Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read online

  Paul smiled tightly and said, “No harm done.”

  “My two compatriots are both of them fine men,” said the Colonel, placing his hands on the table edge. He let his gaze drift past Paul’s shoulder to where J.J. and Bob Wier were threading their way out of the room. “Bob’s a simple man, but godly. And J.J.’s youthful enthusiasm . . . well, I see myself, thirty years ago.” He focused on Paul again. “But there’s no culture in them, Professor. Not like there is in you and I.” He smiled. “Perhaps even a bit of the artiste, no?”

  Paul simply stared at him.

  “But that’s a conversation for another time.” The Colonel pushed himself to his feet and slid his chair up to the table. He lifted his glossy lunch box. “You’re onto something extraordinary here, son, but you just don’t know it yet. In the weeks and months to come, you will look back on yesterday afternoon and say, ‘That was the day I first met Stanley Tulendij.’ ” He glanced across the lunchroom and lowered his voice. “I think you’ll come to find our luncheon repartee the high point of your day. Infinitely more interesting, say, than napping in the toilet.”

  Paul glanced quickly over his shoulder. The lunchroom was nearly empty; only a few people, one or two to a table, still sat chewing and staring blankly into space. Paul turned back to the Colonel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Not to worry, Professor.” The Colonel put a finger to his lips. “Our little secret.” He winked at Paul. “A demain, mon frère.”

  Paul, astonished to speechlessness, turned and watched the Colonel stride, stiff-backed, gut first, between the tables of the empty lunchroom towards the door.

  ELEVEN

  AFTER LUNCH, Paul sulked in his cube for an hour and a half. What was the big deal with Stanley Tulendij? The Colonel and his coterie talked about him like he was . . . what? A general beloved of his troops? A captain who went down with his ship? A titan in fleet management? As far as Paul could tell, the man was not only a disgraced, pensioned-off old buzzard with an unsavory whiff of decay about him, but a man at least indirectly responsible for the disappearance, and possibly death, of a busload of unemployed men. But more importantly, Paul wondered, how did the Colonel find out about my midmorning naps in the men’s room? Do they have a camera in there, God forbid? Paul resisted the urge to glance at the ceiling over his head.

  How did the Colonel know, Paul fumed, that I prefer Red River to Chisum? Paul hated it when anybody read him that easily. He further resented the Colonel’s presumption of a commonality of taste and interest. Fellow intellectuals, indeed. Back at Midwest, in his grad school days, he’d known undergraduates, for cry yi, who’d have made that pompous autodidact look like . . . look like . . . well, they’d have reduced him to a cinder, that’s what. Artiste, my ass.

  It wasn’t long before the soporific effect of the cube smothered Paul’s rage. By two-thirty, as his eyelids drooped and his chin dipped towards his chest and watchful Olivia’s gaze prickled the back of his neck, he grabbed his volume of H. G. Wells and went down to the midafternoon dusk of the lunchroom. He hadn’t planned it, exactly, but this was roughly the same time he’d run into Callie the day before. The lunchroom was empty, so he sat in the Colonel’s seat facing the door, with the fat volume open to the beginning (still) of The Island of Dr. Moreau. After five minutes of staring at the doorway didn’t produce her, Paul lowered his eyes to the book.

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  In the Dingey of the “Lady Vain”

  I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vam. As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao The long-boat with seven of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by H.M gun-boat Myrtle, and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as the far more terrible Medusa case.

  But today Wells read like an instruction manual; Paul’s eyes tripped over “Callao” and were completely derailed by “Medusa.” His gaze drifted through the yellowish tint of the windows to the parking lot, past the humpbacked ranks of Sports and Trackers and pickups, to the embankment that blocked the view of the river. Where had Stanley Tulendij gone yesterday after he crested the rise? Who was the man on the bridge? Had it really been Boy G? And had Boy G been waving at Paul or signaling Stanley Tulendij? And what was it, Paul wondered, his eyelids pulling down like shades, his chin tugging towards his sternum, what was it that Nolene had been about to tell him yesterday? What was it that the Colonel, Bob Wier, and J.J. never did?

  Paul jerked his head up, and the narrow print of the book swam before his eyes. His eyes focused and he read, “But I knew now how much hope of help for me lay in the Beast People.”

  He glanced away from the page and groaned. As he had dozed, the pages had flipped forward on their own to just before Chapter the Thirteenth. How had that happened? Dear God, thought Paul, please don’t let me sleep on my break. Not on my own time. He pushed the book away and pressed his fingers into his eyes, and when he pulled them away he saw a string dangling from the ceiling fifteen feet away. Paul squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again. The string was still there, hanging over a lunchroom table straight as a plumb line, suspended from a little, black, triangular gap where a ceiling panel was askew. At the lower end of the string a little noose was being raised and lowered over a salt shaker in the middle of the table. The noose draped once over the shaker without catching it, then twice, then again, the string above slackening each time. Then, one more try and it caught around the neck of the salt shaker. The string went taut, and the salt shaker swung silently up off the table.

  Paul clapped his hands over his eyes and moaned, “Oh, fuck.” The room swallowed up the epithet, and in the dark behind his palms he heard only the starship hum of the building’s air-conditioning. He thought he heard, just at the edge of audibility, down among the white noise, the surface hiss of his life, the tiniest little scrape, as of someone sliding a ceiling panel back into place.

  “It’s Paul, right?”

  He whisked his hands away from his eyes. Callie stood across the table from him, her Norton anthology clutched to her bosom; the book was open and she pressed the wide spine with both hands. She was balanced on the ball of one foot, ready to flee. Oh fuck, Paul thought, silently this time, and he glanced past her at the ceiling, where the tiles receded towards the vanishing point in perfect rectilinearity.

  “You alright?” It was clear from her intonation that she was asking for her sake, not his.

  Paul waved his hands. “I was, uh, resting my eyes.” He tried to smile. For the first time in his memory, Callie was wearing a skirt, a shapeless denim skirt that came to her knees but a skirt nonetheless. “I stare at a screen all day,” Paul said, “and it makes my eyes . . .”

  Callie twisted her mouth, plainly considering a retreat. But then she pushed the fat H. G. Wells volume aside and plunked the Norton onto the table. She was wearing a thin sweater, Paul noted, not very tight, and she bent over the table and turned the massive anthology towards him with both hands. She leaned over the book, one hand splayed against the tabletop, the other hovering over the tissuey page, one long finger extended. Paul stole a glance down the open collar of her sweater and was rewarded with a glimpse of a bra strap. Reading upside down, Callie pressed the nail of her index finger—clear now, but with flakes of red polish in the seam—against a word in one of the tiny footnotes, creasing the page.

  “How do you say that word?”

  Paul looked up from her collar and met her eyes, which were swimmingly blue. “Sorry?” he said.

  “It don’t appear in the glossary.” Callie squeezed her eyes shut for an instant. “It doesn’t appear in the glossary.”

  He waited for her eyes to open again, then he lowered his gaze to the book.

  “ ‘Synecdoche’?” He looked up again. “Is that the word you mean?”

  “Say that again,” she said, watching his lips. Agin, she pronounced it.

  “
Sit.” Paul nodded at the chair across the table, the one he had sat in at lunch, the one she was leaning over now so fetchingly. Callie narrowed her eyes at him, biting her lip, then abruptly pulled the chair out and sat. She crossed her arms and leaned forward on her elbows, her sweater pulled tight across her shoulders.

  “Se-nek-duh-key,” he said, watching her eyes, but she was looking at the book. “Rhymes with Schenectady.”

  “Rhymes with what?” She looked up at him.

  “Never mind. It’s from the Greek. It means . . .” She was squinting hard at him, concentrating on what he was saying. “It’s when you use the name of part of something to refer to the whole. Like, uh . . .” The first example that came to his mind was skirt, and he shook his head to get rid of it. “Like when you call your car your wheels, for example.”

  To Paul’s surprise, Callie gasped. Her whole face relaxed; her eyes widened and her forehead unfurrowed. Her cheekbones lowered, unclenching her freckles. It was beautiful to watch, as if the shadow of a cloud had passed from a mountain lake of deepest blue.

  “Synecdoche,” she said, and for the skip of a heartbeat, Paul thought she might smile.

  “What are they glossing here?” He dipped to the book again, hoping to prolong the moment.

  “Glossing?” Her eyebrows drew together, her freckles began to clench again.

  “What’s the footnote about?” Paul’s gaze climbed the page, a long ladder of Elizabethan poesy, either a long poem or a speech from a play. But before he could find the reference, Callie put her long palms over the facing pages.

  “That’s okay.” She pulled the book towards her. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  Paul grabbed the outside edges of the book.

  “It’s no bother.” He dipped his head, trying to catch her gaze. “Have dinner with me.”

  Callie stiffened, half out of her chair, her hands on the book, her elbows locked. Her shoulders were hunched; her lips squeezed tight. She peered at Paul as if through a pair of gun slits.

  “You want to have dinner with me,” she said flatly.

  “No,” Paul said. His thumbs were a fraction of an inch from her pinky fingers. “I want to take you to dinner.”

  “You want to take me to dinner.” Her shoulders did not loosen, but she shifted her weight onto one hip.

  “Hello! Hello! Hello . . . !” Paul said in diminishing volume, mimicking an echo.

  Callie snorted. She was trying not to laugh. Paul restrained a smile. “Unless you don’t go out with guys like me.”

  She canted her hip a little more sharply and let her elbows relax. “Hon,” she said, “I think my history shows I’ll go out with prit’ near anybody.” Then she gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes alight. “Oh, shit.” She lowered her fingers to her chin. “That’s a hell of a thing to say, innit, to some guy who just. . . . You’ll think I’m—”

  “I think you’ve got no excuse not to go out with me.” Paul leaned back in his chair and gripped the edge of the table, the way the Colonel had a few hours before. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I’ll tell you all about synecdoche. Or Schenectady, if you prefer.” He smiled; she didn’t. Keep trying, he told himself. “Or we can branch out into simile. Or sigmatism. Or syllepsis. Or syzygy.” Years of graduate training that he thought he’d lost forever came back to him. “Or synaesthesia. I’m real good on synaesthesia.”

  Callie pursed her lips. “Don’t get carried away, cowboy.” She crossed her arms, but her shoulders were loose. “It’s just dinner.”

  “Well, when?”

  She gave him one last, long, appraising look, then leaned slowly across the table. She took the book with both hands, slammed it shut, and picked it up one-handed, cradling it against her hip. “Tomorrow’s Friday, innit?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Paul rocked the chair back on its rear legs. “It surely is.”

  “Well, I can’t Friday.” She turned and walked away, the book balanced on her hip. Cain’t, she said. Oh my God, Paul thought, I’ve just asked out Ado Annie.

  “Saturday, then,” he called after her.

  Callie turned expertly on her heel and kept walking backwards, a sight that startled Paul in his precariously balanced chair. He jerked forward and brought the chair down with a thump, rattling the table. Callie lifted a corner of her lips.

  “Alright,” she said, and she pivoted again on her heel and swung her hips around a table and out the door.

  Paul was still floating later when he went out onto the griddle of the parking lot after work. He rolled down the windows, lifted the hatchback of his car to let out the heat, and tossed his shirt on the passenger seat. The sight of the string dangling from a gap in the ceiling he had consigned to limbo; it was a daydream, a product of subliminal suggestion by the dying tech writer—“They’re up there,” indeed—and Paul’s regular midafternoon stupor. H. G. Wells probably didn’t help, either. If I want to see weird shit, Paul thought, all I need to do is go home every day and deal with my ghost cat. I don’t need any weird shit at work. Get thee behind me, Stanley Tulendij.

  But right now, with the prospect of a Saturday night out with an attractive young woman, for all he cared a whole chorus line of Stanley Tulendijs and Boy Gs and dead cats could kick step across the top of the embankment. As he started the stuttering engine and put the car in reverse, he glanced back and noted the trash in his backseat. I ought to clean all that out, he thought. It’s bad enough showing up Saturday night in this old heap; what will she think? Paul backed out of the parking spot. Oh hell, he told himself, I’m an office temp going out with a minimum-wage TxDoGS employee. She’s not expecting a Lexus.

  As he idled noisily in the nose-to-tail line of elephantine SUVs waiting to pull out onto Travis Avenue, Nolene rolled majestically past the nose of his car with her vast bag slung over her shoulder. Paul watched her approach an enormous minivan, and he swung out of line and into the empty spot next to her van. He left his car running, got out, and called to her across the roof of the Colt. She had heaved open the massive sliding rear door and was slinging in her bag; Paul caught a glimpse of not one, not two, but three child car seats in a row along the backseat.

  “Hey, Nolene,” he said again. She glanced back at him and heaved the other way, leaning into the sliding panel as if she were closing the door of an airplane hangar.

  “Hey, Paul.” She hooded her eyes and turned to the driver’s door with her keys in her hand.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “when you were telling me about Stanley Tulendij . . .?”

  Nolene let out a long sigh, her hand on the open door and one foot on the little running board.

  “You said the Colonel, Bob Wier, and J.J. never did . . . something. You didn’t say what.”

  Nolene lifted one plucked eyebrow and looked warily over her shoulder at the General Services Division Building.

  “All I know is,” she said, not quite looking at Paul, “everybody in the Purchasing Department brings me stuff to do all day long. But whenever any of those three wants me to type something or fax something or process a purchasing order, whatever, the work is waiting on my desk when I get here in the morning.” She gave him a significant look and hoisted herself into the driver’s seat.

  “So?” Paul called out as she shut her door.

  Nolene started her van and stared out the windshield. Then she rolled down her window and stuck her elbow out and beckoned Paul. He came around to the side of the minivan, where she looked imperiously down at him.

  “So do the math, Paul,” she said quietly. “Those boys always leave ever’ day a good twenty minutes before I do. And not a one of ’em comes in until eight-thirty, and I’m here, every blessed morning, by seven-fifteen.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Paul said. “What is it they don’t do?”

  “Work, Paul.” She widened her eyes at him, as if at a dimwit child. “They don’t do a lick of work, ever. Not when I can see them, and I sit across from ’em all day long. Colonel’s yakk
in’ to his stockbroker, Bob Wier’s speed-reading goldang self-help books, and J.J. surfs the Web all the livelong day.” She sighed. “But then, every morning, the work they’re not doing shows up on my desk for me to process.” She put the van in reverse and gunned the engine. Paul stepped back.

  “The only thing I can figure,” said Nolene, backing slowly out of her spot, “is that they come in in the middle of the night, and I don’t believe that for a minute. Not from them.” She swung the van into the lane and put it in drive. She gave Paul one last, significant look and jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the building.

  “You’d never catch me in there after dark.” Then Nolene roared away, leaving Paul standing in her empty space, next to his trembling car.

  TWELVE

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Friday, Paul avoided luncheon with the Colonel by leaving the building. He ate his sandwich in his car, then spent the rest of his lunch hour at a car wash on the other side of the river. He blasted the outside of his ancient Colt with the high-pressure hose, half afraid that the impact of the spray would loosen his bumper or penetrate the Colt’s sunbleached roof. Still, even the mail girl deserved a clean car on a first date. He forked out fistfuls of trash from the backseat and slotted three quarters, three times, into the roaring industrial vacuum cleaner, sweating right through his t-shirt as he wriggled through the car, pushing the plastic nozzle under the seats and into every cranny of the upholstery. He bought a pinescented air freshener from the vending machine and hung it from his rearview mirror; the heat inside the car would probably cook it to a nubbin, but at least the car would no longer smell like sweat, old hamburgers, and failure.