David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

21 By age forty, artist or no, the reality is that only an imprudent chump would neglect to start saving and investing for eventual retirement, especially in this era of tax-deferred IRA and SEP-IRA plans with such generous annual tax-exempt caps — and extra-especially if you can S-corp yourself and let the corporation make an additional annual pension contribution, over and above your IRA, as a contractual ‘employee benefit,’ thereby exempting that extra amount from your taxable income, too. The tax laws right now are practically down on one knee, begging upper-income Americans to take advantage of this provision. The trick, of course, is earning enough to qualify as an upper-income American— Deos fortioribus adesse.

22 (Despite his sudden celebrity and windfall I am still, almost four years later, awaiting repayment of the loan’s principal from this unnamed writer, which I mention not to whinge or be vindictive, but merely as one more small part of my financial condition qua motivation.)

23 (meaning, somewhat confusingly, classically liberal)

24 (attitudes that are not wholly unjustified, given TPs’ hostility to the Service, politicians’ habit of bashing the agency to score populist points, & c.)

25 I’m reasonably sure that I am the only living American who’s actually read all these archives all the way through. I’m not sure I can explain how I did it. Mr. Chris Acquistipace, one of the GS-11 Chalk Leaders in our Rote Exams group, and a man of no small intuition and sensitivity, proposed an analogy between the public records surrounding the Initiative and the giant solid-gold Buddhas that flanked certain temples in ancient Khmer. These priceless statues, never guarded or secured, were safe from theft not despite but because of their value — they were too huge and heavy to move. Something about this sustained me.

26 (which is, after all, memoirs’ specialty)

27 (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it)

28 (again, whether consciously or not)

1 Psychodynamically, he was, as a subject, coming to a late and therefore traumatic understanding of himself as also an object, a body among other bodies, something that could see and yet also be seen. It was the sort of binary self-concept that many children attain as early as age five, often thanks to some chance encounter with a mirror, puddle, window, or photograph seen in just the right way. Despite the boy’s having the average ration of reflectors available to him in childhood, though, this developmental stage was retarded in his case somehow. The understanding of himself as also an object-for-others was in his case deferred to the very cusp of adulthood — and, like most repressed truths, when it finally burst through, it came as something overwhelming and terrible, a winged thing breathing fire.

2 In clinical terms, he was fighting to re-repress a truth that had been too long repressed in the first place, a confinement from which it had taken on far too much psychic energy ever, once it had burst through the mirror (so to speak), to be willed back out of conscious awareness. Consciousness just doesn’t work this way.

3 It especially didn’t happen when he was alone in the upstairs bathroom in front of the mirror, trying to make an attack happen so he could study it in the mirror and see for himself, objectively, how bad and obvious it looked from various angles and how far away it was visible from. He hoped, and on some level believed, that it maybe wasn’t as obvious or bizarre-looking as he was always afraid it was during an actual attack, but he could never verify this because he could never get a real attack to happen when he wanted it to, only when he totally, totally did not.

4 This boy’s surname, which was Cusk, placed him near the front of those classes with assigned seating.

5 Under any reputable Depth-based interpretation, a search- or spotlight serves as a manifest dream-symbol of human attention. On the level of latent content, however, the recurring nightmare could be interpreted as signifying anything from, e.g., a repressed narcissistic desire for others’ notice to an unconscious recognition of the boy’s own excessive preoccupation with himself as the suffering’s proximate cause. At clinical issue would be such questions as the dream-spotlight’s source, the teacher-figure’s status as either imago or archetype (or, perhaps, as projected self-image, since it is in this figure that distress is externalized as affect), and the subject’s own associations concerning such terms as gross, attack, and shattering.

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.