Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,55

in such a way that you could tell they had been handmade by a loved one and given as a gift, perhaps for a birthday, and for some reason this detail was the worst of all. The dream’s bright room was death, I could feel it—but not in any way you could convey or explain to my mother if I cried out in fear and she hurried in. And the idea of ever trying to tell my father about the dream was—even later, after it had vanished as abruptly as the problem with reading—unthinkable. The feeling of telling him about it would have been like coming to our Aunt Tina, one of my mother’s sisters (who, among her other crosses to bear, had been born with a cleft palate that operations had not much been able to help, besides also having a congenital lung condition), and pointing out the cleft palate to Aunt Tina and asking her how she felt about it and how her life had been affected by it, at which even imagining the look that would come into her eyes was unthinkable. The overall feeling was that these colorless, empty-eyed, long suffering faces were the face of some death that awaited me long before I stopped walking around. Then, when real sleep descended, it becomes a real dream, and I lost the perspective of someone merely looking at the scene and am in it—the lens of perspective pulls suddenly back, and I am one of them, one part of the mass of grey faced men stifling coughs and feeling at their teeth with their tongues and folding the edges of papers down into complex accordion creases and then smoothing them carefully out once more before replacing them in their assigned file folders. And the dream’s perspective’s view slowly moves further and further in until it is primarily me in view, in close-up, with a handful of other desks’ men’s faces and upper bodies framing me, and the backs of a few photos’ frames and either an adding machine or a telephone at the edge of the desk (mine is also one of the chairs with a handmade cushion). As I can recall it now, in the dream I look neither like my father nor my real self. I have very little hair, and what I do have is wet combed carefully around the sides, and a small Vandyke or maybe goatee, and my face, which is angled downwards at the desktop in concentration, looks as if it has spent the last 20 years pressed hard against something unyielding. And at a certain point in the interval, in the middle of removing a paper clip or opening a desk drawer (there is no sound), I look up and into the lens of the dream’s perspective and stare back at myself, but without any sign of recognition on my face, nor of happiness or fright or despair or appeal—the eyes are flat and opaque, and only mine in the way that a very old album’s photo of you as a child in a setting you have no memory of is nevertheless you—and in the dream, as our eyes meet, it is impossible to know what the adult me is seeing or how I am reacting or if there is anything in there at all.

STILL LATER, ANOTHER SHARED AND COHESIVE DISCOMFORT AMONG WE WHO CONSTITUTED THE UNWITTING 4 WOULD CONCERN THE INTENDED MEANING OF THE WORD THEM IN THE REPEATED IMPERATIVES THAT MR. JOHNSON HAD FIRST INSERTED AND THEN FINALLY EFFACED AND OBSCURED THE BOARD’S LESSON WITH. THROUGHOUT THE INCIDENT AND ITS AFTERMATH, EVERYONE CONCERNED HAD ASSUMED WITHOUT QUESTION THAT THE CHALKBOARD’S THEM REFERRED TO HIS SUBSTITUTE PUPILS, AND THAT THE INVOLUNTARY REPETITIONS WERE SOME DISTURBED PART OF MR. JOHNSON’S PSYCHE EXHORTING HIM TO KILL US EN MASSE. TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION, IT WAS MY OLDER BROTHER (WHO BY THAT TIME HAD ENLISTED IN THE ARMED FORCES BY TACIT ARRANGEMENT WITH THE FRANKLIN COUNTY COURT OF COMMON PLEAS, AND WENT ON TO SERVE IN THE SAME REGIMENT IN WHICH TERENCE VELAN WOULD DISTINGUISH HIMSELF THREE YEARS LATER) WHO FIRST SUGGESTED THAT THE IMPERATIVES’ THEM MAY NOT HAVE REFERRED TO US AT ALL, THAT IT MIGHT, RATHER, HAVE BEEN US WHO MR. JOHNSON’S DISTURBED PART WAS EXHORTING, AND THE THEM SOME OTHER TYPE OR GROUP OF PEOPLE ALTOGETHER. JUST WHO THIS THEM COULD HAVE BEEN MEANT TO BE WAS ANYONE’S GUESS—THE LATE SUB WAS HARDLY IN A POSITION TO