David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Awake for a week at a time, all of us flying on meth and never coming down because coming down off meth is like having terrible flu while in hell, Boyce’s palms with permanent indentations from gripping the bus’s wheel so hard, and all our eyeballs looking like novelty-shop eyeballs. The closest we’re coming to eating is shuddering in distaste when we see a restaurant sign on our way to the literally dozens of Rescue Ranger calls we’re getting every night, booming the doors and scanning the elevators and taking stairs five at a time singing our Rescue Rangers on the Job fight song.’

‘What’s this Rescue Rangers angle, Todd, if—?’

‘Because in very short order as the power and purity of this stuff starts to ramify throughout Dogtown we impress upon McCool the need for some kind of remedial help from the good offices of Welch Lambeth.’

‘What possible medical use does methamphetamine have? Obesity? Sleep deprivation research? Controlled-psychosis experiments?’

‘And two or three days later — just as all of us are reaching just about the limits of endurance and our ribs are showing and the skin around our eyes is starting to look like hamburger — there was one terrible accident where I was alone and I decided all right this time we take the emergency brake off and shoot almost an eighth of a gram uncut and was in a very very strange state of mind indeed one step short of clinical paranoia and the doorbell rings and I open it on the chain and all I see is a hat with plastic flowers on the brim and it’s this tiny old little blameless Welcome Wagon lady, welcoming us in our caved-in rental house to the neighborhood with a little basket of cookies and hygienic products looking up at me but with those weird little hypnotic spirals of red in one eye and green in another and her little peanut of a face convexly bulging out horribly like a crocodile’s face and then receding and then coming out up at me again, and I’ll spare you the details of how I reacted except to tell you that this incident led directly to my having to drop out and move to Colorado less than two months later, which is how I got the Service Moniker Colorado Todd.’

Tuesday morning I had an ENT appointment and clocked in at 10:05. The complex was even more subdued than usual. People spoke quietly and had a slight shoulder-first quality to their walk. A few of the women who were known to react to any sort of upset by becoming pale were pale. There was a quality of slow-motion milling to everybody’s activities, as if they were all reacting to something but were aware of themselves reacting and that everybody else was reacting. I was out of aspirin. For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn’t know what’s going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows what’s going on. This is a clear low-status marker, and I resisted it. It wasn’t until after eleven that I overheard Trudi Keener, Jane-Ann Heape, and Homer Campbell in the UNIVAC room collating stacks of backdated EST vouchers.

There had been an explosion in another Region. In either Muskegon or Holland, both tenth annexes. Either a car or a light truck had parked directly in front of the District office and then at some later time blown up. Trudi Keener had quoted George Molesworthy as saying that the Posse Comitatus was known to be both extreme and active in Michigan. This meant that it was a terrorist attack on a Service Post, which in any depressed agricultural region is going to send chills. I stood in the room pretending to check something in the file catalogue for as long as I figured I could without Jane-Ann Heape being able to discern that I was eavesdropping and deduce that I was the sort of person who didn’t know what was going on and recalibrate her idea of me accordingly. Her hair today was up and done in a complex set of curls and waves that appeared darker in the blue-end fluorescence of the UNIVAC room. She had on a pale blue acetate blouse and skirt whose plaid was so dark and low-contrast it was hard to identify it as true plaid. No casualty information emerged, but I did learn that two or three of 047’s Audit-Coordination Support Systems staff had been posted in Michigan early in their careers; I had no connection to Audit-Coordination Support Systems and didn’t recognize the names.

When my break came the coffee room smelled sour, which meant that Mrs. Oooley hadn’t cleaned out the pots and filters before clocking out last night. It was a personnel gold mine in there, however. Mr. Glendenning and Gene Rosebury were drinking coffee out of their complimentary Service mugs (for GS-13s and up) and Meredith Rand was eating a cup of yogurt out of the GS-9 refrigerator with a plastic fork (which meant Ellen Bactrim was hoarding spoons again). They were having the conversation, and Gary Yeagle and James Rumps and several others were standing just off to the side, listening. I came in in the middle and pretended to study the vending machines and then to count the coins in my hand.

‘This isn’t terrorism. This is people not wanting to pay their taxes,’ Gene Rosebury said. There were faint remains of his customary Mylanta mustache. The ‘this’ indicated that there was a great deal of conversational context and information that had gone on heretofore.

‘If I’m terrified, that doesn’t make it terrorism?’ Meredith Rand said. She removed a tiny bit of yogurt from the corner of her mouth with her little finger. It seemed significant that no one laughed, not even the GS-9s. Rand’s was the sort of low-cal sally that was meant not so much to be funny as to give the room the opportunity to laugh and so dispel tension. No one took this opportunity. This seemed telling. Mr. Glendenning had on a tan suit and a string tie with a medallion of turquoise at the crux. The REC Director was a man who was accustomed to being the center of attention in any room he was in, although with him this manifested as an air of quiet self-possession instead of exhibitionism. I didn’t know a person at the Post who didn’t like and admire DeWitt Glendenning. I had been with the Service long enough by this time to understand that this was one quality of a successful administrator, to be liked. And not to act in such a way as to be liked, but to be that way. Nobody ever felt that Mr. Glendenning was putting on any kind of act, the way less gifted administrators do, even an act for themselves, for instance acting like a martinet because someplace inside they have a picture of a good administrator as a hard-ass and are trying to contort their own personalities to fit the picture. Or that glad-handing, my-door-is-always-open type who believes a good administrator needs to be everyone’s friend and so acts very open and friendly even though the responsibilities of his office require him to discipline people or cut budgets and deny requests or reassign people to Examination or any number of things that aren’t friendly at all. This type puts himself in a terrible position, because each time he has to do something for the good of the Service that is going to hurt some employee or piss her off, the action now carries the additional emotional freight of a friend dicking over a friend, and frequently the administrator feels so uncomfortable over this and his divided loyalties that he has to get personally angry — or act angry — at the employee to do it, which makes the thing personal in an inappropriate way and adds greatly to the dicked-over employee’s hurt and resentment, and over time this totally undermines the administrator’s authority, and in very short order everybody sees him as a fake and a backstabber, pretending to be your friend and colleague but ready to dick you over whenever he feels like it. It’s interesting that these two false administrative styles — the tyrant and the fake friend — are also the two main stereotypes that books and television shows and comic strips present administrators as. One suspects, in fact, that the mental picture the insecure administrator erects inside himself is based partly on these pop-culture stereotypes.