David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

The man stood totally still as he spoke. David Wallace didn’t think he had ever before seen someone who didn’t fidget in at least a few idle, unconscious ways when he spoke in public. The bodily stillness would have been more thought-provoking if David Wallace had felt less panicked and overwhelmed, and besides automatizing himself by transcribing, David Wallace was doing the other main compensatory thing he did when he was in a room where everyone seemed to understand exactly what was being talked about but him — which had happened in certain social situations at Philo High, at which David Wallace had not been part of any one particular clique but had hung out on the fringes of several different groups, from second-tier athletes to student council and A/V wonks, and was often privy to gossip or references to group situations he had no direct knowledge of, but had to stand there grinning and nodding like he knew exactly what was being referred to. Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he’d accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential and Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic versions of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 to 10:30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement. Leaving the client — who was still enrolled — with his own very special sort of existential dilemma. The point is that this is what David Wallace did in these situations, which was to assume and hold by main force an enormous grin that he imagined communicated ease and confident familiarity with whatever was going on but in fact, unbeknownst to him, in its rigid distension and lack of eye-involvement, together with the skin situation, actually looked like the agonized rictus of someone having the skin of his face slowly torn off, which luckily for him all the room’s GS-13 Immersive Exam transfers and CTO shelter specialists were too serious and intent and engaged with the anti-shelter protocols — for that’s what the Team to which David Wallace was mis-ID’d and erroneously assigned through no fault of his own (though this orientation might have been the place to put up his hand) turned out to be, the examination and evaluation of individual and limited-partnership shelters in realty, agriculture, and leveraged leasing, which was a small but serious component of the Spackman Initiative — to notice in anything more than a peripherally uncomfortable way, as well as David Wallace’s youth, corduroy suit (which was the IRS equivalent of a Speedo and floppy clown shoes), and absence of hat.

A/NA, projected on its own b/w slide, was explained as the entire thrust and raison of Rote Exams.

‘Are you cops?’

The Personnel aide raised his hands and shook them and shouted out ‘Nooo.’ This was the same fake evangelist bit Sylvanshine had seen at the Philadelphia REC when he was twenty-two years old. The Personnel aide’s coin collection was kept in a portable safe in the rear of his mother or grandmother’s closet, judging by the styles of dresses and coats on the rack overhead.

‘Are you judges of civic virtue?’

‘Nooo.’

‘Are you sadistic bureaucrats arbitrarily deciding which TPs’ lives to make miserable by subjecting them to the anxiety and inconvenience of an audit, trying to squeeze every last drop of blood from the neck you’ve got your boot on?’

‘No.’

‘In essence, in today’s IRS, you’re businessmen.’

‘And businesswomen. Businesspersons. Or rather in the employ of what you’re urged to consider a business.’

‘Which returns will be profitable to audit?’

‘How do you determine this?’

‘Different Exam groups do it different ways. Your group orientation will have the specifics.’

Aide: ‘Or your Team, since some Group Managers here have different Teams tasked to different criteria.’

‘You can almost think of them as filters — what gets through, what gets Memo 20’d and routed to District.’

‘Or signs, flags — at least that some return deserves an exhaustive exam.’

‘You won’t be going over every last return with a microscope.’

‘You want to work smart as well as fast.’

‘And fast means some you’ll know right away — this audit wouldn’t produce anything.’

‘That’s the criterion — will an audit produce a maximal increase when the cost of the audit is subtracted?’

‘So that’s one thing to discard — the idea that you’re guardians of civic virtue.’

‘There’s another common misapprehension to disregard. Does anyone have any idea what it is?’

David Cusk had a terrible, totally ghastly impulse to raise his hand. Part of his strategy for surviving the close-order mingling of the break until he could make it to a restroom had been to think hard about the final projected image on the slide projector’s screen, which the Training Officer never had gotten to quite resolve into focus but had been a split-screen view of two desks or tables, one strewn with papers and forms, plus a couple of items whose bright colors indicated they might have been food wrappers, the other clean and neat with items in piles and labeled baskets. Cusk was pretty sure the CTO wanted to stress order and organization and to banish the idea that a slovenly desk was the sign of a productive worker. Meanwhile, no one else had raised their hand. The idea came again of raising his hand and having the CTO point to him over all the turning heads, volunteering for the spotlight of all those people’s attention, including the exotic Belgian transfer or émigré, whom Cusk had managed to avoid during the break, from which he had returned early, and did not know that the woman’s glasses were so thick that if he’d ever seen her he’d have been able to tell that she was practically blind, at least in terms of objects more than three or four feet away, her eyes shriveled and oddly puckered in the irises, filled with cracks and fissures like a dry riverbed — she was about as exotic as a fire hydrant, and roughly the same shape — and he wouldn’t have been as worried about being seen by her as wet or sweating. In any event, he was correct, it emerged:

‘The common misapprehension is that a messy desk is a sign of a hard worker.’

‘Get over the idea that your function here is to collect and process as much information as possible.’

‘The whole mess and disorder of the desk on the left is, in fact, due to its excess information.’

‘A mess is information without value.’

‘The whole point of cleaning off a desk is to get rid of the information you don’t want and keep the information you do want.’

‘Who cares which candy wrapper is on top of which paper? Who cares which half-crumpled memo is trapped between two pages of a Revenue Ruling that pertained to a file three days back?’

‘Forget the idea that information is good.’

‘Only certain information is good.’

‘ Certain as in some, not as in a hundred percent confirmed.’

‘Each file you examine in Rotes will constitute a plethora of information,’ the Personnel aide said, stressing the second syllable of plethora in a way that made Sylvanshine’s eyelids flutter.

‘Your job, in a sense, with each file is to separate the valuable, pertinent information from the pointless information.’