The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘Hey Claude, seriously, is there some process by which you decide I want to hear aesthetic appraisals? Is there reasoning by which somewhere inside you decide this is useful data to have in Mel’s head when he starts working with these people? Don’t strain now, but think about it and sometime tell me the process by which you decide I have to wait through incidentals on dress and carriage before I hear material that’s going to help me do my job here.’

  ‘Your job, is the point. Boil it down. Reduce to fact-pattern, relevance. My job’s the raw data. Do I recall right? Was I the one who asked for the field first? Am I confused?’

  But the distressed sounds were only Reynolds trying to get under the knot with his fingers to do the top button, which he had always had trouble with. Sylvanshine waited the normal interval looking at his thumb and trying to see if he could taste any actual blood—which taste always made him think of touching a nine-volt to his tongue as a kid but the exact association evaded him—and listened to at least try to identify the gender of the ghostly conversation on the line, and finally said:

  ‘Though his secretary—one of them, he seems to have two though one might be an Admin or liaison with the Group Managers—sent a memo, it’s in Mel’s in-box, Welcome and heard some fine things from Henzke re the skill of the turnaround at 0104—that’s Philly Collections, the Auto—’

  ‘You have to tell me that, I wasn’t there?’

  ‘—Henzke re the Collections turnaround at Philly, etc., please call Mrs. Oooley—that’s the head secretary—Mrs. Oooley soonest on your arrival and processing—’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? He has to go through orientation like some turdnagel?’

  ‘I don’t have it, it’s still in Mel’s box, which by the way it’s a good in-box, same size and same row as the ADDs’ and over the GM’s although it’s got Mel’s name on tape over some other fellow’s name but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything unless it’s still like that when he comes. And I’ve got SS putting his name on his door in that one building; I gave them the stencil personally tell him, and told them about the elevator thing so it’s on the ground floor. Tell him the door’s locked and the window outside’s locked and you can’t see through but from the distance of the doors on either side tell him it seems spacious. Unfortunately nearest loo’s third floor; have him advise if we want to risk making a fuss about that, but it’s corner just as requested. No boiling down there, you know he’ll want that. Tell him the doors on either side are 15 and 16.4 and change, respectively, which is almost Philly-sized.’

  ‘You let them see you using a tape measure on the surrounding doors?’

  ‘Don’t be a maroon. I’ve got a front door key already and keys to two of the remaining four. At night before returning to field-quarters you and I need to have a good long talk about before you see it and get your shorts in a tangle. Angler’s Cove apartment complex. Enough said? Makes the first Rome apartment look lavish, to give you an—’

  ‘The memo was from the secretary or from Glendenning personally you’re saying.’

  ‘The bad news is it’s not in the main building, where Glendenning and the DDs’ officers are, whatever it’s called. They’ve got an odd nomenclature for facilities here just like Chicago.’

  ‘This is still Mel’s office you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m going right down my notes just as field protocol you might recall states and the way you did in Rome. I’m afraid it’s in the outbuilding where they do the Corporates; it’s also got the UNIVAC in there. The building’s a bit of a madhouse I’m afraid. The first floor where all the offices for the keypunch people are. You just need to get Mel ready for this so he doesn’t come and see where they put him and start shitting little green men about it.’

  ‘And you may recall initial field-briefing calls are to be ten to twelve minutes, if you’ve memorized the protocol.’ Sylvanshine knew just what Reynolds was doing physically at this minute but he couldn’t think of what the right word for it was, even to himself. Nor was he talking about losing his license in the bank’s drive-through yesterday, which really when you came down to it might be Merrill Errol Lehrl’s concern but was not Reynolds’s concern by any stretch of the imagination, though he knew what he’d say. Sometimes Sylvanshine’s thumbnails had funny little white calciumoid lines in them, sometimes they didn’t. He worried about it at odd moments, what the lines signified. Not adjusting, smoothing, smoothing his tie, which if it was Saturday would be either the light green or the light blue with the little red lozenge shapes in it, both of which were faux silk and butt-smooth at all times anyway. It was an unconscious gesture Reynolds had, and worked as a tell in cards, and Sylvanshine had sacrificed all sorts of opportunities to score off bringing it to Reynolds’s attention because he didn’t want Reynolds conscious of his unconscious gestures in any way, since reading them equaled power. In Martinsburg Sylvanshine had the bigger bedroom because the lease was in his name, but in field-quarters Reynolds always got the bigger room. This time, Angler’s Cove’s squalor aside, the bedrooms were exactly the same size, the door-distance wasn’t the only thing Claude had measured, and he knew what Reynolds’s face would do when he saw. Merrill Errol Lehrl always arranged his own quarters.

  ‘Glendenning himself sent the memo, or the secretary?’

  Sylvanshine held the thumb flat and got the overhead light on it and turned it this way and that. ‘You would not believe how hot it is here. And muggy. The air’s like somebody breathing right in your face. Philly on its worst summer day doesn’t equal. 047’s drinking fountains aren’t refrigerated; they’re low white toilet-porcelain fountains like some elementary school and the water’s room temperature, which is to say hot.’

  Reynolds exhaled so the phone transmitted the sound. ‘I apologize for the tone, Claude.’

  ‘What tone?’

  ‘All right? Happy now?’

  ‘You overestimate me, friend.’

  ‘And yes, I am your friend. We’re a team. I shouldn’t have squeezed your shoes with the underling-tone like I did. It’s high-pressure this week. I’ve had the same tension headache all week. I don’t feel well at all. And none of that’s an excuse, and I really am apologizing.’

  If there were lines they weren’t visible. ‘Secretary or head secretary sent it I’m afraid. Oooley, Carolyn or Caroline maybe. File not located, it’s not on the Support router. Crisp little woman, dry tight little face. Sweater over her shoulders like a cape. Main building’s air-conditioned out the wazoo; that’s where Exams is, so tell Mel the good news is the work environment itself is AC’d already although no halon, but the VAX room’s haloned so we can assume SS has the wherewithal; if you want I’ll call and—’

  ‘So the memo was from the secretary, not Glendenning himself.’

  ‘I’d urge Mel not to read anything into that. Glendenning’s been gone two days out of three. He’s been up to Region twice since last Wednesday.’

  ‘He’s running to Region a lot already? You wait till now to include this and when you do it’s an aside on the secretary’s sweater?’

  ‘From the way they approach her desk she’s formidable, Oooley. You know how it is in the provinces. She may dominate Glendenning; she may be the real link. Small picture of a cat on her desk, but no visible cat hair on the sweater. Odd. And glasses on a little chain around her neck, those old-fashioned little silvery chains, what’s the word. Potentially a formidable part of the equation. So far I’ve asked after the cat and given her a flower someone was selling on the median of the big road out here. To this comatose town. Tell Mel I’m working her already.’ He didn’t tell Reynolds there’d been no sign of the flower on her desk the next day.

  Letting Sylvanshine hear him breathe again—‘And did the memo specifically say heard good things from Henzke, from Bill, or from Bill Henzke?’

  ‘Just Henzke.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Other secretary or liaison or whatever’s been gone. Supposedly young and the Distric
t knockout, two separate Collections fellows told me it’s worth cooking up fallacious business and coming when Oooley’s at lunch just for the full-frontal view.’

  ‘I already apologized, Claude.’

  ‘Rosebury’s secretary’s a big sheet-white woman named Bernays. Looks the ghost of a draft horse.’

  Each Motorola mobile phone cost the Service $349 as opposed to the $380 retail and looked like an enormous walkie-talkie and weighed over two pounds and was something someone as dapper and diminutive as Reynolds Jensen Jr. looked a little silly holding.

  ‘So. Let’s sketch the week then.’ Reynolds would be able to tell Dr. Lehrl they’d talked and he’d tried if what came next week wasn’t what he wanted. Watching Reynolds try to maneuver politically was like watching a lumberjack dance, Harold Adny’d said. ‘Need cogent relevant say again cogent relevant bios, Personnel data, evals, and impressions for Examinations by the seventeenth. This is the protocol I’m reading. The crew is what? There’s Rosebury in Admin, there’s this Yeagle as GM—group size is what, twenty? Exam budget’s 2.4 times the size of Rome’s, right, so what, twenty-two?’

  ‘Twenty-four, maybe -five. There are some kind of unorthodox split-shift arrangements I haven’t gotten a fact-pattern on yet, that Glendenning apparently vetted. Glendenning’s done a lot of custom-tailoring of Exams which of course we can anticipate this will intensify. Say twenty-four to twenty-six, which doubles with then another whole twenty doing punch and sort work on cards during the Storm, though word is Glendenning’s fought hard for Service personnel instead of Storm part-timers, which is understandable given the town; it’s not like there’s a sharp talent pool out there out here.’

  ‘That’s nice data. That’s cogent.’

  ‘Say twenty-six. Contact’s been tough.’

  ‘Guarded are they?’

  ‘More like stupefied. They’re full-timers. Glazed. What’s the other word. Average burn here’s three years. Obtundated is the word. Oh’—Sylvanshine winced at forgetting this before—‘and the big one’s that Glendenning’s first big move on arrival was the elimination of first-years on Exams.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ By Service custom, graduates of the three national IRS Training Centers spent their first years assigned to Examinations, which was the most brutal and unpopular assignment in the Service. A percentage then hurried to pass their certified exams, since a GS-11 revenue agent must have a CPA, and Audits was the natural promotion out of Exams. That Glendenning had eschewed first-years in his Exams branch indicated something important, though neither of them was sure quite what. It was so important Reynolds didn’t even take time to squeeze Sylvanshine’s shoes for waiting till now to tell him. ‘Mel you know is going to want follow-up. Move that immediately to number one on next week’s protocol.’

  ‘I provisionally agree.’

  ‘Glad you agree.’

  ‘Glad you’re glad.’

  ‘Outstanding.’

  ‘Though this is pending the rest of the report, as when I get to flows and outputs.’

  ‘Outstanding. What’s the flow look like then?’

  ‘First individual Exams is one room, couple dozen desks plus Yeagle’s little frosted cubicle thing. Either the room’s symmetries are off or there are rough divisions—might be one section of 1040, one of 1040A, a smaller one for Fats the way Keene was. There’s a Corporate branch that’s a whole separate room.’

  ‘If Corporate changes over it won’t be till after, they’ve run the experiment with the DIF so—’

  ‘Hence my not mentioning it.’

  ‘If you’re cozy with Glendenning’s dry-skin lady then you must have a line on the specs.’

  ‘The specs are a mess. They’re not even on cards. They use old 904 forms I haven’t seen since the Training Center.’

  ‘Huge surprise.’

  ‘They’re all in horrible old dark-green cabinets in a basement complex even spiders would be hesitant to go into.’

  ‘But you boldly went down there with a flashlight, you want Mel to know.’

  ‘Today or tomorrow I have to get somebody in Martinsburg to input them and tabulate the mean values; the spec forms are a mess because the work’s so periodic. Underline for Mel that they get returns from both Region and the St. Louis SC with no set procedures or even rhythms that I can see.’

  ‘The trucks just back up and unload the returns you’re saying.’

  ‘So what I’ve got pending tabs—this is going to look very strange—is for the last six months a total 1,829 returns go through 047’s Exams branch per month, but that figure includes everything from individual EZs to nightmare Fats with twenty schedules each to EST-reconciliations that Rosebury lets Danmeyer hit them with in nightmarish waves quarterly.’

  ‘This is not broken down in a way that tells me anything, Claudie.’

  ‘It’s when you get here you’re going to see why. It’s Dickensian. There’s one UNIVAC terminal in the room. The kicks from Martinsburg come round on big carts pushed by cart boys like they had, then the results get slid down slides two levels down where the keypunch girls prepare the kicks back for Region and Collections. And/or Collections. And the examiners are operating with pencils and NCR adding machines some of which still have I Like Ike and the ilk stickers on them. They’ve got those angled trays or drawer things coming in at their desks from all angles like those pictures of Philly Mel had in the nightmare days. Here they get standard kicks from Martinsburg, plus ESTs, plus exam requests from CID. They do Fats that St. Louis doesn’t even bother to open they’re so fat. They do contract work for Corporate Audits when a CA goes multiyear. The whole thing’s almost Philly-grade, tell him. But this—’

  ‘1,829 by 26 by 22 workdays is what, three a day?’

  ‘3.198 a day by nine-hour shifts minus lunch minus Region average 45.6 minutes for breaks which I’ve got as seven hours 29.4 minutes so 3.2 over 7.5 is .4266 repeating 6 returns per man-hour, which for the Region is so totally average that—’

  ‘So it’s neither here nor there, as a productivity stat, which hurts our case with Glendenning maybe but also makes 047 Exams a fine test case.’

  ‘No, Reynolds. I mean totally average. The average for Region 4 for ’82, ’83, and the part of ’84 Internal’s got loads for—get this—is .42 repeating 6 returns per man-hour.’

  ‘They’re exactly average?’

  ‘And anticipating just that reaction please tell Mel I checked this twice. All off cards, flowthrough totals, performance reviews, utilizations specs. .42 repeating 6. As if—’

  ‘As if Glendenning and Rosebury and/or this Yeagle character were somehow cooking the Output books to produce an output so totally average that no one would ever suspect them of cooking the Output books.’

  ‘I’ll check it again if you like if you’ll let me take just one moment here to discuss the apartment’s water pressure and a commode with the single laziest flush I’ve seen in twelve US—’

  The tone now was of Reynolds Jensen Jr. 100 percent focused, intent, which meant that whether sitting or standing he was bent slightly forward at the waist and not blinking at all. ‘Do. Check. He’ll want you to, you—or as if somehow Glendenning’s been able to structure manpower and flow and morale in just such a way that he gets precisely the average out of Exams.’

  ‘Meaning if and when he wants it to go up he just waves his wand and presto.’

  ‘Could he be that good?’

  ‘It would make him and/or the team of him and Rosebury a genius, a Mozart of production, whose management methods, if quantified and taught or if the other District Directors convinced DC it could be taught—’

  ‘Could kill the project.’

  ‘Especially if you could see these examiners. This is not an elite force, Reynolds. Not one over a GS-11 paygrade. Tics, spasms, eccentricities. Trembling hands. They’re all in the men’s room brushing their teeth after lunch. Whole lot of brushing going on. One has a violin on his desk. No reason. Just a violin. Another has a Do
berman hand puppet on his hand without the rubber, which he talks to.’

  ‘These should all be notated, Claudie.’

  ‘These are shells of men I’m saying. If Glendenning can get any throughput he wants out of this crew… Some look catatonic. One might be an idiot savant. I haven’t seen him yet.’

  ‘None of which has to do with throughput.’

  ‘And have I mentioned the wind out here? The sound it makes through cracks near the windows? Or the heat? Or the enormous mass of these tiny cruciform rural towns with exactly one intersection that appear to consist entirely of a grain silo and a gas station with names like Arrowsmith, Anthony, Shirley, Tolono, Stayne? There’s a town called Big Thistle near here. Repeat: Big Thistle, Illinois. Hey, let’s us go over to the Big Thistle Diner and snap Fanny’s girdle. And the humidity. Towels don’t dry; your windshield gets condensation like a glass of iced tea if you run the AC on the way in. The sky the color of motel ice—no color, no depth. It’s like a bad dream. And the flatness. What’s the horizon at sea level, eighteen miles?’

  ‘Let’s stay on task, Claudie.’

  ‘He’s posted me to the second dimension, R.J.’

  ‘You were doing so well, Claudie.’

  ‘And what if I said I miss you?’

  ‘We’re not going to get into this, not—’

  ‘Because you know the way someone really old’s eyes look, with cataracts? That milky spooky anybody-home quality? Imagine a whole face like that. Philly was frenzy. This is a kind of caul of boredom. Boredom past boredom. These examiners, most—’

  ‘You realize this is good news in a way.’

  ‘Well it’s not good to look at, I can certainly—’

  ‘Has any of the demo equipment arrived?’

  ‘Glendenning’s letting them personalize their desks. Listen to music if they—not smoke at their desks, but get this: A couple of them chew tobacco at their desks.’

  ‘Where are we in terms of profiles of the actual hardware then?’

  ‘Have you by chance ever actually seen an in-use spittoon, Reynolds, because I cer—’