Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,48

with a steel spoon as a child, as well as berating him in Italian for causing her to worry, and once walking silently past the window when he had fallen on rollerskates and skinned his knees and was crying out for her to come out to the sidewalk and help him). Such reactions are common to the point of being nearly universal, and all of this is symbolized by the dream’s slowly falling medallion, which at the sequence’s end lands upon a flat stone in either a cemetery or untended garden, full of moss and spiky undergrowth. Despite the bucolic setting, the air through which the coin falls has been airless and black, the extreme black of nothingness, even as the medallion and chain come to rest on the stone; just as there is no sound, there is no background. But spliced very quickly into the sequence is a brief flash of Father Karras’ face, terribly transformed. The face’s white, reptilian eyes and extrudent cheekbones and root-white pallor are plainly demonic—it is the face of evil. This flash of face is extremely brief, probably just enough frames to register on the human eye, and devoid of sound or background, and is gone again and immediately replaced with the Catholic medal’s continued fall. Its very brevity serves to stamp it on the viewer’s consciousness. My wife, it turned out, did not even see the rapid splice of the face—she may have sneezed, or looked away from the screen for a moment. Her interpretation was that even if the rapid, peripheral image truly had been in the film and not my imagination, it too could be readily interpreted as a symbol of Father Karras subconsciously seeing himself as evil or bad for having allowed his mother to (as he saw it) die alone. I have never forgotten these frames, though—and yet, although I privately disagreed with Miranda’s quick dismissal, I am still far from being certain of what the rapid flash of the Father’s transfigured face was meant to mean, nor why it remains so vivid in my memory of our courtship. I think it can only be the incongruous, near instantaneous quality of its appearance, the utter peripheralness of it. For it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness. Its significance for the story of how those of us who did not flee the Civics classroom in panic became known as the 4 Unwitting Hostages is fairly obvious. In testing, many schoolchildren labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pay attention to. And yet much the same thing happens in adult life—as we age, many people notice a shift in the objects of their memories. We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself. This explains the frequent tip-of-the-tongue feeling when trying to convey what is important about some memory or occurrence. Similarly, it is often what makes it so difficult to communicate meaningfully with others in later life. Often, the most vividly felt and remembered elements will appear at best tangential to someone else—the scent of Velan’s leather shorts as he ran up the aisle, or the very precise double fold at the top of my father’s brown bag lunch, for instance, or even the peripheral tableaux of little Ruth Simmons gazing blindly upwards while a circle of peers castigates her for the Plato figurine and—contiguously in the window but elsewhere in the actual narrative—in the woods along the driveway of the estate of the wealthy manufacturer, of Mr. Simmons, her father, staggering blindly in and out of view while holding the stump of his severed hand, groaning for help as he runs in his vivid snowsuit, and all too often running blindly into the forest’s trees due to his own hurled blood and particulate matter’s having rendered him blind, and the whole highspeed tableau is grainy and imperfectly seen because of all of the trees and spiky undergrowth and the driving blizzard and huge drifts of wind driven snow, which Mr. Simmons finally bounces headfirst off of a tree and falls headlong into one of, a massive snowdrift, and disappears all the way up to his boots, one of which is moving spasmodically as he tries to struggle for stable footing, unaware