As to our actual physical arrival at the center’s main entrance on that first day, all I can say by way of summary is that there is an indescribable thrill about seeing one’s own printed name on a sign held up at a crowded place of disembarkation. I suppose part of it is that one feels especially picked out and — to use the bureaucratic term — validated. The special sign with my name on it held aloft by an attractive, official-looking woman in a bright-blue blazer was also, obviously, after all the ignominies and demeaning hassles, and consequent lateness, surprising, though not so surprising that any person could be reasonably expected to have seen it as immediate evidence of some error or confusion — there was, after all, the aforementioned matter of nepotistic juice and the letter in my dispatch case.
This was also when it emerged that the REC’s ostensible rear was really the front, and that the two orthogonal parts of the center were not continuous, and that the main building’s facade was stylized in a strange and kind of intimidating way that one would concede it was maybe prudent to keep from facing, or looming over, the crowded public road just south. Even without the crowding and chaos, the whole huge main-entrance area was complex and disorienting. There were flags, coded signs, directional arrows, and a kind of broad concrete plaza with what looked to have been a fountain but had no water spurting.34 The main building’s square shadow extended almost all the way across the plaza to the two highly desirable parking lots opposite, neither of which was all that large. And there was the REC’s elaborate and obviously expensive facade, which extended from just above the main entrance to the middle of what appeared to be the fifth floor; it was some kind of tile or mosaic representation of a blank IRS 1978 Form 1040, both pages of it, complete in all detail down to verso Line 31’s slot for the computation of ‘Adjusted Gross Income’ and recto Line 66’s terminal ‘BALANCE DUE’ box, which box served, along with the form’s myriad other slots and boxes and inset squares, as what looked to be windows. The detail was striking and the cream, salmon, and celadon of the offset colors realistic, if slightly dated.35 Also, to make the whole thing even more overwhelming/disorienting when seen all at once from the circular spur off the access road whence Service vehicles could pull right up and offload their passengers without having to park (which would have necessitated going all the way back out and around again, since the parking lots just opposite the entrance, across the plaza, were completely full and even had some extra vehicles parked in prohibited corner spaces that would keep other vehicles from being able to back out of their spaces and exit), the giant 1040, which was realistically proportioned to scale and so was slightly longer than it was wide, was flanked at either distant end by a large, round inset intaglio or glyph of some kind of chimerical combat and a Latin phrase, indecipherable in the right-hand side’s deep shadow, which turned out to be the Service’s official seal and motto (none of which I had been told in my contractual materials [which, as mentioned, tended to be both cryptic and tonally stern or urgent, really little more than engines of apprehension as far as I’d been concerned, sitting in my family’s unused parlor and trying to parse them]). By way of one more detail, the whole elaborate facade assembly was reflected — though in an angled and laterally foreshortened way that made the edge’s glyph and motto look closer together than they actually were — by the garishly mirrored exterior side of the REC’s other structure, a.k.a. the ‘REC Annex,’ which lay at almost a perfect right angle to the main facade and was connected at two floors to the main building’s west edge by what then appeared to be large green tubes supported by blinding (since not in the main building’s shadow) forests of slender anodized or stainless steel poles, which metal supports looked strange and millipedic from this angle and were further reflected in blinding little angled slices by the edges of the Annex’s mirrored exterior.
One or two of the mirrored panels were broken or cracked, however, I remember noting.36
(Also, please keep in mind that I knew none of the REC structures’ actual history or logistics on that initial day; I’m trying to stay faithful to the memory of that experience itself, although there is no avoiding a successive description of various elements that were, at the time, obviously simultaneous — certain distortions are just part and parcel of linear English.)
Re the human element: The broad cement area around the main entrance, as first seen by us from over the mass of other brown and orange/yellow Service vehicles disgorging passengers, was an enormous teeming roil of Service employees all milling around, holding 141-POs in their distinctive dark-yellow Service envelopes, with luggage and briefcases and accordion files, many of them hatted, and various REC or perhaps Regional HQ support personnel in gas-blue blazers with clipboards and sheaves of printout paper that they had rolled into ad hoc megaphones that they spoke through while they held their clipboards up in the air to get people’s attention, evidently trying to collect those arrivals with similar 141-PO job designations and/or GS-grades into cohesive groups for ‘targeted check-in’ at various ‘Intake Stations’ set up around the REC’s main lobby, which lobby, as seen through the entrance’s glass doors, was surprisingly small and cheesy-looking, and had various battered-looking folding tables set up with crude signs made of tented manila folders — the whole thing looked haphazardly jerry-rigged and chaotic, and one figured that there couldn’t possibly be this many newly arrived and/or reassigned transfers to the REC as a typical daily thing, or else the disembarkation and check-in system would be much more permanent-looking and streamlined and less like some small-scale reenactment of the fall of Saigon. Again, though, all this was being perceived and processed in nothing more than a distracted flash — which occurred as the Gremlin finally broke out of the access road’s snarl and pulled up in the almost chilly air of the building’s shade to double-park in the semicircular spur just outside the entrance37—because, as mentioned, a person’s attention is more or less automatically drawn to a sign with one’s name on it, especially if it seems to be one of only two named signs being held up in the whole madding bureaucratic roil outside the main entrance, and so I had almost immediately seen the ethnic-looking woman in the loud blazer standing a few paces to the right of the rightmost group of new arrivals clumped around a man with a raised clipboard and paper horn,38 the female slightly off to the side and maybe ten feet directly beneath the facade’s slot for reporting AGI on line 31, against the wall, holding either a piece of white cardboard or a small erasable whiteboard with the name DAVID WALLACE in neat block capitals. She was standing in a way that managed to connote weariness and boredom without any actual slumping, her legs well out and back supported by the wall, from bottom to crown, and staring straight ahead, holding the sign at chest level and staring into space with neither interest nor resignation. Of course I was now, as mentioned, through no fault of my own, terribly late, the anxiety of which mixed with the inevitable thrill of seeing one’s name on a sign, not to mention a sign held by an exotic-looking female, plus a whole separate set of Ozymandian awe-and-folly reactions to the conjunction of the monumental 1040 mosaic combined with the self-appending chaos of the entrance area’s crowds, to form a sort of sensory and emotional power-surge that I remember now much more vividly than any of the myriad details and impressions (of which there were thousands or even millions, all obviously incoming at the same moment) of arrival. For she was visibly ethnic, even as seen in the deep pool of shade at the facade’s base with various bits of blinding glare from the Annex’s mirrored exterior, parts of which were catching bits of sun as it moved slightly west of due south. My initial guess was upper-caste Indian or Pakistani — one of my freshman roommates at college had been a wealthy Pakistani, with a marvelously burbly singsong accent, though he’d revealed himself over the year to be an unbelievable narcissist and general prick.39 She was, at the distance from which the Gremlin disgorged us, more striking than pretty, or maybe you might say that she was pretty in a somewhat mannish, hard-faced way, with very dark hair and wide-set eyes in which was, as mentioned, the look of someone who was ‘on duty’ in the sort of way that involves having really nothing to do but stand there. It was the same expression one sees on security guards, college research-librarians on a Friday night, parking-lot attendants, grain silo operators, & c. — she stood there gazing into the middle distance as though at the end of a pier.