David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

But I couldn’t. As mentioned, usually afterwards I couldn’t even recall what had seemed so clear and profound about what I’d come to be aware of in that cheap green previous tenant’s easy chair, which somebody had just left there in the room when he’d moved out of the dorm, and which had something broken or bent in its frame under the cushions and kind of tilted to one side when you tried to lean back, so you had to sit up very straight and erect in it, which was an odd feeling. The whole doubling incident would be covered with a sort of mental fuzz the next morning, especially if I woke up late — which I usually did, given what was essentially a kind of amphetamine’s effects on getting to sleep — and had to more or less hit the floor running and hurry to class without even noticing anyone or anything I was running past. In essence, I was one of those types that have a terror of being late but still always seem to be running late. If I came into something late I’d often be too tense and wound up at first even to be able to follow what was going on. I know I inherited the fear of lateness from my father. Plus, it’s true that sometimes the heightened awareness and self-articulation of doubling on Obetrols could go too far— ‘ Now I am aware that I am aware that I’m sitting up oddly straight, now I’m aware that I feel an itch on the left side of my neck, now I’m aware that I’m deliberating whether to scratch or not, now I’m aware of paying attention to that deliberation and what the ambivalence about scratching feels like and what those feelings and my awareness of them do to my awareness of the intensity of the itch.’ Meaning that past a certain point, the element of choice of attention in doubling could get lost, and the awareness could sort of explode into a hall of mirrors of consciously felt sensations and thoughts and awareness of awareness of awareness of these. This was attention without choice, meaning the loss of the ability to focus in and concentrate on just one thing, and was another big incentive for moderation in the use of Obetrols, especially late at night — I have to admit that I know that once or twice I got so lost in the halls or stacked layers of awareness of awareness that I went to the bathroom right there on the sofa — this was up at Lindenhurst College, where there were three roommates per suite and a semi-furnished ‘social room’ in the suite’s center, where the sofa was — which, even at the time, seemed like a clear sign of loss of basic priorities and failure to take care of business. For some reason now, I sometimes have a mental picture of me trying to explain to my father how I somehow became so totally focused and aware that I sat there and wet my pants, but the picture cuts off just as his mouth opens for a response, and I’m 99 percent sure this is not a real memory — how could he know anything about a davenport all the way up in Lindenhurst?

For the record, it is true that I miss my father and was very upset about what happened, and sometimes I feel quite sad at the thought that he is not here to see the career path I’ve chosen, and the changes in me as a person as a result, and some of my PP-47 performance evaluations, and to talk about cost systems and forensic accounting with from a vastly more adult perspective.

And yet these flickers of deeper awareness, whether drug-induced or not — for it is arguable how much that ultimately matters — probably had more of a direct effect on my life and direction’s change and my entering the Service in 1979 than did my father’s accident, or possibly even more than the dramatic experience I underwent in the Advanced Tax review class that I had sat in on by mistake during my second, ultimately much more focused and successful enrollment at DePaul. I’ve mentioned this mistaken final review already. In a nutshell, the story of this experience is that DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus had two newer buildings that looked very alike, were literally almost mirror images of one another, by architectural design, and were connected at both the first floor and — by an overhead transom not unlike our own at the Midwest REC — at the third floor, and DePaul’s accounting and political science departments were in the two different buildings of this identical set, whose names I don’t recall at this moment. Meaning the buildings’ names. It was the last regular class day for Tuesday-Thursday classes of the Fall ’78 term, and we were to be reviewing for the final exam in American Political Thought, which was to be all essay questions, and on my way to the final review I know I was trying to mentally review the areas that I wanted to make sure at least someone in the class asked about — it didn’t have to be me — in terms of how extensively they would be covered on the final. Except for Intro Accounting, I was still taking mostly psychology and political science classes — the latter ones mostly due to the requirements for declaring a major, which you had to satisfy in order to graduate — but now that I wasn’t merely trying to squeak by on last-minute bullshit, these classes were obviously much harder and more time-consuming. I remember that most of DePaul’s version of American Political Thought was on The Federalist Papers, by Madison et al., which I had had before at Lindenhurst but remembered almost none of. In essence, I was so intent on thinking about the review and the final exam that what happened is that I took the wrong building entrance without noticing it, and ended up in the correct third-floor room but the wrong building, with this room being such an identical mirror image of the adjoining building’s correct room, directly across the transom, that I didn’t immediately notice the error. And this classroom turned out to contain the final review day of Advanced Tax, a famously difficult course at DePaul that was known as the accounting department’s equivalent of what organic chemistry was for science majors — the final hurdle, the weed-out class, requiring several prerequisites and open to senior accounting majors and postgrads only, and said to be taught by one of DePaul’s few remaining Jesuit professors, meaning with the official black-and-white clothing ensemble and absolutely zero sense of humor or desire to be liked or ‘connecting’ with the students. At DePaul, the Jesuits were notoriously unmellow. My father, by the way, was raised as a Roman Catholic but had little or nothing to do with the church as an adult. My mom’s family was originally Lutheran. Like many of my generation, I wasn’t raised as anything. But this day in the identical classroom also turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly powerful, galvanizing events of my life at that time, and made such an impression that I even remember what I was wearing as I sat there — a red-and-brown-striped acrylic sweater, white painter’s pants, and Timberland boots whose color my roommate — who was a serious chemistry major, no more Steve Edwardses and rotating feet — called ‘dogshit yellow,’ with the laces untied and dragging, which was the way everyone I knew or hung out with wore their Timberlands that year.

By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I’m going to think about — as in, for instance, ‘I am going to think about life and my place in it and what’s truly important to me, so that I can start forming concrete, focused goals and plans for my adult career’ —and then sit there and think about it until I reach a conclusion. It doesn’t work like that. For myself, I tend to do my most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways. Making a sandwich, taking a shower, sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the Lakehurst mall food court waiting for someone who’s late, riding the CTA train and staring at both the passing scene and my own faint reflection superimposed on it in the window — and suddenly you find you’re thinking about things that end up being important. It’s almost the opposite of awareness, if you think about it. I think this experience of accidental thinking is common, if perhaps not universal, although it’s not something that you can ever really talk to anyone else about because it ends up being so abstract and hard to explain. Whereas in an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like ‘Am I currently happy?’ or ‘What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?’ or — particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—‘ Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?’ then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle’s different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I’ve ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way — it happened more by accident.