The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Give him an example, maybe,’ Reynolds said to Sylvanshine, indicating Fogle with a movement of his head as if there were anyone else he could possibly be referring to.

  ‘OK.’ Sylvanshine made a show of looking right at Chris Fogle. ‘Where’d you go to school?’

  ‘Umm, what kind of school?’

  ‘Your college. Your alma mater.’

  ‘I went to several, actually.’

  If Sylvanshine was impatient, it was impossible to discern this. He had no poker tell whatsoever that Fogle could see. ‘Pick one.’

  ‘UIC. DuPage. DePaul.’

  ‘Perfect. DePaul. So he’ll ask, you’ll say DePaul, he’ll say “Ah, the Blue Demons.” Well, it’s not the Blue Demons, it’s the Blue Devils. But do you correct him?’

  ‘Actually, it is the Blue Demons. The Blue Devils is Duke.’

  A one-beat pause. ‘Whatever. Whatever the team name is, he says the wrong team name. Now, though: Do you correct him?’

  Fogle looked from Sylvanshine to Reynolds. Their suit coats were not identical, but their shirts and slacks were, he could see. Reynolds said, ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do I correct him?’ Fogle said.

  ‘That’s the question.’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking.’

  ‘You do. The correct answer is you do correct him,’ Sylvanshine said. ‘Because it’s a test. He’s testing as to are you a toady, are you intimidated, are you a yes-man.’

  ‘A sycophant,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘It was a test?’

  ‘If he says Blue Devils and you just nod and smile, he won’t say anything, but you’ll have failed a test.’

  Fogle looked quickly up at the clock. ‘Is there more than one?’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ Sylvanshine said. ‘It’s extremely subtle. You’d have no idea anything was going on. But the whole time you’re interfacing he’ll be testing you, probing you. The whole time.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Reynolds said, forcing Fogle to turn his head again. ‘There’ll be a kid in there with him. A seven-, eight-year-old kid.’

  There was a moment of silence. An unparsable look passed between Reynolds and Sylvanshine. Sylvanshine had a very small, thin, neatly groomed mustache.

  ‘Is it Dr. Lehrl’s kid?’ Fogle asked finally.

  ‘Don’t ask him that. That’s the thing. The kid will be in a corner, reading, playing with something. Don’t acknowledge the kid. Nor do you ask him or refer to the kid. The kid won’t acknowledge you, you don’t acknowledge him.’

  ‘There may also be a hand puppet. It’s an old thing from Audits that he’s hung on to. Call it an eccentricity. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention the hand puppet, either.’

  ‘For the record,’ Sylvanshine said, ‘it’s not his kid.’

  Fogle was looking straight ahead in a ruminative way.

  ‘The kid’s the kid of one of Dr. Lehrl’s senior staff back at Danville,’ Reynolds said. ‘Dr. Lehrl just likes having the kid around.’

  ‘Even if the dad isn’t there.’

  ‘It’s all a long, tedious story. The point, as far as you’re concerned, is don’t acknowledge the kid, and it’s up to you but our advice is don’t acknowledge the Doberman hand puppet either.’

  Fogle’s eyelid was doing the maddening fluttery thing again, which neither aide could see. He said: ‘The thing is, can I ask a question?’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘The college sports team thing—how come you’re telling me?’

  Reynolds, at the desk, made a minute adjustment to one of his cuffs. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if it’s going to be a test when he asks me, why tell me in advance what I should say? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the test?’

  Sylvanshine opened the file on top of the stack beside him and made a small show of marking something inside. Reynolds leaned back in Caroline Oooley’s chair and lifted his arms, smiling: ‘Nice. You got us.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You got us. You passed. The test was: Are you just a toady, so anxious to please the hotshot from National that you’d suck up inside dope and go in there and say what we told you to?’

  ‘Which you didn’t,’ Sylvanshine said.

  ‘But I’m not even in there yet,’ Fogle said.

  ‘Instead, you challenged us on a point of logic.’

  ‘Granted, a fairly obvious point.’

  ‘But you’d be amazed how many don’t. How many GS-9s will scuttle in there and correct Dr. Lehrl’s so-called mistake, trying to be a sycophant.’

  ‘A brown-nose toaderooski.’

  What his eyelid felt like was the eyelid equivalent of somebody shuddering. ‘So then this was the test?’

  ‘Consider yourself slapped five.’

  Raising his arms in a gesture of surrender and congratulation had caused Reynolds’s cuffs to protrude unevenly again from the sleeves of his jacket, and he was adjusting them again.

  ‘So but can I ask another question?’

  ‘The kid’s on a roll,’ Sylvanshine said.

  ‘When I go in there, is Dr. Lehrl going to ask me about schools? Did you just make that up?’

  ‘Let’s turn that around,’ Sylvanshine said.

  So now he had to look back over at Sylvanshine again, who hadn’t changed position in his chair over by the magazine and bulletin table even once the whole time, Fogle saw.

  Sylvanshine said: ‘Say you were to go in there and interface and at some point he misidentifies your football team—what do you do?’

  ‘Because,’ Reynolds said, ‘if you don’t correct his mistake, you’re being a toady, and if you do correct him, you’re maybe also being a toady in that you’re acting on inside information we just gave you.’

  ‘And he despises toadies,’ Sylvanshine said, opening the file again.

  ‘But is he even in there?’ Fogle said. ‘With some mysterious child I’m supposed to pretend isn’t there? And is that another test—do I acknowledge the kid or not, given what you’ve said?’

  ‘One item at a time,’ Reynolds said. He and Sylvanshine were looking at Fogle very intently; Fogle thought, for the first time, that maybe they could see the eyelid thing. ‘He calls it the Blue Devils—what do you do?’

  §50

  The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe. An open can of Tab whose color seems lurid against the beige and white. The stainless steel hook for your jacket. No photos or diplomas or personal touches—the facilitator is either newly posted or on outside contract. A woman with a pleasant, pop-eyed face, hair beginning to gray, in a padded chair identical to your own. Some protrusive eyes give the faces a creepy, staring aspect; the facilitator’s do not. You have declined to remove your shoes. The knob beside the dimmer is your chair’s control; it reclines and the feet go up. It is important that you be comfortable.

  ‘You do have a body, you know.’

  She has no notebook, it occurs. And given its position in the building’s northwest leg, the office should by all rights have a window.

  The setting at which you do not feel your own weight in the chair is two-thirds reclined. There is a disposable piece of paper attached to the headrest. Your sight line is the seam of the wall and drop ceiling; the toes of your shoes are visible at the lower periphery. The facilitator is not visible. The seam appears to thicken as the overheads are lowered to the level of a false dawn.

  ‘The way we start is to relax and become aware of the body.

  ‘It is at the level of body that we proceed.

  ‘Do not try to relax.’ Her voice is amused. It is gentle without being soft.

  Since we all breathe, all the time, it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe. And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with bani
ster and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.

  It is nothing like sleeping. Nor does her voice alter or seem to recede. She’s right there, speaking calmly, and so are you.

  Notes and Asides

  Throughout the manuscript of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace wrote hundreds of notes, observations, and larger ideas. Some of these asides suggest where the plot of the novel might have headed. Others provide additional information about characters’ backgrounds or their future development. Contradictions and complications abound among them. For instance, some notes say it’s DeWitt Glendenning who is bringing examiners with unique abilities to Peoria; others that it’s Merrill Errol Lehrl. A note from chapter 22 suggests that Chris Fogle knows a string of numbers that, when recited, give him the power of total concentration, but nowhere in the chapters we have does Fogle display this power. (Perhaps this ability is the reason Fogle has been summoned to meet Merrill Lehrl in chapter 49.) The hope in including this selection of notes is that they allow a fuller understanding of the ideas David was exploring in The Pale King and illuminate how much a work in progress the novel still was.

  Notes that were attached to specific chapters in The Pale King appear first, followed by notes from other parts of the manuscript.

  —Ed.

  §7 Sylvanshine wants desperately to be CID—that’s why he wants to pass the CPA exam. CID must be CPAs, just as FBI must be lawyers. Sylvanshine plays in front of mirror—“Freeze! Treasury!”

  3 high end players—Glendenning, Special HR guy Glendenning needs to find gifted examiners, Lehrl. But we never see them, only their aides and advance men.

  §12 Stecyk flown in via Lehrl’s design to help drive examiners crazy.

  §13 Primed is one of the IRS words for putting Examiners in a state where they pay maximum attention to returns.

  footnote 34 The dragon-image always guards some priceless thing. This other boy never, in all his endless introspection and analysis, conceived the attacks as forms of all-body weeping or sadness itself—for childhood’s end, for the split self required by society, for any number of possible traumas and estrangements. The disgust of others was a rank projection of his innermost secret, which the dragon both guarded and embodied—he was ignorant of mercy.

  §15 It’s Sylvanshine who’s the fact psychic, and Lehrl, who believes in the occult, has sent him to find and place the very finest GS-7 wigglers he can in a given group, so that when the A/NADA outperforms them on revenue, it’ll be convincing to Triple 6. This would require rewriting the Sylvanshine arrival sequence… S wants to become CPA because everyone else in Internal Control Systems is CPA? Or so that he can get out of the Service?

  §19 It’s the HR guys who ultimately get replaced by computers—they’re too distractible, too into side-issues.

  Glendenning’s kid in navy on ship off Iranian coast? Terrified he’s risking his life for an America that’s no longer worth fighting for.

  §22 ‘Irrelevant Chris’ is irrelevant only on the subject of himself? On all other topics/subjects, he’s focused & cogent and interesting? Dictum on him around REC is that he’s OK as long as you keep him off the topic of himself—then you’re in for it?

  Fogle ends up in IRS as the insufferable do-gooder that Stecyk was, as child?

  ‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember—he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.

  §24 Richard ‘Dick’ Tate is Director of Personnel. Ned Stecyk is his Deputy Director. Tate opposes Lehrl and ICS because he wants power, control—no power if fewer living personnel.

  Glendenning ineffectual—lost in a mist of civic idealism—the actual REC is run mostly by Tate and Stecyk, and by the Information Systems person.

  When DW and Stecyk lock eyes as Stecyk is soothing guy in his inner office, a look of tremendous compassion and sympathy spreads over Stecyk’s face, mainly because of DW’s hideous skin. Stecyk thus searches out DW and tries to be nice to him, figuring that he’s been shunned and traumatized his whole life. DW resents this—his position is that if people are shallow enough to regard someone’s skin as the be-all and end-all of his value and character, then fuck them; he doesn’t need them—but is ready to exploit Stecyk’s kindness in order to win various advantages for himself.

  David Wallace, once settled, has thing where he’ll look out the window and see, in the other, more elite building, someone at a window in the computer center looking back. Wearing thick glasses. Their eyes meet but they never meet or say anything.

  Light-blue Pacer with fish bumper sticker. This car is Lane Dean’s—who has to hurry like crazy in the AM because he goes to church services (or Sheri, his wife, does) at dawn, and is always on the edge of being late (Dean has become less fervently Christian since starting at REC, while Sheri has gotten more so)—that made this maneuver almost every morning.

  §26 Stecyk knows about Blumquist. He was at the REC when Blumquist died. He was just out of the IRS academy in Columbus and working as a chalk leader in rotes. He was the one who had to interview the wigglers (in 1978?) who had continued coming to work and working for something like three days while Blumquist sat rigidly at his desk, deceased. Some of them had felt bad about this. A few put in for transfers. Stecyk will discover that Examiners’ total down-the-line audit revenue every month increases when Blumquist sits with them, not talking to them or distracting them but simply sitting there, being with them. Theorizes that double teams of Examiners might be worth the cost—the doubled salary might be exceeded by the overall realized audit-revenue. But how to get this idea sold? Region Personnel Director would want to know how this originally came to light… how can Stecyk refer to a ghost? Or perhaps this was the idea of a previous Personnel Deputy, who got in trouble, because Region figured that he’d tried the experiment with two actual examiners, meaning double salary. It this a plausible plotline?

  What is Stecyk like now, as an adult? Still incredibly nice, but no longer a total dweeb? A bit sadder? A dispenser of pop-psych bromides? What happened to make him realize that the Niceness of his childhood was actually sadistic, pathological, selfish? That other people, too, want to feel nice and do favors, that he’d been massively selfish about generosity? In a college sport, did he keep letting other team score out of ‘niceness,’ and got a visit from a referee—someone dressed all in black and white, like Irrelevant Chris Fogle’s Jesuit in college—who very bluntly told him he was full of shit and that true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity? Stecyk had caused traffic jams at 4-way stops by always letting everyone else go first? Or referee magically gives Stecyk insight into how his mother had felt when Stecyk got up very early every morning to do her housekeeping for her—like she was useless, like the family felt she was incompetent, etc. Stecyk tells David Wallace the story of the butterfly—if you let it out of the cocoon when it seems to be struggling and dying, then its wings don’t get strengthened and it can’t survive.

  The pathologically nice is one of the basic types who gravitate to the IRS, because it’s such a grim, unpopular job—no gratitude, which only increases the sense of sacrifice.

  Sylvanshine has a different take on Blumquist. Sylvanshine has educed that some of the very best Examiners—most attentive, most thorough—are those with some kind of trauma or abandonment in their past. He’s there to intuit which are the best so that they can be auditioned for the test against A/NADA. Blumquist, it turns out, had had brutal Fundamentalist parents—the kind for whom fans and mattresses were luxuries. They had a special punishment: they made him f
ace the wall in the parlor—blank wall—stand there facing it for hours at a time. This was the trauma. There had been a mirror on the other wall behind him; it showed only his back. This is the image Sylvanshine gets for Blumquist: a view of his childhood back, very still, with a scrolled wooden frame around it. Blumquist had had productivity numbers that were much, much higher than anyone else’s, though he had declined offers to be promoted to higher civil service grade and managerial job. Sylvanshine looking for similarly great rote examiner, to do the series of tests against the A/NADA program and digital computer. Several of the recently transferred Examiners are among the very best tested rote examiners left at national RECs. Lehrl’s Systems boys want a fair test, the computer and A/NADA against the very finest rote examiners they can get… so that when the A/NADA crushes them, the test’ll be all that much more definitive.

  §30 LEHRL & PRO-TECH VS. GLENDENNING & DISTRICT DIRECTORS: Project is replacing human Examiners with computers the way Lehrl invented Automated Collection Systems—the District Directors don’t want it, because they’re Old School IRS-as-Civics believers, whereas the new school has a corporate philosophy: maximize revenue while minimizing costs. Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.

  Charles Lehrl preparing to computerize Exams the way he computerized Automated Collection System in Collections—the experiments there were in Rome and Philadelphia. Invented the IRP that compares W2s and 1099s to Returns—made Examiners’ jobs otiose.