Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,5

pulled himself up and over onto the narrow ledge at the base of the second-floor window, rose complexly to his feet, affixed his cups, and swarmed up the pane’s thick glass, which gave onto the Gap’s second floor but had no promotional items displayed within. The figure presented as lithe and expert. His manner of climbing appeared almost more reptilian than mammalian, you’d have to say. He was halfway up the window of a management consulting firm on the fifth floor when a small crowd of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below. Winds at ground level were light to moderate.

In the conference room, the north window’s tint made the northeastern half-cloudy sky seem raw and the froth of the waves on the distant windblown lake look dark; it brindled the sides of the other tall buildings in view, as well, which were all partly in one another’s shadow. Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hairs on one side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassels. One of the youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that even with his legs out splayed and both knees bent his sock-status was unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them. Another of the older men had a mean little slit of a mouth, another a face far too saggy and seamed for his demographic slot. As was often the case, the youngest men’s faces appeared not quite yet fully or humanly formed, with the clean generic quality of products just off the factory floor. Terry Schmidt sometimes sketched his own face’s outlines in caricature form as he spoke on the phone or waited for software programs to run. One of the group’s men had a pear-shaped head, another a diamond- or kite-shaped face; the room’s second-oldest consumer had cropped gray hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect. The men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise on the carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag he kept in his cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern. A small LCD at the bottom of my right scope ran both Real Time and Mission Time. My brief script for the GRDS caucus had been memorized intoto but there was a backup copy on a laminated card just inside my sweater’s sleeve, held in place with small tabs I could release by depressing one of the buttons on my wristwatch, which was really not a watch at all. There was also the emetic prosthesis. The cakes, of which I had already made a show of eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth.

Terry Schmidt himself was hypoglycemic and could eat only confections prepared with fructose, aspartame, or very small amounts of C6H8(OH)6, and sometimes he felt himself looking at trays of the product with the expression of an urchin at a toystore’s window.

Down the hall and past the MROP* Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background. Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had been told which of today’s TFGs represented the nested test’s control group, though it was pretty obvious. You had to work on the upper floors for some time before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s structural design accommodated winds off the lake. ‘Question: just what exactly is polysorbate 80?’ Schmidt was reasonably certain that none of the Focus Group felt the sway. It was not pronounced enough even to cause movement in the coffee in any of the iconized mugs on the table that Schmidt, standing and rotating the Dry Erase marker in his hand in an absent way that connoted both informality and a slight humanizing nervousness in front of groups, could see down into. The conference table