David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

32 At the time, I knew nothing of the bureaucratic hostilities between the IRS and the state of Illinois, these dating all the way back to the state’s brief introduction of a progressive sales tax, which top officials at Triple-Six under the Carter administration had joined others in the editorial pages of major financial dailies in ridiculing and in abusing the ‘brain trust’ behind the state’s revenue scheme, causing bad blood which continued, in the form of many small types of petty hassles and inaccommodation, through the 1980s.

33 Factoid courtesy of GS-9 Robert Atkins (knows all, tells all).

34 (It turned out that the fountain was broken and an obscure hydraulic part was on order.)

35 There had been certain changes and modifications in the 1040 since 1978, the details of which I would come to know all too well over the coming months.

36 N.B. that a detailed illustrative photo of the REC’s mirrored Annex’s west side’s junction with the main building’s facade circa 1985, which I made a point of including as Plate 1 in the original memoir, has been here deleted by the publisher for ‘legal’ reasons that (I opine) make no sense whatsoever. Hiatus valde deflendus.

37 Which we had to do because several other vehicles had double- and even triple-parked just ahead, and it was impossible to go any farther, and the driver simply put the car in park and sat rotating his neck stiffly, with both hands still on the steering wheel, as the more experienced Service employees began piling out.

38 Some of the entrance area’s milling crowd’s men were in shirtsleeves, and a swirling wind caused by the contrast in temperatures in and out of the building’s shadow blew some of their neckties either back over their shoulders or (for a second or two) out straight from their chests in an arrowy way, as if they were impaled on their own neckties, which is what accounts for the strange memorability of this fragment as we pulled up.

39 The Personnel representative, Ms. Neti-Neti, turned out to be what she called Persian. It was she whom 2K Bob McKenzie and some of the others in Hindle’s Rotes group had christened ‘the Iranian Crisis.’

40 It had been the Pakistani roommate, in fact, who as early as Freshman Orientation Week had christened me with the unkind name that followed me throughout the next three semesters, ‘the young man carbuncular.’

41 There is actually a third general class of reactive person, whose eyes would linger on my face in a kind of nakedly horrified fascination. These were usually people with a personal history of various kinds of moderate skin problems and a consequent interest in worst-case-type examples of bad skin that overrides (i.e., the interest does) their natural tact or inhibition. I had actually had strangers come up to me and start expounding on their own past or present skin problems, assuming that I couldn’t fail to care or be interested, which I will admit I found irksome. Children, by the way, are not members of this (c) category — their interested stare is very different, and in general they (= children) are exempt from the whole taxonomy of reactors, since their social instincts and inhibitions are not yet fully evolved and it’s impossible to take their reactions or lack of tact personally — see e.g. the kid on the bus, although obviously he also had a repellent problem of his own.

42 Nor did she offer to help me with any of my bags, despite the fact that the one I held with the same arm with which I had to sort of clamp my dispatch case against my side clunked painfully against the same knee it had been clunking against all day whenever I had to carry my bags from one spot to another, while my left side’s wet clothes caused the spot on my ribs to start itching like mad again.

43 Given the large number of both new employees and transfers who arrived with luggage that day (for reasons I wouldn’t understand for some time), though, it’s only fair to observe that the REC Personnel office might have done well to have set up some system whereby people got taken to housing first, dropped off their bags, and were only then conducted to the REC for intake and orientation. However difficult the logistics of that scheme might have been, the alternative was an enormous number of IRS employees having to carry their bags with them everywhere they went on that first day at the REC, including in cramped elevators and stairways, as well as piles of unattended bags in the corner of whatever rooms the various orientations and ID productions were going on in.

44 These were Tingle tables, an Examinations convention with which I became all too familiar — although no one I ever talked to knew the origin of ‘Tingle,’ as in whether it was eponymous, or sardonic, or what.

45 For me, the pencil sharpener is a big one. I like a very particular sort of very sharp pencil, and some pencil sharpeners are a great deal better than others for achieving this special shape, which then is blunted and ruined after only a sentence or two, requiring a large number of sharpened pencils all lined up in a special order of age, remaining height, & c. The upshot is that nearly everyone I knew had distracting little rituals like this, of which rituals the whole point, deep down, was that they were distracting.

46 This sense of personal disorganization, which of course is very common, was for me heightened by the fact that I had very little trouble analyzing other people’s basic character and motivations, strengths and weaknesses, & c., while all attempts at self-analysis resulted in a tangle of contradictory and hopelessly complex facts and tendencies, impossible to sort out or draw general conclusions from.

47 I am reminded of an observation made during one of the wigglers’ evening bull sessions in the room of Chris Acquistipace, who was a Chalk Leader and one of the only REC wigglers housed on the second floor of the Angler’s Cove complex to display any friendliness or even an open mind toward me, despite the administrative foul-up that at first had me promoted even above the floor’s other GS-9s. It was either Acquistipace or Ed Shackleford, whose ex-wife had taught high school, who observed that what was then starting to be codified as ‘test anxiety’ may well really have been an anxiety about timed tests, meaning exams or standardized tests, where there is no way to do the endless fidgeting and self-distraction that is part of 99.9 percent of real people’s concentrated deskwork. I cannot honestly say that I remember whose observation it was; it was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. For the sake of convenience, let’s assume it was Shackleford. Shackleford’s observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in ‘test anxiety’ might well be a fear of the tests’ associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread — and it’s this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.

48 Once again, I would only later learn that most wigglers and Support Services workers at the REC referred to the whole Intake/Orientation process as ‘ dis orientation,’ which was another bit of clumsy inside humor. On the other hand, no one in authority expected me to be as completely confused and overwhelmed as in fact I was on arrival, since it emerged that the Personnel office had mistaken me for a completely different David Wallace, viz. an elite and experienced Immersives examiner from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC who had been lured to 047 through a complex system of shell-transfers and bureaucratic finagling. I.e., that there were not one but two David Wallaces whose contracted postings to 047 were to begin in this mid-May week. The computer-system problem behind this error is detailed in § 38. It goes without saying that all these facts emerged only after a great deal of time, misunderstanding, and convolved hassle. They were the real explanation for Ms. Neti-Neti’s scripted effusion and deference: It was actually that other, GS-13’s name, ontologically speaking, that had been on her special whiteboard sign, though it’s not as if ‘David Wallace’ is so common a US name that anyone could have reasonably expected me to posit right away that there’d been some freakish confusion about names and identities, especially during all the other confusion and ineptitude of ‘disorientation.’