Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,46

and sometimes gotten into terrible fistfights with my older brother, until eventually their home caught fire in the middle of the night, and several of the family suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation, and they moved away even though their insurance had covered all expenses and repairs, and this boy had often made the characteristic hooting noises) or the mute and uncanny mime of normal laughter’s gestures and expressions, while the school’s Art teacher, who was both deaf and blind, smiled idiotically from her desk at the front of the classroom, unaware that Ruth Simmons was at the weeping center of a laughing, mocking, hooting, cane-waving circle of deaf and blind children, one of whom was tossing Ruth’s figurine up into the air and swinging his slender white cane at it like an American Legion coach hitting fungoes for outfield practice (though with considerably less success); while, in another series of panels further down, Mrs. Marge Simmons’ idling car was now just a large, throbbing, and only vaguely car shaped mound of snow with a peculiar greyish cast to it, as a result of the snowstorm’s piling snow having clogged the worn old car’s exhaust outlet and diverted the exhaust to the car’s interior, where, in an interior view, sat the late Marjorie Simmons, still behind the steering wheel, with her mouth and chin smeared all red as she had been applying Avon Acapulco Sunset lipstick when the carbon monoxide of the vent began to attack, forcing her hand into the shape of a claw that smeared lipstick all over her lower face as she gasped and clawed at herself for air, sitting rigidly upright and blue and staring sightlessly into the auto’s rearview mirror while, outside the idling mound, women so bundled up that they could hardly bend over began shoveling easements for their returning husbands into their driveways, and distant sounds of emergency sirens and ambulances began to approach the scene. At the same time, a single, traumatically abrupt panel appeared to depict Scraps, the subordinate, piebald feral dog with the sore, being attacked in the industrial tunnel by swarms of what were either small, tailless rats or gigantic, atomically mutated cockroaches as Cuffie, nearby, stands frozen with his paws over his eyes in instinctual shock and terror, until the tougher, more experienced and dominant feral rottweiler mix saves Cuffie’s life by dragging him by the scruff of the neck into a smaller side tunnel that serves as an escape hatch and led more towards the area of R. B. Hayes Primary and the Fairhaven Knolls golf course that lay just beyond the copse of trees at the window’s rear right horizon. The tableau, complete with the unfortunate piebald dog’s mouth open in agony and a rat or mutated roach abdomen protruding from his eyesocket as the predator’s anterior half consumed his eye and inner brain, was so traumatic that this narrative line was immediately stopped and replaced with a neutral view of the pipe’s exterior. As a result, the lone, nightmarish panel appeared in the window as just a momentary peripheral snapshot or flash of a horrifying scene, much the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams—somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear, and the lack of any time to get any perspective or digest what you are seeing or fit it into the narrative of the dream as a whole, makes it even worse, and often a rapid, peripheral flash of something contextless and awful could be the single worst part of a nightmare, and the part that stayed with you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work it out or incorporate it. As if the fragment were not done with you yet, in much the same way that now, so very much later, the most persistent memories of early childhood consist of these flashes, peripheral tableaux—my father slowly shaving as I pass my parents’ bathroom on the way downstairs, our mother on her knees in a kerchief and gloves by a rosebush out the kitchen’s east window as I fill a water glass, my brother breaking his wrist in a fall off of the jungle gym