The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. ‘True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers.’ His tone was wholly matter-of-fact. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how many words he’d spoken since that 8,206th one at the conclusion of the review. I was aware of how every detail in the classroom appeared very vivid and distinct, as though painstakingly drawn and shaded, and yet also of being completely focused on the substitute Jesuit, who was saying all this very dramatic or even romantic stuff without any of the usual trappings or flourishes of drama, standing now quite still with his hands again behind his back (I knew the hands weren’t clasped—I could somehow tell that he was more like holding the right wrist with the left hand) and his face’s planes unshadowed in the white light. It felt as though he and I were at opposite ends of some kind of tube or pipe, and that he really was addressing me in particular—although obviously in reality he couldn’t have been. The literal reality was that he was addressing me least of all, since obviously I wasn’t enrolled in Advanced Tax or getting ready to take the final and then go home and sit at my childhood desk in my old bedroom in my parents’ house cramming for the dreaded CPA exam the way it sounded as if many of these others in the room were. Nevertheless—as I wish I’d been able to understand earlier, since it would have saved me a lot of time and cynical drifting—a feeling is a feeling, nor can you argue with results.

  Anyhow, meanwhile, in what essentially seemed to be a recapitulation of his main points so far, the substitute said, ‘True heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man. In fact,’ he said, ‘the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine.’ It seemed then that a sudden kind of shudder went through the room, or maybe an ecstatic spasm, communicating itself from senior accounting major or graduate business student to senior accounting major or grad business student so rapidly that the whole collective seemed for an instant to heave—although, again, I am not a hundred percent sure this was real, that it took place outside of me, in the actual classroom, and the (possible) collective spasm’s moment was too brief to be more than sort of fleetingly aware of it. I also remember having a strong urge to lean over and tie my boots’ laces, which never translated itself into real action.

  At the same time, it might be fair to say that I remembered the substitute Jesuit as using pauses and bits of silence rather the way more conventional inspirational speakers use physical gestures and expressions. He said, ‘To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting—this is heroism. To attend fully to the interests of the client and to balance those interests against the high ethical standards of FASB and extant law—yea, to serve those who care not for service but only for results—this is heroism. This may be the first time you’ve heard the truth put plainly, starkly. Effacement. Sacrifice. Service. To give oneself to the care of others’ money—this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor. Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later—the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’

  One of the accounting students now raised his hand, and the substitute paused to answer a question about adjusted cost basis in the tax classification of gifts. It was at some point in his answer to this that I heard the substitute use the phrase ‘IRS wiggler.’ Since that day, I have never once heard the term anywhere outside of the Examination Center at which I’m posted—it is a piece of Service insider shorthand for a certain class of examiner. In retrospect, then, this definitely should have raised a red flag in terms of the substitute’s experience and background. (By the way, the term ‘FASB’ stood for Financial Accounting Standards Board, though obviously I would not learn this until entering the Service the following year.) Also, I should probably acknowledge an obvious paradox in the memory—despite how attentive and affected by his remarks about courage and the real world I was, I was not aware that the drama and scintillance I was investing the substitute’s words with actually ran counter to those words’ whole thrust. That is to say, I was deeply affected and changed by the hortation without, as it now appears, really understanding what he was talking about. In retrospect, this seems like further evidence that I was even more ‘lost’ and unaware than I knew.

  ‘Too much, you say?’ he said. ‘Cowboy, paladin, hero? Gentlemen, read your history. Yesterday’s hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers—he penetrated, tamed, hewed, shaped, made, brought things into being. Yesterday’s society’s heroes generated facts. For this is what society is—an agglomeration of facts.’ (Obviously, the more real Advanced Tax students who gingerly got up and left, the more my feelings of being particularly, uniquely addressed increased. The older business student with two lush, perfectly trimmed sideburns and incredible notes beside me was able to close his briefcase’s metal clasps without any sound at all. On the wire rack beneath his desk was a Wall Street Journal that he’d either not read or had perhaps been able to read and refold so perfectly it looked untouched.) ‘But it is now today’s era, the modern era,’ the substitute was saying (which was difficult to argue with, obviously). ‘In today’s world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing. Gentlemen, you aspire to hold the knife. Wield it. To admeasure. To shape each given slice, the knife’s angle and depth of cut.’ However transfixed I still was, I was also aware, by this point, that the substitute’s metaphors seemed to be getting a bit jumbled—it was hard to imagine the remaining orientals making much sense of cowboys and pies, since they were such specifically American images. He went to the flag-stand in the corner of the room and retrieved his hat, a dark-gray business fedora, old but very well cared for. Instead of putting the hat on, he held it up aloft.

  ‘A baker wears a hat,’ he said, ‘but it is not our hat. Gentlemen, prepare to wear the hat. You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed, in the codified form in which it’s apposite. You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. It is you—tell them that. Who ride, man the walls, define the pie, serve.’ There was no way not to notice how different he looked now from the way he’d appeared at the beginning. Ultimately, it wasn’t clear whether he’d planned or prepared his final hortation or exhortation or not, or whether he was just speaking passionately from the heart. His hat was noticeably more stylish and European-looking than my father’s had been, its welt sharper and band’s feather pegged—it had to be at least twenty years old. When he raised his arms in conclusion, one hand still held the hat—

  ‘Gentlemen, you are called to account.’

  One or two of the remaining students clapped, a somehow terrible sound when it’s only a few scattered hands—like a spanking or series of ill-tempered slaps. I remember having a visual flash of something lying in its crib and wavin
g its limbs uselessly in the air, its mouth open and wet. And then of walking back across the transom and down and out of Daniel and over to the library in a strange kind of hyperaware daze, both disoriented and very clear, and then the memory of that incident essentially ends.

  After that, the first thing I can remember doing over the holiday recess in Libertyville was getting a haircut. I also then went to Carson Pirie Scott’s in Mundelein and bought a dark-gray ventless wool suit with a tight vertical weave and double-pleat trousers, as well as a bulky box-plaid jacket with wide notched lapels, which I ended up almost never wearing, as it had a tendency to roll at the third button and produce what almost looked like a peplum when it was buttoned all the way. I also bought a pair of Nunn Bush leather wing tips and three dress shirts—two white oxfords and one light-blue sea island weave. All three collars were of the button-down type.

  Except for practically dragging my mother to Wrigleyville for Christmas dinner at Joyce’s, I spent nearly the whole holidays in the house, researching options and requirements. I remember I was also deliberately trying to do some sustained, concentrated thinking. My inner feelings about school and graduating had totally changed. I now felt suddenly and totally behind. It was a bit like the feeling of suddenly looking at your watch and realizing you’re late for an appointment, but on a much larger scale. I had only one term left now before I was supposed to graduate, and I was exactly nine required courses short of a major in accounting, to say nothing of trying to sit for the CPA exam. I bought a Barron’s guide to the CPA exam at a Waldenbooks in the Galaxy Mall off of Milwaukee Road. It was given three times a year, and it lasted two days, and you were strongly advised to have had both intro and intermediate financial accounting, managerial accounting, two semesters of auditing, business statistics—which, at DePaul, was another famously brutal class—intro data processing, one or preferably two semesters of tax, plus either fiduciary accounting or accounting for nonprofits, and one or more semesters of economics. A fine-print insert also recommended proficiency in at least one ‘high-level’ computer language like COBOL. The only computer class I’d ever finished was Intro Computer World at UI-Chicago, where we’d mostly played homemade Pong and helped the prof try to recollate 51,000 Hollerith punch cards he’d stored data for a project on and then accidentally dropped on a slick stairway. And so on and so forth. Plus, I looked at a business-stats textbook and discovered that you needed calculus, and I hadn’t even had trigonometry—in my senior year of high school, I’d taken Perspectives on Modern Theater instead of trig, which I well remembered my father squeezing my shoes about. Actually, my hatred of Algebra II and refusal to take any more math after that was the occasion for one of the really major arguments that I heard my parents have in the years before they separated, which is all kind of a long story, but I remember overhearing my father saying that there were only two kinds of people in the world—namely, people who actually understood the technical realities of how the real world worked (via, his obvious point was, math and science), and people who didn’t—and overhearing my mother being very upset and depressed at what she saw as my father’s rigidity and small-mindedness, and her responding that the two basic human types were actually the people so rigid and intolerant that they believed there were only two basic human types, on one side, versus people who believed that there were all different types and varieties of people with their own unique gifts and destinies and paths through life that they had to find, on the other, and so forth. Anyone eavesdropping on the argument, which had started as a typical exchange but escalated into an especially heated one, could quickly tell that the real conflict was between what my mother saw as two extremely different, incompatible ways of seeing the world and treating the people you were supposed to love and support. For instance, it was during this argument that I overheard my father say the thing about my being unable to find my ass even if it had a large bell attached to it, which my mother heard mainly as him passing cold, rigid judgment on somebody he was supposed to love and support, but which, in retrospect, I think might have been the only way my father could find to say that he was worried about me, that I had no initiative or direction, and that he didn’t know what to do as a father. As is well-known, parents can have vastly different ways of expressing love and concern. Of course, much of my interpretation is just speculative—there’s obviously no way to know what he really meant.

  Anyhow, the upshot of all my concentrated thinking and research over the holiday recess was that it looked as though I would basically have to start college all over again, and I was then almost twenty-four. And the financial situation at home was in total flux due to the complex legalities of the wrongful death suit that was under way at the time.

  As a side note, there was no amount of alteration that could have made my father’s suits fit me. At that time, I was a 40L/30 with a 34 inseam, whereas the bulk of my father’s suits were 36R/36/30. The suits and archaic silk blazer ended up being given to Goodwill after Joyce and I cleaned out most of his things from his closet and study and workshop, which was a very sad experience. My mother, as mentioned, was spending more and more time watching the neighborhood birds at the tube feeders which she’d hung around the front porch and the standing feeders in the yard—my father’s house’s living room had a large picture window with an excellent view of the porch, yard, and street—and often wearing a red chenille robe and large fuzzy slippers all day, and neglecting both her normal interests and personal grooming, which increasingly worried everyone.

  After the holidays, just as it was beginning to snow, I made an appointment to speak with DePaul’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (who was definitely a real Jesuit, and wore the official black-and-white uniform, and also had a yellow ribbon tied to the knob of his office door) about the experience in Advanced Tax and the turnaround in my direction and focus, and about now being so behind in terms of that focus, and to broach the possibility of maybe continuing my enrollment an extra year with deferred tuition in order to help make up some of my deficits in terms of an accounting major. But it was awkward, because I had actually been in this father’s office before, two or three years prior, under, to put it mildly, very different circumstances—namely, getting my shoes squeezed and being threatened with academic probation, in response to which I think I may actually have said, aloud, ‘Whatever,’ which is the sort of thing that Jesuits do not take kindly to. Thus, in this appointment the Associate Dean’s demeanor was patronizing and skeptical, and amused—he seemed to find the change in my appearance and stated attitude more comical than anything else, as if he regarded it as a prank or joke, or some kind of ploy to try to buy myself one more year before having to go out and fend for myself in what he termed ‘the world of men,’ and there was no way to adequately describe for him the awarenesses and conclusions I’d come to while watching daytime television and then later bumbling into the wrong final class without sounding childish or insane, and essentially I was shown the door.

  This was in early January 1979, on the day it was just beginning to snow—I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train through the window of the CTA commuter line from Lincoln Park back up to Libertyville, and thinking, ‘This is my crude approximation of a human life.’ As far as I recall, the yellow ribbons all over the city were because of the hostage trouble in the Mideast and the assault on US embassies. I knew very little about what was going on, partly because I had not watched any TV since that experience in mid-December with the soccer ball and As the World Turns. It is not as though I made any conscious decision to renounce television after that time. I just cannot remember watching any after that day. Also, after the pre-holiday experiences, I now felt far too far behind to be able to afford to waste time watching TV. Part of me was frightened that I’d actually become galvanized and motivated too late and was somehow going to just at the last minute ‘miss’ some crucial chance to renounce nihilism and make
a meaningful, real-world choice. This was also all taking place during what emerged as the worst blizzard in the modern history of Chicago, and at the start of the Spring ’79 term, everything was in chaos because DePaul’s administration kept having to cancel classes because no one who lived off-campus could guarantee they could get in to school, and half of the dorms couldn’t reopen yet because of frozen pipes, and part of my father’s house’s roof cracked because of the weight of accumulated snow and there was a big structural crisis that I got stuck dealing with because my mother was too obsessed with the logistical problems of keeping the snow from covering up all the birdseed she left out. Also, most of the CTA trains were out of service, and buses were abruptly canceled if it was determined that the plows couldn’t keep certain roads clear, and every morning of that first week I had to get up very early and listen to the radio to see if DePaul was even having classes that day, and if they were, I’d have to try to slog in. I should mention that my father didn’t drive—he’d been a devotee of public transportation—and my mother had given Joyce the Le Car as part of the arrangement they made regarding the dissolution of the bookstore, so there was no car, although occasionally I could get rides from Joyce, although I hated to impose—she was over there mostly to look in on my mother, who was obviously in a decline, and about whom we were all increasingly worried, and it later turned out Joyce had spent a great deal of time doing research into north-county psychological services and programs and trying to determine what kind of special care my mother might need and where it could be found. Despite the snow and temperatures, for instance, my mother now abandoned her practice of watching the birds from inside through the window and progressed to standing on or near the steps to the porch and holding up tube feeders herself in her upraised hands, and appeared prepared to stay in this position long enough to actually develop frostbite if someone didn’t intervene and remonstrate with her to come inside. The numbers and noise-level of birds involved were also problematic by this time, as some in the neighborhood had already pointed out even before the blizzard had struck.