The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  The Service vehicle in question was a two-door orange or yellow AMC Gremlin, albeit fitted with a high-powered whip antenna and a Service-seal decal on the driver’s-side door. Interior signs prohibited smoking and/or food. The vehicle’s rigid plastic interior was clean, but it was also extremely hot and stuffy. I could feel myself beginning to perspire, which is obviously not a pleasant sensation at all inside a three-piece corduroy suit. No one spoke to me or even acknowledged my existence—although I had, as I may or may not have mentioned, a severe dermatological condition during this period, and was more or less used to not being looked at or acknowledged after an initial involuntary gasp and expression of sympathy or distaste (depending), which is to say that I no longer took it all that personally. There were no general offers to adjust the air-conditioning, or even standardly polite questions about whether any of the AC’s trickle was reaching us in the cramped backseat, where between myself and an older GS-11 whose homburg was mashed down almost around his eyes by the roof’s pressure on its crown sat a long-jawed younger man in a gray polyester sport coat and tie, maybe roughly my age, his feet on the medial hump and knees thus up almost to his chest, who was already sweating prodigiously, and who kept surreptitiously wiping rivulets of sweat off his forehead and then wiping his fingers off on his shirt with a motion that looked strangely as if he were pretending to scratch himself under his sport coat rather than wipe off his wet fingers. He did this over and over in my peripheral vision. The whole thing was very strange. His smile was an anxious and totally false rictus, his profile a branching mass of running droplets, some of which were actually falling onto his sport coat and dappling the lapels. He gave off a palpable aura of tension or fear, or perhaps claustrophobia—there was the unexplainable feeling that I’d hurt him terribly if I spoke to him or asked if he was feeling OK. Another older IRS employee sat up front beside the driver, both men also hatless (the driver with a monastic-looking coupe de zéro haircut) and staring straight ahead, neither of them speaking or moving, even when the vehicle was completely stopped in traffic. From the side, the skin of the older employee’s chin’s underside and upper throat had the scrotal or lizardy cast of some men’s advanced middle age (not unlike the then-current US president’s, whose face, on television, often looked as though it was melting down into his throat, which I remember making his jet-black pompadour and harlequin ovals of rouge look all the more incongruous). We alternated between sitting stopped in traffic and moving at roughly cortege speed. The sun beat palpably on the Gremlin’s metal roof; a franchise bank’s digital Time & Temp sign, which we sat idling in view of for several minutes, kept flashing first the time and then YOU DONT WANT TO KNOW, presumably for temperature, which seemed to me an ominous preview of Peorian wit and culture. You can imagine for yourself the air quality and overall smells involved.

  I had never before been in a crowded vehicle for so long a time with no radio playing and no one in the car saying anything, even once, ever, feeling utterly isolated at the same time that I was crammed in so closely with other people that we were all breathing one another’s air the whole time.16 Every so often, the IRS driver would knead the back of his neck, which had obviously become stiff from the strange position he was forced to hold his head in in order to see through the dashboard’s set of protrusive signs. The early part of the ride’s chief excitement: A period of furious itching along the left side of my ribcage gave rise to fears (understandable, but luckily unfounded) that the former boy on the bus’s impetigo had somehow been pneumatic or contagious without direct contact, which fears I had to quell because there was obviously no way to untuck my shirt and check the area’s appearance. Meanwhile, the older Serviceman in the antiquated hat had opened an accordion file and spread two or three dark-brown manila folders in his lap and was perusing various forms and printouts, moving them from one folder to another according to some scheme or system I had no way of understanding, since I was watching the whole thing in my leftward peripheral vision past the steady cascade of droplets of sweat off the tip of the nose of the man on the hump, who was now sweating in a way I had previously seen only on the squash courts of college and in the case of a mild infarction suffered by an unnamed older relative on Thanksgiving Day 1978. I spent much of my own time drumming my fingers impatiently on the dispatch case—which was now especially soft and moist from the heat of the Gremlin’s interior, and made a satisfying series of splattish noises when drummed on—which, though drumming absently on something in an otherwise silent space is usually one of the fastest ways to drive those around you crazy and get them to speak to you, if only to ask you to knock it off, no one in the Gremlin commented on or even seemed to notice.

  Self-Storage Parkway more or less circles Peoria and composes the boundary between the city proper and its outlying suburbs. It is what now, in 2005, would be just a typical multilane exurban highway, complete with the paradoxical combination of high speed limit and traffic lights every quarter-mile, which lights were obviously placed to help give consumers and commuters access to all the retail commerce packed along SSP’s length down at least the entire east side we were trying to traverse. As of the mid-1980s, Self-Storage Parkway was elevated over interstate junctions, and crossed the tobacco-colored Illinois River at two points via WPA-era iron bridges whose rivets wept orange rust and inspired, shall we say, less than total confidence.

  Moreover, the closer we came to metro Peoria’s southeast side and the special access road to the Examination Center, the worse the traffic became. The reason for this was apparent from that first day: It was institutional stupidity in all its manifold forms and names. Item one. The highway people were broadening this section of Self-Storage Parkway into three lanes, but the construction served to reduce the extant two lanes to just one; the right lane was closed off with orange cones, even in sections where no construction was ongoing and the lane looked clear and navigable. And, of course, single-lane traffic always moves exactly as fast as the very slowest vehicle in line. Item two. There were, as mentioned, traffic lights every eighth- to quarter-mile, and yet the single southbound lane’s line of traffic was substantially longer than the distance between any two such traffic lights, so that our progress was dependent not just on the color of the next traffic light ahead but also on the colors of the two or three lights beyond that. It was the obverse of gridlock. It seemed like very bad urban planning or traffic-management or whatever exactly the discipline involved here was, and I could feel the corduroy of my suit getting sodden along the entire area of contact with the Gremlin’s patterned plastic seat, as well as along the hip and upper thigh that were mashed up against the human sprinkler next to me, who was by now radiating both heat and an acrid, panicky smell that made me turn my head and pretend to be concentrating hard on something in view beyond the window (which rolled down only halfway, due to some design flaw or obscure safety feature). There is no point in describing the gauntlet of franchise retail and shopping centers and auto and tire and motorcycle / Jet Ski outlets and self-serve gas plazas with built-in convenience stores and national fast food brands we crawled through, since it’s now the same basic gauntlet around every US city—I believe the economic term is ‘monoculture.’ Item three. It emerged, finally, that the turnoff from the parkway to the Examination Center was not serviced with a traffic light, even though it also became visually obvious, when we got within view, that a good percentage of the cars currently in the single lane ahead of us on SSP were also bound for and hence turning in to the REC and its blacktop access road. (Though it would be a maddeningly long time before even this simple fact was explained to me, the REC’s two main eight-hour shifts in that period were 7:10 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. and 3:10 P.M. to 11:00 P.M., which meant that there was a tremendous amount of Service- and employee-owned vehicle traffic between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00.) Meaning that it was actually the Exam Center itself, together with the absence of a traffic light and the abortive SSP construction,17 that had helped cause the hellacious backup, becaus
e there were also a large number of vehicles in the oncoming, northeastbound lanes trying to turn left, i.e. across our single lane, to enter the REC’s access road as well, which required that the vehicle at the front of our lane’s line for the right turn wait and wave the oncoming car through its left turn, which only a very few did, since traffic jams often bring out the most aggressive, me-first elements of the human makeup and cause behavior that itself, perversely, exacerbates the traffic jam—this right here perhaps being the place to mention a behavior that we began seeing more and more of as we inched closer to the REC turnoff. Certain private vehicles18 in our lane veered rightward into the narrow gravel ‘breakdown lane,’ in which they sped up and were able to pass dozens of other vehicles, illegally, which in and of itself would not have been a big deal except for the fact that as the REC turnoff approached and the breakdown lane began to narrow and disappear they then sought to merge left back into the legal single lane, which required someone in that lane to stop to let them in again, which further clotted traffic in the regular lane… meaning that the selfish, me-first vehicles were significantly worsening the very jam that they’d sought to bypass; they gained an extra couple of minutes by making the jam and delay slightly worse for everyone else in the shimmering line of cars in our lane. Within a couple weeks of daily commutes down SSP from the special low-cost Service housing19 to the REC each day, this selfish, me-first behavior with the breakdown lane began to fill me with such disgust and malice that I can still, to this day, remember some of the vehicles that chronically did it, i.e., the same kind of idiotic, solipsistic behavior that causes stampedes in public places in the event of a fire and results in the authorities finding huge numbers of blackened, trampled bodies at the front doors of places after the fires or riots have been quelled, people prevented from getting out precisely by the panic and selfishness with which they all rushed and clotted the exit and got in each other’s way, causing everyone to die horribly, which I have to admit is what I began wishing for the various Vegas, Chevettes, and a particular light-blue AMC Pacer with one of those fish-shaped Christian decals on the bubble of a back window20 that made this maneuver almost every morning.

  An additional bit of bureaucratic idiocy: As mentioned, plastic signs within the car interdicted smoking, eating, & c., as turned out to be the case in all Service vehicles used for employee transport, by internal regs cited in the lower-right portion of the signs themselves21—except that AMC Gremlins’ interiors were so cramped, and the plastic used therein so cheap and thin, that there was nowhere to mount the eight-inch signs except on the dashboard’s top, where they blocked sections of the lower windshield and forced our driver to assume a contorted position with his tonsured head almost over on his right shoulder in order to see the road just ahead between the edges of the mandatory signs. This, so far as I could see, was beyond the pale in terms of both safety and anything like sense.

  Set within a large expanse of very green close-clipped grass bordered on both sides by cornfields’ windbreaks of trees and tangled shrubbery, the Midwest Regional Examination Center lay a good five hundred yards back from the parkway, these five hundred yards filled with nothing except verdant and weirdly dandelionless grass mowed to the consistency of baize. The contrast between the baronial splendor of the lawn and the squat, institutional ugliness of the REC itself was stark and incongruous, and there was plenty of time to ponder it as the Gremlin crawled along and the guy next to me dripped steadily onto both of us. The older man at the other end of the backseat had what looked at first to be a green thimble on one finger, which turned out to be the green traction-rubber that most wigglers wore and all called PCs for ‘pinkie cheaters.’ A large 4-H billboard some distance past the REC’s one-way entrance read IT’S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY, which I knew to be a 4-H sign because every March–May there was an identical one just out past the instant-coffee factory on SR 130 west of Philo.22 The state 4-H held bake sales and car washes all year to provide for these billboards (w/comma splice sic), which by 1985 were so ubiquitous that no one paid any attention to them.23

  I also remember that I had to move and twist my own neck awkwardly in order to make out the Exam Center’s various features through the impediments of the car’s required signs. From this distance and set of perspectives, the REC appeared at first to be a single huge right-angled structure, with its facing24 tan or beige cement side mammoth and sheer, and just a bit of foreshortened side-building’s roof visible past the access road, which road extended in a broad one-way curve around the main building’s rear, which rear itself turned out to actually be the REC’s front, with its enormous self-regarding facade. In a similar distortion, what looked, from a distance, like a bona fide circumambient ‘road’ from the parkway in to and around the REC turned out to be more like a crude rural mew or driveway, narrow and high, banked with deep runoff ditches, and with freakish speed bumps set at such close intervals that travel over about five mph on the access road was impossible; one could see the occupants of any vehicle traveling faster than that being thrown about their cars’ interior like rag dolls by the impact with the speed bumps, which were each over eight inches high. Beginning a couple hundred yards in from SSP, parking lots of various modest sizes extended outward from the access road, rather like square-cut jewels encrusting a bracelet or tiara.25

  There was, from our vantage, no visible sign identifying the site as an IRS or even government facility (which, again, was semi-explained by the fact that what appeared from Self-Storage to be the REC’s front was in fact the rear, and of only one of the two distinct buildings). All there were were two small wooden directional signs—ENTRANCE ONLY; EXIT ONLY—at the semicircular access road’s two junctions with SSP. The former sign also included what turned out to be the REC’s street (though not postal) address. Given the access road’s circular shape, the exit was some thousand or more yards farther west down the parkway, almost within the shadow of the FARM SAFETY billboard. I could hear the man up next to me breathing rapidly, as if almost beginning to hyperventilate; neither of us had even once looked directly at the other. I noticed that only the ENTRANCE side of the access road had parking lots appended; the distant EXIT side, which curved out from behind the rear (i.e., it later emerged, the two separate buildings’ fronts) of the REC was a one-way vector back out to Self-Storage Parkway, with the exit’s intersection also minus any kind of traffic light or directional signal, which absence caused further snarls and delays for commuters trying to reach the REC’s entrance from the west.

  As I may or may not have mentioned, it was already well past the mandated 1340h. reporting time stamped on my 141-PO. Certain obvious and understandable emotions attended this fact, especially since (a) 0.0 percent of this lateness was my fault, and (b) the closer we got to the REC, the slower our progress in traffic became. In order to distract myself from these facts and emotions, I began to compile a list of the logistical absurdities that became evident once the Service vehicle got close enough to the entrance for the REC’s access road to become visible through my unoccluded side window. The following are condensed from an unusually long, intense, unpunctuated notebook entry26 composed at least in part within the Gremlin itself. To wit:

  Besides the oncoming left turns and the loathsome me-firsters trying to remerge from the breakdown lane, the main cause of the excruciating slowness with which our line of cars on the westbound Self-Storage south of the city inched forward to make the right turn into the Examination Center’s access road was what emerged as the even worse, more costive and paralyzed jam of vehicles on the access road itself. This was chiefly caused by the fact that the access road’s appended parking lots were already quite full, and that the farther along the access road the lots were, the fuller they were, and full also of IRS employee vehicles trolling for available parking places. Given the extreme heat and humidity, the most desirable parking lots were clearly the ones directly behind27 the main building, less than a hundred yards from the central REC entrance. Employees
in the more peripheral lots were required to walk along the narrow, ditch-flanked access road all the way around behind28 to that central entrance, which resulted in a great deal of teetering along the access road’s unpaved edge, plus some staggering and windmilling of arms; and we saw at least one employee slip and cartwheel into the drainage ditch by the road’s side and have to be pulled manually back up by two or three others, all of whom held their hats to their heads with one hand, such that the rescued employee then had an enormous smeary grass stain all the way up one side of his slacks and sport coat, and dragged one seemingly injured leg behind him as he and his companions passed from view along the road’s curve.29 The whole problem was as obvious as it was stupid. Given the heat, hassle, and actual danger of pedestrian travel along the access road, it was totally understandable that most employee vehicles seemed to eschew the nearer (that is, nearer to us, hence farther from the REC itself) lots and to proceed to the far more desirable lots around back, lots that turned out to be closest to the main REC entrance and to be separated from it only by a wide, paved, and easily traversed plaza. But if those best, closest lots were full (as of course, given human nature and the above incentives, they were likely to be; the most desirable lots will obviously also be the most crowded lots), the incoming vehicles could not backtrack out the way they came in order to settle for spots in the progressively more distant and less desirable lots they had passed on their way in quest of the best lots—for, of course, the access road was one-way30 all the way around its curve, so vehicles that couldn’t find a spot in the best lots had now to proceed forward all the way back out away from the REC to the EXIT ONLY sign, turn left without any kind of light onto Self-Storage, drive the several hundred yards east back to the REC entrance with its ENTRANCE ONLY sign, and then try to turn left (against oncoming traffic, which obviously further slowed our own, westbound lane’s tortured progress) into the access road again in order to park in some of the less desirable lots out nearer the parkway, from which they then had to join the line of pedestrians tightrope-walking along the road’s edge back toward the main entrance around back.