David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

A word or two on the ‘phantom’ phenomenon that’s so much a part of Exams lore. Examiners’ phantoms are not the same as real ghosts. Phantom refers to a particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom. Or rather say the strain of trying to remain alert and punctilious in the face of extreme boredom can reach levels at which certain types of hallucination routinely occur.

One such hallucination is what’s known in Exams as a visit from the phantom. Sometimes just as a visit, as in ‘You’ll have to forgive Blackwelder. He had a bit of a visit this afternoon, hence the tic.’ Though most rote examiners suffer from hallucinations at one time or another, not every examiner gets visited. Only certain psychological types. One way you know they’re not real ghosts: Every visitee’s phantom is different, but their commonality is that the phantoms are always deeply, diametrically different from the examiners they visit. This is why they’re so frightening. They tend to present as irruptions from a very rigid, disciplined type of personality’s repressed side, what analysts would maybe call a person’s shadow. Hypermasculine wigglers get visits from simpering queens in lingerie and clotted vaudevillian rouge and mascara, nancing about. Devout wigglers see demons; prudish ones see splayed harlots or priapistic gauchos. The immaculately hygienic get visits from filthy figures whose clothing jumps with fleas; the incredibly fussy and organized see whimpering wild-haired figures with strings around their fingers rummaging frantically through the Tingle’s baskets for something crucial they’ve misplaced.

It’s not like it happens every day. Phantoms afflict mainly certain sorts. Not so true ghosts.

Ghosts are different. Most examiners of any experience believe in the phantom; few know or believe in actual ghosts. This is understandable. Ghosts can be taken for phantoms, after all. In certain ways, phantoms serve as distracting background or camouflage from which it can be difficult to pick up the fact-pattern of actual ghosts. It’s like the old cinematic gag of someone on Halloween being visited by a real ghost and complimenting what he thinks is a kid in a really great costume.

The truth is that there are two actual, non-hallucinatory ghosts haunting Post 047’s wiggle room. No one knows whether there are any in the Immersive Pods; those Pods are worlds unto themselves.

The ghosts’ names are Garrity and Blumquist. Much of the following info comes after the fact from Claude Sylvanshine. Blumquist is a very bland, dull, efficient rote examiner who died at his desk unnoticed in 1980. Some of the older examiners actually worked with him in rotes in the 1970s. The other ghost is older. Meaning dating from an earlier historical period. Garrity had evidently been a line inspector for Mid West Mirror Works in the mid-twentieth century. His job was to examine each one of a certain model of decorative mirror that came off the final production line, for flaws. A flaw was usually a bubble or unevenness in the mirror’s aluminum backing that caused the reflected image to distend or distort in some way. Garrity had twenty seconds to check each mirror. Industrial psychology was a primitive discipline then, and there was little understanding of non-physical types of stress. In essence, Garrity sat on a stool next to a slow-moving belt and moved his upper body in a complex system of squares and butterfly shapes, examining his face’s reflection at very close range. He did this three times a minute, 1,440 times per day, 356 days a year, for eighteen years. Toward the end he evidently moved his body in the complex inspectorial system of squares and butterfly shapes even when he was off-duty and there were no mirrors around. In 1964 or 1965 he had apparently hanged himself from a steam pipe in what is now the north hallway off the REC Annex’s wiggle room. Among the staff at 047, only Claude Sylvanshine knows anything detailed about Garrity, whom he’s never actually seen — and then most of what Sylvanshine gets is repetitive data on Garrity’s weight, belt size, the topology of optical flaws, and the number of strokes it takes to shave with your eyes closed. Garrity is the easier of the wiggle room’s two ghosts to mistake for a phantom because he’s extremely chatty and distracting and thus is often taken by wigglers straining to maintain concentration as the yammering mind-monkey of their own personality’s dark, self-destructive side.

Blumquist is different. When Blumquist manifests in the air near an examiner, he just basically sits with you. Silently, without moving. Only a slight translucence about Blumquist and his chair betrays anything untoward. He’s no bother. It’s not like he stares at you in an uncomfortable way. You get the sense that he just likes to be there. The sense is ever so slightly sad. He has a high forehead and mild eyes made large by his glasses. Sometimes he’s hatted; sometimes he holds the hat by the brim as he sits. Except for those examiners who spasm out at any sort of visitation — and these are the rigid, fragile ones who are ripe for phantom-visits anyhow, so it’s something of a vicious circle — except for these, most examiners accept or even like a visit from Blumquist. He has a few he seems to favor, but he is quite democratic. The wigglers find him companionable. But no one ever speaks of him.

The Rotes orientation room was on the top floor of the REC building. You could hear the needly sounds of printers — next door was Systems. David Cusk had chosen a seat near the back below an air-conditioning vent that did not riffle the pages of his training packet and Internal Revenue Code. It was either a large room or a small auditorium. The room was brightly fluorescent-lit, and ominously warm. Industrial roller shade things were pulled over two broad sets of south windows, but you could feel the sun’s heat radiating from the shades and from the Celotex ceiling. There were fourteen new examiners in a room that sat 108, not counting the raised stage thing with the podium and rotary slide projector, which Cusk’s parents had one almost the like of.

The Compliance Training Officer was a woman with flat hair in a tan pantsuit and flats with two separate badges on either side of the jacket. She held a clipboard to her chest and had a pointer in one hand. The room had a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard. In the room’s light her face was the color of suet. She was assisted by one of the Post’s Personnel men whose bright-blue jacket was too short and showed the bones of his wrists. There was no one within six little bolted desks of Cusk on any side, and he’d also taken off his suit coat the way three other people in the desks had. The examiners who’d just come today had their luggage stacked neatly at the back on the opposite side of the room. Cusk had two pencils in his bag, both eraserless and so deeply chewed you couldn’t tell what color they had been. He was teetering on the edge of an attack like the one in the car with the man with the horrible boiled-looking face watching him as his temperature spiked and it was all he could do not to clamber over the man and claw at the window for air. Like almost the other one only an hour later in the line for the badge, where once he had been in the line for a few minutes he was invested and couldn’t leave the line without the man in the blue jacket asking a lot of questions that other people in the line would hear and look over, and by the time he got to stand there under the two hot lights he’d done the thing of pushing the hair back off his forehead so often that the hair stood up almost straight, which he didn’t know until the ID came out all hot from the laminator and he saw the photo.