David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

(Quick aside here. Pace his overall self-indulgence and penchant for hand-wringing, § 22’s ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle was actually on the money about one thing. Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time — and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does. At the same time, rest assured that I am not Chris Fogle, and that I have no intention of inflicting on you a regurgitation of every last sensation and passing thought I happen to recall. I am about art here, not simple reproduction. What logorrheic colleagues like Fogle failed to understand is that there are vastly different kinds of truth, some of which are incompatible with one another. Example: A 100 percent accurate, comprehensive list of the exact size and shape of every blade of grass in my front lawn is ‘true,’ but it is not a truth that anyone will have any interest in. What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point — otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.)

There was also, in one of the leather dispatch case’s myriad ingenious little inner sleeves and snap pockets, a certain piece of supporting documentation in the form of personal intrafamily correspondence from a certain unnamed and non-immediate relative who enjoyed what today would be called significant ‘juice’ with the IRS’s Midwest Regional Commissioner’s Office in Joliet upstate, 5which technically I was not supposed to even have (and which was somewhat rumpled after its retrieval from the wastebasket of an unnamed and more immediate relative), but which it seemed prudent to have with me in case of some kind of bureaucratic emergency or last-resort need. 6In general, my attitude toward bureaucracies was the same as that of most ordinary Americans: I hated and feared them (i.e., bureaucracies) and basically regarded them as large, grinding, impersonal machines — that is, they seemed rigidly literal and rule-bound the same way machines are, and just about as dumb. 7Dating at least from a 1979 tangle with the state’s DMV and our insurance provider over the terms and coverage of my Learner’s Permit after an incident so laughably minor it could barely even be called a collision, my primary association with the word bureaucracy was an image of someone expressionless behind a counter, not listening to any of my questions or explanations of circumstance or misunderstanding but merely referring to some manual of impersonal regulations as he stamped my form with a number that meant I was in for some further kind of tedious, frustrating hassle or expense. I doubt that you need much prompting to understand why my recent experience with the college’s Judicial Board and Dean of Students’s office (q.v. § 9 above) had done nothing to mitigate this view. Shameful or not, I figured that any possible bit of evidence of extra connective juice might serve to lift me out of some long gray line of faceless supplicants in the event of trouble or confusion 8at the Regional Exam Center, which I had conceived ahead of time as some kind of ur-bureaucratic version of Kafka’s castle, an enormous DMV or Judicial Board.

By way of foreshadowing and advance explanation, I’ll also admit up front here that there are portions of that arrival and intake day that I do not remember very well, due at least in part to the tsunami of sensuous input, technical data, and bureaucratic complication that awaited me when I arrived and was personally taken in hand and escorted — with a degree of solicitude that, however unexpected and confusing, would have been gratifying to just about anyone — to the REC’s Personnel office, bypassing the GS-9 Intake Station (whose location was anyone’s guess) that I’d been directed to find and stand in line at by the smeared and typo-ridden Posting Orders inside my dispatch case. As nearly always happens with human minds inundated by excessive input, I’ve retained only flashes and incomplete clips from that day, which I’ll now go ahead and recount some specially selected relevant portions of, not only as a way to introduce the atmospherics of the REC and the Service, but also to help explain what might initially look like my passivity (it was more simple confusion 9) in the face of what may seem, in the clarity of hindsight, like an obvious case of misassignment or mistaken identity. It was not obvious at the time, though; and expecting a person to have immediately seen it, understood it as an error, and taken immediate steps to correct it is a bit like expecting someone to have noticed and fixed some incongruity in his surroundings at the very moment that a hundred flashbulbs suddenly went off in his eyes. There’s only so much complex input the human nervous system can take, in other words.

I do remember standing there at the edge of the IGA supermarket lot in my suit with my bags and case as dawn officially broke. For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun’s appearance. It’s just all of a sudden there. The temperature immediately goes up ten degrees; the mosquitoes vanish to wherever exactly it is that mosquitoes go to regroup. Just to the west, the roofline of St. Dymphna’s church sprayed complex shadows over half the downtown. I was drinking a can of Nesbitt’s, which is sort of my version of morning coffee. The IGA’s lot abuts the downtown’s main drag, which is the in-town extension of SR 130 and ingeniously named. Directly across this Main Street from the IGA were the bubbletop pumps and saurian logo of Clete’s Sinclair, outside of which the best and brightest of Philo High used to gather on Friday nights to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and search the adjacent lot’s weeds for frogs and mice to throw at Clete’s bug zapper, which he’d modified to hold 225 volts of charge.

This was, so far as I know, the only time I’d ridden a commercial bus line, and it was not an experience I’m eager to repeat. The bus was unclean, and some of the passengers appeared to have been aboard for several days running, with all that that entails in terms of hygiene and inhibition. I remember that the seatbacks seemed unnaturally high, and there was some kind of aluminum-alloy bar for your feet, and a button on the seat’s arm for causing the back to recline, which in the case of my seat failed to work correctly. The arm’s little flip-top ashtray was a nightmare of gum-wads and butts too numerous for the little lid even to close all the way. I remember seeing two or more nuns in full habit in one of the forward sections, and thinking that requiring nuns to travel by filthy commercial bus must have been in line with their sect’s vow of poverty; but it still seemed incongruous and wrong. One of the nuns was doing a crossword puzzle. The trip took over four hours in toto, since the bus stopped at an endless number of sour little towns just like my own. The sun began shortly to broil the bus’s rear and port side. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning. There was a horrific piece of graffiti incised with knife or leather punch in the plastic of the seatback in front of me, which I looked at twice and then made a point of never looking directly at again. The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself. Empiricism has its limits. There is also, in memory, a contextless flash of some female’s feet in clear polyurethane thongs, a tattoo of what was either ivy or barbed wire around one of her ankles. And a round-faced little boy 10in shorts in the seat directly across the aisle, with red sprays of impetigo on his knees and a presumable guardian asleep in the adjoining seat (her seatback did recline), watching me as I ate the small box of raisins from the bag lunch I’d had to pack myself in the dark kitchen, the boy moving his whole head to follow the path of each raisin I brought to my mouth, and I peripherally trying to decide whether to offer to share some of the raisins or not (ultimately not: I was reading and didn’t want to converse, not to mention that God only knew what this child’s situation or story was; plus impetigo is notoriously contagious).