David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

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.

22 At 158 employees, the vacuum-sublimation-and-caffeine-supplementation works for Bright Eyes Instant Coffee represented Philo’s last remaining claim to industry. A subsidiary of Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics, Bright Eyes was a regional high-caf brand, recognizable in Midwest stores by the jar’s crude graphic of an electrified-looking squirrel with bulging blazing suns for eyes and what looked like tiny bolts of cartoon lightning shooting out from its splayed extremities. When Archer Daniels Midland Co. absorbed Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics in 1991, Bright Eyes was (mercifully*) discontinued. More than this I am legally enjoined from telling you by the refusal of certain members of my family to sign the appropriate legal releases. Suffice it to say that I know a lot more about the chemistry, manufacture, and ambient odors of instant coffee than anyone would voluntarily want to, and that the smells were not at all the cozy comforting breakfastish aromas that one might naively imagine (they were closer to burning hair, actually, when the wind was right).

* As early as the 1970s, there had been evidence linking artificially enhanced caffeine to everything from arrhythmias to Bell’s palsy, though the first class-action suit was not filed until 1989.

23 A further irony: During an April 1987 tornado outside De Kalb, a detached portion of one of these FARM SAFETY billboards whirled in and for all practical purposes decapitated a soybean farmer — that was pretty much it for the 4-H sign.

24 (i.e., facing south and SSP, on which we were moving west at literally the rate of a toddler’s crawl)

25 Again, much of this is from the actual notebook in which these impressions were recorded. I’m aware that I’m describing the access road from a distance but attributing to it qualities that became evident only as we got very slowly closer and closer and then were actually on it. Part of this is artful compression; part is that it’s next to impossible to take coherent notes in a moving auto.

26 (inscribed with a pencil that had long since gone blunt and dull, which is something I detest; there would have had to be considerable psychic pressure/incentive for me to be willing to write with a dull pencil)

27 Again, the ‘behind’ is from the perspective of the parkway. Given that what we were approaching was the main building’s rear, the premium lots were actually ‘in front’ of the REC, though that front faced away from Self-Storage.

28 Ibid.

29 Let’s mainly skip the issue of the additional crowding and dysfunction caused by outer lots’ pedestrians trying to negotiate the access road’s narrow edge past the solid line of cars that filled that road, much of which problem could have been solved simply by installing a sidewalk across the immaculate lawn and some kind of entrance in the front (i.e., what appeared to be the front; it was actually the building’s rear). In essence, the baronial splendor of the REC’s grass was a testament to the idiocy and hassle of the whole thing’s planning.

30 It had to be: It wasn’t nearly wide enough to sustain two-way traffic, not to mention the additional space taken up by pedestrians trying to walk to/from their vehicles along the road’s edge.

31 What I did not at that time know was that, as the result of certain complex Compliance Branch reorganizations related to the implementation of the ‘Initiative,’ the Midwest REC had had a net gain of more than three hundred new employees over the previous two fiscal quarters. One theory among the rote examiners at Angler’s Cove was that this had helped tip some delicate balance in the REC’s parking situation, exacerbated by the construction on Self-Storage and the elimination, for what were represented as morale reasons, of reserved parking for those with civil service grades above GS-11. The latter had been the idea of Mr. Tate, the REC’s Director of Personnel, who’d regarded reserved parking as elitist and corrosive to REC morale. The syndrome of DP Richard Tate’s instituting a policy that resulted in far more problems than it resolved was so familiar that wigglers referred to it as ‘dicktation.’