David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

(Also, please keep in mind that I knew none of the REC structures’ actual history or logistics on that initial day; I’m trying to stay faithful to the memory of that experience itself, although there is no avoiding a successive description of various elements that were, at the time, obviously simultaneous — certain distortions are just part and parcel of linear English.)

Re the human element: The broad cement area around the main entrance, as first seen by us from over the mass of other brown and orange/yellow Service vehicles disgorging passengers, was an enormous teeming roil of Service employees all milling around, holding 141-POs in their distinctive dark-yellow Service envelopes, with luggage and briefcases and accordion files, many of them hatted, and various REC or perhaps Regional HQ support personnel in gas-blue blazers with clipboards and sheaves of printout paper that they had rolled into ad hoc megaphones that they spoke through while they held their clipboards up in the air to get people’s attention, evidently trying to collect those arrivals with similar 141-PO job designations and/or GS-grades into cohesive groups for ‘targeted check-in’ at various ‘Intake Stations’ set up around the REC’s main lobby, which lobby, as seen through the entrance’s glass doors, was surprisingly small and cheesy-looking, and had various battered-looking folding tables set up with crude signs made of tented manila folders — the whole thing looked haphazardly jerry-rigged and chaotic, and one figured that there couldn’t possibly be this many newly arrived and/or reassigned transfers to the REC as a typical daily thing, or else the disembarkation and check-in system would be much more permanent-looking and streamlined and less like some small-scale reenactment of the fall of Saigon. Again, though, all this was being perceived and processed in nothing more than a distracted flash — which occurred as the Gremlin finally broke out of the access road’s snarl and pulled up in the almost chilly air of the building’s shade to double-park in the semicircular spur just outside the entrance 37—because, as mentioned, a person’s attention is more or less automatically drawn to a sign with one’s name on it, especially if it seems to be one of only two named signs being held up in the whole madding bureaucratic roil outside the main entrance, and so I had almost immediately seen the ethnic-looking woman in the loud blazer standing a few paces to the right of the rightmost group of new arrivals clumped around a man with a raised clipboard and paper horn, 38the female slightly off to the side and maybe ten feet directly beneath the facade’s slot for reporting AGI on line 31, against the wall, holding either a piece of white cardboard or a small erasable whiteboard with the name DAVID WALLACE in neat block capitals. She was standing in a way that managed to connote weariness and boredom without any actual slumping, her legs well out and back supported by the wall, from bottom to crown, and staring straight ahead, holding the sign at chest level and staring into space with neither interest nor resignation. Of course I was now, as mentioned, through no fault of my own, terribly late, the anxiety of which mixed with the inevitable thrill of seeing one’s name on a sign, not to mention a sign held by an exotic-looking female, plus a whole separate set of Ozymandian awe-and-folly reactions to the conjunction of the monumental 1040 mosaic combined with the self-appending chaos of the entrance area’s crowds, to form a sort of sensory and emotional power-surge that I remember now much more vividly than any of the myriad details and impressions (of which there were thousands or even millions, all obviously incoming at the same moment) of arrival. For she was visibly ethnic, even as seen in the deep pool of shade at the facade’s base with various bits of blinding glare from the Annex’s mirrored exterior, parts of which were catching bits of sun as it moved slightly west of due south. My initial guess was upper-caste Indian or Pakistani — one of my freshman roommates at college had been a wealthy Pakistani, with a marvelously burbly singsong accent, though he’d revealed himself over the year to be an unbelievable narcissist and general prick. 39She was, at the distance from which the Gremlin disgorged us, more striking than pretty, or maybe you might say that she was pretty in a somewhat mannish, hard-faced way, with very dark hair and wide-set eyes in which was, as mentioned, the look of someone who was ‘on duty’ in the sort of way that involves having really nothing to do but stand there. It was the same expression one sees on security guards, college research-librarians on a Friday night, parking-lot attendants, grain silo operators, & c. — she stood there gazing into the middle distance as though at the end of a pier.

It was only outside the cramped Gremlin, when the cool air of the facade-shadowed front area first hit and chilled it, that I became aware that the whole left side of my suit was now wet from the ambient perspiration of the young man I’d been mashed up next to through the whole ride, though when I looked around for him in order to make a gesture at the darkened corduroy and give him an appropriate look of distaste, he was now nowhere to be seen.

Ms. F. Chahla Neti-Neti (according to her ID badge)’s expression changed, actually several different times, as I approached her with bags and a degree of direct eye contact that would have been inappropriate if she hadn’t been holding a sign with my name on it. Here, if I haven’t already done so, I should explain that in this period of what was basically late adolescence I had very bad skin — very, very bad, as in the dermatological category ‘severe/disfiguring.’ 40On meeting or encountering me for the first time, most people either (a) looked only briefly at my face and then looked away, or (b) looked involuntarily stricken or pitying, or repelled, then could be seen struggling with themselves to superimpose on that expression another one that signified they either didn’t see the bad skin or weren’t especially bothered by it. The whole skin thing is a long story and for the most part not worth mentioning, except to emphasize again that by that time I was more or less reconciled to the skin thing and it didn’t much bother me anymore, although it did make it difficult to shave with any precision, and I did tend to be very aware of whether I was standing in direct light and, if so, from just what angle that light originated — because in certain kinds of light the problem was very, very bad indeed, I knew. On this first encounter, I don’t remember whether Ms. Neti-Neti was an (a) or a (b), 41perhaps because my attention/memory was occupied by the way the Service ID badge clipped to her Personnel jacket’s breast pocket had a head-shot photo that looked taken in very bright, almost magnesium-looking light, and I remember instantly calculating what this sort of photo’s hideous light was going to do in terms of my face’s blebular cysts and scabs, just as it had made this creamily dark Persian woman’s complexion look dark gray, and had exaggerated the wide-setness of her eyes so that in the ID photo she looked almost like a puma or some other strange kind of feline predator, along with the badge’s displaying her first initial and surname, GS grade, Personnel affiliation, and a series of nine digits that I would only later understand to be her internally generated SS, which also functions as one’s Service ID number.

The reason for even taking the time to mention the (a) or (b) reaction thing is that it is the only way to make sense of the fact that Ms. Neti-Neti’s greeting was so verbally effusive and deferential—‘Your reputation precedes you’; ‘On behalf of Mr. Glendenning and Mr. Tate, we’re just so extremely pleased to have you on board’; ‘We’re extremely pleased you were willing to take this posting’—without her face and eyes registering any such enthusiasm or even displaying any affect or interest in me or in why I was so late in arriving and had forced her to stand there holding up a sign for God only knew how long, which I personally would very much have wanted some kind of explanation of. Not to mention that the whole left side of my suit was wet, which I would have at least commented on in some concerned way, e.g. had the person fallen into a puddle or what. In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words ‘Have a nice day’ while her expression indicates that it’s really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now. And this whole doubly disorienting affectless monologue occurred as the woman led me away beneath the ‘Paid Preparer’s Information’slots at the base of the great 1040’s recto side toward a smaller, much less ostentatious set of doors some hundred yards west along the REC’s tile facade. 42At this close range, it was possible to see that some of the facade’s tiles were chipped and/or stained. We could also see various distorted parts of our reflections in the facade of the Annex building directly ahead (i.e., east), though it was several hundred yards distant and the partial reflections were very tiny and indistinct.