Oblivion: Stories Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by David Foster Wallace

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group, USA

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  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-759-51156-9

  First Edition

  Contents

  Also by David Foster Wallace

  Dedication

  Mister Squishy

  The Soul is Not a Smithy

  Incarnations of Burned Children

  Another Pioneer

  Good Old Neon

  Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

  Oblivion

  The Suffering Channel

  About the Author

  Also by David Foster Wallace

  The Broom of the System

  Girl with Curious Hair

  Infinite Jest

  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  Everything and More

  For Karen Carlson and Karen Green

  MISTER SQUISHY

  The Focus Group was then reconvened in another of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms. Each member returned his Individual Response Profile packets to the facilitator, who thanked each in turn. The long conference table was equipped with leather executive swivel chairs; there was no assigned seating. Bottled spring water and caffeinated beverages were made available to those who thought they might want them. The exterior wall of the conference room was a thick tinted window with a broad high-altitude view of points NE, creating a spacious, attractive, and more or less natural-lit environment that was welcome after the bland fluorescent enclosure of the testing cubicles. One or two members of the Targeted Focus Group unconsciously loosened their neckties as they settled into the comfortable chairs.

  There were more samples of the product arranged on a tray at the conference table’s center.

  This facilitator, just like the one who’d led the large Product Test and Initial Response assembly earlier that morning before all the members of the different Focus Groups had been separated into individual soundproof cubicles to complete their Individual Response Profiles, held degrees in both Descriptive Statistics and Behavioral Psychology and was employed by Team Δy, a cutting-edge market research firm that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had begun using almost exclusively in recent years. This Focus Group’s facilitator was a stout, palely freckled man with an archaic haircut and a warm if somewhat nervous and complexly irreverent manner. On the wall next to the door behind him was a presentation whiteboard with several Dry Erase markers in its recessed aluminum sill.

  The facilitator played idly with the edges of the IRPs forms in his folder until all the men had seated themselves and gotten comfortable. Then he said: ‘Right, so thanks again for your part in this, which as I’m pretty sure Mr. Mounce told you this morning is always an important part of deciding what new products get made available to consumers versus those that don’t.’ He had a graceful, practiced way of panning his gaze back and forth to make sure he addressed the entire table, a skill that was slightly at odds with the bashful, somewhat fidgety presentation of his body as he spoke before the assembled men. The fourteen members of the Focus Group, all male and several with beverages before them, engaged in the slight gestures and expressions of men around a conference table who are less than 100% sure what is going to be expected of them. The conference room was very different in appearance and feel from the sterile, almost lablike auditorium in which the PT/IR had been held two hours earlier. The facilitator, who did have the customary pocket-protector with three different colored pens in it, wore a crisp striped dress shirt and wool tie and cocoa-brown slacks, but no jacket or sportcoat. His shirtsleeves were not rolled up. His smile had a slight wincing quality, several members observed, as of some vague diffuse apology. Attached to the breast pocket on the same side of his shirt as his nametag was also a large pin or button emblazoned with the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connoted delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon communicated the sort of innocuous facial affect that was almost impossible not to smile back at or feel positive about in some way, and it had been commissioned and introduced by one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the regional Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate ownership and rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich breads and buns into sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack cakes and soft confections of nearly every conceivable kind; and without any particular messages or associations anyone in Demographics could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on, the crude line-drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and demonstrably successful brand icons in American advertising.

  Traffic was brisk on the street far below, and also trade.

  It was, however, not the Mister Squishy brand icon that concerned the carefully chosen and vetted Focus Groups on this bright cold November day in 1995. Currently in third-phase Focus Testing was a new and high-concept chocolate-intensive Mister Squishy-brand snack cake designed primarily for individual sale in convenience stores, with twelve-pack boxes to be placed in up-market food retail outlets first in the Midwest and upper East Coast and then, if the test-market data bore out Mister Squishy’s parent company’s hopes, nationwide.

  A total 27 of the snack cakes were piled in a pyramidal display on a large rotating silver tray in the center of the conference table. Each was wrapped in an airtight transpolymer material that looked like paper but tore like thin plastic, the same retail packaging that nearly all US confections had deployed since M&M Mars pioneered the composite and used it to help launch the innovative Milky Way Dark line in the late 1980s. This new product’s wrap had the familiar distinctive Mister Squishy navy-and-white design scheme, but here the Mister Squishy icon appeared with its eyes and mouth rounded in cartoon alarm behind a series of microtextured black lines that appeared to be the bars of a jail cell, around two of which lines or bars the icon’s plump and dough-colored fingers were curled in the universal position of inmates everywhere. The dark and exceptionally dense and moist-looking snack cakes inside the packaging were Felonies!®—a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack. The name’s association matrix included as well the suggestion of adulthood and adult autonomy: in its real-world rejection of the highly cute, cartoonish, n- and oo-intensive names of so many other snack cakes, the product tag ‘Felony!’ was designed and tested primarily for its appeal to the 18-39 Male demographic, the single most prized and fictile demotarget in high-end marketing. Only two of the present Focus Group’s members were over 40, and their profiles had been vetted not once but twice by Scott R. Laleman’s Technical Processing team during the intensive demographic/behavioral voir dire for which Team Δy Focus Group data was so justly prized.

  Inspired, according to agency rumor, by an R.S.B. Creative Director’s epiphanic encounter with something billed as Death by Chocolate in a Near North café, Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual
hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same. A domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered entirely in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin chocolate frosting manufactured with trace amounts of butter, cocoa butter, baker’s chocolate, chocolate liquor, vanilla extract, dextrose, and sorbitol (a relatively high-cost frosting, and one whose butter-redundancies alone required heroic innovations in production systems and engineering—an entire production line had had to be remachined and the lineworkers retrained and production and quality-assurance quotas recalculated more or less from scratch), which high-end frosting was then also injected by high-pressure confectionery needle into the 26 × 13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony!’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant- grade frosting whose central pocket—given that the thin coat of outer frosting’s exposure to the air caused it to assume traditional icing’s hard-yet-deliquescent marzipan character—seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agency Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double-blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development boys.)

  In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy’s snack cake production sequence and the complex adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. The relevant information was relayed in a skillfully orchestrated QA period, with many of the specified questions supplied by two ostensible members of the Targeted Focus Group who were in fact not civilian consumers at all but employees of Team Δy assigned to help orchestrate the unconventionally informative QA, and to observe the deliberations of the other twelve men once the facilitator left the room, taking care not to influence the Focus Group’s arguments or verdicts but later adding personal observations and impressions that would help round and flesh out the data provided by the Group Response Data Summary and the digital videotape supplied by what appeared to be a large smoke detector in the conference room’s northwest corner, whose lens and parabolic mike, while mobile and state-of-the-art, invariably failed to catch certain subtle nuances in individual affect as well as low-volume interchanges between adjoining members. One of the UAFs,* a slim young man with waxy blond hair and a complexion whose redness appeared more irritated than ruddy or hale, had been allowed by Team Δy’s UAF Coordinator to cultivate an eccentric and (to most Focus Group members) irritating set of personal mannerisms whose very conspicuousness served to disguise his professional identity: he had small squeeze bottles of both contact lens lubricant and intranasal saline before him on the table, and not only took written notes on the facilitator’s presentation but did so with a Magic Marker that squeaked loudly and had ink you could smell, and whenever he asked one of his preassigned questions he did not tentatively raise his hand or clear his throat as other UAFs were wont but rather simply tersely barked out, ‘Question:’, as in: ‘Question: is it possible to be more specific about what “natural and artificial flavors” means, and is there any substantive difference between what it really means and what the average consumer is expected to understand it to mean,’ without any sort of interrogative lilt or expression, his brow furrowed and rimless glasses very askew.

  As any decent small-set univariable probability distribution would predict, not all members of the Targeted Focus Group were attending closely to the facilitator’s explanation of what Mister Squishy and Team Δy hoped to achieve by leaving the Focus Group alone very shortly in camera to compare the results of their Individual Response Profiles and speak openly and without interference amongst themselves and attempt to come as close as possible to a unanimous univocal Group Response Data Summary of the product along sixteen different radial Preference and Satisfaction axes. A certain amount of this inattention was factored into the matrices of what the TFG’s facilitator had been informed was the actual test underway on today’s nineteenth floor. This secondary (or, ‘nested’) test sought quantifiable data on quote unquote Full-Access manufacturing and marketing information’s effects on Targeted Focus Groups’ perceptions of both the product and its corporate producer; it was a double-blind series, designed to be replicated along three different variable grids with random TFGs throughout the next two fiscal quarters, and sponsored by parties whose identities were being withheld from the facilitators as (apparently) part of the nested test’s conditions.

  Three of the Targeted Focus Group’s members were staring absently out the large tinted window that gave on a delicately muted sepia view of the street’s north side’s skyscrapers and, beyond and between these, different bits of the northeast Loop and harbor and several feet of severely foreshortened lake. Two of these members were very young men at the extreme left of the demotarget’s x axis who sat slumped in their tilted swivels in attitudes of either reverie or stylized indifference; the third was feeling absently at his upper lip’s little dent.

  The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator’s name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group’s fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign. A twelfth, by far the TFG’s oldest member, had the platinum fob of a quality pocketwatch running diagonally left-right across his vest and a big pink face and the permanent benevolent look in his eyes of someone older who had many grandchildren and spent so much time looking warmly at them that the expression becomes almost ingrained. Schmidt’s own grandfather had lived in a north Florida retirement community where he sat with a plaid blanket on his lap and coughed constantly both times Schmidt had ever been in his presence, addressing him only as Boy. Precisely 50% of the room’s men wore coats and ties or had suitcoats or blazers hanging from the back of their chairs, three of which coats were part of an actual three-piece business wardrobe; another three men wore combinations of knit shirts, slacks, and various crew- and turtleneck sweaters classifiable as Business Casual. Schmidt lived alone in a condominium he had recently refinanced. The remaining four men wore bluejeans and sweatshirts with the logo of either a university or the garment’s manufacturer; one was the Nike Swoosh icon that to Schmidt always looked somewhat Arabic. Three of the four men in conspicuously casual/sloppy attire were the Focus Group’s youngest members, two of whom were among the three making rather a show of not attending closely. Team Δy favored a loose demographic grid. Two of the three youngest men were under 21. All three of these youngest members sat back on their tailbones with their legs uncrossed and their hands spread out over their thighs and their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning. Schmidt’s initial undergraduate concentration had been in Statistical Chemistry; he still enjoyed the clinical precision of a lab. Less than 50% of the room’s total footwear involved laces. One man in a knit shirt had small brass zippers up the sides of low-cut boots that were shin
ed to a distracting gleam, another detail possessed of mnemonic associations for Schmidt. Unlike Terry Schmidt’s and Ron Mounce’s, Darlene Lilley’s own marketing background was in computer-aided design; she’d come into Research because she said she’d discovered she was really more of a people person at heart. There were four pairs of eyeglasses in the room, although one of these pairs were sunglasses and possibly not prescription, another with heavy black frames that gave their wearer’s face an earnest aspect above his dark turtleneck sweater. There were two mustaches and one probable goatee. A stocky man in his late twenties had a sort of sparse, mossy beard; it was indeterminable whether this man was just starting to grow a beard or whether he was the sort of person whose beard simply looked this way. Among the youngest men, it was obvious which were sincerely in need of a shave and which were just affecting an unshaved look. Two of the Focus Group’s members had the distinctive blink patterns of men wearing contact lenses in the conference room’s astringent air. Five of the men were more than 10% overweight, Terry Schmidt himself excluded. His high-school PE teacher had once referred to Terry Schmidt in front of his peers as the Crisco Kid, which he had laughingly explained meant fat in the can. Schmidt’s own father, a decorated combat veteran, had recently retired from a company that sold seed, nitrogen fertilizer, and broad-spectrum herbicides in downstate Galesburg. The affectedly eccentric UAF was asking the men on either side of him, one of whom was Hispanic, whether they’d perhaps care for a chewable vitamin C tablet. The Mister Squishy icon also reappeared in the conference room as the stylized finials of two fine beige or tan ceramic lamps on side tables at either end of the windowless interior wall. There were two African-American males in the Targeted Focus Group, one over 30, the one under 30 with a shaved head. Three of the men had hair classifiable as brown, two gray or salt/pepper, another three black (excluding the African-Americans and the Focus Group’s lone oriental, whose nametag and overwhelming cheekbones suggested either Laos or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—for complex but solid statistical reasons, Scott Laleman’s team’s Profile grids specified distributions for ethnicity but not national origin); three could be called blond or fair-haired. These distributions included the UAFs, and Schmidt felt he already had a good idea who this Group’s other UAF was. Rarely did R.S.B. Focus Groups include representatives of the very pale or freckled red-haired physical type, though Foote, Cone & Belding and D.D.B. Needham both made regular use of such types because of certain data suggesting meaningful connections between melanin quotients and continuous probability distributions of income and preference on the US East Coast, where over 70% of upmarket products tested. Some of the trendy hypergeometric techniques on which these data were based had been called into question by more traditional demographic statisticians, however.