Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

by James Hynes

The other men laughed. “Really happening,” said Colonel. “That’s rich.”

  “Typical,” said J.J. bitterly.

  “They do your work for you,” Paul said, nodding down the slope into the dark. He thought of what Nolene had told him last week about Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier—“They don’t do a lick of work, ever” she’d said, “but every morning the work they’re not doing shows up on my desk.” The pale faces below seemed to bubble a little higher; the murmur rose to a rumble. “But what do they get out of it?” Paul said.

  The four men crowded around Paul exchanged a glance.

  “We offer them something from time to time,” said Colonel.

  “Like a sacrifice,” said J.J. “Kind of.”

  “ ‘The fire and wood are here,’ ” Bob Wier said with a catch in his throat, “ ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Genesis twenty-two, seven.”

  Colonel shouldered Bob Wier aside. “Don’t listen to him,” he murmured, his breath hot in Paul’s ear.

  “Okay,” said J.J., “ ‘sacrifice’ is maybe too strong a word.”

  “It’s something you’ll never miss,” said Stanley Tulendij, and he swung Paul around and started to walk him back up the slope towards the bright rectangle of the sliding door. “Not really.”

  Paul surprised himself by resisting a bit; he tried to twist out of the grasp of the men on either side, tried to crane over his shoulder to see into the creek bed at the bottom of the slope. All he saw was Bob Wier gnawing on his knuckle, his eyes brimming with tears in the lantern light. Then the grip on each of Paul’s arms tightened, and they marched him towards the house.

  “So are you in, Professor?” said Colonel, digging his blunt fingers into Paul’s elbow.

  “You’re either with us or agin’ us, Paul,” said Stanley Tulendij, tightening his grip.

  “The line forms on the right, babe,” J.J. said.

  Paul gave up struggling and let them carry him back towards the house. Fuck it, he thought, it’s all a dream anyway. Behind him, the murmur of the pale figures in the creek bed faded into the electric burr of the crickets. From the house came the jolly thump of a galloping bass line, and through the door they could see Callie and Yasumi dancing together on the platform, swinging their hips and singing along with the Bananarama version of “Venus,” more or less in harmony.

  “ ‘She’s got it,” they sang, swing, swing, swing, “ ‘yeah, baby, she’s got it . . .’ ”

  The giant TV screen pulsed with parti-colored light like a sixties discotheque, and vivid greens and blues and reds washed over the faces of the five men just beyond the glass.

  “ ‘I’m your Venus,’ ” sang Callie, “ ‘I’m your fi-yuh, at your de-zi-yuh.’ ”

  Stanley Tulendij’s eyes widened, and he relaxed his grip on Paul’s hand.

  “Who’s that splendid little filly?” he said.

  “That’s no filly,” Paul said, yanking his other arm free of Colonel’s grip. “That’s my . . . that’s my . . .” My what? he thought.

  “Not her,” said Stanley Tulendij. “The little lady at the bar.”

  The four other men swiveled their gaze to the bar, where Olivia perched on one of the stools with her cheerleader legs crossed. She leaned one elbow on the bar top and picked absently at the plate of crudités. She bit a celery stick in half as if she were crunching on a human bone.

  Paul started to laugh. That proves it, he thought. I am dreaming. “Olivia?” he said aloud, before he could stop himself.

  The other men shifted in the dark, exchanging glances and saying nothing.

  “Seriously,” said Paul. “Olivia?”

  Stanley Tulendij’s eyes shone with the same animal glow as the eyes in the creek bed. “That’s a fine figure of a woman,” he said.

  “Take her,” Paul laughed, “she’s yours. You’d be doing everybody a favor.”

  The song pounding through the glass seemed to fade, and even the cricket shriek and the dive bomb whine of mosquitoes went away. The other men seemed to recede into the dark, and Paul found himself alone in a little bubble of silence with Stanley Tulendij. The old man turned slowly to him, the Day-Glo colors of the karaoke screen washing rhythmically across his face. His eyes were wide and bright, and his lips drew back in a skull-like grin. He took Paul’s hand and shook it gravely.

  “Done,” he said, and a moment later he was gone, gliding on his long, crooked legs down the slope, under the tree, and into the dark, beyond the glow of the paper lanterns.

  THIRTY-THREE

  PAUL STARTED AWAKE IN A HEART-HAMMERING PANIC, sprawled nude along the edge of a narrow mattress. In the crepuscular light he saw a clumsily plastered ceiling, a scruffy carpet littered with discarded clothes, a half-open doorway into an empty room. He sat up and nearly swooned from the pain in his head, as if two great hands were squeezing his temples together, trying to crack his skull like a coconut. He groaned and put his head between his knees, and tried to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there.

  He heard a noise behind him, and he turned to see Callie wedged against the wall on the other side of the mattress, snoring face down into her pillow, her back bare to the waist. Paul sighed and tugged the crumpled sheet up to her shoulder blades. Bits and pieces of the end of karaoke night were coming back to Paul. J.J. had bellowed “Patton!” from the La-Z-Boy until Colonel had mounted the stage and worked the touch pad. A giant American flag had filled the TV screen, and as Colonel stepped before it and squared his shoulders, Bob Wier rose to his feet and cried, “Tennn-hut!” J.J. struggled to rise from the recliner and gave up, but Yasumi sat up straight on the loveseat. Paul was slumped on the couch as if he’d been poured there, with Callie propped against him. Olivia was nowhere to be seen. During a long trumpet fanfare, Colonel sucked in his gut and saluted. Callie started to laugh, but Yasumi glared at her and Callie clapped her hand over her mouth. At last the fanfare faded, and Colonel stood at ease. The “Patton March” played quietly through the speakers.

  “Now I want you to remember,” growled Colonel, without the microphone, “that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.” He began to pace, pumping his fist. “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

  Shortly after that, Paul began to pass out in a slow fade, interrupted by exclamations from Colonel—“Wade into them! Spill their blood!”—and repressed hilarity from Callie. The next thing he remembered clearly was staggering up the basement stairs, propped up by Callie; with his shoulder he knocked every photograph on the staircase wall askew. When he tried to go back to straighten them, Callie hauled at him from above and a pair of small hands, probably Yasumi’s, pushed at him from below.

  Then they were tottering across Colonel’s front lawn, in the dark under the tree, where the paper lanterns had gone out. Callie took Paul’s keys from his pocket and leaned him up against the passenger door of his car. It seemed to take her forever to make her way around the car and let herself in and unlock the passenger door, and in that eternity Paul remembered Olivia stalking towards him across the lawn, out of the dark, dangling her own car keys, scarier and more determined even than George Patton.

  “So,” she’d said, “will I see you tomorrow morning?”

  Thank God! Paul remembered thinking. She’s still here; she hasn’t been spirited off into the dark by Stanley Tulendij like some maiden carried off by the Erlkönig.

  “You bet!” Paul had declared happily, with no idea what she was talking about. “I’ll be there.”

  Now, as he struggled with his hangover on the edge of Callie’s mattress, he wasn’t sure how much of the night before had actually happened—Olivia approaching him in the dark like a marauding angel; Colonel channeling George C. Scott; the creepy confab in Colonel’s backyard, with the pale faces floating in the creek bed—and how much of it he had simply dreamed after tumbling drunkenly into bed at Callie’s apartment.

  “You bet,” he said now, squatting naked on the edge of the mat
tress, mimicking his own drunken chipperness. “I’ll be there.” Then suddenly he remembered where he was supposed to be this morning—assuming it was Saturday morning—and he lurched to his knees on the carpet and pawed through the litter of clothes by the side of the bed. After a frantic search he found his watch and squinted at it in the dim light of the windowless bedroom. Quarter after two, it said, and the two palms against his temples pressed harder until he groaned. “Oh fuck,” he said, over and over, until it occurred to him to turn the watch right side up. Now it read quarter to eight, which wasn’t much better. He wasn’t entirely certain, but he was pretty sure he was due to meet Olivia at TxDoGS at eight. He found his shorts and rolled onto his back to pull them on.

  “Callie,” he whispered. “Callie.” Pulling on his shirt, he knelt by the mattress and gently shook Callie’s arm.

  “Unh,” said Callie, into her pillow.

  “Where are my keys?” he said, still whispering.

  Callie lifted her face a millimeter from the pillow and painfully cracked a crusty eye. “There’s no need for you to shout,” she rasped.

  “Forget it, I found them,” said Paul, treading on the keys as he hopped one leg at a time into his trousers.

  The traffic between Callie’s apartment and TxDoGS wasn’t too bad on a Saturday morning, and he even rolled into the empty parking lot a minute or two early. Olivia was just locking up her trim little Corolla as his Colt clattered alongside at the main entrance. She had exchanged her capri pants for sensible shoes, slacks, and a cotton sweater for the air-conditioning. As Paul hauled himself out of his car, his head throbbing, she glanced at her watch and then looked him up and down. She didn’t say a word, but he could tell she had noted that he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night. Fuck her, Paul thought, wishing he’d had time to shower and brush his teeth.

  “Good morning,” he managed to say, squinting against the pain in his temples.

  “Good morning,” sang Olivia, and she marched towards the door, digging in her purse for her badge. She swiped it through the card reader, and as the lock clicked open, Paul scooted forward to hold the door for her. She minced ahead of him without a word, and he followed her out of the heat and into the darkened lobby.

  The door clicked shut behind him, and the emptiness of the building on a Saturday morning closed around them both, swelling out of the hallways and down from the balcony. Paul shivered, feeling a chill. Olivia didn’t seem to notice, sailing past Preston’s empty security desk and up the stairs. Paul tiptoed after her, along the balcony past the locked door of Building Services and around the corner into the main hallway, where only every third or fourth light was on. The rumble of the ventilators seemed louder in the gloom, and Paul shot nervous glances into the shadows of the door wells and at the corners of the ceiling. Olivia marched heedlessly up the hall, illuminated only when she passed under one of the infrequent lights, and fading again in the dark between, a busy silhouette against the glare from the tall windows at the far end of the hall. Paul trotted to keep up with her, not wanting to go any deeper into the empty building but not wanting to be left behind.

  The lights were out in the elevator lobby, and the sunlight through the glass wall seemed to taunt Paul with its inaccessibility. He edged round the recycling box as Olivia’s switching backside retreated into the deeper gloom of cubeland, where all the lights were out. Paul hesitated in the doorway, peering at the dim, labyrinthine outline of the cube horizon. Objects that rose innocently above the horizon in the light—the top of a filing cabinet, a hard hat, someone’s ficus plant—looked menacing in the gloom; Paul expected the round outline of the hard hat, halfway across the room, to lift slowly and reveal a pair of eyes watching from below the brim.

  Olivia turned on her desk lamp, filling her cube with yellow light. The light struck across her cheekbones and nose, turning her eyes into hollows, and she lifted her purse off her shoulder and glanced back at the doorway.

  “Paul?” she said. “Are you coming?”

  “Sure.” Paul edged past the darkened conference room and then rounded the corner and went into his cube, keeping close to the fabric wall. He fumbled for the switch to his own desk lamp, nearly panicking when he couldn’t find it. At last it clicked on, and the yellow glow that filled his cube only made the gloom all around seem darker. Across the aisle, Olivia perched on the edge of her chair, switching on her monitor and moving her mouse to deactivate the screen saver. Paul winced as his own chair squeaked under him, as if worried that it might give him away. With an unsteady hand he turned on his own monitor.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  Paul jumped in his seat; he hadn’t heard Olivia get up and cross the aisle. She watched him wide-eyed, her palms pressed together just below her breastbone. His head began to pound again, as if she were squeezing it between her hands.

  “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Sure.”

  Olivia held out her hand. “Twenty-five cents, please.”

  Paul, speechless, only blinked at her.

  “For the coffee fund.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to put a quarter in the cup for every cup you drink.”

  Paul stood to dig in his pocket, his shoulders hunched against the dark. He handed her a quarter, then glanced around him, over the cube horizon.

  “Why don’t you call up the RFP from the server?” she said. “It will take me a few minutes to make the coffee.”

  She turned and disappeared silently up the aisle, and Paul watched anxiously over the top of his cube until the doorway of the coffee room filled with bright, fluorescent light.

  “Olivia?” he called out weakly. When she didn’t answer, he raised his voice. “Olivia!”

  Olivia stepped into the bright doorway with the coffeepot in one hand and a paper filter in the other. She lifted her eyebrows at him.

  “I’m, uh, I’m just going to splash a little water on my face.” Paul gestured over his shoulder. Olivia said nothing, but simply stepped out of the doorway.

  The men’s room was pitch-black when Paul gingerly pushed open the door, so he stood in the hall, snaked his arm inside, and groped for the light switch. Through the crack in the door he watched the fluorescents flicker on, filling the room with a bluish glare. Then he pushed the door wide and surveyed the room, squatting down in the doorway to check under the sides of the stalls. At the sink he ran the water full blast, for the sound of it, and in the mirror he kept an eye on the ceiling as he bent over the sink and splashed two handfuls of water on his face. He pumped a little liquid soap into his palms, then, glancing once more at the ceiling in the mirror, closed his eyes and quickly scrubbed his face. He opened his eyes again, blinking against the water dripping off his eyebrows, and fumbled a handful of towels out of the dispenser. He mopped his face and turned off the water, pausing with his hand on the tap to listen hard. With the crumpled paper towels in his fist, he surveyed the ceiling tiles above him. But he saw nothing and heard only the water gulping down the drain.

  “Suck it up,” he told himself, but not too loud. “Grow up.”

  He turned off the men’s room light as he left, though he did it from the hall, reaching back through the door for the switch. His face tingling, his head throbbing less painfully, his nerves buzzing less anxiously, he walked through the bright sunlight of the elevator lobby, passing the recycling box without even a glance. As he came into cubeland he noted immediately the twin, square pools of light in his and Olivia’s cubes, printed against the gloom, and the bright rectangular glare of the coffee room doorway. Over the rumble of the AC he could even hear the busy little trickle of the coffeemaker. He successfully resisted the urge to scan the cube horizon again, and he allowed himself to fall heavily into his squealing chair. His screen saver streaked slowly across his monitor, so he bumped the mouse, and then called up the RFP from the server. The trickle stopped, and a moment later Olivia arrived. “I noticed you don’t have your own cup,” she said, and he took a Styrofoa
m cup from her, secretly pleased that she hadn’t startled him.

  “I forgot to ask if you wanted sugar or creamer,” Olivia said as she carried her own cup—FOLLOW YOUR BLISS, it said—into her cube.

  “Black’s fine.” Paul turned away, blowing across the coffee as he lowered it to his desktop. “So, Olivia,” he said, lifting his voice as he faced the glow of his monitor, “how do you want to work this?”

  He heard a bump and scrape from across the aisle, as if she were moving a ring binder along her desktop. “Do you want to look over my shoulder,” he said, “or shall we work together from our own separate monitors?”

  He heard her chair creak, heard it roll against the carpet.

  “What do you think?” Paul said. “Olivia?”

  He picked up his coffee and, slouching in his chair, turned slowly to look across the aisle. Olivia’s chair was spinning slowly in place, empty. Then, as he watched, her shoe dropped onto her desk from above with a soft slap, and Paul lifted his eyes to see Olivia’s wriggling legs, one foot bare, rising into a gap in the suspended ceiling. Several pairs of pale hands were grappling with her, hauling her from above into a black square where a ceiling tile had been a moment before. Olivia’s sweater was rucked up, baring her doughy midriff; her legs kicked and pedaled at nothing. Paul heard a muffled cry, and the groan and squeak of the ceiling tiles all around the gap. The tiles bulged and sagged, and out of the dark Paul heard thumps and grunts. Suddenly Olivia’s legs jerked a little higher into the ceiling, and Paul felt a searing heat on the back of his hand.

  “Agh!” he cried, instinctively dropping his cup from his violently trembling hand. Hot coffee splashed across the carpet, soaking immediately into a dark stain. An unusually loud thump made him look up again; only Olivia’s flailing calves hung from the hole in the ceiling.

  “Oh, God,” breathed Paul, and a moment later, to his astonishment, he had crossed the aisle, jumped up on Olivia’s desk, and leaped to grab her ankles. He caught one and held on, his feet crashing against her desktop, making her cup jump and slosh coffee all over her computer. Smoke and sparks began to sputter out of the unit, filling the air instantly with an acrid chemical reek, but Paul hung doggedly onto Olivia’s ankle, stretching himself to his full length like a cat reaching for a treat. With a grunt he lunged for her other ankle and caught it, and he managed to haul her slightly down out of the gap, as far as her thighs.