IJ study archive

the attaché's wife finds him

quote

eventually and naturally she—noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very positive, ecstatic, even, you could say—she eventually and naturally turning her head and following his line of sight to the cartridge-viewer.

Context

Contagion by sightline, and the grammar does the killing. The wife rushes to her ruined husband, gets no response, and then — "eventually and naturally," the phrase repeated like a law of physics — turns to follow his gaze to the screen. There is no struggle in it, no warning heeded; the doom is transmitted along a line of sight as inevitably as water finding level, and Wallace stages the transmission entirely through that flat adverbial pair. The rictus that is "ecstatic, even" is the tell she should read and instead obeys: his face is the ad for the thing that destroyed him, and she reads the ad and turns to look at the product. Curiosity, here, is not a choice but a reflex the Entertainment can count on.

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