The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Due to our District 040(c)’s Audits Pod’s administrative structure, Group Managers also did rotating duty as the District’s Level 1 Appeals Officer, requiring Mr. Manshardt sometimes to put his suit jacket back on and proceed downstairs to one of the second floor’s audit cubicles, where aggrieved TPs or their representatives would present their objections to a given audit’s findings. And since, by the Service’s Statement of Procedural Rules §601’s specifications for Appeal of Findings, the GS-9 auditor himself was never present during a Level 1 Appeal, that auditor became the logical choice for Mr. Manshardt to approach at his or her desk and ask to move his or her work materials temporarily into the Group Manager’s office, and to keep an eye on the infant while Mr. Manshardt handled the Level 1 Appeal.

  In due course, the day eventually came when one of my audits’ findings was appealed when Mr. Manshardt was ‘up’ as the Post’s Appeals Officer. As luck would have it, the appeal was of a field audit that I had spent nearly eight full working days conducting at All Right Flowers, a small, family-owned S corporation specializing in the arrangement and delivery of bouquets for public functions, and whose Form 1120 Schedule A, E, and G deductions for everything from depreciation and spoilage to employee compensation were so grossly inflated that I’d been forced—despite terrible, long-standing hay fever—to back-audit them for the two previous years and to amend both their Schedule Js and 1120s’ Line 33s heavily in the Treasury’s favor. As the field audit came directly off a Form 20 directive from the Regional Examination Center, and as the combined adjustments, penalties, and interest assessed against All Right Flowers might well exceed the TP’s ability to pay unless terms were made, the appeal was hardly a cause for surprise or alarm, Mr. Manshardt assured me in the bland, kindly tone that characterized his management style. But as the Level 1 would be conducted in the office of All Right Flowers’ attorney on DeKalb Street downtown—as is the prerogative of certain categories of field auditees under SPR §601.105—it would require that Mr. Manshardt be off-post for several hours, which in turn entailed that I was to have an extended period in the Group Manager’s office in the company of his fierce and frightening infant, who could only be brought along on an L-1 in the field if Manshardt and the appellant’s rep had a long-standing history of cordial relations, which he and All Right Flowers’ attorney1 unfortunately, he said, did not.

  The Group Managers’ offices were the only fully enclosed work spaces on the third-floor office’s Audits Pod, and have doors, affording the luxury of privacy. But the offices are not large, Manshardt’s own being perhaps at most eight feet by eight, with large frosted-glass windows on two sides—these being the sides which did not abut the structural, load-bearing walls of the District building—and a double brass coat hook fixture, and a US flag and Service seal and motto flag on one corner’s complex pole, as well as framed portraits of both Triple-Six’s Commissioner of Internal Revenue and our own Regional Commissioner across town. In contrast to the cramped, impersonal metal desks of the Audit Group, Gary Manshardt’s wood-grain desk, with its Tingle array of trays and hutches, took up nearly all of the space in the office not ceded to the infant, along with there being one of the large, multi-display easels on which all Group Managers charted both their auditors’ present loads and, in a DD-mandated Charleston code that fooled no one,2 each GS-9’s total cases, adjustments, and assessed deficiencies so far in the present quarter. The air-conditioning was good.

  And yet I’m now advised that none of this is directly to the point, the substance of which is: Imagine my surprise and discomfiture once I had moved my briefcase, Doberman hand puppet, desk nameplate, hat, personal items, Service notebook, expandable cardboard file of Hollerith cards, M1 printouts, Memo 20s, Form 520s and 1120s, blank forms, and at least two fat folders of crosschecks and receipt-request forms into the Group Manager’s office, and—glancing as little as possible at Gary’s forbidding infant, which was still wearing its lunch bib and standing-slash-sitting at its circular plastic play station gumming a liquid-filled ring in what I can describe only as a studious or contemplative way—was just managing to regather my concentration in order to organize a list of preliminary receipt and supporting-document requests from a vendor that made and affixed tempered handles on a line of galvanized pails for Danville’s Midstate Galvanics Co. when I heard the unmistakable adult sound of a cleared throat, albeit at an extremely high pitch, as if from an adult who had recently inhaled helium out of a decorative balloon. The infant was, like Gary Manshardt’s wife, a redhead, although in the infant’s case its extreme pallor and the light-yellow pajamas or jumper—or whatever exactly one calls the small and fuzzy full-body snap-up chamois bodysuits which infants today tend to wear—made its fine wisps and spirals of hair appear, in the intensive light of the office, to be the color of old blood, and its fierce and concentrated blue eyes appeared now to be almost pupilless; and, to complete the incongruous horror, the infant had set aside its teething ring—rather carefully and deliberately, as a man might set aside a file on his desk once he has completed it and is ready to turn his professional attention to another—to lie moist and shiny next to an upright bottle of what appeared to be apple juice, and had placed its tiny hands folded adultly together before it on the vivid blue plastic of its play station,3 exactly as Mr. Manshardt or Mr. Fardelle or any of the other Group Managers or District Director’s senior staff would place their clasped hands before them on the desk to signal that you and the issue that had brought you into their office now occupied their full attention, and cleared its throat again—for it had indeed been it, he, the infant, who, like any other GM, had cleared its throat in an expectant way in order to get my attention and at the same time in some subtle way to upbraid me for requiring it to do something to get my attention, as if I had been daydreaming or digressing mentally from some issue at hand—and, gazing at me fiercely, said—yes, said, in a high and l-deficient but unmistakable voice—

  ‘Well?’

  It now seems probable that it was at first my shock, my as it were nonplussedness at being spoken that adultly to by an infant in diapers and jammies soaked with drool, that led me so automatically to answer, to respond as I would to any expectant ‘Well?’ from a Service superior, functioning on, as it were, automatic pilot:

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said, as we stared at each other across our respectively wood-grain and lurid blue surfaces and the five or six fluorescent feet of air between us, both our hands now identically out and clasped, the infant’s gaze fiercely expectant and a small, creamy gout of mucus appearing and receding in one nostril as it breathed, looking directly at me, the cowlick at its crown like a tag or receipt from a register’s slit, its eyes lashless and without circumference or bottom, its lips pursed as if considering how to proceed, a bubble in its bottle of juice ascending slowly, leisurely towards the bottle’s top, the salient nipple brown and shiny from recent use. And the moment hung there between us, borderless and distendant, my impulse to clear my own throat only blocked by a fear of appearing impertinent—and it was in that seemingly endless, expectant interval that I came to see that I deferred to the infant, respected it, granted it full authority, and therefore waited, abiding, both of us in that small and shadowless father’s office, in the knowledge that I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frightening thing’s to command, its instrument or tool.

  §36

  Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

  His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

  There is little to say about the original animus or ‘motive cause’ of the boy’s desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. He had been homebound one day with asthma, a rainy a
nd distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father’s promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire. The boy’s asthma was thought to be congenital.

  The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion. (The young boy thought, at that point, of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.) The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom’s carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect 90-degree angle to his thigh as he could at that point manage. Then he had to lean as far over to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot’s outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips (the boy’s idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signified kissing in children’s cartoons) at a section of the foot’s outside he had marked with a bull’s-eye of soluble ink, struggling to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom’s door. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for over a month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.

  The father’s chiropractor, Doctor Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms. More important, it was Doctor Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in flexion. Doctor Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind. The child lay prone on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She manipulated his head, very gently but in a way that seemed to make things happen all the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she felt the boy’s back he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the muscles and fasciae and nerve bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises Doctor Kathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boy’s T2 and T3 vertebrae, which were what he had just injured. Doctor Kathy had reading glasses on a necklace and a green button-up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to perform the stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in symptomology keep him from performing the rehabilitative exercises in a disciplined way. She said the long-term goal was not relief of present discomfort but neurological hygiene and health and a wholeness of body and mind he would someday appreciate very, very much. For the boy’s father, Doctor Kathy prescribed an herbal relaxant.

  Thus was Doctor Kathy the child’s formal introduction both to incremental stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress toward a long-term goal. This proved fortuitous. During his five weeks disabled with a subluxated T3 vertebra—often in such discomfort that not even his inhaler could help the asthma that struck whenever he experienced pain or distress—the heady enthusiasm of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time he could not then (because of his age) imagine.

  One thing Doctor Kathy had taken time out to show the boy was a freestanding 3-D model of a human spine that had not been taken proper care of in any real or significant way. It looked dark, stunted, necrotic, and sad. Its tubercles and soft tissues were inflamed, and the annulus fibrosus of its disks was the color of bad teeth. Up against the wall behind this model was a hand-lettered plaque or sign explaining about what Doctor Kathy liked to say were the two different types of payments for the spine and associated nervosa, which were Now and Later.

  Most professional contortionists are, in fact, simply persons born with congenital atrophic/dystrophic conditions of major recti, or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine, or both. A majority display Chvostek’s sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their ‘art,’ therefore. In 1932, a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamil mysticism as capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just above the patella, and as thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 rpm. The phenomenon of suiphagia (i.e., ‘self-swallowing’) has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused by deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc.

  The insides of the small boy’s thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for, daily hours spent cross-legged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum, and the interior thigh’s dense and intransigent gracilis, pectineus, and adductor longus, which fuse below Scarpa’s triangle and transmit sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded. Had anyone seen him during these two- and three-hour sessions, bringing his soles together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep cross-legged lean to work the great tight sheet of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his pelvis to his dorsal costae, the child would have appeared to that person either prayerful or catatonic, or both.

  Once the thighs’ anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the upper portions of his genitals were simple, and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum, and extreme upper groin.

  The boy had turned seven.

  The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with a repeating jungle motif. The room’s second-floor window yielded a view of the backyard’s tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the room’s carpet, stretching and holding positions. His bedroom’s carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boy’s father did not think went well with the walls’ repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, palm; but the father kept his feelings to himself.

  Radical increase of the lips’ protrusive range requires systematic exercise of maxillary fasciae such as the depressor septi, orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris, depressor labii inferioris, and the buccinator, circumoral, and risorius groups. Zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis: Affix string to Wetherly button of at least 1.5" diameter borrowed from father’s second-best raincoat; place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips; hold string fully extended at 90 degrees to face’s plane and pull with gradually increasing tension on end, using lips to resist pull; hold for twenty seconds; repeat; repeat.

  Sometimes his father sat on the floor outside the boy’s bedroom with his back to the door. It’s not clear whether the boy ever heard him listening for movement in the room, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his seated position against the door. The boy was in there stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent hi
m an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most people’s mental album was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it—the image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he made for an exit. Most clients found the father made them uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone.

  By age eight, the child’s long-term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked changes in posture and gait. The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of the circumlabial hypertrophy’s effects on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual also, rigid and overbroad and seeming, in one custodian’s evaluative phrase, ‘like nothing in this round world.’

  Facts: Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds which penetrated the left hand and both feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in one hand as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command. The eighteenth-century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands’ wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating those clients’ own recovery from rationalist despair.