The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  22 At 158 employees, the vacuum-sublimation-and-caffeine-supplementation works for Bright Eyes Instant Coffee represented Philo’s last remaining claim to industry. A subsidiary of Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics, Bright Eyes was a regional high-caf brand, recognizable in Midwest stores by the jar’s crude graphic of an electrified-looking squirrel with bulging blazing suns for eyes and what looked like tiny bolts of cartoon lightning shooting out from its splayed extremities. When Archer Daniels Midland Co. absorbed Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics in 1991, Bright Eyes was (mercifully*) discontinued. More than this I am legally enjoined from telling you by the refusal of certain members of my family to sign the appropriate legal releases. Suffice it to say that I know a lot more about the chemistry, manufacture, and ambient odors of instant coffee than anyone would voluntarily want to, and that the smells were not at all the cozy comforting breakfastish aromas that one might naively imagine (they were closer to burning hair, actually, when the wind was right).

  * As early as the 1970s, there had been evidence linking artificially enhanced caffeine to everything from arrhythmias to Bell’s palsy, though the first class-action suit was not filed until 1989.

  23 A further irony: During an April 1987 tornado outside De Kalb, a detached portion of one of these FARM SAFETY billboards whirled in and for all practical purposes decapitated a soybean farmer—that was pretty much it for the 4-H sign.

  24 (i.e., facing south and SSP, on which we were moving west at literally the rate of a toddler’s crawl)

  25 Again, much of this is from the actual notebook in which these impressions were recorded. I’m aware that I’m describing the access road from a distance but attributing to it qualities that became evident only as we got very slowly closer and closer and then were actually on it. Part of this is artful compression; part is that it’s next to impossible to take coherent notes in a moving auto.

  26 (inscribed with a pencil that had long since gone blunt and dull, which is something I detest; there would have had to be considerable psychic pressure/incentive for me to be willing to write with a dull pencil)

  27 Again, the ‘behind’ is from the perspective of the parkway. Given that what we were approaching was the main building’s rear, the premium lots were actually ‘in front’ of the REC, though that front faced away from Self-Storage.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Let’s mainly skip the issue of the additional crowding and dysfunction caused by outer lots’ pedestrians trying to negotiate the access road’s narrow edge past the solid line of cars that filled that road, much of which problem could have been solved simply by installing a sidewalk across the immaculate lawn and some kind of entrance in the front (i.e., what appeared to be the front; it was actually the building’s rear). In essence, the baronial splendor of the REC’s grass was a testament to the idiocy and hassle of the whole thing’s planning.

  30 It had to be: It wasn’t nearly wide enough to sustain two-way traffic, not to mention the additional space taken up by pedestrians trying to walk to/from their vehicles along the road’s edge.

  31 What I did not at that time know was that, as the result of certain complex Compliance Branch reorganizations related to the implementation of the ‘Initiative,’ the Midwest REC had had a net gain of more than three hundred new employees over the previous two fiscal quarters. One theory among the rote examiners at Angler’s Cove was that this had helped tip some delicate balance in the REC’s parking situation, exacerbated by the construction on Self-Storage and the elimination, for what were represented as morale reasons, of reserved parking for those with civil service grades above GS-11. The latter had been the idea of Mr. Tate, the REC’s Director of Personnel, who’d regarded reserved parking as elitist and corrosive to REC morale. The syndrome of DP Richard Tate’s instituting a policy that resulted in far more problems than it resolved was so familiar that wigglers referred to it as ‘dicktation.’

  32 At the time, I knew nothing of the bureaucratic hostilities between the IRS and the state of Illinois, these dating all the way back to the state’s brief introduction of a progressive sales tax, which top officials at Triple-Six under the Carter administration had joined others in the editorial pages of major financial dailies in ridiculing and in abusing the ‘brain trust’ behind the state’s revenue scheme, causing bad blood which continued, in the form of many small types of petty hassles and inaccommodation, through the 1980s.

  33 Factoid courtesy of GS-9 Robert Atkins (knows all, tells all).

  34 (It turned out that the fountain was broken and an obscure hydraulic part was on order.)

  35 There had been certain changes and modifications in the 1040 since 1978, the details of which I would come to know all too well over the coming months.

  36 N.B. that a detailed illustrative photo of the REC’s mirrored Annex’s west side’s junction with the main building’s facade circa 1985, which I made a point of including as Plate 1 in the original memoir, has been here deleted by the publisher for ‘legal’ reasons that (I opine) make no sense whatsoever. Hiatus valde deflendus.

  37 Which we had to do because several other vehicles had double- and even triple-parked just ahead, and it was impossible to go any farther, and the driver simply put the car in park and sat rotating his neck stiffly, with both hands still on the steering wheel, as the more experienced Service employees began piling out.

  38 Some of the entrance area’s milling crowd’s men were in shirtsleeves, and a swirling wind caused by the contrast in temperatures in and out of the building’s shadow blew some of their neckties either back over their shoulders or (for a second or two) out straight from their chests in an arrowy way, as if they were impaled on their own neckties, which is what accounts for the strange memorability of this fragment as we pulled up.

  39 The Personnel representative, Ms. Neti-Neti, turned out to be what she called Persian. It was she whom 2K Bob McKenzie and some of the others in Hindle’s Rotes group had christened ‘the Iranian Crisis.’

  40 It had been the Pakistani roommate, in fact, who as early as Freshman Orientation Week had christened me with the unkind name that followed me throughout the next three semesters, ‘the young man carbuncular.’

  41 There is actually a third general class of reactive person, whose eyes would linger on my face in a kind of nakedly horrified fascination. These were usually people with a personal history of various kinds of moderate skin problems and a consequent interest in worst-case-type examples of bad skin that overrides (i.e., the interest does) their natural tact or inhibition. I had actually had strangers come up to me and start expounding on their own past or present skin problems, assuming that I couldn’t fail to care or be interested, which I will admit I found irksome. Children, by the way, are not members of this (c) category—their interested stare is very different, and in general they (= children) are exempt from the whole taxonomy of reactors, since their social instincts and inhibitions are not yet fully evolved and it’s impossible to take their reactions or lack of tact personally—see e.g. the kid on the bus, although obviously he also had a repellent problem of his own.

  42 Nor did she offer to help me with any of my bags, despite the fact that the one I held with the same arm with which I had to sort of clamp my dispatch case against my side clunked painfully against the same knee it had been clunking against all day whenever I had to carry my bags from one spot to another, while my left side’s wet clothes caused the spot on my ribs to start itching like mad again.

  43 Given the large number of both new employees and transfers who arrived with luggage that day (for reasons I wouldn’t understand for some time), though, it’s only fair to observe that the REC Personnel office might have done well to have set up some system whereby people got taken to housing first, dropped off their bags, and were only then conducted to the REC for intake and orientation. However difficult the logistics of that scheme might have been, the alternative was an enormous number of IRS employees having to carry their bags with them everywhere they went on that fir
st day at the REC, including in cramped elevators and stairways, as well as piles of unattended bags in the corner of whatever rooms the various orientations and ID productions were going on in.

  44 These were Tingle tables, an Examinations convention with which I became all too familiar—although no one I ever talked to knew the origin of ‘Tingle,’ as in whether it was eponymous, or sardonic, or what.

  45 For me, the pencil sharpener is a big one. I like a very particular sort of very sharp pencil, and some pencil sharpeners are a great deal better than others for achieving this special shape, which then is blunted and ruined after only a sentence or two, requiring a large number of sharpened pencils all lined up in a special order of age, remaining height, & c. The upshot is that nearly everyone I knew had distracting little rituals like this, of which rituals the whole point, deep down, was that they were distracting.

  46 This sense of personal disorganization, which of course is very common, was for me heightened by the fact that I had very little trouble analyzing other people’s basic character and motivations, strengths and weaknesses, & c., while all attempts at self-analysis resulted in a tangle of contradictory and hopelessly complex facts and tendencies, impossible to sort out or draw general conclusions from.

  47 I am reminded of an observation made during one of the wigglers’ evening bull sessions in the room of Chris Acquistipace, who was a Chalk Leader and one of the only REC wigglers housed on the second floor of the Angler’s Cove complex to display any friendliness or even an open mind toward me, despite the administrative foul-up that at first had me promoted even above the floor’s other GS-9s. It was either Acquistipace or Ed Shackleford, whose ex-wife had taught high school, who observed that what was then starting to be codified as ‘test anxiety’ may well really have been an anxiety about timed tests, meaning exams or standardized tests, where there is no way to do the endless fidgeting and self-distraction that is part of 99.9 percent of real people’s concentrated deskwork. I cannot honestly say that I remember whose observation it was; it was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. For the sake of convenience, let’s assume it was Shackleford. Shackleford’s observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in ‘test anxiety’ might well be a fear of the tests’ associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it’s this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.

  48 Once again, I would only later learn that most wigglers and Support Services workers at the REC referred to the whole Intake/Orientation process as ‘ dis orientation,’ which was another bit of clumsy inside humor. On the other hand, no one in authority expected me to be as completely confused and overwhelmed as in fact I was on arrival, since it emerged that the Personnel office had mistaken me for a completely different David Wallace, viz. an elite and experienced Immersives examiner from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC who had been lured to 047 through a complex system of shell-transfers and bureaucratic finagling. I.e., that there were not one but two David Wallaces whose contracted postings to 047 were to begin in this mid-May week. The computer-system problem behind this error is detailed in §38. It goes without saying that all these facts emerged only after a great deal of time, misunderstanding, and convolved hassle. They were the real explanation for Ms. Neti-Neti’s scripted effusion and deference: It was actually that other, GS-13’s name, ontologically speaking, that had been on her special whiteboard sign, though it’s not as if ‘David Wallace’ is so common a US name that anyone could have reasonably expected me to posit right away that there’d been some freakish confusion about names and identities, especially during all the other confusion and ineptitude of ‘disorientation.’

  (N.B. Purely as an autobiographical aside, I’ll insert that my use of my full middle name in published writing has its origins in this early confusion and trauma, i.e., trauma at being threatened at first with blame for the whole snafu, which, though egregious bullshit, was still understandably traumatic for a twenty-year-old green recruit with a fear of bureaucracies and one so-called ‘honor code’ violation, however specious and hypocritical, in his background already. For years afterward, I had morbid anxieties about there being God only knew how many other David Wallaces running around out there, doing God knows what; and I never again wanted to be professionally mistaken for or conflated with some other David Wallace. And then once you’ve fixed on a certain nom de plume, you’re more or less stuck with it, no matter how alien or pretentious it sounds to you in your everyday life.)

  49 The subterranean level, which had been excavated and added (at staggering expense) to the main building in 1974–75, was designated Level 1, and the ground floor was therefore technically Level 2, which was additionally confusing because not all of the REC’s older, pre-excavation-and-addition signs had been changed out, and these signs and directories still identified the main, ground level as 1, the level above that 2, and so on, so that one could get any orientational help from these older directories and ‘You Are Here’ maps only if one knew in advance to recalibrate every level number upward by one, which was another piece of easily correctable institutional idiocy that Mr. Stecyk was grateful to have brought to his attention but embarrassed that he hadn’t seen and fixed before, and in essence took full responsibility for, even though technically it was the responsibility of Mr. Lynn Hornbaker and the Physical Plant office to have seen and amended the signs many years before, which is one reason why the process of getting the new design and makeup of the signs contracted and requisitioned then turned out to be so fraught and pointlessly complex—by making the sign thing as difficult and complex as possible, Hornbaker’s staff helped allay and diffuse responsibility for the signs’ not having been caught and amended years before, such that by the time the REC Director’s office heard about the issue, it was through a cloud of internal memos and cc’s so involved and opaque that no one not directly involved would have paid anything more than vague attention to the very general details of the snafu.

  50 These double doors were gray steel, and this was the overall color scheme of Level 1—searing white and matte gray.

  51 (the Midwest of which RSCs was in that era located in East St. Louis, two hours southwest)

  52 (FYI, late spring was always an exceptionally bad time, skin-wise, during this era; and the harsh fluorescents of Level 1 threw every blister, scab, and lesion into merciless relief.)

  53 The logistical information, too, is postdated, strictly speaking. On the day itself, I couldn’t have told you where in the building we even were by this time; no one could have.

  54 = Deputy Director of Personnel, which was Mr. Stecyk’s official job title. My IRS contract, by the way, was signed not by Mr. Stecyk or by DP Richard Tate, but by Mr. DeWitt Glendenning Jr., whose bivalent titles were DREC (Director—Regional Examinations Center) and ARCE (Asst. Regional Commissioner for Examinations), but who was referred to by almost everyone as ‘Dwitt.’

  55 (This turned out to be Mrs. Marge van Hool, Mr. Stecyk’s adjutant and right arm, who had the lashless, protuberant, unblinking eyes of a reptile or squid, something that could kill and eat you without its bulging alien stare ever changing, although Mrs. van Hool turned out to be the veritable salt of the earth, a classic instance of the truth that what most people look like has very little to do with their intrinsic human qualities… a truth I held quite dear at this time of my life.)

  56 (during which interval, through momentary sight lines, I witnessed the Iranian Crisis first reading a paperback book and then at a later point attending to one sleeve of her gas-blue jacket with some kind of small portable sewing implement—she was clearly someone well-suited by temperament and/or experience to standing in long lines)

  57 (i.e., nauseously warmed by the heat of s
ome stranger’s back and bottom)

  58 I would learn only much later that Mrs. Sloper’s son had been badly burned in some kind of vehicle accident while in the service, and that the state of my skin hit her harder than the average mom. At the time, all I knew was that we despised each other on sight, as of course can happen with some people.

  59 In the usual way of twenty-year-olds, when home in Philo, I made a point of arguing with members of my family about their political attitudes, and yet then outside the home I often found myself reflexively holding, or at least sympathizing with, those same parental attitudes. I suppose all this meant was that I hadn’t yet formed a stable identity of my own.