David Wallace - Oblivion

On the same coffee table between them, beside the magazines and tape recorder and a small vase of synthetic marigolds, were three artworks allegedly produced through ordinary elimination by Mr. Brint F. Moltke. The pieces varied slightly in size, but all were arresting in their extraordinary realism and the detail of their craftsmanship — although one of Atwater’s notes was a reminder to himself to consider whether a word like craftsmanship really applied in such a case. The sample pieces were the very earliest examples that Mrs. Moltke said she’d been able to lay hands on; they had been out on the table when Atwater arrived. There were literally scores more of the artworks arranged in vaguely familiar looking glass cases in the unattached storm cellar out back, an environment that seemed strangely perfect, though Atwater had seen immediately how difficult the storm cellar would be for any of Style’ s photographers to light and shoot properly. By 11:00 AM, he was mouthbreathing due to hay fever.

Mrs. Moltke periodically fanned at herself in a delicate way and said she did believe it might rain.

When Atwater and his brother had been in the eighth grade, the father of a family just up the road in Anderson had run a length of garden hose from his vehicle’s exhaust pipe to the interior and killed himself in the home’s garage, after which the son in their class and everyone else in the family had gone around with a strange fixed smile that had seemed both creepy and courageous; and something in the hydraulics of Brint Moltke’s smile on the davenport reminded Skip Atwater of the Haas family’s smile.

Omitted through oversight above: Nearly every Indiana community has some street, lane, drive, or easement named for Wendell L. Willkie, b. 1892, GOP, favorite son.

The recorder’s tiny tape’s first side had been almost entirely filled by Skip Atwater answering Mrs. Moltke’s initial questions. It had become evident pretty quickly whose show this was, in terms of any sort of piece, on their end. Chewing a piece of gum with tiny motions of her front teeth in the distinctive Indiana style, Mrs. Moltke had requested information on how any potential article would be positioned and when it was likely to run. She had asked about word counts, column inches, boxes, leader quotes, and shared templates. Hers was the type of infantly milky skin on which even the lightest contact would leave some type of blotch. She had used terms like conferral, serial rights, and sic vos non vobis, which latter Skip did not even know. She had high quality photographs of some of the more spectacular artworks in a leatherette portfolio with the Moltkes’ name and address embossed on the cover, and Atwater was asked to provide a receipt for the portfolio’s loan.

The tape’s second side, however, contained Mr. Brint Moltke’s own first person account of how his strange and ambivalent gift had first come to light, which emerged — the account did — after Atwater had phrased his query several different ways and Amber Moltke had finally asked the journalist to excuse them and removed her husband into one of the home’s rear rooms, where they took inaudible counsel together while Atwater circumspectly chewed the remainder of his ice. The result was what Atwater later, in his second floor room at the Holiday Inn, after showering, applying crude first aid to his left knee, and struggling unsuccessfully to move or reverse the room’s excruciating painting, had copied into his steno as certainly usable in some part or form for deep background/UBA, particularly if Mr. Moltke, who had appeared to warm to the task or at least to come somewhat alive, could be induced to repeat its substance on record in a sanitized way:

‘It was on a field exercise in basic [training in the US Army, in which Moltke later saw action in Kuwait as part of a maintenance crew in Operation Desert Storm], and the fellows on shitter [latrine, hygienic] detail — [latrine] detail is they soak the [military unit’s solid wastes] in gas and burn it with a [flamethrower] — and up the [material] goes and in the fire one of the fellows saw something peculiar there in amongst the [waste material] and calls the sergeant over and they kick up a [fuss] because at first they’re thinking somebody tossed something in the [latrine] for a joke, which is against regs, and the sergeant said when he found out who it was he was going to crawl up inside the [responsible party’s] skull and look out his eyeholes, and they made the [latrine] detail [douse] the fire and get it [the artwork] out and come to find it weren’t a[n illicit or unpatriotic object], and they didn’t know whose [solid waste] it was, but I was pretty sure it was mine [because subj. then reports having had prior experiences of roughly same kind, which renders entire anecdote more or less pointless, but could foreseeably be edited out or massaged].’

3.

The Mount Carmel Holiday Inn regretfully had neither scanner nor fax for guests’ outgoing use, Atwater had been informed at the desk by a man whose blazer was nearly identical to his own.

Temperatures had fallen and the sodium streetlights come on by themselves as Skip Atwater drove the artist and his spouse home from Ye Olde Country Buffet with a styrofoam box of leavings for a dog he’d seen no sign of; and the great elms and locusts were beginning to yaw and two thirds of the sky to be stacked with enormous muttering masses of clouds that moved in and out of themselves as if stirred by a great unseen hand. Mrs. Moltke was in the back seat, and there was a terrible noise as the car hit the driveway’s grade. Blinds that had been open on the duplex’s other side were now closed, though there was still no vehicle in that side’s drive. The other side’s door had a US flag as well. As was also typical of severe weather conditions in the area, a gray luminescence to the light made everything appear greasy and unreal. The rear of the artist’s company van listed a toll free number to dial if one had any concerns about the employee’s driving.

It had emerged that the nearest Kinko’s was in the nearby community of Scipio, which was only a dozen miles east on SR 252 but could be somewhat confusing to get around in because of indifferent signage. Scipio evidently also had a Wal Mart. It was Amber Moltke who suggested that they leave the artist to watch his Sunday Reds game in peace the way he liked to and proceed together in Atwater’s rented Chevrolet to that Kinko’s, and decide together which photos to scan in and forward, and to also go on and talk turkey in more depth respecting Skip’s article on the Moltkes for Style. Atwater, whose fear of the region’s weather was amply justified by childhood experience, was unsure about either driving or using the Moltke’s land line to call Laurel Manderley during an impending storm that he was pretty sure would show up at least yellow on Doppler radar — though on the other hand he was not all that keen about returning to his room at the Holiday Inn, whose wall had an immovable painting of a clown that he found almost impossible to look at — and the journalist ended up watching half an inning of the first Cincinnati Reds game he had seen in a decade while sitting paralyzed with indecision on the Moltkes’ davenport.

Besides the facts that she walked without moving her arms and in general reminded him unpleasantly of the girl in Election, the core reason why Atwater feared and avoided Ellen Bactrian was that Laurel Manderley had once confided to Atwater that Ellen Bactrian — who had been in madrigals with Laurel Manderley for a year of their overlap at Wellesley, and at the outset of Laurel’s internship more or less took the younger woman under her wing — had told her that in her opinion Skip Atwater was not really quite as spontaneous a person as he liked to seem. Nor was Atwater stupid, and he was aware that his being so disturbed over what Ellen Bactrian apparently thought of him was possible evidence that she might actually have him pegged, that he might be not only shallow but at root a kind of poseur. It was not exactly the nicest thing Laurel Manderley had ever done, and part of the fallout was that she was now in a position where she had to act as a sort of human shield between Atwater and Ellen Bactrian, who was responsible for a lot of the day to day administration of WHAT IN THE WORLD; and to be honest, it was a situation that Atwater sometimes exploited, and used Laurel’s guilt over her indiscretion to get her to do things or to use her personal connections with Ellen Bactrian in ways that weren’t altogether right or appropriate. The whole thing could sometimes get extremely complicated and awkward, but Laurel Manderley for the most part simply bowed to the reality of a situation she had helped create, and accepted it as a painful lesson in respecting certain personal lines and boundaries that turned out to be there for a reason and couldn’t be crossed without inevitable consequences. Her father, who was the sort of person who had favorite little apothegms that could sometimes get under one’s skin with constant repetition, liked to say, ‘Education is expensive,’ and Laurel Manderley felt she was now starting to understand how little this saying had really to do with tuition or petty complaint.