David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Anyhow, as I still can recall, the obvious idea was that anyone who was truly serious would make their best attempt to read the whole contents of the binder, would see and complete the relevant portions of the forms at the back, and then would make the effort to somehow commute back in, weather permitting, to the West Taylor recruiting station the next day by 9:00 A.M. for something which the final sheet termed ‘advanced processing.’ It also snowed all night again, though not as heavily, and by 4:00 A.M. you could hear the terrible sound of the City of Libertyville’s plows scraping the street’s concrete raw outside my childhood room’s window — also, the bird-sounds at sunrise were incredible, causing lights in some of the other houses along our street to come on in irritation — and the CTA was still only running a staggered schedule. Still, even given the rush of commuters at that time of day and the rigors of the trek in from Grant Park, I arrived back at the storefront recruiting station no later than 9:20 A.M. (albeit covered with snow again), to find no one else there from the prior day except the same Service recruiter, looking even more exhausted and disheveled, who, when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I’d plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.

Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood. The complex regret. One or two, the most alive, looked better in an objectless way. Many others looked blank as the faces on coins. At the edges were office workers bustling at the endless small tasks involved in mailing, filing, sorting, their faces blankly avid, filled with the mindless energy you see in bugs, weeds, birds. The dream seemed to take hours, but when I’d come awake Superman’s arms (the clock was a gift) would be in the same position as the last time I looked.

This dream was my psyche teaching me about boredom. I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as — what I knew was that I worried a lot. I was a fretful, nervous, anxious, worried boy. These were my parents’ words, and they became mine. Wet distended Sunday afternoons, while my mother and brother were at a recital and my father lay asleep on the couch in front of a Bengals game, with the libretto to Norma open on his chest, I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. I do not recall the things I worried about, but I remember the feeling, and it was an anxiety whose lack of a proper object is what made it horrible, free-floating. I’d look out the window and see the glass instead of anything past it. I’d think of the sorts of small games and toys and developmental projects my mother always suggested and within the boredom not only find them unappealing but be unable to imagine how anyone anywhere could possibly have the mindless energy to undertake any sort of child’s amusements, or sit still in the silence long enough to read a picture book — the whole world was torpid, enervated, worry-logged. My parents’ words and feelings became my own, as I took on the responsibilities of my role in the family drama, the nervous delicate son, object of my mother’s concern, as my brother was the gifted, driven son whose piano filled the house after school and kept the twilight outside the windows where it belonged. In psychotherapy after the incident with my own son, I free-associated my way into recalling a Great Books presentation on Achilles and Hector in the eleventh grade, and I remembered realizing vividly that my family was Achilles, that my brother was Achilles’ shield and I the family’s heel, the part of the family my mother held tight to and made undivine, and that the recognition had come in the middle of my speech and left again so fast I’d not had time to grab it, though I did for much of my adolescence and early adulthood conceive of myself in terms of a heel or foot — my internal remonstrances often took the form of calling myself a ‘heel,’ for example, and it was true that people’s feet, shoes, socks, and ankles were often the first things about them I noticed. Just as my father was the beaten but obdurate warrior — ground down every day in a campaign whose pointlessness was part of its corrosive power. My mother’s role in the Achilles corpus remains unclear. I’m not sure, either, whether as a child my brother was conscious of the fact that his afternoon practice always coincided with my father’s return home; in some respects I think my brother’s whole piano career was designed around this requirement that there be light and music at 5:42 for my father’s reentry, that in a way his life depended on it — every evening he made the opposite transition from that of the sun, death to life.

It is not surprising that I had trouble in grammar school, with its rows of empty faces and shadowless lights and wire mesh in the windows and a regimentation to primary education that still held on in the Midwest — memorization and regurgitation, tables, prescriptive grammar and diagrams of sentences, the only decorations the alphabet in construction paper on a cork guilloche that ran above the blackboard. Each classroom contained thirty student desks in five rows of six; each had flooring of white tile with insubstantial cloud-shapes of brown and gray that were discontinuous because whoever laid the tile didn’t bother to match the patterns. Each room had a wall clock, manufactured by Benrus, with no second hand and a minute hand whose movements were discrete clicks instead of silent continuous clicks; the system of clocks was wired to the school’s bell, which sounded at 55 past the hour, again at 00, and in a somehow more dire way at 02, signaling tardiness and interrupting each instructor’s opening remarks. The school smelled of adhesive paste, rubber boots, sour cafeteria food, and a warm biotic odor of many bodies and the fixative of the tile floor as three hundred mammals slowly warmed the rooms throughout the day. Most of the teachers were sexless females, old (meaning older than my mother) and severe but not unkind, with a small dilution of younger males — one, in fourth-grade Mathematics, with the actual name Mr. Goodnature — drawn to teach children by the vague political idealism then just beginning to build (unknown to me) on college campuses far beyond my world. The young men were the worst, some actual martinets, depressed and bitter, because the idealism that had brought them to us was no match for the petrified bureaucracy of the Columbus School System or the listless passivity of children they’d dreamed of inspiring (read, indoctrinating) to a soft liberalism ( peace was a big word with these men) that would replicate and flatter their own, children who were instead locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to.

Author here. 1I arrived for intake processing at Lake James IL’s 2IRS Post 047 sometime in mid-May of 1985. It was quite probably on or very near Wednesday, May 15. 3In any event, the point is that I journeyed to Peoria on whatever particular day in May from my family’s home in Philo, to which my brief return had been shall we say untriumphant, and where certain members of my family had more or less been looking at their watches impatiently the whole brief time I was home. Without mentioning or identifying anyone in particular, let’s just say that the prevailing attitude in my family tended to be ‘What have you done for me lately?’ or, maybe better, ‘What have you achieved/earned/attained lately that may in some way (imaginary or not) reflect well on us and let us bask in some kind of reflected (real or not) accomplishment?’ It was a bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter. Although, you know, whatever. I most definitely was not offered any kind of family ride to Peoria, though I may have gotten a quick lift to the bus station, which in Philo comprised one corner of the local IGA parking lot, which was not all that far but would have been ghastly to walk to wearing my three-piece corduroy suit in the gluey humidity of pre-dawn (which, in the lower Midwest, is also one of the two prime times of day for mosquito activity, the other being dusk, and mosquitoes there are not just a nuisance but serious business indeed) while carrying two heavy suitcases (this was a couple years before the sudden advance of someone in the luggage industry realizing that suitcases could be fitted with little wheels and telescoping handles so they could be pulled, which was just the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system — it gives people incentive to make things more efficient). Plus I also had my beloved dispatch case, which was inherited from an older, non-immediate relative who’d been a staff officer in Hawaii during the latter part of World War II, and was a bit like a briefcase (i.e., the dispatch case was) except that it had no handle, and was therefore carried tucked under one’s arm, and which contained the sorts of intimate or irreplaceable personal effects, toiletries, customized earplug case, dermatological salves and ointments, and important papers that any thinking person carries with him instead of trusting to the vagaries of baggage handling. These papers included my recent correspondence with both the Guaranteed Student Loan people and the IRS’s Midwest Region’s Office of the Deputy Regional Commissioner for Personnel, as well as my copy of the signed IRS contract and the Form 141-PO constituting my so-called ‘Posting Orders’ to the Midwest REC, both of which (i.e., both latter documents) I would evidently need in order to acquire my Service ID badge, which I’d been directed to do straightaway upon my arrival at the ‘GS-9 Intake Station’ at a certain particular time that was filled in by hand on a smeary, indifferently stamped line near the bottom of the Posting Orders. 4