David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

As Cusk discovered the year his grades had jumped in high school, his chances of an attack could be minimized if he paid very close and sustained attention to whatever was going on outside him. He had an associate’s in Accounting from Elkhorn-Brodhead Community College. The problem was that at a certain level of arousal it was hard to pay attention to anything but the threat of an attack. Paying attention to anything but the fear was like hoisting something heavy with a pulley and rope — you could do it, but it took effort, and you got tired, and the minute you slipped you were back paying attention to the last thing you wanted to.

On the whiteboard was the acronym SHEAM, which had not yet been defined. Some examiners were transferring from other posts or had been through the twelve-week IRS training courses in Indianapolis or Rotting Flesh LA. Their orientation was somewhere else, and shorter.

The little desktops were bolted to the chairs’ sides and forced people to sit in a very particular way. Little flexible lamps on stalks were bolted to the side of the desktop in the place where a right-handed person needed to place his elbow in order to take notes.

The whiteboard was rather small, and the new GS-9s had to refer to a small printed booklet for some of the diagrams that illustrated the procedures the Training Officer was explaining. Many of the diagrams were so complicated that they took more than one two-page spread and had to be continued on later pages.

First there were several forms to fill out. An oriental man collected them. The orientation people obviously believed that training sessions worked better and were easier to attend to if the presentation wasn’t solo. This was not Cusk’s experience. His experience was that the man with the prominent wrists and Adam’s apple kept interrupting or providing unnecessary and distracting commentary. It was much easier and safer for David Cusk to pay attention to just one exterior thing at a time.

‘One of the things you’re going to hear a lot about is quotas. In the break rooms, the water cooler.’

‘The Center has no illusions about gossip and scuttlebutt.’

‘The older examiners like to tell tall tales about how things were in the bad old days.’

‘On the public level, the Service has always denied quotas as gauges of work performance.’

‘Because one of the things you’ll be thinking, because it’s natural, is: How will my work be evaluated? On what will my quarterly and annual performance reviews be based?’

The gangly man wrote a question mark on the whiteboard. Cusk’s feet were hot in his dress chukkas, on one of which a scuff mark had been carefully colored in with a black pen.

The Training Officer said, ‘Let’s say, as a hypothetical, that at one point there were quotas.’

‘But for what?’

‘In 1984, the Service processed a total of over sixty million individual 1040s. There are six Regional Service Centers and six Regional Exam Centers. Do the math.’

‘Well, in 1984, this Post had annual throughput of seven hundred sixty-eight thousand four hundred returns.’

‘That math may not appear to add up.’

‘That’s because it’s not sixty million divided by twelve.’

‘It leaves out the factor of Martinsburg.’

Their employee handbooks contained a full-color photo of the Service’s National Computer Center in Martinsburg WV, one of whose three layers of perimeter fencing was electrified and had to have its base swept up every morning during equinoctial bird migrations.

The problem was that the screen for the slide projector came down over the whiteboard, so that anything written on the whiteboard was obscured when a diagram or schema had to be projected. Also, the screen appeared to have something wrong with the lock on its roller mechanism and wouldn’t stay down, so that the Personnel aide had to hunch down and grasp the pull ring to keep the screen in position while keeping his shadow off the screen, which required him to practically get on his knees. The image on the slide projector’s screen was a crude map of the United States with six dots in various locales whose names were too blurred by the projector’s diffracted beam to make out. Each dot had an arrowed line that terminated at a dot just slightly in and below the middle of the Atlantic Coast. Some of the room’s new examiners were taking notes on the image, though Cusk couldn’t have guessed what the notes contained.

‘Let’s say a 1040 return with a claim for a refund comes into the Western Region Service Center in Ogden, Utah.’ The lady pointed to the leftmost block. The man held up a Hollerith card, whose shadow on the screen was like the most complicated domino of all time.

One of the window shades was canted slightly in its own roller, and through the resultant gap a plane of light from the southern exposure empaled the screen’s right side. A series of black-and-white photographs began to cycle through the automated slide projector, both too quickly and too irresolute in the sun to quite parse. There appeared to be two incongruous photos of some kind of beach or lake scene, but they went past too quickly to be seen.

‘Of course, your own RSC is in East St. Louis,’ the man said from his place hunched down at the screen’s bottom. He had some kind of regional accent that Cusk did not recognize.

‘During the intensive processing season—’

‘Which this is the tail end of—’

‘The procedure is basically this. Seasonal employees remove the pre-bundled bundles of envelopes from special trucks, remove the bundling restraints, and feed the envelopes into an automated mail processor, known also as AMP, which is one of the Systems Division’s latest improvements in the speed and efficiency of returns processing, with a peak of almost thirty thousand envelopes an hour.’ A Fornix Industries advertising photo of a room-sized machine with numerous belts, blades, and lamps had already cycled past on the screen several images ago. ‘Automated AMP processes include sorting, opening with ultra-fast milling knives, coding the edges of the different returns, sorting them onto different belts on which further temporary employees open them by hand—’

‘The empty envelopes are then run through a special AMP candling scanner to ensure that they’re empty, a feature that has ameliorated a great many administrative problems of the past.’

(Most of the shots just looked like a lot of people milling around a large room with a lot of bins and tables. The slides were so out of sync with the data being presented that it was impossible to pay attention to both — most of the wigglers averted their eyes from the screen.)

‘When the envelopes are opened, the first task is to remove all checks and money orders enclosed. These are batched, recorded, and rushed by special courier to the nearest federal depository, which in the Western Region is in Los Angeles. The returns themselves are batched according to five basic types and status.’ The man let go of the screen, which ascended with a pop that made people in the first few rows jump. The projector was still on, and a photo of several black women in horn-rim glasses keypunching data was superimposed on the Training Officer as she pointed at the codes for corporate returns, 1120; trusts and estates, 1041; partnerships, 1065; and the well-known Individual 1040 and 1040A; plus S corporations, which also filed 1120s.

‘Of these, you’re going to be concerned only with individual returns.’

‘Corporates and fiduciaries — fiduciaries are, as you know, estates and trusts — are done at the District level.’

The Personnel man, who was trying to turn the slide projector off, said, ‘And 1040s divide into simples and Fats — Fats including schedules beyond A, B, and C, or an excess of supporting schedules or attachments or more than three total pages of Martinsburg printout.’