David Wallace - Oblivion

At various intervals throughout the pre-GRDS presentation the limbic portions of Schmidt’s brain pursued this line of thinking — while in fact a whole other part of his mind surveyed these memories and fantasies and was simultaneously fascinated and repelled at the way in which all these thoughts and feelings could be entertained in total subjective private while Schmidt ran the Focus Group through its brief and supposedly Full-Access description of Mister Squishy’s place in the soft-confection industry and some of the travails of developing and marketing what these men were experiencing as Felonies! (referring offhandedly to nascent plans for bite-sized misdemeanors! [ sic ] if the original product established a foothold), at least half the room’s men listening with what’s called half an ear while pursuing their own private lines of thought, and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and — knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he’d watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg’s cap’s public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other’s arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc’s of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus and yet at the same time still believed that they could (= the bright young men could) begin to manifest their larger potential for impact and effectiveness by being the very best darn Targeted Focus Group facilitator that Team Δy and R.S.B. had ever seen, better than the nested-test data they’d seen so far had shown might even be possible, establishing via manifest candor and integrity and a smooth informal rhetoric that let their own very special qualities manifest themselves and shine forth such a level of connection and intimacy with a Focus Group that the TFG’s men or women felt, within the special high-voltage field of the relationship the extraordinary facilitator created, an interest in and enthusiasm for the product and for R.S.B.’s desire to bring the product out into the US market in the very most effective way that matched or even exceeded the agency’s own. Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium’s picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley’s home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day’s crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep again once more. Schmidt was sensitive about the way his weight and body fat percentage increased with each passing year, and imagined that there was something about the way he walked that suggested a plump or prissy fat man’s waddle, when in fact his stride was 100 % average and unremarkable and nobody except Terry Schmidt had any opinions about his manner of walking one way or the other. Sometimes over this last quarter, when shaving in the morning with WLS News and Talk Radio on over the intercom, he stopped — Schmidt did — and would look at his face and at the faint lines and pouches that seemed to grow a little more pronounced each quarter and would call himself, directly to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy, the name would come unbidden into his mind, and despite his attempts to ignore or resist it the large subsidiary’s name and logo had become the dark part of him’s latest taunt, so that when he thought of himself now it was as something he called Mister Squishy, and his own face and the plump and wholly innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude and line-drawn and clever in a small way, a design that someone might find some small selfish use for but could never love or hate or ever care to truly even know.

Some of the shoppers inside the first-floor display window of the Gap observed the mass of people on the sidewalk craning upward and wondered, naturally, what was up. At the base of the eighth floor, the figure shifted himself carefully around so that he was seated on the ledge facing outward with his bicolored legs adangle. He was 238 feet up in the air. The square of sky directly above him a pilot-light blue. The growing crowd watching the figure’s climb could not discern that there was in turn a growing collection of shoppers inside looking out at them because the building’s glass, which appeared tinted on the inside, was reflective on the outside; it was One Way Glass. The figure now crossed his legs lotus-style on the ledge beneath him, paused, and then in one lithe movement drove himself upright, losing his balance slightly and windmilling his arms to keep from pitching forward off the ledge altogether. There was a brief group-exhalation from the sidewalk’s crowd as the figure now snapped its hooded head back and with a tiny distant wet noise affixed the suction cup at his head’s rear to the window. A couple young men in the crowd cried up at the eighth floor for the figure to jump, but their tone was self-ironic and it was plain that they were simply parodying the typical cry of jaded onlookers to a figure balanced on a slim ledge 240 feet up in a high wind and looking down at a crowd on the plaza’s sidewalk far below. Still, one or two much older people shot optical daggers at the youths who’d shouted; it was unclear whether they knew what self-parody even was. Inside the window of the building’s north facet’s eighth floor — which space happened to comprise the circulation and subscription departments of Playboy magazine — the employees’ reaction to the sight of the back of a lithe blue-and-white figure attached to the window by a large suction cup on its head can only be imagined. It was the Gap’s floor manager in Accessories who first called the police, and this merely because the press of customers at the window’s display clearly bespoke some kind of disturbance on the street outside; and because the nature of that disturbance was unknown, none of the roving television vans who monitored the city’s police frequencies were alerted, and the scene remained media-free for a good 1500 feet in every direction.