David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didn’t want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseous when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with but to hang dutifully in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman, in secret and as it were ‘on the side,’ in order to feel — if only for a short time — the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen.

Thus began the father’s true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair.

The boy’s mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long river’s end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimeters just below the chin’s point, the galeae of his scalp’s back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyes — as well as the paradoxical ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic place in the overall project: The boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a ‘worrier’ (unlike himself, his father thought), but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh year, darkening the whole endeavor, a tenebrous shadow the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a somber dignity rather than futility or pathos.

He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.

‘Certainly appears to be a nice restaurant.’

‘Looks pretty nice.’

‘I myself have never been here before. I’d heard good things about it, though, from some of the fellows in Administration. I’ve been anxious to try it.’

‘…’

‘And here we are.’

(Removing chewing gum and wrapping it in Kleenex removed from handbag.) ‘Uh-huh.’

‘…’

‘…’

(Makes minute adjustments to placement of silverware.) ‘…’

‘…’

‘Do you suppose it’s so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don’t know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it’s only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don’t go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?’

‘…’

‘…’

‘What did you say your name was again?’

‘Russell. Russell or sometimes “Russ,” though to be honest I have a marked preference for Russell. Nothing against the name Russ; I just never quite cottoned to it.’

‘Do you got any aspirin with you, Russell?’

Until mid-1987, the IRS’s attempts at achieving an integrated data system were plagued with systemic bugs and problems, many of them exacerbated by Technical Branch’s attempts to economize by updating older Fornix keypunch and card-sorter equipment to handle ninety-six-column Powers cards instead of the original eighty-column Holleriths. 1

One particular bug is relevant here. The Personnel and Training Division’s COBOL-based systems had long had special trouble with what were sometimes called ‘ghost redundancies’ in the processing of employee promotions. The problem was especially acute in Examinations staffing because of the unusually high rates of turnover and promotion among REC personnel. Suppose, for example, that Mr. John Q. Doe, a GS-9 rote examiner, was promoted in grade to GS-11. The system would then generate a whole new personnel file, and thereafter would recognize two separate files for what appeared to be two separate employees, John Q. Doe GS-9 and John Q. Doe GS-11, causing extraordinary hassle and confusion for both payroll and Systems planning protocols down the line.

As part of a multipronged debugging effort in 1984, a go to subroutine was inserted in all Personnel systems’ file sections: In cases of what appeared to be two different employees with the same name and IRS Post code, the system was now directed to recognize only the ‘John Q. Doe’ of higher GS grade. 2This led pretty much directly to the snafu at IRS Post 047 in May 1985. In effect, David F. Wallace, GS-9, age twenty, of Philo IL, did not exist; his file had been deleted, or absorbed into, that of David F. Wallace, GS-13, age thirty-nine, of Rome NY’s Northeast REC. This absorption occurred at the instant that David F. Wallace (i.e., the GS-13)’s Regional Transfer Form 140(c)-RT and posting Form 141-PO were generated, which instant two different systems administrators in the Northeast and Midwest Regions would eventually have to go back through a combined 2,110,000 lines of recorded code in order to find in order to override the go to absorption. None of this, of course, was explained in any detail to David F. Wallace (GS-9, formerly GS-13—meaning the David F. Wallace of Philo IL) until much later, after the whole administrative swivet was over and various outlandish charges had been retracted.

The problem was not, in other words, that no one in the Midwest Regional Examination Center’s Personnel and Training office noticed that two separate David F. Wallaces were scheduled for intake and processing at the Midwest REC over two successive days. The problem was that the office’s computer system recognized, and generated a Powers card and Intake Protocol Form for, only one such David F. Wallace, whom the system further conflated into both (a) the higher-ranked employee transferring from Philadelphia and (b) the employee whose physical arrival was scheduled first in the system, this latter viz. the twenty-year-old ephebe from Philo, whom the system also listed, in a further conflation, as arriving on CT Flight 4130 from Midway (due to the ticketing and travel information generated as part of the Form 140(c)-RT’s arrival specs) rather than by Trailways bus, which was why no one was waiting to meet and transport the supposedly elite and valuable David F. Wallace at the Peoria bus terminal on 15 May, and why the second (i.e., the ‘real’) David F. Wallace, who arrived at the REC by ordinary commercial taxi the following day — which taxi this other, older David Wallace was evidently so meek and passive that it didn’t even register on his consciousness that there’d been some foul-up in REC transport, that his rank and value merited a special pickup with his name on a cardboard sign, or even that he should at least get a receipt from the taxi driver so that he could apply for reimbursement, and who furthermore arrived for permanent transfer and a complete change in residence with (rather incredibly) his entire life contained in only one carry-on bag — why that older, elite, highly valued David F. Wallace spent almost two full working days with his Xerox copies of the Forms 141 and chintzy brown suitcase in first the lines for the GS-13 Intake Station and then Problem Resolution desks in the REC’s main building’s lobby, then sitting in a corner of the lobby itself, then in the Security offices off Level 2’s 3southeast corridor, sitting there with his neotenous face blank and his hat in his lap, unable to proceed, since of course the bureaucracy’s computer system had him listed as already having gone through Intake and received his Post 047 ID and badge — in which case where were his badge and ID, a Security part-timer kept asking him, over again each time he checked the system, and if he hadn’t lost them then why couldn’t he produce them? and so on and so forth. 4