Oblivion: Stories

and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized throughout his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart up to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her invol

Atwater had a short man’s emphatic, shoulder inflected walk.

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 q

Although I’m not going to pretend that the specific incident wouldn’t strike most people as absurd or even sort of insipid, as causes go.

The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew—as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud—that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great sy

whereby once every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in return to compensate the child for its services w

would cause a slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the smoke.

In some respects, Atwater’s various tics and habitual gestures were designed to physicalize his consciousness and to keep him from morbid abstractions like this—he wasn’t going to have a stroke, he wouldn’t have to look at the painting or listen to the idiot tune over and over until a maid came in the next morning and found him.

When he concentrates on the clipped end to get it alight, he appears briefly strabismic or ‘cross eyed,’ and the hand holding the lighter shakes badly, and in that instant he appears every bit his age or more.