The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘The common misapprehension is that a messy desk is a sign of a hard worker.’

  ‘Get over the idea that your function here is to collect and process as much information as possible.’

  ‘The whole mess and disorder of the desk on the left is, in fact, due to its excess information.’

  ‘A mess is information without value.’

  ‘The whole point of cleaning off a desk is to get rid of the information you don’t want and keep the information you do want.’

  ‘Who cares which candy wrapper is on top of which paper? Who cares which half-crumpled memo is trapped between two pages of a Revenue Ruling that pertained to a file three days back?’

  ‘Forget the idea that information is good.’

  ‘Only certain information is good.’

  ‘Certain as in some, not as in a hundred percent confirmed.’

  ‘Each file you examine in Rotes will constitute a plethora of information,’ the Personnel aide said, stressing the second syllable of plethora in a way that made Sylvanshine’s eyelids flutter.

  ‘Your job, in a sense, with each file is to separate the valuable, pertinent information from the pointless information.’

  ‘And that requires criteria.’

  ‘A procedure.’

  ‘It’s a procedure for processing information.’

  ‘You are all, if you think about it, data processors.’

  The next slide on the screen was either a foreign word or a very complex acronym, each letter in bold and also underlined.

  ‘Different groups and teams within groups are given slightly different criteria that help inform what to look for.’

  The Personnel aide was thumbing through his laminated outline.

  ‘Actually there’s another example of the information thing.’

  ‘I think they’ve got it.’ The CTO had a way of turning one foot out perpendicular to its normal direction and tapping it furiously to signal impatience.

  ‘But it’s right here under the desk thing.’

  ‘You mean the deck of cards?’

  ‘The checkout line.’

  They seemed to believe their mikes were off.

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Who’d like to hear another example illustrating the idea of collecting information versus processing data?’

  Cusk was feeling solid and confident, as he often did after a series of attacks had passed and his nervous system felt depleted and difficult to arouse. He felt that if he’d raised his hand and given an answer that turned out not to be correct it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. ‘Whatever,’ he thought. The ‘whatever’ is what he often thought when he was feeling jaunty and immune from attack. He had twice actually asked women out when in this cocky, extroverted, hydrotically secure mood, then later failed to show up or call at the appointed time. He actually considered turning around and saying something jaunty and ever so slightly flirtatious to the noisome Belgian swimsuit model—on the upswing, he now wanted people’s attention.

  At age eight, Sylvanshine had data on his father’s liver enzymes and rate of cortical atrophy, but he didn’t know what these data meant.

  ‘There you are at the market while your items are being tallied. There’s an individual price for each item, obviously. It’s often right there on the item, on an adhesive tag, sometimes with the wholesale price also coded in the corner—we can talk about that some other time. At checkout, the cashier enters the price of each grocery, adds them up, appends relevant sales taxes—not progressive, this is a current example—and arrives at a total, which you then pay. The point—which has more information, the total amount or the calculation of ten individual items, let’s say you had ten items in your cart in the example. The obvious answer is that the set of all the individual prices has much more information than the single number that’s the total. It’s just that most of the information is irrelevant. If you paid for each item individually, that would be one thing. But you don’t. The individual information of the individual price has value only in the context of the total; what the cashier is really doing is discarding information. What you arrive at the cash register with is a whole lot of information, which the cashier runs through a procedure in order to arrive at the one piece of information that’s valuable—the total, plus tax.’

  ‘Get rid of the layman’s idea that information is good. That the more information the better. The phone book has lots of information, but if you’re looking for a phone number, 99.9 percent of that information is just in the way.’

  ‘Information per se is really just a measure of disorder.’ Sylvanshine’s head popped up at this.

  ‘The point of a procedure is to process and reduce the information in your file to just the information that has value.’

  ‘There’s also the matter of using your time most efficiently. You’re not going to spend equal time on each file. You want to spend the most time on the files that look most promising in terms of yielding the most net revenue.’

  ‘Net revenue is our term for the amount of additional revenue generated by an audit less the cost of the audit.’

  ‘Under the Initiative, examiners are evaluated according to both total net revenue produced and the ratio of total additional revenue produced over total cost of additional audits ordered. Whichever is the least favorable.’

  ‘The ratio is to keep some rube from simply filling out a Memo 20 on every file that hits his Tingle in hopes of jacking up his net.’ Cusk considered: An examiner who filed no Memo 20s ever would have a ratio of 0/0 which is infinity. But the net revenue total would, he reflected, also be 0.

  ‘The point is to develop and implement procedures that let you determine as quickly as possible whether a given file merits closer examination—’

  ‘—that closer examination itself involving some type or types of procedures blended with your own creativity and instinct for smelling a rat in the woodwork—’

  ‘—although at the beginning of your service, as you’re gaining experience and honing your skills, it will be natural to rely on certain tested procedures—’

  ‘—a lot of these will vary by group or team.’

  ‘Incongruities on the Master Files, for one thing. That’s pretty obvious. Disagreement of W-2s plus 1099s with stated income. Disagreement of state return with 1040—’

  ‘But by how much? Below what floor do you simply let an incongruity go?’

  ‘These are the sorts of matters for your group orientation.’

  Sylvanshine now knew that two separate pairs of new wigglers were actually, unbeknownst to them, related, one pair through a liaison five generations ago in Utrecht.

  David Cusk was now feeling so relaxed and unafraid that he was almost getting drowsy. The two trainers sometimes established a rhythm and concert that was soothing and restful. Cusk’s tailbone was a tiny bit numb from settling back and slumping slightly in his seat, resting his elbow casually on the foldout desk, the heat of the little lamp of no more direct concern than news of the weather somewhere else.

  ‘Who has an unusually big dip in income or rise in deductions compared to previous years? These are just samples.’

  ‘A major one—who has been fruitfully audited within the past five years? This appears on some, but not all, of the Martinsburg printouts.’

  ‘—Sometimes you have to order additional specs from the Master Files.’

  ‘But be disciplined about it. Avoid the temptation to think that you always need more information. You can drown in it.’

  ‘Plus it’s expensive.’

  ‘Get to know your cart boy. Your cart boy is the GS-7 who liaisons with the examiners and the Technical Pod, where data processors can get you additional information from the Master Files if you fill out a DR-104 data requisition form.’

  ‘Not all of them are boys. “Cart boy” is just a more historical term.’

  ‘Plus cart boys are who keep the files circulating, particularly picking up files that you’ve cleared and keepi
ng your Tingle’s in-box filled.’

  ‘They do not bring refreshments or do personal errands.’

  Cusk was considering the possible advantages of being a cart boy if being an examiner turned out to be too dangerous in terms of subjecting him to attacks and making it difficult to leave the area. Cart boys sounded as if they were in more or less constant motion, and constant motion meant constant chances to nip into the restroom and check the sweat situation and wipe sweat off his forehead. On the other hand, it would probably mean a large pay cut. A small gurgling noise Cusk heard behind him at five-minute intervals was the sound of Toni Ware’s glasses’ auto-lubricant in her eyes.

  ‘You’ll meet your cart boy in your Group and Team orientations.’

  ‘Other general examples: Who’s in a largely cash business?’

  ‘Who’s got unusually high charitable deductions compared to the averages for his income level?’

  ‘Who’s getting divorced? For reasons they’ll go into if relevant to your Group, divorces tend to generate unusually high net revenue from audits.’

  ‘Partly because of liquidation of assets, partly because the proceedings often expose a great deal of the auditable situation without our having to incur the time and cost and uncovering things like hidden income.’

  ‘Who’s got unusually high depreciation write-offs that should be amortized over several years? Over 40 percent of accelerated depreciation on 1040s is illicit or at least challengeable in audit.’

  ‘These are all just small, random examples of criteria.’

  ‘You can’t use them all—you won’t be able to turn your files around fast enough.’

  ‘Some teams examine each file in the context of the two prior years’ returns. These are called interval terms. The point is to look for large dips in income or spikes in deductions.’

  ‘Intuition plays a part. You can tell something’s off. You can justify taking extra time on a file.’

  ‘This is the great advantage of human examiners. Intuition, creativity.’

  ‘Some people have a special talent for smelling a rat.’

  ‘Guessing doesn’t account for the nets of certain great examiners, some of whom are at this Post—’

  ‘A rat that’s worth pursuing.’

  10 Laws of IRS Personnel

  All GS-9 Examiners want to be GS-11 Examiners. All GS-11 Examiners want to be Auditors. All Collections want to be CID. All Auditors want to be Appeals Officers or Supervisors. All Supervisors want to be Group Managers. All CIDs want to be almost anything that doesn’t involve site surveillance. Some Appeals Officers want to be Group Managers. All Group Managers want to be Deputy District Directors, or else they dream of being Examiners again, alone at a desk with no one to bother you. All Deputy District Directors want to be District Directors—it’s the ones who tell you they don’t to watch out for. Some District Directors want to be DRECs or DRSCs or Regional Commissioners, but all these are political appointments, and the best the District Director can do is make their District’s output look really good and hope someone notices. Output is the ratio of collected tax to District expenses. It’s the District’s net profit. The Service code is very simple as the DDDs say as they circle the DD, plotting: Output or Kaput; Supply or Die; Revenue or Au Revoir. Au Revoir almost always means backwater postings.

  §29

  ‘I only have one real story about shit. But it’s a doozy.’

  ‘Why shit?’

  ‘What is it about shit? We’re repelled but fascinated.’

  ‘I’m not fascinated, I can tell you that.’

  ‘It’s like watching a car wreck, impossible to tear the eyes away.’

  ‘My fourth-grade teacher had no eyelashes. Mrs. Something.’

  ‘I mean I’m bored, too, but why shit?’

  ‘My earliest memory of shit is dog shit. Remember as a kid how potent a presence and threat dog shit was? It seemed to be all over. Every time you played outside, somebody was stepping in it, and then everything stopped and it was like, “OK, who stepped in it?” Everybody has to check their shoes, and sure enough somebody had it on their shoe.’

  ‘Embedded in the sole. In the pattern.’

  ‘Impossible to scrape off.’

  ‘New was always wet and yellow and horrible, the most horrible. But old got embedded more deeply in the sole. You had to set the shoes aside until it dried and then try to scrape out the sole’s pattern with a stick or a rusty old knife out of the garage.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘What are we supposed to see in all this? Somebody could go right by.’

  ‘But it never got all the way out. Scrape and scrape. You’d have to try and run the sole under the faucet and wet it then and try to scrape out the rest.’

  ‘The garage always had old butter knives, coffee cans full of screws and nails and little metal doodads that nobody ever even knew the function of.’

  ‘And whoever had it on their shoe, it was discovered, then that person had some kind of terrible power.’

  ‘Nobody’d have anything to do with him until he got it out.’

  ‘Instant butt. Odd man out.’

  ‘Like it was ever his fault if you were all playing football or at recess or whatever and somebody had the random misfortune to step in it. Suddenly it wasn’t that he’d stepped in shit so much as become shit.’

  ‘The way the cruelty in a group of kids swirls and shifts, at any moment you become the target, everybody constantly shifting for position all the time—now you’re the one being cruel, now you’re the target of someone else’s cruelty.’

  ‘And nothing like peeing or pooping your pants in a group playing baseball or kick the can or whatever out of excitement or a reluctance to leave the game even for a moment to turn you into the target of everyone’s scorn and ridicule. Forever after you were the kid who shit his pants playing kick the can and it took only a few tackles for everyone to know it was you and it could be years later, it could be your junior prom, and everybody still knew you as the kid who shit his pants in 1961.’

  No one said anything. The spools’ turning was the only sound. The fog made the streetlights ghostly. This was the fourth hour of a third-shift CID Surveillance on Peoria Hobby ’n Coin. There was no wind; the fog just hung there.

  ‘But a terrible power, too, as a kid, to have come into contact with shit—you were the butt, but you could repel people just by coming at them with the part that had contacted the shit; you could make them run screaming.’

  The two agents who were younger had sunglasses folded and clipped to their shirts’ necks by one arm.

  ‘Kids’ obsession with shit and dog shit and coming into contact with shit has to be connected to toilet training and their own infancy, which at this age isn’t that far behind them.’

  ‘It might have been third grade. We took a long time figuring it out, what made her eyes look piggy like that. No eyelashes. She had hair, head-hair, and eyebrows, but her eyes were piggy and lashless and blue.’

  As much as two minutes elapsed between each remark, sometimes. It was 2:10 and even the agents’ small personal movements were languid and underwater.

  ‘Which if you think about it remember in high school when guys got together the whole thing was insulting each other’s mom and saying you’d had sex with their mom and how she wasn’t any good and couldn’t get enough? What do you suppose that was all about? The sexuality of everyone’s mom becoming an issue just as everybody hits puberty.’

  ‘My shit story. Hide-and-seek, gang of neighborhood kids, twilight. I’m running for home base and trip over decorative logs somebody bordered his driveway with and went flying and put my hands out to like shield the impact and what do you suppose happens.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. Both hands first into a big new yellow steamer. Which I can still almost smell.’

  ‘Jesus not even on the shoes but the hands. The personal skin.’

  ‘You bet. I have maybe a dozen vivid, seared-in
memories of early childhood, this is one of them. The feeling, the color, the dispersal, the rising smell. I howled, screamed, and everyone of course comes running, and as soon as they see it they’re screaming and 180ing and running from me, and I’m both crying and roaring like some kind of horrible shit-monster and chasing after them, horrified and repulsed but also somehow underneath it all glorious in my role as monster, with the ability to make them all scream in terror and run for home where everybody’s porch lights are just starting to come on and the little fake lamps by their driveways are on automatic timers; it’s that time of day.’

  ‘The hands being especially close to your idea of your identity of who you are, adding to the horror. Exceeded only by the face in terms of closeness, maybe.’

  ‘There was no dog shit on my face. I held my arms out straight in front of me in order to like hold my hands as far out away from me as was humanly possible.’

  ‘That only added to the monster-aspect. Monsters almost always hold their arms out straight in front of them as they chase you. I would have run like hell.’

  ‘They did. I remember on one hand I was both screaming in horror just like they were and on the other I was roaring with monstrousness as I’d chase first one and then sort of peel off to chase somebody else. There were cicadas in the trees and they were all screaming in rhythm and somebody’s radio was on through an open window. I remember the smell coming off my hands and how they didn’t look like my hands anymore at all and feeling like how was I going to open the door without getting shit on it or even if I rang the bell. There’d be shit on my parents’ doorbell.’