The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  §26

  A word or two on the ‘phantom’ phenomenon that’s so much a part of Exams lore. Examiners’ phantoms are not the same as real ghosts. Phantom refers to a particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom. Or rather say the strain of trying to remain alert and punctilious in the face of extreme boredom can reach levels at which certain types of hallucination routinely occur.

  One such hallucination is what’s known in Exams as a visit from the phantom. Sometimes just as a visit, as in ‘You’ll have to forgive Blackwelder. He had a bit of a visit this afternoon, hence the tic.’ Though most rote examiners suffer from hallucinations at one time or another, not every examiner gets visited. Only certain psychological types. One way you know they’re not real ghosts: Every visitee’s phantom is different, but their commonality is that the phantoms are always deeply, diametrically different from the examiners they visit. This is why they’re so frightening. They tend to present as irruptions from a very rigid, disciplined type of personality’s repressed side, what analysts would maybe call a person’s shadow. Hypermasculine wigglers get visits from simpering queens in lingerie and clotted vaudevillian rouge and mascara, nancing about. Devout wigglers see demons; prudish ones see splayed harlots or priapistic gauchos. The immaculately hygienic get visits from filthy figures whose clothing jumps with fleas; the incredibly fussy and organized see whimpering wild-haired figures with strings around their fingers rummaging frantically through the Tingle’s baskets for something crucial they’ve misplaced.

  It’s not like it happens every day. Phantoms afflict mainly certain sorts. Not so true ghosts.

  Ghosts are different. Most examiners of any experience believe in the phantom; few know or believe in actual ghosts. This is understandable. Ghosts can be taken for phantoms, after all. In certain ways, phantoms serve as distracting background or camouflage from which it can be difficult to pick up the fact-pattern of actual ghosts. It’s like the old cinematic gag of someone on Halloween being visited by a real ghost and complimenting what he thinks is a kid in a really great costume.

  The truth is that there are two actual, non-hallucinatory ghosts haunting Post 047’s wiggle room. No one knows whether there are any in the Immersive Pods; those Pods are worlds unto themselves.

  The ghosts’ names are Garrity and Blumquist. Much of the following info comes after the fact from Claude Sylvanshine. Blumquist is a very bland, dull, efficient rote examiner who died at his desk unnoticed in 1980. Some of the older examiners actually worked with him in rotes in the 1970s. The other ghost is older. Meaning dating from an earlier historical period. Garrity had evidently been a line inspector for Mid West Mirror Works in the mid-twentieth century. His job was to examine each one of a certain model of decorative mirror that came off the final production line, for flaws. A flaw was usually a bubble or unevenness in the mirror’s aluminum backing that caused the reflected image to distend or distort in some way. Garrity had twenty seconds to check each mirror. Industrial psychology was a primitive discipline then, and there was little understanding of non-physical types of stress. In essence, Garrity sat on a stool next to a slow-moving belt and moved his upper body in a complex system of squares and butterfly shapes, examining his face’s reflection at very close range. He did this three times a minute, 1,440 times per day, 356 days a year, for eighteen years. Toward the end he evidently moved his body in the complex inspectorial system of squares and butterfly shapes even when he was off-duty and there were no mirrors around. In 1964 or 1965 he had apparently hanged himself from a steam pipe in what is now the north hallway off the REC Annex’s wiggle room. Among the staff at 047, only Claude Sylvanshine knows anything detailed about Garrity, whom he’s never actually seen—and then most of what Sylvanshine gets is repetitive data on Garrity’s weight, belt size, the topology of optical flaws, and the number of strokes it takes to shave with your eyes closed. Garrity is the easier of the wiggle room’s two ghosts to mistake for a phantom because he’s extremely chatty and distracting and thus is often taken by wigglers straining to maintain concentration as the yammering mind-monkey of their own personality’s dark, self-destructive side.

  Blumquist is different. When Blumquist manifests in the air near an examiner, he just basically sits with you. Silently, without moving. Only a slight translucence about Blumquist and his chair betrays anything untoward. He’s no bother. It’s not like he stares at you in an uncomfortable way. You get the sense that he just likes to be there. The sense is ever so slightly sad. He has a high forehead and mild eyes made large by his glasses. Sometimes he’s hatted; sometimes he holds the hat by the brim as he sits. Except for those examiners who spasm out at any sort of visitation—and these are the rigid, fragile ones who are ripe for phantom-visits anyhow, so it’s something of a vicious circle—except for these, most examiners accept or even like a visit from Blumquist. He has a few he seems to favor, but he is quite democratic. The wigglers find him companionable. But no one ever speaks of him.

  §27

  The Rotes orientation room was on the top floor of the REC building. You could hear the needly sounds of printers—next door was Systems. David Cusk had chosen a seat near the back below an air-conditioning vent that did not riffle the pages of his training packet and Internal Revenue Code. It was either a large room or a small auditorium. The room was brightly fluorescent-lit, and ominously warm. Industrial roller shade things were pulled over two broad sets of south windows, but you could feel the sun’s heat radiating from the shades and from the Celotex ceiling. There were fourteen new examiners in a room that sat 108, not counting the raised stage thing with the podium and rotary slide projector, which Cusk’s parents had one almost the like of.

  The Compliance Training Officer was a woman with flat hair in a tan pantsuit and flats with two separate badges on either side of the jacket. She held a clipboard to her chest and had a pointer in one hand. The room had a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard. In the room’s light her face was the color of suet. She was assisted by one of the Post’s Personnel men whose bright-blue jacket was too short and showed the bones of his wrists. There was no one within six little bolted desks of Cusk on any side, and he’d also taken off his suit coat the way three other people in the desks had. The examiners who’d just come today had their luggage stacked neatly at the back on the opposite side of the room. Cusk had two pencils in his bag, both eraserless and so deeply chewed you couldn’t tell what color they had been. He was teetering on the edge of an attack like the one in the car with the man with the horrible boiled-looking face watching him as his temperature spiked and it was all he could do not to clamber over the man and claw at the window for air. Like almost the other one only an hour later in the line for the badge, where once he had been in the line for a few minutes he was invested and couldn’t leave the line without the man in the blue jacket asking a lot of questions that other people in the line would hear and look over, and by the time he got to stand there under the two hot lights he’d done the thing of pushing the hair back off his forehead so often that the hair stood up almost straight, which he didn’t know until the ID came out all hot from the laminator and he saw the photo.

  As Cusk discovered the year his grades had jumped in high school, his chances of an attack could be minimized if he paid very close and sustained attention to whatever was going on outside him. He had an associate’s in Accounting from Elkhorn-Brodhead Community College. The problem was that at a certain level of arousal it was hard to pay attention to anything but the threat of an attack. Paying attention to anything but the fear was like hoisting something heavy with a pulley and rope—you could do it, but it took effort, and you got tired, and the minute you slipped you were back paying attention to the last thing you wanted to.

  On the whiteboard was the acronym SHEAM, which had not yet been defined. Some examiners were transferring from other posts or had been through the twelve-week IRS training courses in Indianapolis or Rottin
g Flesh LA. Their orientation was somewhere else, and shorter.

  The little desktops were bolted to the chairs’ sides and forced people to sit in a very particular way. Little flexible lamps on stalks were bolted to the side of the desktop in the place where a right-handed person needed to place his elbow in order to take notes.

  The whiteboard was rather small, and the new GS-9s had to refer to a small printed booklet for some of the diagrams that illustrated the procedures the Training Officer was explaining. Many of the diagrams were so complicated that they took more than one two-page spread and had to be continued on later pages.

  First there were several forms to fill out. An oriental man collected them. The orientation people obviously believed that training sessions worked better and were easier to attend to if the presentation wasn’t solo. This was not Cusk’s experience. His experience was that the man with the prominent wrists and Adam’s apple kept interrupting or providing unnecessary and distracting commentary. It was much easier and safer for David Cusk to pay attention to just one exterior thing at a time.

  ‘One of the things you’re going to hear a lot about is quotas. In the break rooms, the water cooler.’

  ‘The Center has no illusions about gossip and scuttlebutt.’

  ‘The older examiners like to tell tall tales about how things were in the bad old days.’

  ‘On the public level, the Service has always denied quotas as gauges of work performance.’

  ‘Because one of the things you’ll be thinking, because it’s natural, is: How will my work be evaluated? On what will my quarterly and annual performance reviews be based?’

  The gangly man wrote a question mark on the whiteboard. Cusk’s feet were hot in his dress chukkas, on one of which a scuff mark had been carefully colored in with a black pen.

  The Training Officer said, ‘Let’s say, as a hypothetical, that at one point there were quotas.’

  ‘But for what?’

  ‘In 1984, the Service processed a total of over sixty million individual 1040s. There are six Regional Service Centers and six Regional Exam Centers. Do the math.’

  ‘Well, in 1984, this Post had annual throughput of seven hundred sixty-eight thousand four hundred returns.’

  ‘That math may not appear to add up.’

  ‘That’s because it’s not sixty million divided by twelve.’

  ‘It leaves out the factor of Martinsburg.’

  Their employee handbooks contained a full-color photo of the Service’s National Computer Center in Martinsburg WV, one of whose three layers of perimeter fencing was electrified and had to have its base swept up every morning during equinoctial bird migrations.

  The problem was that the screen for the slide projector came down over the whiteboard, so that anything written on the whiteboard was obscured when a diagram or schema had to be projected. Also, the screen appeared to have something wrong with the lock on its roller mechanism and wouldn’t stay down, so that the Personnel aide had to hunch down and grasp the pull ring to keep the screen in position while keeping his shadow off the screen, which required him to practically get on his knees. The image on the slide projector’s screen was a crude map of the United States with six dots in various locales whose names were too blurred by the projector’s diffracted beam to make out. Each dot had an arrowed line that terminated at a dot just slightly in and below the middle of the Atlantic Coast. Some of the room’s new examiners were taking notes on the image, though Cusk couldn’t have guessed what the notes contained.

  ‘Let’s say a 1040 return with a claim for a refund comes into the Western Region Service Center in Ogden, Utah.’ The lady pointed to the leftmost block. The man held up a Hollerith card, whose shadow on the screen was like the most complicated domino of all time.

  One of the window shades was canted slightly in its own roller, and through the resultant gap a plane of light from the southern exposure empaled the screen’s right side. A series of black-and-white photographs began to cycle through the automated slide projector, both too quickly and too irresolute in the sun to quite parse. There appeared to be two incongruous photos of some kind of beach or lake scene, but they went past too quickly to be seen.

  ‘Of course, your own RSC is in East St. Louis,’ the man said from his place hunched down at the screen’s bottom. He had some kind of regional accent that Cusk did not recognize.

  ‘During the intensive processing season—’

  ‘Which this is the tail end of—’

  ‘The procedure is basically this. Seasonal employees remove the pre-bundled bundles of envelopes from special trucks, remove the bundling restraints, and feed the envelopes into an automated mail processor, known also as AMP, which is one of the Systems Division’s latest improvements in the speed and efficiency of returns processing, with a peak of almost thirty thousand envelopes an hour.’ A Fornix Industries advertising photo of a room-sized machine with numerous belts, blades, and lamps had already cycled past on the screen several images ago. ‘Automated AMP processes include sorting, opening with ultra-fast milling knives, coding the edges of the different returns, sorting them onto different belts on which further temporary employees open them by hand—’

  ‘The empty envelopes are then run through a special AMP candling scanner to ensure that they’re empty, a feature that has ameliorated a great many administrative problems of the past.’

  (Most of the shots just looked like a lot of people milling around a large room with a lot of bins and tables. The slides were so out of sync with the data being presented that it was impossible to pay attention to both—most of the wigglers averted their eyes from the screen.)

  ‘When the envelopes are opened, the first task is to remove all checks and money orders enclosed. These are batched, recorded, and rushed by special courier to the nearest federal depository, which in the Western Region is in Los Angeles. The returns themselves are batched according to five basic types and status.’ The man let go of the screen, which ascended with a pop that made people in the first few rows jump. The projector was still on, and a photo of several black women in horn-rim glasses keypunching data was superimposed on the Training Officer as she pointed at the codes for corporate returns, 1120; trusts and estates, 1041; partnerships, 1065; and the well-known Individual 1040 and 1040A; plus S corporations, which also filed 1120s.

  ‘Of these, you’re going to be concerned only with individual returns.’

  ‘Corporates and fiduciaries—fiduciaries are, as you know, estates and trusts—are done at the District level.’

  The Personnel man, who was trying to turn the slide projector off, said, ‘And 1040s divide into simples and Fats—Fats including schedules beyond A, B, and C, or an excess of supporting schedules or attachments or more than three total pages of Martinsburg printout.’

  ‘We haven’t yet covered the Martinsburg part of the process yet, though,’ the TO said.

  ‘The point for you is that 1040 exams are divided into rotes and Fats, and you’re tasked to rotes, which are relatively simple 1040 and 1040As, hence Rote Exams. Fats are done in Immersive Exams, which are staffed by more senior, umm, staff, which under some regional organizations also handle 1065s and 1120Ss for certain classes of S corporation.’

  The lady extended her hand in a way that signified acquiescence.

  Cusk noted that pretty much all the information the training team was offering was also in the orientation packet, although the team was presenting it in a different way. His seat was in the third row from the back and all the way to the right. His fear of an attack was considerably lessened by the fact that no one was around him or in a position to look at him closely. One or two of the new examiners toward the front were actually sitting in the planar column of sun from the damaged window shade. Cusk tried hard not to imagine how much warmer and more exposed these new hires or promotions must have felt, since he was aware that other people did not suffer from phobic anxiety about attacks, which combined with the other terms ruminative obses
sion, hyperhydrosis, and parasympathetic nervous system arousal loop in a self-diagnosis he had arrived at through scores of hours of covert research—he had even enrolled in psychology courses he had no interest in, in order to create a plausible cover for the research—in the Elkhorn-Brodhead Community College library, and an awareness of his unique anxiety was one of twenty-two identified factors that could help prime him for an attack, though not one of the really super-drive factors. The sound of the door closing behind him was what first alerted David Cusk to the fact that a change in pressure he had felt was not due to the start of the pressurized room’s AC, but to someone else having entered, though turning his head to see who had come in was a sure way to draw that person’s attention to him, which was imprudent because there was a reasonable chance that a late-arriving person would sit behind him, near the door through which he had first entered, and Cusk did not relish the thought of a person he had made eye contact with sitting behind him and possibly looking at the back of his hair, which was still suspiciously damp. Just the thought of the prospect of being looked at was enough to send a small aftershock of heat through Cusk’s body, and he could feel selected pinpricks of sweat breaking out along his hairline and just under his lower eyelid, which were the sites where sweat usually first appeared.