David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera, which was also heavily loaded with commercials — especially in the second half, which soap operas tend to load with more commercials, as they figure that you’re already sucked in and mesmerized and will sit still for more ads — and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, ‘You’re watching As the World Turns ,’ which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—‘ You’re watching As the World Turns ,’ until the tone began to seem almost incredulous— ‘ You’re watching As the World Turns ’ —until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. I don’t mean any sort of humanities-type ironic metaphor, but the literal thing he was saying, the simple surface level. I don’t know how many times I’d heard this that year while sitting around watching As the World Turns, but I suddenly realized that the announcer was actually saying over and over what I was literally doing. Not only this, but I also realized that I had been told this fact countless times — as I said, the announcer’s statement followed every commercial break after each segment of the show — without ever being even slightly aware of the literal reality of what I was doing. I was not Obetrolling at this moment of awareness, I should add. This was different. It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep— ‘ You’re watching As the World Turns. ’ It’s hard to explain. It was not even the obvious double entendre that struck me. This was more literal, which somehow had made it harder to see. All of this hit me, sitting there. It could not have felt more concrete if the announcer had actually said, ‘You are sitting on an old yellow dorm couch, spinning a black-and-white soccer ball, and watching As the World Turns, without ever even acknowledging to yourself this is what you are doing.’ This is what struck me. It was beyond being feckless or a wastoid — it’s like I wasn’t even there. The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of ‘You’re watching As the World Turns ’ until three days later — the show’s almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time of sitting there watching something whose reception through the hanger didn’t even come in very well, while all the while real things in the world were going on and people with direction and initiative were taking care of business in a brisk, no-nonsense way — meaning not until Thursday morning, when this secondary meaning suddenly struck me in the middle of taking a shower before getting dressed and hurrying to what I intended — consciously, at any rate — to be the final-exam review in American Political Thought. Which may have been one reason why I was so preoccupied and took the wrong building’s entrance, I suppose. At the time, though, on Monday afternoon, all that hit home with me was the reiteration of the simple fact of what I was doing, which was, of course, nothing, just slumped there like something without any bones, uninvolved even in the surface reality of watching Victor deny his paternity to Jeanette (even though Jeanette’s son has the same extremely rare genetic blood disorder that’s kept putting Victor in the hospital throughout much of the semester. Victor may in some sense have actually ‘believed’ his own denials, I remember thinking, as he essentially seemed like that kind of person) between my knees.

But nor is it as though I consciously reflected on all of this at the time. At the time, I was aware only of the concrete impact of the announcer’s statement, and the dawning realization that all of the directionless drifting and laziness and being a ‘wastoid’ which so many of us in that era pretended to have raised to a nihilistic art form, and believed was cool and funny (I too had thought it was cool, or at least I believed I thought so — there had seemed to be something almost romantic about flagrant waste and drifting, which Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for calling ‘malaise’ and telling the nation to snap out of it) was, in reality, not funny, not one bit funny, but rather frightening, in fact, or sad, or something else — something I could not name because it has no name. I knew, sitting there, that I might be a real nihilist, that it wasn’t always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better. That I was, in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn’t actually real — I was free to choose ‘whatever’ because it didn’t really matter. But that this, too, was because of something I chose — I had somehow chosen to have nothing matter. It all felt much less abstract than it sounds to try to explain it. All this was happening while I was just sitting there, spinning the ball. The point was that, through making this choice, I didn’t matter, either. I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter — even just to myself — I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way. Even if it was nothing more than an act of will. All of these awarenesses were very rapid and indistinct, and the realizations about choosing and mattering were as far as I got — I was also still trying to watch As the World Turns, which tended to get steadily more dramatic and compelling as it progressed towards the hour’s end, as they always wanted to make you remember to tune in again the next day. But the point was that I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially ‘lost soul’ was, I was one — and it wasn’t cool or funny. And, as mentioned, it was only a few days later that I mistakenly ended up across the transom in the final-class session of Advanced Tax — which was, I should stress, a subject which at that time I had zero interest in, I believed. Like most people outside the industry, I imagined tax accountancy to be the province of fussy little men with thick glasses and elaborate stamp collections, more or less the opposite of hip or cool — and the experience of hearing the CBS announcer spell out surface reality over and over, of suddenly really being aware of hearing him, and of seeing the little screen between my knees, beneath the spinning ball on my finger’s point was part of what put me in a position, I think, whether mistakenly or not, to hear something that changed my direction.

I remember that the third-floor’s hallway’s bell had rung at the end of the scheduled time for Advanced Tax that day without any of the students doing that end-of-class thing in humanities classes of fidgeting around to gather their materials together or leaning over their desks to retrieve their bags and briefcases from the floor, even as the substitute turned off the overhead projector and raised the A/V screen with a smart snap of his left hand, replacing the handkerchief in his suit coat’s pocket. They all remained quiet and attentive. As the room’s overhead lights came back on, I remember glancing and seeing that the older, mustachioed student beside me’s class notes were almost unbelievably neat and well-organized, with Roman numerals for the lecture’s main points and lowercase letters, inset numbers, and double indents for subheadings and corollaries. His handwriting itself looked almost automated, it was that good. This was despite the fact that they were essentially written in the dark. Several digital watches beeped the hour in sync. Just like its mirror opposite across the transom, Garnier 311’s floor was tiled in an institutional tan-and-brown pattern that was either checkerboard or interlocking diamonds, depending on one’s angle or perspective. All of this I remember very clearly.