The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘The big Two-O,’ the counter woman said, as if to herself, punching the keys with the slight extra force a 1280 takes.

  A moment later Toni was out around the side of the store, sheltered from the lot’s view by the Kluckman Ice dispenser, with the plastic bag’s top whipping and popping between her shoes as she removed a traveler’s Kleenex from her handbag, tore it in two and again, and wrapped a quarter of the tissue tightly around her little finger, whose nail was perfect and almond-shaped and done in arterial red. Up into the right nasal cavity and around in a comprehensive spiral, and what came out included a standard-colored clot, both viscous and hard, with even a tiny thread of capillary inside the right border. The only thing someone in a store or line might remark about her was a faint affective abstraction, a quality of detachment that was not the detachment of peace or a personal relation with Our Lord Jesus Christ. Which she carefully wiped onto the left lapel of her cream-colored coat, with enough pressure to give it some length but not enough to compromise its adhesion or distort the nougat at its heart. A plasticized flatness about her reminiscent of processed air, airline food, transistorized sound. This was merely to pass the time until her order at Butts Hardware was assembled. The stockroom as she entered it had only paper goods and large cardboard boxes and borax in the floor-wall seam for roaches, and the manager’s little office door with its snap-on pinups and Peace with Honor poster of an eagle with a ski-jump nose and 5:00 shadow was ajar and emitted Dutch Masters and the mollified twang of country on a pocket radio. The day manager, who had no nametag (the counter woman was ‘Cheryl’) and had his feet up reading just what she’d have imagined, and who had a high convex forehead and one of those rapid and overhard blink rates like someone almost wincing when they blinked that signified something just a little neurally amiss, just a bit, swung his feet around and rose with complex squeaks of the chair as her timid knock and the force with which she all but staggered through the door spelled out all the innocent shock anyone’d need to read in her character. She’d drained her face of color and kept her eyes open in the wind on the way back from side to storefront, which wetted her eyes, and had her shoulders up and arms out in an attitude of speechless defilement. She appeared both smaller and larger than she really was, and the manager with the ticcy blink did not move or come around or find within himself the power to respond even during her setup, which was halting and hypoxic and sketched a scenario in which she was a frequent nay even habitual customer at this QWIK ’N’ EZ Ramp Tumor and had always received not only good value for the hard-earned money she earned taking in mending at home which as the single mother of two was all she could do, even though she’d been trained as a legal secretary over five years of night school during the time she was nursing her blind mother through her lengthy terminal illness, not just value and gas but always cheerful and courteous service from the gals at the counter, until—here a shudder that brought the manager, still holding the remains of a Little Debbie product in his left hand, halfway around the desk to comfort her until he saw the two-inch mess on her left lapel, which was the result of several Q-Tipless days and near-sneeze feeling and was indeed a mucal clot of sheer clock-stopping horror—until today just now, just, she didn’t know how to say this—her strongest impulse had just been to drive half-blind with tears home to throw the coat that had cost months of going without to buy so she could take her two babies to church in something they didn’t have to feel ashamed to be with into the low-income housing development’s dumpster and spend the rest of the day praying God to help her make some sense out of the senseless violation she’d just had happen and to avoid forever thereafter this QWIK ’N’ EZ out of degradation and horror but no, she’d always had such good value and service at this establishment that she felt it almost her duty, however embarrassing and degrading to account, to tell him what the employee behind the cash register had done, even though it made no sense, to her least of all, who certainly looked normal and even friendly and to whom she’d tried to be pleasant and had done nothing more than try to pay for the items she’d elected to buy here, who had, while she’d reached for her change and while looking her steadily in the eye had, had, with the other hand put her finger up her nose and then reached out and… and… here giving way completely to sobs and a kind of high-pitched keening sound and looking down at the lapel of a coat she gave the impression of somehow trying to back away from in horror as if the only reason she hadn’t already taken off the green-dolloped coat was that she couldn’t bear to take it off, feeling the clonic blinks upon the wad to note even the thread of red blood that made it more ghastly, then turning to stagger out as if too upset to continue or press for redress, lurching out until the transistor’s song of whiskey and loss had receded and she was back in the bleached light of the store itself, the sound of her heels in the aisle and lot rapid and satisfying as the counter woman’s wave and farewell-till-next-time receded unacknowledged and the manager stood there working his way from the shock to outrage and the boys silent and docile as gargoyles in the back even as she leapt into the car and all but peeled out, in case the manager had made it out front yet which she doubted, fishtailing onto the Frontage Road with such hysteric force that one dog was thrown into another, steadying herself with a right arm against the bag of bricks, half-humming the country tune’s refrain, coat defiled and already half off one shoulder, mailbox-bound.

  §48

  ‘It’s all a little hazy.’

  ‘That’s certainly understandable, Sir.’

  ‘I think I should tell you I’m very upset.’

  ‘We can certainly appreciate that.’

  ‘No. No. I mean inside. Upset inside.’

  ‘I think they’ve anticipated that, Sir, and that every possible—’

  ‘Down low I mean.’

  ‘Perhaps if you could just relay it to us as if you were relating data, Sir.’

  ‘You know: down low? You take my meaning?’

  ‘That’s just the effects, Sir, lingering. Take your time.’

  ‘It was the annual picnic. Is that what you want?’

  ‘That we know already, Sir.’

  ‘Every year, summer. In Coffield Park, bond-financed. Examinations annual picnic. Mummified fried chicken, potato salad. Deviled eggs I believe with flecked paprika like dots of dried blood—horrid. Great arrayed fans of luncheon meat. All this protein. Examiners eat like wild beasts, I’m sure you know. Audits more sparingly. You must know this. The variance in—’

  ‘We’ve certainly had reports, Sir.’

  ‘And grilled things. Those odd bolted park grills, also bond-financed to be sure. Wieners, patties in tiers on shiny white paper. Great swarms and shrouds of insects on the food on the table. Flies rubbing their little legs together. Do you know what that means when a fly does that? Hornets at the waste cans, hovering. Watermelon with ants on it. When it rubs its legs together like that?’

  ‘…’

  ‘A raw hamburger patty’s like blood in the water to an insect, men.’

  ‘You were just inventorying the picnic’s provisions, Sir.’

  ‘Iced tea, Kool-Aid. There was pop in a chest the GM brought. Some primary-colored Jell-O. Red or green or red-and-green. It’s for morale, the annual picnic, change the interactive context.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with a picnic, Sir.’

  ‘See everyone’s families, children. The children. One doesn’t think of GS-9s having children, playing with children, little Line 40s. And yet every year there they are. The mothers arranged games. And bottles of beer in a chest Marge van Hool’s husband brought.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to Mr. van Hool, Sir.’

  ‘And mosquitoes everywhere. The terrible kind, that cast a shadow and have hairy legs. You can hear them but you can’t see them. Not until. Blood draws every—and Audits, Audits were playing some type of children’s game with that flying disk from Hasbro. Aerodynamic disk, bright color, Hasbro, where did—?’

  ‘A Frisbee, perhaps, Sir?’
/>
  ‘Hasbro now a division of I believe one United Amusements, supposedly based in St. Paul but with substantial offshore accounts.’

  ‘…’

  ‘And you know as well as I what that so often means.’

  ‘And you noticed nothing out of the ordinary regarding the iced tea, the Jell-O.’

  ‘They think it was the Jell-O then.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be our department, Sir.’

  ‘The Jell-O had very small marshmallows in it as I recall. One of those exceedingly bright primary colors, the Jell-O. The flies left it alone, although those bloody mosquitoes my God if you—’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘I should tell you I’m extremely agitated and upset.’

  ‘We’re making a second note of that, Mr. Director, Sir, for emphasis.’

  ‘I don’t believe the effects have entirely worn off yet.’

  ‘Just proceed on the assumption that we’re the ones in the middle, please, Sir.’

  ‘I spoke with law enforcement agents, I believe, unless that was the effects.’

  ‘That was several hours ago, Sir. We’re with the Service. I am Agent Clothier, this is Special Agent Aylortay.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Sir, although it’s damn unfortunate it has to be under these circumstances.’

  ‘You’re CID?’

  ‘No, Sir, we’re Inspections, out of Chicago, Post 1516.’

  ‘They brought you down.’

  ‘Everyone’s very concerned, Sir, understandably.’

  ‘Mosquitoes are just needles with wings.’

  ‘Not entirely sure how to respond to that, Sir.’

  ‘There were no CID at the picnic.’

  ‘No, Sir, as you might recall CID had a forensic accounting in-service this weekend at Region, Sir.’

  ‘They don’t mix well, as a rule, CID.’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘Hold themselves a bit aloof if you know what I mean. Vomiting.’

  ‘Vomiting, Sir?’

  ‘When they rub their legs together. It looks innocuous, but the flies are in fact vomiting digestive juices onto their legs and applying it to the food. They’re one of the animals which pre-digest. Mosquitoes do the same thing.’

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘Vomit inside you. That’s what raises the lump. They’re pre-digesting the blood before they suck it out of you. Great hairy-legged things. They breed in the fields, you know. Needles with wings. Disease-vector. None finer. Whole civilizations down. Read your history.’

  ‘We can appreciate the bug situation down here, Sir.’

  ‘I was grilling. Brats and patties. At least for a time. They gave me an apron. Something witty on the front. A certain impertinence permissible at picnics, the Christmas party. Let everyone’s hair down a bit if you get me.’

  ‘You estimate you were grilling throughout the early intervals of the picnic, then, Sir, which would square with Mr. van Hool’s account.’

  ‘The iced tea was brewed, not that horrible mix iced tea with the slight scum on top.’

  ‘The iced tea was consumed by you’d say how many at the picnic, Sir?’

  ‘Copious. Terribly hot you understand. No one wants pop when it’s hot, except of course children, which then they have sticky mouths, which then the sugar in the pop excites the bugs.’

  ‘Jesus, Clothier, now with the bugs again.’

  ‘Utitshay.’

  ‘Nothing against CID, you understand. Indispensable part of the mechanism. Fine hardworking fellows. Notwithstanding all the junk cases, deplorable waste of resources, Region had figures on—’

  ‘So if there was a common denominator, Sir, you might point at the iced tea, you’re telling us.’

  ‘We all drank it. Ungodly hot. Who wants beer under a sun like that? Do either of you hear a—a sound?’

  ‘And yet you yourself you’re saying did not see anyone bringing the iced tea into the picnic area or making the iced tea.’

  ‘An urn. Dispenser. Orange pebbled plastic, nozzle like a barrel’s bung, yes?’

  ‘The iced tea, you’re saying.’

  ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever felt this agitated. It’s as if.’

  ‘They tell us it will come and go for a time, Sir, as the blood level stabilizes.’

  ‘You’ll be up and around in no time they tell us, Sir.’

  ‘Trying to be glad to be of help. Our boys in uniform.’

  ‘Clothier, what say—’

  ‘You were helping us identify the urn, Sir, with the iced tea.’

  ‘Orange dispenser that said Gatorade on the side. Some of the older children were excited; they thought it was Gatorade.’

  ‘No children drank the tea.’

  ‘The examiners call their children their little Line 40s. That’s of course where you enter your CCDC from Form 2441 on the 1040. Some of the children were playing Collections. Near the horseshoe courts. Some of the older children. Liens on the toys, a jeopardy assessment and seizure of some of the smaller childrens’ plates; there was some of the usual crying.’

  ‘And you’d say you might first have noticed any unusual effects or anything out of the ordinary when, then, Sir, if you had to say?’

  ‘Terrible activity to teach children. Collections is Ghent’s problem. Was Ghent’s. I avoid Collections.’

  ‘Understandable from our vantage, Sir.’

  ‘Are those sunglasses, then?’

  ‘Sir, we’re not wearing eye protection of any kind.’

  ‘My nose itches something awful.’

  ‘I’m afraid we aren’t permitted to touch any part of your person, Sir.’

  ‘My thoughts are normally so much more organized than this.’

  ‘Please take all the time you need.’

  ‘They seemed just awful. Whole clouds of them. Shrouds, clouds, crowds of them. They’re a disease-vector you know. Read your history. Breed in the trees. When I looked in one of their shades two of the smaller children were covered. A shroud of them around both, in their eyes, nose, smothering them—I saw one of them fall; it couldn’t cry out. Pendleton’s little Line 40.’

  ‘So then you’d say that was the first observable sign of any effect, then, Sir.’

  ‘I had a very long fork, you know.’

  ‘For the grilling you mean, Sir.’

  ‘Let’s didi, Norm, man. This guy’s still gone. Scratch his nose and let’s go.’

  ‘Aitway, Aylortay.’

  ‘The Culex and malaria. The Aedes aegypti and dengue. Read it. It’s written. Fork or no.’

  ‘For your duties at the grill at the picnic area’s southeast quadrant according to this schematic, Sir.’

  ‘A very long fork. I don’t think you can appreciate. Jagged tines. It cast a shadow.’

  ‘And were—were you able to observe at this time any of the other agents or families behaving in any way out of the ordinary or engaged with the iced tea in any way, Sir?’

  ‘Though I did notice the settings. At the tables. With checked cloths. The settings were all knives. No spoons, no forks. I had the fork. Knife, plate, knife, knife. Three wicked knives at each place. Some years the breeze blows the plates away. Not this year, I can tell you.’

  ‘So this was an effect, or you were observing an effect, Sir, can you say which?

  ‘Fechner has a glass eye.’

  ‘That would be Revenue Agent Fechner, Sir. You observed him setting knives at the tables?’

  ‘Lost an eye in the war. How he put it: “Lost an eye.” The idea. Say there, fellows, anyone seen my eye by any chance?’

  ‘So you hadn’t observed any person or persons actually setting the table with all knives, then, Sir.’

  ‘Norm, man, what knives? Let’s didi.’

  ‘That’s a war term if I’m not mistaken. Agent Taylor. You think I don’t know what this is?’

  ‘It’s Aylortay, Sir. Pleased to meet you, Sir, although it’s damn unfortunate it has to be under these circumstances.’

&nbs
p; ‘They were coming out of the trees.’

  ‘They were rappelling, Sir. The incursion may or may not have been tactical, that much we know.’

  ‘There was an egg-toss and gunny—the egg wouldn’t move; it stayed there in midair. The three-legged race under way when they came from the trees and they were trying to run away, to get to their children but their legs were tied together. It was a feeding frenzy, the mosquitoes—I was waving the long fork around.’

  ‘And you said you observed Revenue Agent Fechner suffering effects from the adulterated tea.’

  ‘So it was the tea.’

  ‘That’s not our area, Sir, I’m afraid. We’re collecting data.’

  ‘On the knives.’

  ‘A handsome set of knives indeed, Sir, would you care to see them?’

  ‘Who is this really? Who are you men?’

  ‘You were saying Revenue Agent Fechner and his glass eye.’

  ‘That he was at van Hool’s beer chest; he had his glass eye out so there was just the socket.’

  ‘And did the knives oh by some chance look like… this, Sir?’

  ‘Atiencepay, Aylortay. Onay uttingcay etyay.’

  ‘You think I don’t speak Latin?’

  ‘Sir, I’m pleased you speak Latin.’

  ‘Who is this man to your right and left?’

  ‘Try to focus, Sir. I know it’s difficult.’

  ‘Fechner was at the chest, had the eye out and was… was opening bottles of beer with the socket. Socket as bottle opener. In goes the bottle, downward yank. The little Line 40s were watching—it was awful!’

  ‘Revenue Agent Fechner’s going to be fine, Sir. They found the eye and he’s going to be right as rain.’

  ‘Was it raining, Sir?’

  ‘Placing the cap in the socket and then yanking down on the bottle, then the children would scream and clap because the cap was in the socket. A little gray sun in the eye. Eye eye!’

  ‘I say we just cut it out of him right now. It’s right there, Clothier, see it?’