David Wallace - Oblivion

‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was standing next to the trayless fax machine, and the editorial intern who had regaled the previous day’s working lunch with the intracunnilingual flatus vignette was seated at the other WITW salaryman’s console a few feet away. Today the editorial intern — whose first name also happened to be Laurel, and who was a particularly close friend and protégé of Ellen Bactrian — wore a Gaultier skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck of very soft looking ash gray cashmere.

‘Your own saliva,’ said Laurel Manderley. ‘You’re swallowing it all the time. Is it disgusting to you? No. But now imagine gradually filling up a juice glass or something with your own saliva, and then drinking it all down.’

‘That really is disgusting,’ the editorial intern admitted.

‘But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes gross.’

‘Are you suggesting it’s somehow the same thing with poo?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think with poo, it’s more like as long as it’s inside us we don’t think about it. In a way, poo only becomes poo when it’s excreted. Until then, it’s more like a part of you, like your inner organs.’

‘It’s maybe the same way we don’t think about our organs, our livers and intestines. They’re inside all of us —’

‘They are us. Who can live without intestines?’

‘But we still don’t want to see them. If we see them, they’re automatically disgusting.’

Laurel Manderley kept touching at the side of her nose, which felt naked and somewhat creepily smooth. She also had the kind of sick headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even woozier. She said: ‘But partly we don’t like seeing them because if they’re visible, that means there’s something wrong, there’s a hole or some kind of damage.’

‘But we also don’t even want to think about them,’ the other Laurel said. ‘Who sits there and goes, Now the salad I ate an hour ago is entering my intestines, now my intestines are pulsing and squeezing and moving the material along?’

‘Our hearts pulse and squeeze, and we don’t mind thinking about our heart.’

‘But we don’t want to see it. We don’t even want to see our blood. We faint dead away.’

‘Not menstrual blood, though.’

‘True. I was thinking more of like a blood test, seeing the blood in the tube. Or getting a cut and seeing the blood come out.’

‘Menstrual blood is disgusting, but it doesn’t make you lightheaded,’ Laurel Manderley said almost to herself, her large forehead crinkled with thought. Her hands felt as though they were shaking even though she knew no one else could see it.

‘Maybe menstrual blood is ultimately more like poo. It’s a waste thing, and disgusting, but it’s not wrong that it’s all of a sudden outside of you and visible, because the whole point is that it’s supposed to get out, it’s something you want to get rid of.’

‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Your skin isn’t disgusting to you, right?’

‘Sometimes my skin’s pretty disgusting.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

The other editorial intern laughed. ‘I know. I was just kidding.’

‘Skin’s outside of us,’ Laurel Manderley continued. ‘We see it all the time and there’s no problem. It’s even aesthetic sometimes, as in so and so’s got beautiful skin. But now imagine, say, a foot square section of human skin, just sitting there on a table.’

‘Eww.’

‘Suddenly it becomes disgusting. What’s that about?’

The editorial intern recrossed her legs. The ankles above her slingback Jimmy Choos were maybe ever so slightly on the thick side, but she had on the sort of incredibly fine and lovely silk hose that you’re lucky to be able to wear even once without totally ruining them. She said: ‘Maybe again because it implies some kind of injury or violence.’

The fax’s incoming light still had not lit. ‘It seems more like the skin is decontextualized.’ Laurel Manderley felt along the side of her nostril again. ‘You decontextualize it and take it off the human body and suddenly it’s disgusting.’

‘I don’t even like thinking about it, to be honest.’

‘I’m just telling you I don’t like it.’

‘Between you and I, I’d say I’m starting to agree. But it’s out of our hands now, as they say.’

‘You’re saying you’d maybe prefer it if I hadn’t gone to Miss Flick with them,’ Laurel Manderley said on the telephone. It was late Tuesday afternoon. At certain times, she and Atwater used the name Miss Flick as a private code term for Ellen Bactrian.

‘There was no other way to pitch it, I know. I know that,’ Skip Atwater responded. ‘Whatever’s to blame is not that. You did what I think I would have asked you to do myself if I’d had my wits about me.’ Laurel Manderley could hear the whispery whisk of his waist level fist. He said: ‘Whatever culpability is mine,’ which did not make that much sense to her. ‘Somewhere some core part of it got past me on this one, I think.’

The Style journalist had been seated on the bed’s edge on a spread out towel, checking the status of his injured knee. In the privacy of his motel room, Atwater was sans blazer and the knot of his necktie was loosened. The room’s television was on, but it was tuned to the Spectravision base channel where the same fragment of song played over and over and the recorded voice of someone who was not Mrs. Gladys Hine welcomed you to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn and invited you to press Menu in order to see options for movies, games, and a wide variety of in room entertainment, over and over; and Atwater had evidently misplaced the remote control (which in Holiday Inns tends to be very small) required for changing the channel or at the very least muting it. The left leg of his slacks was rolled neatly up to a point above the knee, every second fold reversed to prevent creasing. The television was a nineteen inch Symphonic on a swiveling base that was attached to the blondwood dresser unit facing the bed. It was the same second floor room he had checked into on Sunday — Laurel Manderley had somehow gotten Accounting to book the room straight through even though Atwater had spent the previous night in a Courtyard by Marriott on Chicago’s near north side, for which motel the freelance photographer was even now bound, at double his normal daily rate, in preparation for tomorrow’s combined coverage spectacle.

On the wall above the room’s television was a large framed print of someone’s idea of a circus clown’s face and head constructed wholly out of vegetables. The eyes were olives and the lips peppers and the cheeks’ spots of color small tomatoes, for example. Repeatedly, on both Sunday and today, Atwater had imagined some occupant of the room suffering a stroke or incapacitating fall and having to lie on the floor looking up at the painting and listening to the base channel’s nine second message over and over, unable to move or cry out or look away. 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.

‘Because that’s the only reason. I thought you knew she’d sent them.’

‘And if I’d called in on time as I should have, we’d both have known and there would have been no chance of misunderstanding.’