The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Voc Ed students tend not to be very sensitive or emotionally agile, and it would be too much to say that ‘everything changed’ after that day in Industrial Arts. It was not that Leonard Stecyk became popular, or that the hard boys started inviting him to come out with them on school nights to perpetrate vandalism or abuse gateway drugs. A few of them, though, were surprised—not ashamed so much as shaken—by their paralysis in the face of trauma and the noxious little faggot’s actions. It was strange. These were tough boys: They fought freely, took beatings from stepdads and older brothers. For the brightest among them, their idea of what toughness was, of the relations between coolness and actual value, had now been somewhat fucked with. Their accounts of the incident were confused and varied from boy to boy. More than one alluded to Lost in Space, which was a popular show at the time. The main change in the quality of the future DDP’s life was that most of the Stecyk Specials and sudden hallway punches in the upper arm’s radial nerve and other daily bits of cruelty ceased, mostly because a strange unease came over the hard boys when they saw or even thought of Stecyk, and real cruelty—as every adolescent knows—requires a close attention to the object of that cruelty. Stecyk’s actions that day did not make him more but less special; the hard boys ceased to see him or single him out. It was strange, and stranger still was how fast Stecyk himself forgot the whole thing, even after Mr. Ingle returned to C. E. Potter after Thanksgiving for his new duties as a Driver Ed instructor with his maimed right hand encased in some kind of protective black polyurethane glove or sheath, resulting in the student sobriquet ‘Dr. No’ throughout the early 1970s. Everyone seemed to have incentive to forget the whole thing. A Voc Ed hard boy who would serve in the Plaine des Joncs region of Indochina twenty months later was the only one with a clear conscious memory of Stecyk and Ingle’s thumb that one day, and this when a fat-body draftee who’d almost flunked Basic and been the object of a savage blanket party had taken a squad that had lost its corporal and regrouped them and brought them around between two separate NVA platoons to reform with Able Company; he had just stood up and told them to strip ordnance off the dead and form a defilade against the opposite side of the creekbed, and everyone had obeyed—unthinkingly, for reasons they could not later explain or admit—and the hard boy had thought of Stecyk in his little apron and paisley bow tie (the latter a distortion of memory) and of the fact, again, that what they’d then thought was the wide round world was a little boy’s preening dream.

  §40

  Cusk had been ushered into the psychiatrist’s office and was counting the boxes of Kleenex in a little room lined with big books and diplomas. The sixth was on the little desk in the corner the psychiatrist used for filling out prescriptions. The office was minus the little sink some physicians had—he’d spent whole days girding himself for the sink. When his name had been called, Cusk had shaken the psychiatrist’s hand and taken a padded chair the psychiatrist’s other hand had indicated. The psychiatrist hitched her trousers up slightly at the knee and had sat down opposite Cusk across a glass coffee table on which were two boxes of Kleenex. Her hand had been large, warm, and soft. Her chair was the same model as Cusk’s chair—one, maybe two levels of comfort below an easy chair—but seemed, unless it was his imagination, to be slightly taller than his chair.

  … ‘of spiders, of dogs, of mail,’ Cusk was listing—the psychiatrist listened intently, nodding, but did not take notes, which relieved Cusk—‘Fear of spiral notebooks, the kind with the spiral or wire down the spine; fear of fountain pens—though not felt-tip or ballpoint pens, unless the ballpoint is one of those expensive ones with an aspect of permanence—Cross, Montblanc, the kind that look gold—but not plastic or disposable ballpoints.’ Having exhausted Kleenex boxes to count, Cusk was mentally repeating ‘large, soft, and warm, large, soft and warm,’ over and over, a ruminative chant just below the level of thought.

  ‘Fear of disks. Fear of drains. Fear of pretty much all spiral movements in liquid, across the board.’

  The psychiatrist’s eyebrows were extraordinarily thin and sparse, and when she raised them it meant she didn’t quite follow—

  ‘Whirlpools, maelstroms, bathtubs draining,’ Cusk illustrated. He had a fine sheen of sweat on his upper lip, but could tell by feel that the forehead was staying dry, hanging in there. ‘Briskly stirred beverages. Flushing toilets.’

  §41

  ‘You sent Cardwell to get him?’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘He’s demented, Charlie, that’s what’s the problem.’

  ‘He’s a good driver. He’s dependable.’

  ‘He’ll rant at the guy the whole way here; the guy’ll think it’s a post of evangelist goons. This is Lehrl’s aide, Charlie. Jesus.’

  §42

  There were long silences between periods of attention.

  ‘Shit I got one for you. This was a while ago, though, when I was in school in St. Louis, when we were the Reserve Rangers.’

  ‘I’ll bite.’

  ‘You won’t get some of it. You had to be alive in the late sixties.’

  ‘We weren’t alive?’

  ‘I don’t mean playing-with-your-toes alive or squeezing-the-pores-of-your-nose alive. I mean of age, aware. I mean culturally.’

  ‘Counterculturally you mean.’

  ‘I could say to eat shit off a thick wooden stick, Gaines. But I don’t. Instead I say if there’s something cool with this unmistakable quality and I say the thing’s quality is just so Beatles, you don’t get it.’

  ‘You had to be there.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing as just owning Beatles records, you’re saying. You had to be there, in it.’

  ‘Grooving. Being groovy.’

  ‘That’s just it. Nobody really said groovy. People that said groovy or called you man were just playing out some fantasy they’d seen on CBS reports. I’m saying if I say Baxter-Bathing or Owsley or mention Janis’s one dress she wore you think in terms of data. There’s none of the feeling attached to it—this was a feeling. It’s impossible to describe.’

  ‘Except as saying it’s so very Beatles.’

  ‘And some of it not even data. What if I say Lord Buckley? What if I say the Texas tower or Sin Killer Griffin on tape from jail or Jackson going on Today and sitting across from that J. Fred chimp in a shirt that’s still got Martin’s blood and brain matter on it and nobody says anything even though Today’s in New York which means fucking Jackson flew all the way in from Memphis in that shirt so he could wear blood on TV—do you feel anything if I say that? Or Bonanza or I Am Curious parenthesis Yellow? J. Fred Muggs? Jesus, The Fugitive— if I say the one-armed man, what interior state does it provoke?’

  ‘You mean nostalgia.’

  ‘I mean methamphetamine hydrochloride. Say December’s Children or Dharma Bums or Big Daddy Cole at the House of Blues in Dearborn or crew cuts and horn-rims or even let me think of rolled-up Levi’s showing three inches of white cotton over penny loafers and I taste the hydrochloride from the days at Wash U when we were the Reserve Rangers. How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.’

  ‘We have our own little cultural signposts and cathexes and things that make us feel nostalgia.’

  ‘It’s not nostalgia. It’s a whole set of references you don’t even know you don’t have. Suppose I say Sweater Puppies—you feel nothing. Christ, Sweater Puppies.’

  ‘Not acid?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why methamphetamine and not acid? LSD? Weren’t grass and LSD the era’s like defining drugs?’

  ‘That’s what I mean. None of the nuance or complexity introduces into your field. Acid was the West Coast and a small cell around Boston. Acid wasn’t even in Greenwich Village until Kesey and Leary’s thing upstate in ’67. By ’67 the sixties were over. The Midwest was meth and designer hallucinogens. We had a small sort of inner set at Wash U who were in with the Dogtown crowd; one reason I’m here instead of private is I don’t think
one of us cracked a book in two years, then I had to move because of the Rescue Rangers and this older guy named, perversely, McCool, who wanted in with us, hung around, but desperately uncool, from hunger we’d say but to you this means nothing. McCool was a district rep for Welch Lambeth. I presume Welch Lambeth is part of your cultural index.’

  ‘Chemicals. Now part of Lilly. University City, Miz, heavily diversified, chemical and largely industrial solvents, medical supplies, adhesive, polymers, chassis molds.’

  ‘Medical supplies at this time including for instance sometimes he’d bring stuff in, we’d be at the usual table at Jaegerschnitzel, a rathskeller for WU’s most countercultural and antiestablishment but not mod or groovy crowd, and one night in the midst of some bull session in comes McCool, who had a larcenous heart, with a half-pound insulated box he’d got from some sample room and said, “I know some of you fellows like this, so when I saw it I said, Holy Smokes I gotta liberate this for the fellows” and like that. From hunger, but plucky in that Eisenhower way. He’s in his thirties and already bald with a blinky hunger for acceptance; you can only imagine what must have happened to him as a kid. The sort of guy who comes to your party and you get him drunk enough to pass out by nine and put him in the Rescue Rangers minibus and strip off everything but his shoes and socks and leave him propped up on a bus stop bench in East St. Louis and he’ll not only survive somehow but the next night he’ll be back at the Jaegerschnitzel punching you in the shoulder and saying Good One like you’d just given him a hotfoot, desperate to be one of the guys.’

  ‘My brothers taught me that desperation is the chief, like, bar to being accepted as one of the guys. I learned this the hard way I can tell you. One time because as a kid I was scared of the water and they let me come with them on a camping trip and my oldest brother said this was my one big chance to be one of the guys and instead of camping it turned out it was a fishing trip and when I tried to climb in the boat it turned out they—’

  ‘And we’re like right, great, but then Eddie Boyce opens it up and inside are these long insulated corrugated-cardboard tubes, and inside each tube is a little three-inch double-stoppered test tube with… pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine hydrochloride, three-point-something grams each. We’re all sitting there looking at each other and Boyce’s eyebrows are about on top of his head. McCool trying to play it casual but saying “See? What do you think?” Do you know what this means? There were 224 grams of pure pharmaceutical meth in that box. Do you know what even crummy adulterated garage-lab meth can do to a twenty-year-old nervous system?’

  ‘I would have sold it off and used the net to establish a position in silver and then gone to my professors and pulled their beards, tell them I could buy and sell them now and they could put that in their pipes and smoke it.’

  ‘We didn’t sell enough of it, I’ll tell you. But what we did wreaked havoc. Classes were a zoo. Carbuncular kids who’d sat in the back row and never made a peep were grabbing their profs by the lapels and citing the surplus theory of value in the voice of SS interrogators. Newman Club mainstays were copulating with abandon on the library steps. The infirmary was besieged by philosophy grad students begging someone to shut their heads off. Dining halls were empty. The entire Wash U defensive backfield was jailed for assault on the Kansas State water boy. Coeds whose hymens could be used for a vault door were giving it up in the bushes outside Lambda Pi. Most of the next two months we spent as the Reserve Rangers, in the van, answering distress calls from boys who had gotten hold of a tenth of a gram of this stuff and now found their girlfriends hanging off the ceiling by their nails grinding their perfect little white teeth into nubbins. Reserve Rangers!

  ‘Awake for a week at a time, all of us flying on meth and never coming down because coming down off meth is like having terrible flu while in hell, Boyce’s palms with permanent indentations from gripping the bus’s wheel so hard, and all our eyeballs looking like novelty-shop eyeballs. The closest we’re coming to eating is shuddering in distaste when we see a restaurant sign on our way to the literally dozens of Rescue Ranger calls we’re getting every night, booming the doors and scanning the elevators and taking stairs five at a time singing our Rescue Rangers on the Job fight song.’

  ‘What’s this Rescue Rangers angle, Todd, if—?’

  ‘Because in very short order as the power and purity of this stuff starts to ramify throughout Dogtown we impress upon McCool the need for some kind of remedial help from the good offices of Welch Lambeth.’

  ‘What possible medical use does methamphetamine have? Obesity? Sleep deprivation research? Controlled-psychosis experiments?’

  ‘And two or three days later—just as all of us are reaching just about the limits of endurance and our ribs are showing and the skin around our eyes is starting to look like hamburger—there was one terrible accident where I was alone and I decided all right this time we take the emergency brake off and shoot almost an eighth of a gram uncut and was in a very very strange state of mind indeed one step short of clinical paranoia and the doorbell rings and I open it on the chain and all I see is a hat with plastic flowers on the brim and it’s this tiny old little blameless Welcome Wagon lady, welcoming us in our caved-in rental house to the neighborhood with a little basket of cookies and hygienic products looking up at me but with those weird little hypnotic spirals of red in one eye and green in another and her little peanut of a face convexly bulging out horribly like a crocodile’s face and then receding and then coming out up at me again, and I’ll spare you the details of how I reacted except to tell you that this incident led directly to my having to drop out and move to Colorado less than two months later, which is how I got the Service Moniker Colorado Todd.’

  §43

  Tuesday morning I had an ENT appointment and clocked in at 10:05. The complex was even more subdued than usual. People spoke quietly and had a slight shoulder-first quality to their walk. A few of the women who were known to react to any sort of upset by becoming pale were pale. There was a quality of slow-motion milling to everybody’s activities, as if they were all reacting to something but were aware of themselves reacting and that everybody else was reacting. I was out of aspirin. For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn’t know what’s going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows what’s going on. This is a clear low-status marker, and I resisted it. It wasn’t until after eleven that I overheard Trudi Keener, Jane-Ann Heape, and Homer Campbell in the UNIVAC room collating stacks of backdated EST vouchers.

  There had been an explosion in another Region. In either Muskegon or Holland, both tenth annexes. Either a car or a light truck had parked directly in front of the District office and then at some later time blown up. Trudi Keener had quoted George Molesworthy as saying that the Posse Comitatus was known to be both extreme and active in Michigan. This meant that it was a terrorist attack on a Service Post, which in any depressed agricultural region is going to send chills. I stood in the room pretending to check something in the file catalogue for as long as I figured I could without Jane-Ann Heape being able to discern that I was eavesdropping and deduce that I was the sort of person who didn’t know what was going on and recalibrate her idea of me accordingly. Her hair today was up and done in a complex set of curls and waves that appeared darker in the blue-end fluorescence of the UNIVAC room. She had on a pale blue acetate blouse and skirt whose plaid was so dark and low-contrast it was hard to identify it as true plaid. No casualty information emerged, but I did learn that two or three of 047’s Audit-Coordination Support Systems staff had been posted in Michigan early in their careers; I had no connection to Audit-Coordination Support Systems and didn’t recognize the names.

  When my break came the coffee room smelled sour, which meant that Mrs. Oooley hadn’t cleaned out the pots and filters before clocking out last night. It was a personnel gold mine in there, however. Mr. Glendenning and Gene Rosebury were drinking coffe
e out of their complimentary Service mugs (for GS-13s and up) and Meredith Rand was eating a cup of yogurt out of the GS-9 refrigerator with a plastic fork (which meant Ellen Bactrim was hoarding spoons again). They were having the conversation, and Gary Yeagle and James Rumps and several others were standing just off to the side, listening. I came in in the middle and pretended to study the vending machines and then to count the coins in my hand.

  ‘This isn’t terrorism. This is people not wanting to pay their taxes,’ Gene Rosebury said. There were faint remains of his customary Mylanta mustache. The ‘this’ indicated that there was a great deal of conversational context and information that had gone on heretofore.

  ‘If I’m terrified, that doesn’t make it terrorism?’ Meredith Rand said. She removed a tiny bit of yogurt from the corner of her mouth with her little finger. It seemed significant that no one laughed, not even the GS-9s. Rand’s was the sort of low-cal sally that was meant not so much to be funny as to give the room the opportunity to laugh and so dispel tension. No one took this opportunity. This seemed telling. Mr. Glendenning had on a tan suit and a string tie with a medallion of turquoise at the crux. The REC Director was a man who was accustomed to being the center of attention in any room he was in, although with him this manifested as an air of quiet self-possession instead of exhibitionism. I didn’t know a person at the Post who didn’t like and admire DeWitt Glendenning. I had been with the Service long enough by this time to understand that this was one quality of a successful administrator, to be liked. And not to act in such a way as to be liked, but to be that way. Nobody ever felt that Mr. Glendenning was putting on any kind of act, the way less gifted administrators do, even an act for themselves, for instance acting like a martinet because someplace inside they have a picture of a good administrator as a hard-ass and are trying to contort their own personalities to fit the picture. Or that glad-handing, my-door-is-always-open type who believes a good administrator needs to be everyone’s friend and so acts very open and friendly even though the responsibilities of his office require him to discipline people or cut budgets and deny requests or reassign people to Examination or any number of things that aren’t friendly at all. This type puts himself in a terrible position, because each time he has to do something for the good of the Service that is going to hurt some employee or piss her off, the action now carries the additional emotional freight of a friend dicking over a friend, and frequently the administrator feels so uncomfortable over this and his divided loyalties that he has to get personally angry—or act angry—at the employee to do it, which makes the thing personal in an inappropriate way and adds greatly to the dicked-over employee’s hurt and resentment, and over time this totally undermines the administrator’s authority, and in very short order everybody sees him as a fake and a backstabber, pretending to be your friend and colleague but ready to dick you over whenever he feels like it. It’s interesting that these two false administrative styles—the tyrant and the fake friend—are also the two main stereotypes that books and television shows and comic strips present administrators as. One suspects, in fact, that the mental picture the insecure administrator erects inside himself is based partly on these pop-culture stereotypes.