Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,64

shaman—whose eyes are described as appearing literally red in just the way certain modern albinistic specimens’ pupils can appear hemean or red—apparently imbibes some melanistic philter or smears himself with dark clay and disguises himself in a cloak and bushy rabbinical beard and magically transports himself bodily across the region to the upstart village, whereupon he insinuates himself into the long line of villagers waiting to ask their respective questions of the child on the dais, and, upon eventually arriving at the queue’s front, the nigrescently disguised shaman presents the child with the offering of a certain mysterious mutant specimen of breadfruit which has a strange excrescent growth resembling the child’s village’s new crude alphabet’s glyph for ‘growth,’ ‘fertility,’ ‘wisdom,’ or ‘destiny’ (the village’s written language still wasn’t very advanced or differentiated) on the breadfruit’s side, and then instead of asking his question aloud at high volume, publicly, which had gradually evolved into the custom at these lunar Q&A rituals, the malefic shaman instead leans forward in his jaguar-hide mantle and flowing French Fork and whispers something in the child’s tiny ear—the natives of this region evidently all have very tiny and close-set ears, rather the way the aborigines of other Third World areas developed racially distinctive eyelids, complexions, and so forth—susurrating some question that is completely inaudible to anyone else in the line but which evidently has a profound effect on the child, because directly after the thanatophilic shaman withdraws and melts back into the rain forest the child on the dais closes its eyes and withdraws its consciousness into some type of meditative catatonic state for weeks or even according to one sub-version of the variant months, refusing to respond to anyone’s questions or to react to or even acknowledge the presence of any of the other villagers; and there are apparently all manner of further sub- and sub-sub-versions of the variant which devote a great deal of narrative time to various speculations and allegations about what it was that the dominant ———— village’s incognito shaman whispered to the child, although all the sub-versions’ theories evidently concur that whatever it was had indeed been in the standard grammatical form of a question and not any sort of declarative statement or apothegm or rhyming mesmeric spell. In the second of the epitasis’s three main variants, the autocratic shaman evidently does not disguise or insinuate himself in any way but rather gathers all the upper-caste citizens of the powerful ———— village as well as a phalanx of attendants and palanquin carriers and syces and white-painted security personnel and specialized antijaguar squads and travels with this contingent en masse through the rain forest to the puericratic village for a full-scale State Visit or Diplomatic Summit, and in this version the epitatic complication is due not to anything the sibilant shaman asks—because evidently the entire Summit consists of nothing but the endless roundabout courtesies and ritual tropes which intervillage State Visits in that region of the rain forest always entail—but rather to some potion or spell affixed to the mutant glyph-excrescent breadfruit which the shaman presents in a decorative parchment papillote to the seated child as one of the State Visit’s countless de rigueur ceremonial gifts and tokens of esteem, which potion or spell here then causes the child on the dais to close its eyes and enter the aforementioned oneirically catatonic mystical state, rather like a mainframe compiling, and he refuses to answer or acknowledge the villagers’ questions for several lunar cycles. Then in the third, final, and rather more passively modernistic epitatic variant, there is evidently no disguise or State Visit or psychoactive breadfruit; rather in the third version the malefic angekok merely consults the yams’ evaporate and makes elaborate necromantic calculations and finally tells the ———— village’s upper-caste supplicants not to worry, that in fact no action is called for, that the actual threat the überchild poses is not to them or the ———— village’s brutal hegemony over the region, because the child at this point is just on the verge of reaching the sidereal equivalent of eleven years old, which birthday evidently represents the paleolithic Third World’s bar mitzvah or as it were age of majority; and, the albino shaman tells the delegation, any child this preternaturally gifted and exceptional is itself still growing and developing and learning at a geometric rate and advancing inevitably toward its supernatural entelechy’s fulfillment, and that—this is still the shaman, whose role in this third main variant of the epitasis is almost