The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  Mr. Glendenning seemed not so much to subvert the stereotypes as to transcend them. His self-possession allowed him to be and act precisely as he was. What he was was a taciturn, slightly unapproachable man who took his job very seriously and required his subordinates to do the same, but he took them seriously as well, and listened to them, and thought about them both as human beings and as parts of a larger mechanism whose efficient function was his responsibility. That is, if you had a suggestion or a concern, and you decided that it merited his attention, his door was open (that is, you could make an appointment through Caroline Oooley), and he would pay attention to what you said, but whether and how he would act on what you said would depend on reflection, input from other sources, and larger considerations he was required to balance. In other words, Mr. Glendenning could listen to you because he did not suffer from the insecure belief that listening to you and taking you seriously obligated him to you in any way—whereas someone in thrall to the martinet-picture would have to treat you as unworthy of attention, and someone in thrall to the peer-picture would feel that he needed either to take your suggestion to avoid offending you, or give an exhausting explanation about why your suggestion wasn’t implementable or maybe even enter into some kind of debate about it—to avoid offending you or violating his picture of himself as the sort of administrator who would never treat a subordinate’s suggestion as unworthy of serious consideration—or get angry as a way of anesthetizing his discomfort at not welcoming the suggestion of someone he feels obligated to see as a friend and equal in every way.

  Mr. Glendenning was also a man of style, the sort of man whose clothes hang on him just right even after he’s ridden in cars and sat at desks in them. All his clothes had a sort of loose but symmetrical hang to them that I associated with European clothes. He always put one hand in his hip pocket and leaned back against the lip of the counter when he drank coffee. It was, in my opinion, his most approachable posture. His face was tan and ruddy even under the fluorescents. I knew one of his daughters was a gymnast of some national repute, and sometimes he wore a tiepin or brooch or something that seemed to consist of two horizontal bars and a platinum figure bent complexly over both. Sometimes I imagined coming into the coffee room and finding Mr. Glendenning alone, leaning back against the counter, staring down into the coffee in his mug and thinking deep administrative thoughts. In my fantasy he looks tired, not haggard but careworn, weighed down by the responsibilities of his position. I come in and get some coffee and approach him, he calling me Dave and I calling him DeWitt or even D.G., which was rumored to be his nickname around other District Directors and Assistant Regional Commissioners—Mr. G is up for Regional Commissioner, is the rumor—and I ask him what’s up and he confides to me about some administrative dilemma he’s on the horns of, like how the Systems guy Lehrl’s constant reconfiguration of people’s spaces and the passages between them was a ridiculous pain in the ass and waste of time and if it were up to him he’d personally pick the officious little prick up by the scruff of the neck and put him in a box with only one or two air-holes in it and FedEx him back to Martinsburg but that Merrill Lehrl was a protégé and favorite of the Assistant Commissioner for Taxpayer Service and Returns at Triple-Six, whose other big protégé was the Midwest Region’s Regional Commissioner for Examination, who was essentially if not formally Mr. Glendenning’s immediate superior in terms of Post 047’s Corporate Examination Function and was the sort of disastrous administrator who believed in alliances and patrons and politics, and who could deny 047’s application for an additional half-shift of GS-9 examiners on a number of pretexts that would appear reasonable on paper, and only D.G. and the RCE would know it was over Merrill Lehrl, and DeWitt felt beholden to the beleaguered examiners to get them some relief and to take some time off the Return Turnaround Schedule, which two different studies indicated could be accomplished better through relief and expansion than through motivation and reconfiguration (an analysis with which Merrill Lehrl disagreed, D.G. noted wearily). In the fantasy, D.G.’s head and mine are lowered somewhat, and we speak quietly, even though no one else is in the coffee room, which smells good and has cans of fine-ground Melitta instead of the Jewel-brand white cans with the khaki lettering, and it’s then, perfectly in the context of the exact beleaguered-and-distracted-examiners problem he’s confiding to me about, that I hit D.G. with the idea of these new Hewlett-Packard document scanners and the way the software could be reconfigured to scan both returns and schedules and to apply the TCMP code to red-flag selected items, so that examiners would have only to check and verify the important red-flag items instead of wading through line after line of unimportant OK stuff in order to reach the important items. D.G. listens to me intently, respectfully, and it’s only his judiciousness and administrative professionalism that keep him from expressing on the spot the enormous acuity and potential of my suggestion, and his gratitude and care that here a GS-9 examiner has come out of nowhere and given a lateral, outside-the-box solution that will both relieve the examiners and free up D.G. to send the odious Merrill Lehrl packing.

  §44

  I learned it at just twenty-one or twenty-two, at the IRS’s Regional Examination Center in Peoria, where I spent two summers as a cart boy. This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood—that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.

  I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

  But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

  The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

  The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and ’85, two such men.

  It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

  §45

  Toni’s mom was a bit nuts, as was her own mom, who was a notorious recluse and eccentric who lived in the Hubcap House in Peoria. Toni’s mom took up with a succession of bad-news men in the US Southwest. The last one was giving them a ride back to Peoria, where Toni’s mom had decided to return after the relationship before that one had gone bad. Blah blah. On this ride, the mom had more or less gone crazy (stopped taking her meds) and stolen the guy’s truck at a rest stop, leaving the guy behind.

  Both the mom and the grandmother had been given to catatonic/cataleptic states, which as far as I can tell is a symptom of a certain kind of schizophrenia. The girl, ever since young, had amused herself by trying to imitate this state, which involved sitting or lying extremely still, slowing your pulse, breathing in such a way that your chest doesn’t even rise, and holding your eyes open for long periods, such that you’re blinking only every couple minutes. It’s the last that’s hardest—the eyes start to burn as they dry out. Very, very hard to push through this discomfort… but if you do, if you can resist the almost involuntary urge to blink that comes when the burning and drying is the very worst, then the eyes will
start lubricating themselves without blinking. They will manufacture a kind of false or ersatz tears, just to save themselves. Almost no one knows this, because the incredible discomfort of having your eyes open without blinking stops most people before they hit that critical point. And there’s usually damage, anyway. The girl had called it ‘playing dead,’ since that’s the way her mother had tried to describe and discount the states to the girl when she was very tiny, saying that she was only playing and that the game was called ‘play dead.’

  The abandoned man had caught up with them somewhere in eastern Missouri. They’d been on a little blacktop highway, and the first sign that he was behind was a pair of headlights that showed just when they were on a downslope that extended a mile or more—they’d see the headlights appear when the trailing vehicle hit the crest, then they’d lose them when they started to climb the slow grade again.

  As Toni Ware remembers it and recounted it just one time to X on a night that turned out to be the anniversary of the occurrence, the vehicle that the man had commandeered or hired came up fast behind them—it turned out to be going quite a bit faster than the truck, which had a camper shell—and the man was not driving the vehicle. He was standing on the front hood of what emerged to be the trailerless cab of an enormous semi truck, swollen by rage and malice to at least twice his normal size, holding his arms up and out in a terrible gesture of almost Old Testament retribution, and hollering (in the rural sense of ‘holler,’ which is almost a special kind of art form; it used to be the way that people who lived way out in hill country out of sight of each other would communicate—it was the way of letting other people know that they were around, because otherwise it could seem, in the rural hills, like you were the only person anywhere within thousands of miles) with an ecstatic black evil rage and glee that caused Toni’s mother—who, let’s recall, was not a paragon of stability—to become hysterical and floor the accelerator and try to outrun the vehicle while at the same time trying to extract from her purse a bottle of prescription pills and to open the childproof cap, which the mother was terrible at and usually needed Toni to open for her—causing the vehicle, which was top-heavy because of the LEER camper shell, to swerve off the road and go over on its side in some kind of field or area of weeds, injuring the mom terribly such that she was half-stunned and moaning and blood covering her face and Toni was lying against the passenger-side window, and in fact still has the window’s crank imprinted into her side if you can get her to raise her top and show you the eerie reproduction. The vehicle came to rest on its right side, and the mom wasn’t wearing a seat belt, which people like that never do, and she was lying partly on top of Toni Ware, pinning her against the window so that she couldn’t move or even tell whether she was injured. There was nothing but that terrible silence and hissing and ticking of a vehicle that’s just had an accident, plus the sound of spurs or maybe just a great deal of pocket change jingling as the man negotiated the downslope down to them. Her own window was driven into the ground and the driver’s-side window was now pointing up at the sky, but the windshield, though buckled and hanging halfway off, had turned into a four-foot vertical slot through which Toni Ware got a full-length view of the man standing there, cracking his knuckles and looking at the occupants of the car. Toni lay there with her eyes opened and slowed her breathing and played dead. The mom’s eyes were closed, but she was alive because you could hear her breathing and occasionally giving little unconscious exclamations in her coma or whatever it was. The man looked at Toni, locked eyes with her, for a long time—later, she understood that he was trying to ascertain if she was alive. It is unimaginably hard to be staring straight ahead and have someone lock eyes with you and yet to appear like you’re not looking back at them. (This is what had started the story; David Wallace or someone else had remarked that Toni Ware was creepy because, even though she wasn’t shy or evasive and would maintain eye contact, she seemed to be staring at your eyes rather than into them; it was a bit the way a fish in a tank swimming past as you watched through the glass and looked into its eyes looked back at you—you knew that it was aware of you in some way, but it was unsettling because it wasn’t anything like the way a human being seems aware of you when he meets your gaze.)

  Toni’s eyes were open. It was too late to shut them. If she suddenly did, the man would know she was alive. Her only chance was to appear so dead that the man didn’t check her pulse or hold a piece of glass to her mouth to check. What would keep him from checking was if her eyes were open and stayed open—no living human being could hold its eyes open for long periods of time. There was no one around; the man had plenty of time to look through the windshield and see if they were alive. Her mother’s face was right up against her face, but luckily the blood was dripping into some hollow of Toni’s throat; if it had been dripping into her eyes it would have made her blink involuntarily. She stayed rigid like that with her eyes open. The man climbed up and tried the driver’s-side door but it was locked from the inside. The man went back and got some kind of tool or crowbar and pried the windshield off, shaking the truck violently. He got on his side and edged through the slot of the windshield, looking first at the unconscious mom and then at the girl. The mom moaned and stirred slightly, and the man killed her by reaching in and pinching her nostrils shut with one hand and covering her mouth with a greasy rag with the other and pressing hard, so hard that the mom’s head strained against the side of Toni’s as she unconsciously resisted being suffocated. Toni stayed there, shell-breathing, with her eyes still open and only inches from the man’s eyes as he suffocated her mother, which took over four minutes of pressure for the man to be totally sure. Toni staring sightlessly and not blinking even though the dryness and discomfort must have been terrific. And somehow succeeded in convincing the man she was dead, because he did not pinch her nostrils shut and use the greasy rag on her, even though it would only have taken an extra four or five minutes… but no regular living human can sit there with their eyes open that long without blinking, so he knew. And so he got one or two valuables out of the glove compartment and she heard him jingling his way back up the upslope and the tremendously powerful sound of the truck’s motor starting up and the truck leaving, and then the girl lay there trapped between the door and her dead mom for what must have been several hours before someone happened by and saw the wreck and called the police, and then probably an additional long time for them to extract her from the truck, uninjured in any real physical sense, and put her in some kind of charity ambulance…

  Sheesh.

  So do not mess with this girl; this girl is damaged goods.

  §46

  What usually happens is that on Friday afternoons a percentage of Pod C’s revenue officers meet for Happy Hour cocktails at Meibeyer’s. As is the case with most of the north side’s taverns that serve as Service hangouts, Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s lasts exactly sixty minutes and features drink specials that are indexed to the approximate cost of gasoline and vehicle depreciation involved in the 2.3-mile drive from the REC to the Southport-474 interchange. Different levels and Pods tend to congregate at different places, some of which are downtown and ape in various ways the more stylized venues of Chicago and St. Louis. The Bell Shaped Men can be found nearly every evening at Father’s, which is right there on Self-Storage Parkway and owned outright by the area’s Budweiser distributor; its function is less social than intubatory. Many of the wigglers, on the other hand, frequent the steroidal college bars around PCB and Bradley. Homosexuals have the Wet Spot in the downtown arts district. Most of the examiners with children, of course, go home to spend time with their family, although Steve and Tina Geach are often at Meibeyer’s together for Friday’s 2-H. Nearly everyone finds it necessary to blow off some of the unvented steam that’s accreted during a week of extreme tedium and concentration, or extreme volume and stress, or both.