The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  §24

  Author here.1 I arrived for intake processing at Lake James IL’s2 IRS Post 047 sometime in mid-May of 1985. It was quite probably on or very near Wednesday, May 15.3 In any event, the point is that I journeyed to Peoria on whatever particular day in May from my family’s home in Philo, to which my brief return had been shall we say untriumphant, and where certain members of my family had more or less been looking at their watches impatiently the whole brief time I was home. Without mentioning or identifying anyone in particular, let’s just say that the prevailing attitude in my family tended to be ‘What have you done for me lately?’ or, maybe better, ‘What have you achieved/earned/attained lately that may in some way (imaginary or not) reflect well on us and let us bask in some kind of reflected (real or not) accomplishment?’ It was a bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter. Although, you know, whatever. I most definitely was not offered any kind of family ride to Peoria, though I may have gotten a quick lift to the bus station, which in Philo comprised one corner of the local IGA parking lot, which was not all that far but would have been ghastly to walk to wearing my three-piece corduroy suit in the gluey humidity of pre-dawn (which, in the lower Midwest, is also one of the two prime times of day for mosquito activity, the other being dusk, and mosquitoes there are not just a nuisance but serious business indeed) while carrying two heavy suitcases (this was a couple years before the sudden advance of someone in the luggage industry realizing that suitcases could be fitted with little wheels and telescoping handles so they could be pulled, which was just the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system—it gives people incentive to make things more efficient). Plus I also had my beloved dispatch case, which was inherited from an older, non-immediate relative who’d been a staff officer in Hawaii during the latter part of World War II, and was a bit like a briefcase (i.e., the dispatch case was) except that it had no handle, and was therefore carried tucked under one’s arm, and which contained the sorts of intimate or irreplaceable personal effects, toiletries, customized earplug case, dermatological salves and ointments, and important papers that any thinking person carries with him instead of trusting to the vagaries of baggage handling. These papers included my recent correspondence with both the Guaranteed Student Loan people and the IRS’s Midwest Region’s Office of the Deputy Regional Commissioner for Personnel, as well as my copy of the signed IRS contract and the Form 141-PO constituting my so-called ‘Posting Orders’ to the Midwest REC, both of which (i.e., both latter documents) I would evidently need in order to acquire my Service ID badge, which I’d been directed to do straightaway upon my arrival at the ‘GS-9 Intake Station’ at a certain particular time that was filled in by hand on a smeary, indifferently stamped line near the bottom of the Posting Orders.4

  (Quick aside here. Pace his overall self-indulgence and penchant for hand-wringing, §22’s ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle was actually on the money about one thing. Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time—and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does. At the same time, rest assured that I am not Chris Fogle, and that I have no intention of inflicting on you a regurgitation of every last sensation and passing thought I happen to recall. I am about art here, not simple reproduction. What logorrheic colleagues like Fogle failed to understand is that there are vastly different kinds of truth, some of which are incompatible with one another. Example: A 100 percent accurate, comprehensive list of the exact size and shape of every blade of grass in my front lawn is ‘true,’ but it is not a truth that anyone will have any interest in. What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point—otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.)

  There was also, in one of the leather dispatch case’s myriad ingenious little inner sleeves and snap pockets, a certain piece of supporting documentation in the form of personal intrafamily correspondence from a certain unnamed and non-immediate relative who enjoyed what today would be called significant ‘juice’ with the IRS’s Midwest Regional Commissioner’s Office in Joliet upstate,5 which technically I was not supposed to even have (and which was somewhat rumpled after its retrieval from the wastebasket of an unnamed and more immediate relative), but which it seemed prudent to have with me in case of some kind of bureaucratic emergency or last-resort need.6 In general, my attitude toward bureaucracies was the same as that of most ordinary Americans: I hated and feared them (i.e., bureaucracies) and basically regarded them as large, grinding, impersonal machines—that is, they seemed rigidly literal and rule-bound the same way machines are, and just about as dumb.7 Dating at least from a 1979 tangle with the state’s DMV and our insurance provider over the terms and coverage of my Learner’s Permit after an incident so laughably minor it could barely even be called a collision, my primary association with the word bureaucracy was an image of someone expressionless behind a counter, not listening to any of my questions or explanations of circumstance or misunderstanding but merely referring to some manual of impersonal regulations as he stamped my form with a number that meant I was in for some further kind of tedious, frustrating hassle or expense. I doubt that you need much prompting to understand why my recent experience with the college’s Judicial Board and Dean of Students’s office (q.v. §9 above) had done nothing to mitigate this view. Shameful or not, I figured that any possible bit of evidence of extra connective juice might serve to lift me out of some long gray line of faceless supplicants in the event of trouble or confusion8 at the Regional Exam Center, which I had conceived ahead of time as some kind of ur-bureaucratic version of Kafka’s castle, an enormous DMV or Judicial Board.

  By way of foreshadowing and advance explanation, I’ll also admit up front here that there are portions of that arrival and intake day that I do not remember very well, due at least in part to the tsunami of sensuous input, technical data, and bureaucratic complication that awaited me when I arrived and was personally taken in hand and escorted—with a degree of solicitude that, however unexpected and confusing, would have been gratifying to just about anyone—to the REC’s Personnel office, bypassing the GS-9 Intake Station (whose location was anyone’s guess) that I’d been directed to find and stand in line at by the smeared and typo-ridden Posting Orders inside my dispatch case. As nearly always happens with human minds inundated by excessive input, I’ve retained only flashes and incomplete clips from that day, which I’ll now go ahead and recount some specially selected relevant portions of, not only as a way to introduce the atmospherics of the REC and the Service, but also to help explain what might initially look like my passivity (it was more simple confusion9) in the face of what may seem, in the clarity of hindsight, like an obvious case of misassignment or mistaken identity. It was not obvious at the time, though; and expecting a person to have immediately seen it, understood it as an error, and taken immediate steps to correct it is a bit like expecting someone to have noticed and fixed some incongruity in his surroundings at the very moment that a hundred flashbulbs suddenly went off in his eyes. There’s only so much complex input the human nervous system can take, in other words.

  I do remember standing there at the edge of the IGA supermarket lot in my suit with my bags and case as dawn officially broke. For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun’s appearance. It’s just all of a sudden there. The temperature immediately goes up ten degrees; the mosquitoes vanish to wherever exactly it is that mosquitoes go to regroup. Just to the west, the roofline of St. Dymphna’s church sprayed complex shadows over half the down
town. I was drinking a can of Nesbitt’s, which is sort of my version of morning coffee. The IGA’s lot abuts the downtown’s main drag, which is the in-town extension of SR 130 and ingeniously named. Directly across this Main Street from the IGA were the bubbletop pumps and saurian logo of Clete’s Sinclair, outside of which the best and brightest of Philo High used to gather on Friday nights to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and search the adjacent lot’s weeds for frogs and mice to throw at Clete’s bug zapper, which he’d modified to hold 225 volts of charge.

  This was, so far as I know, the only time I’d ridden a commercial bus line, and it was not an experience I’m eager to repeat. The bus was unclean, and some of the passengers appeared to have been aboard for several days running, with all that that entails in terms of hygiene and inhibition. I remember that the seatbacks seemed unnaturally high, and there was some kind of aluminum-alloy bar for your feet, and a button on the seat’s arm for causing the back to recline, which in the case of my seat failed to work correctly. The arm’s little flip-top ashtray was a nightmare of gum-wads and butts too numerous for the little lid even to close all the way. I remember seeing two or more nuns in full habit in one of the forward sections, and thinking that requiring nuns to travel by filthy commercial bus must have been in line with their sect’s vow of poverty; but it still seemed incongruous and wrong. One of the nuns was doing a crossword puzzle. The trip took over four hours in toto, since the bus stopped at an endless number of sour little towns just like my own. The sun began shortly to broil the bus’s rear and port side. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning. There was a horrific piece of graffiti incised with knife or leather punch in the plastic of the seatback in front of me, which I looked at twice and then made a point of never looking directly at again. The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself. Empiricism has its limits. There is also, in memory, a contextless flash of some female’s feet in clear polyurethane thongs, a tattoo of what was either ivy or barbed wire around one of her ankles. And a round-faced little boy10 in shorts in the seat directly across the aisle, with red sprays of impetigo on his knees and a presumable guardian asleep in the adjoining seat (her seatback did recline), watching me as I ate the small box of raisins from the bag lunch I’d had to pack myself in the dark kitchen, the boy moving his whole head to follow the path of each raisin I brought to my mouth, and I peripherally trying to decide whether to offer to share some of the raisins or not (ultimately not: I was reading and didn’t want to converse, not to mention that God only knew what this child’s situation or story was; plus impetigo is notoriously contagious).

  I will spare all of us much sensuous reminiscence about Peoria’s main bus terminal—which was ghastly in the special way of bus stations in depressed downtowns everywhere—or of my over-two-hour wait there, except to say that its air was not conditioned or even circulated, and it was extremely crowded, and that there were a certain number of lone men and groups of two or three men, nearly all wearing suit coats and hats, or else holding their hats or slowly fanning themselves with them as they sat (none of them ever seemed to think to remove their coats or even loosen their ties); and I remember remarking even then that it was strange to see men in their adult prime wearing the business-type hats that normally one saw only on much older men of a certain background and station. A few of the hats were eccentric or unusual.

  I know that I saw, during my survey of the pay-phone and vending-machine area near the entrance to the restrooms, what may have been an actual prostitute.

  I well remember the subsequent roil of these same hatted men in the humidity and diesel fumes outside the terminal; and I well remember the two baked-bean-brown IRS transport sedans’ arriving, finally, and pulling up at the terminal curb, and there turning out to be far too many other newly arrived or transferred IRS personnel,11 all with abundant luggage, to fit everyone in the sedans, and the order of departure being determined not by the mandatory reporting times stamped on people’s respective Forms 141-PO (as would appear to have been fair and rational) but by GS grade as evidenced by Service ID—which I didn’t have, and my argument that it was precisely in order to acquire Service ID that I had been specifically ordered to be at the GS-9 Intake Station by 1340h. made no impression whatever, perhaps since several other, pushier personnel were also at that same time exclaiming to the driver while holding up their extant IRS IDs; and, slightly later, quite a few of us standing there watching the overfilled sedans recede from the curb into downtown traffic, and many of the other new personnel simply shrugging and going passively back inside the terminal, and my personal feeling that the whole thing was not only unfair and disorganized but a grim little foretaste indeed of what bureaucratic life was going to be like.

  Here, by the way, as a brief interpolation, is some preliminary general background that I have opted not to massage or smuggle in through the sort of graceless dramatic contrivance12 so many stock memoirs resort to; to wit:

  The IRS’s Midwest Regional Examination Center is a roughly L shaped physical structure located off Self-Storage Parkway in the Lake James district of Peoria IL. What makes the facility’s L shape only rough is that the REC’s two perpendicular buildings are closely proximate but not continuous; they are, however, connected at the second and third floors by elevated transoms that are enclosed in olive-green fiberglass carbonate as a shield against inclement weather, since important documents and data storage cards are often conveyed across them. Neither heating nor air-conditioning service was ever reliably achieved in these elevated tunnels, and in summer months the Post’s personnel refer to them as bataans, an apparent reference to the Bataan Death March of World War II’s Pacific theater.

  The larger of the site’s two buildings, originally constructed in 1962, basically comprises Post 047’s administrative offices, data processing, document storage, and Support Service facilities. The other, which is where the bulk of actual examinations of US tax returns takes place, is not owned by the IRS but instead back-leased through a proprietary holding company established by the shareholder trustees of one Mid West Mirror Works (sic), a glass-and-amalgam manufacturer that vanished into the protections of UCC Ch. 7 in the mid-1970s.

  Incorporated in 1845 and perhaps best known as the birthplace of barbed wire in 1873, Peoria plays a vital role in the IRS’s Midwest Regional structure. Located medially between East St. Louis, Illinois’s Regional Service Center, and Joliet, Illinois’s Regional Commissioner’s Office, and serving the region’s nine states and fourteen IRS districts, the Midwest REC’s staff of more than 3,000 employees examines the math and veracity of some 4.5 million tax returns per year.13 Though the Service’s nationwide structure comprises seven regions in toto, there are (following the Rome NY REC’s spectacular administrative meltdown in 1982)14 only six currently operating Regional Examination Centers, these being located at Philadelphia PA, Peoria IL, Rotting Flesh LA, St. George UT, La Junta CA, and Federal Way WA, to which tax returns are forwarded by either the relevant region’s Service Center or the IRS’s central computer facility in Martinsburg WV.

  Among the notable businesses and industries based in metropolitan Peoria as of 1985 are included Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics; American Twine, the nation’s second-largest manufacturer of string, wire, and low-diameter rope; Consolidated Self Storage, one of the first corporations in middle America to utilize the franchise financing model; the Farm & Home Insurance Group; the Japanese-owned remains of Nortex Heavy Equipment; and the national HQ of Fornix Industries, a privately held maker of keypunch and card-reading equipment, one of whose largest remaining customers of that time was the US Treasury. Of Peoria’s employers, however, the Internal Revenue Service has ranked first ever since American Twine lost exclusive patent rights to Type 3 barbed wire in 1971.

  End
of interpolation; return to mnemonic real time.

  After who knows how many attempts, back in the fetid terminal, to find a working pay phone and to prevail on someone at the Form 141-PO’s ‘employee assistance number’ (which turned out to be incorrect or out of order), it was eventually in either the fourth or fifth Service vehicle to appear at the terminal that I finally secured transport to the REC, now direly late for my appointed check-in time, which tardiness I could imagine being blamed for by some expressionless person whose finger also controlled the Intake system’s moral bell/siren.

  The next salient fact of that day is that traffic along the city’s circumambient Self-Storage Parkway was totally horrible. The section of SSP around Peoria’s east side was lined with franchise restaurants and things like Kmarts, and auto dealerships with gaudy tethered parade balloons and blinking neon signs. There was an entire separate four-lane access road leading to something called Carousel Mall, which one shuddered even to think about.15 Behind all this commerce (i.e., behind as seen from the east side, heading south around the city’s perimeter, with the slow and silty Illinois River coming in and out of view on the Gremlin’s left side) was the ruined-looking skyline of downtown Peoria, a bar graph of sooty brick and missing windows and a sense of hard pollution even though no smoke issued from any of the smokestacks. (This was several years before attempted gentrification of the old downtown.)