The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  ‘Scopolamine you say. Loco weed. Parentis. Mens sano in corpus. And not plastic knives, either. And may I say what handsome skulls you have beneath that skin, boys.’

  ‘And you last saw Revenue Agent Drinion before the tactical incursion, Sir, or after?’

  ‘Drinion was at the table. Holding down the table as they say. Almost asleep he seemed. Drinion never takes part. They weren’t touching him—the mosquitoes. His chin in his hand.’

  ‘You don’t mean that literally, Sir.’

  ‘Note the honed edge. Note the seven-inch length, you old drone. Note the five stars on the blade and where it says No Stain and Ice Hardened and Zwilling and J.A. Henckels, Solingen FRG. You know what this is?’

  ‘I just don’t feel well at all, still. The examiners—a whole writhing boiling mass of them on the ground.’

  ‘From the three-legged race you mean, Sir, you don’t mean what Miriam calls your “third leg,” back in the days when she wanted that leg, Sir, didn’t she, Sir, before it repelled her.’

  ‘They were rappelling. Ropes in the trees. Victor Charles. A writhing mass of GS-9 examiners—mass copulation among the examiners which I personally observed—it’s all there in my report on a Form 923(a) for personal observations of impropriety; you Inspections men know all about 923(a)s, do you not.’

  ‘You observed this from the grill, then, Sir.’

  ‘I observed the effect of the tea in opened sockets and mass frenzied orgylike copulation and humping under the trees, on the table, under the tossed egg, on both ends of the horseshoe grotto. There were actual buttocks thrusting under my grill.’

  ‘And I believe you said you were wearing an apron, Sir.’

  ‘Cut him. Take it right off, Clothier.’

  ‘So by this point in time everyone with the possible exception of the children was suffering definite effects, Sir, you’re saying.’

  ‘The wieners themselves were writhing, thrusting. Plump, thrusting, shiny, moist, there on the grill, on Mrs. Kagle’s aluminum platter, in the air. I with the fork and observing it all until out of the trees where they breed! Breeding, ever breeding!’

  ‘I think we’ve got a decent picture of the situation from your particular vantage, Sir.’

  ‘You know it doesn’t go, Sir. Not really. You’ll stay like this. Look at me. You’ll look like this, Sir. Always. We came to tell you. We’ll cut it off right now if you like. Say the word.’

  ‘Needles with wings. Knives with wings, all dancing on their sharp tips, shrouds of mosquitoes making it dark. The sky is no longer the sky.’

  ‘He doesn’t want it, Clothier.’

  ‘The air no longer white with it.’

  ‘Get used to it, you impotent old fag. That’s right: fag.’

  ‘Ixnay, Taylor.’

  ‘I have seen my wife take her skin off, you know. Since you came all the way down, eh? Peel the white skin of her arm clean off like an opera glove. Take off her face from the top down.’

  ‘Like: this, Sir?’

  ‘I think I’m going to be moving over to the next subject of the debriefing now, Sir. With much gratitude for taking the time.’

  ‘As if it’s even yours, eh, Dwitt? Eh?’

  ‘I’m simply unprecedentedly upset. I don’t think it’s getting better.’

  ‘You know what doctors do, don’t you? When you’re asleep. From the top down, like you’re a soft old grape in the back of the fridge that someone’s forgot to throw out. DeWitt, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times.’

  ‘I’m noting that, Sir, as well as Inspections’ appreciation for your cooperation under the circumstances.’

  ‘Well don’t just lie there say something. Tell them what they want or they’ll cut it off. They’ve as much as said so. Are you a fool?’

  ‘And I know they’ll be back in, and doing everything possible for your comfort until it comes off, Sir. I mean wears off. The blood level.’

  ‘I’m naked, you know. Under all this.’

  ‘We may or may not be needing to interview you again, Sir. When the effects are less noticeable if you understand.’

  ‘As a jaybird. Buck-naked. Birthday suit.’

  ‘Tell them, hurry. It’s German.’

  ‘Yes and I do, I have a penis. Penis.’

  ‘Hate that word, Clothier.’

  ‘Dreadful word, eh? Penis? Like something you’d touch with a thick rubber glove if at all.’

  ‘Why DeWitt you old scalawiggle! I’m still a woman, you know!’

  ‘Say it with me, boys. Penis penis penis penis penis.’

  ‘You didn’t forget, oh DeWitt, it’s lovely.’

  ‘You just get some rest, Sir.’

  ‘Its name is—I won’t tell you. How do you like that? I won’t!’

  ‘I remember when you looked at me that way.’

  ‘It’s got a name. Its name is—I won’t tell you. It’s mine. It’s my third leg, Miriam calls it. But never from the forehead. It’s not a mask. They start with the chin. Upsy daisy. In comes the needle on wings!’

  ‘Allweshay, Aylortay?’

  ‘My proboscis itches so I sink it deep before vomiting.’

  ‘Not in me, DeWitt. It’s like you’re vomiting inside me. Even your expression is as if you’re taken ill. If you could ever see it you’d—’

  ‘Miriam’s frigid you know.’

  ‘I’ll be locking this behind me, Sir, but it’s just procedural.’

  ‘Since our third. A terrible labor. Stillborn. Blue and cold. You know what we named it?’

  ‘Taylor?’

  ‘That’s right. Taylor. Fine little Clothier just like his gumpappy.’

  ‘I just don’t want it. Don’t torture me for not, I beg you.’

  ‘Shall we… there you are, Sir.’

  ‘No interest since. Frigid. Dry as a fine martini, Bernie Cheadle’d say.’

  ‘So then toodleoo, Sir.’

  ‘Thank God we have our work, boys, eh? And our hobbies. Our home workshops, yes? Fashioning needles and wings for the commonweal? Yes, Aylor?’

  ‘I’ll be back with more of these if you don’t lie still like a good boy though, Sir, and wait for them to come for it, Sir, so you can look like: THIS! Just one firm tug and off she comes.’

  ‘She’ll say Give it a tug yourself, you old degenerate.’

  ‘Barely feel a thing. This’ll get ’em cracking at their desks, Sir, eh what?’

  ‘I can inhale, but I can’t seem to exhale.’

  [Voices in hall.]

  ‘My workshop is organized, it is, you should see it.’

  [Voices in hall.]

  ‘I can find anything in there.’

  [Voices in hall.]

  ‘You’ll see.’

  [Voices in hall.]

  §49

  Fogle sat waiting in the small reception area of the Director’s office. No one knew what it meant that Merrill Errol Lehrl was using Mr. Glendenning’s office. Mr. Glendenning and his senior staff were up at Region; it might just be a cordial professional-courtesy thing that Lehrl was using Mr. Glendenning’s office. Mrs. Oooley wasn’t at her desk in the reception area; instead at the desk was one of Lehrl’s aides, whose either first or last name was Reynolds. He’d moved a certain amount of Caroline’s stuff around, you could see. The area had a large rug whose geometric patterns, which were intricate, made the carpet look Turkish or Byzantine. The overheads were off; someone had placed several lamps around the little room, creating attractive oases in a general atmosphere of gloom. Fogle found low light gloomy. Dr. Lehrl’s other aide, Sylvanshine, was in a chair just off to Fogle’s right, so that the two aides were just outside the peripheries of Fogle’s vision and could not both be seen at the same time, and he had to turn his head slightly to look at either directly. Which he was forced to do, rather a lot, because they appeared to be prebriefing him for some reason. Doing so in tandem. But also, in a way, to be talking across Fogle to each other. When they addressed Chris Fogle directly, they
tended to wax a bit didactic, but at the same time it was not totally uninteresting. Both Reynolds and Sylvanshine were knowledgeable about various powerful administrators’ career trajectories and résumés. It was the sort of thing that aides at National could be expected to know a lot about; they were a little like royal courtiers. Most of the names of the people they spoke of were people at Nation; only a few were known to Fogle. As was customary in the Service, the aides spoke in a rapid, excited way without either’s face showing any excitement or even interest in the subject at hand, which started out with a small lecture on the two basic different ways that a person could rise to prominence and large responsibility within the bureaucracy of the IRS. Bureaucratic aerodynamics and modes of advancement were very common topics of interest among examiners; it was unclear whether Reynolds and Sylvanshine didn’t know that much of this was familiar ground to Fogle or didn’t care. Fogle imagined that at whatever Post these two were normally at, they were legendary dickheads.

  According to the two aides, one way to advance to managerial levels beyond GS-17 was through slow, steady demonstrations of competence, loyalty, reasonable initiative, interhuman skills with the people above and below you, etc., moving slowly up through the promotional ranks.

  ‘The other, lesser known, is the éclat.’

  ‘The éclat means the sudden, extraordinary idea or innovation that brings you to the notice of those at high levels. Even national levels.’ One got the sense they were parroting others.

  ‘Dr. Lehrl is the latter kind. The éclat kind.’

  ‘Allow us to give you some background.’

  ‘It’s some time ago. Should I specify the year?’

  The rhythms of Reynolds and Sylvanshine’s back and forth were quite precise. There was no wasted time. Questions had a vaguely staged quality. If Dr. Lehrl himself was back behind that frosted door, it wasn’t clear whether Reynolds and Sylvanshine thought that he could hear what they were saying.

  ‘The details are unimportant. He was just one of a low-level audit group in a backwater district somewhere, and he got an idea.’

  ‘He’s not even on 1040s within the group, mind you. He’s small business and S.’

  ‘The idea, however, concerns 1040s.’

  ‘Specifically exemptions.’

  ‘An area not unfamiliar to you, I assume.’ Neither had any accent at all.

  ‘You may, for example, know or not know that up until 1979, filers could declare dependents just by name.’

  ‘On the 1040 of the time.’

  ‘Dependents. Children, elderly in the filer’s care.’

  ‘I think we can assume he knows what dependents are, Claude.’

  ‘But do you know the 1040 of that period? What the filer had to do was put the dependent children’s first names on Line 5c, others’ names and relations on 5d.’

  ‘Now, of course, it’s all 6c and 6d. We’re talking about 1977.’

  ‘But the point is just the name and relation. Which you can see the problem.’

  ‘There’s no way to check,’ Sylvanshine said.

  ‘In retrospect, it appears absurd,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘But that’s after the éclat that it looks so naive. Since there was no way to check.’

  ‘Not really. Just a name and relation.’

  ‘It was the honor system. There was no real way to ensure that dependents were real.’

  ‘No efficient way, that is.’

  ‘Oh sure, sure, they figured that the filer figured we could check, but as a practical matter we couldn’t check. Not really. Not in any definitive way.’

  ‘Especially since data processing was in such a primitive state. You could track consistency of dependents listed over successive years, but it was time-consuming and inconclusive.’

  ‘A kid could have turned eighteen. An elderly dependent could have died. A new kid could have been born. Who was going to chase all this down? It wasn’t worth the man-hours for anybody.’

  ‘True, if there was an audit and some of the dependents were made up the filer was in huge trouble and there were criminal penalties plus interest and penalties. But that was just random chance. The dependents themselves couldn’t trigger an audit.’

  ‘Each dependent was I think two hundred dollars added to the standard deduction.’

  ‘Which you guys now know as the zero bracket amount.’ Both aides were in their late twenties, but they spoke to Fogle as if they were much, much older than he. ‘But before ’78 everyone knew it as the standard deduction.’

  ‘But this was ’77.’

  Sylvanshine gave Reynolds a look whose impatience was conveyed through duration instead of expression. Then he said: ‘In case this sounds picayune or inconsequential, let’s stress right here that we’re talking $1.2 billion.’

  ‘That’s b-b-billion, from this one tiny change.’

  Fogle wondered if he was supposed to ask what change, whether they were including him in the choreography here as a kind of prompter, whether the sophistication of their routine was that advanced.

  Sylvanshine said: ‘What Dr. Lehrl saw, as some no-account GS-9 auditor, was insufficient incentive for the filer to report dependents accurately. Institutional incentive. In retrospect, it seems obvious.’

  ‘That’s the way of genius, of éclat.’

  ‘And his solution looks simple. He simply suggested requiring taxpayers to include the SS number of each dependent.’

  ‘Requiring an SSN right next to each name.’

  ‘Since everything in the Martinsburg database at the time was keyed to SSNs.’

  ‘Which actually didn’t make it all that much easier to really check.’

  ‘But the filer didn’t know that. The requirement would greatly increase the filer’s fear of a phantom dependent being detected.’

  ‘Such was the power of the SSN.’

  ‘It created, in other words, an added incentive for compliance on dependents.’

  ‘And it was very easy and inexpensive. Just add “and Social Security Number” in the directions for 5c and 5d.’

  ‘His District Director had the sense to recognize an éclat and kicked the idea up to the Region, who routed it to the DC-Compliance’s office at 666 Independence.’

  ‘No one could believe it hadn’t been thought of before.’

  ‘The first tax year it’s actually implemented is ’78, as Section 151(e) of the Code. So ’79 is the first year the new instructions are on 1040s. Six-point-nine million dependents disappear.’

  ‘From the nation’s 1040s.’

  ‘Vanish, poof.’

  ‘As compared to the ’77 returns.’

  ‘There are no sanctions. Everybody decides simply to pretend the fake dependents never happened.’

  ‘Netting $1.2 billion the first year.’

  ‘It’s a textbook éclat.’

  ‘It’s also politically brilliant. There’s more than one kind of éclat.’

  ‘This was both.’

  ‘Because although it costs next to nothing to implement, it requires a written change in Section 151 of the US Tax Code, which requires one of the Three-Personed God’s senior staff to shepherd it through the Ways and Means process, to get codified as law.’

  ‘Which means the idea gets bruited about at the very highest levels of Triple-Six.’

  ‘And from out of nowhere Dr. Lehrl jumps four grades and even jumps Region after only two quarters and becomes in short order the DC-Systems’ most valuable—’

  ‘Well, one of the most valuable, to be fair, since there’s also——in——.’

  ‘Who is a whole other story involving your more slow, conventional rise through the pipeline.’

  ‘But certainly one of Systems’ most valuable utility men.’

  ‘Like an in-house consultant.’

  ‘Especially since the Initiative.’

  ‘Especially in Personnel Systems.’

  ‘Which is where you come in, Mr. Fogle.’

  ‘Essentially, he comes in
and reconfigures Posts to maximize revenue.’

  ‘Essentially, he’s a reorganizer.’

  ‘An idea man.’

  ‘More bang for the buck.’

  ‘True, largely at the District level.’

  ‘But this is hardly his first Regional Center.’

  ‘There’s a certain amount of this we can’t talk about.’

  ‘We’re enjoined.’

  ‘You can think of him as a Personnel guy, or a Systems guy.’

  ‘Personnel Systems, essentially.’

  ‘But he answers to Systems. He serves at the pleasure of the Deputy Commissioner–Systems. He’s the DCS’s instrument, you could say.’

  ‘But he’s not a slave to any one system.’

  ‘He’s a reader of people.’

  ‘He’s an administrator, ultimately.’

  ‘Or more like an administrator of administrators.’

  ‘The Systems Division, you may or may not know, used to be called Administration.’

  ‘It’s a vague term, admittedly.’

  ‘He’d describe himself more as a cyberneticist.’

  ‘The Service is, after all, a system composed of many systems.’

  ‘His job is to come in and redesign Posts to get the most out of them. To find ways to streamline and enhance productivity, remove bottlenecks, debug. This blends an expertise in automation, personnel, support logistics, and overall systems.’

  ‘He goes where he’s sent. His assignment is simply a certain Post. The assignment memos are always about one line long.’

  ‘Phase One is fact-finding. Feeling out the situation.’

  ‘His real genius is incentive. Creating incentive. Finding out what makes people tick.’

  ‘He’ll take you apart like a little machine.’

  ‘It’s not as if Line 5 was his only éclat. We’re just giving you an example. What he really is is a genius of human motivations and incentives and designing systems to achieve them.’

  ‘He’ll test you.’

  ‘When you go in.’

  ‘He reads people. It can be a little scary.’

  ‘Be ready is all we mean.’

  ‘But don’t look nervous or like you’re braced for some battery of tests.’ Fogle knew of eastern cultures where any small piece of business had to be worked up to through involved systems of small talk and ritual indirection. Only an idiot would not have wondered whether this was what was going on, or whether Reynolds and Sylvanshine were just extremely boring and took a very long time to come to the point, assuming there was any point. Fogle had been away from his table for over half an hour already. Sylvanshine was continuing. ‘Because it doesn’t work like that. It’s not that kind of testing.’