David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Speaking of which, what do you think of when you masturbate?’

‘…’

‘…’

‘What?’

Neither had said a word for the first half hour. They were doing the mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet again. In one of the fleet’s Gremlins, seized as part of a jeopardy assessment against an AMC dealership five quarters past.

‘Look, I think we can presume you masturbate. Something like 98 percent of all men masturbate. It’s documented. Most of the other 2 percent are impaired in some way. We can forgo the denials. I masturbate; you masturbate. It happens. We all do it and we all know we all do it and yet no one ever discusses it. It’s an incredibly boring drive, there’s nothing to do, we’re stuck in this embarrassing car — let’s push the envelope. Let’s discuss it.’

‘What envelope?’

‘Just what do you think of? Think about it. It’s a very interior time. It’s one of life’s only occasions of real self-sufficiency. It requires nothing outside you. It’s bringing yourself pleasure with nothing but your own mind’s thoughts. Those thoughts reveal a lot about you: what you dream of when you yourself choose and control what you dream.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘Tits.’

‘Tits?’

‘You asked me. I’m telling you.’

‘That’s it? Tits?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Just tits? In isolation from anybody? Just abstract tits?’

‘All right. Fuck off.’

‘You mean just floating there, two tits, in empty space? Or nestled in your hands, or what? Is it always the same tits?’

‘This is me learning a lesson. You ask a question like that and I go what the hell and I answer it and you run a DIF-3 on the answer.’

‘Tits.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘So what do you think about, then, Mr. Envelope Guy?’

From the Peoria Journal Star,

Monday, November 17, 1980, p. C-2:

IRS WORKER DEAD FOR FOUR DAYS

Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.

Frederick Blumquist, 53, who had been employed as a tax return examiner with the agency for over thirty years, suffered a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with twenty-five coworkers at the agency’s Regional Examination Center on Self-Storage Parkway. He quietly passed away last Tuesday at his desk, but nobody noticed until late Saturday evening when an office cleaner asked how the examiner could still be working in an office with all the lights off.

Mr. Blumquist’s supervisor, Scott Thomas, said, ‘Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn’t say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself.’

A postmortem examination by the Tazewell County Coroner’s Office yesterday revealed that Blumquist had been dead for four days after suffering from a coronary. Ironically, according to Thomas, Blumquist was part of a special task force of IRS agents examining the tax affairs of medical partnerships in the area when he died.

It is this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier and shepherds the lower grades’ kids through the crosswalk outside school. This is after finishing his Meals on Wheels breakfast tour of the charity home for the aged downtown, whose administrator lunges to bolt her office door when she hears his cart’s wheels in the hall. He has paid out of pocket for the steel whistle and the white gloves held palm-out at cars while children who did not dress themselves cross behind him, some trying to run despite WALK, DON’T RUN!! the happy-face sandwich board he also made himself. The autos whose drivers he knows he waves at and gives an extra-big smile and tosses some words of good cheer as the crosswalk clears and the cars peel out and barrel through, some joshing around a little by swerving to miss him only by inches as he laughs and dances aside and makes faces of pretended terror at the flanks and rear bumpers. (The time that one station wagon didn’t miss him really was an accident, and he sent the lady several notes to make absolutely sure she knew he understood that, and asked a whole lot of people he hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to make friends with to sign his cast, and decorated the crutches very carefully with bits of colored ribbon and tinsel and adhesive sparkles, and even before the minimum six weeks the doctor sternly prescribed he’d donated the crutches to Calvin Memorial’s pediatrics wing in order to brighten up some other less lucky and happy kid’s convalescence, and by the end of the whole thing he’d been inspired to write a very long theme to enter in the annual Social Studies Theme Competition about how even a painful and debilitating accidental injury can yield new opportunities for making friends and reaching out to others, and while the theme didn’t win or even get honorable mention he honestly didn’t care, because he felt like writing the theme had been its own reward and that he’d gotten a lot out of the whole nine-draft process, and was honestly happy for the kids whose themes did win prizes, and told them he was 100-plus percent sure they deserved it and that if they wanted to preserve their prize themes and maybe even make display items out of them for their parents he’d be happy to type them up and laminate them and even fix any spelling errors he found if they’d like him to, and at home his father puts his hand on little Leonard’s shoulder and says he’s proud that his son’s such a good sport, and offers to take him to Dairy Queen as a kind of reward, and Leonard tells his father he’s grateful and that the gesture means a lot to him but that in all honesty he’d like it even more if they took the money his father would have spent on the ice cream and instead donated it either to Easter Seals or, better yet, to UNICEF, to go toward the needs of famine-ravaged Biafran kids who he knows for a fact have probably never even heard of ice cream, and says that he bets it’ll end up giving both of them a better feeling even than the DQ would, and as the father slips the coins in the coin slot of the special bright-orange UNICEF volunteer cardboard pumpkin-bank, Leonard takes a moment to express concern about the father’s facial tic again and to gently rib him about his reluctance to go in and have the family’s MD look at it, noting again that according to the chart on the back of his bedroom door the father is three months overdue for his annual physical and that it’s almost eight months past the date of his recommended tetanus booster.)

He serves as hall monitor for Periods 1 and 2 (he’s half a grade ahead on credits) but gives far more official warnings than actual citations — he’s there to serve, he feels, not run people down. Usually with the warnings he dispenses a smile and tells them you’re young exactly once so enjoy it, and to go get out of here and make this day count why don’t they. He does UNICEF and Easter Seals and starts a recycling program in three straight grades. He is healthy and scrubbed and always groomed just well enough to project basic courtesy and respect for the community of which he is a part, and he politely raises his hand in class for every question, but only if he’s sure he knows not only the correct answer but the formulation of that answer that the teacher’s looking for that will help advance the discussion of the overall topic they’re covering that day, often staying after class to double-check with the teacher that his take on her general objectives is sound and to ask whether there was any way his in-class answers could have been better or more helpful.