Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,53

Claymore’s blanket term for our fathers’ occupations. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on other small office windows in other grey buildings. The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so that she could reassure you that there was nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world. I knew that he liked to have music or a lively radio program on and audible all of the time at home, or to hear my brother practicing while he read the Dispatch before dinner, but I am certain I did not then connect this with the overwhelming silence he sat in all day. I did not know that our mother’s making his lunch was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of land use stars. My father died of a coronary when I was sixteen, and I can acknowledge, despite the obvious shock and loss, that his passing was less hard to bear than much of what I learned about his life when he was gone. For instance, it was very important to my mother that my father’s burial plot be somewhere where there were at least a few trees in view; and given the logistics of the cemetery and the details of the mortuary contract he’d prepared for them both, this caused a great deal of trouble and expense at a difficult time, which neither my brother nor I saw the point of until years later when we learned about his weekdays and the bench where he liked to eat his lunch. At Miranda’s suggestion, I made a point, one spring, of visiting the site where his little square of grass and trees had been. The area had been refashioned into one of the small and largely unutilized downtown parks that were characteristic of the New Columbus renewal programs of the early ’80s, in which there were no longer grass or beech trees but a small, modern children’s play area, with wood chips instead of sand and a jungle gym made entirely of recycled tires. There is also a swingset, whose two empty swings moved back and forth at different rates in the wind the whole time I sat there. For a time in my early adulthood, I had periods of imagining my father sitting on the bench year after year, chewing, and looking at that carved out square of something green, always knowing exactly how much time was left for lunch without taking his watch out. Sadder still was trying to imagine what he thought about as he sat there, imagining him perhaps thinking about us, our faces when he got home or the way we smelled at night after baths when he came in to kiss us on the top of the head—but the truth is that I have no idea what he thought about, what his internal life might have been like. And that were he alive I still would not know. Or trying (which Miranda feels was saddest of all) to imagine what words he might have used to describe his job and the square and two trees to my mother. I knew my father well enough to know it could not have been direct—I am certain he never sat down or lay beside her and spoke as such about lunch on the bench and the twin sickly trees that in the fall drew swarms of migrating starlings, appearing en masse more like bees than birds as they swarmed in and weighed down the elms’ or buckeyes’ limbs and filled the mind with