David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

An additional bit of bureaucratic idiocy: As mentioned, plastic signs within the car interdicted smoking, eating, & c., as turned out to be the case in all Service vehicles used for employee transport, by internal regs cited in the lower-right portion of the signs themselves 21—except that AMC Gremlins’ interiors were so cramped, and the plastic used therein so cheap and thin, that there was nowhere to mount the eight-inch signs except on the dashboard’s top, where they blocked sections of the lower windshield and forced our driver to assume a contorted position with his tonsured head almost over on his right shoulder in order to see the road just ahead between the edges of the mandatory signs. This, so far as I could see, was beyond the pale in terms of both safety and anything like sense.

Set within a large expanse of very green close-clipped grass bordered on both sides by cornfields’ windbreaks of trees and tangled shrubbery, the Midwest Regional Examination Center lay a good five hundred yards back from the parkway, these five hundred yards filled with nothing except verdant and weirdly dandelionless grass mowed to the consistency of baize. The contrast between the baronial splendor of the lawn and the squat, institutional ugliness of the REC itself was stark and incongruous, and there was plenty of time to ponder it as the Gremlin crawled along and the guy next to me dripped steadily onto both of us. The older man at the other end of the backseat had what looked at first to be a green thimble on one finger, which turned out to be the green traction-rubber that most wigglers wore and all called PCs for ‘pinkie cheaters.’ A large 4-H billboard some distance past the REC’s one-way entrance read IT’S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY, which I knew to be a 4-H sign because every March — May there was an identical one just out past the instant-coffee factory on SR 130 west of Philo. 22The state 4-H held bake sales and car washes all year to provide for these billboards (w/comma splice sic ), which by 1985 were so ubiquitous that no one paid any attention to them. 23

I also remember that I had to move and twist my own neck awkwardly in order to make out the Exam Center’s various features through the impediments of the car’s required signs. From this distance and set of perspectives, the REC appeared at first to be a single huge right-angled structure, with its facing 24tan or beige cement side mammoth and sheer, and just a bit of foreshortened side-building’s roof visible past the access road, which road extended in a broad one-way curve around the main building’s rear, which rear itself turned out to actually be the REC’s front, with its enormous self-regarding facade. In a similar distortion, what looked, from a distance, like a bona fide circumambient ‘road’ from the parkway in to and around the REC turned out to be more like a crude rural mew or driveway, narrow and high, banked with deep runoff ditches, and with freakish speed bumps set at such close intervals that travel over about five mph on the access road was impossible; one could see the occupants of any vehicle traveling faster than that being thrown about their cars’ interior like rag dolls by the impact with the speed bumps, which were each over eight inches high. Beginning a couple hundred yards in from SSP, parking lots of various modest sizes extended outward from the access road, rather like square-cut jewels encrusting a bracelet or tiara. 25

There was, from our vantage, no visible sign identifying the site as an IRS or even government facility (which, again, was semi-explained by the fact that what appeared from Self-Storage to be the REC’s front was in fact the rear, and of only one of the two distinct buildings). All there were were two small wooden directional signs — ENTRANCE ONLY; EXIT ONLY — at the semicircular access road’s two junctions with SSP. The former sign also included what turned out to be the REC’s street (though not postal) address. Given the access road’s circular shape, the exit was some thousand or more yards farther west down the parkway, almost within the shadow of the FARM SAFETY billboard. I could hear the man up next to me breathing rapidly, as if almost beginning to hyperventilate; neither of us had even once looked directly at the other. I noticed that only the ENTRANCE side of the access road had parking lots appended; the distant EXIT side, which curved out from behind the rear (i.e., it later emerged, the two separate buildings’ fronts) of the REC was a one-way vector back out to Self-Storage Parkway, with the exit’s intersection also minus any kind of traffic light or directional signal, which absence caused further snarls and delays for commuters trying to reach the REC’s entrance from the west.

As I may or may not have mentioned, it was already well past the mandated 1340h. reporting time stamped on my 141-PO. Certain obvious and understandable emotions attended this fact, especially since (a) 0.0 percent of this lateness was my fault, and (b) the closer we got to the REC, the slower our progress in traffic became. In order to distract myself from these facts and emotions, I began to compile a list of the logistical absurdities that became evident once the Service vehicle got close enough to the entrance for the REC’s access road to become visible through my unoccluded side window. The following are condensed from an unusually long, intense, unpunctuated notebook entry 26composed at least in part within the Gremlin itself. To wit:

Besides the oncoming left turns and the loathsome me-firsters trying to remerge from the breakdown lane, the main cause of the excruciating slowness with which our line of cars on the westbound Self-Storage south of the city inched forward to make the right turn into the Examination Center’s access road was what emerged as the even worse, more costive and paralyzed jam of vehicles on the access road itself. This was chiefly caused by the fact that the access road’s appended parking lots were already quite full, and that the farther along the access road the lots were, the fuller they were, and full also of IRS employee vehicles trolling for available parking places. Given the extreme heat and humidity, the most desirable parking lots were clearly the ones directly behind 27the main building, less than a hundred yards from the central REC entrance. Employees in the more peripheral lots were required to walk along the narrow, ditch-flanked access road all the way around behind 28to that central entrance, which resulted in a great deal of teetering along the access road’s unpaved edge, plus some staggering and windmilling of arms; and we saw at least one employee slip and cartwheel into the drainage ditch by the road’s side and have to be pulled manually back up by two or three others, all of whom held their hats to their heads with one hand, such that the rescued employee then had an enormous smeary grass stain all the way up one side of his slacks and sport coat, and dragged one seemingly injured leg behind him as he and his companions passed from view along the road’s curve. 29The whole problem was as obvious as it was stupid. Given the heat, hassle, and actual danger of pedestrian travel along the access road, it was totally understandable that most employee vehicles seemed to eschew the nearer (that is, nearer to us, hence farther from the REC itself) lots and to proceed to the far more desirable lots around back, lots that turned out to be closest to the main REC entrance and to be separated from it only by a wide, paved, and easily traversed plaza. But if those best, closest lots were full (as of course, given human nature and the above incentives, they were likely to be; the most desirable lots will obviously also be the most crowded lots), the incoming vehicles could not backtrack out the way they came in order to settle for spots in the progressively more distant and less desirable lots they had passed on their way in quest of the best lots — for, of course, the access road was one-way 30all the way around its curve, so vehicles that couldn’t find a spot in the best lots had now to proceed forward all the way back out away from the REC to the EXIT ONLY sign, turn left without any kind of light onto Self-Storage, drive the several hundred yards east back to the REC entrance with its ENTRANCE ONLY sign, and then try to turn left (against oncoming traffic, which obviously further slowed our own, westbound lane’s tortured progress) into the access road again in order to park in some of the less desirable lots out nearer the parkway, from which they then had to join the line of pedestrians tightrope-walking along the road’s edge back toward the main entrance around back.