not merely to wander idly, but to actively construct whole linear, discretely organized narrative fantasies, many of which unfolded in considerable detail. That is to say that anything in any way remarkable in the view outside—such as a piece of vivid litter blowing from one wire square to the next, or a city bus flowing stolidly from right to left through the lowest three horizontal columns of squares—became the impetus for privately imagined films’ or cartoons’ storyboards, in which each of the remaining squares of the window’s wire mesh could be used to continue and deepen the panels’ narrative—the ordinary looking C.P.T. bus in reality commandeered by Batman’s then-archnemesis, the Red Commando, who in an interior view in successive squares holds hostage, among others, Miss Vlastos, several blind children from the State School for the Blind and Deaf, and my terrified older brother and his piano teacher, Mrs. Doudna, until the moving bus is penetrated by Batman and (behind his small decorative mask) a markedly familiar looking Robin, through a series of acrobatic rope and grappling hook maneuvers each one of which filled and animated one reticulate square of the window and then was frozen in tableau as my attention moved on to the next panel, and so on. These imagined constructions, which often took up the entire window, were difficult and concentrated work; the truth is that they bore little resemblance to what Mrs. Claymore, Mrs. Taylor, Miss Vlastos, or my parents called daydreaming. At the time of the inciting trauma, I was still nine years old; my tenth birthday would be April 8. Ages seven to nearly ten were also the troubling and upsetting period (particularly for my parents) when I could not, in any strictly accepted sense, read. By which I mean that I could scan a page from From Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of America in Words and Pictures (which was the mandated textbook for all primary school Civics classes statewide at that time) and supply a certain amount of specific quantitative information, such as the exact number of words per page, the exact number of words on each line, and often the word and even letter with the most and the fewest occurrences of use on a given page, for example, as well as the number of occurrences of each word, often retaining this information long after the page had been read, and yet I could not, in the majority of cases, internalize or communicate in any very satisfactory way what the words and their various combinations were intended to mean (this is my memory of the period, at any rate), with the result that I performed well below average when tested on homework assimilation and reading comprehension. Much to everyone’s relief, the reading problem reversed itself, almost as mysteriously as it had first appeared, somewhere around my tenth birthday.

MR. JOHNSON, ORIGINALLY OF NEARBY URBANCREST, WAS LATER REVEALED TO HAVE NO RECORD OF MENTAL DISTURBANCE