David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

I had never before been in a crowded vehicle for so long a time with no radio playing and no one in the car saying anything, even once, ever, feeling utterly isolated at the same time that I was crammed in so closely with other people that we were all breathing one another’s air the whole time. 16Every so often, the IRS driver would knead the back of his neck, which had obviously become stiff from the strange position he was forced to hold his head in in order to see through the dashboard’s set of protrusive signs. The early part of the ride’s chief excitement: A period of furious itching along the left side of my ribcage gave rise to fears (understandable, but luckily unfounded) that the former boy on the bus’s impetigo had somehow been pneumatic or contagious without direct contact, which fears I had to quell because there was obviously no way to untuck my shirt and check the area’s appearance. Meanwhile, the older Serviceman in the antiquated hat had opened an accordion file and spread two or three dark-brown manila folders in his lap and was perusing various forms and printouts, moving them from one folder to another according to some scheme or system I had no way of understanding, since I was watching the whole thing in my leftward peripheral vision past the steady cascade of droplets of sweat off the tip of the nose of the man on the hump, who was now sweating in a way I had previously seen only on the squash courts of college and in the case of a mild infarction suffered by an unnamed older relative on Thanksgiving Day 1978. I spent much of my own time drumming my fingers impatiently on the dispatch case — which was now especially soft and moist from the heat of the Gremlin’s interior, and made a satisfying series of splattish noises when drummed on — which, though drumming absently on something in an otherwise silent space is usually one of the fastest ways to drive those around you crazy and get them to speak to you, if only to ask you to knock it off, no one in the Gremlin commented on or even seemed to notice.

Self-Storage Parkway more or less circles Peoria and composes the boundary between the city proper and its outlying suburbs. It is what now, in 2005, would be just a typical multilane exurban highway, complete with the paradoxical combination of high speed limit and traffic lights every quarter-mile, which lights were obviously placed to help give consumers and commuters access to all the retail commerce packed along SSP’s length down at least the entire east side we were trying to traverse. As of the mid-1980s, Self-Storage Parkway was elevated over interstate junctions, and crossed the tobacco-colored Illinois River at two points via WPA-era iron bridges whose rivets wept orange rust and inspired, shall we say, less than total confidence.

Moreover, the closer we came to metro Peoria’s southeast side and the special access road to the Examination Center, the worse the traffic became. The reason for this was apparent from that first day: It was institutional stupidity in all its manifold forms and names. Item one. The highway people were broadening this section of Self-Storage Parkway into three lanes, but the construction served to reduce the extant two lanes to just one; the right lane was closed off with orange cones, even in sections where no construction was ongoing and the lane looked clear and navigable. And, of course, single-lane traffic always moves exactly as fast as the very slowest vehicle in line. Item two. There were, as mentioned, traffic lights every eighth- to quarter-mile, and yet the single southbound lane’s line of traffic was substantially longer than the distance between any two such traffic lights, so that our progress was dependent not just on the color of the next traffic light ahead but also on the colors of the two or three lights beyond that. It was the obverse of gridlock. It seemed like very bad urban planning or traffic-management or whatever exactly the discipline involved here was, and I could feel the corduroy of my suit getting sodden along the entire area of contact with the Gremlin’s patterned plastic seat, as well as along the hip and upper thigh that were mashed up against the human sprinkler next to me, who was by now radiating both heat and an acrid, panicky smell that made me turn my head and pretend to be concentrating hard on something in view beyond the window (which rolled down only halfway, due to some design flaw or obscure safety feature). There is no point in describing the gauntlet of franchise retail and shopping centers and auto and tire and motorcycle / Jet Ski outlets and self-serve gas plazas with built-in convenience stores and national fast food brands we crawled through, since it’s now the same basic gauntlet around every US city — I believe the economic term is ‘monoculture.’ Item three. It emerged, finally, that the turnoff from the parkway to the Examination Center was not serviced with a traffic light, even though it also became visually obvious, when we got within view, that a good percentage of the cars currently in the single lane ahead of us on SSP were also bound for and hence turning in to the REC and its blacktop access road. (Though it would be a maddeningly long time before even this simple fact was explained to me, the REC’s two main eight-hour shifts in that period were 7:10 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. and 3:10 P.M. to 11:00 P.M., which meant that there was a tremendous amount of Service- and employee-owned vehicle traffic between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00.) Meaning that it was actually the Exam Center itself, together with the absence of a traffic light and the abortive SSP construction, 17that had helped cause the hellacious backup, because there were also a large number of vehicles in the oncoming, northeastbound lanes trying to turn left, i.e. across our single lane, to enter the REC’s access road as well, which required that the vehicle at the front of our lane’s line for the right turn wait and wave the oncoming car through its left turn, which only a very few did, since traffic jams often bring out the most aggressive, me-first elements of the human makeup and cause behavior that itself, perversely, exacerbates the traffic jam — this right here perhaps being the place to mention a behavior that we began seeing more and more of as we inched closer to the REC turnoff. Certain private vehicles 18in our lane veered rightward into the narrow gravel ‘breakdown lane,’ in which they sped up and were able to pass dozens of other vehicles, illegally, which in and of itself would not have been a big deal except for the fact that as the REC turnoff approached and the breakdown lane began to narrow and disappear they then sought to merge left back into the legal single lane, which required someone in that lane to stop to let them in again, which further clotted traffic in the regular lane… meaning that the selfish, me-first vehicles were significantly worsening the very jam that they’d sought to bypass; they gained an extra couple of minutes by making the jam and delay slightly worse for everyone else in the shimmering line of cars in our lane. Within a couple weeks of daily commutes down SSP from the special low-cost Service housing 19to the REC each day, this selfish, me-first behavior with the breakdown lane began to fill me with such disgust and malice that I can still, to this day, remember some of the vehicles that chronically did it, i.e., the same kind of idiotic, solipsistic behavior that causes stampedes in public places in the event of a fire and results in the authorities finding huge numbers of blackened, trampled bodies at the front doors of places after the fires or riots have been quelled, people prevented from getting out precisely by the panic and selfishness with which they all rushed and clotted the exit and got in each other’s way, causing everyone to die horribly, which I have to admit is what I began wishing for the various Vegas, Chevettes, and a particular light-blue AMC Pacer with one of those fish-shaped Christian decals on the bubble of a back window 20that made this maneuver almost every morning.