‘Well, some of the same thing is at work here. In Rotes. I like it. An average 1040 takes around twenty-two minutes to go through and examine and fill out the memo on. Maybe a little longer depending on your criteria, some teams tweak the criteria. You know. But never more than half an hour. Each completed one gives you that solid little feeling.
‘The thing here is that the returns never stop. There’s always a next one to do. You never really finish. But on the other hand, it was the same with the lawn, you know? At least when it rained enough. By the time he got around to the last little section he’d marked off, the first patch would be ready to mow again. He liked a short, groomed-looking lawn. He spent a lot of time out there, come to think of it. A lot of his time.’
951876833
‘It was on either Twilight Zone or Outer Limits— one of those. A claustrophobic guy who gets worse and worse until he’s so claustrophobic that he starts screaming and carrying on, and they trundle him off to a mental asylum, and in the asylum they put him in isolation in a straitjacket in a tiny little room with a drain in the floor, a room the size of a closet, which you can see would be the worst thing possible for a claustrophobic, but they explain to him through a slit in the door that it’s the rules and procedures, that if somebody’s screaming they have to be put in isolation. Hence, the guy’s damned, he’s in there for life—because as long as he’s screaming and trying to beat himself unconscious against the wall of the room, they’re going to keep him in that little room, and as long as he’s in that little room, he’s going to be screaming, because the whole problem is that he’s a claustrophobic. He’s a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there’s going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone’s going to be in a living hell. The episode was even called “Rules and Procedures,” and none of us ever forgot it.’
987613397
‘I don’t believe I have anything to say that isn’t in the code or Manual.’
943756788
‘Mother called it being in a stare. She referred to my father in this, a habit he had in the midst of almost whatever. He was a kindly individual, a bookkeeper for the school district. Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven’t had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you’ve overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involves gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually something straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one’s concentration becomes stuck the way an auto’s wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intent concentration. And now I too do this. I find myself doing it. It’s not unpleasant, but it is strange. Something goes out of you—you can feel your face merely hanging loose, with no muscles or expression. It frightens my children, I know. As if your face, like your attention, belongs to someone else. Sometimes now in the mirror, in the bathroom, I’ll come to myself and catch myself in a stare, without any recognition. The man has been dead for twelve years now.
‘This is the new challenge of it here. From outside the examiner, there was no guarantee that anyone could distinguish the difference between doing the job well and being in what she called the stare, staring at the returns files but not engaged by them, not truly paying attention. So long as you processed your given number of returns each day for throughput, they could not be sure. Not that I did this, my being in stares occurs after the day here, or before, when preparing. But I know they would worry: Who is the good examiner, and who is fooling them, spending their day in a stare, or thinking of other things. This can happen. But now, this year, they can know, they know who is doing the job. It becomes true later, the difference. Because they now log your eventuated revenue instead of your throughput. This is the change for us. Now it is easier, we are looking for something, what will cause ER, not just how many returns can one put through. This helps us pay attention.’
984057863
‘Our house was outside of the city, off one of the blacktop roads. We had us a big dog that my daddy would keep on a chain in the front yard. A big part German shepherd. I hated the chain but we didn’t have a fence, we were right off the road there. The dog hated that chain. But he had dignity. What he’d do, he’d never go out to the length of the chain. He’d never even get out to where the chain got tight. Even if the mailman pulled up, or a salesman. Out of dignity, this dog pretended like he chose this one area to stay in that just happened to be inside the length of the chain. Nothing outside of that area right there interested him. He just had zero interest. So he never noticed the chain. He didn’t hate it. The chain. He just up and made it not relevant. Maybe he wasn’t pretending—maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world. He had a power to him. All of his life on that chain. I loved that damn dog.’
§15
An obscure but true piece of paranormal trivia: There is such a thing as a fact psychic. Sometimes in the literature also known as a data mystic, and the syndrome itself as RFI ( = Random-Fact Intuition). These subjects’ sudden flashes of insight or awareness are structurally similar to but usually far more tedious and quotidian than the dramatically relevant foreknowledge we normally conceive as ESP or precognition. This, in turn, is why the phenomenon is so little studied or publicized, and why those possessed of RFI almost universally refer to it as an affliction or disability. In what few reputable studies and monographs exist, examples nevertheless abound; indeed, abundance, together with irrelevance and the interruption of normal thought and attention, composes the essence of the RFI phenomenon. The middle name of the childhood friend of a stranger they pass in a hallway. The fact that someone they sit near in a movie was once sixteen cars behind them on I-5 near McKittrick CA on a warm, rainy October day in 1971. They come out of nowhere, are inconvenient and discomfiting like all psychic irruptions. It’s just that they’re ephemeral, useless, undramatic, distracting. What Cointreau tasted like to someone with a mild head cold on the esplanade of Vienna’s state opera house on 2 October 1874. How many people faced southeast to witness Guy Fawkes’s hanging in 1606. The number of frames in Breathless. That someone named Fangi or Fangio won the 1959 Grand Prix. The percentage of Egyptian deities that have animal faces instead of human faces. The length and average circumference of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s small intestine. The exact (not estimated) height of Mount Erebus, though not what or where Mount Erebus is.
In the case of GS-9 fact psychic Claude Sylvanshine on, say, 12 July 1981, the precise metric weight and speed of a train moving southwest through Prešov, Czechoslovakia, at the precise moment he’s supposed to be crosschecking 1099-INT receipts with the tax return of Edmund and Willa Kosice, whose home’s shutters were replaced in 1978 by someone whose wife once won three rounds of bingo in a row at St. Bridget’s Church in Troy MI, even though the Kosices’ residential address is Urbandale IA—reason for RFI incongruity unknown to Sylvanshine, for whom the factoids are just one more distraction he has to shake off in the noise and overall frenzied low morale of the Philadelphia REC. Then the Toltec god of corn, except in Toltec glyphs, so that to Sylvanshine it looks like an abstract drawing of origin unknown. The winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize in physiology slash medicine.
Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers’ seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless. The human appendix’s real reason. Norbert Wiener’s name for the little leather ball t
hat was his only friend as a sickly child. The number of blades of grass in the front lawn of one’s mailman’s home. They intrude, crash, rattle around. One reason Sylvanshine’s gaze is always so intent and discomfiting is that he’s trying to filter out all sorts of psychically intuited and intrusive facts. The amount of parenchyma in a certain fern in the waiting room of an orthodontist in Athens GA, though not and never what parenchyma might be. That the 1938 featherweight WBA champ had mild scoliosis in the region T10-12. Nor does he look it up—you don’t chase these facts down; they’re like lures that lead you nowhere. He’s learned this from hard experience. The rate in astronomical units with which System ML435 is moving away from the Milky Way. He tells no one of the intrusions. Some are connected, but rarely in any way that yields what someone with true ESP would call meaning. The metric weight of all the lint in all the pockets of everyone at the observatory in Fort Davis TX on the 1974 day when a scheduled eclipse was obscured by clouds. Perhaps one in every four thousand such facts is relevant or helpful. Most are like having someone sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in your ear while you’re trying to recite a poem for a prize. Claude Sylvanshine can’t help it. That someone he passes in the street’s great-great-great-grandmother’s baby sister who died of whooping cough in 1844’s name was Hesper. The cost, in adjusted dollars, of that obscured eclipse; the FCC broadcasting license of the Christian station the observatory’s director listened to as he drove home, where he’d find his wife frazzled and the milkman’s hat on the kitchen counter. The shape of the clouds on the afternoon two people he’s never met conceived their child, who was miscarried six weeks in. That the pioneer of pullable consumer luggage was the ex-husband of a People Express stew who’d spent over eighteen months driving himself almost insane trying to research luggage manufacturing specs and pending patent applications because he couldn’t believe no one had thought of mass-marketing this feature already. The USPTO registration number of the machine that attached the paper housing to the milkman’s hat. The average molecular weight of peat. The affliction kept a secret from everyone everywhere since fourth grade when Sylvanshine knew the name of his homeroom teacher’s husband’s first love’s childhood cat who’d lost one side’s whiskers in a mishap near the coal stove in Ashtabula OH, verified only when he wrote a little illustrated booklet and the husband saw the name and whiskerless crayon drawing of Scrapper, turned ivory white, and dreamed intensely for three nights, unknown to anyone.
The fact psychic lives part-time in the world of fractious, boiling minutiae that no one knows or could be bothered to know even if they had the chance to know. The population of Brunei. The difference between mucus and sputum. How long a piece of gum has resided on the underside of the third-row fourth-from-left seat of the Virginia Theater, Cranston RI, but not who put it there or why. Impossible to predict what facts will intrude. Constant headaches. The data sometimes visual and queerly backlit, as by an infinitely bright light an infinite distance away. The amount of undigested red meat in the colon of the average forty-three-year-old adult male resident of Ghent, Belgium, in grams. The relation between the Turkish lira and the Yugoslavian dinar. The year of death for undersea explorer William Beebe.
Tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.
§16
Lane Dean Jr. and two older examiners from a different Pod are outside one of the unalarmed door exits between Pods, on a hexagram of cement surrounded by maintained grass, watching the sun on the fallow fields just south of the REC. None of them are smoking; they’re just being outside for a bit. Lane Dean hasn’t come outside with the other two; he just happened to step out for air on the break at the same time. He’s still looking for a really desirable, diverting place to go during breaks; they’re too important. The other two guys know each other or work on the same team; they’ve come out together; one senses it’s a routine of long standing.
One of the men gives a sort of artificial-looking gap and stretch. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘Well, Midge and I went over to the Bodnars’ on Saturday. You know Hank Bodnar, from over in K-team at Capital Exams, with the glasses with the lenses that turn dark by themselves outside, what are they called.’ The man has his hands behind his back and goes up and down on his toes rapidly, like someone waiting for a bus.
‘Uh-huh.’ The other man, who’s perhaps five years younger than the man who went to the Bodnars’, is contemplating some kind of benign cyst or growth on the inside of his wrist. The heat is accumulating at mid-morning, and the electric sound of the locusts in the wild grasses rises and falls in the parts of the fields the sun is striking. Neither man has introduced himself to Lane Dean, who’s standing farther from them than they are from each other, though not so far away that he could be seen as wholly disconnected from the conversation. Maybe they’re giving him privacy because they can see he’s new and still adjusting to the unbelievable tedium of the exam job. Maybe they’re shy and awkward and not sure how to introduce themselves. Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he’d have to go into a stall in a men’s room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.
‘We were supposed to go over the weekend before, the what, the seventh that would be,’ the first man says, looking out at a vista with nothing really particular to hold the eye, ‘but our youngest had a temperature and a little bit of a sore throat, and Midge didn’t want to leave her with the sitter if she had a temperature. So she called to cancel, and Midge and Alice Bodnar worked it out so we all just moved it up a week, seven days to the day, that way it was easy to remember. You know how mama bears get when their little cubs run a temperature.’
‘Don’t have to tell me,’ Lane Dean inserts from several feet away, laughing a little too heartily. One shoe is in the shadow of the pod’s overhang and one is in the morning sun. Lane Dean is starting now to feel desperate about the fact that the break’s fifteen minutes are ticking inexorably away and he is going to have to go back in and examine returns for another two hours before the next break. There’s an empty Styrofoam cup on its side in the ashtray unit of a small waste can in the alcove. Being in a conversation makes the time pass differently; it’s not clear whether it’s better or worse. The other man is still examining his wrist’s thing, holding the forearm up like a surgeon after scrubbing. If you think of the locusts as actually screaming, the whole thing becomes much more unsettling. The normal protocol is not to hear them; they cease to register on you after a while.
‘So anyhow,’ the first examiner says. ‘We go over, have a drink. Midge and Alice Bodnar get to talking about some new drapes they’re looking at for the living room, on and on. Pretty dry stuff, wife stuff. So Hank and me end up in the den, because Hank he collects coins—seriously, he’s a serious coin collector from what I could see, not just those cardboard albums with circular holes, he really knows his business. And he wanted to show me a picture of a coin he was thinking about acquiring, for his collection.’ The other man had looked up for the first real time when the guy telling the story mentioned coin collecting, which is a hobby that to Lane Dean, as a Christian, has always seemed debased and distorted in a number of ways.
‘A nickel, I think,’ the first fellow is saying. He keeps lapsing into what seems like almost talking to himself, while the second man starts and stops examining the growth thing. You get the idea that this is the sort of interchange the two men have had on breaks for many, many years—it’s such a habit it’s not even conscious anymore. ‘Not a buffalo nickel, but some kind of five-cent piece with an alternate backing that’s well-known; I don’t know much about coins but even I’d heard of it, which means it must be pretty well-known. But I can’t think of the correct term for it.’ He laughs in a way that sounds
almost pained. ‘Right out of my head. I can’t remember it now.’
‘Alice Bodnar’s a pretty good little cook,’ the other fellow says. The plastic tabs of a light-brown clip-on tie show slightly around his shirt’s collar. The knot of the tie itself is tight as a knuckle; there’d be no way to loosen it. From where he stands, Lane Dean has a better, more circumspect view of this second examiner. The growth on the inside of his wrist is the size of a child’s nose and composed of what looks almost like horn or hard, outgrowthy material, and appears reddened and slightly inflamed, though this may be because the second fellow picks at it so much. How could one not? Lane Dean knows that he might well become sickeningly fixated on the man’s wrist’s thing if they worked at adjoining Tingles in the same Pod—trying to look at it without being observed, making resolutions not to look at it, etc. It slightly appalls him that he almost envies whoever is at that table, imagines the reddened cyst and its career as an object of distraction and attention, something to hoard the way a crow hoards shiny useless things it happens to find, even strips of aluminum foil or little bits of a locket’s broken chain. He feels an odd desire to ask the man about the growth, what is its deal, how long, etc. It’s happened, just as the man said: Lane Dean no longer needs to look at his watch on breaks. There are now six minutes left.
‘Jeez, well, there was a whole plan to poach some salmon fillets and eat out on the porch with the salmon with this special little sage glaze Midge and Alice wanted to make up and scalloped potatoes—I think scalloped; maybe you call them au gratin. And a big salad, so big you couldn’t pass the bowl around, even; it had to be on a little separate table.’
The second man is now carefully rolling his shirtsleeve down and buttoning it back over the wrist with the thing, though when he sits over returns and the sleeve pulls back slightly Dean bets that the rim of the cyst’s red penumbra will still show slightly over the cuff, and that the cuff’s movement back and forth over the growth throughout the examination day might be part of what makes it look red and sore—it might hurt in a tiny, sickening way each time the man’s cuff pulls forward or back over the little growth of horn.