The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Getting a little taste, I see.

  It was a big older fellow with a seamed face and picket teeth. He wasn’t from any Tingle that Lane Dean had ever observed from his own. The man had on a headlamp with a tan cotton band like some dentists wore and a type of thick black marker in his breast pocket. He smelled of hair oil and some kind of food. He had part of his bottom on the edge of Lane’s desk and was cleaning under his thumbnail with a straightened-out paperclip and speaking softly. You could see an undershirt under his shirt; he wore no tie. He kept moving his upper body around in a slight kind of shape or circle, and the movements left a little bit of a visual trail. None of the wigglers in either adjoining row was paying attention to him. Dean checked the face in the photo to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming.

  They don’t ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It’s too manifest. As if talking about the air you’re breathing, yes? It would be as if saying, I see so-and-so with my eye. What would be the point?

  There was something wrong with one of his eyes; the pupil of the eye was bigger and stayed that way, making the eye look fixed. His headlamp wasn’t on. The slow upper-body motions brought him in closer and then back and away and around again. It was very slight and slow.

  Yes but now that you’re getting a taste, consider it, the word. You know the one. Dean had the uneasy sense that the fellow wasn’t strictly speaking to him, which would mean that he was more like ranting. The one eye looked fixedly past him. Although hadn’t he just been thinking about a word? Was that word dilated? Had he said the word out loud? Lane Dean looked circumspectly to either side. The Group Manager’s frosted door was shut.

  Word appears suddenly in 1766. No known etymology. The Earl of March uses it in a letter describing a French peer of the realm. He didn’t cast a shadow, but that didn’t mean anything. For no reason, Lane Dean flexed his buttocks. In fact the first three appearances of bore in English conjoin it with the adjective French, that French bore, that boring Frenchman, yes? The French of course had malaise, ennui. See Pascal’s fourth Pensée, which Lane Dean heard as pantsy. He was checking for errant spit on the file before him. One ham in dark-blue work pants was inches from his elbow. The man moved slightly back and forth like his waist was hinged. He appeared to be inspecting Lane Dean’s upper body and face in a systematic gridlike fashion. His eyebrows were all over the place. The tan band was either soaked or stained. See La Rochefoucauld’s or the Marquise du Deffand’s well-known letters to Horace Walpole, specifically I believe Letter 96. But nothing in English prior to March, Earl of. This means a good five hundred years of no word for it you see, yes? He rotated slightly away. In no way was this a vision or moment. Lane Dean had heard of the phantom but never seen it. The phantom of the hallucination of repetitive concentration held for too long a time, like saying a word over and over until it kind of melted and got foreign. Mr. Wax’s high hard gray hair was just visible four Tingles down. No word for the Latin accidia made so much of by monks under Benedict. For the Greek . Also the hermits of third-century Egypt, the so-called daemon meridianus, when their prayers were stultified by pointlessness and tedium and a longing for violent death. Now Lane Dean was looking openly around as in like who is this fellow? The one eye was fixed at a point over past the row of vinyl screens. The tearing sound had gone, as had that one cart’s squeaky wheel.

  The fellow cleared his throat. Donne of course called it lethargie, and for a time it seems conjoined somewhat with melancholy, saturninia, otiositas, tristitia— that is, to be confused with sloth and torpor and lassitude and eremia and vexation and distemper and attributed to spleen, for example see Winchilsea’s black jaundice, or of course Burton. The man was still on the same thumbnail. Quaker Green in I believe 1750 called it spleen-fog. Hair oil made Lane Dean think of the barber’s, of the stripy pole that seemed to spiral eternally upward but you could see when the shop closed and it stopped really didn’t. The hair oil had a name. No one under sixty used it. Mr. Wax used a men’s spray. The fellow appeared unconscious of his upper body’s underwater X-shaped rotations. Two of the wigglers in a Team near the door had long beards and black derbies and bobbed at their Tingles as they examined returns but their bobbing was rapid and back and forth only; this was different. The examiners on either side didn’t look up or pay attention; their fingers on the adders never slowed. Lane Dean couldn’t tell if this was a sign of their professional concentration or something else. Some wore the rubber on the left pinkie, most on the right. Robert Atkins was ambidextrous; he could fill out different forms with each hand. The fellow on his left hadn’t blinked once all morning that Dean had been able to see. And then suddenly up it pops. Bore. As if from Athena’s forehead. Noun and verb, participle as adjective, whole nine yards. Origin unknown, really. We do not know. Nothing on it in Johnson. Partridge’s only entry is on bored as a subject complement and what preposition it takes, since bored of as opposed to with is a class marker which is all that ever really concerns Partridge. Class class class. The only Partridge Lane Dean knew was the same TV Partridge everybody else knew. He had no earthly idea what this guy was talking about but at the same time it unnerved him that he’d been thinking about bore as a word as well, the word, many returns ago. Philologists say it was a neologism—and just at the time of industry’s rise, too, yes? of the mass man, the automated turbine and drill bit and bore, yes? Hollowed out? Forget Friedkin, have you seen Metropolis? All right, this really creeped Lane out. His inability to say anything to this guy or ask him what he even wanted felt a little like a bad dream as well. The night after his first day he’d dreamed of a stick that kept breaking over and over but never got smaller. The Frenchman pushing that uphill stone throughout eternity. Look for instance at L. P. Smith’s English Language, ’56 I believe, yes? It was the bad eye, the frozen eye, that seemed to inspect what he leaned toward. Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity— his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you’re getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself. The term. Now he switched nails. It was Vitalis that had soaked the headlamp’s band, which looked more and more like a bandage. The Group Manager’s door had his name on it painted on the same pebbled-glass window thing that older high schools have. Personnel’s doors were the same. The wiggle rooms had windowless metal fire doors on struts up top, a newer model. Consider that the Oglok of Labrador have more than a hundred separate and distinct words for snow. Smith puts it as that when anything assumes sufficient relevance it finds its name. The name springs up under cultural pressure. Really quite interesting when you consider it. Now for the first time the fellow at the Tingle to the right turned briefly to give the man a look and turned just as fast back around when the man made his hands into claws and held them out at the other wiggler like a demon or someone possessed. The whole thing happened too fast to almost be real to Lane Dean. The wiggler turned a page in the file before him. Someone else had also called it that, soul murdering. Which now you will, too, yes? In the nineteenth century then suddenly the word’s everywhere; see for example Kierkegaard’s Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion. When he slid his big ham off the desktop the movement made the smell stronger; it was Vitalis and Chinese food, the food in the little white bucket with the wire handle, moo goo something. The room’s light on the frosted glass was different because the door was slightly open, though Lane Dean hadn’t seen the door open. It occurred to Lane Dean that he might pray.

  It was the same gridlike swaying motion standing. The one eye was on the Group Manager’s door, open a crack. Note too that interesting first appears just two years after bore. 1768. Mark this, two years after. Can this be so? He was halfway down the row; now the fellow with the cushion looked up and then back down right away. Invents itself, yes? Not all it invents. Then something Lane Dean heard as bone after tea. The man was gone when he reached the row’s end. The file and its Schedules
A/B and printout were right where they’d been, but Lane’s son’s picture was facedown. He let himself look up and saw that no time had passed at all, again.

  §34

  IRM §781(d) AMT Formula for Corporations: (1) Taxable income before NOL deduction, plus or minus (2) All AMT adjustments excepting ACE adjustment, plus (3) Tax preferences, yields (4) Alternative Minimum Taxable Income before NOL deduction and/or ACE adjustment, plus or minus (5) ACE adjustment, if any, yields (6) AMTI before NOL deduction, if any, minus (7) NOL deduction, if any (Ceiling at 90%), yields (8) AMTI, minus (9) Exemptions, yields (10) AMT base, multiplied by (11) 20% AMT rate, yields (12) AMT prior to AMT Foreign Tax Credit, minus (13) AMT Foreign Tax Credit, if any (Ceiling at 90% unless Exceptions 781(d) (13-16) apply, in which case attach Memo 781-2432 and forward to Group Manager), yields (14) Tentative Alternative Minimum Tax, minus (15) Standard tax liability before credit minus standard Foreign Tax Credit, yields (16) Alternative Minimum Tax.

  §35

  My Audit Group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can only describe as—fierce. Its expression is fierce, its demeanor is fierce, its gaze over bottle or pacifier—fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look all the fiercer. On those workdays when our Group Manager brought it in with him to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against the Group Manager’s, its large head resting in the hollow of its father’s neck, forcing Mr. Manshardt’s head out and down into a posture of classic oppression. They made a beast with two faces, one of which was calm, bland, and adult, and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce. The infant never wiggled or fussed in the device. Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gathered there waiting for the morning elevator was level and unblinking and, it seemed, somehow almost accusing.

  The infant’s face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its whorl of red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or ever even eyelids that I could see. I never once saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.

  In the elevator, my customary spot is often in the middle, just behind Mr. Manshardt, and on the mornings when the child rides him and hangs there facing backward and I spend the time staring into the large, stern, lashless, fiery-blue eyes, I can only say that these rides are not pleasant at all, and often affect my mood and concentration for much of the subsequent work period.

  On the third floor, in Mr. Manshardt’s office, the infant had a crib and also a modern, ingenious, mobile supporting device which it spent much of its time in, a large ring-shaped contraption of heavy blue plastic and a type of cloth sling or saddle in the center’s hole, in which the infant was placed in a position somewhere between sitting and standing—that is, the infant’s legs were nearly straight, but the sling appeared to support its weight. The device or station had four short, squat supporting legs, which terminated in plastic wheels, and was designed to be movable under the infant’s power, albeit slowly, rather the way our own workstations’ wheeled chairs could be maneuvered this way and that by awkward motions of the auditor’s legs. However, the infant declined to move the device, as far as I ever saw, or to play with any of the bright, primary-colored toys and small, amusing developmental tchotchkes built into sockets in the ring’s blue surface. Nor did it ever seem to occupy itself with the books made of cloth, dump trucks and fire engines, teething rings of liquid-filled plastic, intricate mobiles, or pull-string music-and-animal-noise-emitting toys with which its play area was replete. It just sat there, motionless and mute, gazing fiercely at whichever GS-9 auditors happened to enter our Group Manager’s small, frosted-glass office on the days when Mr. Manshardt—whose wife was liberated and had her own career—brought it in with him, for which he had reportedly received special permission from the District Director. At first, many a GS-9 would enter the office on some thin pretext, trying to curry favor with the Group Manager by smiling and making soft, primal sounds at the infant, or by putting a finger or pencil in its field of vision, perhaps trying to stimulate its instinct for grasping. The infant, however, would just gaze at the auditor fiercely, with a combination of intensity and disdain, its expression rather as if it were hungry and the auditor were food but not quite the right kind. There are some small children who you can just tell are going to grow up to be frightening adults—this infant was frightening now. It was eerie and discomfiting to see something with hardly any bona fide human face yet to speak of nevertheless assume a fierce, intimidating, almost accusatory expression. For my own part, I had abandoned all ideas of ingratiating myself with Mr. Manshardt through his infant quite early on. To be honest, I was concerned that Gary Manshardt might be able to pick up my fear and dislike of the infant on some type of mysterious, occult parental radar.

  His office’s desk’s personal-item area was lined with photos of Mr. Manshardt’s infant—on a rug, newborn in an obstetrics ward, in boots and a tiny hooded coat, squatting nude with a red pail and shovel at the beach, and so on and so forth—and in all of the photos the infant looked fierce. Its presence seemed not to interfere with Manshardt’s office duties, the bulk of which were administrative and required much less pure concentration than the Audit Group itself’s. Once the working day began, however, the Group Manager appeared for the most part to ignore the infant, and to be ignored by it in return. Whenever I went in, try as I might, I could not interact with the infant. The nylon papoose appliance hung on a coat hook next to Mr. Manshardt’s hat and jacket—he preferred to work in shirtsleeves, a further perquisite of Group Managers. Sometimes the office smelled slightly of powder or pee. I did not know when the GM changed the infant, or where, and avoided visualizing what-all might be involved or the infant’s expression when this occurred. I myself could not imagine touching the infant or being touched by it in any way.