Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,43

classroom silence, during which the pupils all began looking at one another while Mr. Johnson stood with his back to the room at the board with his hand with the yellow chalk hanging at his side and his head again cocked to the side as if he were having trouble hearing or understanding something, without turning around or saying anything, before picking up the board’s eraser once again and trying to continue the lesson on Amendments X and XIII as though nothing unusual had taken place. According to Mandy Blemm, by this time the room was deathly quiet, and many of the pupils had an uneasy expression on their face as they dutifully crossed out the THEM and KILL THEM that Mr. Johnson had initially inserted in the quotation. At this same time, in the window, a terrible series of events was transpiring for Ruth Simmons’ father, who in a diagonal series of panels in the protective mesh was stoically and uncomplainingly clearing the long black driveway of snow with the enormous Snow Boy brand device that the owner’s company engineers had invented in his R&D laboratories, which was why he was now so wealthy. This was just the beginning of the era of power lawnmowers and snow removers for ordinary consumers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Marjorie Simmons’ car was stuck in the street’s heavy snow and was idling with the windows so fogged up that the observer had no idea what she might be doing in there, and Cuffie and the hardbitten feral dogs were presumably still traversing the lengthy industrial pipe that ran from the Scioto River to a large industrial-chemical factory on Olentangy River Road, as for several consecutive panels there are depictions of the cement exterior of the pipe but no visible activity or anything exiting the pipe at either end except for the ominous orange trickle into the river. The whole Civics classroom had become very quiet. The total number of words on the chalkboard after the erasures was either 104 or 121, depending on whether one counted Roman numerals as words or not. If asked, I could probably have told you the total number of letters, the most and the least used letters (in the latter case, a tie), as well as a number of different statistical functions by which the relative frequency of different letters’ appearance could be quantified, although I would not have put any of these data in this way, nor was I even quite aware that I could. The facts about the words were simply there, much the way a knowledge of how your tummy feels and where your arms are are there regardless of whether you’re paying attention to these parts or not. They were simply part of the whole peripheral environment in which I sat. What I was, however, wholly aware of was that I was becoming more and more disturbed by the graphic narrative that was unfolding, square by square, in the window. While compelling and diverting, few of the window’s narratives were ever gruesome or unpleasant. Most had upbeat—if somewhat naive and childish—themes. And it was only on days when there was enough time before the bell rang for the end of Civics that I got to see how they ended. Some carried over from the prior day, but as a practical matter this was rare, as it was difficult to hold all the unfolding details in mind for that long.

IN CHILDHOOD, I HAD NO INSIGHT WHATSOEVER INTO MY FATHER’S CONSCIOUSNESS, NOR ANY AWARENESS OF WHAT IT MIGHT HAVE FELT LIKE, INSIDE, TO DO WHAT HE HAD TO SIT THERE AT HIS DESK AND DO EVERY DAY. IN THIS RESPECT, IT WAS NOT UNTIL MANY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH THAT I FELT I TRULY KNEW HIM.

In terms of the precise order of events in the Civics classroom, something was now evidently wrong with Mr. Johnson’s face and its expression as the lesson moved on to Amendment XIII. In this same interval, in a series of panels several rows down, the large, orange, gas-powered Snow Boy device, which removed snow from driveways by means of a system of rotary blades that chopped the snow into fine particles and then a powerful blower that enhanced the vacuum of the blades’ rotation to throw the snow five, eight, or twelve feet in a high arc to the side of the man operating the machine (the distance of the arc could be controlled by adjusting the angle of the chute by means