Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,63

extremely ancient and politically astute and merciless and frightening and is universally regarded as being at the very least in league with the primitive rain forest’s diabolical White Spirits—recall that this is an equatorial Third World region, such that here dark colors are apparently associated with life and beneficent spiritual forces and light or whitish colors with death, absence, and pantheism’s evil or malignant spirits, and evidently one reason why the dominant village’s warriors are so formidable is that the shaman forces them to smear themselves with white or light-colored clay or ground talc or some canescent indigenous substance before battle such that according to legend they present the appearance of a regiment of evil spirits or the risen dead coming at one with spears and phytotoxic blowguns, and the sight always so terrifies all the other villages’ warriors that they quail and lose heart before battle is even joined, and the dominant village has had no serious opposition since the necromantic shaman took charge many aeons ago. Even so, the more politically astute upper castes of the dominant village eventually become concerned, obviously, about this other village with the messianically brilliant child; they fear that as the child’s village continues to evolve and becomes more and more advanced and sophisticated it will be only a matter of time before some prescient member of the little village’s warrior caste comes before the child and asks, ‘How shall we attack and defeat the village of ————’ (the fellow could not understand or reproduce the airline passenger’s pronunciation of the dominant village’s name, which evidently consisted mostly of glottal clicks and pops) ‘and take their lands and hunting grounds for our own more advanced and sophisticated culture?’ and so on; and a delegation of the bellicose ———— village’s upper-caste citizens finally work up their nerve and appear en masse for an audience with their tyrannical shaman, who it emerges is not only extremely ancient and powerful but is in fact an albino—with all that extreme congenital pallor connotes in this part of the prehistoric world—and who evidently dwells in a small, austerely appointed lean-to just outside the dominant village’s city limits, and spends most of his time conducting private necromantic rituals that involve playing crude musical arrangements with human tibias and femurs on rows of differently sized human skulls like some sort of ghastly paleolithic marimbas, as well as apparently using skulls for both his personal stew pot and his commode; and the elite villagers come and make the customary obeisances and offerings and then lay out their concerns about the upstart village’s rapid development under the stewardship of this brilliant juvenile lusus naturae—who by the way we are informed has by this time been presiding hierophantically from his raised central dais for several solar cycles and is now something more like ten years old—and they respectfully ask their necromantic leader whether he’s perhaps had a chance to give any thought to the überchild issue and/or might see fit to intervene before the child’s upstart village becomes so advanced that even the predacious ———— village’s albescent warriors are no match for it. There are certain intimations that the dominant ———— village’s culture is cannibalistic or else perhaps uses the practice of cannibalizing enemy POWs as a way to further terrify and demoralize rival cultures, but all this is left shadowy and as it were merely suggestive. All he could say for certain was that the flight’s highly analytic narrator was darker-haired and—judging from his posture and the distinctively squared-off edge of the haircut against the back of his well-tanned neck—both younger and of a higher social or economic station than was the other passenger, who, again, appeared to have some type of auditory or perhaps cognitive deficit. Structurally, this scene apparently functions as both the climax of the protasis and the as it were engine of the narrative’s rising action, because at just this point we are told that the original exemplum splits or diverges here into at least three main epitatic variants. All three versions involve the maleficent shaman’s hearing out the ———— village’s upper-caste citizens’ fears and their pleas for counsel and then conducting a lengthy and very intricate pantheistic ritual in which he boils yams in a special ceremonial skull and reads the rising steam, rather the way certain other primitive cultures read tea leaves or the entrails of poultry in order to divine and inform a certain course of action. In one variant of the epitasis, then, the