Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,94

all the ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs in the grass along the sides of the Legion field (all of whom already probably saw through the sham from the outset anyway, he was pretty sure)—in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way—with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’

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PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE

Then just as I was being released in late 1996 Mother won a small product liability settlement and used the money to promptly go get cosmetic surgery on the crow’s feet around her eyes. However the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times. No doubt you know the way an individual’s face can look in the split second before they start to scream. That was now Mother. It turns out that it only takes a minuscule slip of the knife one way or the other in this procedure and now you look like someone in the shower scene of Hitchcock. So then she went and had more cosmetic surgery to try and correct it. But the second surgeon also botched it and the appearance of fright became even worse. Especially around the mouth this time. She asked for my candid reaction and I felt our relation demanded nothing less. Her crow’s feet indeed were things of the past but now her face was a chronic mask of insane terror. Now she looked more like Elsa Lanchester when Elsa Lanchester first lays eyes on her prospective mate in the 1935 classic of the studio system Bride of Frankenstein. Now after the second botched procedure even dark glasses were no longer of much help as there was still the matter of the gaping mouth and mandibular distention and protrudant tendons and so forth. So now she was involved in still another lawsuit and when she regularly took the bus to the attorney she had chosen’s office I would escort her. We rode at the bus’s front in one of the two longer seat areas which are aligned sideways instead of frontally. We had learnedthrough experimental method to not sit further back in the rows of more regular seats which face frontally because of the way certain fellow passengers would visibly react when they board and perform the seemingly reflexive action as they start moving down the aisle to a seat of briefly scanning the faces facing them from the narrow rows of seats extended backward through the bus and would suddenly see Mother’s distended and soundlessly screaming face appearing to gaze back at them in mindless terror. And there were a smattering of such cases and interactions before I applied myself to the problem and evolved a more workable right-angle habitat. Nothing in sources sufficiently explains why people perform the scan of faces when they first board though anecdotally it appears to be a defensive reflex species-wide. Nor am I even a good specimen to sit with if she wanted to be inconspicuous because of the way my head physically towers over all others in the crowd. Physically I am a large specimen and have distinctive coloration, to look at me you would never know I have such a studious bend. There also are the goggles worn and specially constructed gloves for field work, it is far from impossible to