The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘I miss you, too, Claude. Happy now?’

  Once he’d chewed it so badly it got infected, which made it taste just awful. ‘I haven’t done a list per se as such yet.’

  ‘What should I tell Mel?’

  ‘That I’ve been here only a week and am under terrific duress from the primitiveness of the field-quarters, lack of contact vectors, and numbing heat. Tell Mel that.’

  ‘Aren’t we brave in absentia.’

  ‘As you may recall the real hardware’s over with Corporate in the out-site, and except for verifying Mel’s facilities I’ve been lurking in Exams. Per specs I believe.’

  ‘I wasn’t squeezing, Claudie. Let’s just get through this. I have a nasty commute ahead of me.’

  ‘I have so far seen a Sperry UNIVAC 3- or 4000-series mainframe with terminals apparently all at Corporate. I’ve seen two IBM 5486 card sorters and have deduced the presence of related 5000-series keypunch and collating equipment.’

  ‘And ninety-six-column cards for the IBMs.’

  ‘Except UNIVACs still use the eighty-. They’ve apparently got something jerry-rigged to mix the two.’

  ‘So the examiners are all hexadecimal-proficient, or is that the punch-girls? But the punch-girls are locals, no?’

  ‘I don’t have a training protocol yet. We can assume they’re natural-language-translated for temps during March to May, yes?’

  ‘Even Rome didn’t mix ninety-six and eighties.’

  ‘This is the provinces, I’ve been telling you. Mel’s office is right down from the Central, which I deduce is a complete mutt of different systems. I’ve seen a Burroughs 1005 calculator-printer.’

  ‘Does Burroughs even use cards anymore?’

  ‘Burroughs work off tape since the 900 series. I’ve told you. The whole thing’s a mutt. A garage sale. I’ve seen two IBM RPGs in a closet with an unbelievable tangle of co-ax leading up to a ragged and sub-code hole in the closet’s ceiling, presumably meant to compatibilize the RPGs with the UNIVAC. It’s all very ancient and scuzzy and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there were monkeys with abacuses and string inside.’

  ‘This is very good news. And their assembler’s COBOL?’

  ‘Unknown at this juncture.’

  ‘We’ve got good news on the hardware front.’

  ‘And if anything’s arrived from DC then SS here isn’t aware of it.’

  ‘So it could just be sitting on the loading dock?’

  ‘So I’m to be in Records with a flashlight in my teeth, on the horn to Martinsburg getting flowthrough analyses, probing Glendenning’s No-First-Year implementation, inventorying the hardware, and cabbaging keys to get a firsthand at Mel’s office all at once? Oh, and on the loading dock quizzing burly men on whether any of the boxes are from Martinsburg.’

  ‘All I’m doing is lining up a protocol for next week’s field-, Claudie.’

  ‘What am I, a machine?’

  §31

  Shinn was long-bodied and had very light baby-fine blond hair that hung in bangs like an early Beatle’s. The man seated next to him in the IRS van had exited Angler’s Cove with several others as they all stood at the curb in the pastel dawn and waited for the van. The sweet wet heavy air of summer dawns. The men with Service nametags all knew each other and spoke among themselves. Some drank from mugs or smoked cigarettes they ground out against the curb as the van came into view. One had sideburns and a cowboy hat, which now in the van he’d removed two rows of bench seats up. Some read the paper. Some of the men in the van were as old as maybe fifty. The windows tilted out rather than rolling down; it was an odd vehicle, more like a small boxy truck that had bench seats welded in.

  The van stopped at two other apartment complexes along Self-Storage Parkway; at one of these it idled for several minutes, apparently dilating time for a schedule. Shinn wore a powder-blue dress shirt. A conversation behind him featured someone telling someone else that if you cut a small notch in the center of your toenail’s edge, it won’t ingrow. Someone else yawned loudly and gave little shivers.

  The man next to Shinn, their hams touching with varied pressure as the van swung slightly side to side on a loose suspension, was reading an IRM supplemental pamphlet whose title Shinn could not see because the guy was one of those people who folded pamphlets back into a single square to read them. He had a small backpack in his lap. Shinn considered introducing himself; he wasn’t sure what the etiquette called for.

  Shinn had stood at the curb drinking his first Coke of his first day at the Post and felt his clothes unwrinkle and sag slightly in the humidity, smelling the same honeysuckle and cut grass as suburban Chicago, listening to the songs of dawn-stirred birds in the locust trees along Self-Storage, and his thoughts had drifted all over the place, and suddenly it occurred that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying ‘Get away’ or ‘This branch is mine!’ or ‘This tree is mine! I’ll kill you! Kill, kill!’ Or any manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

  §32

  ‘Don’t ask me to do this.’

  I switched my live-in sister Julie over to the speaker while she was still trying to get out of doing it. We were all in my part of the cubicle. I was sitting at my workstation and they were standing around it. ‘I told them and they don’t believe it. In the uncanny accuracy of it, that I keep trying to describe but I can’t do it justice, especially this fellow here Jon whom I’ve been telling you about.’ I was looking over at Soane as I persuaded her. Julie is my sister. Her voice sounded less like her own voice on the speaker—it had that tinny, desiccated quality. Steve Mead always wore a counter’s rubber on his right pinkie. The constant ripping metallic dental sound of a printer came from the Audit Room nearest the cubicle, a sound that set all our teeth on the edge when the printer ran. Steve Mead, Steve Dalhart, Jane Brown, and Likourgos Vassiliou were all standing around the speaker in my part of the cubicle, while Soane had rolled his chair back slightly from his own workstation to be included in the circle.

  ‘I can’t do it on demand. I feel stupid; don’t make me,’ Julie stated.

  ‘Who this morning bought you three scrunchies when all you asked for was one?’ I said, making a circle of affirmation with my thumb and finger and holding it up to the others.

  There was silence from my younger sister’s end of the phone.

  ‘I already told them some of the effect will be lost on the phone. Without the eyes and face. Pressure’s off, nobody’s expecting perfection.’

  ‘“What an excellent day for an exorcism, Father.”’

  Even on the speaker. Steve Mead visibly started. I had an urge to giggle and bite my knuckle in delight. Dalhart and Jane Brown were looking at each other and they let their bodies sag and lengthen a little to indicate how astounded they were.

  ‘“Your mother sucks cocks in hell!”’ Julie said, doing it.

  ‘Astounding, Nugent.’

  ‘My God’ and ‘It’s uncanny,’ Steve Mead said. He is always extremely pale and ill-looking. A Phillips screw was coming partway out of one of the supports at the back of Soane’s chair’s back support area. The ripping sound of the printer continued to set everyone’s teeth on the edge.

  Dale Gastine and Alice Pihl, who always conduct audits as a team, put their heads over the top of the cubicle to see what was going on.

  ‘You should see the face if you could. She rolls her eyes all the way up and turns pale and puffs her cheeks out and it—she doesn’t look like her at all until she does, then it’s uncanny.’ I said this. Soane, who is extremely cool and laid-back at all times, was doing something to his cuticle with a paperclip out of the dispenser.

  Julie’s regular voice came through the speaker. I consider Jane Brown attractive, but I can tell that Soane does not. ‘Are we d
one?’

  ‘You should see. They’re all standing here agog. I really appreciate this,’ I said. Jane Brown always wears the same orange blazer. ‘Goggle-eyed. My credibility here has soared thanks to you.’

  ‘We’re going to talk about this when you get home, buckaroo, believe you me.’

  ‘But can she lower the room down to freezing and write Help with her skin like when she—’

  ‘One more,’ whispered Mead, who does farm audits and goes out to the counter when a taxpayer rings the assistance bell (whole days go by without a taxpayer coming in for assistance, however) and has a soft square face and looks like he either never has to shave or uses moisturizer.

  I told Julie on the phone, ‘One more and then you’ll have acquitted yourself in your usual outstanding way.’

  ‘You promise.’

  Likourgos Vassiliou, who is also unusually pale, especially for an ethnic Mediterranean, said to Dale Gastine and Alice Pihl, ‘This new man Nugent does not exaggerate; make a note out of this.’

  ‘“Can you spare a quotter fran old altaboy, Fadda. Dimmy. Why you do this to me, Dimmy? Let Jesus fuck you, fuck you!”’

  ‘I’m practically getting the shivers,’ Mead stated.

  ‘This is positively the last time,’ Julie emphasized on the speaker.

  §33

  Lane Dean Jr. with his green rubber pinkie finger sat at his Tingle table in his Chalk’s row in the Rotes Group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays where the cart boys could get them when they came by. After just an hour the beach was a winter beach, cold and gray and the dead kelp like the hair of the drowned, and it stayed that way despite all attempts. Then three more, including one 1040A where the deductions for AGI were added wrong and the Martinsburg printout hadn’t caught it and had to be amended on one of the Form 020-Cs in the lower left tray and then a lot of the same information filled out on the regular 20 you still had to do even if it was just a correspondence audit and the file going to Joliet instead of the District, each code for which had to be looked up on the pull-out thing he had to scoot the chair awkwardly over to pull out all the way. Then another one, then a plummeting inside of him as the wall clock showed that what he’d thought was another hour had not been. Not even close. 17 May 1985. Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me a poor sinner. Crosschecking W-2s for the return’s Line 7 off the place in the Martinsburg printout where the perforation if you wanted to separate the thing’s sheets went right through the data and you had to hold it up against the light and almost sometimes guess, which his Chalk Leader said was a chronic bug with Systems but the wiggler was still accountable. The joke this week was how was an IRS rote examiner like a mushroom? Both kept in the dark and fed horseshit. He didn’t know how mushrooms even worked, if it was true that you scooped waste on them. Sheri’s cooking wasn’t what you would call at the level of adding mushrooms. Then another return. The rule was, the more you looked at the clock the slower the time went. None of the wigglers wore a watch, except he saw that some kept them in their pockets for breaks. Clocks on Tingles were not allowed, nor coffee or pop. Try as he might he could not this last week help envisioning the inward lives of the older men to either side of him, doing this day after day. Getting up on a Monday and chewing their toast and putting their hats and coats on knowing what they were going out the door to come back to for eight hours. This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt. This made the routing desk at UPS look like a day at Six Flags. It was May 17, early morning, or early mid-morning you could maybe almost call it now. He could hear the squeak of the cart boys’ carts someplace off at a distance where the vinyl panels between his Chalk’s Tingles and the blond oriental fellow’s Chalk one row up blocked the sight of them, the kids with the carts. One of the carts had a crazy wheel that chattered when the boy pushed it. Lane Dean always knew when that cart was coming down the rows. Chalk, Team, Group, Pod, Post, Division. He did another return, again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 34A and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that boring also meant something that drilled in and made a hole. His buttocks already ached from flexing, and the mere thought of envisioning the desolate beach unmanned him. He shut his eyes but instead of praying for inward strength now he found he was just looking at the strange reddish dark and the little flashes and floaters in there, that got almost hypnotic when you really looked at them. Then when he opened his eyes the In tray’s stack of files looked to be still mainly the height it had been at 7:14 when he’d logged in in the Chalk Leader’s notebook and started and there weren’t enough files in his Out trays for Form 20s and 402s that he could see any over the side of the trays and he refused once more to stand up to check how many of them there were for he knew that would make it worse. He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide. He was doing a return at the same time he fought with his mind, with the sin and affront of even the passing thought. The room was silent except for the adding machines and the chattering sound of that one kid’s cart that had a crazy wheel as the cart boy brought it down a certain row with more files, but also he kept hearing in his head the sound a piece of paper makes when you tear it in half over and over. His six-man Chalk was a quarter of a row, separated off by the gray vinyl screens. A Team is four Chalks plus the Team Leader and a cart boy, some of these from Peoria College of Business. The screens could be moved around to reconfigure the room’s layout. Similar rotes groups were in the rooms to either side. Far to the left past three other Chalks’ rows was the Group Manager’s office with the AGM’s little cubicle of screens to the side of it. The pinkie rubbers were for traction on the forms for all deliberate speed. You were supposed to save the rubber at the end of the day. The overhead lights cast no shadow, even of your hand if you held it out like you were reaching at a tray. Doug and Amber Bellman of 402 Elk Court, Edina MN, who itemized and then some, elected to have $1 go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. It took several minutes to crosscheck everything on Schedule A but nothing qualified for the specs of a promising audit, even though Mr. Bellman had the jaggedy handwriting of a crazy man. Lane Dean had filed far fewer 20s than protocol called for. On Friday he had the fewest 20s of anyone else in the Chalk. Nobody’d said anything. All the wastebaskets were full of the curled strips of paper from the adding machines. Everyone’s faces were the color of wet lead in the fluorescent light. You could make a semiprivate cubicle out of the screens like the Team Leader had. Then he looked up despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes it would be another hour, a half hour after that was the fifteen-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he imagined himself running around the outside grounds shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and despite prayers and effort sit counting the seconds tic
k off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again. The imagined sound made him remember different times he’d seen people rip paper in half. He thought of a circus strongman tearing a phone book; he was bald and had a handlebar mustache and wore a stripy all-body swimsuit like people wore in the distant past. Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of. He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices. Tell him to pucker his butt and think beach when he starts to get antsy, and that would be just the word they’d use, antsy, like his mother. Let him find out in time’s fullness what a joke the word was, that it didn’t come anyplace close. He’d already dusted the desk with his cuff, moved his infant son’s photo in its rattly little frame where the front glass slid a bit if you shook it. He’d already tried switching the green rubber over and doing the adding machine with his left hand, pretending he’d had a stroke and was bravely soldiering on. The rubber made the pinkie’s tip all damp and pale beneath it. Unable to sit still at home, unable to look at anything for more than a second or two. The beach now had solid cement instead of sand and the water was gray and barely moved, just quivered a little, like Jell-O that’s almost set. Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O. Lane Dean tried to control the rate of his heartbeat. He wondered if with enough practice and concentration you could stop your heart at will the same way you hold your breath—like this right here. His heart rate felt dangerously slow and he became scared and tried to keep his head inclined by rolling his eyes way up and compared the rate to the clock’s second hand but the second hand seemed impossibly slow. The sound of ripping paper again and again. Some cart boys brought you files with everything you needed, some did not. The buzzer to bring a cart boy was just under the iron desk’s edge, with a wire trailing down one of the desk’s sides and little welded-on leg, but it didn’t work. Atkins said the wiggler who’d been at the station before him, who’d got transferred someplace, had pressed on it so much it burnt the circuit. Small strange indentations in rows on the blotter’s front edge were, Lane Dean had realized, the prints of teeth that somebody’d bent down and pressed real carefully into the blotter’s edge so that the indentations went way down and stayed there. He felt he could understand. It was hard to keep from smelling his finger; at home he’d find himself doing it, staring into space at the table. His little baby boy’s face worked better than the beach; he imagined him doing all sorts of things that he and his wife could talk about later, like curling his fist around one of their fingers or smiling when Sheri made that amazed face at him. He liked to watch her with the baby; for half a file it helped to have them in mind because they were why, they were what made this worthwhile and the right thing and he had to remember it but it kept slipping away down the hole that fell through him. Neither man on either side of him seemed to ever fidget or move except to reach up and lift things onto the desk from their Tingles’ trays, like machines, and they were never in the lounge at break. Atkins claimed that after a year he could examine and crosscheck two files at once, but you never saw him try and do it, though he could whistle one song and hum a different one. Nugent’s sister did the exorcist on the phone. Lane Dean watched out of the corner of his eye as a parrot-faced man by the central aisle dividing Teams pulled a file out of his tray and removed the return and detached the printout and centered both documents on his blotter. With his little homemade seat cushion and gray hat on its hook screwed into the 402s tray. Lane Dean stared down without seeing his own open file and imagined being that guy with his sad little cushion and customized banker’s lamp and wondered what he possibly had or did in his spare time to make up for these soul-murdering eight daily hours that weren’t even a quarter through until he just couldn’t stand it and did three returns in a row in a kind of frenzy where he might have missed things and so on the next file went very slowly and painstakingly and found a discrepancy between the 1040’s Schedule E and the RRA annuity tables for poor old Clive R. Terry of Alton’s pissant railroad pension, but a discrepancy so small that you couldn’t tell if the Martinsburg printout had even made an error or had just accepted a wide roundoff for time’s sake given the amount at stake, and he had to fill out both an 020-C and a Memo 402-C(1) kicking the return over to the Group Manager’s office to decide how to classify the error. Both had to be filled out with duplicated data on both sides, and signed. The whole issue was almost unbelievably meaningless and small. He thought about the word meaning and tried to summon up his baby’s face without looking at the photo but all he could get was the heft of a full diaper and the plastic mobile over his crib turning in the breeze the box fan in the doorway made. No one in either congregation ever saw The Exorcist; it was against Catholic dogma and an obscenity. It was not entertainment. He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him. When he started to see the baby’s photo’s face melting and lengthening and growing a long cleft jaw and the face aging years in just seconds and finally caving in from old age and falling away from the grinning yellow skull underneath, he knew he was half asleep and dreaming but did not know his own face was in his hands until he heard a human voice and opened his eyes but couldn’t see who it went with and then smelled the pinkie’s rubber right under his nose. He might have drooled on the open file.