Introduction

The first new fiction in five years from one of the most prodigiously talented and original writers at work today.

In the stories that make up OBLIVION, David Foster Wallace conjoins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite convolutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by retelling the daydream that kept his son from noticing his fourth grade substitute teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"), or explore the deepest (and most hilarious) aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel").

The man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring, the parolee who carries his spider collection with him on the bus, the market research professional whose office anxieties take a morbid turn--each of these is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once absurd and painfully real. OBLIVION is a welcome new creation from the writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

"No other writer now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow." -Elle

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Excerpt

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 learned through 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 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 the response itself was the expression. Causing no end of confusion before they got her sedated. The surgeon was leaning forward against the wall with his face to the wall a behavioral reaction which signaled, Yes there was an objective problem in the surgery's results. The bus is because we have no car, a situation this new attorney says he can now remedy in spades. The whole thing was carefully contained and screened off and even the state conceded that if he had not been up fiddling around on the roof of someone else's garage there is no way he could have come in contact with them in any form. This factoring into the terms of probation. At the outset too it was of interest on the bus to see the way passengers upon catching any glimpse of her expression will by reflex turn to look out whichever of the bus windows Mother appears to them to be responding to with such facial alarm. Her fear of the phylum arthropodae is long-standing which is why she never ventured in the garage and could contend ignorantia facti excusat, a point of law. Ironically also hence her constant spraying of R - - d © despite my repeatedly advising her that these species are long-resistant to resmethrin and trans-d allethrin. The active ingredients in R - - d ©. Granted widow bites are a bad way to go because of the potent neurotoxin involved prompting one physician all the way in 1935 to comment, I do not recall having seen more abject pain manifested in any other medical or surgical condition whereas the painless loxoceles or recluse toxin only causes necrosis and severe sloughing of the area. Recluses however exhibiting a native aggression which widow species never share unless actively disturbed. Which he did. The bus's interior is flesh-colored plastic with promotions for legal and medical services arrayed above the windows. Many par Español. The ventilation varies according to such criteria as fullness. The phobia becomes so extreme she will carry a can in her bag of knitting until I always find it before leaving and say firmly, No. In one or two regrettable moments of insensitivity also I have joked about taking the bus all the way through into Studio City and environs and auditioning Mother as an extra in one of the many films nowadays in which crowds of extras are paid to look upwards in terror of a special effect which is only later inserted into the film through computer-aided design. Which I sincerely regret, after all I'm all the support she has. To my mind however it is quite a stretch to say that an area of weakness in a twenty-year-old garage roof equals failing to exercise due diligence or care. Whereas Hitchcock and other classics used only primitive special effects but to more terrifying results. To say nothing of him trespassing and having no business up there anyhow. In the deposition. To say nothing of claiming that not foreseeing a trespasser falling through a portion of a garage roof and wholesale wrecking a complex and expensive tempered-glass container complex and crushing or otherwise disturbing a great many specimens and inevitably, due to the mishap, leading to some partial decontainment and penetration of the surrounding neighborhood amounts to my failing due exercise of caution. This then being my argument for preferring the classics of older film terror. Declining to ever place the briefcase under the seat I keep it on my lap throughout the frequent rides. My position throughout the proceedings was a natural deep regret for the kid and his family but that the misfortune of what happened as a result did not justify hysterical or trumped-up charges of any kind. Quality counsel would have been able to translate this reasoning into effective legal language in legal briefs and arguments in camera. But the reality is counsel proves to be abundant if you are the aggressor but not if you are merely prey, they're parasites, daytime TV is infested with their commercials urging the viewer to wait patiently for the opportunity to attack, handled on a percentage basis, no fee of any kind if you are the aggressor! One could see them come right out of the woodwork after Mother's original product liability. Objectively no one even knows how the widow's neurotoxin works to produce such abject pain and suffering in larger mammals, science is baffled as to evolutionarily what advantage there is for a venom well in excess of required for this unique but common specimen to subdue its prey. Science is often confounded by both the luminous widow and the more average-looking recluse. Plus the ones who say they will really get down in the dirt of the trench and really fight for you are sleazeballs such as this supposed Van Nuys negligence specialist Mother has lined up. From another context the hysteria would have almost been humorous as any environs as unkempt as our surrounding neighborhood will already be naturally infested with them in all the clutter and rundown homes. Clutter's abundant shelter being their native element. Specimens of widely varied size and aggression are to be found in basement corners, beneath shelves of sheds, garages and linen closets, behind large appliances and in the innumerable crevices of cast-away litter and unkempt weeds. Widows in particular favoring ill-lit right angles for their web's construction. In the right angles of most structures' shaded sides up under the eaves for example in summer months. If you know what to look for. Hence the clear goggles and polyurethane gloves are indispensable even in the shower stall whose right angles can be infested in just so many few absent hours. Widows being long noted as industrious weavers. Or outside the moving bus in the palm trees they stand so naively beneath in the shade to await their buses, Rent a ladder and carefully examine the undersides of those fronds sometime! one is tempted to shout through the window. Once conditioned to know what to look for they are often observable everywhere hiding in plain sight. Patience being another hallmark. This habitat and also further inland both contain the more exotic variety of red widow whose ventral hourglass is brown or tan as well as one of the hemisphere's two smaller brown or gray species in the further-inland desert regions which prefer arid climes. The red widow's red lacking however the spellbinding lustre of the familiar household black variety, it is more a dull or dullish red, and they are rare and both specimens escaped in his mishap and have not been reacquired. Here as so often in the arthropod realm the female dominates as well. To be frank Mother's pain and suffering appeared somewhat inflated in the original product liability claim and in reality she coughs less than during her own deposition. Far be it from me to deny her however due to the thickness of blood. Sitting at home in dark glasses as ever knitting while monitoring my activities her mouth parts working idly. Scientifically however a large mammal would have to inhale a great deal of trans-d allethrin for permanent damage to result which as predicted did impact the modesty of her settlement. The true facts are less than a centimeter either way is the difference between smooth youthful eyes and the chronic expression of Vivian Leigh in the shower in the 1960 classic of that name. The briefcase is aerated at select tiny points in each corner and 2.5 dozen polystyrene chocks distributed throughout the interior can protect the contents from jostling or trauma. Her new case's complexity is exactly how to distribute the liability claim between the original surgeon whose negligence gave her the frightened eyes and forehead and the second whose repair's callous butchery left her with a chronic mask of crazed suffering and terror that now can fortunately only possibly cause incidents in the case of someone in the opposing lateral seat. Directly behind the driver. Because the sole exposure to liability of Mother's placement here is that any such individual in the opposing seat hence will have the vantage of gazing frontally at us throughout the ride. And on select occasions such a specimen will, if predisposed by environmental conditioning or instinctive temperament, appear to assume that the stimulus causing her expression is me. That with my size and distinctive mark that I have kidnapped this horror-stricken middle-aged female or behaved in a somehow threatening manner toward her saying, Ma'am is there some problem or, Why don't you just leave the lady alone as she sinks lower in her knitted scarf in self-discomfort over their reaction but my own evolved response is to calmly smile and raise my gloves in puzzled bemusement as if to say, Why who knows for certain why anyone wears the face they do my good fellow let us not leap to conclusions based on incomplete data! Her original liability was that a worker at the assembly plant actually glued a can's nozzle on facing backward, I submit a clear-cut case of failing to exercise due care. The fifth condition of the settlement being to never under any circumstances mention the trade name of the common household spray in any connection to the liability suit which I am resolved to honor on her behalf, the law is the law. Respecting mating I have been on dates but there was insufficient chemistry, Mother is blackly cynical in matters of the heart referring to the entire spectrum of mating rituals as a disaster waiting to happen. Recently as the bus crossed Victory Boulevard as I looked down to check the status I saw accidentally protruding from one of the ventilation holes at the case's corner the slender tip of a black jointed foreleg, it was moving about slightly and possessed the same luminous coloration as the rest of the specimens, moving tentatively in an exploratory way. Unseen against the more inorganic black of the briefcase's side. Unseen by Mother whose reaction's expression I must lightheartedly say would not change in the least, once you get accustomed it is like a poker face. Even if I opened up the entire case right here on my lap and tipped it out into the central aisle allowing rapid spreading out and penetration of the contained environs. The worse-case scenario only occurring if one confronts some young duo of punks or hostile organisms in the opposing seat whose reaction to Mother might be an aggressive challenging stare or aggressive, What the f--k are you looking at. It is for such a case that I am her sematic accessory or escort, with my imposing size and goggles one can tell beneath the gaping rictus she believes I can protect her which is good. ... view entire excerpt...

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