Oblivion: Stories

The Sleep specialist (or, ‘Somnologist’) in charge of our case, a large, mild mannered, burly, heavily set fellow with a lead colored crew cut and what appeared to be an extraordinary number of keys on a promotional ‘Parke Davis, Inc.’ key ring—his manner pleasant in the neutral, subdued and punctilious way of morticians and certain types of Hortic

The fitness center’s sonic environment was basically one large, complex, and rhythmic pneumatic clank.

The large room smelled powerfully of bodies and hot food.

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

One or two fingers of cirrus were now in the sky overhead.

In what everyone at the next day’s working lunch would agree was a masterstroke, the special limousine that arrived at 5:00 AM Wednesday to convey the artist and his wife to Chicago was like something out of a Style reader’s dream. Half a city block long, white the way cruise ships and bridal gowns are white, it had a television and wet bar, opposi

Of the room’s three youngest men, none were attending closely, and two were still established in postures and facial configurations designed to make this apparent.

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.

By which point the village’s whole social structure and citizenry, from exarch to lumpen, is in an uproar of cultural disorientation and anxiety and antichild sentiment, an hysteria abetted at every turn by the consultant caste, most of whom are now of course out of work because of the metamorphic changes in the child’s mode or style of answering q