Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,54

sound before rising again in a great mass to spread and contract like a great flexing hand against the downtown sky. Trying thus to imagine remarks and attitudes and tiny half anecdotes that over time conveyed enough to her that she would go through hell and back to have his grave site moved to the premium areas nearer the front gate and its little stand of blue pines. It was not quite a nightmare proper, but neither was it a daydream or fancy. It came when I had been in bed for a time and was beginning to fall asleep but only partway there—the part of the featherfall into sleep in which whatever lines of thought you’ve been pursuing begin now to become surreal around the edges, and then at some point the thoughts themselves are replaced by images and concrete pictures and scenes. You move, gradually, from merely thinking about something to experiencing it as really there, unfolding, a story or world you are part of, although at the same time enough of you remains awake to be able to discern on some level that what you are experiencing does not quite make sense, that you are on some cusp or edge of true dreaming. Even now, as an adult, I still can consciously recognize that I am starting to fall asleep when my abstract thoughts turn into actual pictures and tiny films, ones whose logic and associations are ever so slightly off—and yet I am always aware of this, of the illogic and my reactions to it. The dream was of a large room full of men in suits and ties seated at rows of great grey desks, bent forward over the papers on their desks, motionless, silent, in a monochrome room or hall under long banks of high lumen fluorescents, the men’s faces puffy and seamed with adult tension and wear and appearing to hang slightly loose, the way someone’s face can go flaccid and loose when he seems to be staring at something without really seeing it. I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in rote work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing. Some of the men wore glasses; there were a few small, neatly trimmed mustaches. Some had grey or thinning hair or the large, dark, complexly textured bags beneath their eyes that both our father and Uncle Gerald had. Some of the younger men had wider lapels; most did not. Part of the terror of the dream’s wide angle perspective was that the men in the room appeared as both individuals and a great anonymous mass. There were at least 20 or 30 rows of a dozen desks each, each with a blotter and desklamp and file folders with papers in them and a man in a straightback chair behind the desk, each man with a subtly different style or pattern of necktie and his own slightly distinctive way of sitting and positioning his arms and inclining his head, some feeling at their jaw or forehead or the crease of their tie, or biting dead skin from around their thumbnail, or tracing along their lower lip with their pencil’s eraser or pen’s metal cap. You could tell that the particular styles of sitting and the small, absent habits that individualized them had evolved over years or even decades of sitting like this over their job’s work every day, moving purposefully only once in a while to turn a stapled page, or to move a loose page from the left side of an open file folder to the right side, or to close one file folder and slide it a few inches away and then pull another file folder to themselves and open it, gazing down into it as if they were at some terrible height and the documents were the ground far below. If my brother dreamed, we certainly never heard about it. The men’s expressions were somehow at once stuporous and anxious, enervated and keyed up—not so much fighting the urge to fidget as appearing to have long ago surrendered whatever hope or expectation causes one to fidget. A few of the chairs’ seat portions had cushions made of corduroy or serge, one or two of them brightly colored and edged with fringe