It was only outside the cramped Gremlin, when the cool air of the facade-shadowed front area first hit and chilled it, that I became aware that the whole left side of my suit was now wet from the ambient perspiration of the young man I’d been mashed up next to through the whole ride, though when I looked around for him in order to make a gesture at the darkened corduroy and give him an appropriate look of distaste, he was now nowhere to be seen.
Ms. F. Chahla Neti-Neti (according to her ID badge)’s expression changed, actually several different times, as I approached her with bags and a degree of direct eye contact that would have been inappropriate if she hadn’t been holding a sign with my name on it. Here, if I haven’t already done so, I should explain that in this period of what was basically late adolescence I had very bad skin — very, very bad, as in the dermatological category ‘severe/disfiguring.’40 On meeting or encountering me for the first time, most people either (a) looked only briefly at my face and then looked away, or (b) looked involuntarily stricken or pitying, or repelled, then could be seen struggling with themselves to superimpose on that expression another one that signified they either didn’t see the bad skin or weren’t especially bothered by it. The whole skin thing is a long story and for the most part not worth mentioning, except to emphasize again that by that time I was more or less reconciled to the skin thing and it didn’t much bother me anymore, although it did make it difficult to shave with any precision, and I did tend to be very aware of whether I was standing in direct light and, if so, from just what angle that light originated — because in certain kinds of light the problem was very, very bad indeed, I knew. On this first encounter, I don’t remember whether Ms. Neti-Neti was an (a) or a (b),41 perhaps because my attention/memory was occupied by the way the Service ID badge clipped to her Personnel jacket’s breast pocket had a head-shot photo that looked taken in very bright, almost magnesium-looking light, and I remember instantly calculating what this sort of photo’s hideous light was going to do in terms of my face’s blebular cysts and scabs, just as it had made this creamily dark Persian woman’s complexion look dark gray, and had exaggerated the wide-setness of her eyes so that in the ID photo she looked almost like a puma or some other strange kind of feline predator, along with the badge’s displaying her first initial and surname, GS grade, Personnel affiliation, and a series of nine digits that I would only later understand to be her internally generated SS, which also functions as one’s Service ID number.
The reason for even taking the time to mention the (a) or (b) reaction thing is that it is the only way to make sense of the fact that Ms. Neti-Neti’s greeting was so verbally effusive and deferential—‘Your reputation precedes you’; ‘On behalf of Mr. Glendenning and Mr. Tate, we’re just so extremely pleased to have you on board’; ‘We’re extremely pleased you were willing to take this posting’—without her face and eyes registering any such enthusiasm or even displaying any affect or interest in me or in why I was so late in arriving and had forced her to stand there holding up a sign for God only knew how long, which I personally would very much have wanted some kind of explanation of. Not to mention that the whole left side of my suit was wet, which I would have at least commented on in some concerned way, e.g. had the person fallen into a puddle or what. In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words ‘Have a nice day’ while her expression indicates that it’s really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now. And this whole doubly disorienting affectless monologue occurred as the woman led me away beneath the ‘Paid Preparer’s Information’ slots at the base of the great 1040’s recto side toward a smaller, much less ostentatious set of doors some hundred yards west along the REC’s tile facade.42 At this close range, it was possible to see that some of the facade’s tiles were chipped and/or stained. We could also see various distorted parts of our reflections in the facade of the Annex building directly ahead (i.e., east), though it was several hundred yards distant and the partial reflections were very tiny and indistinct.
Ms. Neti-Neti chattered along almost the whole length of the facade. It goes without saying that it was hard to comprehend all this personal attention and (verbal) deference being directed at a GS-9 who was probably going to get assigned to opening envelopes or carrying stacks of obscure files from one place to another or something. My initial theory was that the unnamed relative who’d helped get me in the door here as a way to defer the mechanisms of Guaranteed Student Loan collection had a lot more administrative juice than I’d originally thought. Although, of course, as I tried to clunk my way along behind the ethnic lady in the shadow of the building’s rear/front, that business about my ‘reputation preced[ing]’ me was worrisome, given some of the irrational anxieties I’ve already given more attention than they deserved just above.
Now it’s becoming clear that I could spend an enormous amount of both our time just on describing this initial arrival and the compounding stack of confusions, miscommunications, and overall fuck-ups (at least one of which was mine — viz., leaving one of my suitcases in the outer waiting area of the REC’s Personnel office, which I didn’t even realize I’d done until I was on the shuttle back from the REC to the Angler’s Cove apartment complex where my assigned IRS housing was located43) that attended that first day of posting, some of which took weeks to iron out. But only a few of these are relevant overall. One of the quirks of real human memory is that the most vivid, detailed recall doesn’t usually concern the things that are most germane. The as it were forest. It’s not just that real memory is fragmentary; I think it’s also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years later, to retrieve tend to be sensory. We live inside bodies, after all. Random examples of recalled snippets: Long and windowless interior halls, the burning in my forearms just before I had to set down the bags for a moment. The particular sound and cadence of Ms. Neti-Neti’s heels on the hallways’ flooring, which was of light-brown linoleum whose wax smelled strong in the unmoving air and reflected an endless series of shining parenthetical arcs where a custodian had swung his autowaxer from side to side in the empty hall at night. The place was a labyrinth of hallways, staircases, and fire doors with coded signs. Many of the halls seemed curved as opposed to straight, which I remember thinking was an illusion of perspective; the REC’s exterior had nothing rounded or podular about it. In sum, the place was too overwhelmingly complex and repetitive to describe one’s first experience of in any detail. Not to mention confusing: For instance, I know that our initial destination on arrival was one level below the main entrance and lobby. I know this in retrospect, because it’s where the REC’s Personnel office was, which I know was where Ms. Neti-Neti had been instructed to route me around the lobby check-ins and bring me directly… but I also have what feels like a clear sensuous memory of climbing at least one short set of stairs at some point, since it was climbing stairs with the luggage that caused the severest clunking of that one suitcase against the outside of my knee, which I could almost visualize the swelling and flamboyant bruising of. On the other hand, I don’t suppose it’s impossible that I’m confusing the order in which various parts of the REC were traversed.