Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

by James Hynes

  “Easy, compadre,” said the Colonel, his eyes twinkling.

  “Don’t do that!” Paul hated the whine in his voice, and he glanced around him to see if anyone had noticed. J.J. and Bob Wier clutched the tops of their cubes and peered over like a pair of Kilroys, J.J. glowering, Bob Wier’s eyes round and shining.

  “I think you need a little quality time at lunch,” said the Colonel in a gravelly murmur. “Come see us.”

  Paul waved him away and continued up the aisle towards the printer.

  “Don’t be afraid, Paul,” the Colonel said. “Big changes are coming.”

  “It’s the only way,” said Bob Wier.

  “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” said J.J., “asshole.”

  The pages from the RFP rattled in Paul’s hand as he plucked them from the printer. Nolene had reappeared from nowhere. She beckoned him.

  “How you feelin’, hon?” she asked, folding her hands on her desktop.

  Paul gripped the edge of her cube and struggled to keep his voice low and even. “How would you feel if you found a dead guy in the cube next to yours first thing in the morning?”

  Nolene nodded. “Why’n’t you take a sick day? I’m sure Rick wouldn’t mind.”

  Just then Rick’s voice floated through his door, out of the glare, like the voice of the almighty. “ ’Zat Paul out there? You got my watermark, son?”

  Nolene sighed silently, with her eyes closed. Then she leveled her gaze, severe and maternal, at Paul. “Or I can make it so he don’t mind. You just say the word.”

  Paul waved at her speechlessly and went into Rick’s office. He shut the door behind him and collapsed in one of the chairs across from Rick’s desk.

  “Here,” he said, and he shoved the RFP pages at Rick. They were airborne for a moment, then fluttered to Rick’s desktop like a pair of leaves. Rick planted a palm on each one and slid them towards him, lifting his hands to peer at each page in turn.

  “Perfect,” he breathed, his eyebrows bounding. “Took you long enough, but you got it.”

  “I didn’t do it.” Paul dug his fingers into the armrests of the chair to keep them from trembling. His heart was still racing from the fright the Colonel had given him.

  “Say what?” Rick’s eyebrows bounded to their furthest north.

  “I didn’t put the watermark in the document.”

  “Then who did?”

  “He did!” Paul’s voice climbed a couple of octaves. “The tech writer! The guy who died over the weekend!” Paul pointed unsteadily at Rick’s door. “He did it for me! And then . . . and then . . . he died.” Paul clamped his palm over his mouth to keep from whimpering.

  “Ah.” Rick flung himself back in his chair so forcefully that he nearly tipped over backwards. Outside the window, the bare limbs of the dying oak seemed to reach towards him out of the glare. Rick clamped his fingers together behind his head and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Coupla temps, cubes right next to each other, y’all got to be friends over there.” Rick didn’t even seem to be addressing Paul but explaining the situation to himself out loud. “I guess that’s what y’all call solidarity . . .”

  “I didn’t even know his name,” said Paul.

  “Huh.” Rick lowered his gaze to Paul and blinked, as if surprised to see him there.

  “He died. At work.” Paul’s mouth was dry. “All because . . . because . . . she . . .”

  “ ‘She’?”

  “Olivia.” Paul’s knuckles were white on the armrest. “I heard her tell him he couldn’t go home till he finished the job, or she wouldn’t pay him. I heard her.”

  Rick lurched forward in his chair. “Way-ul,” he said, not looking at Paul. He moved his hands aimlessly among the papers on his desk. “We sent her home.”

  “What for?” Paul said. “So she can’t kill anybody else?”

  “Well now,” said Rick. “Well now.”

  Keep your mouth shut, Paul told himself. You need this job. But it was all he could do not to stand and hurl his chair through the glass and into the bony grasp of the oak tree.

  “I tell you what.” Rick’s hands twitched through a pile of folders. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

  “Don’t you people get it? I’m a temp. I live paycheck to paycheck, Rick. I can’t afford to lose the hours.”

  “Yep. Welp.” Rick still wouldn’t look at Paul. “You won’t have to. Just fill in the hours on your time sheet like you always do, and I’ll sign it. Go on home.”

  Paul blinked at Rick. He relaxed his grip on the armrests. “Are you serious?”

  “Serious as a heart attack, Paul. Now g’wan, git, before I change my mind.”

  Paul rose unsteadily to his feet, pulled open the door, and started down the aisle without looking back. He stiffened as he passed the Colonel’s cube, but he managed to round the corner without incident. He came around the next corner into his own little side street and stopped short at the sight of florid Ray from Building Services hulking over the desk in the tech writer’s cube, clearing the littered desktop into a cardboard box. Paul hurried past him into his own cube, where he dropped in his chair and sat for a moment with his head propped in his hands.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered. “They only just wheeled him away.” He turned and aimed his voice over the partition into the next cube. “Don’t you people have any fucking decency?” He switched off his monitor and his desk lamp and heaved himself out of the chair and into the aisle. Ray stood holding the box with one hand and a fistful of papers in the other.

  “Say, bud,” he said breathlessly as Paul passed the doorway of the dead man’s cube, “how ’bout you give me a hand here? You could hold the box for me.”

  Paul shot him an angry glance and stalked away.

  In the lobby Preston was on the phone, but he gave Paul a meaningful look and held up his finger for Paul to wait a moment. But Paul just flipped his badge across the counter and kept going. By the time he got to his car and rolled down his windows and opened the hatchback to let the heat out, he was still trembling. He slammed the hatchback and lowered himself behind the wheel, the shocks groaning under him, and he lifted his key to the ignition. But he didn’t start the car; he only gripped the steering wheel loosely and stared through his cracked and spotted windshield at the glare of the morning sun off the SUVs and pickups in the parking lot. Little waves of heat trembled off the electric sheen of hoods and bumpers and high roof lines. Beyond the embankment, Paul thought he could actually see the stale odor of the river rising off the water. I left my lunch inside, he thought, but I’m not going back for it. I may never go back into that building again. But where am I going to go? Do I really want to spend the whole day in that grotty apartment with Charlotte? He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel and lowered his head.

  “Paul?”

  The voice outside his window startled him, and Paul banged the horn with his forehead.

  “Aw, Christ!” he moaned. “Are you people trying to drive me crazy?”

  Callie stooped at his window, her brow furrowed. She wore a man’s blue dress shirt and a faded pair of jeans—very nicely, too, Paul thought, even in his distress. She clutched the collar of her shirt together with one hand.

  “You okay?” she said.

  Paul sighed and sagged back against the headrest of his seat. Callie glanced back at the building, then lifted her other hand and brushed his shoulder with her fingertips. “Ray said you was in kind of a state,” she said.

  “The guy in the cube next to me . . . ,” Paul began. “The tech writer. He—”

  “I know,” Callie said, crouching closer, rubbing his shoulder.

  “It’s just . . . it could have been me, you know?”

  “I don’t think so, hon.” She brushed his hair with the backs of her fingers. “Poor Dennis, he was real sick.”

  Dennis. Was that his name? Paul sighed again and said, “Rick said I could go home.”

  “Good for Rick.”

/>   “It’s just . . .” He turned to meet her gaze. “The thing is . . .” How could he tell her why he was afraid of his own apartment? Especially now?

  Callie bit her lip. She glanced up at the building again, then stepped back and dug in the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a ring of keys and began to pry one free with her long fingers. “Here,” she said, and offered Paul her apartment key.

  Paul stared at the key in her palm as if he had never seen anything like it. He looked up and said, “Seriously?” in a little boy’s voice.

  “Take it.” She shoved the key through the window and dropped it in his palm.

  “Thank you,” Paul breathed. A warm relief spread through him down to his toes.

  “I don’t have a TV or nothin’. Just, y’know, the anthology.” Callie lifted a corner of her lips. “You can brush up on your Shakespeare.”

  Paul grabbed her by the wrist and tugged her down to the window.

  “Don’t,” she said, glancing at the blank, tinted windows of the building, but he pulled her to him, and she kissed him sweetly. Then she stepped back, blushing. “Just be sure you’re there when I get home. I can’t get in without that key.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “ARE YOU AWAKE?”

  No answer.

  “Paul? Are you awake, honey?”

  A sigh. “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “You feel tense.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  Another sigh.

  “Do you like it when I do this?”

  “Sure.” Pause. “Not right now.”

  “Well, that’s a first.” Pause. “What’d you do here all day?”

  “Slept. I slept all day.”

  “I reckon that’s why you can’t sleep now.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s alright. Means you were real happy to see me when I got home.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t apologize. I was a little surprised when I walked in the door, but Lord. Better’n having a cat rub up against you as you walk in the door.”

  “A cat?”

  “Yeah, you know how a cat that’s been left alone all day’ll rub up against you when you come home? Wind between your legs and such? Well, you were like a big, horny cat—”

  “A cat?”

  “ ’Cause you were certainly winding between my legs there for a while—”

  “What made you think of a cat?”

  “And I made you purr, too, didn’t I—”

  “Why do you say ‘a cat’?”

  “I know all your favorite places, don’t I. You’re just a big ol’ tomcat.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Come on, one pussy to another. Who’s a good boy?”

  “Stop it!”

  Silence. An angry sigh. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” Pause. “You don’t have to stay here, pal. You can just find the goddamn door.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “ ’Cause I don’t need the goddamn aggravation. If I want some sulky, tongue-tied cowboy, I can go down to Sixth Street right now and get me one.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “ ’Cause I’ve fucked a lot of cowboys, Paul. I know what I’m talking about, and I’m sick to death of that shit.”

  “I mean it, I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up. I ain’t done with you.” A sigh. “You’re my first college professor. I thought you’d be different. But you’re just like all the rest. Got plenty to say when you want to get my panties off, but afterwards, it’s like lying here with a length of two-by-four. ‘Uh huh.’ ‘Sure.’ ‘You bet.’ ” Furious pause. “Well, Fuck. That. Shit.”

  A long pause.

  “Callie—”

  “Yeah, go on. Say something smart, Professor.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Don’t call you what?”

  “ ‘Professor.’ I hate that.”

  “Why not? You mean you’re not a professor?”

  Sigh. “Not anymore I’m not, and I never will be again. I’m a typist, and a temp typist at that. You tell me: Is that a step up or down from a cowboy?”

  “Paul—”

  “Okay, a tech writer. I guess that’s better than a typist. By about four dollars an hour. That’s what? Another thirty-two dollars a day. Another, let’s see, hundred and sixty dollars a week.”

  “Ooh baby, keep talking. Self-pity gets me hot.”

  A long pause. “He died, Callie! That fucking bitch Olivia worked him to death! That poor bastard died in a cubicle!”

  “Paul . . .”

  “He died working overtime! And he wasn’t even getting paid for it!”

  “Paul, listen to me. He had cancer. He was dead anyway. He just hadn’t laid down yet.”

  “Well, I know just how he feels.”

  “Jesus Christ on a stick, what planet are you from? You think you’re the only person who works a shitty job? ’Cause on the planet I’m from, which is planet Earth, you son of a bitch, you got it pretty sweet. You get to sit all day in the air-conditioning, and you don’t have to deal with the public or take their sass or pick up their trash or scrape the food off their plates or wipe their ass. . . .”

  Silence.

  “Fuck.” A sigh. “First I’m an asshole because I won’t tell you what I think. Then when I do, I’m a self-pitying asshole. What do you want from me, Callie? Make up your goddamn mind.”

  A long silence. “Well.” A touch in the dark. “I guess that ain’t hardly fair, is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Paul . . .”

  “Really, it doesn’t matter. It’s okay. Forget it.”

  A long silence. Then, in the dark, singing, in a hoarsely sexy voice, an Oklahoma Janis. “ ‘You haul sixteen tons, what do you get?’ ” A nudge in the dark. “C’mon, cowboy, you know this.”

  “You want me to sing?”

  “ ‘Sixteen tons, what do you get . . .?’”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Closer, deeper, more sensually. “ ‘You haul sixteen tons, what do you get . . .?’”

  A laugh, a sigh, then a quavering tenor, a little out of tune. “ ‘Another day older and deeper in debt . . .’ ”

  Her breath hot on his ear. “ ‘Saint Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go . . .’ ”

  Together, not quite in harmony: “ ‘I owe my soul to the company store!’ ” Then, wordlessly, “Do, do, do, do, do do do do.”

  Laughter. “That’s not from the Norton Anthology.”

  “Not yet.”

  A pair of sighs. Sheets rustling.

  “Okay if I touch you there?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Whoa. Dead man couldn’t do that.”

  “Like you said, I’m dead, but I won’t lie down.”

  “Oh.” A gasp. “Oh.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Oh, that’s it” Then, tenderly, “Honey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck me sweet.”

  “Like this?”

  “Please, yes.”

  “Right here?”

  “Oh, you got it. Yes.”

  Murmurs. A moan.

  Then, louder. “Oh Jesus, I’m close.”

  Breathlessly. “It’s okay, honey, don’t wait for me.”

  “Oh, God, Callie, I don’t want to die in Texas!”

  Hard breathing. A sniffle.

  “There, there, baby, there, there.” A kiss. “Me neither.”

  EIGHTEEN

  EARLY THAT TUESDAY a glum Paul stood before a pull-down white screen in Building Services to pose for his permanent TxDoGS badge. This morning Callie displayed all the warmth of a DMV clerk, barking at Paul to look at the red dot on the camera. Still, after the photo, she glanced into the outer offi
ce to make sure Ray wasn’t lumbering into view, then kissed Paul quickly and pushed him out the door. Forty minutes later, as he stared gloomily at his computer monitor, the laminated badge slid across the desktop at his elbow. Paul gazed without recognition at his own flash-bleached face and zombie gaze. Callie didn’t so much as touch his shoulder, and by the time Paul turned slowly in his chair, she was gone. He clipped on his new badge, and then carried the old, temporary one down to the security desk on the first floor. Without meeting Preston’s eye, Paul slid the old badge across the counter. “I don’t need this anymore.”

  “How you doin’ this morning?” Preston asked, keeping his voice low.

  “I’m okay.” Paul started to turn away.

  “ ’Cause if you want to talk about anything,” Preston said, lowering his gaze to catch Paul’s, “or if you see anything you want to tell me about—”

  Paul recognized the look in the security guard’s eye. It was Loser’s Solidarity, and Paul had seen it before during his long fall from grace in academia. Back then some colleague who was even worse off than Paul would meet his eye in the hallway or across the faculty lounge, with a mournful, liquid gaze that said, Aren’t we a couple of sad bastards? This look had been worse than being ignored by old friends, worse even than being condescended to by graduate students, because it usually came from some haggard, aging adjunct at the end of his string or, worst of all, from some clapped-out, tenured old hack who, after forty years, had never risen above the rank of assistant professor and hadn’t published a book since the Eisenhower administration. It was a look that said, It’s alright. Just lie down and die with the rest of us.

  Paul stepped sharply back as if Preston had tried to touch him. Who the fuck is this guy? Paul wondered. Another retired military man padding out his pension. The last thing I need, Paul thought angrily, is sympathy from some ex-master-sergeant. His throat seized up, but he managed to say, “I’m okay,” as he moved away across the lobby.

  Back in his cube he kept his head down, happy to let the nubbly walls block out the wider horizons of the office. He left only once, to go to the bathroom. At the urinal he found his pulse racing as he strained to pee, and he emptied his bladder at last out of sheer willpower, in squirts and dribbles. The men’s room seemed too quiet, as if someone was waiting for him to leave. At first he couldn’t bring himself to look up at the ceiling, though he glanced up in the mirror as he washed his hands. The panels were in perfect order. Hurrying back to his cube, he plucked up the nerve to look into the empty cube next to his. The cubicle had been stripped bare. The computer and office chair were gone; not even a stray paper clip remained. The bare desktop gleamed, and the shampooed nap of the carpet stood in pert swirls.