David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Mr. Glendenning seemed not so much to subvert the stereotypes as to transcend them. His self-possession allowed him to be and act precisely as he was. What he was was a taciturn, slightly unapproachable man who took his job very seriously and required his subordinates to do the same, but he took them seriously as well, and listened to them, and thought about them both as human beings and as parts of a larger mechanism whose efficient function was his responsibility. That is, if you had a suggestion or a concern, and you decided that it merited his attention, his door was open (that is, you could make an appointment through Caroline Oooley), and he would pay attention to what you said, but whether and how he would act on what you said would depend on reflection, input from other sources, and larger considerations he was required to balance. In other words, Mr. Glendenning could listen to you because he did not suffer from the insecure belief that listening to you and taking you seriously obligated him to you in any way — whereas someone in thrall to the martinet-picture would have to treat you as unworthy of attention, and someone in thrall to the peer-picture would feel that he needed either to take your suggestion to avoid offending you, or give an exhausting explanation about why your suggestion wasn’t implementable or maybe even enter into some kind of debate about it — to avoid offending you or violating his picture of himself as the sort of administrator who would never treat a subordinate’s suggestion as unworthy of serious consideration — or get angry as a way of anesthetizing his discomfort at not welcoming the suggestion of someone he feels obligated to see as a friend and equal in every way.

Mr. Glendenning was also a man of style, the sort of man whose clothes hang on him just right even after he’s ridden in cars and sat at desks in them. All his clothes had a sort of loose but symmetrical hang to them that I associated with European clothes. He always put one hand in his hip pocket and leaned back against the lip of the counter when he drank coffee. It was, in my opinion, his most approachable posture. His face was tan and ruddy even under the fluorescents. I knew one of his daughters was a gymnast of some national repute, and sometimes he wore a tiepin or brooch or something that seemed to consist of two horizontal bars and a platinum figure bent complexly over both. Sometimes I imagined coming into the coffee room and finding Mr. Glendenning alone, leaning back against the counter, staring down into the coffee in his mug and thinking deep administrative thoughts. In my fantasy he looks tired, not haggard but careworn, weighed down by the responsibilities of his position. I come in and get some coffee and approach him, he calling me Dave and I calling him DeWitt or even D.G., which was rumored to be his nickname around other District Directors and Assistant Regional Commissioners — Mr. G is up for Regional Commissioner, is the rumor — and I ask him what’s up and he confides to me about some administrative dilemma he’s on the horns of, like how the Systems guy Lehrl’s constant reconfiguration of people’s spaces and the passages between them was a ridiculous pain in the ass and waste of time and if it were up to him he’d personally pick the officious little prick up by the scruff of the neck and put him in a box with only one or two air-holes in it and FedEx him back to Martinsburg but that Merrill Lehrl was a protégé and favorite of the Assistant Commissioner for Taxpayer Service and Returns at Triple-Six, whose other big protégé was the Midwest Region’s Regional Commissioner for Examination, who was essentially if not formally Mr. Glendenning’s immediate superior in terms of Post 047’s Corporate Examination Function and was the sort of disastrous administrator who believed in alliances and patrons and politics, and who could deny 047’s application for an additional half-shift of GS-9 examiners on a number of pretexts that would appear reasonable on paper, and only D.G. and the RCE would know it was over Merrill Lehrl, and DeWitt felt beholden to the beleaguered examiners to get them some relief and to take some time off the Return Turnaround Schedule, which two different studies indicated could be accomplished better through relief and expansion than through motivation and reconfiguration (an analysis with which Merrill Lehrl disagreed, D.G. noted wearily). In the fantasy, D.G.’s head and mine are lowered somewhat, and we speak quietly, even though no one else is in the coffee room, which smells good and has cans of fine-ground Melitta instead of the Jewel-brand white cans with the khaki lettering, and it’s then, perfectly in the context of the exact beleaguered-and-distracted-examiners problem he’s confiding to me about, that I hit D.G. with the idea of these new Hewlett-Packard document scanners and the way the software could be reconfigured to scan both returns and schedules and to apply the TCMP code to red-flag selected items, so that examiners would have only to check and verify the important red-flag items instead of wading through line after line of unimportant OK stuff in order to reach the important items. D.G. listens to me intently, respectfully, and it’s only his judiciousness and administrative professionalism that keep him from expressing on the spot the enormous acuity and potential of my suggestion, and his gratitude and care that here a GS-9 examiner has come out of nowhere and given a lateral, outside-the-box solution that will both relieve the examiners and free up D.G. to send the odious Merrill Lehrl packing.

I learned it at just twenty-one or twenty-two, at the IRS’s Regional Examination Center in Peoria, where I spent two summers as a cart boy. This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood — that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.

I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and ’85, two such men.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Toni’s mom was a bit nuts, as was her own mom, who was a notorious recluse and eccentric who lived in the Hubcap House in Peoria. Toni’s mom took up with a succession of bad-news men in the US Southwest. The last one was giving them a ride back to Peoria, where Toni’s mom had decided to return after the relationship before that one had gone bad. Blah blah. On this ride, the mom had more or less gone crazy (stopped taking her meds) and stolen the guy’s truck at a rest stop, leaving the guy behind.