David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

The prebriefers, both GS-13s on loan from some Post where Tate has unspecified suction, were themselves prebriefed in Stecyk’s office. Both are credible, in coordinated navy and brown, the woman with something hard beneath the charm that suggests an ascent through Collections. The man is a blank to Ware, though; he could be from anywhere.

As is to be expected, some examiners are better than others. At this. Some can actuate, forget the setting, the stilted artifice, and speak as from the heart. So that with these, briefly, the recording techs can forget the job’s sheer tedium, the contrivance, the stiffness of standing still at machines that could run on their own. The techs are, in other words, engaged by the better ones; attention requires no effort. But only some are better… and the question at the monitor is why, and what it means, and whether what it means will matter, in terms of results, when the whole thing is given to Stecyk to track down the line.

Videotape File 047804(r)

© 1984, Internal Revenue Service

Used by Permission

945645233

‘It’s a tough job. People think deskwork, pushing papers, how hard can it be. Government work, the job security, pushing papers along. They don’t get it why it’s hard. I’ve been here now three years. That’s twelve quarters. All my reviews have been good. I won’t be doing rotes forever, trust me. Some of the fellows in our group are fifty, sixty. They’ve been doing rote exams over thirty years. Thirty years of looking at forms, crosschecking forms, filling out the same memos on the same forms. There’s something in some of their eyes. I don’t know how to explain it. My grandparents’ apartment building had a boiler man, a janitor. This was up near Milwaukee. Coal heat, this old fellow fed the coal furnace every couple hours. He’d been there forever; he was almost blind from looking into the mouth of that furnace. His eyes were… The older ones here are like that; their eyes are almost like that.’

968223861

‘Three or four years ago, the new president, the current one, got elected into office on the promise of big defense spending and a massive tax cut. This is known. The idea was that the tax cut would stimulate economic growth. I’m not certain how this was supposed to work — a lot of the, like, upper policy ideas didn’t reach us directly, they just trickled down to us through administrative changes in the Service. The way you know the sun’s moved because now the shadows in your room are different. You know what I’m saying.’

Q.

‘All of a sudden there were all these reorganizations, sometimes one right after the other, and repostings. Some of us stopped even unpacking. This is where I’ve been the longest now. I had no background in exams. I came out of Service Centers. I got reposted here from 029, the Northeast Service Center, Utica. New York, but upstate, in the third quarter, ’82. Upstate New York is beautiful, but the Utica Center had a lot of problems. At Utica I was in general data processing; I was more like a troubleshooter. Before that I was at Service Center substation 0127, Hanover NH — I was in payment processing, then refund processing. The Northeast districts were all in octal code and the forms with sprocket holes that they hired Vietnamese girls to sit there and tear off. Hanover had a lot of refugees. It was eight, nine years ago, but a whole different era. This here is a much more complex organization.’

Q.

‘I’m single, and single men are the ones in the Service that get reposted the most. Any repost is a hassle for Personnel; reposting a family is worse. Plus you have to offer incentives for people with families to move, it’s a Treasury reg. Regulation. If you’re single, though, you stop even unpacking.

‘It’s hard to meet women in the Service. It’s not the most popular. There’s a joke; can I tell it?’

Q.

‘You meet a woman you like at, like, a party. She goes, what do you do. You go, I’m in finance. She goes, what kind. You go, sort of a type of accounting, it’s a long story. She says, oh, who for. You go, the government. She goes, city, state? You go, federal. She goes, oh, what branch. You go, US Treasury. On it goes, narrowing down. At some point she figures it out, what you’re dancing around, and she’s gone.’

928874551

‘Sugar in a cake has several different functions. One, for instance, is to absorb moisture from the butter, or perhaps shortening, and release it slowly over time, keeping the cake moist. Using less sugar than the recipe calls for produces what’s known as a dry cake. Don’t do that.’

973876118

‘Suppose you think along the lines of power, authority. Inevitability. You’ve got your two kinds of people now, when you get down to it. On one hand you’ve got your rebel mentality whose whole bag or groove or what have you is going against power, rebelling. Your spit-in-the-wind type that feels powerful going against the power and the Establishment and what have you. Then, type two, you’ve got your other type, which is the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly. So imagine you’re a type two type. There’s more than they think. The age of the rebel is over. It’s the eighties now. If You’re a Type Two, We Want You — that should be their slogan. In the Service. Check out the blowing wind, man. Join up with the side that always gets paid. We shit you not. The side of the law and the force of the law, the side of the tide and gravity and that one law where everything always gradually gets a little hotter until the sun up and blows. Because you got your two unavoidables in life, just like they say. Unavoidability — now that’s power, man. Either be a mortician or join the Service, if you want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further. You can trust me on that, my man.’

917229047

‘I had an idea I’d try and write a play. Our stepmother always went to plays; she’d drag us all down to the civic center all the time on weekends for matinees. So I got to know all about the theater and plays. So this play, because they’d ask me — family, fellows at the driving range — to give an idea what it was like. It would be a totally real, true-to-life play. It would be unperformable, that was part of the point. This is to give you an idea. The idea’s that a wiggler, a rote examiner, is sitting poring over 1040s and attachments and cross-filed W-2s and 1099s and like that. The setting is very bare and minimalistic — there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler, who doesn’t move except for every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad. It’s not a Tingle — it’s just a regular desk, so you can see him. But that’s it. At first there was a clock behind him, but I cut the clock. He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start. This was the idea — I told my stepmom all about it, it was going to be a realistic play. Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play. That’s what I tell them. It’s the only way to explain it.’

965882433

‘There have been frequent studies. Two-thirds of taxpayers think an exemption and a deduction are the same thing. Don’t know what a capital gain is. Four percent every year don’t sign their returns. Shit, two-thirds of people don’t know how many senators a state has. Something like three-quarters can’t name the branches of government. This is not rocket science we’re doing here. The truth is, most of our time is wasted. The system kicks us mostly shit. You spend ten minutes filling out a 20-C on an unsigned return, it goes back to the SC, a bullshit letter audit requesting a signature, nothing at stake. And then now in Rotes we’re reviewed on the basis of increased revenue from audits down the line. It’s a joke. Most of the stuff we’re looking at isn’t auditable, it’s just rank stupidity. Carelessness. You should see people’s handwriting — average people, educated people. The truth is, they waste our time. They need a better system.’