The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Russell. Russell or sometimes “Russ,” though to be honest I have a marked preference for Russell. Nothing against the name Russ; I just never quite cottoned to it.’

  ‘Do you got any aspirin with you, Russell?’

  §38

  Until mid-1987, the IRS’s attempts at achieving an integrated data system were plagued with systemic bugs and problems, many of them exacerbated by Technical Branch’s attempts to economize by updating older Fornix keypunch and card-sorter equipment to handle ninety-six-column Powers cards instead of the original eighty-column Holleriths.1

  One particular bug is relevant here. The Personnel and Training Division’s COBOL-based systems had long had special trouble with what were sometimes called ‘ghost redundancies’ in the processing of employee promotions. The problem was especially acute in Examinations staffing because of the unusually high rates of turnover and promotion among REC personnel. Suppose, for example, that Mr. John Q. Doe, a GS-9 rote examiner, was promoted in grade to GS-11. The system would then generate a whole new personnel file, and thereafter would recognize two separate files for what appeared to be two separate employees, John Q. Doe GS-9 and John Q. Doe GS-11, causing extraordinary hassle and confusion for both payroll and Systems planning protocols down the line.

  As part of a multipronged debugging effort in 1984, a go to subroutine was inserted in all Personnel systems’ file sections: In cases of what appeared to be two different employees with the same name and IRS Post code, the system was now directed to recognize only the ‘John Q. Doe’ of higher GS grade.2 This led pretty much directly to the snafu at IRS Post 047 in May 1985. In effect, David F. Wallace, GS-9, age twenty, of Philo IL, did not exist; his file had been deleted, or absorbed into, that of David F. Wallace, GS-13, age thirty-nine, of Rome NY’s Northeast REC. This absorption occurred at the instant that David F. Wallace (i.e., the GS-13)’s Regional Transfer Form 140(c)-RT and posting Form 141-PO were generated, which instant two different systems administrators in the Northeast and Midwest Regions would eventually have to go back through a combined 2,110,000 lines of recorded code in order to find in order to override the go to absorption. None of this, of course, was explained in any detail to David F. Wallace (GS-9, formerly GS-13—meaning the David F. Wallace of Philo IL) until much later, after the whole administrative swivet was over and various outlandish charges had been retracted.

  The problem was not, in other words, that no one in the Midwest Regional Examination Center’s Personnel and Training office noticed that two separate David F. Wallaces were scheduled for intake and processing at the Midwest REC over two successive days. The problem was that the office’s computer system recognized, and generated a Powers card and Intake Protocol Form for, only one such David F. Wallace, whom the system further conflated into both (a) the higher-ranked employee transferring from Philadelphia and (b) the employee whose physical arrival was scheduled first in the system, this latter viz. the twenty-year-old ephebe from Philo, whom the system also listed, in a further conflation, as arriving on CT Flight 4130 from Midway (due to the ticketing and travel information generated as part of the Form 140(c)-RT’s arrival specs) rather than by Trailways bus, which was why no one was waiting to meet and transport the supposedly elite and valuable David F. Wallace at the Peoria bus terminal on 15 May, and why the second (i.e., the ‘real’) David F. Wallace, who arrived at the REC by ordinary commercial taxi the following day—which taxi this other, older David Wallace was evidently so meek and passive that it didn’t even register on his consciousness that there’d been some foul-up in REC transport, that his rank and value merited a special pickup with his name on a cardboard sign, or even that he should at least get a receipt from the taxi driver so that he could apply for reimbursement, and who furthermore arrived for permanent transfer and a complete change in residence with (rather incredibly) his entire life contained in only one carry-on bag—why that older, elite, highly valued David F. Wallace spent almost two full working days with his Xerox copies of the Forms 141 and chintzy brown suitcase in first the lines for the GS-13 Intake Station and then Problem Resolution desks in the REC’s main building’s lobby, then sitting in a corner of the lobby itself, then in the Security offices off Level 2’s3 southeast corridor, sitting there with his neotenous face blank and his hat in his lap, unable to proceed, since of course the bureaucracy’s computer system had him listed as already having gone through Intake and received his Post 047 ID and badge—in which case where were his badge and ID, a Security part-timer kept asking him, over again each time he checked the system, and if he hadn’t lost them then why couldn’t he produce them? and so on and so forth.4

  At the IRS’s National Computer Center in Martinsburg WV,5 the ‘ghost conflation’ problem for employees with identical names had been recognized as early as December 1984—thanks mainly to a hideous mess involving two separate Mary A. Taylors at the Southeast Regional Service Center in Atlanta—and Technical Branch programmers were already in the process of inserting a block and reset sub-subroutine that overrode the go to subroutine for the thirty-two most common surnames in the United States: viz., Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, & c. But Wallace was, according to 1980 US Census figures,6 only the 104th most common American surname, way down the list between Sullivan and Cole; and any override of go to that countenanced more than thirty-two surnames ran a statistically significant risk of reintroducing the original ‘ghost redundancy’ problem. In short, the name David F. Wallace fell in that statistical middle area where the original debugging’s consequent ‘ghost conflation’ bug could still cause significant problems and woe, especially for any employee too new to understand why or whence these accusations of everything from contractual fraud to ‘impersonation of an immersive’ (that latter an unprecedented charge that may well have been simply made up out of whole cloth by Dick Tate’s hatchet men as a way of deflecting what at one point they feared might be construed as negligence or administrative error on the part of REC Personnel, a fear that even Mr. Stecyk, the DDP, conceded was simply bureaucratic paranoia, once the ‘unreal’ David Wallace [i.e., the author]7 had gotten in to see him and more or less thrown himself on his mercy).

  §39

  GS-9 Claude Sylvanshine, back in the Martinsburg Systems compound as part of the April run-up to his advance work at the Midwest REC, went twice into the directed-input tank and tried, under Reynolds’s audio supervision, running RFA1 on Post 047’s top brass, the first of which RFA sessions yielded some fruit. Sylvanshine got interpretable fact-sets on DeWitt Glendenning Jr.’s pathological hatred of mosquitoes born of his Tidewater childhood, his failed attempt to become a US Army Ranger in 1943, his violent allergy to shellfish, his evident belief that his genitals were somehow malformed, his run-in with the dreaded Internal Inspections Division while a District Audit Director in Cabin John MD, parts of the home and/or office address of his psychiatrist in suburban Joliet, his memorization of the birthday of every last member of the Midwest Regional Commissioner’s family, and a great deal of esoterica about home furniture-construction and -refinishing and power tools that led to an abrupt SDI2 into certain specs surrounding a male adult’s severed thumb. This leading some in Systems to conclude that current Midwest REC Director and Regional toady DeWitt ‘Dwitt’ Glendenning had lost or would shortly lose a thumb in some type of home woodworking accident, and to tailor certain plans and expectations around this fact.

  The truth—which Claude Sylvanshine will and can never know despite the repeated column of figures on both the aerodynamics of arterial blood and the rates at which a 1420-rpm standing band-saw blade can cut through the various conic sections of a human hand of certain mass and angle—is that an adult severed thumb’s factual relevance was actually to the life and psyche of Leonard Stecyk, Post 047’s DDP, who as a practical matter undertook to do not only his own work but much of his superior’s. The severed-thum
b incident figures in the psychic development that transformed L. M. Stecyk into one of the most brilliant and able Service administrators in the Region, though the thumb incident is by now buried deep in Mr. Stecyk’s unconscious, his conscious life dominated by the REC’s Personnel office and by issues surrounding the gathering storms in both Systems and Compliance.

  The incident itself is not immediately relevant and so can be recounted quite fast. For reasons now lost in the administrative mists, Industrial Arts was then required of male tenth-graders across the upper Midwest, giving the Vocational Ed pupils a last chance to savage and torment the College Prep boys from whom they’d been (in Michigan) split off the previous year. And Leonard Stecyk had an especially hard time of it in Mr. Ingle’s third-hour Industrial Arts class at Charles E. Potter High School in the autumn of 1969. It was not just that at almost sixteen Stecyk was 5' 1" and 105 pounds soaking wet, which he was (soaking wet) when the boys in his PE class’s shower all urinated on him after knocking him to the tile floor, which ritual they called a Stecyk Special—he ending up the only boy in the history of Grand Rapids to carry an umbrella into a school’s showers. Nor was it a matter just of the special OSHA-approved safety goggles and special homemade carpenter’s apron inscribed in Palmer cursive with LEN’S THE NAME; WOOD’S THE GAME that he wore to class. Nor that third-hour IA featured two separate future convicted felons, one of whom had already served a week’s suspension for heating an ingot of cast iron red-hot with an acetylene torch, waiting just until the last color had vanished from it, and then casually asking Stecyk to go bring him that one ingot over by the scroll saw real quick. The real problem was practical: Leonard turned out to have no talent or affinity whatsoever for Industrial Arts, whether it came to basic dynamics or welding, rudimentary construction or custom carpentry. True, the kid’s drafting and measurement specs were, Mr. Ingle admitted, exceptionally (almost effeminately, he felt) neat and precise. It was with actual projects and operations of the machinery that Stecyk was terrible, whether it was cutting to an angle, following a pre-drawn jig, or even sanding smooth the base of the special pinewood cigar box that Mr. Ingle (who liked cigars) forced all the pupils to make for their fathers, but on which Stecyk’s apparently loose or insufficiently masculine grip caused the belt-sander to shoot the box like a piece of ordnance across the Industrial Arts classroom, where it exploded against the cement wall not ten feet from the head of Mr. Ingle, who told Stecyk (whom he despised without guilt or reservation) that the only reason he didn’t force him and his little apron over to Home Economics with the girls was that he’d probably burn the whole everloving school down! at which some of the larger and crueler tenth-grade boys (one of whom would be expelled the following autumn for not only bringing a USFWS bear trap onto school property but going so far as to open and set it—the dagger-sharp spring-loaded trap—outside the door to the vice principal’s office, where it had to be deactivated with the pole of a custodian’s push broom, which it snapped with a sound that caused students in classrooms all up and down the hall to duck and cover) actually pointed directly at Stecyk as they laughed.

  On the other hand, it’s possible that the severed-thumb incident did not so much actually change or shape Leonard Stecyk’s character as alter his own perspectives on it (if any), as well as others’ perceptions of him. As most adults know, the distinctions between one’s essential character and value and people’s perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence. There is also the fact that a certain amount of situational setup and context to the incident Leonard Stecyk no longer recalls, not even in dreams or peripheral flashes. It had to do with cutting a sheet of drywall into lathes or strips for some kind of reinforcement involving the framing and hanging of a door in an interior wall. The band saw was set in a broad metal table with gauges and calibrated clamps to hold what you were cutting just so while you pushed the piece carefully along the smooth surface so that the band saw’s high-speed blade cut along the pencil line you’d drawn after measuring at least twice. There were, of course, detailed safety procedures as codified by Mr. Ingle in both the mimeographed Shop Rules and several stenciled all-cap signs on and around the band saw’s rear housing, which procedures Leonard Stecyk had not only memorized but tried helpfully to point out some instances of typos or ambiguous phrasing in the terse imperatives of, which had caused one side of Mr. Ingle’s big face to start jumping and crinkling involuntarily, a notorious sign that the man was just barely keeping his temper under control. The reality behind the surfeit of signs and yellow caution lines painted on the shop room floor was that Mr. Ingle operated under great felt pressure and constant borderline frustration and rage, since it was his responsibility if anybody got hurt, and yet at the same time many of the kids in the classes were either inept effeminate ‘mathlete’ pansies like Stecyk and Moss here or else long-haired delinquents in army coats that sometimes came to class smelling of marijuana and peppermint schnapps, and screwed around with rules and equipment they didn’t have the sense to respect the dangerousness of, including standing around watching within the clearly marked yellow line to the side of the band saw and its unshielded blade despite the clearly painted instructions on both machine and floor to STAY BEHIND LINE WHEN IN OPERATION, where all it would then take is a careless shove or even gesture where you waved one of your arms around when standing in the unauthorized side area; and in illustrating this at the top of his lungs for maybe the fifth time this quarter as the sad excuse for kids stood at the yellow line and watched him exaggerate a childish gesture, his right hand inadvertently made contact with the blade of the band saw, which just as quickly as Mr. Ingle had promised it could, took off his thumb and the surrounding material from the interdigital webbing down to the abductor pollicis longus tendon, also opening the radial artery, which caused a tremendous fan of blood-spatter as Mr. Ingle brought the red thing to his chest and toppled sideways, gray with shock and the paralytic reflexes of trauma. As was more or less everyone else in the class—gray-faced, openmouthed—watching from the yellow line as blood from the radial and also first volar metacarpal arteries shot rhythmically up and out and spattered even some of the taller boys’ khaki coats and the control panel of the drill press against which they bumped as they stepped reflexively back. This was not the slow welling of a skinned knuckle or the trickle of a punched nose. This was arterial blood under great systolic pressure, which shot up and fanned out from where the teacher knelt cradling the hand against his chest with the other hand and staring at the phalanx of boys, mouthing something that could not be heard over the band saw’s A# scream, some of the College Prep boys’ faces also distended in screams which could be seen but not heard, a few others at the extreme back peeling off around the drill press’s clamps and running for the classroom door with their arms up and hands waving in the universal movement of blind panic, the rest splayed against the nearest peer or machine with their eyes wide and minds in deep neutral.

  … All but little Leonard Stecyk, who after only the briefest neural pause moved forward, quickly and decisively, came out around the group’s flank, punching at the band saw’s double-marked Power button with the heel of his bandaged hand as he swept around the back of the machine, looking neither right nor left in his apron and pressed white shirt, elbowing aside a large boy in a paisley headband who stood with his Keds’ soles in human blood—a boy who only days before had menaced Stecyk with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs behind the lathe’s peg-board tool display—and seemed instantly to be at the side of Mr. Ingle, implementing the first rule of on-site treatment for hemorrhagic trauma, which was simultaneously to elevate the wound and to identify the severity of the trauma using the five-point Ames Scale from Cherry Ames RN’s 1962 First Aid for Industrial Injury, which Stecyk had checked out of the public library as part of his standard preparation for the Autumn ’69 class schedule. Stecyk simply lifted the hand as high as he could, to about eye level, while Mr. Ingle knelt hunched and slumped be
neath it. It cannot be overstressed how fast this all was happening. The thumb and surrounding base tissues were not completely detached but hung by a flap of dermis such that Mr. Ingle’s thumb itself pointed straight down in a parody of imperial judgment as Stecyk, ignoring both the blood and the high-pitched diminutives for ‘Mother’ that began to be audible as the band saw cycled down, removed with one hand first his slacks’ belt and then the metric-conversion ruler he carried in a special narrow pocket of the carpenter’s apron Mr. Ingle had ridiculed and—after running mentally through the protocols and determining à la Cherry Ames RN that digital pressure around the wrist did not alone control the bleeding—fashioned a deft two-knot tourniquet (w/just a hint of Edwardian flourish to the top’s four-loop bow, which was even more amazing given that Stecyk constructed the special knot with slippery scarlet hands that also supported a man’s half-fainting weight) that stanched the flow with only one and a half turns of the ruler, such was the memorized precision with which Stecyk had placed the tourniquet just at the crucial branch between the forearm’s ulnar and radial arteries. In the belling stillness after the saw’s blade stopped you could now hear the sounds of the pneumatic jack from the Intro Auto Mechanics classroom next door. It was also now, with the spray’s cessation, that Mr. Ingle lost consciousness, so that the last sight some of the taller boys at the flanks had was Stecyk cupping Mr. Ingle’s skull at the back like a child’s and gently lowering him—it, the big man’s head—to the floor with one hand while the other held the tourniquet in place at the upraised wrist, there being something both dancerly and maternal and yet not one bit girlish about the sight that reverberated within the souls of a few in strange ways for days and even weeks after they were shouldered aside and told to break it up and give the man some air by the Auto Mechanics and Appliance Repair teachers, who also were brisk and adultly unfrozen but did not try to move Len aside or ask the Home Ec aide to shoo him outside with all the others and their red footprints but rather stood like subalterns at either side of the man’s upraised arm with pendent thumb, awaiting instructions from the boy on whether they should wait for the ambulance or maybe try and put Mr. Ingle in one of their cheap but faultlessly tuned cars and rush him right to Calvin, speaking to Stecyk as more of a peer and being spoken to in return without deference or hesitation.