The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

Notes

1 Little-known fact: The only US citizens anywhere whose Social Security numbers start with the numeral 9 are those who are, or at some time were, contract employees of the Internal Revenue Service. Through its special relationship with the Social Security Administration, the IRS issues you a new SS number on the day your contract starts. It’s like you’re born again, ID-wise, when you enter the Service. Very few ordinary citizens know about this. There’s no reason they should. But consider your own Social Security number, or those of the people close enough to you that you’re entrusted with their SS. There’s only one digit that these SS numbers never start with. That number is 9. 9’s reserved for the Service. And if you’re issued one, it stays with you for the rest of your life, even if you happen to have left the IRS long ago. It sort of marks you, numerically. Every April — and quarterly, of course, for those who are self-employed and pay quarterly ESTs — those tax returns and ESTs whose filers’ SS numbers start with 9 are automatically pulled and routed through a special processing and exam program in the Martinsburg Computer Center. Your status in the system is forever altered. The Service knows its own, always.

2 This is a term of art; what I really mean is that everything that surrounds this Foreword is essentially true. The Foreword’s having now been moved seventy-nine pages into the text is due to yet another spasm of last-minute caution on the part of the publisher, re which please see just below.

3 At the advice of its corporate counsel, the publishing company has declined to be identified by name in this Author’s Foreword, despite the fact that anyone who looks at the book’s spine or title page will know immediately who the company is. Meaning it’s an irrational constraint; but so be it. As my own counsel has observed, corporate attorneys are not paid to be totally rational, but they are paid to be totally cautious. And it is not hard to see why a registered US corporation like this book’s publisher is going to be cautious about even the possibility of appearing to thumb its nose at the Internal Revenue Service or (this from some of the corporate counsel’s hysterical early memos) to be ‘abetting’ an author’s violation of the Nondisclosure Covenant that all Treasury employees are required to sign. Nevertheless — as my lawyer and I had to point out to them about 105 times before the company’s counsel seemed to get it — the version of the Nondisclosure Covenant that’s binding on all Treasury employees, not just on agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and of the Secret Service, as formerly, was instituted in 1987, which happens to be the year that computers and a high-powered statistical formula known as the ANADA (for ‘Audit — No Audit Discriminant Algorithm’) were first used in the examination of nearly all individual US tax returns. I know that’s a pretty involved and confusing data-dump to inflict on you in a mere Foreword, but the crux here is that it is the ANADA,^(a) and the constituents of its formula for determining which tax returns are most apt to yield additional revenue under audit, that the Service is concerned to protect, and that that was why the Nondisclosure Covenant was suddenly extended to IRS employees in 1987. But I had already left the Service in 1987. The worst of a certain personal unpleasantness had blown over, and I’d been accepted for transfer at another college, and by autumn of 1986 I was back on the East Coast and again up and running in the private sector, albeit of course still with my new SS number. My entire IRS career lasted from May 1985 through June 1986. Hence my exemption from the Covenant. Not to mention that I was hardly in a position to know anything compromising or specific about the ANADA. My Service post was totally low-level and regional. For the bulk of my time, I was a rote examiner, a.k.a. a ‘wiggler’ in the Service nomenclature. My contracted civil service rank was a GS-9, which at that time was the lowest full-time grade; there were secretaries and custodians who outranked me. And I was posted to Peoria IL, which is about as far from Triple-Six and the Martinsburg Center as anyone could imagine. Admittedly, at the same time — and this is what especially concerned the publishing company’s counsel — Peoria was a REC, one of seven hubs of the IRS’s Examination Division, which was precisely the division that got eliminated or, more accurately (though this is arguable), transferred from the Compliance Branch to the newly expanded Technical Branch, by the advent of the ANADA and a digital Fornix network. This is rather more esoteric, contextless Service information than I’d anticipated having to ask you to swallow right at the beginning, and I can assure you that all this gets explained and/or unfolded in much more graceful, dramatically apposite terms in the memoir itself, once it gets under way. For now, just so you’re not totally flummoxed and bored, suffice it to say that Examinations is the IRS division tasked with combing and culling various kinds of tax returns and classifying some as ‘20s,’ which is Service shorthand for tax returns that are to be forwarded to the relevant District office for audit. Audits themselves are conducted by revenue agents, who are usually GS-9s or -11s, and employed by the Audit Division. It’s hard to put all this very smoothly or gracefully — and please know that none of this abstract information is all that vital to the mission of this Foreword. So feel free to skip or skim the following if you wish. And don’t think the whole book will be like this, because it won’t be. If you’re burningly interested, though, each tax return pulled, for whatever reason(s) (some of which were smart and discerning and others, frankly, wacko and occult, depending on the wiggler), by a line examiner and forwarded for audit is supposed to be accompanied by an IRS Series 20 Internal Memo, which is where the term ‘20’ comes from. Like most insular and (let’s be frank) despised government agencies, the Service is rife with special jargon and code that seems overwhelming at first but then gets internalized so quickly and used so often that it becomes almost habitual. I still, sometimes, dream in Servicespeak. To return to the point, though, Examinations and Audits were two of the main divisions of the IRS’s Compliance Branch, and the publishing company’s house counsel’s concern was that the IRS’s own counsel could, if they were sufficiently aggrieved and wanted to make trouble over the Nondisclosure Covenant thing, argue that I and several of the Post 047 REC coworkers and administrators who feature in this story should be grandfathered in under the constraints of the Nondisclosure Covenant, because we were not only employed by the Compliance Branch but posted at the REC that ended up figuring so prominently in the run-up to what came to be known variously as ‘the New IRS,’ ‘the Spackman Initiative,’ or just ‘the Initiative,’ which was ostensibly created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 but was actually the result of a long, very complicated bureaucratic catfight between the Compliance Branch and the Technical Branch over Examinations and the Exam function in IRS operations. End of data-dump. If you’re still reading, I hope enough of all that made sense for you to at least understand why the issue of whether or not I explicitly say the name of the publishing company was not one that I chose to spend a lot of time and editorial goodwill arguing about. You sort of have to pick your battles, as far as nonfiction goes.

(a) By the way, no kidding about the formula’s name. Were the Technical Branch statisticians aware that they were giving the algorithm such a heavy, almost thanatoid-sounding acronym? It’s actually doubtful. As all too many Americans now know, computerized programs are totally, maddeningly literal and nonconnotative; and so were the people in Technical Branch.

4 (excepting the ‘All rights reserved’ part, of course)

5 This latter is a good example of the sort of thing that threw the publisher’s legal people into a swivet of anality and caution. People often don’t understand how seriously large US corporations take even a threat of litigation. As I eventually realized, it’s not even so much a question of whether or not the publisher would lose a lawsuit; what really concerns them is the cost of defending against it, and the effect of those costs on the company’s liability insurance premiums, which are already a major operating expense. Legal trouble is, in other words, a bottom-line issue; and the editor or in-house counsel who exposes a publishing company to possible legal liability had better be able to demonstrate to his CFO that every last reasonable bit of caution and due diligence was exercised on the manuscript, lest he wear what we in Exams used to call ‘the brown helmet.’ At the same time, it isn’t fair to attribute every last tactical change and deviation here to the publisher. I (meaning, again, the actual human David Wallace) also fear litigation. Like many Americans, I’ve been sued — twice, in fact, though both suits were meritless, and one was dismissed as frivolous before I was even deposed — and I know what so many of us know: Litigation is no fun, and it’s worth one’s time and trouble to try to head it off in advance whenever possible. Plus, of course, looming over the whole vetting-and-due-diligence process on The Pale King was the shadow of the Service, which no one in his right mind would ever even dream of wanting to piss off unnecessarily, or actually even to come to the full institutional attention of, since the Service, like civil litigation, can make your life miserable without ever getting one extra dime from you.

6 E.g., one is now an Assistant Regional Commissioner for Taxpayer Assistance in the Western Regional Commissioner’s Office at Oxnard CA.

7 A signed, notarized 2002 FOIA request for copies of these videotapes is on file at the Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Public Information, 666 Independence Avenue, Washington DC…. And yes: The Service’s national HQ’s street number really is ‘666.’ So far as I know, it’s nothing more than an unfortunate accident in the Treasury Department’s assignment of office space after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. On the Regional levels, Service personnel tend to refer to the national office as ‘Triple-Six’—the meaning of the term is obvious, though no one I was able to talk to seemed to know just when it came into use.

8 This loose term is meant to connote the dramatized reconstruction of an empirically real occurrence. It is a common and wholly respectable modern device used in both film (q.v. The Thin Blue Line, Forrest Gump, JFK) and literature (q.v. Capote’s In Cold Blood, Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Oates’s Zombie, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, & c., & c.).

9 The main way you can tell that the contracts are different is from our reactions to their breach. The feeling of betrayal or infidelity that the reader suffers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible nonfiction has made-up stuff in it (as has been revealed in some recent literary scandals, e.g. Kosinski’s Painted Bird or that infamous Carcaterra book) is because the terms of the nonfiction contract have been violated. There are, of course, ways to quote-unquote cheat the reader in fiction, too, but these tend to be more technical, meaning internal to the story’s own formal rules (see, e.g., the mystery novel’s first-person narrator who doesn’t reveal that he’s actually the murderer until the last page, even though he obviously knew it all along and suppressed it just to jerk us around), and the reader tends to feel more aesthetically disappointed than personally dicked over.

10 Apologies for the preceding sentence, which is the product of much haggling and compromise with the publisher’s legal team.

11 (which, FYI, there were few or no formal classes in at that time)

12 (correctly, it turned out)

13 Junior year, by the way, was when many of the college’s other, more privileged students, including several who’d been my freelance clients, were enjoying their traditional ‘semester abroad’ at places like Cambridge and the Sorbonne. I’m just mentioning this. There’s no expectation that you’re going to wring your hands over whatever hypocrisy and unfairness you may discern in this state of affairs. In no sense is this Foreword a bid for sympathy. Plus it’s all water long under the bridge now, obviously.

14 (but highly unlikely, given the college’s concern with its reputation and PR)

15 Sorry about that text sentence. The truth is that the whole frat-cabinet-and-cascading-scandal’s-need-for-a-scapegoat situation still sometimes gets me jacked up, emotionally speaking. Two facts might make the durability of these emotions easier to understand: (a) of the five other students found by the J-Board to have either bought term papers or plagiarized from those who had, two ended up graduating magna cum laude, and (b) a third now serves on the college’s Board of Trustees. I’ll just leave those as stark facts and let you draw your own conclusions about the whole shabby affair. Mendacem memorem esse oportet.

16 And please forgive the contrivance here. Given the familio-legal strictures detailed just below, this kind of anti-explanation is the only permissible way for me to avoid having my whole presence at IRS Post 047 be some enormous, unexplained, and unmotivated blank, which in certain types of fiction might be (technically) OK, but in a memoir would constitute a deep and essential breach of contract.

17 (not a parent)

18 Q.v. FN 2, supra.

19 The word bureaucracy is notwithstanding that part of the run-up to the whole ‘New IRS’ thing was an increasing anti- or post-bureaucratic mentality on the part of both Triple-Six and Region. See, for one quick example, this snippet from an interview with Mr. Donald Jones, a GS-13 Team Leader in the Midwest REC’s Fats group from 1984 through 1990:

Perhaps it would help to define bureaucracy. The term. What we’re talking about. All they said you had to do was refer to the dictionary. Administration characterized by diffusion of authority and adherence to inflexible rules of operation, unquote. Inflexible rules of operation. An administrative system in which the need or desire to follow complex procedures impedes effective action, unquote. They had transparencies of the definition projected up on the wall during meetings. They said he had them all recite them as nearly some type of catechism.

Meaning, in discursive terms, that the couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human. The terror of concurrent films like Terminator and Blade Runner was based around just this premise… but of course in the case of the Service the convulsions, and fallout, although more diffuse and undramatic, had an actual impact on Americans’ lives.

N.B. Mr. Jones’s ‘they’ is referring to certain high-level figures who were exponents of the so-called ‘Initiative,’ which it is totally impractical here to try to explain abstractly (although q.v. Item 951458221 of § 14, Interview Documentary, which consists of a long and probably not ideally focused version of such an explanation from Mr. Kenneth [‘Type of Thing Ken’] Hindle, one of the oldest wigglers in the rotes group to which I ended up [after a great deal of initial confusion and misassignment] being tasked), except to say that the only such figure anyone at our low level ever even laid eyes on was the Technical Branch’s M. E. Lehrl and his strange team of intuitives and occult ephebes, who were (it emerged) tasked to help implement the Initiative as it pertained to Examinations. If that doesn’t make any sense at this point, please don’t worry about it. I went back and forth on the issue of what to explain here vs. what to let unfold in a more natural, dramatic way in the memoir itself. I finally decided to offer certain quick, potentially confusing explanations, betting that if they’re too obscure or baroque right now you just won’t pay much attention to them, which, again, I hasten to assure you is totally OK.

20 If you’re interested, this term is shorthand for an unrefundable advance payment against the author’s projected royalties (through a 7½%–15 % set of progressive margins) on sales of a book. Since actual sales are difficult to predict, it is in the writer’s financial interest to receive the largest possible advance, even though the lump-sum payment can create tax problems for the year of receipt (thanks largely to the 1986 Tax Reform Act’s elimination of income averaging). And given, again, that predicting actual sales is an inexact science, the size of the up-front author advance that a publishing company is willing to pay for the rights to a book is the best tangible indication of the publisher’s willingness to ‘support’ that book, w/the latter term meaning everything from the number of copies printed to the size of the marketing budget. And this support is practically the only way for a book to gain the attention of a mass audience and to garner significant sales — like it or not, that’s just the commercial reality today.

21 By age forty, artist or no, the reality is that only an imprudent chump would neglect to start saving and investing for eventual retirement, especially in this era of tax-deferred IRA and SEP-IRA plans with such generous annual tax-exempt caps — and extra-especially if you can S-corp yourself and let the corporation make an additional annual pension contribution, over and above your IRA, as a contractual ‘employee benefit,’ thereby exempting that extra amount from your taxable income, too. The tax laws right now are practically down on one knee, begging upper-income Americans to take advantage of this provision. The trick, of course, is earning enough to qualify as an upper-income American—Deos fortioribus adesse.

22 (Despite his sudden celebrity and windfall I am still, almost four years later, awaiting repayment of the loan’s principal from this unnamed writer, which I mention not to whinge or be vindictive, but merely as one more small part of my financial condition qua motivation.)

23 (meaning, somewhat confusingly, classically liberal)

24 (attitudes that are not wholly unjustified, given TPs’ hostility to the Service, politicians’ habit of bashing the agency to score populist points, & c.)

25 I’m reasonably sure that I am the only living American who’s actually read all these archives all the way through. I’m not sure I can explain how I did it. Mr. Chris Acquistipace, one of the GS-11 Chalk Leaders in our Rote Exams group, and a man of no small intuition and sensitivity, proposed an analogy between the public records surrounding the Initiative and the giant solid-gold Buddhas that flanked certain temples in ancient Khmer. These priceless statues, never guarded or secured, were safe from theft not despite but because of their value — they were too huge and heavy to move. Something about this sustained me.

26 (which is, after all, memoirs’ specialty)

27 (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it)

28 (again, whether consciously or not)

1 Psychodynamically, he was, as a subject, coming to a late and therefore traumatic understanding of himself as also an object, a body among other bodies, something that could see and yet also be seen. It was the sort of binary self-concept that many children attain as early as age five, often thanks to some chance encounter with a mirror, puddle, window, or photograph seen in just the right way. Despite the boy’s having the average ration of reflectors available to him in childhood, though, this developmental stage was retarded in his case somehow. The understanding of himself as also an object-for-others was in his case deferred to the very cusp of adulthood — and, like most repressed truths, when it finally burst through, it came as something overwhelming and terrible, a winged thing breathing fire.

2 In clinical terms, he was fighting to re-repress a truth that had been too long repressed in the first place, a confinement from which it had taken on far too much psychic energy ever, once it had burst through the mirror (so to speak), to be willed back out of conscious awareness. Consciousness just doesn’t work this way.

3 It especially didn’t happen when he was alone in the upstairs bathroom in front of the mirror, trying to make an attack happen so he could study it in the mirror and see for himself, objectively, how bad and obvious it looked from various angles and how far away it was visible from. He hoped, and on some level believed, that it maybe wasn’t as obvious or bizarre-looking as he was always afraid it was during an actual attack, but he could never verify this because he could never get a real attack to happen when he wanted it to, only when he totally, totally did not.

4 This boy’s surname, which was Cusk, placed him near the front of those classes with assigned seating.

5 Under any reputable Depth-based interpretation, a search- or spotlight serves as a manifest dream-symbol of human attention. On the level of latent content, however, the recurring nightmare could be interpreted as signifying anything from, e.g., a repressed narcissistic desire for others’ notice to an unconscious recognition of the boy’s own excessive preoccupation with himself as the suffering’s proximate cause. At clinical issue would be such questions as the dream-spotlight’s source, the teacher-figure’s status as either imago or archetype (or, perhaps, as projected self-image, since it is in this figure that distress is externalized as affect), and the subject’s own associations concerning such terms as gross, attack, and shattering.

6 There are secrets within secrets, though — always.

1 I won’t keep saying this each time that I, the living author, am actively narrating. For now, I’m including it just as an innocuous cue to help you keep the book’s various sections and agonists straight, since (as explained in the Author’s Foreword) the legal situation here entails a certain degree of polyphony and flux.

2 At that time, Lake James was something between a suburb and an independent township of metropolitan Peoria. The same is true of other little outlying communities like Peoria Heights, Bartonville, Sicklied Ore, Eunice, & c., the latter two of which adjoined Lake James along certain unincorporated zones to the east and west. The whole separate-but-attached-district thing had to do with the city’s inexorable expansion and encroachment into the rich agricultural land around it, which over time brought certain small, formerly isolated farming communities into Peoria’s orbit. I know that these little satellite towns each had their own property-tax structure and zoning authority, but in many other respects (e.g., police protection) they functioned as outlying districts of Peoria proper. The whole thing could be extremely involved and confusing. For instance, the Regional Examination Center’s street address was listed as 10047 Self-Storage Parkway, Lake James, IL, whereas the REC’s official postal address was ‘Internal Revenue Service Examination Center, Peoria IL 67452.’ This may be because Peoria’s USPS center on G Street downtown had a whole separate three-bin area for the REC, however, plus a pair of special tandem trucks that came out the restricted back road three times a day to the REC’s loading docks behind the Annex. I.e., the mailing address may have been Peoria simply because that’s where the REC’s daily mountain of mail actually came to. That is, it may have been more a function of the relationship between the US Postal Service and the IRS than anything else. Like so many other features of the REC and Service, the answer to the physical-vs.-postal-location-incongruity question is doubtless incredibly complicated and idiosyncratic and would require far more time and energy to ferret out and truly understand than any sane person would want to expend. Another example: The really relevant, representative thing about Lake James as a township is that it has no lake. There is, in fact, a body of water called Lake James, but as a practical matter it’s more of a large fetid pond, choked with algae from ag-runoff, a good dozen miles northwest of Lake James proper, closer to Anthony IL, which latter really is a separate township of Peoria and has its own zip code, & c., & c…. In other words, incongruities like these are complex and puzzling but not really all that important unless you’re invested in the geographical minutiae of Peoria (the possibility of which I have decided I can safely presume is remote).

3 N.B.: I’m not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesn’t work that way, and everyone knows it; it’s an insulting bit of artifice in a genre that purports to be 100 percent ‘realistic.’ To be honest, I think you deserve better, and that you’re intelligent enough to understand and maybe even applaud it when a memoirist has the integrity to admit that he’s not some kind of eidetic freak. At the same time, I’m not going to waste time noodling about every last gap and imprecision in my own memory, a prime cautionary example of which is ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle’s vocational soliloquy (q.v. § 22 above, which is actually heavily edited and excerpted) as part of the abortive 1984 Personnel Division motivational/recruitment faux documentary debacle, which ended up as a debacle in part because Fogle and two or three other maundering grandstanders took up so much film and time, and because Mr. Tate had failed to have his deputy, Mr. Stecyk, assign anyone on-site the responsibility of keeping someone’s answer to the ‘documentary question’ under a certain sane ceiling, which meant that the supposed ‘documentarian’ and his crew had every incentive to let Fogle et al. go on and on while they stared into space and calculated the running amount of tiered overtime pay they were accruing. The whole thing, while obviously of archival value, was evidently an immense cluster-fuck, one of many that Tate authored when he indulged his administrative brainstorms instead of simply letting Stecyk do all the work of the Personnel office as usual.

4 I no longer have this original two-page Form 141-PO, which vanished into the maw of the REC’s Personnel and Internal Control Systems Problem Resolution filing systems during the whole eventual swivet and comedy of errors surrounding my initial misassignment to an Immersive Exams Pod, the story of which unfolds in full pathetic, ur-bureaucratic detail below.

5 N.B.: With possible competition only from East St. Louis, Peoria and Joliet are well-known as the two grimmest, most blighted and depressed old factory cities in Illinois*, which fact turns out not to be a coincidence, since it affords statistically verifiable savings to the Service in terms of both facilities and labor. The location of most Regional HQs, RECs, and Service Centers in blighted and/or devitalized cities, which is traceable all the way back to the Service’s big reorganization and decentralization after the King Commission’s report to Congress in 1952, is just one sign of the deep pro-business and — bottom-line philosophies beginning to gather force in the Service as early as the Nixon administration.

* As part of the overall relevant context, be advised that Illinois’s five largest cities and metro areas by population (excluding Chicago, which is more like its own galaxy) c. 1985 were, in descending order, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Joliet, and Decatur.

6 I do, by the way, still possess this letter, which for legal reasons I am told I cannot reproduce more than one single fair-use sentence of, for ‘general flavor,’ the sentence I’ve chosen being from the second immaculately copperplate-handwritten paragraph; to wit: ‘He will be given only a small job to begin with, and it will be his business to work his way up by diligence and attentiveness,’ in the margin next to which the unnamed addressee of this letter had absently jotted either ‘HA!’ or ‘HAH!’ depending on how one tried to parse the spiky and almost indecipherable hand of someone for whom a ‘quick cocktail before supper’ involved a sixteen-ounce tumbler and no ice.

7 This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flintstonianly remote.

8 However puerile it seems now, I know that I sometimes felt an irrational anxiety about the possibility that the recent unpleasantness at school might have found its way into some shadowily comprehensive data retrieval system to which the IRS was somehow linked, and that some kind of bell or siren would suddenly sound when I presented at the counter for my ID and badge, and so on… an irrational fear that I knew was irrational and so did not admit fully into my consciousness, though at the same time I know that I spent at least some of the interminable time aboard the bus to Peoria idly constructing emergency plans and scenarios for how, if and when the bell or siren sounded, I might avoid returning home to Philo the same day I’d left and facing whoever it was who opened the door to my knock and saw me there on the home’s filthy screen porch with my bags and dispatch case — at some moments I know that the unconscious anxiety consisted only of envisioning the expression on the face of whatever immediate relative opened the door, saw me, and opened his mouth to say something, at which time I became aware of the fact that I was having anxious fantasies and waved them away on the bus ride, returning to the unbelievably insipid book I’d been presented with as a ‘gift’ by my family, their idea of useful wisdom and support, this ‘gift’ presented to me at supper on the evening before my departure (which special farewell supper, by the way, had consisted of [a] leftovers and [b] steamed ears of corn that I had just had my braces tightened and couldn’t even have hoped to try to eat), after first being told to open the gift very carefully so that the wrapping paper could be reused.

9 (plus, I’ll admit, a certain amount of slack relief at what seemed to be the opposite of bells/sirens and possible rejection for ethical unfitness or whatever my unconscious had conjured; I think I’d been more afraid than I’d acknowledged to myself)

10 This boy had also spent the first several minutes after I’d boarded and gotten settled staring wide-eyed at the condition of the side of my face, making no effort to hide or disguise the clinical interest with which little children stare, all of which I’d of course seen (and in some ways almost appreciated) out of the corner of my eye.

11 I.e., all these men with hats, which hats I would soon suspect and then outright learn were an Exam Division trademark (just as flat square shoulder-holsters for one’s pocket calculator were the signature accessory of Audits, earbuds and stylized tie clips were Systems, and so on) such that the REC’s group rooms, whether for rotes or immersives, all featured at least one wall with a peg-board of hooks for examiners’ hats, since individual hat racks or hooks screwed into the edge of one’s Tingle table created impediments for cart boys’ carts…

12 (e.g., having one character inform another of stuff they both actually already know, in order to get this information across to the reader — which I’ve always found irksome in the extreme, not to mention highly suspicious in a ‘nonfiction’ memoir, although it is true [if mysterious] that mass-market readers seem not to mind being jerked around this way)

13 N.B.: Some of this is more or less lifted from the packet of IRS orientation materials that new hires and transfers received at Intake & Processing; hence the somewhat dead, bureaucratic flavor, which I have elected not to jazz up or prettify.

14 I have, however, worked in relevant details that were obviously not in the official materials. The Rome debacle was not something the Service had any interest in publicizing, even internally; but it also figured prominently in the whole high-level struggle over the so-called ‘Initiative’ and its implementation. None of which I had any idea of or interest in on this first day, it goes without saying.

15 One of the pieces of freelance work I’d completed just before the fraternity-file idiocy blew up in everyone’s face had been the first two chapters of a rather likable but disorganized sociology major’s senior thesis on shopping malls as the modern functional analog of medieval cathedrals (with some of the parallels being downright striking), and I had no stomach left for shopping malls, even though they were often the only places anymore that had movie theaters, the grand old downtown palaces being now either shuttered or converted to Adult.

16 True, there had been silent rides aplenty with my own family, though the AM radio then was always playing Easy Listening music at high volume, which helped explain-slash-cover the absence of conversation.

17 GS-9 Chris Fogle would later explain (probably as I and whoever else was around rotated our hand in the air in the please-get-on-with-it way that almost everyone started involuntarily rotating their hand to convey whenever ‘Irrelevant’ Chris was on a roll) that the widening of Self-Storage Parkway had been stalled for over a year, first because a supplementary bond issue was being challenged in district court by a conservative Illinois citizens’ taxation watchdog group, and second because the extremely harsh regional winters and abrupt spring thaws that then so often refroze again a day later (all of which is true) caused whatever part of the new, freshly built SSP third lane that had not been treated with a special type of industrial sealant to heave and crack, and the courts had halted the previous year’s construction at just the point when this sealant was going to be applied with some kind of rare and very expensive piece of heavy machinery that had to be rented far in advance from a single specialty-distributor in either Wisconsin or Minnesota (I still have an actual sense-memory of the way my hand would begin rotating in the air, almost involuntarily, when Fogle started foundering in extraneous detail — he was unpopular out of all proportion to his character, which was actually decent and well-meaning to a fault; he was one of the low-level True Believers on whom the Service depended so heavily for so much of the inglorious gruntwork and heavy lifting of day-to-day operations, and what eventually happened to him was a great injustice, I’ve always thought, since in his case he really did need the drugs and took them entirely for professional reasons; it wasn’t recreational by any means), with, of course, the legal injunction and failure to apply the sealant then causing heavy damage the following winter and spring, and roughly doubling the cost of the construction over the civil engineering firm’s initial bid. Meaning that it was all a horrific mess of litigation and engineering mishaps that, as usual, placed a chronic, annoying, tedious burden on the ordinary commuters of the city. By the way, it emerged that another reason traffic on the circumambient SSP was so chronically bad even before the construction nightmare was that, understood not as an agglomeration of human beings but as a going economic concern, Peoria had come in the 1980s to assume the same basic doughnut shape as so many other formerly industrial cities: The downtown center was empty and denuded, all but dead, while at the same time a robust collection of malls, plazas, franchises, business and light-industrial parks, town house developments, and apartment complexes had pulled most of the city’s life out into an exurban ring. The mid-1990s would see a partial renaissance and gentrification of the riverside downtown — some of the factory and warehouse sites were converted to condos and high-concept restaurants; artists and younger professionals took some others for division into lofts, & c. — though much of this optimistic development was spurred by the establishment of riverboat casinos just off what had been the main industrial set of offload docks, casinos that were not locally owned and whose base revenues Peoria never even got a plausible cut of, the entire downtown rejuvenation spurred by incidental, small-potato tourist spending… viz., on the part of people who came for the casinos, which, since casinos are in the business of separating people from the cash they would otherwise use to shop and dine out, meant that the actual relationship between casino revenues and tourist spending was inverse, which, given casinos’ deserved reputation for extreme profitability, meant that any levelheaded person could have predicted the steeply declining revenue curve that within just a few years caused most of the ‘New Downtown’ renaissance to sputter, especially when the casinos (after prudently waiting a decent interval) all opened their own restaurants and retail shops. And so on… the same basic thing played out in cities all over the Midwest.

18 (identifiable as such in memory because they were not Gremlins, Mercury Montegos, or Ford Econoline vans. It emerged that the REC’s Support Service fleet of government vehicles were nearly all derived from a jeopardy-assessment seizure against a conjoint auto dealership in downstate Effingham, an explanation of which would be way too long and digressive to inflict on you here.)

19 Brief, unavoidable aside: For the first six quarters of a contracted posting, examiners without dependents could avail themselves of special Service housing in a set of apartment complexes and converted motels along the eastern edge of SSP’s circumambient ring, government-owned through either seizures or tax sales during the recession of the early 1980s. There is, of course, a whole other long and tediously involved story here, including the fact that the housing situation had been vastly complicated by the large number of transfers and personnel reshufflings all RECs had undergone as (a) a result of the mid-Atlantic REC’s foundering and dissolution in 1981 and (b) the early phases of the so-called ‘Intiative’ which it turned out bore directly on the Midwest REC. The point, though, was that this housing was offered both to facilitate ease of transfers and to offer a financial inducement, since the monthly rent at (for instance) the Angler’s Cove complex was at least $150 a month less than the going rents for comparable housing in the private sector. My own motives for accepting this housing option should be clear… although it is also true that the IRS in 1986 began treating the difference between the subsidized and free-market rents as ‘implied income’ and taxing it, which as you can imagine caused no end of ill will among Service employees, who are also of course US citizens and taxpayers, and whose annual tax returns receive special scrutiny every year because of the distinctive ‘9’s at the head of our ID/SS numbers, & c., & c. In retrospect, the whole Service housing thing was probably not worth it, given all the bureaucratic hassles and idiocies involved (q.v. below), although the monthly savings in rent were substantial.

20 We observed that it was almost always the private cars and pickups that clotted things by selfishly trying to shortcut through the breakdown lane and then merging back in. Service vehicles, including the Support Services vans that ran back and forth between the wiggler housing at north Peoria’s Angler’s Cove and the Oaks, never deviated from the legal lane, the Service drivers being non-contract hourly workers who had no incentive to hurry or try to cut corners, which presented a different set of problems for us who were required to be at our Tingle tables by a certain very definite time at the start of the shift; but from the point of view of orderly traffic it was still probably a good administrative move on Support Services’ part, although it meant that the Support Services drivers, whose jobs were chiropractically sadistic as well as boring and repetitive beyond belief, couldn’t join the Treasury union, didn’t qualify for health insurance, & c.

21 These cited regulations, when the Internal Revenue Manual’s whole code of regulations was perused in a period of examination downtime with literally nothing else to do to occupy one’s time, exposed a strange kind of error: The cars’ and vans’ interior signs’ citations actually referred to the regulation that required the signs to be ‘displayed in a prominent, unobscured location’ within each vehicle; it was really a regulation two regs above that cited reg that interdicted eating, tobacco, & c. within Service-owned transport. That is, the signs’ cited reg referred to the sign itself, not to the regulation the sign was supposed to signify.

22 At 158 employees, the vacuum-sublimation-and-caffeine-supplementation works for Bright Eyes Instant Coffee represented Philo’s last remaining claim to industry. A subsidiary of Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics, Bright Eyes was a regional high-caf brand, recognizable in Midwest stores by the jar’s crude graphic of an electrified-looking squirrel with bulging blazing suns for eyes and what looked like tiny bolts of cartoon lightning shooting out from its splayed extremities. When Archer Daniels Midland Co. absorbed Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics in 1991, Bright Eyes was (mercifully*) discontinued. More than this I am legally enjoined from telling you by the refusal of certain members of my family to sign the appropriate legal releases. Suffice it to say that I know a lot more about the chemistry, manufacture, and ambient odors of instant coffee than anyone would voluntarily want to, and that the smells were not at all the cozy comforting breakfastish aromas that one might naively imagine (they were closer to burning hair, actually, when the wind was right).

* As early as the 1970s, there had been evidence linking artificially enhanced caffeine to everything from arrhythmias to Bell’s palsy, though the first class-action suit was not filed until 1989.

23 A further irony: During an April 1987 tornado outside De Kalb, a detached portion of one of these FARM SAFETY billboards whirled in and for all practical purposes decapitated a soybean farmer — that was pretty much it for the 4-H sign.

24 (i.e., facing south and SSP, on which we were moving west at literally the rate of a toddler’s crawl)

25 Again, much of this is from the actual notebook in which these impressions were recorded. I’m aware that I’m describing the access road from a distance but attributing to it qualities that became evident only as we got very slowly closer and closer and then were actually on it. Part of this is artful compression; part is that it’s next to impossible to take coherent notes in a moving auto.

26 (inscribed with a pencil that had long since gone blunt and dull, which is something I detest; there would have had to be considerable psychic pressure/incentive for me to be willing to write with a dull pencil)

27 Again, the ‘behind’ is from the perspective of the parkway. Given that what we were approaching was the main building’s rear, the premium lots were actually ‘in front’ of the REC, though that front faced away from Self-Storage.

28 Ibid.

29 Let’s mainly skip the issue of the additional crowding and dysfunction caused by outer lots’ pedestrians trying to negotiate the access road’s narrow edge past the solid line of cars that filled that road, much of which problem could have been solved simply by installing a sidewalk across the immaculate lawn and some kind of entrance in the front (i.e., what appeared to be the front; it was actually the building’s rear). In essence, the baronial splendor of the REC’s grass was a testament to the idiocy and hassle of the whole thing’s planning.

30 It had to be: It wasn’t nearly wide enough to sustain two-way traffic, not to mention the additional space taken up by pedestrians trying to walk to/from their vehicles along the road’s edge.

31 What I did not at that time know was that, as the result of certain complex Compliance Branch reorganizations related to the implementation of the ‘Initiative,’ the Midwest REC had had a net gain of more than three hundred new employees over the previous two fiscal quarters. One theory among the rote examiners at Angler’s Cove was that this had helped tip some delicate balance in the REC’s parking situation, exacerbated by the construction on Self-Storage and the elimination, for what were represented as morale reasons, of reserved parking for those with civil service grades above GS-11. The latter had been the idea of Mr. Tate, the REC’s Director of Personnel, who’d regarded reserved parking as elitist and corrosive to REC morale. The syndrome of DP Richard Tate’s instituting a policy that resulted in far more problems than it resolved was so familiar that wigglers referred to it as ‘dicktation.’

32 At the time, I knew nothing of the bureaucratic hostilities between the IRS and the state of Illinois, these dating all the way back to the state’s brief introduction of a progressive sales tax, which top officials at Triple-Six under the Carter administration had joined others in the editorial pages of major financial dailies in ridiculing and in abusing the ‘brain trust’ behind the state’s revenue scheme, causing bad blood which continued, in the form of many small types of petty hassles and inaccommodation, through the 1980s.

33 Factoid courtesy of GS-9 Robert Atkins (knows all, tells all).

34 (It turned out that the fountain was broken and an obscure hydraulic part was on order.)

35 There had been certain changes and modifications in the 1040 since 1978, the details of which I would come to know all too well over the coming months.

36 N.B. that a detailed illustrative photo of the REC’s mirrored Annex’s west side’s junction with the main building’s facade circa 1985, which I made a point of including as Plate 1 in the original memoir, has been here deleted by the publisher for ‘legal’ reasons that (I opine) make no sense whatsoever. Hiatus valde deflendus.

37 Which we had to do because several other vehicles had double- and even triple-parked just ahead, and it was impossible to go any farther, and the driver simply put the car in park and sat rotating his neck stiffly, with both hands still on the steering wheel, as the more experienced Service employees began piling out.

38 Some of the entrance area’s milling crowd’s men were in shirtsleeves, and a swirling wind caused by the contrast in temperatures in and out of the building’s shadow blew some of their neckties either back over their shoulders or (for a second or two) out straight from their chests in an arrowy way, as if they were impaled on their own neckties, which is what accounts for the strange memorability of this fragment as we pulled up.

39 The Personnel representative, Ms. Neti-Neti, turned out to be what she called Persian. It was she whom 2K Bob McKenzie and some of the others in Hindle’s Rotes group had christened ‘the Iranian Crisis.’

40 It had been the Pakistani roommate, in fact, who as early as Freshman Orientation Week had christened me with the unkind name that followed me throughout the next three semesters, ‘the young man carbuncular.’

41 There is actually a third general class of reactive person, whose eyes would linger on my face in a kind of nakedly horrified fascination. These were usually people with a personal history of various kinds of moderate skin problems and a consequent interest in worst-case-type examples of bad skin that overrides (i.e., the interest does) their natural tact or inhibition. I had actually had strangers come up to me and start expounding on their own past or present skin problems, assuming that I couldn’t fail to care or be interested, which I will admit I found irksome. Children, by the way, are not members of this (c) category — their interested stare is very different, and in general they (= children) are exempt from the whole taxonomy of reactors, since their social instincts and inhibitions are not yet fully evolved and it’s impossible to take their reactions or lack of tact personally — see e.g. the kid on the bus, although obviously he also had a repellent problem of his own.

42 Nor did she offer to help me with any of my bags, despite the fact that the one I held with the same arm with which I had to sort of clamp my dispatch case against my side clunked painfully against the same knee it had been clunking against all day whenever I had to carry my bags from one spot to another, while my left side’s wet clothes caused the spot on my ribs to start itching like mad again.

43 Given the large number of both new employees and transfers who arrived with luggage that day (for reasons I wouldn’t understand for some time), though, it’s only fair to observe that the REC Personnel office might have done well to have set up some system whereby people got taken to housing first, dropped off their bags, and were only then conducted to the REC for intake and orientation. However difficult the logistics of that scheme might have been, the alternative was an enormous number of IRS employees having to carry their bags with them everywhere they went on that first day at the REC, including in cramped elevators and stairways, as well as piles of unattended bags in the corner of whatever rooms the various orientations and ID productions were going on in.

44 These were Tingle tables, an Examinations convention with which I became all too familiar — although no one I ever talked to knew the origin of ‘Tingle,’ as in whether it was eponymous, or sardonic, or what.

45 For me, the pencil sharpener is a big one. I like a very particular sort of very sharp pencil, and some pencil sharpeners are a great deal better than others for achieving this special shape, which then is blunted and ruined after only a sentence or two, requiring a large number of sharpened pencils all lined up in a special order of age, remaining height, & c. The upshot is that nearly everyone I knew had distracting little rituals like this, of which rituals the whole point, deep down, was that they were distracting.

46 This sense of personal disorganization, which of course is very common, was for me heightened by the fact that I had very little trouble analyzing other people’s basic character and motivations, strengths and weaknesses, & c., while all attempts at self-analysis resulted in a tangle of contradictory and hopelessly complex facts and tendencies, impossible to sort out or draw general conclusions from.

47 I am reminded of an observation made during one of the wigglers’ evening bull sessions in the room of Chris Acquistipace, who was a Chalk Leader and one of the only REC wigglers housed on the second floor of the Angler’s Cove complex to display any friendliness or even an open mind toward me, despite the administrative foul-up that at first had me promoted even above the floor’s other GS-9s. It was either Acquistipace or Ed Shackleford, whose ex-wife had taught high school, who observed that what was then starting to be codified as ‘test anxiety’ may well really have been an anxiety about timed tests, meaning exams or standardized tests, where there is no way to do the endless fidgeting and self-distraction that is part of 99.9 percent of real people’s concentrated deskwork. I cannot honestly say that I remember whose observation it was; it was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. For the sake of convenience, let’s assume it was Shackleford. Shackleford’s observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in ‘test anxiety’ might well be a fear of the tests’ associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread — and it’s this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.

48 Once again, I would only later learn that most wigglers and Support Services workers at the REC referred to the whole Intake/Orientation process as ‘ dis orientation,’ which was another bit of clumsy inside humor. On the other hand, no one in authority expected me to be as completely confused and overwhelmed as in fact I was on arrival, since it emerged that the Personnel office had mistaken me for a completely different David Wallace, viz. an elite and experienced Immersives examiner from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC who had been lured to 047 through a complex system of shell-transfers and bureaucratic finagling. I.e., that there were not one but two David Wallaces whose contracted postings to 047 were to begin in this mid-May week. The computer-system problem behind this error is detailed in § 38. It goes without saying that all these facts emerged only after a great deal of time, misunderstanding, and convolved hassle. They were the real explanation for Ms. Neti-Neti’s scripted effusion and deference: It was actually that other, GS-13’s name, ontologically speaking, that had been on her special whiteboard sign, though it’s not as if ‘David Wallace’ is so common a US name that anyone could have reasonably expected me to posit right away that there’d been some freakish confusion about names and identities, especially during all the other confusion and ineptitude of ‘disorientation.’

(N.B. Purely as an autobiographical aside, I’ll insert that my use of my full middle name in published writing has its origins in this early confusion and trauma, i.e., trauma at being threatened at first with blame for the whole snafu, which, though egregious bullshit, was still understandably traumatic for a twenty-year-old green recruit with a fear of bureaucracies and one so-called ‘honor code’ violation, however specious and hypocritical, in his background already. For years afterward, I had morbid anxieties about there being God only knew how many other David Wallaces running around out there, doing God knows what; and I never again wanted to be professionally mistaken for or conflated with some other David Wallace. And then once you’ve fixed on a certain nom de plume, you’re more or less stuck with it, no matter how alien or pretentious it sounds to you in your everyday life.)

49 The subterranean level, which had been excavated and added (at staggering expense) to the main building in 1974–75, was designated Level 1, and the ground floor was therefore technically Level 2, which was additionally confusing because not all of the REC’s older, pre-excavation-and-addition signs had been changed out, and these signs and directories still identified the main, ground level as 1, the level above that 2, and so on, so that one could get any orientational help from these older directories and ‘You Are Here’ maps only if one knew in advance to recalibrate every level number upward by one, which was another piece of easily correctable institutional idiocy that Mr. Stecyk was grateful to have brought to his attention but embarrassed that he hadn’t seen and fixed before, and in essence took full responsibility for, even though technically it was the responsibility of Mr. Lynn Hornbaker and the Physical Plant office to have seen and amended the signs many years before, which is one reason why the process of getting the new design and makeup of the signs contracted and requisitioned then turned out to be so fraught and pointlessly complex — by making the sign thing as difficult and complex as possible, Hornbaker’s staff helped allay and diffuse responsibility for the signs’ not having been caught and amended years before, such that by the time the REC Director’s office heard about the issue, it was through a cloud of internal memos and cc’s so involved and opaque that no one not directly involved would have paid anything more than vague attention to the very general details of the snafu.

50 These double doors were gray steel, and this was the overall color scheme of Level 1—searing white and matte gray.

51 (the Midwest of which RSCs was in that era located in East St. Louis, two hours southwest)

52 (FYI, late spring was always an exceptionally bad time, skin-wise, during this era; and the harsh fluorescents of Level 1 threw every blister, scab, and lesion into merciless relief.)

53 The logistical information, too, is postdated, strictly speaking. On the day itself, I couldn’t have told you where in the building we even were by this time; no one could have.

54 = Deputy Director of Personnel, which was Mr. Stecyk’s official job title. My IRS contract, by the way, was signed not by Mr. Stecyk or by DP Richard Tate, but by Mr. DeWitt Glendenning Jr., whose bivalent titles were DREC (Director — Regional Examinations Center) and ARCE (Asst. Regional Commissioner for Examinations), but who was referred to by almost everyone as ‘Dwitt.’

55 (This turned out to be Mrs. Marge van Hool, Mr. Stecyk’s adjutant and right arm, who had the lashless, protuberant, unblinking eyes of a reptile or squid, something that could kill and eat you without its bulging alien stare ever changing, although Mrs. van Hool turned out to be the veritable salt of the earth, a classic instance of the truth that what most people look like has very little to do with their intrinsic human qualities… a truth I held quite dear at this time of my life.)

56 (during which interval, through momentary sight lines, I witnessed the Iranian Crisis first reading a paperback book and then at a later point attending to one sleeve of her gas-blue jacket with some kind of small portable sewing implement — she was clearly someone well-suited by temperament and/or experience to standing in long lines)

57 (i.e., nauseously warmed by the heat of some stranger’s back and bottom)

58 I would learn only much later that Mrs. Sloper’s son had been badly burned in some kind of vehicle accident while in the service, and that the state of my skin hit her harder than the average mom. At the time, all I knew was that we despised each other on sight, as of course can happen with some people.

59 In the usual way of twenty-year-olds, when home in Philo, I made a point of arguing with members of my family about their political attitudes, and yet then outside the home I often found myself reflexively holding, or at least sympathizing with, those same parental attitudes. I suppose all this meant was that I hadn’t yet formed a stable identity of my own.

60 (whose personal strengths did not include perceptiveness — and I am far from the only member of the family to observe this; trust me)

61 There was, though, an oral exchange that I overheard involving two or possibly three unseen voices in the narrow hallway my chair was near the ingress of, from two REC personnel presumably standing waiting in some sort of line in that hallway, which I remember (the exchange) in detail because the waiting area’s fluorescent lighting was gray-white and blinding and shadowless, the kind of light that makes people want to kill themselves, and I couldn’t imagine spending nine hours a day in light like this, and so I was emotionally primed to pick this exchange out of the overall ambient noise of the room’s exchanges, even though I could see neither party who was speaking; and I actually transcribed parts of the conversation in real time in a kind of personal shorthand on the inside of the pop psychology book’s front cover, in order to transfer it later to the notebook (which is why I am able now to recount it in such potentially suspicious-looking detail); to wit:

‘That’s the short version?’

‘Well, the point is just that Systems is not uncreative. You can’t paint them all with the same brush.’

‘Not uncreative? What kind of word is that?’

‘The up-front cost-savings of fluorescent lights were obvious. All you had to do was compare power bills. Fluorescent lighting in Exam Centers was doctrine. But Lehrl found, at least in La Junta, that replacing the inset fluorescents with banked incandescents and desk lamps increased efficiency.’

‘No, all the Systems boys found is that throughput of returns increased after fluorescents were changed out for lamps.’

‘Again, no. What Lehrl’s team found was that the net audit receipts of the Western REC’s monthly throughput increased, for each of the three quarters following the installation of incandescents, by an amount next to which the combined installation cost and increased monthly power cost of incandescents was almost negligible, assuming you amortized the one-time expense of taking out all the fluorescents and fixing the ceiling.’

‘But they never did prove that the incandescents had a direct causal link to the increased audit receipts.’

‘But how do you prove that? A Region’s balance sheet is thousands of separate pages. The increased receipts flowed from district offices spread all over the West. There’s too many variables to account for — a single connection is unprovable. That’s why it requires creativity. Lehrl’s boys knew there was a correlation. They could just never get anyone at Triple-Six to accept it.’

‘That’s your interpretation.’

‘They want everything quantified. But how do you quantify morale?’

… which transcription ended up making the book somewhat valuable, in terms of reproduction, decades later. So it was both a waste and not, depending on one’s perspective and context.

62 The Personnel Director’s own large office was down at the end of one of the waiting area’s radial corridors. As I would learn later, Mr. Tate, like many senior administrators, preferred to work out of view; he rarely interacted with anyone below the rank of GS-15.

63 These, I learned, were ‘turdnagels,’ which term referred to low-grade or seasonal IRS support staff tasked mainly to inputting or extracting data on the REC’s computer systems. Many of them were students at either the local junior college or Peoria College of Business, which was not an elite school. Like many low-caste or marginal groups, turdnagels turned out to be very tight-knit and exclusive, even when some of them were assigned to ‘cart boy’ duty and as a result tended to know and exchange pleasantries with many of the wigglers and higher-ranked immersives whose exam materials and supplies they (i.e., the turdnagels) had to courier back and forth in large carts filled with individual levels and boxes and trays that could be expanded like some enormous tackle box’s tiers of compartments, so that the carts became enormous, complicated Rube Goldberg — like versions of a regular grocery or mail-room cart, and of which some (meaning the carts) clattered badly when they were pushed, because of all the moving parts and jerry-rigged tiers and compartments.

64 (signifying that the first kid said nothing)

65 More accurately, it was someone I presumed to be a man…. From my perspective, which was primarily behind the hunched person, he/she appeared to be wearing a suit jacket whose padded shoulders, in that era, were unisex.

66 (again, my assumption)

67 In effect, these people were standing in a kind of preliminary line just to enter the three hallways’ lines in order to see various mid-level Personnel officers like Mrs. van Hool, who was just at that minute (extrapolating backward from Ms. Neti-Neti’s imminent reappearance with the signed Form 706-IC) issuing her a crisp, decisive set of instructions as to what was to be done with and for the valued, veteran, high-ranking immersive exams specialist they believed me to be. (N.B. That examiner, transferred from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC, being not only named David Wallace but having also been scheduled to arrive the following day, and whom the Iranian Crisis had actually been dispatched to wait for and personally escort, the Personnel computer systems having made a conflation error that will be explained in § 38, and in effect collapsing that second, later-arriving David Wallace into me, explaining both the mistaken identity and the mistaken day… all of which it goes without saying is post facto knowledge that I had no way of either knowing or guessing at the time, since ‘David Wallace,’ though hardly the rarest name in the United States, is also not all that common. Nor did I or anyone else know, obviously, on May 15—on which date the other, older, more ‘valuable’ David Wallace was clearing out his Tingle table’s trays and helping a senior cart boy collate and organize the files and supporting documents for distribution to other members of his Immersives Team in preparation for his transfer and flight the following day — that when, the following day, this senior transfer arrived at the appointed time and tried to check in at the GS-13 Intake Station in the Midwest REC lobby, he would be unable to do so — to check in and be permitted to proceed to the line for his new REC badge — because the GS-13 Intake Station would of course have him already listed as checked in and issued a new ID, that badge and GS-13 ID number (which was that other David Wallace’s; he’d received it twelve years prior) having been already issued in Peoria to me, the author and ‘real’ (to me) David Wallace, who was obviously in no position to understand or explain (later) that the whole thing was an administrative fuck-up and not an intentional attempt to supplant or impersonate an IRS GS-13 with over twelve years of devoted service at a job whose difficulty and arcane complication I would shortly start discovering; but in any event, this snafu would end up explaining not just the effusive welcome and mistakenly high civil service grade and salary (which I won’t pretend I wasn’t pleasantly surprised by, albeit of course puzzled) but also, partly, the strange and — for me — pretty much unprecedented interlude in the dark electrical closet off one of the radial hallways extending from the Level 1 central corridor with Ms. Neti-Neti shortly after I was conducted to the head of the ID line and issued the new badge, in which (i.e., incident in the electrical closet) she backed me up against a warm series of inset circuit-boxes and administered what would, according to former president W. J. Clinton, not properly be considered ‘sex,’ but which to me was far and away the most sexual thing that had happened or would happen to me until almost 1989, all of which eventuated because of both the Personnel computer’s failure to distinguish between two different internal David Wallaces and Mrs. van Hool’s apparent instruction to Ms. Neti-Neti to extend to ‘me’ (i.e., to the GS-13 they’d so heavily recruited and gotten to transfer from the Northeast REC’s elite Immersive Pod) ‘every courtesy,’ which it emerged was a very loaded and psychologically charged term for Chahla Neti-Neti, who’d come of economic age in the sybaritic but highly etiquette- and euphemism-intensive culture of pre-Revolutionary Iran (I learned this only later, obviously), and had, like many other nubile younger Iranian women with familial connections to the existing government, had to basically ‘trade’ or ‘barter’ sexual activities with high-level functionaries in order to get herself and two or three other members of her family out of Iran during the tense period when the displacement of the shah’s regime was becoming more and more certain, and to whom ‘extend[ing] every courtesy’ therefore translated into a rapid, almost woodpeckerishly intensive round of fellatio, this apparently being the preferred method of pleasuring government functionaries from whom one sought favor but upon whose face one did not wish or could not bear to look. But it was still really exciting, albeit — for obvious reasons — extremely brief, and also helps explain why it was such a long time before I even realized that I’d left one of my pieces of luggage on the floor of the Personnel office’s waiting area…. All of which background also would later explain the sobriquet ‘Iranian Crisis’ for Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti, whose breasts’ shapes against the damp corduroy of my upper legs remain one of the most vivid sensuous memories of that whole cluster-fuck of my first several days as an IRS immersive.

68 (again helping to account for the gender confusion…)

1 (a female Jew)

2 Production quotas are a reality in the Service. This is not difficult to understand. Given numerous and repeated public statements to the contrary by top officials at Triple-Six, however, all such internal quotas are required to be kept and recorded in code. At the same time, administrators view the knowledge of such quotas as valuable performance incentives, which is why the Compliance Branch mandates and authorizes internal codes that are laughably familiar to most auditors. The Charleston code, in which C stands for the number 0 and H stands for 1, dot, dot, dot, up to N’s standing for 9, is today most commonly employed by retailers who use a perpetual inventory system which must include the nominal cost of goods sold in each transaction record. Thus, an item’s retail price tag at, let us say, a rural IGA supermarket will include both the retail price in digits and the CGS or distributor’s unit price in Charleston code, often at the tag’s lower border. Thus, anyone familiar with the code can determine from, let us say, a $1.49 retail price and a tiny TE beneath it, that the unit markup here is nearly 100 percent, and that the IGA supermarket he is patronizing is either disposed to gouge or has extraordinary retail overhead, possibly involving poorly leveraged debt — a common problem with the management of Midwest supermarket chains. On the other hand, one advantage of the Charleston code is that inflating its Schedule A’s Cost of Goods Sold is one of the most common and effective ways for a retail franchise to cook down its Line 33, especially if the retailer uses one type of code for CGS and its distributor another type of code for its receivables — and most distributors use a much more sophisticated octal PIS code. This is why so many large corporate audits are coordinated to review all different levels of the supply chain simultaneously. Such coordinated audits are handled out of Region, often also using specially selected GS-13 examiners from the Regional Exam Center; we do not conduct such audits at the District level.

3 (I observed that one of the elastic wristlets of its yellow chamois jumper was soaked through with saliva and appeared, for several inches up the infant’s forearm, darker than the other wristlet, which the infant appeared to ignore and I certainly did not mention or foresee doing anything about)

1 Because of the heavy, more or less uninterrupted volume of data the IRS processes, its computer systems had been constructed on the fly and had to be maintained and upgraded the same way. The situation was analogous to maintaining a freeway whose high volume of traffic both necessitates and hinders serious maintenance (i.e., there is no way simply to close the road in order to fix the whole thing at one time; there’s no way to divert all that traffic). In hindsight, it would ultimately have been cheaper and more efficient to shut the entire Service down for a brief period and transfer everything to a modern, freshly installed disk-based system, nationwide. At the time, though, this seemed unimaginable, especially in light of the Rome NY REC’s spectacular 1982 meltdown under the pressures of a cumulative backlog. So many of the fixes and upgrades were temporary and partial and, in retrospect, wildly inefficient, e.g. trying to increase processing power by altering antiquated equipment to accommodate slightly less antiquated computer cards (plus Powers cards had round holes instead of Holleriths’ old square ones, requiring all kinds of violent alterations for Fornix equipment that was already old and fragile).

2 What might appear to a layman as the obvious problem caused by this debugging — i.e., the loss of the system’s ability to recognize and classify IRS demotions — was not in fact much of a problem, comparatively, for Personnel. The fact is that fewer than.002 percent of Internal Revenue Service employees are ever demoted in grade, thanks in large part to the collective-bargaining power of the National Association of Treasury Employees. In effect, the conditions and procedural hurdles required for demotion were gradually strengthened until in most cases they were no less stringent than those required for termination with cause… although this is all very much a side issue, mentioned only to head off certain possible confusions on the part of the reader.

3 (which, again, was actually the main building’s ground floor)

4 It’s probably worth noting two additional bugs or systemic weaknesses or whatever that contributed to the fuck-up and my initial misassignment at Post 047. The first problem was that, due to limitations imposed by the reconfiguration of certain core programs to accommodate round-holed ninety-column Powers cards, the Personnel computer system’s file labels could accommodate only an employee’s middle initial, which in the case of David Francis Wallace, incoming high-value transfer from Philadelphia, was not enough to distinguish him in the system from David Foster Wallace, incoming low-value contract hire. The second, much more serious problem was that IRS Personnel’s original Social Security numbers (i.e., the civilian SSs issued to them in childhood) are always deleted and replaced systemwide by the new, IRS-issued SSs that serve also as Service IDs. An employee’s original SS is ‘stored’ only on his original employment application — which applications are always copied to microfiche and stored in the National Records Center, which NRC by 1981 was dispersed throughout a dozen different regional annexes and warehouse complexes and was notoriously ill-managed and disorganized and difficult to extract specific records from in any kind of timely way. Plus the Personnel systems’ file labels can accommodate only one SS # anyway, and that’s obviously going to be the new ‘9’-based SS that functions as one’s Service ID number. And since the 975-04-2012 that the new, low-value David F. Wallace was issued upon Expedited Intake was also the 975-04-2012 Service ID # of the older, high-value GS-13 David F. Wallace, the two employees became, so far as the Service’s computer system was concerned, the same person.

5 In retrospect, it’s now clear that there was actually a third, even more severe systemic problem, which was that, prior to 1987, the Service’s computer systems were organized around what’s now known as a ‘Bad Wheel’ model of network integration. Again, there’s a great deal of arcana and explanation — most of it involving not only the trying-to-maintain-a-freeway-while-still-letting-people-use-it maintenance situation detailed above but also the piecemeal and jerry-rigged quality of systems whose maintenance depended on annual budget allocations to the Technical Branch, which for a variety of bureaucratic/political reasons fluctuated wildly from year to year — but the point of the Bad Wheel thing was that Technical Branch’s networking setup through the mid-1980s resembled a wheel with a hub but no rim. In terms of computer interface, everything had to go through Martinsburg’s NCC. A transfer of data from Peoria’s Midwest Regional Exam Center to Midwest Region HQ up in Joliet, for example, actually entailed two separate data transfers, the first from Peoria to Martinsburg and the second from Martinsburg to Joliet. Martinsburg’s modems and dedicated lines were (for that era) high-baud and efficient, but there was still often a delay in ‘routing time,’ which bland term actually referred to incoming data’s sitting there in Martinsburg’s Fornix mainframes’ magnetic cores until that data’s turn came up in the routing queue. Meaning there was always a lag. And, for understandable reasons, the queue was always longest and the lag worst in the weeks following April 15’s tidal influx of individual tax returns. Had there been anything like lateral networking in the IRS system — i.e., had the Midwest REC’s Systems/Personnel computers been able to interface directly with their Systems/Personnel counterparts at the Northeast REC in Philadelphia, the whole David F. Wallace swivet could have been resolved (and unjust blame averted) much more quickly. (Not to mention that the whole rimless-wheel model was at odds with the much-touted decentralization of the Service following the 1952 King Commission report, not much of which is relevant here except in that it just adds to the overall Rube Goldberg idiocy of the whole setup.)

6 (This was the latest published data available, and the Service had to rely exclusively on published data because the US Dept. of Commerce’s new UNIVAC system was incompatible with the more antiquated Fornix hardware that Martinsburg was still using.)

7 (Now you can probably see why this occasional ‘author’ appositive thing is sometimes necessary; it turned out that there were two separate David Wallaces posted at the Midwest REC, of whom the one who ended up accused of impersonation was guess who.)

1 Remote Fact Acquisition

2 Spontaneous Data Intrusion

* Meredith Rand becomes no less comely or beautiful when she speaks to someone else about ritualistically cutting herself and being pink-paper’d into the Zeller Center. But she does look abruptly older or more drawn. You can see, not just imagine but see the way her face will look at forty — which after all, as is well known, will be only a different form of beauty, a less received and more severe or ‘earned’ beauty, in which the emergent flaws and lines do not mar her beautiful features but rather frame them, show seams in a face that is made and not just stamped out at random. Meredith Rand’s nose and chin’s slight cleft shine slightly in the red light of the walls’ fake flames.