The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  On one level, I’m fairly sure that it was on WBBM-AM—a very dry, conservative, all-news station which my father had favored, but whose weather-related cancellations reports were the most comprehensive in the area—that I first heard mention of the Service’s aggressive new recruiting-incentive program. ‘The Service’ obviously being shorthand for the Internal Revenue Service, better known to taxpayers as the IRS. But I also have a partial memory of actually first seeing an advertisement for this recruitment program in a sudden, dramatic way that now, in retrospect, seems so heavily fateful and dramatic that perhaps it is more the memory of a dream or fantasy I had at the time, which essentially consisted of me waiting in the Galaxy Mall food court area while Joyce was helping my mother negotiate another large delivery order from Fish ’n Fowl Pet Plaza. Certain elements of this memory are certainly credible. It is true that I had trouble seeing animals for sale in cages—I have always had difficulty with cages and seeing things caged—and I often did wait for my mother outside in the food court while they were in Fish ’n Fowl. I was there to help carry bags of seed in the event that delivery orders were refused or delayed on account of the severe weather, which, as many Chicagoans still recall, remained intense for quite some time, all but paralyzing the whole area. Anyhow, according to this memory, I was sitting at one of the many stylized plastic tables in the Galaxy Mall’s food court, looking absently down at the table’s pattern of star- and moon-shaped perforations, and saw, through one such perforation, a portion of the Sun-Times that someone had evidently discarded on the floor beneath the table, which was open to the Business Classified section, and the memory involves seeing this from above the table in such a way that a beam of light from the food court’s overhead lighting far above fell through one of the star-shaped perforations in the tabletop and illuminated—as if by a symbolically star-shaped spotlight or ray of light—one particular advertisement among all the page’s other ads and notices of business and career opportunities, this being a notice about the IRS’s new recruitment-incentive program under way in some sections of the country, of which the Chicagoland area was one. I’m simply mentioning this memory, whether it’s actually as credible as the more pedestrian WBBM memory or not, as another illustration of how motivationally ‘primed’ I seemed to be, in retrospect, for a career in the Service.

  The IRS recruiting station for the Chicagoland area was in a kind of temporary storefront-type office space on West Taylor Street, right near to the UIC campus where I’d spent a joyless and hypocritical 1975–76 school year, and almost across the street from the Chicago Fire Department Academy, whose apprentice firemen actually used to show up sometimes in full slicker-and-boot regalia at the Hat, where they were banned from drinks involving seltzer or carbonation of any kind—which involves a long explanation which I won’t go into here. Nor, luckily, was the podiatrist’s sign with the rotating foot visible from this side of the Kennedy Expressway. That huge, rotating foot represented one of the childish things I was anxious to put away.

  I remember the sun had finally emerged—although this later turned out to be only a temporary break or ‘eye’ in the storm system, and there was more severe winter weather on the way two days hence. There were now four or more feet of new snow on the ground, and much more in places where high-speed plows had cleared the streets and formed mammoth drifts along the sides, and you had to pass through almost a kind of tunnel or nave to get to the sidewalk itself, where you then floundered whenever you passed a property whose owner wasn’t civic-minded enough to shovel the sidewalk. I was wearing flared green corduroys whose cuffs were soon almost up around my knees, and my heavy Timberlands—which were not great on actual traction, I had discovered—were packed with snow. It was so bright that it was difficult to see. It felt almost like a polar expedition. When the sidewalks were simply too piled up, you had to try to clamber back over the drifts and walk in the street. Understandably, traffic was light. The streets were now more like canyons with sheer white sides, and the high drifts and business-district buildings beyond cast complex, flat-topped shadows that sometimes formed bar graphs you walked right across. I had been able to catch a bus transfer as far as Grant Park, but no closer. The river was frozen and piled high with snow which the plows had tried to dump there. By the way, I know that it’s doubtful that anyone outside the Chicagoland area is very interested in the great 1979 winter storm anymore, but for me it was a vivid, critical time whose memory is unusually clear and focused. To me, this remembered clarity is a further sign of the clear demarcation in my own awareness and sense of direction before and after the substitute in Advanced Tax. It wasn’t so much the rhetoric about heroism and wrangling, much of which seemed a bit over-the-top to me even then (there are limits). I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute’s diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info. This rang true to me, though on a level that I don’t think I even was fully aware existed within me.

  Anyhow, it took a while even to find it. I can remember that a few corners’ stop signs had only the polygonal sign portion visible above the drifts, and several storefronts’ doors had their mail slots frozen open and long tongues of windblown snow on their carpet. Many of the city’s maintenance and garbage trucks also had blades affixed to their grilles and were serving as extra plows as Chicago’s mayor tried to respond to the public outcry over the inefficient disposal of snow. On Balbo, there were some remains of snowmen in front yards, whose heights indicated the ages of whoever had made them. The storm had blown some of their eyes and pipes away or rearranged their features—from a distance, they looked sinister or deranged. It was very quiet, and so bright that when you closed your eyes there was only a lit-up blood-red in there. There were a few harsh sounds of snow shovels, and a high distant snarling sound that I only later remembered as being one or more snowmobiles on Roosevelt Road. Some of the yards’ snowmen wore a father’s old or cast-off business hat. One very high, clotted drift had an open umbrella visible at its top, and I recall a frightening few minutes of digging and shouting downward into the hole, because it almost looked as if a person carrying an umbrella might have gotten abruptly buried in mid-stride. But it turned out to be just an umbrella which someone had abandoned by opening it and shoving it handle-down into the snowbank, perhaps as some kind of prank or gesture to play with people’s minds.

  Anyhow, it emerged that the Service had recently instituted a program of recruiting new contract employees in much the same way as the new volunteer armed forces—with heavy advertising and inducements. There turned out to be good institutional reasons for the aggressive recruiting, only some of which had to do with competition from the private accounting sector.

  By the way, only lay and popular media refer to all IRS contract employees as ‘agents.’ Within the Service, where personnel are more often identified by the branch or division in which they’re posted, ‘agent’ usually refers to those in the Criminal Investigation Division, which is comparatively small and handles cases of tax evasion so egregious that criminal penalties more or less have to be sought in order to make an example of the TP, which is essentially designed to motivate overall compliance. (By the way, given that the federal tax system still proceeds largely on voluntary compliance, the psychology of the Service’s relation to taxpayers is complex, requiring a public impression of extreme efficiency and thoroughness, together with an aggressive system of penalties, interest, and, in extreme cases, criminal prosecution. In reality, though, Criminal Investigations is somewhat of a last resort, since criminal penalties rarely tend to yield additional revenue—a TP in prison has no income and is thus obviously not in a position to pay down his delinquency—whereas the credible threat of prosecution can function as a spur to repayment and future compliance, as well as having a motivating effect on other taxpayers considering criminal eva
sions. For the Service, in other words, ‘public relations’ is actually a vital, complex part of both mission and efficacy.) Similarly, while ‘examiner’ is often the popular term—even among some private tax professionals—for the IRS employee who conducts an audit, whether in the field or the appropriate District office, the Service’s own internal term for such a post is ‘auditor’—the term ‘examiner’ refers to an employee tasked with the actual selection of certain tax returns for audit, although he never deals with the TP directly. Examinations is, as mentioned, the responsibility of Regional Examination Centers such as Peoria’s Midwest REC. Organizationally, Examinations, Audits, and Criminal Investigation are all divisions of the IRS’s Compliance Branch. At the same time, though, it is true that certain mid-level auditors are known technically within the Service’s personnel hierarchy as ‘revenue agents.’ It’s also true that members of the Internal Inspections Division are sometimes classified as ‘agents,’ with the Inspections Division being rather like the Service’s version of law enforcement agencies’ Internal Affairs. In essence, they are tasked with investigating charges of malfeasance or criminal behavior on the part of Service employees or administration. Administratively, IID is part of the Internal Control Branch of the IRS, which also includes both the Personnel and Systems Divisions. The point, I suppose, is that, as with most large federal agencies, the structure and organization of the Service is highly complex—in fact, there are departments within the Internal Control branch tasked exclusively to studying the Service’s own organizational structure and determining ways to help maximize efficiency in terms of the Service’s mission.

  Set amid the dazzling paralysis of the Chicago Loop, the IRS recruiting station was not, at first blush, a very dramatic or compelling-looking place. There was also a US Air Force recruiting office in the same storefront, separated from the IRS’s space only by a large polyvinyl screen or shield, and the fact that the USAF office played an orchestral version of the familiar ‘Off we go into the wild blue yonder’ musical theme over and over again on a repeating track in its reception area may well have had something to do with the IRS recruiter’s problem with his head and face, which were prone to small spastic jerks and grimaces at various times, and was, at first, difficult not to stare at and to act casual in the presence of. This Service recruiter, who appeared unshaven and had a cowlick that seemed to comprise almost the whole right side of his head, also wore his sunglasses indoors, and had an involved stain on one lapel of his suit jacket, and his necktie—unless my eyes had not yet adjusted from the brilliant dazzle of floundering southwest through fallen snow all the way from the Buckingham Fountain bus stop in Grant Park—might have been an actual clip-on. On the other hand, I had melted snow up to my groin, and frozen birdseed on my down coat, as well as two different winter-weight turtlenecks on beneath that, and probably did not look very promising either. (There was obviously no way that I was going to wear any of my new Carson’s business apparel to clamber through chest-high snowdrifts.) Besides the distracting martial music from across the screen, the IRS recruiting station itself was overheated, and smelled of sour coffee and a brand of stick-style deodorant which I couldn’t place. Several empty Nesbitt’s soda cans were arranged atop an overfull wastebasket, around which a litter of balled-up papers suggested idle hours of trying to throw balled-up papers into it—a pastime I knew well from ‘studying’ at the UIC library on the evenings when the podiatrist’s sign’s foot had so ruled. I also remember an open box of doughnuts whose glaze had gone unappetizingly dull.

  Nevertheless, I wasn’t here to judge anything, nor to make hasty commitments. I was here to try to verify the seemingly almost incredible incentives for entering the Service that had been detailed by the advertisement I’d either heard or perhaps seen two days prior. It eventually emerged that the recruiter had been on duty without relief for several days because of the storm, which was probably the reason for his condition—the Service’s standards for personal appearance on-post are normally fairly stringent. When one of the city’s large, makeshift plows came by, the noise shook the storefront’s window, which faced south and was untinted—forming another possible explanation for the recruiter’s sunglasses, which I still found disconcerting. The recruiter’s desk was flanked by flags and a large easel with institutional charts and advertisements on large pieces of posterboard, and hanging slightly askew on the wall above and behind the desk was a framed print of the Internal Revenue Service seal, which, the recruiter explained, depicted the mythic hero Bellerophon slaying the Chimera, as well as the Latin motto on a long furling banner along the bottom, ‘Alicui tamen faciendum est,’ which essentially means ‘He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job.’ It turned out that, for reasons dating all the way back to the permanent institution of a federal income tax in 1913, Bellerophon was the Service’s official symbol or figure, rather the way the bald eagle is the United States as a whole’s.

  In return for a commitment of two to four years, depending on the specific incentive scheme, the Internal Revenue Service was offering up to a total of $14,450 for college or continuing technical education. That was, of course, $14,450 before applicable taxes, I remember the IRS recruiter stipulating with a smile I did not, at that point, know how to interpret. Also, by an elaborate arrangement which the recruiter highlighted for me on a fold-out document that outlined all the Service’s various incentive schedules in complex diagrams with dotted lines and extremely small type, if the continuing education led to either a CPA license or a master’s degree in the accounting or tax fields from an accredited institution, there were several grades of further inducements to extend one’s employee contract with the IRS, including an option to attend classes while posted at either a Regional Service Center or Regional Examination Center, to which the recruiter explained that newer Service personnel were commonly posted for their first several quarters after what the recruiter called ‘T and A.’ In order to qualify for the incentive package, one had to complete the twelve-week course at an IRS Training and Assessment Center, or TAC, which is what the recruiter’s rather cynical ‘T and A’ also stood for. Also, employees nearly always refer to the IRS as ‘the Service,’ and the site at which one works as their IRS ‘Post,’ and they measure time of employment not in years or months but in terms of the Service calendar’s four fiscal quarters, which correspond to the legal deadlines for mailing quarterly estimated tax, or 1040-EST, payments, the only unusual thing about which is that the second quarter runs from 15 April to 15 June, or only two months, and the fourth extends from 15 September to 15 January of the successive year—this is mainly so that the final quarter can comprise the entire taxable year through 31 December. The recruiter explained none of this in so many words at the time—much of it is just the sort of special institutional info one absorbs over time in an adult career.

  Anyhow, by this time there were also two other would-be recruits in the office, one of whom I only remember as having a brightly colored one-piece snowsuit and a somewhat low, bulging forehead. The other, older man, though, had masking or duct tape holding his battered sneakers’ soles on, and was shivering in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with temperature, and impressed me as quite probably an indigent or street person rather than a bona fide candidate for recruitment. I was trying to concentrate and study the incentive-schedule handout in my hand throughout the recruiter’s more formal introductory presentation, and as a result, I know I failed to catch certain key details. Also, though, those details were sometimes actually drowned out by the cymbals and timpanis of the Air Force theme’s crescendo portion on the screen’s other side. We three, the recruiting presentation’s audience, were in folding metal chairs arranged before his desk, which the recruiter initially stood to the side of, beside his display easel—I remember that the man with the low forehead had reversed his chair and was seated leaning forward with his hands on the chair’s back and his chin atop his knuckles, whereas the third member of our audience was eating a doughnut af
ter placing several others in side pockets of his khaki army coat. I remember the Service recruiter continually referred to an elaborate color chart or diagram that depicted the administrative structure and organization of the IRS. The depiction covered more than one chart, actually, and the recruiter—who sneezed several times without covering his nose or even averting his head, and also had more of the tiny neurological tic- or spasm-events at certain points in the unavoidably overheard ‘Off we go…’—had to keep pulling different sections of posterboard to the front of the easel, and the whole thing was so complicated, and consisted of so many branches, sub-branches, divisions, and coordinating offices and sub-offices, as well as parallel or bilateral sub-offices and technology support divisions, that it appeared impossible to comprehend even the general sense of well enough to take a real interest in, though I obviously made it a conscious point to look as attentive and engaged as possible, if only to show that I was someone who could be trained to herd and process large amounts of info. At that juncture, I was obviously unaware that initial diagnostic screening of possible recruits was already under way, and that the excessive complexity and minutiae of the recruiter’s presentation represented part of a psychological ‘dispositional assessment’ mechanism in use by the IRS’s Personnel Division since 1967. Nor did I understand, when the other potential recruit (meaning the one who wasn’t obviously just looking for a warm place off the street) began nodding off over his chair’s back at the abstruseness of the presentation, that he had effectively eliminated himself as a candidate for all but the lowest-level IRS postings. Also, there were upwards of twenty different forms to fill out, many of which were redundant—it wasn’t clear to me why one couldn’t simply fill out one copy and then xerox a number of duplicates, but I again chose to keep my own counsel and simply fill out the same essential info over and over again.