David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Three years corresponding to the audit window for a given return, meaning we have until April 15 of next year to audit and recover taxes due on returns filed for 1982 taxes, some of which may cross your desk as parts of coordinated exam programs generated either through Compliance or Martinsburg.’

Cusk was now fighting desperately to attend to every last syllable enunciated at the podium. It was his one chance not to begin dwelling on his core temperature and perspiration, which were now severe enough that he felt a sort of yarmulke of heat at his head’s crown, which was one of four main symptoms of a true attack. He knew his face was now starting to gleam with sweat, which was the main reason he had opted not to turn around and get a general attractiveness-level on the tardy female examiner behind him — which could either have possibly forestalled the attack or kick-started it into a full-out attack in which he would be unable to feel or pay attention to anything except his prodigious flow and feelings of uncontrollable heat and total panic at the idea of being seen sweating this way.

The Personnel aide was describing the 3,312 employees at IRS Post 047 in terms of both shift—58 percent worked the 7:10 A.M.–3:00 P.M. (I) shift, 40 percent 3:10–11:00, plus some janitorial + physical plant activity overnight — as well as percentage breakdown of Exams, Clerical, Data Processing, and Administration, most of which Cusk missed because he had entered the incipient stages of an actual attack where his attention telescoped and the state of his own body and its emission of perspiration occupied almost 90 percent of his conscious awareness. He could hear the female behind him clicking her ballpoint pen in a nervous and arrhythmic way, and once a sound that had to be her uncrossing and recrossing her legs in what sounded like sheer hose, a sound that sent a terrible wave of internal heat through Cusk, and caused the first felt drops to go running from armpits down his torso’s sides beneath the dress shirt. He automatically lowered his head during an attack, as well as slumping as far down in his plastic seat as would be inconspicuous, seeking to make himself as small as possible, visually, in terms of the woman behind him, whom he imagined by now to be a heart-stoppingly pretty girl of about Cusk’s own age, with extraordinary posture and composure and a round porcelain face with intimidating blue eyes and overall an almost European hauteur about her. In short, she was Cusk’s fantasy woman — which was as it were the price he paid for being too petrified with fear and self-consciousness to turn around and feign a look at the clock (which read 3:10 P.M.) in order to gauge the woman’s threat in reality. The Compliance Training Officer, he could hear, was alluding to a page in the Exam Orientation Booklet that the current slide on the screen was a representation of that turned out to be exact, item for item, as Cusk lowered his running head further and pretended to study the relevant page of the booklet, circumspectly wiping away each fallen drop of perspiration before it could pucker its dime-sized section of the page, in case anyone would ever need to borrow his booklet and wonder what kind of grotesque, creepy thing had happened to p. B-3’s diagram.

Cusk began gauging the exact distance to the exit in terms of both seconds and number of footsteps, another part of his brain calculating angles, sight lines, and intensities of light at various posts along the path of retreat — at as it were the periphery of his attention. Instinctively, he understood that not every item on the Rote Exams checklist was going to be equally important.

‘What we have here are phases or the elements of triage,’ the CTO said, then stopped briefly while the Personnel aide defined triage for those unfamiliar with the medical term. Claude Sylvanshine, three rows up and four seats to the left of Cusk, was battling between trying to resummon the distinctions between § 162 and § 212(2) deductions related to rental properties and data incursions of the annual rainfall in Zambia for even-numbered years since 1974, the latter appearing as highlighted columns on the page of a WHO atlas whose editor in chief had some form of psychomotor debility.

‘If you think about it, you are not going to want to file a Memo 20 on a return just because, say, its Line 11 appears to understate alimony received by $200.’

‘Since the additional tax due on $200 of income is less than 5 percent of the additional cost of conducting an audit.’

‘You might, however, file a 20(a) and send the return to Automated Collections for a letter audit.’

‘That will depend on your group protocols as stated by your Group Manager and group protocols packet in group orientation.’

‘Which, in turn, will depend on your group assignment.’ Someone whose pile of luggage was in the seat next to Sylvanshine several rows up raised his hand to ask what a group was in terms of Rote Exams assignments. What was odd was that there were no data incursions for Sylvanshine on the mysterious child that Dr. Lehrl traveled with and kept near him at all times but never seemed to talk to. Sylvanshine knew that it was not Dr. Lehrl’s child, but that was only because Reynolds had told him so. It was as if the child were surrounded by a sort of impermeable factual membrane, or inhabited a fact vacuum. The big data Sylvanshine got for David Cusk, whose name he did not know, were the dimensions of his home’s bathroom’s medicine chest’s mirror and certain temperature readouts in twin columns with the left column’s numbers higher and illuminated in a kind of cheesy emergency red.

Page 24 had a diagram of the Compliance Branch’s Rote Exams’ Chalk — Team — Group — Pod organizational structure.

‘The standard triage works like this. The M1 printout from Martinsburg will already note and list certain incongruities, either in arithmetic or a cross-reference of, say, an ex-spouse’s return’s Line 29 with your return’s Line 11—’

‘That’s one reason the returns are forwarded to Exams — Martinsburg catches something.’

‘Others are forwarded because of criteria that may, as far as you’re concerned, appear almost random.’

‘Another advantage of the Master Files — now over 50 percent of the arithmetical and cross-file verification takes place automatically at Martinsburg, which vastly increases your efficiency and the number of returns this Post can process and reach audit determinations on.’

‘Though volume and throughput are no longer the criteria by which a Post’s performance is judged and evaluated.’

An involuntary grimace went over the Personnel aide’s face as he spoke. Sylvanshine knew this aide’s shoe size and total blood volume, but not his name.

‘The evaluative criteria now concern return on audit,’ the CTO said.

Without looking at it, the Personnel aide held aloft a Fornix twelve-column computer card and a sheet of printout.

The CTO said, ‘These represent Memo PP-47 plus a subsection for one’s Pod, Group, Team, Detail, and personnel margin.’

‘Margin refers to the ratio of additional tax assessed through audit to costs.’

‘—Including your own salary, benefits, housing allowance if any, etc.’

‘—It’s the new Bible,’ said the Personnel aide.

Sylvanshine, his eyes rolling up slightly white, received a whole slew of facts about the CTO that he did not wish to know, including the specs of her mitochondrial DNA and the fact that it was ever so slightly nonstandard due to her mother’s having taken thalidomide four days before it was abruptly yanked from the shelves. Training Officer Pam Jensen had a.22 revolver in her purse — she had promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation, which at current rates would be July 1986.