David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Do you know why they call you Mr. X?’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you know why they call Chahla the Iranian Crisis?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you know why they call McKenzie Second-Knuckle Bob?’

‘No.’

Meredith Rand sees Drinion looking at the cigarette. Her lighter is in a special loop attached to the cigarette case, which is cheap pebbled vinyl — Meredith Rand ends up losing her cigarettes in different places so often that it makes no sense to have an expensive cigarette case. She knows, from the Pod’s workday breaks, that it would be pointless to offer Drinion a cigarette.

‘What about you? Do you think I’m interesting?’ Rand asks Shane Drinion. ‘I mean, apart from me saying you were interesting.’

Drinion’s eyes are on hers — he makes a lot of eye contact without being in any way challenging or flirty — while he seems to do the same internal card-sorting thing he’s done before. Drinion wears an argyle sweater vest, strange, pebbly-textured polyester slacks, and brown Wallabee knockoffs that might literally be from JC Penney. The cold stream from the vent overhead tears the smoke ring to shreds the minute she shapes and exhales it. Beth Rath is now playing foosball with Herb Dritz while Keith Sabusawa watches the pregame warmup to a Cardinals baseball game on the television above the bar. You can tell that Beth would rather be sitting with Sabusawa but isn’t sure how forward to be about her feelings for Sabusawa, who has always struck Meredith Rand as awfully tall for an oriental. Drinion also has a way of nodding where the nod has nothing to do with etiquette or affirmation. He says: ‘You’re pleasant, and so far I’m enjoying the tête-à-tête. It’s a chance to pay direct attention to you, which is otherwise hard to do, because it seems to make you uncomfortable.’ He waits for a moment to see if she wants to say anything. Drinion’s facial expression isn’t blank, but it’s bland and neutral in a way that might as well be blank for all it tells you. Meredith Rand has, without being quite aware of it, quit trying with the rings.

‘Is liking paying attention the same thing as being interested in somebody?’

‘Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.’

‘Is that true?’

‘I think so, yes.’ Drinion says: ‘Of course you’re especially interesting to pay attention to because you’re attractive. It’s almost always pleasant to pay attention to beauty. It requires no effort.’

Rand’s eyes have narrowed, though part of this may have been the bits of cigarette smoke being blown back into her face by the AC vent.

Shane Drinion says: ‘Beauty is almost by definition interesting, if by interesting you mean something that compels attention and makes attention feel pleasant. Although the word you just used was interested rather than interesting. ’

‘You do know I’m married,’ says Meredith Rand.

‘Yes. Everyone knows you’re married. You wear a wedding ring. Your spouse picks you up at the south entrance several days a week. His car has a small hole in the exhaust that gives the engine a powerful sound. A sound that makes the car sound more powerful than normal, I mean.’

Meredith Rand does not look pleased at all. ‘Maybe I’m confused. If you just said that it makes me uncomfortable, why even bring up the attractiveness thing?’

‘Well, you asked me a question,’ Drinion says. ‘I told you what I decided is the truth. It took a second to decide what the true answer is and what is and isn’t part of it. Then I said it. It isn’t intended to make you uncomfortable. But it isn’t intended to keep you from being uncomfortable, either — you didn’t ask about that.’

‘Oh, and you’re the authority on what the truth is because…?’

Drinion waits a moment. In just the same tiny interval as the pause, it occurs to Meredith Rand that Drinion’s pausing to see whether there’s more or whether the truncated question is meant to invite him to supply the answer. Meaning is it sarcastic. Meaning he has no natural sense of whether something was sarcastic or not. ‘No. I’m not an authority on the truth. You asked me a question about me being interested, and I tried to determine the truth of what I felt, and to say that truth to you, because my assumption was that’s what was wanted.’

‘I notice you weren’t nearly as, like, blunt and forthcoming about how me saying I found you interesting made you feel.’

Drinion’s expression and tone haven’t changed even a little bit. ‘I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time understanding what you just said.’

‘I’m saying when I asked you how me finding you interesting made you feel, you weren’t as blunt about answering. You skittered and skipped all over. Now with me all of a sudden there’s a sudden concern for the blunt truth.’

‘Now I understand.’ Again a slight pause. The light-brand’s smoke does taste thin against the aftertaste of tonic and lime. ‘I don’t recall any part of me trying to be evasive or false in that answer. Maybe I’m able to express some things better than others. I think that’s a common finding for people. Also, I don’t usually speak very much. I’m hardly ever in a tête-à-tête, actually. It may be that I’m not as skilled as other people at speaking in a consistent way about how something makes me feel.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Yes.’

Rand is now having no problem looking directly at Drinion. ‘It doesn’t occur to you that all that might strike somebody as a little condescending?’

Drinion’s brow moves ever so slightly upward as he thinks. The baseball game has now started on the television, which may explain why Keith Sabusawa, who’s usually keen to leave after Happy Hour has ended, hasn’t left yet, and so neither has Shane Drinion. Sabusawa is tall enough that he has his loafers partly on the floor instead of hooked into the little support near the barstool’s base. Ron, the bartender, has a small towel and a glass in his hand and is making cleaning motions but is also looking up at the game, and he’s saying something to Keith Sabusawa, who in fact sometimes keeps whole long lists of baseball statistics in his head, which according to Beth Rath he finds soothing and restful to think about. Two great flashing, twittering pinball machines stand against the wall just south of the air hockey game, which no Meibeyer’s patron ever plays because there’s some chronic malfunction that makes air blow too hard through the table’s pinholes and the puck rides several inches off the surface and is next to impossible to keep from flying off the table altogether. On the nearer of the pinball machines, a beautiful Amazon in a Lycra bodysuit is lifting by the hair a man whose limbs appear to gyrate in time with the syncopated lights of the obstacles and gateways and flippers.

Drinion says: ‘That doesn’t occur to me. But I do notice that you’ve become angry or upset in response to something I’ve said. This I can tell,’ he says. ‘It occurs to me that you might want to end this tête-à-tête conversation even though your spouse hasn’t arrived yet to pick you up, but that possibly you’re not sure how to do it, and so you feel somewhat trapped, and this is part of what’s angering you.’

‘And you, you don’t have to be someplace?’

‘No.’

An interesting bit of trivia is that Meredith Rand actually outranks Drinion, technically, since she’s a GS-10 and Drinion a GS-9. This even though Drinion is several orders of magnitude more effective than Rand as an examiner. Both his daily average of returns and his ratio of total returns examined to total additional revenue produced through audit are much higher than Meredith Rand’s. The truth is that utility examiners have a harder time getting promoted, since promotions usually result from Group Managers’ recommendations, and UTEXs are rarely at one Post or Pod long enough to develop the sort of rapport with superiors that makes the superior willing to go through the paperwork hassle of recommending someone for a promotion. Also, since utility examiners are often the best at what they do, there is a disincentive in the Service against promoting them, since at GS-15 a Service employee moves into administration and can no longer travel from Post to Post. One of the things that regular posted wigglers find mysterious about UTEXs is what motivations induce them to serve as UTEXs when the position is something of a career-killer in terms of advancement and pay raises. As of 1 July 1983, the difference between a GS-9’s and a GS-10’s annual salary is $3,220 gross, which is not pocket change. Like many wigglers, Meredith Rand assumes that there’s a certain type of basic personality that’s maybe drawn to the constant movement and lack of attachment of being a utility examiner, plus the variety of challenges, and that Personnel has ways to test for these personality traits and so to ID certain examiners as likely UTEX candidates. There is a certain prestige or romance to the UTEX lifestyle, but part of this is married or elsewise dug-in employees’ romanticization of the unattached lifestyle of somebody who goes from Post to Post at the institutional whim of the Service, like a cowboy or mercenary. Lots of UTEXs have come to Peoria since late winter / spring ’84—there are a variety of theories about why.