The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  I do know that at one point Ms. Neti-Neti herself apparently got confused or distracted, and opened the wrong door, and in the wedge of light before she could push the heavy door closed again I caught a glimpse of a long room filled with IRS examiners in long rows and columns of strange-looking tables or desks, each of which (desks) had a raised array of trays or baskets clamped to its top,44 with flexible-necked desk lamps in turn clamped at angles to these fanned-out arrays, so that each of the IRS examiners worked in a small tight circle of light at what appeared to be the bottom of a one-sided hole. Row after row, stretching to a kind of vanishing point near the room’s rear wall, in which there was incised another door. This, although I didn’t know it at the time, was my first glimpse of an Immersives Room, of which the main REC structure contained a handful. The most striking thing about it was the quiet. There were at least 150 men and/or women in that room, all intently occupied and busy, and yet the room was so silent that you could hear an imperfection in the door’s hinge as Ms. Neti-Neti pushed it closed against the force of its pneumatic strut. This silence I remember best of all, because it was both sensuous and incongruous: For obvious reasons, we tend to associate total quiet with emptiness, not with large groups of people. The whole thing lasted only a moment, though, after which we continued on our complex way, with Ms. Neti-Neti occasionally greeting or nodding at other Personnel officers in distinctive bright-blue jackets conducting small groups the other way—which in hindsight should have been additionally confusing, though I have no memory of feeling one way or another about it; I was still as it were reverberating from the sight of all those intent, totally silent examiners.

  Here is probably an apt place for some exposition on my background re: silence and concentrated deskwork. In hindsight, I know that there was something about the silent, motionless intensity with which everyone in that opened door’s instant was studying the tax-related documents before them that frightened and thrilled me. The scene was such that you just knew that if you were to open the door for another brief instant ten, twenty, or forty minutes later, it would look and sound just the same. I had never seen anything like it. Or rather I had, in a way, for of course television and books often portray concentrated study or deskwork just this way, at least by implication. As in e.g. ‘Irving knuckled down and spent the entire morning plowing through the paperwork on his desk’; ‘Only when she had finished the report did the executive glance at her watch and see that it was nearly midnight. She had been completely absorbed in her task, and was only now aware that she had worked through supper, and was famished. Gracious, wherever did all the time go? she thought to herself.’ Or even just as in ‘He spent the day reading.’ In real life, of course, concentrated deskwork doesn’t go this way. I had spent massive amounts of time in libraries; I knew quite well how deskwork really was. Especially if the task at hand was dry or repetitive, or dense, or if it involved reading something that had no direct relevance to your own life and priorities, or was work that you were doing only because you had to—like for a grade, or part of a freelance assignment for pay from some lout who was off skiing. The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c.45 This is because sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended length of time is, as a practical matter, impossible. If you said, ‘I spent the whole night in the library, working on some client’s sociology paper,’ you really meant that you’d spent between two and three hours working on it and the rest of the time fidgeting and sharpening and organizing pencils and doing skin-checks in the men’s room mirror and wandering around the stacks opening volumes at random and reading about, say, Durkheim’s theories of suicide.

  There was none of this diffraction in that split-second view of the room, though. One sensed that these were people who did not fidget, who did not read a page of, say, dull taxpayer explanation about the deduction of some item and then realize that they’d actually been thinking about the apple in their lunchbag and whether or not to maybe eat the apple right here and now until they realized that their eyes had passed over all the words (or, given the venue here, perhaps columns of figures) on the page without actually having read them at all—with read here meaning internalized, comprehended, or whatever we mean by really reading vs. simply having one’s eyes pass over symbols in a certain order. Seeing this was kind of traumatic. I’d always felt frustrated and embarrassed about how much reading and writing time I actually wasted, about how much I sort of blinked in and out while trying to absorb or convey large amounts of information. To put it bluntly, I had felt ashamed about how easily I got bored when trying to concentrate. As a child, I think I’d understood the word concentrate literally and viewed my problems with sustained concentration as evidence that I was an unusually dilute or disorganized form of human being,46 and had laid much of the blame for this on my family, who tended to need a lot of loud noise and distraction going on at all times and undertook almost every kind of activity with every available radio, stereo, and television set on, such that I’d taken to wearing special high-filter customized earplugs at home from the age of fourteen on. It took me all the way up to the age of finally getting away from Philo and entering a highly selective college to understand that the problem with stillness and concentration was more or less universal and not some unique shortcoming that was going to prevent me from ever really rising above my preterite background and achieving something. Seeing the enormous lengths that those elite, well-educated undergrads from all over the nation went to to avoid, delay, or mitigate concentrated work was an eye-opening experience for me. In fact, the school’s social structure was set up to prize and esteem students who could pass their classes and assemble a good transcript without ever working hard. People who skated by, doing the absolute minimum required for institutional/parental approval, were regarded as cool, while people who actually applied themselves to their assignments and to the work of their own education and achievement were relegated to the status of ‘grinds’ or ‘tools,’ the lowest caste in the college’s merciless social hierarchy.47 The upshot, though, was that up until entering college, where everyone often lived and did homework together in plain mutual view, I’d had no opportunity to realize that fidgeting, distraction, and frequent contrived breaks were more or less universal traits. In high school, for example, homework is literally that—it’s done at home, in private, with earplugs and KEEP OUT signs and a chair jammed up underneath the knob. Same with reading, working on journal entries, tabulating one’s accounts from a paper route, & c. You’re with your peers only in social or recreational settings, including classes, which at my own public high school were academic jokes. In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it—which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.

  Ms. Neti-Neti of Personnel, by the way, continued talking during much of the circuitous trip to Personnel. The truth is that most of what she said is no longer available to memory. Her tone was pleasant, professional; but she chattered so nonstop that one more or less involuntarily stopped listening to her after a little while, rather as with a six-year-old. Some of what she was saying was probably helpful and apposite REC information, though, and it’s a bit of a shame that I can’t resummon it now, since it would probably be useful and concise, memoir-wise, in ways that my own impressions and memories were not. I know that I kept stopping and switching various suitcases from one hand to the other to attenuate the burning sensation that comes from carrying the heavier bag on just, say, the right side for any length of time, and that it took a few such moments for
Ms. Neti-Neti to understand what was happening and pause instead of continuing and ending up twenty or more yards ahead of me, at which time the fact that she was still talking became absurd, since there was literally no one there to hear her. The complete absence of any offers to help with any of the luggage was OK; that was attributable to gender codes, which I knew were especially rigid in the Middle East. But nothing drives home the awareness that someone’s volubility and chatter are her own trip and have nothing to do with you quite like your falling behind and being literally absent and the chatter still proceeding, reaching you only as an indistinct stream of echoes off the hallways’ surfaces. It would be disingenuous to say much more about the Iranian Crisis in the context of the first day, since what more I learned about her off-duty eccentricities and their origins in the Iranian upheavals of the late 1970s came only later when she seemed to emerge from a different wiggler’s housing unit almost every morning during the month of August 1985. Her accent was mild and sounded more British than Mideastern or foreign, and her hair was a very dark black, with an almost liquid aspect to the perfect straightness with which it hung—from the rear, its contrast with the ghastly bright blue of the Personnel office’s jacket was the only interesting or comely thing about that jacket. Also, because I spent so much time in various parts of her wake, I remember that she smelled faintly—as if the scent belonged not to her but to the Personnel jacket—of a certain mall-bought perfume that some unnamed member of my own family used to practically drench herself with eye-watering quantities of every morning.

  Unlike the upper floors, the REC building’s lower level is sectioned into roughly hexagonal pods, with corridors radiating from a central hub like spokes in a misshapen wheel. As you can imagine, this radial floor plan, so popular in the 1970s, made no immediate sense, given that the REC building itself was starkly rectangular, which added to the overall disorientation of that first day’s descent toward the Intake mechanism.48 The array of directional signs at each hub was so detailed and complex that it seemed designed only to increase the confusion of anyone not already sure where they were going and why. This level had white flooring and walls with battleship-gray trim, and very bright inset fluorescents—it might as well have been a galaxy away from the main floor just above. At this point, it’s probably best to keep the explanations as terse and compressed as possible, for realism’s sake. The longer-term truth is that since I eventually came to be employed here—or, rather, it’s better to say that I came to rest here, like a racquetball or caroming projectile, after the series of administrative mix-ups that almost resulted in disciplinary charges and/or Termination For Cause in the following weeks had been cleared up—it would be easy to impose on the Level 1 layout49 and Personnel office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying around with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memory—one tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord’s exit through the back of the retina. As in, for example, the fact that the madhouse at the Exam Center’s main entrance and lobby area upstairs, and the extremely long line of travel-weary employees in hats with baggage and brown Service expandable files of documentation and posting orders that now extended (i.e., this line did) all the way out through one of the heavy hermetic fire doors50 out into the fluorescent rotary at what later turned out to be the center of the central pod of Level 1, which line consisted of newly posted and/or transferred personnel waiting to have their passport-sized photo taken and their new Post 047 ID printed and run through the laminator, after which it would be almost too hot to hold for several minutes, such that you could see personnel holding their new IDs by one corner and fanning them rapidly back and forth through the air in order to cool them before attaching the gator clips to their breast pockets (as was required at all times on-post)… that all this mid-May roil and crowding was in fact due to a major restructuring of the IRS’s Compliance Branch that was ongoing at all six operational RECs and over half of all Districts’ Audit facilities (whose sizes varied widely) nationwide, scheduled to begin (i.e., the restructuring had been) exactly one month after the national individual income tax filing deadline of April 15, in order to allow the annual massive inflow of returns to have gone through its initial sorting and processing at the Regional Service Centers51 and the attached checks to have been processed and deposited in the US Treasury via the six Regional Depository mechanisms… all of this uncovered later, informally, through confabs at Angler’s Cove with Acquistipace, Atkins, Redgate, Shackleford, & c. Such that it would be misleading to go into any substantive detail or explanation at this point, since none of these truths yet existed, realistically speaking. Or the fact that it turned out one needed a valid IRS ID to access any of the shuttles from the complex to any of the special low-cost Post housing at two former commercial apartment complexes farther up Self-Storage Parkway, which was a Systems regulation nationwide and therefore the reason it was not Mr. Tate’s or Stecyk’s fault per se that new arrivals were required to schlep their luggage all over and stand in line with it as they waited to have their ID photo taken and fresh internal Social Security number generated, & c., though it was still irksome and idiotic not to have some mechanism in place for dealing with the luggage of new employees who didn’t yet have an ID—all these facts are postdated, as it were.

  What can validly be included among the experiences of the first day is that I was naturally surprised—a little thrilled, even—when I was exempted from the long and excruciatingly slow line that stretched from the central Level 1 rotary in to the makeshift ID station and instead got taken up to the front of the ID line and posed and shot and given my hot and redolently laminated ID card and gator clip right there on the spot. (I didn’t yet know what the nine-digit sequence of numbers below the bar code signified, or that my old Social Security number, which as an American over age eighteen I knew pretty much by heart, would never again be used by anyone; it simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint.) Like being met by someone in authority with your name on a sign, it’s almost inevitably gratifying to be specially escorted to the front of a line, no matter what looks of resentment or (in my case52 ) revulsion you receive from the preterite people in line who watch you being conducted up front and exempted from all the ordinary hassle and crowded wait. Plus some of the new personnel in line were clearly high-ranking transfers, and I was again both gratified and curious or even apprehensive about what kind of suction the distant relative who’d helped me arrange for the posting might turn out to have, and about what-all personal or biographical information had been relayed about me ahead of time, and to just whom. This bit of special treatment is legitimately part of the real memory-chain only if it’s made clear that it (i.e., my being specially conducted to the front of the line) happened somewhat later on arrival day, after Ms. Neti-Neti had already taken me on a slightly different route along this central pod’s rotary to the REC Personnel office itself, which was in a large suite of connected offices and reception areas in Level 1’s southwest corner or vertex.53 It had been her impression that I was supposed to have some kind of personal introductory audience with the DDP,54 but either the Iranian Crisis was wrong about this, or the travel and traffic delays had caused me to forfeit the interview slot, or else some type of Personnel crisis had obtruded on the DDP’s attention. For when we had descended to this level and negotiated the central rotary and skirted various parts of the line for ID, and had taken a number of labyrinthine turns and opened various fire doors, pausing ever more often so that I could redistribute the weight of my luggage, and had finally arrived at the Personnel office, we found the waiting area, outer offices, copier corridor, and special bisected room with a UNIVAC 1100 and remote terminal (connected, I learned later, by half-duplex Dataphone line to Region in upstate Joliet) across the hall already completely filled with IRS per
sonnel sitting, standing, reading, staring into space, holding and twidgeling their various hats, and (I assumed—wrongly, as it turned out, although it’s also true that Ms. Neti-Neti did nothing to disabuse me, instead disappearing into a side office and entering into a line of blue-jacketed people waiting to speak with a Personnel superior55 in order to report my [i.e., the ostensible elite transfer’s] arrival and to receive instructions about how to proceed in the absence of the special interview. It was this Assistant DDP who signed the internal Form 706-IC authorizing my being taken right up to the front of the line for Service ID processing, although it took Ms. Neti-Neti over twenty minutes56 to reach the front of Mrs. van Hool’s office’s line and present with her questions) doing nothing but sitting around on the taxpayer’s dime in some kind of classic ‘hurry up and wait’ scenario.