Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,68

questioners staggering back to their lean-tos to lie curled foetally on their sides with rolling eyes and high fevers as their primitive CPUs tried frantically to reconfigure themselves. All of which obviously compounds the fear and unrest the villagers feel toward this new metamorphosed catastatic incarnation of the extraordinary child, and many of them might have stopped lining up every lunar cycle with offerings and questions altogether had the sidereal ritual not become such an entrenched social custom that the villagers feel terrific unease and anxiety at the thought of abandoning it; plus we’re now told that in addition the villagers also have come more and more to fear offending or provoking the child on its raised dais—a child who according to the glyph-haired passenger is by this point fully pubescent and developing the broad squat torso, protrusive forehead, and hairy extremities of a bona fide paleolithic adult male—and their fear and unease is then further increased in the falling action’s third and apparently final stage of the child’s development, in which after several more lunar cycles he begins to act increasingly irritable and captious with the villagers’ questions and now begins responding not with a sincere answer or a further question or even a digressive chautauqua but now with what often seems a rebuke or complaint, appearing almost to berate them, asking what on earth made them think that theirs are the really important questions, asking rhetorically what the point of all this is, why must he be consigned to life on a wickerwork platform if all he’s going to be asked are the sort of dull, small, banal, quotidian, irrelevant questions that these squat hirsute tiny-eared villagers line up under a blazing Third World sun all day with offerings in order to pose, asking what makes them think he can help them when they haven’t the slightest idea what they even really need. Asking whether the whole thing might not, in fact, be a waste of everyone’s time. By which point the village’s whole social structure and citizenry, from exarch to lumpen, is in an uproar of cultural disorientation and anxiety and antichild sentiment, an hysteria abetted at every turn by the consultant caste, most of whom are now of course out of work because of the metamorphic changes in the child’s mode or style of answering questions and now have nothing better to do all day than hold seminars for the angry villagers in which for some type of fee the consultants will advance and debate various theories about what exactly has happened to the child and whom or what the child appears to be metamorphosing into and about what it portends for the village that its central dais’s beloved omniscient child has become an agent of disruption and cultural anomie; and in the versions with the disguised malefic shaman or the breathtaking daughter of the deceased exarch there are now also some especially costly elite-caste seminars in which the consultants theorize about just what fatal question the dissimilated magus or jeune fille dorée might have whispered into the boy’s hypotrophied ear to cause such a ghastly transformation, with various sub-versions’ consultants arguing for every sort of possible question from, ‘Why do you put yourself at the service of villagers so much less extraordinary than yourself?’ to, ‘What sort of Yam Gods and/or Dark Spirits does someone as supernaturally advanced as yourself believe in, deep inside?’ to the deceptively simple but of course all too plausibly disastrous, ‘Might there ever be any questions you yourselfwish to ask?’—as well as untold other examples which ambient engine and cabin noise obscured, the United flight evidently being filled with weather and turbulence and at least one interval during which it looked as though they were going to be rerouted and forced to land somewhere other than their scheduled destination—but with all the different versions’ and sub-versions’ seminars’ hypothesized questions sharing an essentially recursive quality that bent the child’s cognitive powers back in on themselves and transformed him from messianic to monstrous, and whose lethal involution resonates with malignant-self-consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7 to the self-devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana to the Medousa’s reflective demise to Gödelian metalogic; and fewer and fewer villagers begin queuing up before the child’s platform in the village’s center every 29.52 days, although they never make so bold as to stop coming altogether because the villagers are still deeply afraid of offending the child or making him angry, especially after one incident in