The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  6 There are secrets within secrets, though—always.

  1 I won’t keep saying this each time that I, the living author, am actively narrating. For now, I’m including it just as an innocuous cue to help you keep the book’s various sections and agonists straight, since (as explained in the Author’s Foreword) the legal situation here entails a certain degree of polyphony and flux.

  2 At that time, Lake James was something between a suburb and an independent township of metropolitan Peoria. The same is true of other little outlying communities like Peoria Heights, Bartonville, Sicklied Ore, Eunice, & c., the latter two of which adjoined Lake James along certain unincorporated zones to the east and west. The whole separate-but-attached-district thing had to do with the city’s inexorable expansion and encroachment into the rich agricultural land around it, which over time brought certain small, formerly isolated farming communities into Peoria’s orbit. I know that these little satellite towns each had their own property-tax structure and zoning authority, but in many other respects (e.g., police protection) they functioned as outlying districts of Peoria proper. The whole thing could be extremely involved and confusing. For instance, the Regional Examination Center’s street address was listed as 10047 Self-Storage Parkway, Lake James, IL, whereas the REC’s official postal address was ‘Internal Revenue Service Examination Center, Peoria IL 67452.’ This may be because Peoria’s USPS center on G Street downtown had a whole separate three-bin area for the REC, however, plus a pair of special tandem trucks that came out the restricted back road three times a day to the REC’s loading docks behind the Annex. I.e., the mailing address may have been Peoria simply because that’s where the REC’s daily mountain of mail actually came to. That is, it may have been more a function of the relationship between the US Postal Service and the IRS than anything else. Like so many other features of the REC and Service, the answer to the physical-vs.-postal-location-incongruity question is doubtless incredibly complicated and idiosyncratic and would require far more time and energy to ferret out and truly understand than any sane person would want to expend. Another example: The really relevant, representative thing about Lake James as a township is that it has no lake. There is, in fact, a body of water called Lake James, but as a practical matter it’s more of a large fetid pond, choked with algae from ag-runoff, a good dozen miles northwest of Lake James proper, closer to Anthony IL, which latter really is a separate township of Peoria and has its own zip code, & c., & c…. In other words, incongruities like these are complex and puzzling but not really all that important unless you’re invested in the geographical minutiae of Peoria (the possibility of which I have decided I can safely presume is remote).

  3 N.B.: I’m not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesn’t work that way, and everyone knows it; it’s an insulting bit of artifice in a genre that purports to be 100 percent ‘realistic.’ To be honest, I think you deserve better, and that you’re intelligent enough to understand and maybe even applaud it when a memoirist has the integrity to admit that he’s not some kind of eidetic freak. At the same time, I’m not going to waste time noodling about every last gap and imprecision in my own memory, a prime cautionary example of which is ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle’s vocational soliloquy (q.v. §22 above, which is actually heavily edited and excerpted) as part of the abortive 1984 Personnel Division motivational/recruitment faux documentary debacle, which ended up as a debacle in part because Fogle and two or three other maundering grandstanders took up so much film and time, and because Mr. Tate had failed to have his deputy, Mr. Stecyk, assign anyone on-site the responsibility of keeping someone’s answer to the ‘documentary question’ under a certain sane ceiling, which meant that the supposed ‘documentarian’ and his crew had every incentive to let Fogle et al. go on and on while they stared into space and calculated the running amount of tiered overtime pay they were accruing. The whole thing, while obviously of archival value, was evidently an immense cluster-fuck, one of many that Tate authored when he indulged his administrative brainstorms instead of simply letting Stecyk do all the work of the Personnel office as usual.

  4 I no longer have this original two-page Form 141-PO, which vanished into the maw of the REC’s Personnel and Internal Control Systems Problem Resolution filing systems during the whole eventual swivet and comedy of errors surrounding my initial misassignment to an Immersive Exams Pod, the story of which unfolds in full pathetic, ur-bureaucratic detail below.

  5 N.B.: With possible competition only from East St. Louis, Peoria and Joliet are well-known as the two grimmest, most blighted and depressed old factory cities in Illinois*, which fact turns out not to be a coincidence, since it affords statistically verifiable savings to the Service in terms of both facilities and labor. The location of most Regional HQs, RECs, and Service Centers in blighted and/or devitalized cities, which is traceable all the way back to the Service’s big reorganization and decentralization after the King Commission’s report to Congress in 1952, is just one sign of the deep pro-business and -bottom-line philosophies beginning to gather force in the Service as early as the Nixon administration.

  * As part of the overall relevant context, be advised that Illinois’s five largest cities and metro areas by population (excluding Chicago, which is more like its own galaxy) c. 1985 were, in descending order, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Joliet, and Decatur.

  6 I do, by the way, still possess this letter, which for legal reasons I am told I cannot reproduce more than one single fair-use sentence of, for ‘general flavor,’ the sentence I’ve chosen being from the second immaculately copperplate-handwritten paragraph; to wit: ‘He will be given only a small job to begin with, and it will be his business to work his way up by diligence and attentiveness,’ in the margin next to which the unnamed addressee of this letter had absently jotted either ‘HA!’ or ‘HAH!,’ depending on how one tried to parse the spiky and almost indecipherable hand of someone for whom a ‘quick cocktail before supper’ involved a sixteen-ounce tumbler and no ice.

  7 This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flintstonianly remote.

  8 However puerile it seems now, I know that I sometimes felt an irrational anxiety about the possibility that the recent unpleasantness at school might have found its way into some shadowily comprehensive data retrieval system to which the IRS was somehow linked, and that some kind of bell or siren would suddenly sound when I presented at the counter for my ID and badge, and so on… an irrational fear that I knew was irrational and so did not admit fully into my consciousness, though at the same time I know that I spent at least some of the interminable time aboard the bus to Peoria idly constructing emergency plans and scenarios for how, if and when the bell or siren sounded, I might avoid returning home to Philo the same day I’d left and facing whoever it was who opened the door to my knock and saw me there on the home’s filthy screen porch with my bags and dispatch case—at some moments I know that the unconscious anxiety consisted only of envisioning the expression on the face of whatever immediate relative opened the door, saw me, and opened his mouth to say something, at which time I became aware of the fact that I was having anxious fantasies and waved them away on the bus ride, returning to the unbelievably insipid book I’d been presented with as a ‘gift’ by my family, their idea of useful wisdom and support, this ‘gift’ presented to me at supper on the evening before my departure (which special farewell supper, by the way, had consisted of [a] leftovers and [b] steamed ears of corn that I had just had my braces tightened and couldn’t even have hoped to try to eat), after first being told to open the gift very carefully so that the wrapping paper could be reused.

  9 (plus, I’ll admit, a certain amount of slack relief at what seemed to be the opposite of bells/sirens and possible rejection for ethical unfitness or whatever my unconscious had conjured; I think I’d been more afraid
than I’d acknowledged to myself)

  10 This boy had also spent the first several minutes after I’d boarded and gotten settled staring wide-eyed at the condition of the side of my face, making no effort to hide or disguise the clinical interest with which little children stare, all of which I’d of course seen (and in some ways almost appreciated) out of the corner of my eye.

  11 I.e., all these men with hats, which hats I would soon suspect and then outright learn were an Exam Division trademark (just as flat square shoulder-holsters for one’s pocket calculator were the signature accessory of Audits, earbuds and stylized tie clips were Systems, and so on) such that the REC’s group rooms, whether for rotes or immersives, all featured at least one wall with a peg-board of hooks for examiners’ hats, since individual hat racks or hooks screwed into the edge of one’s Tingle table created impediments for cart boys’ carts…

  12 (e.g., having one character inform another of stuff they both actually already know, in order to get this information across to the reader—which I’ve always found irksome in the extreme, not to mention highly suspicious in a ‘nonfiction’ memoir, although it is true [if mysterious] that mass-market readers seem not to mind being jerked around this way)

  13 N.B.: Some of this is more or less lifted from the packet of IRS orientation materials that new hires and transfers received at Intake & Processing; hence the somewhat dead, bureaucratic flavor, which I have elected not to jazz up or prettify.

  14 I have, however, worked in relevant details that were obviously not in the official materials. The Rome debacle was not something the Service had any interest in publicizing, even internally; but it also figured prominently in the whole high-level struggle over the so-called ‘Initiative’ and its implementation. None of which I had any idea of or interest in on this first day, it goes without saying.

  15 One of the pieces of freelance work I’d completed just before the fraternity-file idiocy blew up in everyone’s face had been the first two chapters of a rather likable but disorganized sociology major’s senior thesis on shopping malls as the modern functional analog of medieval cathedrals (with some of the parallels being downright striking), and I had no stomach left for shopping malls, even though they were often the only places anymore that had movie theaters, the grand old downtown palaces being now either shuttered or converted to Adult.

  16 True, there had been silent rides aplenty with my own family, though the AM radio then was always playing Easy Listening music at high volume, which helped explain-slash-cover the absence of conversation.

  17 GS-9 Chris Fogle would later explain (probably as I and whoever else was around rotated our hand in the air in the please-get-on-with-it way that almost everyone started involuntarily rotating their hand to convey whenever ‘Irrelevant’ Chris was on a roll) that the widening of Self-Storage Parkway had been stalled for over a year, first because a supplementary bond issue was being challenged in district court by a conservative Illinois citizens’ taxation watchdog group, and second because the extremely harsh regional winters and abrupt spring thaws that then so often refroze again a day later (all of which is true) caused whatever part of the new, freshly built SSP third lane that had not been treated with a special type of industrial sealant to heave and crack, and the courts had halted the previous year’s construction at just the point when this sealant was going to be applied with some kind of rare and very expensive piece of heavy machinery that had to be rented far in advance from a single specialty-distributor in either Wisconsin or Minnesota (I still have an actual sense-memory of the way my hand would begin rotating in the air, almost involuntarily, when Fogle started foundering in extraneous detail—he was unpopular out of all proportion to his character, which was actually decent and well-meaning to a fault; he was one of the low-level True Believers on whom the Service depended so heavily for so much of the inglorious gruntwork and heavy lifting of day-to-day operations, and what eventually happened to him was a great injustice, I’ve always thought, since in his case he really did need the drugs and took them entirely for professional reasons; it wasn’t recreational by any means), with, of course, the legal injunction and failure to apply the sealant then causing heavy damage the following winter and spring, and roughly doubling the cost of the construction over the civil engineering firm’s initial bid. Meaning that it was all a horrific mess of litigation and engineering mishaps that, as usual, placed a chronic, annoying, tedious burden on the ordinary commuters of the city. By the way, it emerged that another reason traffic on the circumambient SSP was so chronically bad even before the construction nightmare was that, understood not as an agglomeration of human beings but as a going economic concern, Peoria had come in the 1980s to assume the same basic doughnut shape as so many other formerly industrial cities: The downtown center was empty and denuded, all but dead, while at the same time a robust collection of malls, plazas, franchises, business and light-industrial parks, town house developments, and apartment complexes had pulled most of the city’s life out into an exurban ring. The mid-1990s would see a partial renaissance and gentrification of the riverside downtown—some of the factory and warehouse sites were converted to condos and high-concept restaurants; artists and younger professionals took some others for division into lofts, & c.—though much of this optimistic development was spurred by the establishment of riverboat casinos just off what had been the main industrial set of offload docks, casinos that were not locally owned and whose base revenues Peoria never even got a plausible cut of, the entire downtown rejuvenation spurred by incidental, small-potato tourist spending… viz., on the part of people who came for the casinos, which, since casinos are in the business of separating people from the cash they would otherwise use to shop and dine out, meant that the actual relationship between casino revenues and tourist spending was inverse, which, given casinos’ deserved reputation for extreme profitability, meant that any levelheaded person could have predicted the steeply declining revenue curve that within just a few years caused most of the ‘New Downtown’ renaissance to sputter, especially when the casinos (after prudently waiting a decent interval) all opened their own restaurants and retail shops. And so on… the same basic thing played out in cities all over the Midwest.

  18 (identifiable as such in memory because they were not Gremlins, Mercury Montegos, or Ford Econoline vans. It emerged that the REC’s Support Service fleet of government vehicles were nearly all derived from a jeopardy-assessment seizure against a conjoint auto dealership in downstate Effingham, an explanation of which would be way too long and digressive to inflict on you here.)

  19 Brief, unavoidable aside: For the first six quarters of a contracted posting, examiners without dependents could avail themselves of special Service housing in a set of apartment complexes and converted motels along the eastern edge of SSP’s circumambient ring, government-owned through either seizures or tax sales during the recession of the early 1980s. There is, of course, a whole other long and tediously involved story here, including the fact that the housing situation had been vastly complicated by the large number of transfers and personnel reshufflings all RECs had undergone as (a) a result of the mid-Atlantic REC’s foundering and dissolution in 1981 and (b) the early phases of the so-called ‘Intiative’ which it turned out bore directly on the Midwest REC. The point, though, was that this housing was offered both to facilitate ease of transfers and to offer a financial inducement, since the monthly rent at (for instance) the Angler’s Cove complex was at least $150 a month less than the going rents for comparable housing in the private sector. My own motives for accepting this housing option should be clear… although it is also true that the IRS in 1986 began treating the difference between the subsidized and free-market rents as ‘implied income’ and taxing it, which as you can imagine caused no end of ill will among Service employees, who are also of course US citizens and taxpayers, and whose annual tax returns receive special scrutiny every year because of the distinctive ‘9’s at the head of our ID/SS numbers, & c., & c.
In retrospect, the whole Service housing thing was probably not worth it, given all the bureaucratic hassles and idiocies involved (q.v. below), although the monthly savings in rent were substantial.

  20 We observed that it was almost always the private cars and pickups that clotted things by selfishly trying to shortcut through the breakdown lane and then merging back in. Service vehicles, including the Support Services vans that ran back and forth between the wiggler housing at north Peoria’s Angler’s Cove and the Oaks, never deviated from the legal lane, the Service drivers being non-contract hourly workers who had no incentive to hurry or try to cut corners, which presented a different set of problems for us who were required to be at our Tingle tables by a certain very definite time at the start of the shift; but from the point of view of orderly traffic it was still probably a good administrative move on Support Services’ part, although it meant that the Support Services drivers, whose jobs were chiropractically sadistic as well as boring and repetitive beyond belief, couldn’t join the Treasury union, didn’t qualify for health insurance, & c.

  21 These cited regulations, when the Internal Revenue Manual’s whole code of regulations was perused in a period of examination downtime with literally nothing else to do to occupy one’s time, exposed a strange kind of error: The cars’ and vans’ interior signs’ citations actually referred to the regulation that required the signs to be ‘displayed in a prominent, unobscured location’ within each vehicle; it was really a regulation two regs above that cited reg that interdicted eating, tobacco, & c. within Service-owned transport. That is, the signs’ cited reg referred to the sign itself, not to the regulation the sign was supposed to signify.