The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘But it was such a nice day. Hank and I were in the den, that has a set of those large types of windows that look out over part of the front lawn and the street; there were some neighborhood kids riding bicycles up and down the street and yelling and just having a hell of a time. We decided, Hank did, what the hell, it’s such a hell of a nice day, let’s see if the girls want to barbecue. So we got out Hank’s grill, a big Weber model with wheels that you could roll it out if you leaned it backwards; there were three legs but only two with wheels—you know what I’m talking about.’

  The second man leans out and spits neatly through his teeth into the grass at the edge of the hexagram. He’s maybe forty, silver hairs in the hair on the side of his head in the sun, Lane Dean can see. Lane Dean imagines running out into the field in an enormous circle, flapping his arms like Roddy McDowall.

  ‘So we did, wheeled it out,’ the first man says. ‘And barbecued the salmon instead of poaching it, though everything else was the same, and Midge and Alice talked about where they got the salad bowl, that had all these little carvings around up near the rim, the thing had to weigh five pounds. Hank grilled them on the patio, and we ate there on the porch because of the bugs.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lane Dean asks, aware of the slight edge of hysteria in his voice.

  ‘Why,’ says the first, heavier guy, ‘the sun was going down. The skeeters come down off the golf course out by Fairhaven. No way we’re going to sit out on the patio, get eaten alive. Nobody even had to say anything about it.’ The man sees Lane Dean still looking at him, his head cocked exaggeratedly in a curiosity he didn’t one bit feel.

  ‘Well, it’s a screen porch.’ The second man is looking at Lane Dean like, who is this guy?

  The man who’d eaten supper at the other people’s house laughs. ‘Best of both worlds. A screen porch.’

  ‘Unless it rains,’ the second man says. Both of them laugh ruefully.

  §17

  ‘I’d always from early on as a child I think somehow imagined Revenue men as like those certain kinds of other institutional heroes, bureaucratic, small-h heroes—like police, firemen, Social Service workers, Red Cross and VISTA people, the people who keep the records at SSI, even certain kinds of clergy and religious volunteers—trying to stitch or bandage the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, “Me-First” people are always making in the community. I mean more like police and fire department office and clerical personnel rather than the ones who everyone knows about and get in the newspaper for what they do. I don’t mean the kind of heroes that “put their lives on the line.” I suppose what I’m saying is that there are other kinds. I wanted to be one. The kind that seemed even more heroic because nobody applauded or even thought about them, or if they did it was usually as some enemy. The sort of person who’s on the Clean Up Committee instead of playing in the band at the dance or being there with the prom queen, if you know what I mean. The quiet kind who cleans up and does the dirty job. You know.’

  §18

  ‘And Desk Names are back. This is another plus under Glendenning. Nothing against the Pale King, but the consensus is that Mr. Glendenning is more agent-morale-oriented, and Desk Names are one example.’

  [Off-camera prompt.]

  ‘Well, they’re just what it says. Instead of your name. There’s a plate on your desk with your Desk Name. Your Name de Gear as they say. No more worrying some burger whose shoes you maybe have to squeeze a little bit knows your name, maybe they find out where you and your family live—don’t think this isn’t on an agent’s mind.’

  [Off-camera prompt.]

  ‘Though it’s not exactly like before the Pale King. It got out of hand, there’s no denying. There’s no obvious joke Desk Names now. Which to be honest got old fast and nobody misses; nobody wants a taxpayer thinking he’s silly. We are far from silly around here. No more Phil Mypockets or Mike Hunt or Seymour Booty. Although nobody least of all Mr. Glendenning says you can’t still use the Desk Name as a tool. In the great battle for the hearts and minds. If you’re smart, you’ll use it as a tool. We rotate; seniority chooses the plate. This quarter, my Desk Name is Eugene Fusz—you can see it right on the nameplate here. They look pretty good now. One type of tool is you use a Desk Name where the subject isn’t sure how to pronounce it. Is it like fuse, is it like fuss, is it like fuzz? The burger sure doesn’t want to offend you. Other good ones are Fuchs, Traut, Wiener, Ojerkis, Büger, Tünivich, Schoewder, Wënkopf. There’s over forty-three plates extant. La Bialle, Bouhel. Umlauts are always good; umlauts seem to drive them especially nuts. It’s just one more little off-balance tactic. Plus a small little smile on a gray day and so forth and so on. Hanratty applied for a Peanys plate for third quarter—it’s under review, Mr. Rosebury said. There’s a line, after all, under Glendenning. This is about revenue. It ain’t exactly the Chuckle Hut we’re running here.’

  §19

  ‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. I’m talking mostly about economics and business, because that’s my area.’

  ‘What do we do to stop the decline?’

  ‘I have no idea what we do. As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens’ freedom to cede their autonomy we’re now taking away their autonomy. It’s a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them. Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.’

  ‘I can see taxpayers not wanting to part with money. It’s a natural human thing. I didn’t like getting audited either. But shit, you’ve got basic facts to counterbalance that—we voted these guys in, we choose to live here, we want good roads and a good army to protect us. So you ante up.’

  ‘That’s a little simplistic.’

  ‘It seems like, suppose you’re in a lifeboat with other people and there’s only so much food, and you have to share it. You’ve only got so much and it’s got to go around, and everybody’s really hungry. Of course you want all the food; you’re starving. But so is everybody else. If you ate all the food you couldn’t live with yourself afterward.’

  ‘The others’d kill you, too.’

  ‘But the point is psychological. Of course you want it all, of course you want to keep every dime you make. But you don’t, you ante up, because it’s how things have to be for the whole lifeboat. You sort of have a duty to the others in the boat. A duty to yourself not to be the sort of person who waits till everybody is asleep and then eats all the food.’

  ‘You’re talking like a civics class.’

  ‘Which you never had, I’m betting. What are you, twenty-eight? Did your school have civics when you were a boy? Do you even know what civics is?’

  ‘It was a cold war thing they started in the schools. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Pledge of Alliance, the importance of voting.?
??

  ‘Civics is the branch of political science that quote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens.’

  ‘Duty’s kind of a harsh word. I’m not saying it’s their duty to pay their taxes. I’m just saying it doesn’t make any sense not to. Plus we catch you.’

  ‘I don’t think this will be the conversation you want to have, but if you really want my opinion I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘I think it’s no accident that civics isn’t taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.’

  ‘We’ve gotten soft, you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m saying that the sixties—which God love them did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of areas, such as race and feminism—’

  ‘Not to mention Vietnam.’

  ‘No, mention it, because here was a whole generation where most of them now for the first time questioned authority and said that their individual moral beliefs about the war outweighed their duty to go fight if their duly elected representatives told them to.’

  ‘In other words that their highest actual duty was to themselves.’

  ‘Well, but to themselves as what?’

  ‘This all seems pretty simplistic, you guys. It’s not like everybody that was protesting was doing it out of duty. It became fashionable to protest the war.’

  ‘Neither the ultimate-duty-is-to-self element nor the fashionable element is irrelevant.’

  ‘You’re saying that protesting Vietnam led to tax cheating?’

  ‘No, he’s saying it led to the sort of selfishness that has us all trying to eat all the boat’s food.’

  ‘No, but I think whatever led to it becoming actually fashionable to protest a war opened the door to what’s going to bring us down as a country. The end of the democratic experiment.’

  ‘Did I tell you he was a conservative?’

  ‘But that’s just a put-down. There are all kinds of conservatives depending on what it is they want to conserve.’

  ‘The sixties were America’s starting to decline into decadence and selfish individualism—the Me generation.’

  ‘There was more decadence in the twenties than there was in the sixties, though.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think the Constitution and Federalist Papers of this country were an incredible moral and imaginative achievement. For really the first time in a modern nation, those in power set up a system where the citizens’ power over their own government was to be a matter of substance and not mere symbolism. It was utterly priceless, and it will go down in history with Athens and the Magna Carta. The fact that it was a utopia which for two hundred years actually worked makes it beyond priceless—it’s literally a miracle. And—and now I’m speaking of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, the real church Fathers—what raised the American experiment beyond great imagination and made it very nearly work was not just these men’s intelligence but their profound moral enlightenment—their sense of civics. The fact is that they cared more about the nation and the citizens than about themselves. They could have just set America up as an oligarchy where powerful eastern industrialists and southern landowners controlled all the power and ruled with an iron hand in a glove of liberal rhetoric. Need I say Robespierre, or the Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollah? These Founding Fathers were geniuses of civic virtue. They were heroes. Most of their effort went into restraining the power of government.’

  ‘Checks and balances.’

  ‘Power to the People.’

  ‘They knew the tendency of power to corrupt—’

  ‘Jefferson supposedly boinking his own slaves and having whole litters of mulatto children.’

  ‘They believed that centralizing power in its dispersal among a concerned, educated, civic-minded electorate would ensure against America devolving into one more instance of nobles and peasants, rulers and serfs.’

  ‘An educated landowning white male electorate, we should keep in mind.’

  ‘And this is one of the paradoxes of the twentieth century with its apex in the sixties. Is it good to make things fairer and to allow the whole citizenry to vote? Yes, plainly so, in theory. And yet it’s very easy to judge ancestors through the lens of the present instead of trying to see the world as they might have seen it. The Founding Fathers’ enfranchisement of only wealthy landed educated males was designed to place power in the hands of the people most like themselves—’

  ‘Doesn’t sound all that new or experimental to me, Mr. Glendenning.’

  ‘They believed in rationality—they believed that persons of privilege, literacy, education, and moral sophistication would be able to emulate them, to make judicious and self-disciplined decisions for the good of the nation and not just to advance their own interests.’

  ‘It’s certainly an imaginative and ingenious rationalization of racism and male chauvinism, that’s for sure.’

  ‘They were heroes, and like all true heroes they were modest and didn’t regard themselves as all that exceptional. They assumed their descendants would be like them—rational, honorable, civic-minded. Men with at least as much concern for the common good as for personal advantage.’

  ‘How did we get from the sixties to this?’

  ‘And instead we get the dickless or crooked leaders we’ve got today.’

  ‘We elect what we deserve.’

  ‘But it’s something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.’

  ‘Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they’re venal and weak it’s because we are.’

  ‘I hate it when you synopsize what I’m trying to say and get it wrong, but I don’t quite know what to say. Because it’s stronger than that. I don’t think the problem is our leaders. I voted for Ford and I’ll likely vote for Bush or maybe Reagan and I’ll feel solid about my vote. But we see it here, with TPs. We’re the government, its worst face—the rapacious creditor, the stern parent.’

  ‘They hate us.’

  ‘They hate the government—we’re just the most convenient incarnation of what they hate. There’s something very curious, though, about the hatred. The government is the people, leaving aside various complications, but we split it off and pretend it’s not us; we pretend it’s some threatening Other bent on taking our freedoms, taking our money and redistributing it, legislating our morality in drugs, driving, abortion, the environment—Big Brother, the Establishment—’

  ‘The Man.’

  ‘With the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we’ve ceded to it.’

  ‘Inverting the Founding Fathers’ device of ceding political power to the people instead of the government.’

  ‘Consent of the governed.’

  ‘But it’s gone farther than that, and the sixties idea of personal freedom and appetite and moral license has something to do with it, though I’m damned if I can quite figure it out. Only that something queer is going on in terms of civics and selfishness in this country, and we here in the Service get to see it in some of its most extreme manifestations. We now, as citizens and businessmen and consumers and what-all, we expect government and law to function as our conscience.’

  ‘Isn’t that what laws are for?’

  ‘You mean our superego? In loco parentis?’

  ‘It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with the Constitution’s overestimate of individual character, and it has something to do with consumer capitalism—’

  ‘That’s pretty vague.’

  ‘It is vague. I’m not a political scientist. But it’s not vague in its consequences; the concrete reality of its consequences is what our jobs are about.’

  ‘But the Service has been around since long before the decadent sixties.
’

  ‘Let him finish.’

  ‘I think Americans in 1980 are crazy. Have gone crazy. Regressed somehow.’

  ‘The quote lack of discipline and respect for authority of the decadent seventies.’

  ‘If you don’t shut up I’m going to put you up on the roof of the elevator and you can stay there.’

  ‘It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries—we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?’

  ‘Ask not what your country can do for you…’

  ‘Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.’

  ‘It’s probably part of my naïveté that I don’t want to put the issue in political terms when it’s probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.’

  ‘You can blame some of it on corporations and advertising surely.’