Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,95

find specimens on a public bus even though surveys as yet have yielded no fruit. No it is not as if actively speaking I could be said to enjoy riding with her while she exerts all her effort trying to not allow the embarrassment of the chronic expression to make it even more frightened-looking. Or that I can truthfully look forward to sitting in a would-be reception area reading Rotary newsletters two times per week. It is not as if I do not have other things and studies to occupy my time. But what is one to do, the terms of my probation involve Mother’s sworn statement to assume liability as my custodian. Yet anyone observing the reality of life together since the second procedure would agree the reality was the other way around because due to despondency and fear of others’ reactions to it she is all but incapable of leaving the house and can answer the attorney’s wheedling summonses to his office only with my presence and protection throughout the long ride. Also I have never liked direct sunlight and burn with great ease. This time the attorney smells a windfall profit if and when he can get Mother in a courtroom and let a jury see for itself the consequence of the cosmetic surgeons’ negligence. I also carry a briefcase at all times since my own case. One today would call a briefcase a sematic accessory to warn off potential predators. Since the original negligence I have primarily immunized myself to Mother’s chronic expression of horror but am even so capable of being made uncomfortable by some’s reaction to us visually, it takes some getting use to. A bus’s circular steering wheel is not only larger but is set at an angle of incidence more horizontal than any taxi, private car or police cruiser’s wheel I have seen and the driver turns the wheel with a broad all-body motion which is resemblant of someone’s arm sweeping all the material off a table or surface in a sudden fit of emotion. And the special perpendicular seats in the bus’s anterior segment comprise a good vantage from which to watch the driver wrestle with the bus. Nor did I have anything against the boy in any way. Nor is there anything in any state, county or local ordinance restricting what varieties you can study or stipulating in any way that cultivating more than a certain number thereof constitutes reckless endangerment or a hazard to the community at large. If the appointment is AM then the driver sometimes keeps a newspaper folded in a hutch by the automatic coin or token box which he tries to peruse while idling at stoplights although it is not as if he will get much of his daily reading done in this way. He was only nine which was repeatedly stressed as if his age in any way strengthened any charge of negligence on my part. A common Asian species not only has the sematic ventral insignia but a red line straight down the back, leading to its indigenous name, Red line on back. Standardized testing has confirmed that I have both a studious bend and outstanding retention in study which she would not even deny. I have evolved the theory that the driver peruses his newspaper and reluctantly refolds it and replaces it in the hutch on green to signal the paralyzed dislike he feels about his paid job and a court-appointed psychologist might diagnose the newspaper as a cry for help. Our customary habitat now is the lateral seat that is on the same side as the bus’s door minimizing any likelihood that someone boarding will have a sudden frontal view of her expression. This too being a lesson learned the old-fashioned way. The only lighthearted interlude was that when they brought her the mirror and the first surgery’s bandages came off then one could at first not ascertain whether the face’s expression was a reaction to what she saw in the mirror or if it itself was what she saw and this was the stimulus causing the noises. Mother herself who is a decent-hearted if vain, bitter and timid female specimen but who is not a colossus of the roads of the human intellect, to put it frankly, could herself not ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was the response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to what in the mirror if