The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Not to mention laid.’

  ‘Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that’s when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing.’

  ‘The first time was 7 Up with its Sgt. Pepper psychedelia and kids in sideburns and saying “the Uncola.”’

  ‘But wait. The sixties rebellion in lots of ways opposed the corporation and the military-industrial complex.’

  ‘The man in the gray flannel.’

  ‘What is gray flannel anyway? Has anybody ever seen anybody ever in gray flannel?’

  ‘The only flannel I’ve got is PJs, man.’

  ‘Is Mr. Glendenning even awake?’

  ‘He looks awful pale.’

  ‘Everybody looks pale in the dark, man.’

  ‘I mean is there any more total symbol of conformity and marching in lockstep than the corporation? Assembly lines and punching the clock and climbing the ladder to the corner office? You’ve done field audits at Rayburn-Thrapp, Gaines. Those guys can’t wipe their ass without a policy memo.’

  ‘But we’re not talking about the interior reality of the corporation. We’re talking about the face and voice the corporate advertisers start using in the late sixties to talk the customer into thinking he needs all this stuff. It starts talking about the customer’s psyche being in bondage to conformity and the way to break out of the conformity is not to do certain things but to buy certain things. You make buying a certain brand of clothes or pop or car or necktie into a gesture of the same level of ideological significance as wearing a beard or protesting the war.’

  ‘Virginia Slims and women’s libbers.’

  ‘Alka-Seltzer.’

  ‘I think the I’m-going-to-die connection slipped by me at some point here.’

  ‘I think Stuart’s tracing the move from the production-model of American democracy to something more like a consumption-model, where corporate production depends on a team approach whereas being a customer is a solo venture. That we’re turning into consuming citizens instead of producing citizens.’

  ‘Just wait sixteen quarters till ’84. Just wait for the tidal wave of ads and PR that promote this or that corporate product as the way to escape the gray 1984 totalitarianisms of the Orwellian present.’

  ‘How does buying one kind of typewriter instead of another help subvert government control?’

  ‘It won’t be government in a couple years, don’t you see?’

  ‘There won’t be typewriters, either. Everyone’ll have keyboards cabled into some sort of central VAX, and things won’t even have to be on paper anymore.’

  ‘The paperless office.’

  ‘Rendering Stu here obsolete.’

  ‘No, you’re missing the genius of it. It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’

  ‘But what role will government play in this 1984 scenario?’

  ‘Just as DeWitt said—the government will be the parent, with all the ambivalent love-hate-need-defy charges that surround the parent-figure in the mind of the adolescent, which in this case I’m respectfully disagreeing with DeWitt in the sense that I don’t think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony.’

  ‘We’ll be the cops they call when the party gets out of hand.’

  ‘You can see where it’s going. The extraordinary political apathy that followed Watergate and Vietnam and the institutionalization of grass-roots rebellion among minorities will only deepen. Politics is about consensus, and the advertising legacy of the sixties is that consensus is repression. Voting’ll be unhip: Americans now vote with their wallets. Government’s only cultural role will be as the tyrannical parent we both hate and need. Look for us to elect someone who can cast himself as a Rebel, maybe even a cowboy, but who deep down we’ll know is a bureaucratic creature who’ll operate inside the government mechanism instead of naively bang his head against it the way we’ve watched poor Jimmy do for four years.’

  ‘Carter represents the last gasp of true New Frontier sixties idealism, then. His obvious decency and his political impotence have been conjoined in the voter’s psyche.’

  ‘Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government—or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government—becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though paradoxically for this persona, to have weight the candidate’ll also have to be a creature of government, an Insider, with a flinty-eyed entourage of bureaucrats and implementers who we’ll be able to see can actually run the machine. Plus of course a massive campaign budget courtesy of guess who.’

  ‘We’re now very very very far afield from what I started out trying to describe as my thinking about taxpayers’ relation to government.’

  ‘This describes Reagan even better than Bush.’

  ‘The Reagan symbolism’s just too bold. This is just my opinion. Of course the marvelous thing for the Service about a possible Reagan presidency is that he’s already anti-tax on the record. Flat-out, no hedging. No rise in the tax rates—in fact in New Hampshire he went on record as wanting to lower marginal rates.’

  ‘This is good for the Service? Another politician trying to score points by trashing the tax system?’

  ‘My own view: I see a Bush-Reagan ticket. Reagan for symbolism, the Cowboy, Bush the quiet insider, doing the unsexy work of actual management.’

  ‘Not to mention his hike-defense-spending rhetoric. How are you going to lower marginal rates and increase defense spending?’

  ‘Even a child could see the contradiction in that.’

  ‘Stuart’s saying it’s good for the Service because lowering marginal rates but increasing spending can happen only if collection of tax is made more efficient.’

  ‘Meaning the reins are off. Meaning the Service’s quotas go up.’

  ‘But also meaning a quiet reduction in the constraints on our auditing and collection mechanisms. Reagan’ll set us up as the black-hatted rapacious Big Brother he secretly needs. We—the stitch-mouthed accountants in dull suits and thick specs, punching the keys on our adding machines—become the Government: the authority everyone gets to hate. Meanwhile Reagan triples the Service budget and makes technology and efficiency serious objectives. It’ll be the best era the Service has had since ’45.’

  ‘But meanwhile increasing taxpayers’ hatred of the Service.’

  ‘Which paradoxically, a Reagan would need. The Service’s more aggressive treatment of TPs, especially if it’s high-profile, would seem to keep in the electorate’s mind a fresh and eminently disposable image of Big Government that the Rebel Outsider President could continue to define himself against and decry as just the sort of government intrusion into the private lives and wallets of hardworking Americans he ran for the office to fight against.’

  ‘You’re saying the next president will be able to continue to define himself as an Outsider and Renegade when he’s actually in th
e White House?’

  ‘You’re still underestimating the taxpayers’ need for the lie, for the surface rhetoric they can keep telling themselves while deep down they can rest assured that Daddy’s in control and everyone’s still safe. The way adolescents make a big deal of rebelling against parental authority while they borrow the keys to Daddy’s car and use Daddy’s credit card to fill it with gas. The new leader won’t lie to the people; he’ll do what corporate pioneers have discovered works far better: He’ll adopt the persona and rhetoric that let the people lie to themselves.’

  ‘Let’s get back to how a Bush or Reagan would triple the Service budget for a second? Is this good for us on a District level? What are the implications for a Peoria or a Creve Coeur?’

  ‘Of course the marvelous double irony of the Reduce Government candidate is that he’s financed by the corporations that are the backs government tends to be the most oppressively on the back of. Corporations, as DeWitt pointed out, whose beady little brains are lit by nothing but net profit and expansion, and who we deep-down expect government to keep in check because we’re not equipped to resist their consumerist seductions by the strength of our own character, and whose appeal to the faux rebel is the modern rhetoric that’s going to get Bush-Reagan elected in the first place, and who are going to benefit enormously from the laissez-faire deregulation Bush-Reagan will enable the electorate to believe will be undertaken in their own populist interests—in other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified—they’re small and going to die, after all—’

  ‘Christ, the death thing again.’

  ‘—and whose terror of not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’

  §20

  The quiet, pleasant family two houses down from Lotwis (who was retired after thirty years of service in the County Recorder of Deeds) and his wife were then replaced by a single female of unknown background and occupation who had two large dogs that tended to make a lot of noise. That was all right. Lotwis had a dog of his own that barked a lot sometimes, and so did some of the other people in the neighborhood. The neighborhood was one where people’s dogs were going to bark behind their fences and people were sometimes going to burn their trash or keep junked cars in their yards. The neighborhood was now classed Semirural in the Recorder’s office, but in the Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson years it had been classed Subd. Class 2, a development class, in fact the city’s first recorded subdivision. It hadn’t taken off and gone upscale and spread like Hawthorne 1 and 2 or Yankee Ridge, built out in the seventies on repossessed farmland out east of town. It was twenty-eight houses on two perpendicular blacktop roads and had stayed that way, and the part of the city that spread out south to approach it was not upscale, it was light industry and some warehouses and seed concerns, and the only developments in terms of your basic housing out anywhere near were one large trailer park and one smaller one that hemmed the old subdivision in on the north and west; to the south was the interstate and serious farmland all the way to the pleasant little grain-town of Funk’s Grove thirteen miles south on 51. But so. Within sight if Lotwis was up on his roof tending to gutters or the screen on his chimney was an auto wrecker’s yard and Southtown Wholesale and Custom Meats, which was, when you cut through all the fancy language, a butcher’s. But so the folks that lived out here that the Lotwises had watched slowly move in and settle the neighborhood were folks with an independent streak that were willing to live out near trailer parks and a slaughterhouse and have a rural mailman who brought the mail in his own private car and leaned way over to get it in the boxes out by the street, all in return for the benefits of living in a Class 2 zone without hemmed-in houses and subheaded ordinances on burning your trash or having your washer’s outflow pipe empty into the gulley by the road or dogs with some spirit that were protective and barked up a storm at night.

  ‘I’m glad you said this,’ she said. Her name was Toni; she’d introduced herself when he came to her door. ‘Now I’ll know. If anything happens to these dogs. If they run off, or limp, or anything—I’ll kill you, your family, burn your house down, and sow salt. I have nothing to live for but these dogs. If they want to run they’re going to run. If you don’t like it you can take it up with me. But if anything gets done to these dogs I’ll decide it was you and I’ll sacrifice my life and freedom to destroy you and everyone you love.’

  So Lotwis just let her alone.

  §21

  Rubbing his eyes wearily. ‘So let me get this straight. On $218,000 of gross billing on your Schedule C you realize $37,000 net.’

  ‘It’s all documented. I’ve supplied all receipts and W-2s.’

  ‘Yes, the W-2s. We’ve got $175,471 in W-2s on sixteen employees—investigators, support personnel, research aides.’

  ‘It’s all right there. You’ve got copies of their returns.’

  ‘Except what I found striking is they’re all in terribly low marginal brackets. Terribly low-paid. Why not four or five employees highly paid?’

  ‘The logistics of my business are complex. Much of the work is low-paid but time-consuming.’

  ‘Except I dropped in on one of your researchers—a Mrs. Thelma Purler.’

  ‘Ulp.’

  ‘At the Oakhaven Assisted Living Center, where she resides.’

  ‘Ulp.’

  ‘In a wheelchair, with one of those old-fashioned ear horns even to hear your questions, and to which she replied—let me see’—checking his notes—‘Roodle, roodle roodle roodle.’

  ‘I um er.’

  Turning off his recorder, which has no tape in it.

  ‘So we’re looking at potential criminal fraud, which is CID and not my department. We could go talk to—or dig up—these other employees. You’ll go to jail. So here’s what we can do. You have a one-hour opportunity to fill out an amended 1040 for last year. On which you omit the employee salary deductions. You pay real tax due, plus penalties for underpayment and late filing. You proceed with an employee of this department to your bank, where you cut a cashier’s check for the total. At which time I destroy your original return, and the CID receives no referral.’

  §22

  I’m not sure I even know what to say. To be honest, a good bit of it I don’t remember. I don’t think my memory works in quite the way it used to. It may be that this kind of work changes you. Even just rote exams. It might actually change your brain. For the most part, it’s now almost as if I’m trapped in the present. If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything—I’d just taste the Tang.

  From what I understand, I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.

  I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’

  This was especially after high school, when I drifted for several years, in and out of three different colleges, one of them two different times, and four or five different majors. One of these might have been a minor. I was pretty much of a wastoid. Essentially, I had no motivation, which my father referred to as ‘initiative.’ Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I t
ook a lot of psychology and political science, literature. Classes where everything was fuzzy and abstract and open to interpretation and then those interpretations were open to still more interpretations. I used to write my class papers on the typewriter the day they were due, and usually I got some type of B with ‘Interesting in places’ or ‘Not too bad!’ written underneath the grade as an instructional comment. The whole thing was just going through the motions; it didn’t mean anything—even the whole point of the classes themselves was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. Except, of course, there was no argument about the fact that you had to turn in the papers, you had to go through the motions themselves, although nobody ever explained just why, what your ultimate motivation was supposed to be. I’m 99 percent sure that I took just one Intro Accounting class during all this time, and did all right in it until we hit depreciation schedules, as in the straight-line method vs. accelerated depreciation, and the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative, especially after I’d missed a couple of the classes and fallen behind, which with depreciation is fatal—and I ended up dropping that class and taking an incomplete. This was at Lindenhurst College—the later Intro class at DePaul had the same title but a somewhat different emphasis. I also remember that incompletes peeved my father quite a bit more than a low grade, understandably.

  I know three separate times during this unmotivated period I withdrew from college and tried working so-called real jobs. One was that I was a security guard for a parking garage on North Michigan, or taking tickets for events at the Liberty Arena, or briefly on the production line at a Cheese Nabs plant working the cheese product injector, or working for a company which made and installed gymnasium floors. Then, after a while, I couldn’t handle the boredom of the jobs, which were all unbelievably boring and meaningless, and I’d quit and enroll someplace else and essentially try to start college over again. My transcript looked like collage art. Understandably, this routine wore thin with my father, who was a cost systems supervisor for the City of Chicago—although during this time he lived in Libertyville, which is describable as an upper-bourgeois northern suburb. He used to say, dryly and with a perfectly straight face, that I was shaping up to be an outstanding twenty-yard-dash man. This was his way of squeezing my shoes. He read a great deal and was into dry, sardonic expressions. Although on one other occasion, after taking an incomplete or withdrawing somewhere and coming back home, I remember I was in the kitchen getting something to eat and heard him arguing with my mother and Joyce, telling them I couldn’t find my ass with both hands. That was the angriest I think I ever saw him get during this unfocused period. I don’t remember the exact context, but knowing how dignified and essentially reserved my father usually was, I’m sure I must have just done something especially feckless or pathetic to provoke him. I don’t remember my mother’s response or exactly how I came to overhear the remark, as eavesdropping on your parents seems like something that only a much smaller child would do.