The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  Overall, despite comprising scarcely more than 5,750 total words, the initial recruiting presentation and processing lasted almost three hours, during which there were also several intervals when the recruiter trailed off and sat in a heavy, incongruous silence during which he may or may not have been asleep—the sunglasses made it impossible to verify. (I would later be informed that these unexplained pauses, too, were part of initial recruit screening and ‘dispositional assessment,’ that the shabby recruiting office was, in fact, under sophisticated videotape surveillance—one of the required forms had contained an ‘Authorization to Record’ buried in one of the subclause’s boilerplate, which I obviously did not notice at the time—and that our fidget- and yawn-rates and certain characteristics of posture, position, and facial expression in certain contexts would be reviewed and compared to various psychological templates and predictive formulas which the Service’s Internal Control Branch’s Personnel Division’s Recruitment and Training subdivision had developed several years prior, which is, in turn, a very long and complicated story involving the Service’s emphasis, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, on maximizing ‘throughput,’ meaning the highest possible efficiency in terms of the volume of tax returns and documents that could be processed, examined, audited, and adjusted in a given fiscal quarter. Though the Service’s concept of efficiency would undergo changes in the 1980s, as new government priorities trickled down through the Treasury and Triple-Six, with an institutional emphasis on maximizing revenue rather than throughput of returns, the emphasis at the time—meaning January 1979—required screening recruits for a set of characteristics that boiled down to an ability to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion, and absence of comprehensive info. The Service was, in the words of one of the Examinations instructors at the Indianapolis TAC, looking for ‘cogs, not spark plugs.’

  Eventually, it was beginning to get dark and to snow again by the time the recruiter announced that the process was over, and we—by this time there were perhaps five or six of us in the audience, some having drifted in during the formal presentation—were then each given a ream-sized stack of stapled packets of materials in a large blue IRS binder. The recruiter’s final instructions were that those of us who felt we were still potentially interested should go home and read these materials closely, and return the next day—which would, if I remember right, have been a Friday—for the next stage of the recruitment process.

  To be honest, I had expected to be interviewed and asked all sorts of questions about my background, experience, and direction in terms of career and commitment. I expected that they would want to verify I was serious and not just there to scam the IRS out of free tuition funding. Not surprisingly, I had expected that the Internal Revenue Service—which my father, whose job with the city had understandably involved dealings with the IRS on a variety of levels, feared and respected—would be acutely sensitive to the possibility of being scammed or conned in any way, and I remember, on the long trek in from the bus stop, that I had been apprehensive about what to say in response to tough questioning about the origin of my interest and goals. I’d been concerned about how to tell the truth without the Service’s recruiters reacting the way the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs had just recently reacted, or thinking of me in anything like the way I had thought about the Christian girl with the multifloral boots in the Lindenhurst memory already mentioned. To the best of my recollection, though, I was required to say almost nothing that first day of recruiting after the initial hello and one or two innocuous questions—as well as my name, of course. Nearly all my input was, as I’ve mentioned, in the form of forms, many of which had bar codes in the lower left corners—this detail I remember because these were the first bar codes I can remember ever being aware of in my life up to then.

  Anyhow, the recruiting office’s binder full of homework was so unbelievably dry and obscure that you essentially had to read each line several times to derive any sense of what it was trying to say. I almost couldn’t believe it. I had already gotten a taste of real accounting language from the assigned textbooks for Managerial Accounting and Auditing I, which were both just under way—when weather permitted—at DePaul, but the Service material made those textbooks look like child’s play by comparison. The largest single packet in the binder was something on low-toner Xerox called Statement of Procedural Rules, which is actually from Title 26, §601 of the Code of Federal Regulations. A ninety-five-word section of a page that I remember that I flipped to at first at random and read, just to get an idea of what I would be having to try to read and process, was ¶1910, §601.201a(1)(g), subpart xi:

  For ruling requests concerning the classification of an organization as a limited partnership where a corporation is the sole general partner, see Rev. Proc. 72–13, 1972–1 CB 735. See also Rev. Proc. 74–17, 1974–1 CB 438, and Rev. Proc. 75–16, 1975–1 CB 676. Revenue Procedure 74–17 announces certain operating rules of the Service relating to the issuance of advance ruling letters concerning the classification of organizations formed as limited partnerships. Revenue Procedure 75–16 sets forth a checklist outlining required information frequently omitted from requests for rulings relating to classification of organizations for Federal tax purposes.

  Essentially, the whole thing was like that. Nor, at the time, did I know we would have to try to practically memorize the entire 82,617-word Procedural Rules manual at the Training and Assessment Center, less for informational purposes—since every IRS examiner’s Tingle table would have the Procedural Rules included in the Internal Revenue Manual right there in the bottom-right drawer, attached with a little chain so no one could take or borrow it, as we were all supposed to have it at our Tingle at all times—but more as a type of diagnostic tool for seeing who could sit there hour after hour and apply themselves to it versus who couldn’t, which obviously bore on who could cut it at various levels of complexity and dryness (which, in turn, is why the Examinations component of the TAC’s training course was known at the TAC as ‘Camp Concentration’). My best guess at the time, sitting there in my childhood room in my father’s house in Libertyville (the dorm at DePaul still wasn’t open, as some frozen pipes had ruptured—the storm and its fallout still had much of the city paralyzed), was that requiring us to read this material was some kind of test or hurdle to help determine who was truly motivated and serious and who was just drifting around attempting to scam some easy tuition money from the government. I kept picturing the indigent character who ate all the doughnuts from that afternoon’s presentation lying in a cardboard appliance box in an alley, reading a page of the packet and then setting it afire to provide light for reading the next page. In a certain way, I think that that was essentially what I was doing, too—I had to blow off nearly all my next day’s accounting class assignments in order to stay up nearly all night getting through the Service material. It didn’t feel feckless, though it also didn’t feel especially romantic or heroic. It was more as if I simply had to make a choice of what was more important.

  I read more or less the whole thing. I won’t even say how many words in toto. It took until almost 5:00 A.M. At the very back—not all the way, but tucked between two pages of the transcript of a 1966 USTC case called Uinta Livestock Corporation v. U.S. near the back of the binder—were a couple of more forms to fill out, which reinforced my assumption that it really had been a kind of test to see if we were committed and interested enough to nut up and plow all the way through. I can’t say I read everything carefully, of course. One of the few packets that wasn’t totally eye-glazing was a rundown on the IRS Training and Assessment Centers and on the various types of entry-level posts available to recruits who came out of the TAC course with various levels of education and incentive packages. There were two IRS Training and Assessment Centers, in Indianapolis and Columbus OH, about which the packet had photos and regulations but nothing specific on what the training was actually like. As usually happens with photocopied photos,
the images were mostly black masses with some indistinct white blobs; you couldn’t really make out what was going on. Unlike the present day, the protocol in that era was that if you wanted a serious career in the Service, with a contract and civil service rank above GS-9, you had to go through a TAC course, which lasted twelve weeks. You also had to join the Treasury Employees union, although info on that criterion was not included in the packet. Otherwise you were, in essence, a temporary or seasonal worker, which the Service uses a lot of, especially in the lower levels of Returns Processing and Exams. I remember that the Post List’s representation of the Service’s structure was much simpler and less comprehensive than the recruiter’s presentation’s diagram, although this one also had a lot of asterisks and single and double lines connecting various parts of the page’s grid, and the legend for these marks had been half cut off due to someone having xeroxed the thing at an angle. In that era, the six main nodes or Service branches consisted of Administration, Returns Processing, Compliance, Collections, Internal Control, Support Services, and something called Technical Branch, which was the only branch with the actual word Branch in its name on the diagram, which at the time I found curious. Each branch then branched into several subordinate divisions—thirty-six divisions in all, though in today’s Service there are now forty-eight separate divisions, some with cross-coordinated and overlapping functions which have to be streamlined and overseen by the Divisional Liaison Division, which is itself—somewhat confusingly—a division of both the Administration and Internal Control Branches. Each division then also comprised numerous subdivisions, some of whose typeface got extremely small and hard to read. The Compliance Branch’s Examinations Division, for example, comprised positions—though only those postings marked in italic font (which was practically impossible to make out on the Xerox) required a federal contract or TAC course—in clerical, cart, data entry, data processing, classification, correspondence, district office interface, regional office interface, duplicating services, procurement, research audit interface, secretarial, personnel, service center interface, computer center interface, and so forth, as well as formal ‘rote examiner’ posts grouped (in that era, though here at the Midwest REC now the group characterizations are quite a bit different) by the types of returns one specialized in, encoded on the diagram as 1040, 1040A, 1041, EST, and ‘Fats,’ which refers to a complex 1040 with more than four schedules or attachments. Also, corporate 1120 and 1120S tax returns are examined by special examiners known in Exams as ‘immersives,’ which the recruiting page did not include information on, as immersive exams are conducted by special elite, highly trained examiners who have their own special section of the REC facility.

  Anyhow, as I still can recall, the obvious idea was that anyone who was truly serious would make their best attempt to read the whole contents of the binder, would see and complete the relevant portions of the forms at the back, and then would make the effort to somehow commute back in, weather permitting, to the West Taylor recruiting station the next day by 9:00 A.M. for something which the final sheet termed ‘advanced processing.’ It also snowed all night again, though not as heavily, and by 4:00 A.M. you could hear the terrible sound of the City of Libertyville’s plows scraping the street’s concrete raw outside my childhood room’s window—also, the bird-sounds at sunrise were incredible, causing lights in some of the other houses along our street to come on in irritation—and the CTA was still only running a staggered schedule. Still, even given the rush of commuters at that time of day and the rigors of the trek in from Grant Park, I arrived back at the storefront recruiting station no later than 9:20 A.M. (albeit covered with snow again), to find no one else there from the prior day except the same Service recruiter, looking even more exhausted and disheveled, who, when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I’d plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.

  §23

  Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood. The complex regret. One or two, the most alive, looked better in an objectless way. Many others looked blank as the faces on coins. At the edges were office workers bustling at the endless small tasks involved in mailing, filing, sorting, their faces blankly avid, filled with the mindless energy you see in bugs, weeds, birds. The dream seemed to take hours, but when I’d come awake Superman’s arms (the clock was a gift) would be in the same position as the last time I looked.

  This dream was my psyche teaching me about boredom. I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot. I was a fretful, nervous, anxious, worried boy. These were my parents’ words, and they became mine. Wet distended Sunday afternoons, while my mother and brother were at a recital and my father lay asleep on the couch in front of a Bengals game, with the libretto to Norma open on his chest, I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. I do not recall the things I worried about, but I remember the feeling, and it was an anxiety whose lack of a proper object is what made it horrible, free-floating. I’d look out the window and see the glass instead of anything past it. I’d think of the sorts of small games and toys and developmental projects my mother always suggested and within the boredom not only find them unappealing but be unable to imagine how anyone anywhere could possibly have the mindless energy to undertake any sort of child’s amusements, or sit still in the silence long enough to read a picture book—the whole world was torpid, enervated, worry-logged. My parents’ words and feelings became my own, as I took on the responsibilities of my role in the family drama, the nervous delicate son, object of my mother’s concern, as my brother was the gifted, driven son whose piano filled the house after school and kept the twilight outside the windows where it belonged. In psychotherapy after the incident with my own son, I free-associated my way into recalling a Great Books presentation on Achilles and Hector in the eleventh grade, and I remembered realizing vividly that my family was Achilles, that my brother was Achilles’ shield and I the family’s heel, the part of the family my mother held tight to and made undivine, and that the recognition had come in the middle of my speech and left again so fast I’d not had time to grab it, though I did for much of my adolescence and early adulthood conceive of myself in terms of a heel or foot—my internal remonstrances often took the form of calling myself a ‘heel,’ for example, and it was true that people’s feet, shoes, socks, and ankles were often the first things about them I noticed. Just as my father was the beaten but obdurate warrior—ground down every day in a campaign whose pointlessness was part of its corrosive power. My mother’s role in the Achilles corpus remains unclear. I’m not sure, either, whether as a child my brother was conscious of the fact that his afternoon practice always coincided with my father’s return home; in some respects I think my brother’s whole piano career was designed around this requirement that there be light and music at 5:42 for my father’s reentry, that in a way his life depended on it—every evening he made the opposite transition from that of the sun, death to life.

  It is not surprising that I had trouble in grammar school, with its rows of empty faces and shadowless lights and wire mesh in the windows and a regimentation to primary education that still held on in the Midwest—memorization and regurgitation, tables, prescriptive grammar and diagrams of sentences, the only decorations the alphabet in construction paper on a cork guilloche that ran above the blackboard. Each classroom contained thirty student desks in five rows of six; each had flooring of white tile with insubstantial cloud-shapes of brown and gray that were discontinuous because whoever laid the tile didn’t bother to match the patterns. Each room had a wall clock, manufactured by Benrus, with no second hand and a minute hand whose movements were discrete clicks instead of silent con
tinuous clicks; the system of clocks was wired to the school’s bell, which sounded at 55 past the hour, again at 00, and in a somehow more dire way at 02, signaling tardiness and interrupting each instructor’s opening remarks. The school smelled of adhesive paste, rubber boots, sour cafeteria food, and a warm biotic odor of many bodies and the fixative of the tile floor as three hundred mammals slowly warmed the rooms throughout the day. Most of the teachers were sexless females, old (meaning older than my mother) and severe but not unkind, with a small dilution of younger males—one, in fourth-grade Mathematics, with the actual name Mr. Goodnature—drawn to teach children by the vague political idealism then just beginning to build (unknown to me) on college campuses far beyond my world. The young men were the worst, some actual martinets, depressed and bitter, because the idealism that had brought them to us was no match for the petrified bureaucracy of the Columbus School System or the listless passivity of children they’d dreamed of inspiring (read, indoctrinating) to a soft liberalism (peace was a big word with these men) that would replicate and flatter their own, children who were instead locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to.