David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Anyhow, the upshot of all my concentrated thinking and research over the holiday recess was that it looked as though I would basically have to start college all over again, and I was then almost twenty-four. And the financial situation at home was in total flux due to the complex legalities of the wrongful death suit that was under way at the time.

As a side note, there was no amount of alteration that could have made my father’s suits fit me. At that time, I was a 40L/30 with a 34 inseam, whereas the bulk of my father’s suits were 36R/36/30. The suits and archaic silk blazer ended up being given to Goodwill after Joyce and I cleaned out most of his things from his closet and study and workshop, which was a very sad experience. My mother, as mentioned, was spending more and more time watching the neighborhood birds at the tube feeders which she’d hung around the front porch and the standing feeders in the yard — my father’s house’s living room had a large picture window with an excellent view of the porch, yard, and street — and often wearing a red chenille robe and large fuzzy slippers all day, and neglecting both her normal interests and personal grooming, which increasingly worried everyone.

After the holidays, just as it was beginning to snow, I made an appointment to speak with DePaul’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (who was definitely a real Jesuit, and wore the official black-and-white uniform, and also had a yellow ribbon tied to the knob of his office door) about the experience in Advanced Tax and the turnaround in my direction and focus, and about now being so behind in terms of that focus, and to broach the possibility of maybe continuing my enrollment an extra year with deferred tuition in order to help make up some of my deficits in terms of an accounting major. But it was awkward, because I had actually been in this father’s office before, two or three years prior, under, to put it mildly, very different circumstances — namely, getting my shoes squeezed and being threatened with academic probation, in response to which I think I may actually have said, aloud, ‘Whatever,’ which is the sort of thing that Jesuits do not take kindly to. Thus, in this appointment the Associate Dean’s demeanor was patronizing and skeptical, and amused — he seemed to find the change in my appearance and stated attitude more comical than anything else, as if he regarded it as a prank or joke, or some kind of ploy to try to buy myself one more year before having to go out and fend for myself in what he termed ‘the world of men,’ and there was no way to adequately describe for him the awarenesses and conclusions I’d come to while watching daytime television and then later bumbling into the wrong final class without sounding childish or insane, and essentially I was shown the door.

This was in early January 1979, on the day it was just beginning to snow — I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train through the window of the CTA commuter line from Lincoln Park back up to Libertyville, and thinking, ‘This is my crude approximation of a human life.’ As far as I recall, the yellow ribbons all over the city were because of the hostage trouble in the Mideast and the assault on US embassies. I knew very little about what was going on, partly because I had not watched any TV since that experience in mid-December with the soccer ball and As the World Turns. It is not as though I made any conscious decision to renounce television after that time. I just cannot remember watching any after that day. Also, after the pre-holiday experiences, I now felt far too far behind to be able to afford to waste time watching TV. Part of me was frightened that I’d actually become galvanized and motivated too late and was somehow going to just at the last minute ‘miss’ some crucial chance to renounce nihilism and make a meaningful, real-world choice. This was also all taking place during what emerged as the worst blizzard in the modern history of Chicago, and at the start of the Spring ’79 term, everything was in chaos because DePaul’s administration kept having to cancel classes because no one who lived off-campus could guarantee they could get in to school, and half of the dorms couldn’t reopen yet because of frozen pipes, and part of my father’s house’s roof cracked because of the weight of accumulated snow and there was a big structural crisis that I got stuck dealing with because my mother was too obsessed with the logistical problems of keeping the snow from covering up all the birdseed she left out. Also, most of the CTA trains were out of service, and buses were abruptly canceled if it was determined that the plows couldn’t keep certain roads clear, and every morning of that first week I had to get up very early and listen to the radio to see if DePaul was even having classes that day, and if they were, I’d have to try to slog in. I should mention that my father didn’t drive — he’d been a devotee of public transportation — and my mother had given Joyce the Le Car as part of the arrangement they made regarding the dissolution of the bookstore, so there was no car, although occasionally I could get rides from Joyce, although I hated to impose — she was over there mostly to look in on my mother, who was obviously in a decline, and about whom we were all increasingly worried, and it later turned out Joyce had spent a great deal of time doing research into north-county psychological services and programs and trying to determine what kind of special care my mother might need and where it could be found. Despite the snow and temperatures, for instance, my mother now abandoned her practice of watching the birds from inside through the window and progressed to standing on or near the steps to the porch and holding up tube feeders herself in her upraised hands, and appeared prepared to stay in this position long enough to actually develop frostbite if someone didn’t intervene and remonstrate with her to come inside. The numbers and noise-level of birds involved were also problematic by this time, as some in the neighborhood had already pointed out even before the blizzard had struck.

On one level, I’m fairly sure that it was on WBBM-AM — a very dry, conservative, all-news station which my father had favored, but whose weather-related cancellations reports were the most comprehensive in the area — that I first heard mention of the Service’s aggressive new recruiting-incentive program. ‘The Service’ obviously being shorthand for the Internal Revenue Service, better known to taxpayers as the IRS. But I also have a partial memory of actually first seeing an advertisement for this recruitment program in a sudden, dramatic way that now, in retrospect, seems so heavily fateful and dramatic that perhaps it is more the memory of a dream or fantasy I had at the time, which essentially consisted of me waiting in the Galaxy Mall food court area while Joyce was helping my mother negotiate another large delivery order from Fish ’n Fowl Pet Plaza. Certain elements of this memory are certainly credible. It is true that I had trouble seeing animals for sale in cages — I have always had difficulty with cages and seeing things caged — and I often did wait for my mother outside in the food court while they were in Fish ’n Fowl. I was there to help carry bags of seed in the event that delivery orders were refused or delayed on account of the severe weather, which, as many Chicagoans still recall, remained intense for quite some time, all but paralyzing the whole area. Anyhow, according to this memory, I was sitting at one of the many stylized plastic tables in the Galaxy Mall’s food court, looking absently down at the table’s pattern of star- and moon-shaped perforations, and saw, through one such perforation, a portion of the Sun-Times that someone had evidently discarded on the floor beneath the table, which was open to the Business Classified section, and the memory involves seeing this from above the table in such a way that a beam of light from the food court’s overhead lighting far above fell through one of the star-shaped perforations in the tabletop and illuminated — as if by a symbolically star-shaped spotlight or ray of light — one particular advertisement among all the page’s other ads and notices of business and career opportunities, this being a notice about the IRS’s new recruitment-incentive program under way in some sections of the country, of which the Chicagoland area was one. I’m simply mentioning this memory, whether it’s actually as credible as the more pedestrian WBBM memory or not, as another illustration of how motivationally ‘primed’ I seemed to be, in retrospect, for a career in the Service.