Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,61

these sorts of questions were without fail so ingeniously apposite and simple and comprehensive and fair that all sides felt justly treated, and often the litigants could not understand why they had not thought of such an obviously equitable solution themselves, and in short order a great many long-standing conflicts are settled and perennial social conundrums resolved; and by this time the entire village had come to revere the child and had collectively decided that the child must in fact be a special emissary or legate or even incarnation of the primitive Dark Spirits on which their pantheistic religion was primarily based, and some of the village’s shaman and midwife castes—members of what would later become the new social structure’s professional consultant caste—claimed that the child had in fact come spontaneously into incarnated form deep in the circumambient rain forest and had been suckled and protected by divinely mollified jaguars, and that the child’s putative mother and father had in fact simply stumbled onto the child while out gathering cassava roots and were lying about its having been conceived and born in the usual protomammalian way, and were therefore of course also by extension lying about their own legal paternity; and after a great deal of discussion and debate the village exarchs vote to remove the child from the parents’ custody and to make it an as it were ward or dependent ex officio of the entire village, and to invest the child with some sort of unique unprecedented legal status that was neither minor nor adult nor member of any caste, neither a village exarch nor a thane nor a shaman per se but something entirely else, and with the nominal ‘parents’ granted certain special rights and privileges to compensate them for their supplantation by the village in loco—the exarchs apparently having come in secret to none other than the child itself to help them structure this whole delicate compromise—and they construct for the child a special sort of raised wicker dais or platform in the precise geometric center of the village, and they designate certain extremely rigid and precise intervals and arrangements whereby once every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in return to compensate the child for its services with an offering of a plantain or dik-dik haunch or some other item of recognized value, which offering was what the primitive but complex legal arrangement provided for the child to live on and support himself instead of being his alleged parents’ comme on dit ‘dependent.’ The context in which my own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance is unknown to me as anything more than ‘quotidian’ or ‘everyday.’ They would all line up before the dais to offer the child a yam, an ampoule of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera, and in return the child would undertake to answer their question. As exempla of this sort of mythopoeic cycle so often go, this arrangement is represented as the origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture. Prior to the child’s evection, everyone had made their own clothes and lean-tos and spears and gathered all and only their own family’s food, and while certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared at equinoctial religious festivals and so forth there was evidently nothing like actual barter or trade until the advent of this child who could and would answer any question put to it. And the small child thereafter lived atop this platform and never left it—the dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of plantain leaves and a small hollowed-out concavity for a fire and primitive cooking pot—and apparently the child’s entire childhood was thenceforward spent on the central platform eating and sleeping and sitting for long periods doing nothing, presumably thinking and developing, and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days before the villagers would again line up with their respective questions. And as the village’s trade-based economy became more modern and complex, one novel development was that certain especially shrewd and acute members of the shaman and midwife castes began to cultivate the intellectual or as it were rhetorical skill of structuring a monthly question in such a way as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary