Oblivion: Stories

Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each other’s air; the Cavalier’s glass surfaces were almost entirely steamed over.

The large room smelled powerfully of bodies and hot food.

The fliptop stenographer’s notebook was partly for effect, but it was also what Skip Atwater had gotten in the habit of using out in the field for background at the start of his career, and its personal semiotics and mojo were profound; he was comfortable with it. He was, as a matter of professional persona, old school and low tech.

and which has also historically dominated this entire region of the rain forest and exacted tribute from all the other villages, this both because their warriors are so fierce and because their autocratic shaman is extremely ancient and politically astute and merciless and frightening and is universally regarded as being at the very least in league

was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing.

Those days were now behind her, but they were still part of who the executive intern was.

There was something essentially soul killing about the print of the vegetable head clown that had made Atwater want to turn it to the wall, but it was bolted or glued and could not be moved. It was really on there, and Atwater now was trying to consider whether hanging a bath towel or something over it would or would not perhaps serve to draw emoti

Atwater, trained originally as a background man for news dailies, constructed his own WITW pieces by pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous waterfall of prose which was then filtered more and more closely down to 400 words of commercial sediment.

The whole agency was one big ballet of fraudulence and of manipulating people’s images of your ability to manipulate images, a virtual hall of mirrors.