The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Anyhow, it seems like a very long time ago. But the point of even remembering the conversation, I think, is that there was an important fact behind the Christian girl’s ‘salvation’ story which I simply hadn’t understood at the time—and, to be honest, I don’t think she or the Christian did, either. It’s true that her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in the church that day didn’t happen, or that its effects on her weren’t real. I’m not putting it very well, but I was both right and wrong about her little story. I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular—though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn’t just a result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you. Does that make any sense? It’s hard to explain. What the girl with the meadow on her boots had left out of the story was why she was feeling so especially desolate and lost right then, and thus why she was so psychologically ‘primed’ to hear the pastor’s general, anonymous comment in that personal way. To be fair, maybe she couldn’t remember why. But still, all she really told was her little story’s dramatic climax, which was the preacher’s comment and the sudden inward changes she felt as a result, which is a little like telling just the punch line of a joke and expecting the person to laugh. As Chris Acquistipace would put it, her story was just data; there was no fact-pattern. On the other hand, it’s always possible that the 25,834 words so far of my own life-experience won’t seem relevant or make sense to anyone but me—which would make this not unlike the Christian girl’s own attempt to explain how she got to where she was, assuming she was even sincere about the dramatic changes inside. It’s easy to delude yourself, obviously.

  Anyhow, as mentioned, a crucial element in my entering the Service was ending up in the wrong but identical classroom at DePaul in December 1978, which I was so immersed in staying focused for the Federalist Papers review that I didn’t even notice my error until the prof walked in. I couldn’t tell whether he was the real fearful Jesuit or not. I only later found out that he wasn’t the Advanced Tax instructor of record—there had evidently been some sort of personal emergency for the course’s regular Jesuit prof, and this one had taken over as a sub for the last two weeks. Hence the initial confusion. I remember thinking that, for a Jesuit, the prof was in definite ‘mufti.’ He wore an archaically conservative dark-gray suit whose boxy look might have been actual flannel, and his dress shoes’ shine was dazzling when the classroom’s overhead fluorescents hit them at the proper angle. He seemed lithe and precise; his movements had the brisk economy of a man who knows time is a valuable asset. In terms of realizing my mistake, this was also when I stopped mentally reviewing the Federalist and became aware of a markedly different vibe among the students in this classroom. Several wore neckties under sweater vests, a couple of these vests being actual argyle. Every last shoe I could see was a black or brown leather business shoe, their laces neatly tied. To this day, I do not know precisely how I took the wrong building’s door. I am not the sort of person who gets lost easily, and I knew Garnier Hall, as it’s where the Intro Accounting class also met. Anyhow, to reiterate, on this day I had somehow gone to 311 Garnier Hall, instead of my own political science class’s identical 311 Daniel Hall directly across the transom, and had sat down along the side wall near the room’s extreme rear, a spot from which, once I came out of my preoccupation and realized my error, I would have had to cause a lot of disruption and moving of book bags and down jackets in order to get out—the room was completely filled by the time the substitute came in. Later, I learned that a few of the room’s most obviously serious and adult-looking students, with actual briefcases and accordion files instead of backpacks, were graduate students in DePaul’s advanced-degree business program—the Advanced Tax course was that advanced. Actually, DePaul’s whole accounting department was very serious and strong—accounting and business administration were institutional strengths that DePaul was known for and spent a good deal of time extolling in its brochures and promotional materials. Obviously, this isn’t why I had reenrolled at DePaul—I had next to no interest in accounting except, as mentioned, to prove something or compensate my father by finally passing Intro. The school’s accounting program turned out to be so high-powered and respected, though, that nearly half of that classroom’s Advanced Tax students were already signed up to take the February 1979 CPA exam, although at that time I barely knew what this licensing exam even was, or that it took several months of study and practice to prepare for. For instance, I learned later that the final exam in Advanced Tax was actually designed to be a microcosm of some of the taxation sections of the CPA exam. My father, by the way, also held a CPA license, though he rarely used it in his job with the city. In hindsight, though, and in the light of all that eventuated from that day, I’m not even sure I would have walked out even if the logistics of leaving hadn’t been so awkward—not once the substitute came in. Even though I really did need that final-exam review in American Political Thought, I still may have stayed. I’m not sure I can explain it. I remember he came briskly in and hung his topcoat and hat on a hook on the corner’s flag-stand. To this day, I can never be totally sure whether bumbling into the wrong building’s 311 right before final exams might not just have been one more bit of unconscious irresponsibility on my part. You cannot analyze sudden, dramatic experiences like this this way, though—especially in hindsight, which is notoriously tricky (though I obviously did not understand this during the exchange with the Christian girl in the boots).

  At the time, I did not know how old the substitute was—as mentioned, I only learned later that he was filling in for the class’s real Jesuit father, whose absence seemed unmourned—or even his name. My main experience with substitutes had been in high school. In terms of age, all I knew was that he was in that amorphous (to me) area between forty and sixty. I don’t know how to describe him, though he made an immediate impression. He was slender, and in the room’s bright lighting he looked pale in a way that seemed luminous instead of sickly, and had a steel-colored crew cut and a sort of pronounced facial bone structure. Overall, he looked to me like someone in an archaic photo or daguerreotype. His business suit’s trousers were double pleated, which added to the impression of box-like solidity. Also, he had good posture, which my father always referred to as a person’s ‘carriage’—upright and square-shouldered without seeming stiff—and as he came briskly in with his accordion file filled with neatly organized and labeled course materials, all of the room’s accounting students seemed unconsciously to shift and sit up a little straighter at their little desks. He pulled down the A/V screen before the board much as one would pull down a window’s shade, using his pocket handkerchief to touch the screen’s handle. To the best of my recollection, nearly everyone in the room was male. A handful were also oriental. He was getting his materials out and arranging them, looking down at his desktop with a little formal smile. What he was actually doing was the teacherly thing of acknowledging the roomful of students without looking at them. They in turn were totally focused, to a man. The whole room was different from political science or psychology classes, or even Intro Accounting, where there was always litter on the floor and people slouched back on their tailbones in their seats and looked openly up at the clock or yawned, and there was always a constant restless, whispery undertone which the Intro Accounting professor pretended wasn’t there—maybe the normal profs no longer even heard the sound, or were immune to students’ open displays of tedium and inattention. When the substitute accounting professor entered, however, this room’s whole voltage changed. I don’t know how to describe it. Nor can I totally rationally explain why I stayed—which, as mentioned, meant missing the
final review in American Political Thought. At the time, continuing to sit there in the wrong class seemed like just one more feckless, undisciplined impulse. Maybe I was embarrassed to have the sub see me leave. Unlike the Christian girlfriend, I never seem to recognize important moments at the time they’re going on—they always seem like distractions from what I’m really supposed to be doing. One way to explain it is that there was just something about him—the substitute. His expression had the same burnt, hollow concentration of photos of military veterans who’d been in some kind of real war, meaning combat. His eyes held us whole, as a group. I know I suddenly felt uncomfortable about my painter’s pants and untied Timberlands, but if the substitute reacted to them one way or the other, he gave no sign. When he signified the official start of class by looking at his watch, it was with a crisp gesture of bringing his wrist sharply out and around, like a boxer’s left cross, the force pulling up the sleeve of his suit jacket slightly to disclose a stainless steel Piaget, which I remember at the time struck me as a surprisingly racy watch for a Jesuit.

  He used the white A/V screen for transparencies—unlike the Intro prof, he didn’t write things in chalk on the blackboard—and when he put the first transparency on the overhead projector and the room’s lights dimmed, his face was lit from below like a cabaret performer’s, which made its hollow intensity and facial structure even more pronounced. I remember there was a sort of electric coolness in my head. The diagram projected behind him was an upward curve with bar graphs extending below its various sections, the curve steep near the origin and flattening somewhat at the apex. It looked a bit like a wave preparing to break. The diagram was unlabeled, and only later would I recognize it as representing the progressive marginal rate schedules for the 1976 federal income tax. I felt unusually aware and alert, but in a different way from doubling or Cylert. There were also several curves and equations and glossed citations from USTC §62, many of whose subsections had to do with complex regulations about the distinction between deductions ‘for’ adjusted gross income versus deductions ‘from’ AGI, which the substitute said formed the basis of practically every truly effective modern individual tax-planning strategy. Here—though I realized this only later, after recruitment—he was referring to structuring one’s affairs so that as many deductions as possible were deductions ‘for’ adjusted gross income, as everything from the Standard Deduction to medical-expense deductions are designed with AGI-based floors (floor meaning, for example, that as only those medical expenses in excess of 3 percent of AGI were deductible, it was obviously to the advantage of the average taxpayer to render his AGI—known also sometimes as his ‘31,’ as it was then on Line 31 of the Individual 1040 that one entered AGI—just as low as possible).

  Admittedly, though, however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, much of which was over my head—understandably, as I hadn’t even finished Intro Accounting yet—and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute’s presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or ‘connecting’ with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father’s term ‘no-nonsense,’ and why it was a term of approval.

  I remember I did notice that the class’s students all took notes, which in accounting classes means that one has to internalize and write down one fact or point from the professor while at the same time still listening intently enough to the next point to be able to write it down next, as well, which requires a kind of intensively split concentration that I did not get the hang of until well into T&A in Indianapolis the following year. It was a totally different type of note-taking from the kind in humanities classes, which involved mainly doodles and broad, abstract themes and ideas. Also, the Advanced Tax students had multiple pencils lined up on their desks, all of which were extremely sharp. I realized that I almost never had a sharp pencil at hand when I really wanted one; I had never taken the trouble to keep them organized and sharpened. The only touch of what might have been dry wit in the lecture was occasional statements and quotes that the substitute interpolated into the graphs by sometimes writing them on the current transparency, projecting them onto the A/V screen without comment and then pausing while everyone copied them all down as quickly as possible before he changed to the next transparency. I still remember one such example—‘ What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war,’ with the only written attribution at the end being ‘James,’ which, at the time, I believed referred to the biblical apostle James, for obvious reasons—although he said nothing to explain or reinforce the quote while the six straight rows of students—some of whose glasses reflected the projection’s light in ways that gave them an openly robotic, conformist aspect, with twin squares of white light where their eyes should have been, I remember being struck by—dutifully transcribed it. Or one other example, which was preprinted on its own transparency and credited to Karl Marx, the well-known father of Marxism—

  ‘In Communist society it will be possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I please’—

  about which the substitute’s only gloss was the dry statement ‘Emphasis added.’

  What I’m trying to say is that it was ultimately much more like the evangelist girlfriend with the boots’ own experience than I could have ever admitted at the time. Obviously, through just the 2,235-word story of a memory, I could never convince anybody else that the innate, objective quality of the substitute’s lecture would also have glued anybody else to their seat and made them forget about their final review in American Political Thought, or of the way that much of what the Catholic father (I thought) said or projected seemed somehow aimed directly at me. I can, though, at least help explain why I was so ‘primed’ for experiencing it this way, as I’d already had a kind of foretaste or temblor of just this experience shortly before the mistake in final-review classes’ rooms occurred, though it was only later, in retrospect, that I understood it—meaning the experience—as such.

  I can clearly remember that a few days earlier—meaning on the Monday of the last week of regular classes for the Fall ’78 term—I was sitting there all slumped and unmotivated on the old yellow corduroy couch in our DePaul dorm room in the middle of the afternoon. I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera As the World Turns on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith—not Obetrolling or blowing off anything in particular but essentially still just being an unmotivated lump. There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. I was slouched way down on my tailbone on the couch, so that everything on the little TV was framed by my knees, and watching As the World Turns while spinning the soccer ball in an idle, undirected way. It was technically the roommate’s television, but he was a serious pre-med student and always at the science library, though he had taken the trouble to rig a specially folded wire coat hanger to take the place of the Zenith’s missing antenna, which was the only reason it got any reception at all. As the World Turns ran on CBS from 1:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon. This was something I still did too much during that final year, sitting there wasting time in front of the little Zenith, and several times I’d gotten passively sucked into CBS afternoon soap operas, where the shows’ characters all spoke and emoted broadly and talked to one another without any hitch or pause in intensity whatsoever, it seemed, so that there was something almost hypnotic about the whole thing, especially as I had no classes on Monday or Friday and
it was all too easy to sit there and get sucked in. I can remember that many of the other DePaul students that year were hooked on the ABC soap opera General Hospital, gathering in great avid, hooting packs to watch it—with their hip alibi being that they were actually making fun of the show—but, for reasons that probably had to do with the Zenith’s spotty reception, I was more of a CBS habitué that year, particularly As the World Turns and Guiding Light, which followed As the World Turns at 2:00 P.M. on weekdays and was actually in some ways an even more hypnotic show.