Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,69

a recent lunar cycle in which apparently one of the brighter, more ambitious warrior-caste villagers had positioned himself in the very rear of the line and waited until everyone else had had their Q&A exchanges and dispersed and then had—which is to say the warrior-caste villager waited until everyone else had left and then had—had then leaned in and very quietly asked the child what the best strategy might be for attacking and defeating the dominant ———— village’s spectral troops and necromantic shaman and seizing the ———— village’s lands and exacting tribute from them and from all the rain forest’s other primitive villages and establishing their own paleolithic empire over the region, and the child’s answer—which no one hears because the rest of the queue has dispersed, which in retrospect raises questions about how the young, vigorous, essentially dark-haired and patriciate narrator on the United flight justifies including it in the catastasis—but in any event the child’s answer, which the boy evidently leans way far forward off the edge of the platform to whisper in the warrior’s tiny close-set ear, instantly destroys the warrior’s higher faculties or spirit or soul and drives him hopelessly insane, and the man reels from the dais with his hands over his ears and staggers off into the rain forest and wanders senselessly about making distressed noises until he’s eventually set upon and devoured by the area’s predacious jaguars. This incident sends the first wave of open terror through the village; and, with the demotic fomentation of the lumpen-consultants, the village’s citizens begin truly to hate and fear the child, and there is now more or less a consensus that this preternatural child whom they’d so stupidly revered and depended on and based all their advances and developments on the counsel of is, in fact, either one of the thanatotic White Spirits or a duly authorized agent of same, and that it is only a matter of time before someone catches the child in the wrong mood or asks the wrong question and the child says something which destroys the whole village or perhaps even the entire universe (the two being scarcely distinguished in the paleolithic mind); and a quorum of the exarchs officially decides that the child needs to be assassinated A.S.A.P., but they cannot persuade any of the village’s warrior caste to get close enough to the central raised platform or dais or plinth to kill the child, even spear- and/or phytotoxic dart-distance obviously being well within range of the child’s voice and the memory of their late comrade’s fate—namely that of the ambitious warrior who had been driven insane with a single whisper—remaining still quite vivid in the braves’ minds. And thus then there is apparently a brief interval during which a type of Taoist or comme on dit ‘dolce far niente’ or Zenlike constructive-nonaction movement gains ascendancy in the exarchs’ counsels, some in the warrior and consultant castes arguing that if the villagers simply all stop lining up with provisions once every lunar cycle then the child, who has not moved from the central dais in years and has never had occasion to learn even rudimentary hunting-and-gathering skills, will inevitably starve to death and so to speak solve their problem for them . . . except it turns out that the child had in fact been farsighted enough to break off and stash a certain portion of all the months and years of offerings under his pallet of plantain leaves—note here please gentlemen that in the catastasis of the first epitatic variant in which the dominant ———— village’s theocratic shaman functions as an antagonist it is at this point revealed via flashback or interpolation that what the disguised sorcerer had in fact whispered into the child’s tiny close-set ear when he reached the front of the queue had been something along the lines of, ‘You, child, who are so gifted and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized the extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your gifts, have transformed you into something you know too well you are not? Surely you have seen that they so revere you precisely because they themselves are too unwise to see your limitations? How long before they, too, see what you have seen when gazing deep inside yourself? Surely it has occurred to you. Surely one such as yourself must know already how terribly fickle the affections of a primitive Third World village can be. But tell me, child: