David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Ms. Neti-Neti of Personnel, by the way, continued talking during much of the circuitous trip to Personnel. The truth is that most of what she said is no longer available to memory. Her tone was pleasant, professional; but she chattered so nonstop that one more or less involuntarily stopped listening to her after a little while, rather as with a six-year-old. Some of what she was saying was probably helpful and apposite REC information, though, and it’s a bit of a shame that I can’t resummon it now, since it would probably be useful and concise, memoir-wise, in ways that my own impressions and memories were not. I know that I kept stopping and switching various suitcases from one hand to the other to attenuate the burning sensation that comes from carrying the heavier bag on just, say, the right side for any length of time, and that it took a few such moments for Ms. Neti-Neti to understand what was happening and pause instead of continuing and ending up twenty or more yards ahead of me, at which time the fact that she was still talking became absurd, since there was literally no one there to hear her. The complete absence of any offers to help with any of the luggage was OK; that was attributable to gender codes, which I knew were especially rigid in the Middle East. But nothing drives home the awareness that someone’s volubility and chatter are her own trip and have nothing to do with you quite like your falling behind and being literally absent and the chatter still proceeding, reaching you only as an indistinct stream of echoes off the hallways’ surfaces. It would be disingenuous to say much more about the Iranian Crisis in the context of the first day, since what more I learned about her off-duty eccentricities and their origins in the Iranian upheavals of the late 1970s came only later when she seemed to emerge from a different wiggler’s housing unit almost every morning during the month of August 1985. Her accent was mild and sounded more British than Mideastern or foreign, and her hair was a very dark black, with an almost liquid aspect to the perfect straightness with which it hung — from the rear, its contrast with the ghastly bright blue of the Personnel office’s jacket was the only interesting or comely thing about that jacket. Also, because I spent so much time in various parts of her wake, I remember that she smelled faintly — as if the scent belonged not to her but to the Personnel jacket — of a certain mall-bought perfume that some unnamed member of my own family used to practically drench herself with eye-watering quantities of every morning.

Unlike the upper floors, the REC building’s lower level is sectioned into roughly hexagonal pods, with corridors radiating from a central hub like spokes in a misshapen wheel. As you can imagine, this radial floor plan, so popular in the 1970s, made no immediate sense, given that the REC building itself was starkly rectangular, which added to the overall disorientation of that first day’s descent toward the Intake mechanism. 48The array of directional signs at each hub was so detailed and complex that it seemed designed only to increase the confusion of anyone not already sure where they were going and why. This level had white flooring and walls with battleship-gray trim, and very bright inset fluorescents — it might as well have been a galaxy away from the main floor just above. At this point, it’s probably best to keep the explanations as terse and compressed as possible, for realism’s sake. The longer-term truth is that since I eventually came to be employed here — or, rather, it’s better to say that I came to rest here, like a racquetball or caroming projectile, after the series of administrative mix-ups that almost resulted in disciplinary charges and/or Termination For Cause in the following weeks had been cleared up — it would be easy to impose on the Level 1 layout 49and Personnel office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying around with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memory — one tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord’s exit through the back of the retina. As in, for example, the fact that the madhouse at the Exam Center’s main entrance and lobby area upstairs, and the extremely long line of travel-weary employees in hats with baggage and brown Service expandable files of documentation and posting orders that now extended (i.e., this line did) all the way out through one of the heavy hermetic fire doors 50out into the fluorescent rotary at what later turned out to be the center of the central pod of Level 1, which line consisted of newly posted and/or transferred personnel waiting to have their passport-sized photo taken and their new Post 047 ID printed and run through the laminator, after which it would be almost too hot to hold for several minutes, such that you could see personnel holding their new IDs by one corner and fanning them rapidly back and forth through the air in order to cool them before attaching the gator clips to their breast pockets (as was required at all times on-post)… that all this mid-May roil and crowding was in fact due to a major restructuring of the IRS’s Compliance Branch that was ongoing at all six operational RECs and over half of all Districts’ Audit facilities (whose sizes varied widely) nationwide, scheduled to begin (i.e., the restructuring had been) exactly one month after the national individual income tax filing deadline of April 15, in order to allow the annual massive inflow of returns to have gone through its initial sorting and processing at the Regional Service Centers 51and the attached checks to have been processed and deposited in the US Treasury via the six Regional Depository mechanisms… all of this uncovered later, informally, through confabs at Angler’s Cove with Acquistipace, Atkins, Redgate, Shackleford, & c. Such that it would be misleading to go into any substantive detail or explanation at this point, since none of these truths yet existed, realistically speaking. Or the fact that it turned out one needed a valid IRS ID to access any of the shuttles from the complex to any of the special low-cost Post housing at two former commercial apartment complexes farther up Self-Storage Parkway, which was a Systems regulation nationwide and therefore the reason it was not Mr. Tate’s or Stecyk’s fault per se that new arrivals were required to schlep their luggage all over and stand in line with it as they waited to have their ID photo taken and fresh internal Social Security number generated, & c., though it was still irksome and idiotic not to have some mechanism in place for dealing with the luggage of new employees who didn’t yet have an ID — all these facts are postdated, as it were.

What can validly be included among the experiences of the first day is that I was naturally surprised — a little thrilled, even — when I was exempted from the long and excruciatingly slow line that stretched from the central Level 1 rotary in to the makeshift ID station and instead got taken up to the front of the ID line and posed and shot and given my hot and redolently laminated ID card and gator clip right there on the spot. (I didn’t yet know what the nine-digit sequence of numbers below the bar code signified, or that my old Social Security number, which as an American over age eighteen I knew pretty much by heart, would never again be used by anyone; it simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint.) Like being met by someone in authority with your name on a sign, it’s almost inevitably gratifying to be specially escorted to the front of a line, no matter what looks of resentment or (in my case 52) revulsion you receive from the preterite people in line who watch you being conducted up front and exempted from all the ordinary hassle and crowded wait. Plus some of the new personnel in line were clearly high-ranking transfers, and I was again both gratified and curious or even apprehensive about what kind of suction the distant relative who’d helped me arrange for the posting might turn out to have, and about what-all personal or biographical information had been relayed about me ahead of time, and to just whom. This bit of special treatment is legitimately part of the real memory-chain only if it’s made clear that it (i.e., my being specially conducted to the front of the line) happened somewhat later on arrival day, after Ms. Neti-Neti had already taken me on a slightly different route along this central pod’s rotary to the REC Personnel office itself, which was in a large suite of connected offices and reception areas in Level 1’s southwest corner or vertex. 53It had been her impression that I was supposed to have some kind of personal introductory audience with the DDP, 54but either the Iranian Crisis was wrong about this, or the travel and traffic delays had caused me to forfeit the interview slot, or else some type of Personnel crisis had obtruded on the DDP’s attention. For when we had descended to this level and negotiated the central rotary and skirted various parts of the line for ID, and had taken a number of labyrinthine turns and opened various fire doors, pausing ever more often so that I could redistribute the weight of my luggage, and had finally arrived at the Personnel office, we found the waiting area, outer offices, copier corridor, and special bisected room with a UNIVAC 1100 and remote terminal (connected, I learned later, by half-duplex Dataphone line to Region in upstate Joliet) across the hall already completely filled with IRS personnel sitting, standing, reading, staring into space, holding and twidgeling their various hats, and (I assumed — wrongly, as it turned out, although it’s also true that Ms. Neti-Neti did nothing to disabuse me, instead disappearing into a side office and entering into a line of blue-jacketed people waiting to speak with a Personnel superior 55in order to report my [i.e., the ostensible elite transfer’s] arrival and to receive instructions about how to proceed in the absence of the special interview. It was this Assistant DDP who signed the internal Form 706-IC authorizing my being taken right up to the front of the line for Service ID processing, although it took Ms. Neti-Neti over twenty minutes 56to reach the front of Mrs. van Hool’s office’s line and present with her questions) doing nothing but sitting around on the taxpayer’s dime in some kind of classic ‘hurry up and wait’ scenario.