Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,56

ELABORATE, MY BROTHER’S LETTER OBSERVED.

I have only general, impressionistic memories of Mrs. Roseman’s classroom itself, which did not, even when nearly empty after the mass exodus, seem all that large. There were either 30 or 32 desks facing due north, and on the north wall was the chalkboard with its jagged mass of 212 overstruck KILL THEM’s and fragmentary portions of same, as well as the teacher’s assigned desk and a grey steel cabinet just west of the blackboard in which were kept art supplies and Civics related audiovisual aids. The east wall was partly comprised of two large rectangular windows; the lower half of each was hinged along the sill and could be opened slightly outward in mild weather. In the absence of any imposed tableaux, the reticulate wire mesh gave the windows an institutional quality and contributed to a sense of being encaged. Also, there was the chronological series of U.S. presidents running above the windows’ upper sills up near the ceiling. The ceiling itself was an institutional drop unit comprised of white asbestos tile, numbering 96 total plus 12 fractional tiles at the south end (the tiles’ dimensions did not divide evenly into the classroom’s length, which I would estimate at 25 feet). Two long, fluorescent banks of lights hung a foot or so beneath the false ceiling, supported by struts that I imagine must have been secured to the same metal grillwork on which the drop tiles rested. All acoustic tile of that era was asbestos. The interior walls’ composition appeared to be cinderblock thickly overlaid with multiple coats of paint (possibly as many as four or more coats, so that the uneven texture of the cinderblocks underneath was very much smoothed and occluded), which in the classrooms was an emetic green and in the hallways a type of creamy beige or grey. The tile floor’s pattern was an irregular checkerboard of off-grey and green as well, though a subtly different shade or hue of green, so that it was not clear whether the flooring had been selected to complement the walls or whether the whole thing was a coincidence. I know nothing about when R. B. Hayes was built, or under what arrangements—it was, however, razed during the Carter and Rhodes administrations and a new, supposedly more energy efficient structure put up in its place. On the Civics classroom’s south wall (which no one but the teacher was able to see because of the way the pupils’ desks all faced) were the room’s clock and attached bell and the P.A. speaker, whose cabinet was wood and its face covered in what appeared to be some kind of synthetic burlap, and was attached to the Public Address system in the principal’s office.

The classroom’s westernmost wall—on which were arrayed the unused coathooks, and against which just lately all of the terrified pupils had been clambering over one another to flee the room as Richard Allen Johnson stood frozen and transported, holding out the cuspate length of chalk like a toy sword—also featured, towards the back, two more freestanding cabinets containing spare or damaged copies of From Sea to Shining Sea . . . , various testing forms and supplies, construction paper and a large jar of blunt scissors, two wide boxes of filmstrips on governmental and legal systems, and several white woolen wigs and velveteen waistcoats in dark red or plum, with white ruffled plastrons safety-pinned to the lapels, together with a stovepipe hat, a lensless pair of wire spectacles, a collapsible wheelchair and lengthy cigarette holder, and over a dozen small, handheld American flags (these latter out of date as they contained only 49 stars in the corner), all for use in the annual Presidents’ Day presentation that Mrs. Roseman organized and directed every February, and in which the previous month Chris DeMatteis had portrayed Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mrs. Roseman had felt ill and faint and had had to direct the entire show sitting down on the little set of steps leading up to the gymnasium’s stage, and in which I had had a dual role, playing a flagwaving supporter of democracy in the audiences for Thomas Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural Address and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as well as the thunder in the thunderstorm in which Philip Finkelpearl as Benjamin Franklin held a construction paper kite with a piece of string with a large skeleton key on it while Raymond Gillies and I stood just offstage behind the curtain and rolled a large piece of