by James Hynes
“I thought you weren’t accusing me of anything,” Paul said.
“No, I ain’t.” Preston sighed heavily. “I’m sorry.” Preston glanced over his shoulder. “It’s just . . . remember what we talked about t’other day?”
“About . . . ?”
Preston dropped his voice. “About you tell me if you see anything. You know, out of the ordinary.”
“That’s funny,” said Ray, out of sight behind Preston.
“You remember that?” Preston said, narrowing his eyes.
“This ain’t her computer,” Ray said. “Number don’t match.”
With some reluctance, Preston turned slowly away from Paul. “What?” he said.
Paul glimpsed Ray around Preston’s belly. Ray had set the box down and was cataloguing the contents of Olivia’s cube against a checklist on a clipboard.
“This ain’t her computer,” Ray said. “Serial number don’t match up with the number she was assigned.”
“Then whose computer is it?” said Preston.
Ray licked his fat thumb and paged through the papers on the clipboard. The mild exertion of cleaning out the cube was making him sweat, and his broad forehead glistened in the fluorescent light.
“Huh,” said Ray. Paul could hear him breathing all the way across the aisle.
“What?” said Preston and Paul, simultaneously.
“That’s funny,” said Ray.
“What?” chorused Preston and Paul.
“Used to belong to what’s his name.” Ray rotated slowly on his own axis, and with his blunt chin indicated the empty cube next to Paul’s. “Fella who sat over there.”
“Dennis?” gulped Paul.
“You mean the fella who—?” Preston began.
“Whatever,” said Ray. “It’s his computer. Or was his, before he—”
“Don’t say it,” Paul groaned.
“What’s it doing in her cube?” Preston moved across the aisle.
“Good question,” said Ray. “I thought it was down in storage.”
“Then where’s her computer?” Preston stooped past Ray, peering past the computer at the cabinet over the desk. He felt under the cabinet and stood again, rubbing his fingers together. His fingertips were smudged with black. He looked across the aisle. “Paul?” he said. “You know anything about this?”
Paul pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “No,” he whispered.
Preston sniffed his fingers and wrinkled his nose, then he stepped across the aisle and snatched Olivia’s ID off Paul’s desk. “Excuse me,” he said, marching up the aisle with the heel of his hand on his sidearm.
“Twitchy son of a bitch, ain’t he?” said Ray.
“I guess,” Paul said, watching Preston’s head and shoulders glide away through the labyrinth of cubes.
“Say listen,” Ray said, “I don’t suppose you’d give me a hand getting this computer out of here. She’s got to go all the way back down to storage. . . .”
“Excuse me,” Paul muttered, and he glided up the aisle, in the opposite direction from Preston. A minute or two later, he was in Building Services, where he found Callie bent over the sign-up book in the outer room.
“Hey,” she said, giving him an equivocal look, but he caught her by the elbow and tugged her into the inner office. She brightened a little, misunderstanding his intent, and as soon as they were out of sight of the hallway, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Apology accepted,” she said.
“Apology?” Paul said. They stood with their foreheads touching.
She widened her eyes at him. “No?” she said. “Where the hell were you all weekend? I figured you’d be out of it all day Saturday—God knows I felt like shit—but when I come over Sunday morning, I hammered on your door for prit’ near fifteen minutes.”
“Was my car there?” Paul searched her face.
Callie stared at him. She loosened her grip, but kept her hands draped over his shoulders. “Don’t you know?” she said.
“Callie.” Paul curled his hands around her long wrists. “Where was I Saturday morning?”
Callie blew out a sigh. “Um, well, Saturday.” She let go of him and stepped past him into the doorway where she could watch both him and the outer office. “Last I remember is driving your car back to my apartment—you got short legs, by the way.” She glanced into the outer office and lowered her voice. “Then I remember dragging your sorry ass up the stairs to bed.”
“Was I there when you woke up?”
“No. You wasn . . .” She winced. “You weren’t. But then I didn’t wake up till noon. I figured you went to meet Olivia at work.”
Paul sighed and turned away, pacing a nervous little circle in the inner office. “Olivia’s gone,” he said.
Callie looked puzzled. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”
Paul’s mouth was very dry. With Callie looking at him so intently, it was hard to think straight. He heard a voice that sounded just like his in his head, saying, don’t tell her anything, just take her by the hand and lead her out into the parking lot, and get in her pickup truck and drive away and don’t look back.
Don’t be stupid, he heard another voice say, sounding much like the first one, you can’t run forever. You lost your career and your wife and everything you ever worked for. You have to hit bottom sometime. Colonel’s right, the voice went on, you’ve got it good, finally, after much too long. You’ve got a permanent job, a sweet deal, a safe harbor. Okay, so it’s not exactly what you planned on, not tenure at a research university—no book-lined office overlooking the leafy quad, no slim, influential volumes from major university presses, no fetching graduate students hanging on your every word. It’s just a job in state government, life in a cube, but it’s also a steady income and benefits and job security like nobody else has except maybe the pope and federal judges.
“Olivia quit,” Paul heard himself say.
“Quit?” Callie looked even more puzzled. “How come?”
He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. The voices in his head were still contending with each other. Think what you’re doing, said the first voice, while the second one said, for chrissakes, what you’re being offered here is better than tenure. Yes, Colonel’s magnum opus is probably unreadable, but at least he’s writing a book. Think what you could do with access to a computer and all that time in a cube with nothing else to do. . . .
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “She just did.”
“When?” Callie put her hand to her throat. “We just saw her on Friday night.”
“She came in on Saturday morning and left a letter for Rick.” Paul drew a breath and continued. “Then she left her badge at the security desk and took off.”
“Did you see her?” Callie glanced once more towards the hallway, then stepped towards Paul. “I mean, was she here when you got here?”
Tell her what happened! said the first voice. This girl’s the best thing you’ve got going right now. Be a man for once in your life and tell her the truth!
Don’t be an idiot, said the second voice, you saw nothing on Saturday, you heard nothing. Olivia’s gone, and everybody’s better off. Hell, maybe even Olivia is better off wherever she is. Callie doesn’t need to know.
Callie’s the one untainted thing in your life! said the first voice.
Why not keep it that way? said the second. What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.
“I don’t remember what happened.” Paul’s throat clenched, and he could barely get the words out. “I don’t remember anything until I woke up this morning.”
Callie peered at him. “Really?”
He looked away from her. “Really,” he said hoarsely. The voices in his head had gone silent.
“Jesus,” breathed Callie, and she brushed his shoulder with her fingertips. “Aw, honey, you really can’t hold your liquor, can you?”
Paul was on the verge of tears, and he didn’t know why. “That’s not all.” He drew a deep breath. “They’re
giving me her job.”
Callie’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Really,” she said.
“Yes.” Paul met her eye as best he could. “Probably. Rick’s looking into it.”
“That’s quick,” she said. “I mean, her chair’s still warm, id-nit?” A slow smile spread across Callie’s face.
“What?” he said. He felt his face get hot.
“You’re gonna be a lifer,” she said, with an ironic twist to her lips. “A TexDog.”
Paul laughed bitterly and said, “Fuck you.”
She let her hand trail off his shoulder. “Pretty soon,” she said, “you’re gonna be too good for the mail girl.”
What happened next astonished them both. He seized her tightly around the waist and kissed her hard. She put her palms against his shoulders, but she didn’t push him away, and after a moment, she folded her arms around him and pressed herself as tightly against him as he was pressing himself against her. He could feel her heart pounding, could feel the blood rushing through her arms, could feel the warm slide of muscles in her back. The heat rising off them was more than the sum of their two bodies, and Paul, his eyes squeezed shut, thought he might happily die in this hot darkness, that he might spin away with her into the void and never come back.
They parted, gasping for breath, both of them wide-eyed and flushed.
“Callie,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.
She put her fingers to his lips. “You’re having a good day,” she said. “Don’t push your luck.”
“Callie,” he insisted, trying to pull her close again.
“Shh.” She cupped his face in her palms and wiped his tears with her thumbs. “You got the job. Olivia’s gone.” She smiled. “That means you win, right?”
“Right.” Paul sniffled. “I win.”
THIRTY-SIX
LATE FRIDAY NIGHT, Callie roused Paul from a doze as they lay postcoitally entangled by the flickering light of the TV.
“So what’s eatin’ you?” she said. Paul blinked up at the TV light on the ceiling and stirred, Callie’s arm across his chest, her warm thigh across his lap.
“What makes you think anything’s eating me?” He massaged the sleep from his eyes with the heels of hands.
“Something is,” Callie said. “I can feel it.”
“Nothing,” insisted Paul.
“Bullshit,” Callie said, and under the sheet she twisted a handful of love handle.
“Ow!” cried Paul.
“I ain’t fixin’ to play this game with you every goddamn night.” She vigorously propped herself on an elbow, making the mattress bounce. “I asked you a question, mister.”
Paul sighed. It was true, he had passed the last four days numbly. He felt as if he had retreated to the center of his own head: He could see out of his eyes, he could hear through his ears, but he reached and touched and moved things just with the tips of his fingers. Smells seemed to come to him distantly; food had no taste. When he got up from his desk and walked the aisles of TxDoGS, or down the hall and out the lobby and across the parking lot to his car, he felt like he was in one of the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds, as if he was some sort of slithery, boneless, alien polyp sitting in the control room of a giant machine, working the blinking controls with big, spatular flippers as the machine strode, whirring and clanking, across a miniature landscape. When he turned his head, he seemed to be looking down on the world from a height, dispassionately scanning the villages and roadways below for a house or a hay wagon or a frantic, antlike refugee he could fry with his heat ray.
“I’m waitin’,” said Callie, who got folksier as she got more demanding. She rapped his sternum with her forefinger.
The only emotions that penetrated the rind of Paul’s numbness were fear and lust. What he feared mainly was that everyone around him—Colonel, J.J., Bob Wier, and Rick and Preston and Nolene, even Callie—would learn his secret, that at the top of the striding, insect-jointed legs and under the gleaming metal carapace of the machine, he was a Martian, a soft, palpitating, defenseless thing, vulnerable to the tiniest terrestrial virus. Charlotte, of course, already knew how vulnerable he was, but she had been strangely dormant all week, limiting herself to fleeting appearances in the shadowy corners of his apartment, dashing along the edges of his peripheral vision.
Callie tilted Paul’s face towards hers with the tips of her fingers. “I’ll count to three if I have to,” she said.
Her unblinking blue eyes seemed both remote and bright to him, as if he were looking up at her from the bottom of a well. Apart from his fear of being found out, the only other emotion that reached Martian Paul in his dark little control room was his piercing desire for Callie, who somehow transmuted his fear and rage—magically, alchemically—to tenderness.
“You’re the only . . . ,” he began, and Callie sighed ostentatiously and looked away, down the length of their twined legs to the television, which they had been running with the sound off as a love light. Tonight Charlotte was treating them to Born Free.
“Does your TV ever show anything without lions in it?” She drummed her fingers lightly on his chest.
“Sometimes I get tigers,” Paul said, relieved that she’d changed the subject. “Or cheetahs. The odd panther, now and then.”
“And’s that all because of . . . what’s her name?”
“Charlotte.”
“Charlotte. Huh.” Callie lowered her head to his shoulder and curled against him. She reached for his wrist and pulled his arm around her. “What do you boys talk about at lunch?” she said, her jaw working against his shoulder. “You and Colonel and them others.”
Paul wondered why Callie wanted to know. In his numbness he remembered the past five days as a blur. Only Monday was still clear to him, when a bored, heavy-set woman in Human Resources had conducted a pro forma interview with him in an empty conference room, asking him questions off a checklist without really listening to the answers. Then she had handed him a paper cup with a plastic lid and sent him to the men’s room, where he squeezed out six ounces of warm pee for the state of Texas. By Tuesday morning, barring a bad result from the drug test, he was a Tech Writer II for the Texas Department of General Services, with a salary of nearly $27,000 a year—the largest sum, Paul was alarmed to realize, he’d ever earned in his life. That same day a gum-smacking techie in a Hawaiian shirt spent two minutes at Paul’s keyboard and gave him access to the World Wide Web, and Callie herself photographed him again for a new badge, one with an electronic stripe, like Olivia’s.
After that, the blur set in. At the moment, as Callie breathed against him, he couldn’t remember whole blocks of the week—what he’d had for breakfast on Tuesday, say, or whether he’d spent Wednesday night at his place or hers.
“It’s up to Colonel,” Paul said. “He decides what we talk about.”
“And the rest of you just sorta sit there and nod?” She shifted her head against his chest.
Paul wasn’t sure what to say about that either. He now permanently occupied the fourth chair at Colonel’s table in the corner of the TxDoGS lunchroom. Indeed, Colonel had started to call Paul’s seat the Paul Trilby Chair in Literary Studies, or, worse, the Olivia Haddock Memorial Chair; Paul was still working up the nerve to tell him to knock it off. The last of his bag lunches—one final sandwich of nameless cheese on no-brand bread—slowly desiccated in one of the office fridges, until (unbeknownst to Paul) someone swiped it. Paul could now afford to buy hot lunches from the cafeteria, and he remembered eating a burger and fries, and a slab of meatloaf with mashed potatoes, and chicken fried steak with cream gravy, and a surprisingly good platter of cheese enchiladas with refried beans and rice. He couldn’t remember which day had been enchiladas and which had been meatloaf, but he did remember Colonel’s greeting the first day he had arrived at the table bearing a tray.
“Welcome to the good life, Professor,” Colonel had said.
“I don’t think Colonel likes me,” Callie said, hugging Paul
a little more tightly. “I run into him in the hall the other day, and I told him I had a good time at his party last week, and he just looked at me like . . .”
“Like what?” Paul said, but he already knew the answer. In his general emotional torpor, he only remembered pieces of Colonel’s lunchtime performance, such as a lecture on the decline of the American presidency. “The last twenty years . . . hell, the last forty years of presidents have been whiners and perverts and headcases,” Colonel had declared. “Degenerates, like the later Roman emperors.” And a disquisition on the superiority of the American Browning automatic rifle to the British Lewis gun. “Not to take away from our brothers across the Pond,” Colonel had said, “but give me an American weapon any time.” And a history of the British Empire on film, from The Four Feathers to The Man Who Would Be King. “The sequel to Zulu, the egregious Zulu Dawn? A slander on the English fighting man.”
But the lunchtime conversation Paul remembered best had taken place on the embankment along the river, where Colonel had invited him, without J.J. and Bob Wier, for a postprandial stroll. Had it been Wednesday? Paul wondered. Thursday? Today? He couldn’t remember, but he did remember vividly what Colonel had said as they paced up and down the yellowed grass alongside the sluggish glide of the river.
“Now that you’ve ascended to the middle class, Professor,” Colonel said, his arm around Paul’s shoulders, “you need to get yourself a quality woman.”
“I beg your pardon?” Paul said.
“I understand what you see in Miss Oklahoma.” Colonel squeezed Paul. “We all like a ride on a frisky young colt now and then. But she’s wild, Paul, an untamable mustang, and you deserve a thoroughbred, something with breeding and dignity—”
“Whoa!” Paul cried, twisting free of Colonel’s grip. “You seriously need to back off.”
Colonel shook his head ruefully at the hormonal folly of younger men. “The girl is trash, Paul. You want a solid woman who knows her place, not some lippy bitch who’ll lead you around by your cojones.” Colonel narrowed his gaze. “I think you know what I’m talking about. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to give her up.”