The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘Somehow it’s awful to contemplate.’

  ‘I think he might fall out of his chair and run away crying and flapping his hands hysterically in the air.’

  Drinion says, ‘That I couldn’t guess at one way or the other. I do know that you dislike him. I know he makes you feel uncomfortable.’

  Drinion is facing Meibeyer’s front windows, Meredith Rand the tavern’s rear section, where there is the hallway and darts area and a decorative display of different types of formal or business-type hats glued by the rims to a varnished board. Meredith Rand leans forward and makes as if to rest her chin on the knuckles of one hand, though it’s easy to see that the actual weight of her chin and skull is not really resting on these knuckles; it’s more a stance than a way of making herself comfortable. ‘And then if I say you’re interesting, though, what’s your inward reaction?’

  ‘That it’s a compliment. It’s a pleasantry, but also an invitation to continue the tête-à-tête. To make it more personal or revealing.’

  Rand waved that hand in a small gesture of impatience or acknowledgment. ‘But how does it make you feel, as they say in Evaluation?’

  ‘Well,’ Shane Drinion says, ‘I think an expression of interest like that makes a person feel good. Provided the person saying it isn’t trying to propose a level of intimacy that makes you feel uncomfortable.’

  ‘Did it make you uncomfortable?’

  Drinion pauses for another brief moment, though he doesn’t move and his expression does not change. There’s again maybe the smallest instant of blankness or withdrawal. Rand has the sense of an optical reader scanning a stack of cards very fast and efficiently; there is a kind of ambient unsonic hum about him. ‘No. I suppose if you meant it sarcastically it would be uncomfortable—I would think you were angry at me or found me unpleasant. But you gave no sign that you meant it sarcastically. So no, I’m not sure what you meant by interesting, but people naturally like to be found interesting to other people, so the curiosity about just what you mean is not uncomfortable. In fact, if I understand it, it is this curiosity that the remark “You know, if you want to know the truth, you kind of interest me” is meant to arouse. The conversation then becomes about just what the person who said it meant. Then the other person gets to find out just what about him interests another person, which is enjoyable.’

  ‘Ex—’

  ‘At the same time,’ Drinion continues, showing no sign that he’s noticed Rand starting to say something even though he’s been looking right at her, ‘someone who finds you interesting seems then suddenly, almost by virtue of their interest in you, more interesting to you. That is a very interesting dimension to it also.’ He stops. Meredith Rand pauses a little extra bit of time to make sure he’s now stopped for good. Like her own left pinkie, Drinion’s left pinkie finger is noticeably puckered and pale from wearing the rubber all day in Exams. There’s no way she even wants to notice Drinion’s clothing enough to even catalogue or characterize it to herself. Just the sweater vest alone is a tremendous downer. She has her white vinyl cigarette case out and unsnaps it and withdraws a cigarette, since it’s just the two of them at the table.

  ‘So, and do you think you’re interesting?’ Meredith Rand asks him. ‘Do you see how someone could think you’re interesting?’

  Drinion takes another sip from his glass and puts it back down. Meredith Rand notices that he places it perfectly centered on the napkin without trying to or without having to adjust the glass’s base in small fussy ways to get it perfectly centered on the napkin. That Drinion in not graceful the way dancers or athletes are, but there is something graceful. His movements are very precise and economical without being prissy. The glasses on the table that are not on napkins have large and variously shaped pools of condensation around them. Someone has selected the same popular song to play twice in a row on Meibeyer’s big jukebox, which has concentric rings of red and white lights on an integrated circuit that allows them to go on and off in such a way that they accompany the chosen song’s bass line.

  Shane Drinion says: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever really considered it.’

  ‘Do you know why they call you Mr. X?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you know why they call Chahla the Iranian Crisis?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you know why they call McKenzie Second-Knuckle Bob?’

  ‘No.’

  Meredith Rand sees Drinion looking at the cigarette. Her lighter is in a special loop attached to the cigarette case, which is cheap pebbled vinyl—Meredith Rand ends up losing her cigarettes in different places so often that it makes no sense to have an expensive cigarette case. She knows, from the Pod’s workday breaks, that it would be pointless to offer Drinion a cigarette.

  ‘What about you? Do you think I’m interesting?’ Rand asks Shane Drinion. ‘I mean, apart from me saying you were interesting.’

  Drinion’s eyes are on hers—he makes a lot of eye contact without being in any way challenging or flirty—while he seems to do the same internal card-sorting thing he’s done before. Drinion wears an argyle sweater vest, strange, pebbly-textured polyester slacks, and brown Wallabee knockoffs that might literally be from JC Penney. The cold stream from the vent overhead tears the smoke ring to shreds the minute she shapes and exhales it. Beth Rath is now playing foosball with Herb Dritz while Keith Sabusawa watches the pregame warmup to a Cardinals baseball game on the television above the bar. You can tell that Beth would rather be sitting with Sabusawa but isn’t sure how forward to be about her feelings for Sabusawa, who has always struck Meredith Rand as awfully tall for an oriental. Drinion also has a way of nodding where the nod has nothing to do with etiquette or affirmation. He says: ‘You’re pleasant, and so far I’m enjoying the tête-à-tête. It’s a chance to pay direct attention to you, which is otherwise hard to do, because it seems to make you uncomfortable.’ He waits for a moment to see if she wants to say anything. Drinion’s facial expression isn’t blank, but it’s bland and neutral in a way that might as well be blank for all it tells you. Meredith Rand has, without being quite aware of it, quit trying with the rings.

  ‘Is liking paying attention the same thing as being interested in somebody?’

  ‘Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’ Drinion says: ‘Of course you’re especially interesting to pay attention to because you’re attractive. It’s almost always pleasant to pay attention to beauty. It requires no effort.’

  Rand’s eyes have narrowed, though part of this may have been the bits of cigarette smoke being blown back into her face by the AC vent.

  Shane Drinion says: ‘Beauty is almost by definition interesting, if by interesting you mean something that compels attention and makes attention feel pleasant. Although the word you just used was interested rather than interesting.’

  ‘You do know I’m married,’ says Meredith Rand.

  ‘Yes. Everyone knows you’re married. You wear a wedding ring. Your spouse picks you up at the south entrance several days a week. His car has a small hole in the exhaust that gives the engine a powerful sound. A sound that makes the car sound more powerful than normal, I mean.’

  Meredith Rand does not look pleased at all. ‘Maybe I’m confused. If you just said that it makes me uncomfortable, why even bring up the attractiveness thing?’

  ‘Well, you asked me a question,’ Drinion says. ‘I told you what I decided is the truth. It took a second to decide what the true answer is and what is and isn’t part of it. Then I said it. It isn’t intended to make you uncomfortable. But it isn’t intended to keep you from being uncomfortable, either—you didn’t ask about that.’

  ‘Oh, and you’re the authority on what the truth is because…?’

  Drinion waits a moment. In just the same tiny interval as the pause, it occurs to Meredith Rand that Drinion’s pausing to see whether there’
s more or whether the truncated question is meant to invite him to supply the answer. Meaning is it sarcastic. Meaning he has no natural sense of whether something was sarcastic or not. ‘No. I’m not an authority on the truth. You asked me a question about me being interested, and I tried to determine the truth of what I felt, and to say that truth to you, because my assumption was that’s what was wanted.’

  ‘I notice you weren’t nearly as, like, blunt and forthcoming about how me saying I found you interesting made you feel.’

  Drinion’s expression and tone haven’t changed even a little bit. ‘I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time understanding what you just said.’

  ‘I’m saying when I asked you how me finding you interesting made you feel, you weren’t as blunt about answering. You skittered and skipped all over. Now with me all of a sudden there’s a sudden concern for the blunt truth.’

  ‘Now I understand.’ Again a slight pause. The light-brand’s smoke does taste thin against the aftertaste of tonic and lime. ‘I don’t recall any part of me trying to be evasive or false in that answer. Maybe I’m able to express some things better than others. I think that’s a common finding for people. Also, I don’t usually speak very much. I’m hardly ever in a tête-à-tête, actually. It may be that I’m not as skilled as other people at speaking in a consistent way about how something makes me feel.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rand is now having no problem looking directly at Drinion. ‘It doesn’t occur to you that all that might strike somebody as a little condescending?’

  Drinion’s brow moves ever so slightly upward as he thinks. The baseball game has now started on the television, which may explain why Keith Sabusawa, who’s usually keen to leave after Happy Hour has ended, hasn’t left yet, and so neither has Shane Drinion. Sabusawa is tall enough that he has his loafers partly on the floor instead of hooked into the little support near the barstool’s base. Ron, the bartender, has a small towel and a glass in his hand and is making cleaning motions but is also looking up at the game, and he’s saying something to Keith Sabusawa, who in fact sometimes keeps whole long lists of baseball statistics in his head, which according to Beth Rath he finds soothing and restful to think about. Two great flashing, twittering pinball machines stand against the wall just south of the air hockey game, which no Meibeyer’s patron ever plays because there’s some chronic malfunction that makes air blow too hard through the table’s pinholes and the puck rides several inches off the surface and is next to impossible to keep from flying off the table altogether. On the nearer of the pinball machines, a beautiful Amazon in a Lycra bodysuit is lifting by the hair a man whose limbs appear to gyrate in time with the syncopated lights of the obstacles and gateways and flippers.

  Drinion says: ‘That doesn’t occur to me. But I do notice that you’ve become angry or upset in response to something I’ve said. This I can tell,’ he says. ‘It occurs to me that you might want to end this tête-à-tête conversation even though your spouse hasn’t arrived yet to pick you up, but that possibly you’re not sure how to do it, and so you feel somewhat trapped, and this is part of what’s angering you.’

  ‘And you, you don’t have to be someplace?’

  ‘No.’

  An interesting bit of trivia is that Meredith Rand actually outranks Drinion, technically, since she’s a GS-10 and Drinion a GS-9. This even though Drinion is several orders of magnitude more effective than Rand as an examiner. Both his daily average of returns and his ratio of total returns examined to total additional revenue produced through audit are much higher than Meredith Rand’s. The truth is that utility examiners have a harder time getting promoted, since promotions usually result from Group Managers’ recommendations, and UTEXs are rarely at one Post or Pod long enough to develop the sort of rapport with superiors that makes the superior willing to go through the paperwork hassle of recommending someone for a promotion. Also, since utility examiners are often the best at what they do, there is a disincentive in the Service against promoting them, since at GS-15 a Service employee moves into administration and can no longer travel from Post to Post. One of the things that regular posted wigglers find mysterious about UTEXs is what motivations induce them to serve as UTEXs when the position is something of a career-killer in terms of advancement and pay raises. As of 1 July 1983, the difference between a GS-9’s and a GS-10’s annual salary is $3,220 gross, which is not pocket change. Like many wigglers, Meredith Rand assumes that there’s a certain type of basic personality that’s maybe drawn to the constant movement and lack of attachment of being a utility examiner, plus the variety of challenges, and that Personnel has ways to test for these personality traits and so to ID certain examiners as likely UTEX candidates. There is a certain prestige or romance to the UTEX lifestyle, but part of this is married or elsewise dug-in employees’ romanticization of the unattached lifestyle of somebody who goes from Post to Post at the institutional whim of the Service, like a cowboy or mercenary. Lots of UTEXs have come to Peoria since late winter / spring ’84—there are a variety of theories about why.

  ‘Do you usually keep hanging out here after the hour and the whole Second-Knuckle crowd leaves?’

  Drinion shakes his head. He doesn’t mention the fact that he cannot leave Meibeyer’s until Keith Sabusawa does. Meredith Rand doesn’t know whether he fails to mention this obvious fact because he knows that Meredith already knows it, or whether this guy is so totally literal that what he does is just answer whatever question she asks, literally, like a machine, like with only a yes or a no if it’s a yes-or-no question. She puts out her cigarette in the little yellow foil disposable-type ashtray that you have to request directly from Ron if you want to smoke, because Meibeyer’s has had problems with ashtrays disappearing, hard as that is to really believe given their chintziness. She extinguishes the cigarette a bit more thoroughly and emphatically than she usually does, in order to reinforce a certain tonal impatience in what she says as she puts the cigarette out: ‘All right then.’

  Drinion rotates his upper body slightly in his chair to see just where Keith Sabusawa is at the bar. Rand is 90 percent sure that the movement isn’t any sort of performance or anything that is meant to communicate something nonverbally to her. Outside in the sky to the northwest are great sheer walls of rim-lit sunset clouds in whose interior there is sometimes muttering and light. None of the people in Meibeyer’s can see these clouds, although you can always tell physically that rain’s on the way if you pay attention to certain subliminal physical signals like sinuses, bunions, a particular kind of incipient headache, a slight felt change in the quality of the cold of the air-conditioning.

  ‘So tell me why you think the prettiness thing makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘I don’t know for certain. All I could give you is a guess.’

  ‘You know, you’re not really quite as direct as you seem at first, it turns out.’

  Drinion continues to look directly at Meredith Rand but without any sort of challenge or evident agenda. Rand, who is certainly in a position to know that guilelessness can be a form of guile, will tell Beth Rath that it was a little like having a cow or horse look at you: Not only did you not know what they were thinking as they looked at you, or if they were thinking at all—you had no sense of what they were even really seeing as they looked, and yet at the same time you felt yourself truly seen.

  ‘All right, I’ll play the little game here,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Do you think I’m pretty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you find me attractive?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘I find that question confusing. I’ve heard it in movies and read it in books. It’s strangely phrased. There’s something confusing about it. It seems to ask for an objective opinion as to whether the person you’re talking to would describe you as attractive. From the context it usually appears in, though, it seems almost always to be a way of asking whether the p
erson you’re talking to is sexually attracted to you.’

  Meredith Rand says: ‘Well, sometimes you have to let a roundabout way of saying things pass, don’t you? Some things can’t be said straight out or it’s just too gross. Can you imagine somebody saying “Are you sexually attracted to me?”’

  ‘Actually yes, I can.’

  ‘But it’d be awfully uncomfortable to ask it that way, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I can understand how it could be uncomfortable or even unpleasant, especially if the other person wasn’t sexually attracted. I’m fairly sure that packed into the straightforward question is the suggestion that the asker is sexually attracted to the other person and wants to know whether the feeling is reciprocated. So—yes, this means I was wrong. There are questions or assumptions also packed into the underlying question, too. You’re correct—the business of sexual attraction seems to be a subject that it’s not possible to be wholly straightforward in talking about.’

  Rand’s expression is now patronizing enough to be irksome or annoying to the vast majority of people she might be speaking with. ‘And why do you think that is?’

  Drinion pauses a moment. ‘I think it’s probably because direct sexual rejection is intensely unpleasant for people, and the less directly you express information about your sexual attraction to someone, the less directly you feel rejected if there’s no corresponding expression of attraction.’

  ‘There’s something kind of tiring about you,’ Rand observes. ‘Talking to you.’

  Drinion nods.

  ‘It’s like you’re both interesting and really boring at the same time.’

  ‘I’ve certainly been told that people feel I’m boring.’

  ‘The Mr. Excitement thing.’

  ‘The nickname is obviously sarcastic.’

  ‘Have you ever been on a date?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever asked someone out, or expressed being attracted to somebody?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you get kind of lonely?’