Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,41

that Cuffie was very frightened and unhappy and wishing only to be back in the fenced yard wagging its brindle tail and waiting for the tap, tap sound of Ruth’s miniature white cane coming up the sidewalk to greet Cuffie and bring him in to rub his stomach and whisper to him over and over how beautiful he was and how wonderful his ears and little soft paws smelled, and how lucky they all were to have him, as the black dog leapt easily up onto the lip of the trickling culvert behind Cuffie and, with an ominous look to either side, disappeared into the round black mouth of the pipe, completing the horizontal row.

Meanwhile, in the inception of the real incident, Mr. Johnson had evidently just written KILL on the chalkboard. The most obvious flaw in my memory of the incident as a whole is that much of the trauma’s inception unfolded outside my awareness, so intently was I concentrating on the window’s mesh squares, which in the narrative I was filling the next row of with panels of the unhappy mother, Mrs. Simmons, weaving the family auto slowly down the snow filled streets of the neighborhood while she plucks at various grey hairs that she is trying to find and get a grip on with tweezers in the rearview mirror, as well as scenes of the father, outdoors in the falling snow, operating a large, gas-operated appliance which looks a little like a power lawnmower but is larger and has twice as many rotating blades, as well as being the distinctive bright orange that sportsmen and hunters normally wear, which is the mansion’s wealthy owner’s company’s trademark color, and is also the color of the special snowpants the owner makes the stoic and uncomplaining father wear, beginning to push the machine through the dense, wet snow of the mansion’s driveway. The driveway is so long that by the time the father has finished snowblowing the whole thing he will have to start back at the beginning again, as the snowfall (which you can also see in the background out the mesh window of the State School for the Blind and Deaf classroom, even though little Ruthie obviously is unaware) is becoming heavy and turning into a real snowstorm, with the father’s thought-bubble in one panel saying, ‘Oh, well! It is not so bad, at least I am lucky to have a job, and I am certain that good old Marjorie will find Cuffie in time to bring our pet home in time for Ruthie’s return from school!’ with a patient, uncomplaining expression on his face as the loud, heavy appliance (which the mansion’s owner had patented and his company manufactures, which is why he makes Mr. Simmons wear the undignified orange pants) erases the driveway’s white like a chalkboard being cleaned with damp paper towels by someone serving out an admin- istrative detention. It was thus that I did not literally see or know what began to unfold during the Civics class, although I received the full story so many times from classmates and authorities and the Dispatch that in memory it nearly feels as if I were present as a full witness from the beginning. Dr. Biron-Maint, the administrative psychologist, gave his professional opinion that I was a full witness, but had been too traumatized (shellshocked was his stated term; each child’s parents received a copy of his evaluation) to be able to acknowledge the memory of it. However crude or erroneous, my role in all legal proceedings after the incident was thus limited by Dr. Biron-Maint’s diagnosis, which my mother and father assented to in writing. Such is adult memory’s strangeness, though, that I can still recall in great detail the sight of Dr. Biron-Maint’s nostrils, which were of noticeably different shapes and size, and can remember trying to imagine various things that might have happened to his nose in life or perhaps even in his mother’s stomach as a baby to produce such a marked anomaly. The clinician was very tall, even by adult standards, and I spent much of the required interview looking up at his nostrils and lower jaw. He also smelled the way someone’s bathmat can smell in the summer, though I did not identify this scent as such at the time. To be frank, the consensus was that Dr. Biron-Maint gave many of us the willies even more than Mr. Johnson, although having to watch something like that would obviously be