by James Hynes
“What are you looking at?” Callie said.
“Nothing,” said Paul. His mouth was very dry all of a sudden.
Callie half turned her head as if to look at Charlotte, but not quite far enough. She sat thoughtfully for a moment. Then she faced Paul again and pressed her fingertips along his jaw so that he looked at her. He hoped she couldn’t see the fear in his eyes.
“Let’s read something else,” she murmured, and she took the book from his hands. They shifted slowly together, Paul slipping farther down the bed, Callie settling more tightly against him. His shirt billowed out from her, and he caught her warm, salty scent. She turned the book over and laid it flat against his chest, flipping slowly through the pages.
“Callie,” he said, but she put a finger to his lips and said, “Shh.” She found the page she wanted and pressed her palm against the open pages, flattening the binding against his sternum. “Just listen,” she said, and she began to rock slowly against him.
“ ‘In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?
Ways are on all sides, while the way I miss:
If to the right hand, there in love I burn;
Let me go forward, therein danger is.’ ”
Her accent was as strong as ever, but she read as if she were making the words up as she went along. As she read, Paul slowly slid his palms up her taut thighs.
“Who wrote this?” he said, watching her.
“Mary Worth,” Callie said.
“Mary Worth?” The way she moved against him was exquisite.
“Hush up,” she said, and she continued:
“ ‘If to the left, suspicion hinders bliss,
Let me turn back, Shame cries I ought return.
Nor faint though crosses with my fortunes kiss;
Stand still is harder, although sure to mourn.’ ”
He slid his thumbs under the tails of the shirt and slipped his cock inside her. Callie inhaled sharply, but she kept reading.
“ ‘Then let me take the right or left-hand way;
Go forward, or stand still, or back retire.
I must these doubts endure without allay
Or help, but travail find for my best hire.’ ”
The springs of the creaky old sofa bed sang sweetly. Paul knew that Charlotte was still there, somewhere, watching—angrily? enviously?—or with some feline diffidence he’d never understand. Whatever it was, he couldn’t take his eyes off the tremors of pleasure crossing Callie’s face. The heavy anthology rose and fell on his breastbone, and Callie pressed the pages flat with her thumbs, the tips of her fingers brushing his chest. She squeezed him with her thighs, and Paul moaned and closed his eyes and felt her hot breath on his cheek as she breathed the last lines into his ear.
“ ‘Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move,’ ” she whispered, “ ‘Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.’ ”
TWENTY-EIGHT
IN THE MORNING, just before he was pinched awake, shaking and sweating, by the icy little needles of Charlotte’s teeth, Paul dreamed of a vast cubescape that ran endlessly into a dim twilight, an infinity of cubicles grown over with gray fabric. At the center of each cube stood a pale, buzz-cut man in a shirt and tie, his breast pocket full of pens and mechanical pencils, his eyes wide behind a thick-lensed pair of glasses. Each man wore a smudgy HELLO! MY NAME IS name tag, each with a different unreadable name. Above the cubescape the knotty ceiling was hung with gray stalactites, and fat, gray droplets fell slowly but steadily, each with an echoing bathhouse plink! streaking the gray fabric of the cube partitions and splashing the milky foreheads of the pale men, who seemed not to notice. Apart from the steady chorus of droplets, the only other sound was an arrhythmic murmuring, indecipherable at first, until one by one the men smiled, each one pulling his cracked lips away from a row of sharpened teeth. Like a rising tide it came to Paul what they were saying, not in unison, not a chant, but each man whispering individually, in a feverish monotone, “Are we not men? Are we not men?”
Then they opened their jaws wide and all rushed at him at once, pouring up the aisles between their cubes, and Paul fled from them up a series of long, clammy tunnels, each tunnel narrower than the last. Behind him he heard the whispery patter of many feet and the frenzied mumbling of the pale men. Then the mumbling swelled up behind him, and Paul was in his bed, looking up at the grotty ceiling tile of his apartment, listening to the geriatric chug of his air-conditioner. Down the length of his naked body—his skin as pale as the faces of the men in the cubicles—he saw Boy G at the end of his bed, watching him through his thick lenses.
“Boy G,” whispered the homeless man, his lips barely moving, “conquers by gentleness.”
Am I still dreaming? wondered Paul, and then Charlotte was crouching on the mattress, her tail coiled round her, her ears flattened. She hissed at Boy G, and the homeless man recoiled, his eyes widening behind his glasses. Charlotte turned, opened her jaws as wide as they would go, and drove her teeth into Paul’s big toe.
Paul screamed and sat bolt upright in bed. There was Charlotte for real, crouching next to his bare ankle and growling at him. Paul flung a pillow at her, and the cat vanished as the pillow swished through the space where she had just been.
“Ah, Christ.” Paul rubbed his toe and swung out of bed. “Callie?” he called out, limping through the tiny apartment, but she had already left. The shower stall was wet, a damp towel draped over the curtain rod. In his eagerness to follow her, Paul skipped breakfast; he wanted to get to work early so that he could set up the conference room for the meeting today. On the Travis Street Bridge, waiting for the light in his rattling car, he kept his eyes fixed on the traffic light at the far end, without so much as a glance to the right or left. His dream had shaken him, and he hoped to avoid even a glimpse of any pale figure wandering among the SUVs. A few moments later he swung into the GSD lot and, because he was still a few minutes early, found a spot close to the building. In the first-floor lobby, Preston nodded to him but said nothing. Paul climbed the stairs to Building Services, but the door was closed. With a glance over the balcony railing at Preston, who was still watching him, Paul headed down the long, second-floor aisle towards his cube. Despite his dream, what he feared most was another Post-it this morning from Olivia, some vicious message pressed to his computer screen that would jangle his nerves and unsettle him all day long. He nearly passed the men’s room, then realized that he might not get a chance for a break later in the morning—especially if Olivia was running the meeting—so he went back and pushed through the door. Rick was at the sink already, leaning towards the mirror and tending to the part in his hair with infinite patience, both hands poised over his head. Paul passed behind him to the urinal, unsure if Rick had even seen him.
“Hey, Paul!” Rick called out from the other side of the modesty barrier.
“Yeah,” said Paul from the urinal. From habit, he kept an eye on the ceiling panel over his head.
“Y’all took a look at Olivia’s edits, right?”
“Sure.” Paul zipped up and flushed the urinal with his elbow.
In front of the mirror Rick was still carefully trawling his comb through his hair. “We all set for the big pow-wow this morning?”
“Yes,” said Paul, washing his hands.
Rick stepped back from the mirror, turned his head and smiled, turned his head the other way and smiled. “Faaaantastic!” he said, and he slipped the comb into his back pocket and swung out the door, letting it bang behind him.
“Fantastic,” murmured Paul. He leaned heavily on the counter and surveyed his face in the mirror for a moment. Then he straightened, wiped his hands, and banged out the door. Rounding the corner into the elevator lobby, he ran straight into Boy G.
“Jesus Christ!” cried Paul, jumping back.
The homeless man stood at the recycling box, his fat, bloodless fingers curled under the lid. He was wearing the same clothes he always wore—trousers, baggy in the seat, a threadbare white shirt
with a breast pocket full of mismatched pens, his astronomical tie, wire rims with bulbous lenses. He still sported his smudgy name badge with its bold block printing. His milky scalp gleamed under the fluorescent lights. For the first time Paul noticed his shoes, lace-up black Oxfords scuffed along the sides and gleaming with wet.
“Am I still dreaming?” Paul said out loud. He glanced over his shoulder and then through the door into the twilight of cubeland. “Are you real?” he gasped.
Boy G slowly turned his bug-eyed stare in Paul’s direction. “Boy G’s no fool,” he said, in his whispery undertone.
Paul felt a clammy chill that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning, and he edged slowly around the homeless man. Boy G rotated slowly in place to follow him.
“Who are you?” Paul said.
“Myself,” breathed Boy G.
Paul edged closer to the door. “What are you?” he said.
“Myself,” said Boy G. “Can you say the same?”
There was a long, mournful, hydraulic groan as the elevator arrived at the second floor. Boy G hissed and flashed his savage teeth, then dashed round the corner. Paul was afraid to move until he heard the thump of the men’s room door, and then he leaped forward himself, nearly bowling over Renee as she stepped out of the elevator. She shrieked and leaped back, but by then Paul had rounded the corner. He stiff-armed the men’s room door and held it open, his muscles trembling. In the glare of the lights Paul saw no one, only his own reflection in the mirror, wild-eyed and panting, but in the far corner, over the farthest stall, the one where Paul occasionally caught a nap in the morning, he saw something black—the scuffed heel, perhaps, of a lace-up black Oxford—rising into a gap in the ceiling, and then the ceiling tile scraping back into its frame. Then he heard a long, slow creaking as something large moved above the ceiling towards the door.
Paul jumped back into the hall and let the door thump shut. He hustled round the corner into cubeland and into his own aisle. His heart pounded, and his hands shook. Please be at your desk, Preston, he prayed, please please please be at your desk. He halted for a moment just outside the doorway of his cube and lifted his eyes to the ceiling, making an anxious circuit of the ceiling tiles around his cube. Nothing moved or bulged or creaked. He held his breath and listened. Nothing.
He exhaled and stepped into his cube and froze. On the desk next to the keyboard, squarely at the center of the pool of light from his desk lamp, sat the Tiffany’s box, wilted and warped and stained with river water.
TWENTY-NINE
“WHY ISN’T HE WRITING ALL THIS DOWN?” said Olivia, who was seated to the left of Rick.
“Why isn’t who writing what down?” said Rick, from the head of the table.
“Why isn’t Paul writing down what everyone is saying?” Olivia twirled a pencil between her fingers as skillfully as a majorette.
To the right of Rick, Paul kept his gaze on the glowing screen of the laptop. “I’m waiting for the consensus,” he muttered.
“For the what?” said J.J., out of the twilight somewhere to Paul’s right. Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier all sat on Paul’s side of the table, while Olivia sat all by herself on the other side.
“What the professor’s trying to say,” said Colonel, “is that he’s waiting for us’n’s to come to an agreement on how the paragraph should read.”
“It’s not for him to decide how the paragraph should read,” said Olivia. In the glow from the screen at the far end of the room, her face floated as pale as ectoplasm.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” muttered Paul.
“That’s not what he’s saying, Olivia,” said Colonel. He balanced his laser pointer between his fingers, itching for a chance to switch it on.
“I think there should be a record of everyone’s ideas as we go along,” said Olivia. “Of who proposed what.”
There was a general sigh from the men down the length of the table, and Colonel said, “With all due respect, Olivia, what we need is a firm consensus on the finished document, not a record of the process. Who cares who says what?” He glanced either way down the table. “Am I right, gentlemen?”
“Fuckin’ A,” mumbled J.J.
“Amen,” breathed Bob Wier.
“Hm,” said Rick, gazing at the backs of his hands.
“The professor here,” said Colonel, “is a tech writer, not a stenographer.”
Paul hunched his shoulders and avoided meeting Olivia’s eyes, but even so her gaze drilled through Paul’s forehead and out the back of his skull.
“And anyway,” Colonel continued, “I don’t think he can type that fast.”
The men laughed, and Olivia sighed. Once again she beat a tactical retreat on this subject. It was not the first time she had brought it up, but it was the first time since lunch. She laid her pencil against the tabletop with a distinct click and folded her hands over it, as if sheathing her weapon. Across the table J.J. slumped in his seat, his head propped in one hand, and Bob Wier shifted restlessly, both of them silvered by the glow from paragraph 4.3.3 of section 4.3, “Parts, Supplies, and Fluids”:
4.3.3 The Vendor shall be responsible for damage and costs caused by the use of substandard or non-OEM parts, supplies, or fluids.
“I thought . . . ,” Bob began, stabbing the air meekly with his hand.
“Yessir!” barked Rick. A vent in the rear of the projector threw a hot sliver of glare back across the tip of Rick’s nose and the bulge of his cheekbones. “Speak up there, Bob!”
“I mean,” Bob Wier went on, jerking his hand back, “what was wrong with the RFP the way it was?”
“Yeah,” said J.J.
Olivia gasped in exasperation and looked beseechingly at Rick. Rick, however, merely puffed out his cheeks and made popping noises with his lips. All day Rick had been spiritually hors de combat, staring into space or fussing with his tie while Olivia and Colonel conducted a light-saber duel in the dark over the conference table. Olivia gestured with her pencil, and Colonel parried with his laser pointer, bouncing the little red dot all over the screen. Olivia pushed to tear out every paragraph and start over, and Colonel dug in his heels as if each passage were scripture. Rick had stepped in to adjudicate only two or three times during the morning, and since lunch he had been mostly silent, letting the battle wash back and forth across the table before him.
Now Olivia plucked her pencil off the table again and poked it at the screen. “We require the vendor to buy OEM parts in the first place,” she said. “So how can we make him responsible if the parts fail? It’s not his fault.”
“Parts is parts,” drawled J.J., his voice slurred by boredom.
“Whose side are you on, Olivia?” Colonel rolled the laser pointer between his thumb and forefinger. “Ours or the vendor’s?”
“Plus,” Olivia continued, ignoring him, “isn’t there a hyphen in ‘substandard’?”
Before he could stop himself, Paul said, “No!” rather hotly.
“Whoa!” chorused the men along Paul’s side of the table.
“The professor speaks!” Rick said merrily.
“Well, there isn’t,” muttered Paul. It was nearly quitting time, and they had been sitting in the overheated semidark, blinking at the screen and listening to the buzz of the projector’s fan, since eight-fifteen that morning. The meeting was supposed to have started at eight, but Paul had been so rattled by the discovery of the Tiffany’s box—the rest had never happened, he was sure of it—that he had taken longer than expected to set up. And, quite apart from the stress of sitting for hours in the same room with Olivia, he had kept an eye cocked all day at the ceiling, watching for bulges or sudden gaps or the heel of a black Oxford.
“Way-ul,” Rick was saying now, “I don’t think we’re gonna get to the end of this today.”
“I can stay late,” Olivia said.
J.J. groaned, and there was a sharp intake of breath from Bob Wier’s direction.
“Yeah, well.” Rick raised his eyebrows at his wrist
watch. “I can’t. We’ll reconvene on Monday.”
“Yesssss,” breathed J.J., and there was a long, slow creeeeak as he shifted in his chair. Paul’s gaze shot to the ceiling again. He’d spent hours listening to every squeak and groan of every chair in the room, and yet each little noise still took him by surprise, stretching his nerves a little tighter. “What’s that?” he gasped.
Rick stretched in his own chair, making it creak as well. “What’s eating you, son?”
“You been acting hinky all day,” said Colonel. “You see a ghost or something?”
Across the table Olivia rapped on the tabletop with the sharp end of her pencil. “Could we at least finish this paragraph before we leave?” she said.
All the men groaned except for Paul, who didn’t make a sound.
“At least,” insisted Olivia, raising her voice, “at least let’s have Paul enter the revisions so far before he goes home tonight. . . .”
“I don’t believe Paul has the level of badge,” said Colonel, “that allows him to remain in the building after business hours.”
“I have a pretty low-level badge,” Paul said.
“One of us could stay with him,” Olivia said. “As I said before, I can stay late.”
Paul’s hands began to tremble over the laptop, making the keys rattle. This was even worse than he’d imagined: Not only would he have to be here on his own time, after hours—“You’d never catch me in there after dark,” Nolene had said—but he’d be alone with Olivia. On Monday morning his coworkers would find him dead in his chair, a gray, desiccated, bloodless husk.
“Not tonight you can’t,” said Colonel heartily. “Have you forgotten already?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Olivia.
“Karaoke night, my good woman,” boomed Colonel. “My house, tonight, seven P.M. sharp. I believe I announced it when we convened this morning?”