David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

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The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King

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In hindsight, I realized later that my father was actually kind of witty and sophisticated. At the time, I think I thought of him as barely alive, as like a robot or slave to conformity. It’s true that he was uptight, anal, and quick with the put-downs. He was a hundred percent conventional establishment, and totally on the other side of the generation gap — he was forty-nine when he died, which was in December 1977, which obviously means he grew up during the Depression. But I don’t think I ever appreciated his sense of humor about all of it — there was a way he sort of wove his pro-establishment views into a dry, witty style that I don’t remember ever getting or understanding his jokes in at the time. I didn’t have much of a sense of humor then, it seems, or else I did the standard child’s thing of taking everything he said as a personal comment or judgment. There was stuff I knew about him, which I’d picked up through the years of childhood, mostly from my mother. Like that he’d been really, really shy when they’d first met. How he had wanted to go to more than just technical college but he had bills to pay — he was in logistics and supply in Korea but had already gotten married to my mother before he was posted overseas, and so upon discharge he immediately had to find a job. This is what people her age did then, she explained — if you met the right person and were at least out of high school, you got married, without even ever really thinking about it or questioning yourself. The point is that he was very smart and somewhat unfulfilled, like many of his generation. He worked hard because he had to, and his own dreams were put on the back burner. This is all indirectly, from my mother, but it fit with certain bits and pieces that even I couldn’t help being aware of. For instance, my father read all the time. He was constantly reading. It was his whole recreation, especially after the divorce — he was always coming home from the library with a stack of books with that clear library plastic wrap on the covers. I never paid any attention to what the books were or why he read so much — he never talked about what he was reading. I don’t even know what his favorite kinds were, as in history, mysteries, or what. Looking back now, I think he was lonely, especially after the divorce, as the only people you could call his friends were colleagues from his job, and I think he essentially found his job boring — I don’t think he felt much personal investment in the City of Chicago’s budget and expenditure protocols, especially as it wasn’t his idea to move here — and I think books and intellectual issues were one of his escapes from boredom. He was actually a very smart person. I wish I could remember more examples of the sort of things he’d say — at the time, I think they seemed more hostile or judgmental than like he was making fun of both of us at the same time. I do remember he sometimes referred to the so-called younger generation (meaning mine) as ‘This thing America hath wrought.’ That’s not a very good example. It’s almost like he thought the blame went both ways, that there was something wrong with the whole country’s adults if they could produce kids like this in the 1970s. I remember once in October or November 1976, at twenty-one, during another period of time off, after being enrolled at DePaul — which actually didn’t go well at all, the first time I was at DePaul. It was basically a disaster. They kind of invited me to leave, actually, which was the only time that had happened. The other times, at Lindenhurst College and then later at UIC, I’d withdrawn on my own. Anyhow, during this time off, I was working the second shift at a Cheese Nabs factory in Buffalo Grove and living there at my father’s house in Libertyville. There was no way I was crashing at my mother and Joyce’s apartment in the Wrigleyville section of Chicago, where the rooms all had bead curtains instead of doors. But I didn’t have to punch in at this mindless job until six, so I’d mostly just hang around the house all afternoon until it was time to leave. And sometimes during this period my father would be away for a couple of days — like the Service, the City of Chicago’s financial departments were always sending their more technical people to conferences and in-services, which I would come to learn later here in the Service are not like the big drunken conventions of private industry but are usually highly intensive and work-centered. My father said the city in-services were mostly just tedious, which was a word he used a fair amount, tedious. And on these trips it was just me living in the house, and you can imagine what used to happen when I’d be there on my own, especially on weekends, even though I was supposed to be in charge of looking after the house while he was gone. But the memory is of him coming home early one afternoon in ’76 from one of these work trips, like a day or two before I’d thought he told me he was going to be home, and coming in the front door and finding me and two of my old so-called friends from Libertyville South high school in the living room — which, due to the slightly raised design of the front porch and front door, was in effect a sunken living room that more or less started right inside the front door, with one small set of stairs leading down into the living room and another set leading up to the house’s second floor. Architecturally, the house’s style is known as a raised ranch, like most of the other older homes on the street, and it had another set of stairs leading from the second-floor hallway down into the garage, which actually supports part of the second story — that is, the garage is, structurally, a necessary part of the house, which is what’s distinctive about a raised ranch. At the moment he entered, two of us were slumped on the davenport with our dirty feet up on his special coffee table, and the carpeting was all littered with beer cans and Taco Bell wrappers — the cans were my father’s beer, which he bought in bulk twice a year and stored in the utility room closet and normally drank maybe a total of two per week of — with us sitting there totally wasted and watching The Searchers on WGN, and one of the guys listening to Deep Purple on my father’s special stereo headphones for listening to classical music on, and the coffee table’s special oak or maple top with big rings of condensation from the beer cans all over it because we’d turned the house’s heat way up past where he normally allowed it to be, in terms of energy conservation and expense, and the other guy next to me on the davenport leaning over in the middle of taking a huge bong hit — this guy was famous for being able to take massive hits. Plus, the whole living room reeked. When then, suddenly, in the memory, I heard the distinctive sound of his footsteps on the broad wooden porch and the sound of his key in the front door, and only a second later my father suddenly comes in on a wave of very cold, clear air through the doorway with his hat and overnight bag — I was in the paralyzed shock of the totally busted kid, and I sat there paralyzed, unable to do anything and yet seeing each frame of him coming in with horrible focus and clarity — and him standing there at the edge of the few stairs down to the living room, taking his hat off with the trademark gesture that involved both his head and his hand as he stood there taking in the scene and the three of us — he’d made no secret of not much liking these old high school friends, who were the same guys I’d been out partying with when my mom’s gas cap was stolen and the tank siphoned out, and none of us had any money left by the time we found the car, and I had to call my father and he had to take the train down after work to pay for gas so I could get the Le Car back to my mom and Joyce, who co-owned it and used it for bookstore business — with the three of us now slumped there all totally wasted and paralyzed, one of the guys wearing a ratty old tee shirt that actually said FUCK YOU across the chest, the other coughing out his mammoth hit in shock, so that a plume of pot smoke went rolling out across the living room towards my father — in short, my memory is of the scene being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation-gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids, and of my father slowly putting down his bag and case and just standing there, with no expression and not saying anything for what felt like such a long time, and then he slowly made a gesture of putting one arm up in the air a little and looking up and said, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ and then picked up his overnight bag again and without a word walked up the upstairs stairs and went into their old bedroom and closed the door. He didn’t slam it, but you could hear the door close quite firmly. The memory, strangely, which is horribly sharp and detailed up to there, then totally stops, like a tape that’s just run out, and I don’t know what happened after that, like getting the guys out of there and hurriedly trying to clean everything up and turn the thermostat back down to sixty-eight, though I do remember feeling like complete shit, not so much like I’d been ‘busted’ or was in trouble as just childish, like a spoiled little selfish child, and imagining what I must have looked like to him, sitting there in litter in his house, wasted, with my dirty feet on the marked-up coffee table he and my mother had saved up for and gotten at an antique store in Rockford when they were still young and didn’t have much money, and which he prized, and rubbed lemon oil in all the time, and said all he asked was that I should please keep my feet off of it and use a coaster — like, for a second or two seeing what I actually must have looked like to him as he stood there looking at us treating his living room like that. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and it felt even worse as he hadn’t yelled or squeezed my shoes about it — he just looked weary, and sort of embarrassed for both of us — and I remember for a second or two I could actually feel what he must have been feeling, and for an instant saw myself through his eyes, which made the whole thing much, much worse than if he’d been furious, or yelled, which he never did, not even the next time he and I were alone in the same room — which I don’t remember when this was, like whether I skulked out of the house after cleaning everything up or whether I stayed there to face him. I don’t know which one I did. I didn’t even understand what he said, although obviously I understood he was being sarcastic, and in some way blaming himself or making fun of himself for having produced the ‘work’ that had just thrown the Taco Bell wrappers and bags on the floor instead of bothering to get up and take like eight steps to throw them away. Although later on, I just stumbled on the poem it turned out he was quoting from, in some kind of weird context at the Indianapolis TAC, and my eyes just about bulged out of my head, because I hadn’t even known it was a poem — and a famous one, by the same British poet who evidently wrote the original Frankenstein. And I didn’t even know my father read British poetry, much less that he could quote from it when he was upset. In short, there was probably much more to him than I was aware of, and I don’t remember even realizing how little I knew about him, really, until after he was gone and it was too late. I expect that this sort of regret is typical, as well.

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