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THE COMPLIANCEBRANCHBy David Foster Wallace, from a work in progress.WaUace read thispassageat the 2006 Le Coriversazionifestival in Italy. His last articlefar Harper's Magazine,"Tense Present," appeared in the April 2001 issue.

My audit group's Group Manager and hiswife have an infant I can describe only as fierce.Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; itsgaze over bottle or pacifier or finger-fierce, in-timidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry.When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens,which makes it look all the fiercer. On thoseworkdays when our Group Manager, Mr. Yea-gle, brought it in to the District office, hangingpapoose-style in a nylon device on his back, theinfant appeared to be riding him as a mahoutdoes an elephant. It hung there, radiating au-thority. Its back lay directly against Mr. Yea-gle's, its large head resting in the hollow of its fa-ther's neck and forcing our Group Manager'shead out and down into a posture of classic op-pression. They made a creature with two faces,one of which was calm and blandly adult andthe other unformed and yet emphatically fierce.The infant never wiggled or fussed in the device.Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gath-ered waiting for the morning elevator was leveland unblinking and (it seemed) almost accus-ing. The infant's face, as I experienced it, was

mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch,its forehead milky and domed, its pale red hairwispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids Icould see. I never saw it blink. Its features seemedsuggestions only. It had roughly as much face asa whale does. I did not like it at all.

On the fourth floor, in Mr. Yeagle's office, theinfant had a crib and also a modem, ingeniousmobile supporting and restraining device whichit spent much of its time in, a large ring- ordoughnut-shaped appurtenance of heavy blueplastic and a type of cloth or nylon saddle in thecenter's hole in which the infant was placed ina position somewhat between sitting and stand-ing (that is, the infant's legs were nearly straight,but the saddle or sling appeared to support itsweight). The toy or station had four short, equi-distant legs, which terminated in rubber or plas-tic wheels, and it was designed to be movableunder the infant's power, albeit slowly, rather theway our own stations' wheeled chairs could bemaneuvered this way and that via awkward mo-tions of their occupants' legs. However, the infantdeclined to move the appliance, as far as I eversaw, or to play with any of the bright, primary-colored toys and small, amusing developmentaldevices built into sockets in the ring's blue sur-face; nor did it seem much to occupy itself withthe books made entirely of cloth, the dump trucksand fire engines, teething rings of liquid-filledplastic, intricate mobiles, or pull-string music-and-animal-noise-emitting toys with which itsarea of the office was replete. It just sat there, mo-tionless and mute, gazing fiercely at whateverGS-6-class IRS auditor entered the Group Man-ager's small, frosted-glass office on the days when

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Gary Yeagle (whose wife, Janine, was modernand had a career) brought the infant in with him,for which he had reportedly received special per-mission from the Asst. Regional Commissioner'soffice. At first, many a GS-6 would enter the of-fice on some thin pretext, trying to curry favorby smiling and making soft primal sounds at theinfant and putting a finger or pencil in its field ofvision, perhaps trying to stimulate its instinct forgrasping. The infant, however, would gaze at theGS-6 auditor fiercely, with a combination of in-tensity and disdain, rather as if it were hungry andthe GS-6 were food but not quite the right kind.There are some small children who you can tellare going to grow up to be frightening adults;this infant was frightening now. It was eerie anddiscomfiting to see something with hardly anybona fide human face yet to speak of neverthe-less assume a fierce, intimidating, almost ac-cusatory expression. I myself had abandoned allideas of ingratiating myself with Mr. Yeagle viahis infant quite early on. To be honest, I wasconcerned that the Group Manager might beable to pick up my fear and dislike of the infanton some type of mysterious occult parental radar.

The child's presence seemed not to interferewith Mr. Yeagle's office duties, the bulk of whichwere administrative and required far less pureconcentration than his audit group's own. Oncethe post's working day began, Mr. Yeagle appearedfor the most part to ignore the infant, and to beignored by it in return. Whenever I went in, tryas I might, I could not interact with the infant. Thenylon papoose device hung on the coat hook nextto Mr. Yeagle's suit coat. Sometimes the officesmelled slightly of powder or pee. I did not knowwhen he changed the infant, or where, and avoid-ed visualizing what all might be involved or theinfant's expression when this occurred. I myself

could not imagine touching the infant

B or being touched by it in any way.

ecause of our post's unique administrativestructure, the Audits branch's Group Managersalso did rotating duty as the District's Level-OneAppeals Officer, requiring Mr. Yeagle sometimesto put his suit coat back on and proceed down-stairs to one of the second floor's audit cubicles,where aggrieved taxpayers or their representa-tives would present their objections to a givenaudit's findings. And since, by the Internal Rev-enue Manual's procedural rules for Appeal ofFindings, the GS-6 auditor in question was him-self never present during a Level-One Appeal,that auditor became the logical choice for GaryYeagle to approach and ask quietly to move hiswork materials into the Group Manager's officeand to keep an eye on the infant while Mr. Yea-gle handled the Level-One Appeal.

The day eventually came when one of my au-

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dits' findings was appealed, when Mr. Yeagle was,so to speak, "up" as Appeals Officer; and, as luckwould have it, the appeal was of a field audit I hadspent almost eight full working days conductingat All Right Flowers, a small, family-owned S cor-poration specializing in the arrangement and de-livery of bouquets for public functions, a firm whoseForm 1120, Schedule A, E, and G deductions foreverything from depreciation and spoilage to em-ployee compensation were so grossly inflated thatI had been forced-despite terrible, longstandinghay fever-to back-audit them for the two previ-ous years and to amend both their Schedule [s and1120s' Line 33s heavily in the Treasury's favor.'v And yet none of this is directly to the point, thesubstance of which is: Imagine my surprise and dis-comfiture when I had moved my briefcase, desknameplate, expandable Service file of 520s and1120s, and two fat folders of return-receipts andreceipts-receipts and DIF checklists and Strategy-Memo 81s into Gary Yeagle's office, and-glancing sidelong as little as possible at his forbid-ding infant, which was still wearing its lunch biband standing/sitting at its circular plastic stationgumming a liquid-filled ring in what I can describeonly as a studious or contemplative way-I was justmanaging to regather my concentration in orderto organize a list of preliminary receipt andsupporting-document requests from a small vendorthat made and affixed tempered handles on a lineof galvanized pails for Peoria's Midstate Galvanics,when I heard the unmistakably adult sound of acleared throat, albeit at an extremely high pitch,as if from an adult who had recently inhaled he-lium out of a decorative balloon. The infant is, likeMr. Yeagle's spouse herself, a redhead, althoughin the infant's case its extreme pallor and the light-yellowpajamas or jumper it wore made its fine wispsand spirals of cupreous hair appear, in the light ofthe office's overhead fluorescents, to be the color ofold blood, and its fierce and concentrated blue eyesappeared to be pupilless and the overintense blueof a Popsicle; and to complete the incongruoushorror, the infant had set aside its teething ring-rather carefully and deliberately, as a man mightset aside a file on his desk once he has completedit and is ready to turn his professional attention toanother-which ring now lay moist and shiny nextto an upright bottle of what appeared to be applejuice, and had placed its tiny folded hands adultlytogether before him on the vivid blue plastic of itsplay station (I noted that one of the elastic wristletsof its yellow chamois jumper was soaked throughwith saliva and appeared, for several inches up the

. infant's forearm, darker than the other wristlet,which the infant appeared to ignore and I certainlydid not mention or foresee doing anything about),exactly as Mr. Yeagle or any of the other GroupManagers or District Commissioner's senior staffmight place their clasped hands before them on the

Empty Bar, by Armando Marino, was on exhibit in September at Galeria Fernando Pradilla, in Madrid,

desk to signal that you and the issue that hadbrought you into their office now occupied theirfull attention, and cleared its throat again-for ithad indeed been it, he, the infant, who, like anyother Group Manager, had cleared its throat in anexpectant way in order to get my attention and atthe same time in some subtle way to upbraid me forrequiring it to do something to get my attention, asif I had been daydreaming or digressing mentallyfrom some issue at hand-and, gazing at me fierce-ly, said-yes, said, in a high and I-deficient but un-mistakable voice-

"Well?"And it is probable, in retrospect, that it was at

first my shock, my nonplussedness at being spokento so adultly by an infant in diapers and jammiessoaked with drool, that led me so automatically toanswer, to respond as I would to any expectant"Wel1?" from a Service superior, functioning, so tospeak, on autopilot: "Excuse me!" I said, as westared at each other across our respectively wood-

grain and lurid-bluesurfaces and the five or six fluo-rescent feet of air between us, both our hands nowidentically out and clasped, the infant's gazefierce-ly expectant and a small, creamy gout of mucus ap-pearing and receding in one nostril as it breathed,looking at me, the cowlick at its crown like a re-ceipt from a register's slit, its eyes lashless and with-out circumference or bottom, its lips pursed as ifconsidering how to proceed, a bubble in its bottle ofjuice ascending slowly toward the bottle's top, thesalient nipple brown and shiny with recent use;and the moment hung there between us, borderlessand distendant, my impulse to clear my own throatblocked only by a fear of appearing impertinent;and it was in that literally endless expectant in-terval that I came to see that I deferred to the in-fant, respected it, granted it full authority, andtherefore waited, abiding, both of us in that smalland shadowless father's office, in the knowledgethat I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frighteningthing's to command, its instrument or tool.

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