by James Hynes
Additional Acclaim for Kings of Infinite Space
“What makes this novel scarier—and more ambitious—than The Lecturer’s Tale and Publish & Perish, Hynes’s previous books, is that it isn’t about the academy. It’s about all of us—porters, waitresses, office schlubs and TV anchorwomen, as well as people who read The Norton Anthology of English Literature. They, we, are all trying to rise or at least not fall, haunted by the idea that someone—no matter where we are on the totem pole—is richer, more important, hipper, less humiliated than us.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that too.”
—Laura Miller, Salon.com
“[A] brilliantly twisted new satire . . . a slapstick apocalypse, part H. G. Wells, part Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
—Time Out New York
“Marvelous. Dark and funny and well paced. If you liked Publish & Perish, you’ll get down with this one too.”
—Maudnewton.com
“It’s one of the funniest, creepiest books to come around in a long while, and perhaps the best novel to be set in Texas to appear in years.”
—Bookslut
“A strange, suspenseful, and splendidly written novel. Think Stephen King writing satire . . . a very funny, very macabre novel, filled with unforgettable characters (the living dead among them).”
—Nancy Pearl, The Seattle Times
“People really do laugh out loud when reading Hynes novels. . . . Funny, frightening, smart, and sexy! It is absolutely unlike anything you have ever read.”
—Keith Taylor, Ann Arbor Observer
“Funny, scary, supernatural . . . wanders across genre lines in a delightful and unexpected way. Four stars.”
—Rawbrick.net
“Part Office Space, part The Office, and part The X-Files . . . Full of feeling and funny as hell.”
—The Austin Chronicle
“A darkly comic portrait of the job from hell . . . By turns ominous, hilarious, and genuinely scary: Hynes offers a highly original send-up of the most unnatural activity ever conceived by the human mind—work.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Kings of Infinite Space is at turns frightening and laugh-out-loud funny. Hynes has captured many of the realities of office work while contorting them to nightmarish fantasies. From office politics to bloodthirsty zombies, from classic literary references to a steamy love affair, Hynes erases lines between genres. . . . You will never look at the ceiling tiles above your desk the same way again.”
—Bookreporter.com
“A hilarious natural send-up of office life . . . readers will be on the edge of their seats.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In the best tradition of Baum, Carroll, and Orwell, Hynes crafts a mordantly incisive satire.”
—Booklist
“Hilarious . . . It’s part Falling Down . . . part Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom . . . part Temp Slave! ’zine, part erotic love story and part (of course) The Island of Dr. Moreau.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“A whack job of narrative collating that mixes the black comedy of an office satire with a hot love story with a crazy and gruesome horror tale. That Hynes can blend this all together and come up with a novel touching, sexy, scary, and funny is proof of his wizardry.”
—John Griesemer, author of Signal & Noise
ALSO BY JAMES HYNES
The Lecturer’s Tale
Publish and Perish
The Wild Colonial Boy
KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE
JAMES
HYNES
KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE. Copyright © 2004 by James Hynes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hynes, James.
Kings of infinite space : a novel / by James Hynes.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-31966-5
EAN 978-0312-31966-3
1. Government contractors—Fiction. 2. Temporary employees—Fiction.
3. Technical writing—Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Divorced
men—Fiction. 6. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.Y55K56 2004
813'.54—dc22 2003058563
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press
First Picador Edition: March 2005
D 10 9 8 7 6 5
TO MIKE AND TOM,
A COUPLE OF HARDWORKING GUYS
Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
—H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
ONE
ONE BRUTALLY HOT SUMMER’S MORNING, Paul Trilby—ex-husband, temp typist, cat murderer—slouched sweating in his t-shirt on his way to work, waiting behind the wheel of his car for the longest red light in central Texas. He was steeling himself for a confrontation with his boss, screwing up his nerve to ask for a raise, but his present circumstances were conspiring against him. His fourteen-year-old Dodge Colt rattled in place in the middle of the Travis Street Bridge, hemmed in on all sides by bulbous, purring pickup trucks and gleaming sport utility vehicles with fat, black tires. The electric blues and greens of these enormous automobiles reflected the dazzling morning glare through Paul’s cracked and dirty windshield; they radiated shimmering heat through his open window. Waiting for the light, the fingers of his left hand drumming the scalding side of his car, the skin of his forearm baking to leather in the heat, Paul felt less like a man who deserved more out of life than a peasant on a mule cart trapped in the middle of an armored division.
“You’re paying me as a typist,” Paul said aloud, practicing, “but you’re working me as a technical writer.”
In the heat, and in the rumble of idling engines, this sounded especially feeble. Paul sighed and peered ahead, where a homeless man was walking through the waves of heat between the lines of hulking trucks and SUVs, turning slowly from side to side as if he were lost in a parking lot looking for his car. Unlike most panhandlers, he didn’t carry a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard, telegraphing some tale of woe; even more strange, he wore a white, short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie instead of the usual sun-bleached denims and filthy t-shirt. The bluntness of his large, egg-shaped head was exaggerated by a severe buzz cut and a pair of wire-rim glasses, and his body was egg shaped as well—he looked unusually well fed for a homeless guy. Indeed, in his white shirt and polyester slacks, he looked like a caricature of a middle manager from some draw-this-puppy matchbook school of art, one large oval topped by a smaller one. The shirt and tie are a mistake, Paul thought, he needs a sign—WILL T
YPE AND FILE FOR FOOD. But that cut too close to the bone for Paul; he was only a paycheck away from panhandling himself. And anyway, it wasn’t his job to offer marketing advice to the homeless. I’ve got my own problems, he told himself, and he lifted his gaze through the heat shimmering off the trucks ahead and saw, at the far end of the bridge, the time and temperature endlessly chasing each other across the shadow side of the Bank of Texas Building. It was just barely eight o’clock, and already 85 degrees. In the morning glare the bank’s brass logo along the sunlit side of the building blazed as if it were burning.
“Bot,” said Paul, pronouncing the bank’s acronym aloud. “Bee. Oh. Tee.” Sweat trickled down his breastbone. Both front windows of his unair-conditioned Colt were rolled down, in the unlikely event of a breeze, and his own dress shirt was tossed on the passenger seat so that he wouldn’t sweat through it on the drive to work. A racket like someone violently battering a cookie sheet came from the undercarriage of his unevenly idling car and was reflected back at him by the enormous, neon blue Trooper to his left.
This is not the climate for ambition, Paul thought, and at the edge of his consciousness flickered a retort from his former, more politically engaged persona as a university professor: that this kind of thinking was prejudiced and possibly even racist. Old buzzwords flickered dialectically at the back of his brain like heat lightning along the horizon—colonial/postcolonial; First World/Third World; North/South—but Paul was only barely aware of them. During this moment of distraction, each of the red numerals streaming across the bank at the end of the bridge had grown by one. Now it was 86 degrees and 8:01, and Paul was late for work.
The egg-shaped man had come closer, only a couple of vehicles away. All the other drivers on the bridge sat high up behind their tinted windows, ignoring the man in air-conditioned comfort. Paul had come to think of these more affluent drivers as “the truckoisie,” middle-class state employees who faced, at worst, a forty-minute, stop-and-start commute every morning, but who did it in vehicles capable of fording a jungle stream or hauling half a ton of manure. These vehicles had names that bespoke Spartan virtues, a semimilitary asceticism—Explorer and Pathfinder and Samurai—but within, even in the cabs of the pickup trucks, the vehicles were as comfy as suburban living rooms, where the truckoisie drank from huge plastic flagons of specialty coffee, talked on their cell phones, and listened to hyperventilating, drive time DJs on the radio or best-selling self-help books on tape. Paul’s own tape player had long since choked to death on a cassette of Jan and Dean’s greatest hits, stuck at last on the screeching tires of “Dead Man’s Curve,” and the FM band on his radio no longer worked, leaving him with only the shrill democracy of AM—jammin’ oldies, oompah Tejano accordion music, and Dr. Laura. At this moment he waited with the radio off, his car noisily juddering itself to pieces beneath him, and he sat smelling exhaust, his own sweat, and the nitrous aroma of bat shit rising off the sluggish green river below.
“I’m not a typist,” muttered Paul, trying to focus on the matter at hand, “I’m a goddamn tech writer.”
Suddenly the egg-shaped man was at the Colt’s bumper, swiveling his spectacles in Paul’s direction. Paul averted his gaze, trying to avoid eye contact. Too late. The homeless man came up to Paul’s window, his eyes huge behind his glasses.
Paul glowered straight ahead, his train of thought derailed. This was a breach of panhandler decorum. The way it was supposed to work was, you waggled your sign, if you had one, and scowled in a guilt-inducing manner; the object of your attentions ignored you; you moved on. Paul sighed ostentatiously and lifted his eyebrows at the traffic light, just barely visible above the tall rear end of the Pathfinder ahead of him. Still red. Over the stink of exhaust and hot metal, he was certain he could already smell the homeless man’s riparian scent. But for the heat, Paul would have rolled up his window.
Don’t meet his eye, Paul told himself. Pretend he isn’t there.
But now Mr. Egg was bent at Paul’s window like a highway patrolman. Paul allowed himself only the tiniest roll of his eyeballs to the side and was surprised to note that the man’s tie featured some sort of astronomical theme, lines of right ascension and declination and signs of the Zodiac against a background of twilight blue. Still not meeting the man’s eye, Paul performed another leftward, double-take bounce of his eyeballs. The tie was faded but tightly knotted and clipped to the man’s shirt with a dull, silver tie clip, upon which an eroded engraving read “. . . OF THE YEAR.” Paul risked another eyeball bounce at Herr Egg, then another. The white shirt front was smudged, and the narrow points of the man’s collar were frayed, but astonishingly in this heat—Paul himself perspired like an overweight prizefighter—there were no sweat stains on the shirt. Monsieur Egg wore two pens; the lower end of one poked through a hole in the bottom of his breast pocket. Across his other breast, inches from Paul’s nose, was a smudgy, creased, blue-and-white paper name tag, the sort with a sticky backing that conference goers wear. It read, in blue sans serif and large, block hand lettering:
Hello! My name is
BOY G
Paul twisted sideways in his seat and looked the man in his egg-shaped face. “Go away,” he demanded.
Señor Egg’s face from temple to chin was one long, smooth, hairless curve. His skin—another first for a homeless guy in Texas—was pale as a slug, almost albino. His milky scalp gleamed through his stubbled hair, but even this close to him Paul saw not a drop of sweat. The man—Boy G, why else would he wear a name tag?—had a small mouth and a rounded nose, and his tiny, pale eyes were magnified by the bulbous lenses of his wire rims. He was not looking at Paul, however, but past him, appraising the contents and the state of Paul’s automobile. His fishy eyes noted the S-shaped crack in the windshield, the greasy dust on the dashboard, the foamy rents in the upholstery. The driver’s side sun visor was long gone, torn off in a rage, and the armrest on the passenger door hung by one screw. Behind the front seat a rising tide of Coke cans, crumpled Taco Bell bags, and empty Big Gulp cups cluttered the foot wells.
Paul stared at the man openmouthed and gripped the steering wheel, his stomach tight with anger. Could this bum be judging him? Was it possible that Paul Trilby, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., almost a Fulbright, did not meet the exacting standards of the homeless? Boy G’s small mouth curved down at either end, either the beginnings of a smile or a condescending frown, and Paul braced himself for some hoarse obscenity or just an indecipherable grunt. He frantically sought for something cutting to say to forestall this asshole’s street witticism.
But Boy G spoke in a whisper, his breath betraying no trace of alcohol nor of anything else for that matter.
“Are we not men?” he said.
Paul’s retort caught in his throat. “What?” was all he managed to say.
“Are we not men?” repeated Boy G, with the same ghostly inflection.
The driver of the Ram Truck behind him honked her horn just then, startling Paul, and he glanced in the rearview mirror, then ahead through the windshield glare at the traffic light. It was green, and all the gleaming trucks ahead of him were in motion; a wide gap had opened up between his front bumper and the receding wall of SUVs and pickups. Paul jerked his foot off the brake and the Colt rattled forward. Then he remembered the homeless guy so close to his car, and he hit the brake again. He turned to the window as Ms. Ram Truck leaned on her horn.
“Watch it!” said Paul to Boy G, but there was no one there.
The Ram Truck roared around him and raced through the yellow light. Paul cursed and hit the gas, then jammed the brake almost immediately as the light turned red. His threadbare tires screeched; his arthritic shocks groaned. He lurched against his seat belt, and from the passenger seat his shirt and his lunch slid to the floor; behind him the midden of cans and crumpled bags rustled. Paul pounded the wheel and twisted in his seat, looking right and left, forward and back, for the egg-shaped man. But all he saw were the six sun-baked lanes and the concrete parapet of the bridge, a
nd another fearsome brigade of Troopers and Scouts coming up from behind. Boy G had vanished.
TWO
BY THE TIME PAUL PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT, all the spaces in the shade next to the General Services Division Building had been taken by trucks and SUVs, lined up along the wall like piglets at the teat. Paul’s watch said 8:06, and he drove frantically up and down the lanes looking for a spot, the angry rattle under his car reflected back at him by the rows of vehicles. But all the shady spots were taken, and he was forced to park along the river embankment in the sun. Before the car shuddered and gasped to a stop, he had rolled up the windows and bent with a grunt to snatch his shirt and his bag lunch off the floor. He trotted across the lot in the stifling heat, pulling on the shirt as he ran, his bag lunch dangling from between his teeth.
“Tech writer,” he snarled through clenched lips, “not typist.”
Preston, the security guard, lifted his eyebrows at the sight of Paul tucking in his shirt as he came breathlessly into the dank air-conditioning of the lobby.
“You oughta get a regular badge.” Preston had big shoulders, a steel-grey crew cut, and a massive Joseph Stalin moustache. He stood behind the counter at parade rest, one hand clasping the other wrist below his tight little potbelly, and he unclasped his wrist and leaned forward just enough to turn the sign-in sheet towards Paul with his long fingers. “You been here long enough,” he continued, in a thick East Texas accent like a mouth full of grits.
“I’m only here temporarily,” Paul gasped. Sweat trickled down his collar. He wrote “7:59” on the sheet and dashed out his signature. “It’s a temporary situation.”