David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

In the case of GS-9 fact psychic Claude Sylvanshine on, say, 12 July 1981, the precise metric weight and speed of a train moving southwest through Prešov, Czechoslovakia, at the precise moment he’s supposed to be crosschecking 1099-INT receipts with the tax return of Edmund and Willa Kosice, whose home’s shutters were replaced in 1978 by someone whose wife once won three rounds of bingo in a row at St. Bridget’s Church in Troy MI, even though the Kosices’ residential address is Urbandale IA — reason for RFI incongruity unknown to Sylvanshine, for whom the factoids are just one more distraction he has to shake off in the noise and overall frenzied low morale of the Philadelphia REC. Then the Toltec god of corn, except in Toltec glyphs, so that to Sylvanshine it looks like an abstract drawing of origin unknown. The winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize in physiology slash medicine.

Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers’ seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless. The human appendix’s real reason. Norbert Wiener’s name for the little leather ball that was his only friend as a sickly child. The number of blades of grass in the front lawn of one’s mailman’s home. They intrude, crash, rattle around. One reason Sylvanshine’s gaze is always so intent and discomfiting is that he’s trying to filter out all sorts of psychically intuited and intrusive facts. The amount of parenchyma in a certain fern in the waiting room of an orthodontist in Athens GA, though not and never what parenchyma might be. That the 1938 featherweight WBA champ had mild scoliosis in the region T10-12. Nor does he look it up — you don’t chase these facts down; they’re like lures that lead you nowhere. He’s learned this from hard experience. The rate in astronomical units with which System ML435 is moving away from the Milky Way. He tells no one of the intrusions. Some are connected, but rarely in any way that yields what someone with true ESP would call meaning. The metric weight of all the lint in all the pockets of everyone at the observatory in Fort Davis TX on the 1974 day when a scheduled eclipse was obscured by clouds. Perhaps one in every four thousand such facts is relevant or helpful. Most are like having someone sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in your ear while you’re trying to recite a poem for a prize. Claude Sylvanshine can’t help it. That someone he passes in the street’s great-great-great-grandmother’s baby sister who died of whooping cough in 1844’s name was Hesper. The cost, in adjusted dollars, of that obscured eclipse; the FCC broadcasting license of the Christian station the observatory’s director listened to as he drove home, where he’d find his wife frazzled and the milkman’s hat on the kitchen counter. The shape of the clouds on the afternoon two people he’s never met conceived their child, who was miscarried six weeks in. That the pioneer of pullable consumer luggage was the ex-husband of a People Express stew who’d spent over eighteen months driving himself almost insane trying to research luggage manufacturing specs and pending patent applications because he couldn’t believe no one had thought of mass-marketing this feature already. The USPTO registration number of the machine that attached the paper housing to the milkman’s hat. The average molecular weight of peat. The affliction kept a secret from everyone everywhere since fourth grade when Sylvanshine knew the name of his homeroom teacher’s husband’s first love’s childhood cat who’d lost one side’s whiskers in a mishap near the coal stove in Ashtabula OH, verified only when he wrote a little illustrated booklet and the husband saw the name and whiskerless crayon drawing of Scrapper, turned ivory white, and dreamed intensely for three nights, unknown to anyone.

The fact psychic lives part-time in the world of fractious, boiling minutiae that no one knows or could be bothered to know even if they had the chance to know. The population of Brunei. The difference between mucus and sputum. How long a piece of gum has resided on the underside of the third-row fourth-from-left seat of the Virginia Theater, Cranston RI, but not who put it there or why. Impossible to predict what facts will intrude. Constant headaches. The data sometimes visual and queerly backlit, as by an infinitely bright light an infinite distance away. The amount of undigested red meat in the colon of the average forty-three-year-old adult male resident of Ghent, Belgium, in grams. The relation between the Turkish lira and the Yugoslavian dinar. The year of death for undersea explorer William Beebe.

Tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.

Lane Dean Jr. and two older examiners from a different Pod are outside one of the unalarmed door exits between Pods, on a hexagram of cement surrounded by maintained grass, watching the sun on the fallow fields just south of the REC. None of them are smoking; they’re just being outside for a bit. Lane Dean hasn’t come outside with the other two; he just happened to step out for air on the break at the same time. He’s still looking for a really desirable, diverting place to go during breaks; they’re too important. The other two guys know each other or work on the same team; they’ve come out together; one senses it’s a routine of long standing.

One of the men gives a sort of artificial-looking gap and stretch. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘Well, Midge and I went over to the Bodnars’ on Saturday. You know Hank Bodnar, from over in K-team at Capital Exams, with the glasses with the lenses that turn dark by themselves outside, what are they called.’ The man has his hands behind his back and goes up and down on his toes rapidly, like someone waiting for a bus.

‘Uh-huh.’ The other man, who’s perhaps five years younger than the man who went to the Bodnars’, is contemplating some kind of benign cyst or growth on the inside of his wrist. The heat is accumulating at mid-morning, and the electric sound of the locusts in the wild grasses rises and falls in the parts of the fields the sun is striking. Neither man has introduced himself to Lane Dean, who’s standing farther from them than they are from each other, though not so far away that he could be seen as wholly disconnected from the conversation. Maybe they’re giving him privacy because they can see he’s new and still adjusting to the unbelievable tedium of the exam job. Maybe they’re shy and awkward and not sure how to introduce themselves. Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he’d have to go into a stall in a men’s room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.

‘We were supposed to go over the weekend before, the what, the seventh that would be,’ the first man says, looking out at a vista with nothing really particular to hold the eye, ‘but our youngest had a temperature and a little bit of a sore throat, and Midge didn’t want to leave her with the sitter if she had a temperature. So she called to cancel, and Midge and Alice Bodnar worked it out so we all just moved it up a week, seven days to the day, that way it was easy to remember. You know how mama bears get when their little cubs run a temperature.’

‘Don’t have to tell me,’ Lane Dean inserts from several feet away, laughing a little too heartily. One shoe is in the shadow of the pod’s overhang and one is in the morning sun. Lane Dean is starting now to feel desperate about the fact that the break’s fifteen minutes are ticking inexorably away and he is going to have to go back in and examine returns for another two hours before the next break. There’s an empty Styrofoam cup on its side in the ashtray unit of a small waste can in the alcove. Being in a conversation makes the time pass differently; it’s not clear whether it’s better or worse. The other man is still examining his wrist’s thing, holding the forearm up like a surgeon after scrubbing. If you think of the locusts as actually screaming, the whole thing becomes much more unsettling. The normal protocol is not to hear them; they cease to register on you after a while.