David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

L. M. STECYK DEPUTY ASSISTANT REGIONAL COMMISSIONER FOR EXAMINATIONS — PERSON which in a very different sort of mood might have been amusing.

To explain the context of this sight line into the office: Closest to me in terms of the personnel also sitting there waiting for something were two young unhatted males in two of a series of slightly different vinyl chairs at a slight angle to my left, both holding stacks of folders with color-coded tabs. Both seemed roughly college-age and wore short-sleeve shirts, poorly knotted ties, and tennis shoes, in contrast to the much more conventionally adult business-style dress of most of the rest of the room. 63These boys, too, were engaged in some kind of long, aimless exchange. Neither crossed his legs as he sat; both their breast pockets had arrays of identical pens. From my angle of sight, their badges reflected the overhead lights and were impossible to parse. Mine was the only luggage in our area, some of which luggage was technically encroaching on the nearer kid’s part of the room’s floor, near his off-brand sneaker; and yet neither of them seemed aware of or curious about the luggage, or me. One might normally expect a kind of instant unspoken camaraderie between younger people in a workplace crowded mostly with older adults — rather the way two unconnected black people will often go out of their way to nod at or otherwise specially acknowledge each other if everyone else around them is white — but these two acted as if someone their approximate age were not even there, even after I raised my head from How… Success twice and looked pointedly their way. It had nothing to do with the skin thing; I had a good antenna for the various ways of and motives for not being looked at. These two seemed practiced at screening out input in general, rather like commuters on subways in the larger cities of the East Coast. Their tone was very earnest. E.g.:

‘How can you constantly be this obtuse?’

‘Me, obtuse?’

‘Jesus.’

‘I’m not aware of being the least bit obtuse.’

‘…’ 64

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

‘Good God.’

… but I couldn’t determine whether it was a serious argument or just cynical collegiate titty-pinching to pass the time. At first, it seemed impossible to believe that the second kid was unaware that his protests of being unaware that he was obtuse played right into the hands of the colleague who was accusing him of obtuseness, i.e., being unaware. I was unsure whether or not to laugh, in other words. I had come to a ¶ in the book that explicitly recommended loud laughter at someone in a group’s joke as being more or less an automatic way to signal or invite inclusion in that group, at least for purposes of conversation; the crude illustration was a line drawing of someone standing just outside a group of laughing people at a cocktail party or reception (they were all holding what were either shallow snifters or badly drawn martini glasses). The turdnagels, though, never turned their heads or even acknowledged my laughter, which was definitely loud enough to be audible even against the background noise. The point here being that it was at an extension of the angle over the shoulder of the ’nagel who denied having been obtuse, more or less pretending to be looking past them at something else in the way of someone whose attempt at eye contact or some moment of camaraderie has been rebuffed, that I enjoyed a momentary view into the actual office of the DDP, in which view the desk was empty but the office was not, for before the desk one man was squatting on his haunches before a chair in which another man 65hunched forward with his 66face in his hands. The posture, together with the movement of the suit coat’s shoulders, made it pretty clear the second man was weeping. No one else among the crowds of personnel in the waiting area or standing in the lines that now extended out beyond the three narrow hallways 67into the waiting room seemed aware at that moment of this little tableau, or of the fact that the DDP’s office door was partly open. The weeper was facing away from me, for the most part, 68but the man hunkered down before him with a hand on his padded shoulder and saying something in what you could tell was a not ungentle tone had a wide soft flushed or pinkish face with lush and (I thought) incongruous sideburns, a face slightly out of date, which, when his eye caught mine (I having forgotten, in my interest, that sight lines are by definition two-way) in the same moment when the loathsome secretary, still speaking on the phone, now saw me staring past her and reached out without even having to look at the door or its knob’s position in order to pull it closed with an emphatic sound, spread (the administrator’s face did, i.e., Mr. Stecyk’s) in an involuntary expression of compassion and sympathy, an expression that seemed almost moving in its spontaneity and unself-conscious candor, which, as explained above, I was not at all used to, and which I have no idea how my own face registered my reaction to in that moment of what felt like highly charged eye contact before his stricken face was replaced with the door’s frosted glass and my own eyes dropped quickly to the book once more. I had not had my facial skin provoke such an expression before, not ever once, and it was that soft, bureaucratically mod face’s expression that kept obtruding on my mind’s eye in the darkness of the electrical closet as the Iranian Crisis’s forehead impacted my abdomen twelve times in rapid succession and then withdrew to a receptive distance that seemed, in that charged instant, much farther away than it really could have been, realistically speaking.

‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page. Anand Singh closes and opens his dominant hand several times while studying a muscle in his wrist. Sandra Pounder straightens slightly and swings her head in a neck-stretching arc and leans forward again to examine a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Most sit up straight but lean forward at the waist, which reduces neck fatigue. Boris Kratz turns a page. Olive Borden raises the little hinged flag on her empty 402-C box. Ellis Ross starts to turn a page and then stops to recheck something higher up on the page. Bob McKenzie hawks mucus without looking up. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing worries his lower lip with a pen’s pocket clip. Ann Williams sniffs and turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Paul Howe opens a drawer and looks inside and closes the drawer without taking anything out. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Two walls’ paneling painted over in Baker-Miller pink. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. One Chalk per row, four rows per column, six columns. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Robert Atkins’s lips are soundlessly moving. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page with a long purple nail. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris Fogle turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Chris Acquistipace signs a Memo 20. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror. Ken Wax turns a page. Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Olive Borden stands and raises her hand with three fingers out for the cart boy. David Cusk turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Exterior temperature/humidity 96°/74 %. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Bob McKenzie still hasn’t spit. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. The cart comes up the group room’s right side with its squeaky wheel. Two others in the third Chalk’s row also stand. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ann Williams turns a page.