The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  Meanwhile, I was understandably tired and disoriented, and also frazzled (what today would be called ‘stressed’), and hungry, and more than a little irritated, and was seated in a recently vacated57 vinyl chair in the main waiting area, with my suitcases at my feet and dispatch case held against me in such a way as to hopefully obscure the dampness of my suit’s left side, in direct view of the desk of the DDP’s horrific secretary/receptionist, Mrs. Sloper, who on this first day gave me the exact same look of incurious distaste I would receive from her for the next thirteen months, and wore (this I sure remember) a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly. She was maybe fifty, and very thin and tendony, and had the same asymmetrical beehive coiffure as two different older females in my own family, and was made up like an embalmed clown, the stuff of nightmares. (Her face looked somehow held in place with pins.) Several times, at moments when there was enough of a gap in the mass of personnel to constitute a real line of sight, this secretary and I glanced at each other with mutual hatred and revulsion. She might actually have bared her teeth at me for an instant.58 A few of the personnel seated or standing all around the room and connected hallways were reading files or filling out forms that might conceivably have had something to do with their assigned work, but most of them were staring vacantly into space or engaged together in wandering, desultory workplace conversations, the sort (as I learned) that neither start nor ever end. I could feel my pulse in two or three pemphigoid cysts along the line of my jaw, which meant that they were going to be really nasty ones. The nightmarish secretary had a small framed workplace cartoon on her desk’s edge which featured a crude caricature of an angry face and below it the caption ‘I have got one nerve left… AND YOU’RE GETTING ON IT!,’ which some of the administrative workers at Philo High had also displayed and expected people to applaud the wittiness of.

  The fact that I was being paid for sitting here reading an insipid self-help book—my Service contract’s period of employ had legally commenced at noon—while someone else who was being paid stood in a long line of similarly paid people simply in order to find out what to do with me: It all seemed massively wasteful and inept, a prime illustration of the view held among certain members of my family that government, government bureaucracy, and government regulation constituted the most wasteful, stupid, and un-American way to do anything, from regulating the instant-coffee industry to fluoridating the water.59 At the same time, there were also flashes of anxiety that the delay and confusion might signify that the Service was considering whether to maybe disqualify and eject me based on some distorted record of allegedly unsavory behavior at the elite college I was on leave from, either with or without sirens. As every American knows, it is totally possible for contempt and anxiety to coexist in the human heart. The idea that people feel just one basic emotion at a time is a further contrivance of memoirs.

  In short, I was there in the main waiting area for what felt like a very long time, and had all sorts of rapid, fragmentary impressions and reactions, of which I will include here only a few examples. I can remember hearing one middle-aged man who sat nearby saying ‘Simmer down, boyo’ to another older man seated kitty-corner to me across the doorway to one of the hallways extending out from the waiting area, except when I looked up from the book both these men were staring straight ahead, expressionless, with no sign of anyone needing to ‘simmer down’ in any conceivable way. Emerging from one radial hallway to traverse the edge of the waiting area and down another hallway was at least one good-looking girl, whose creamy pallor and cherrywood hair drawn to a knot with a store-bought bow I saw peripherally but then when I looked directly could see only the back of (i.e., the woman) as she went down the hall. I have to confess that I’m not sure just how much detail to actually indulge in, or how to keep myself from imposing on the waiting area and various personnel a familiarity earned only later. Telling the truth is, of course, a great deal trickier than most regular people understand. One of the waiting room’s wastebaskets, I remember, contained an empty Nesbitt’s can, which I interpreted as evidence that the REC’s vending facilities might well include a Nesbitt’s machine. Like all crowded rooms in summertime, the place was hot and stuffy. The smell of the sweat from my suit was not wholly my own; my flared collar was curling up slightly at the tips.

  By this time, I had removed the mass-market paperback from my dispatch case and was reading it with partial attention—which was all that it deserved—while holding a ballpoint pen in my teeth. As I may have already mentioned in passing, the book had been given to me the day prior by an immediate relative (the same one whose wastebasket had contained the rumpled letter concerning my IRS posting from that other, less immediate relative) and was titled How to Make People Like You: An Instant Recipe for Career Success, and in essence I was ‘reading’ the book only to place certain tart, mordant margin-comments next to each bromide, cliché, or cloying bit of inauthentic pap, which meant just about every ¶. The idea was that I would mail the book back to this immediate relative a week or two hence, along with a voluble thank-you note filled with the gestures and tactics the book recommended—such as e.g. using the person’s first name over and over again, emphasizing areas of agreement and shared enthusiasm, & c.—the overwhelming sarcasm of which this relative60 would not detect until he then opened the book and saw the acerbic marginalia on every page. At school, I had once done certain freelance work for someone enrolled in an interdisciplinary course on Renaissance ‘courtesy books’ and the semiotics of etiquette, and the idea here was to allude to texts like Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman and Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son in the marginalia so as to make the implicit scorn all the more withering. It was just a fantasy, though. The truth was that I would never mail the book and note; it was a total waste of time.61

  Crowded offices’ waiting areas have their own special choreography, and I do know that at a certain further point the configuration of personnel sitting and standing around altered enough that I enjoyed a sustained line of sight, over the book, into a select bit of the inner office of the Deputy Director of Personnel,62 which office was basically a large wood-framed cubicle inset against the rear wall of the waiting area, the entrance to which was just behind and to the side of the nightmarish secretary/receptionist’s desk, from which position she easily could and (one got the sense) often did shoot out a bony lavender arm into the space of the DDP’s doorway to prevent someone from going in or even standing there knocking without her special nihil obstat. (Here being a veritable law of bureaucratic administration, it turned out: The more compassionate and effective the high-level official, the more unpleasant and Cerberusian the secretary who barred one’s access to him.) Mrs. Sloper’s desk’s multiline telephone’s handset had an attachment that let her rest it (i.e., the attachment) on her shoulder and be able still to use both hands for her secretarial tasks, without the violinish contortion of the neck required to hold a regular phone against one’s shoulder. The little curved device or attachment, which was tan plastic, turned out to have been mandated by OSHA for certain classes of federal office workers. Personally, I’d never seen such a thing before. The office door behind her, which was partly ajar, featured frosted glass on which was inscribed the name and very long, complex title of the DDP (whom most of the Angler’s Cove wigglers referred to by the facetious sobriquet of ‘Sir John Feelgood,’ which it took me several weeks to understand the Hollywood context and reference of [I detest commercial films, for the most part]). My sight line’s particular angle was through the partly open door into a wedge-shaped section of the room inside. Within this section was a view of an empty desk with a name-and-title-plate so long that it actually extended beyond the width of the desk at both sides (i.e., of the desk), and a small bowler or rounded business hat hung at a slight angle from one of these protrusive sides, its brim occluding the last several letters on the plate so that what the desk’s sign averred became:

  L. M. STECYK DEPUTY ASSIS
TANT REGIONAL COMMISSIONER FOR EXAMINATIONS—PERSON which in a very different sort of mood might have been amusing.

  To explain the context of this sight line into the office: Closest to me in terms of the personnel also sitting there waiting for something were two young unhatted males in two of a series of slightly different vinyl chairs at a slight angle to my left, both holding stacks of folders with color-coded tabs. Both seemed roughly college-age and wore short-sleeve shirts, poorly knotted ties, and tennis shoes, in contrast to the much more conventionally adult business-style dress of most of the rest of the room.63 These boys, too, were engaged in some kind of long, aimless exchange. Neither crossed his legs as he sat; both their breast pockets had arrays of identical pens. From my angle of sight, their badges reflected the overhead lights and were impossible to parse. Mine was the only luggage in our area, some of which luggage was technically encroaching on the nearer kid’s part of the room’s floor, near his off-brand sneaker; and yet neither of them seemed aware of or curious about the luggage, or me. One might normally expect a kind of instant unspoken camaraderie between younger people in a workplace crowded mostly with older adults—rather the way two unconnected black people will often go out of their way to nod at or otherwise specially acknowledge each other if everyone else around them is white—but these two acted as if someone their approximate age were not even there, even after I raised my head from How… Success twice and looked pointedly their way. It had nothing to do with the skin thing; I had a good antenna for the various ways of and motives for not being looked at. These two seemed practiced at screening out input in general, rather like commuters on subways in the larger cities of the East Coast. Their tone was very earnest. E.g.:

  ‘How can you constantly be this obtuse?’

  ‘Me, obtuse?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I’m not aware of being the least bit obtuse.’

  ‘…’64

  ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Good God.’

  … but I couldn’t determine whether it was a serious argument or just cynical collegiate titty-pinching to pass the time. At first, it seemed impossible to believe that the second kid was unaware that his protests of being unaware that he was obtuse played right into the hands of the colleague who was accusing him of obtuseness, i.e., being unaware. I was unsure whether or not to laugh, in other words. I had come to a ¶ in the book that explicitly recommended loud laughter at someone in a group’s joke as being more or less an automatic way to signal or invite inclusion in that group, at least for purposes of conversation; the crude illustration was a line drawing of someone standing just outside a group of laughing people at a cocktail party or reception (they were all holding what were either shallow snifters or badly drawn martini glasses). The turdnagels, though, never turned their heads or even acknowledged my laughter, which was definitely loud enough to be audible even against the background noise. The point here being that it was at an extension of the angle over the shoulder of the ’nagel who denied having been obtuse, more or less pretending to be looking past them at something else in the way of someone whose attempt at eye contact or some moment of camaraderie has been rebuffed, that I enjoyed a momentary view into the actual office of the DDP, in which view the desk was empty but the office was not, for before the desk one man was squatting on his haunches before a chair in which another man65 hunched forward with his66 face in his hands. The posture, together with the movement of the suit coat’s shoulders, made it pretty clear the second man was weeping. No one else among the crowds of personnel in the waiting area or standing in the lines that now extended out beyond the three narrow hallways67 into the waiting room seemed aware at that moment of this little tableau, or of the fact that the DDP’s office door was partly open. The weeper was facing away from me, for the most part,68 but the man hunkered down before him with a hand on his padded shoulder and saying something in what you could tell was a not ungentle tone had a wide soft flushed or pinkish face with lush and (I thought) incongruous sideburns, a face slightly out of date, which, when his eye caught mine (I having forgotten, in my interest, that sight lines are by definition two-way) in the same moment when the loathsome secretary, still speaking on the phone, now saw me staring past her and reached out without even having to look at the door or its knob’s position in order to pull it closed with an emphatic sound, spread (the administrator’s face did, i.e., Mr. Stecyk’s) in an involuntary expression of compassion and sympathy, an expression that seemed almost moving in its spontaneity and unself-conscious candor, which, as explained above, I was not at all used to, and which I have no idea how my own face registered my reaction to in that moment of what felt like highly charged eye contact before his stricken face was replaced with the door’s frosted glass and my own eyes dropped quickly to the book once more. I had not had my facial skin provoke such an expression before, not ever once, and it was that soft, bureaucratically mod face’s expression that kept obtruding on my mind’s eye in the darkness of the electrical closet as the Iranian Crisis’s forehead impacted my abdomen twelve times in rapid succession and then withdrew to a receptive distance that seemed, in that charged instant, much farther away than it really could have been, realistically speaking.

  §25

  ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-K
enzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page. Anand Singh closes and opens his dominant hand several times while studying a muscle in his wrist. Sandra Pounder straightens slightly and swings her head in a neck-stretching arc and leans forward again to examine a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Most sit up straight but lean forward at the waist, which reduces neck fatigue. Boris Kratz turns a page. Olive Borden raises the little hinged flag on her empty 402-C box. Ellis Ross starts to turn a page and then stops to recheck something higher up on the page. Bob McKenzie hawks mucus without looking up. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing worries his lower lip with a pen’s pocket clip. Ann Williams sniffs and turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Paul Howe opens a drawer and looks inside and closes the drawer without taking anything out. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Two walls’ paneling painted over in Baker-Miller pink. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. One Chalk per row, four rows per column, six columns. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Robert Atkins’s lips are soundlessly moving. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page with a long purple nail. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris Fogle turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Chris Acquistipace signs a Memo 20. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror. Ken Wax turns a page. Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Olive Borden stands and raises her hand with three fingers out for the cart boy. David Cusk turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Exterior temperature/humidity 96°/74%. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Bob McKenzie still hasn’t spit. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. The cart comes up the group room’s right side with its squeaky wheel. Two others in the third Chalk’s row also stand. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ann Williams turns a page.