The Group Managers’ offices were the only fully enclosed work spaces on the third-floor office’s Audits Pod, and have doors, affording the luxury of privacy. But the offices are not large, Manshardt’s own being perhaps at most eight feet by eight, with large frosted-glass windows on two sides — these being the sides which did not abut the structural, load-bearing walls of the District building — and a double brass coat hook fixture, and a US flag and Service seal and motto flag on one corner’s complex pole, as well as framed portraits of both Triple-Six’s Commissioner of Internal Revenue and our own Regional Commissioner across town. In contrast to the cramped, impersonal metal desks of the Audit Group, Gary Manshardt’s wood-grain desk, with its Tingle array of trays and hutches, took up nearly all of the space in the office not ceded to the infant, along with there being one of the large, multi-display easels on which all Group Managers charted both their auditors’ present loads and, in a DD-mandated Charleston code that fooled no one,2 each GS-9’s total cases, adjustments, and assessed deficiencies so far in the present quarter. The air-conditioning was good.
And yet I’m now advised that none of this is directly to the point, the substance of which is: Imagine my surprise and discomfiture once I had moved my briefcase, Doberman hand puppet, desk nameplate, hat, personal items, Service notebook, expandable cardboard file of Hollerith cards, M1 printouts, Memo 20s, Form 520s and 1120s, blank forms, and at least two fat folders of crosschecks and receipt-request forms into the Group Manager’s office, and — glancing as little as possible at Gary’s forbidding infant, which was still wearing its lunch bib and standing-slash-sitting at its circular plastic play station gumming a liquid-filled ring in what I can describe only as a studious or contemplative way — was just managing to regather my concentration in order to organize a list of preliminary receipt and supporting-document requests from a vendor that made and affixed tempered handles on a line of galvanized pails for Danville’s Midstate Galvanics Co. when I heard the unmistakable adult sound of a cleared throat, albeit at an extremely high pitch, as if from an adult who had recently inhaled helium out of a decorative balloon. The infant was, like Gary Manshardt’s wife, a redhead, although in the infant’s case its extreme pallor and the light-yellow pajamas or jumper — or whatever exactly one calls the small and fuzzy full-body snap-up chamois bodysuits which infants today tend to wear — made its fine wisps and spirals of hair appear, in the intensive light of the office, to be the color of old blood, and its fierce and concentrated blue eyes appeared now to be almost pupilless; and, to complete the incongruous horror, the infant had set aside its teething ring — rather carefully and deliberately, as a man might set aside a file on his desk once he has completed it and is ready to turn his professional attention to another — to lie moist and shiny next to an upright bottle of what appeared to be apple juice, and had placed its tiny hands folded adultly together before it on the vivid blue plastic of its play station,3 exactly as Mr. Manshardt or Mr. Fardelle or any of the other Group Managers or District Director’s senior staff would place their clasped hands before them on the desk to signal that you and the issue that had brought you into their office now occupied their full attention, and cleared its throat again — for it had indeed been it, he, the infant, who, like any other GM, had cleared its throat in an expectant way in order to get my attention and at the same time in some subtle way to upbraid me for requiring it to do something to get my attention, as if I had been daydreaming or digressing mentally from some issue at hand — and, gazing at me fiercely, said — yes, said, in a high and l-deficient but unmistakable voice—
‘Well?’
It now seems probable that it was at first my shock, my as it were nonplussedness at being spoken that adultly to by an infant in diapers and jammies soaked with drool, that led me so automatically to answer, to respond as I would to any expectant ‘Well?’ from a Service superior, functioning on, as it were, automatic pilot:
‘Excuse me?’ I said, as we stared at each other across our respectively wood-grain and lurid blue surfaces and the five or six fluorescent feet of air between us, both our hands now identically out and clasped, the infant’s gaze fiercely expectant and a small, creamy gout of mucus appearing and receding in one nostril as it breathed, looking directly at me, the cowlick at its crown like a tag or receipt from a register’s slit, its eyes lashless and without circumference or bottom, its lips pursed as if considering how to proceed, a bubble in its bottle of juice ascending slowly, leisurely towards the bottle’s top, the salient nipple brown and shiny from recent use. And the moment hung there between us, borderless and distendant, my impulse to clear my own throat only blocked by a fear of appearing impertinent — and it was in that seemingly endless, expectant interval that I came to see that I deferred to the infant, respected it, granted it full authority, and therefore waited, abiding, both of us in that small and shadowless father’s office, in the knowledge that I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frightening thing’s to command, its instrument or tool.
§ 36
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.
There is little to say about the original animus or ‘motive cause’ of the boy’s desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. He had been homebound one day with asthma, a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father’s promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire. The boy’s asthma was thought to be congenital.
The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion. (The young boy thought, at that point, of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.) The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom’s carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect 90-degree angle to his thigh as he could at that point manage. Then he had to lean as far over to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot’s outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips (the boy’s idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signified kissing in children’s cartoons) at a section of the foot’s outside he had marked with a bull’s-eye of soluble ink, struggling to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom’s door. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for over a month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.