David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

6 E.g., one is now an Assistant Regional Commissioner for Taxpayer Assistance in the Western Regional Commissioner’s Office at Oxnard CA.

7 A signed, notarized 2002 FOIA request for copies of these videotapes is on file at the Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Public Information, 666 Independence Avenue, Washington DC…. And yes: The Service’s national HQ’s street number really is ‘666.’ So far as I know, it’s nothing more than an unfortunate accident in the Treasury Department’s assignment of office space after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. On the Regional levels, Service personnel tend to refer to the national office as ‘Triple-Six’—the meaning of the term is obvious, though no one I was able to talk to seemed to know just when it came into use.

8 This loose term is meant to connote the dramatized reconstruction of an empirically real occurrence. It is a common and wholly respectable modern device used in both film (q.v. The Thin Blue Line, Forrest Gump, JFK ) and literature (q.v. Capote’s In Cold Blood, Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Oates’s Zombie, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, & c., & c.).

9 The main way you can tell that the contracts are different is from our reactions to their breach. The feeling of betrayal or infidelity that the reader suffers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible nonfiction has made-up stuff in it (as has been revealed in some recent literary scandals, e.g. Kosinski’s Painted Bird or that infamous Carcaterra book) is because the terms of the nonfiction contract have been violated. There are, of course, ways to quote-unquote cheat the reader in fiction, too, but these tend to be more technical, meaning internal to the story’s own formal rules (see, e.g., the mystery novel’s first-person narrator who doesn’t reveal that he’s actually the murderer until the last page, even though he obviously knew it all along and suppressed it just to jerk us around), and the reader tends to feel more aesthetically disappointed than personally dicked over.

10 Apologies for the preceding sentence, which is the product of much haggling and compromise with the publisher’s legal team.

11 (which, FYI, there were few or no formal classes in at that time)

12 (correctly, it turned out)

13 Junior year, by the way, was when many of the college’s other, more privileged students, including several who’d been my freelance clients, were enjoying their traditional ‘semester abroad’ at places like Cambridge and the Sorbonne. I’m just mentioning this. There’s no expectation that you’re going to wring your hands over whatever hypocrisy and unfairness you may discern in this state of affairs. In no sense is this Foreword a bid for sympathy. Plus it’s all water long under the bridge now, obviously.

14 (but highly unlikely, given the college’s concern with its reputation and PR)

15 Sorry about that text sentence. The truth is that the whole frat-cabinet-and-cascading-scandal’s-need-for-a-scapegoat situation still sometimes gets me jacked up, emotionally speaking. Two facts might make the durability of these emotions easier to understand: (a) of the five other students found by the J-Board to have either bought term papers or plagiarized from those who had, two ended up graduating magna cum laude, and (b) a third now serves on the college’s Board of Trustees. I’ll just leave those as stark facts and let you draw your own conclusions about the whole shabby affair. Mendacem memorem esse oportet.

16 And please forgive the contrivance here. Given the familio-legal strictures detailed just below, this kind of anti-explanation is the only permissible way for me to avoid having my whole presence at IRS Post 047 be some enormous, unexplained, and unmotivated blank, which in certain types of fiction might be (technically) OK, but in a memoir would constitute a deep and essential breach of contract.

17 ( not a parent)

18 Q.v. FN 2, supra.

19 The word bureaucracy is notwithstanding that part of the run-up to the whole ‘New IRS’ thing was an increasing anti- or post-bureaucratic mentality on the part of both Triple-Six and Region. See, for one quick example, this snippet from an interview with Mr. Donald Jones, a GS-13 Team Leader in the Midwest REC’s Fats group from 1984 through 1990:

Perhaps it would help to define bureaucracy. The term. What we’re talking about. All they said you had to do was refer to the dictionary. Administration characterized by diffusion of authority and adherence to inflexible rules of operation, unquote. Inflexible rules of operation. An administrative system in which the need or desire to follow complex procedures impedes effective action, unquote. They had transparencies of the definition projected up on the wall during meetings. They said he had them all recite them as nearly some type of catechism.

Meaning, in discursive terms, that the couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human. The terror of concurrent films like Terminator and Blade Runner was based around just this premise… but of course in the case of the Service the convulsions, and fallout, although more diffuse and undramatic, had an actual impact on Americans’ lives.

N.B. Mr. Jones’s ‘they’ is referring to certain high-level figures who were exponents of the so-called ‘Initiative,’ which it is totally impractical here to try to explain abstractly (although q.v. Item 951458221 of § 14, Interview Documentary, which consists of a long and probably not ideally focused version of such an explanation from Mr. Kenneth [‘Type of Thing Ken’] Hindle, one of the oldest wigglers in the rotes group to which I ended up [after a great deal of initial confusion and misassignment] being tasked), except to say that the only such figure anyone at our low level ever even laid eyes on was the Technical Branch’s M. E. Lehrl and his strange team of intuitives and occult ephebes, who were (it emerged) tasked to help implement the Initiative as it pertained to Examinations. If that doesn’t make any sense at this point, please don’t worry about it. I went back and forth on the issue of what to explain here vs. what to let unfold in a more natural, dramatic way in the memoir itself. I finally decided to offer certain quick, potentially confusing explanations, betting that if they’re too obscure or baroque right now you just won’t pay much attention to them, which, again, I hasten to assure you is totally OK.

20 If you’re interested, this term is shorthand for an unrefundable advance payment against the author’s projected royalties (through a 7½%–15 % set of progressive margins) on sales of a book. Since actual sales are difficult to predict, it is in the writer’s financial interest to receive the largest possible advance, even though the lump-sum payment can create tax problems for the year of receipt (thanks largely to the 1986 Tax Reform Act’s elimination of income averaging). And given, again, that predicting actual sales is an inexact science, the size of the up-front author advance that a publishing company is willing to pay for the rights to a book is the best tangible indication of the publisher’s willingness to ‘support’ that book, w/the latter term meaning everything from the number of copies printed to the size of the marketing budget. And this support is practically the only way for a book to gain the attention of a mass audience and to garner significant sales — like it or not, that’s just the commercial reality today.