Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read online

  “Prit’ near six weeks.” Preston slid a visitor’s badge across the desk and returned to parade rest. “Save you a few minutes is all.”

  But Paul was already jogging down the first-floor hall to the refrigerators outside the cafeteria, where he stashed his lunch amid bulging plastic grocery bags and snap-top containers crammed with last night’s casserole. He glanced through the door at the cafeteria’s morning trade: large white men with belts cinched up under their bellies purchasing breakfast burritos from squat, buxom Hispanic women in hair nets and white aprons. Paul decided against a burrito—it wouldn’t do to have salsa on his breath when he talked to Rick—and hurried around the corner to the tiny elevator. The stairs were faster—the GSD Building only had two floors—but riding the elevator gave Paul a moment to catch his breath, to pretend that he hadn’t just dashed in out of the heat. As the door slid shut, he loosened the sticky waistband of his shorts, and, through his shirt, pinched his t-shirt front and back, peeling it away from his humid skin, flapping it like a bellows to cool himself. He tipped his head back against the wall of the car and sighed.

  Are we not men? he thought. What does that mean?

  At the second floor the elevator itself groaned, a long sigh that sounded as if it were giving up. But the door slid open, and Paul stepped out, turned left past the aluminum can recycling box, and slipped through the doorway into cubeland.

  The General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services—the GSD of TxDoGS—was housed in a wide, low-ceilinged, underlit room in the shape of a hollow square. In the center of the square was a courtyard where a sun-blasted redwood deck surrounded an old live oak, which was fighting a losing battle with oak wilt. The offices along the outer walls, with views of the parking lot and the river, were taken by senior managers. Middle managers had offices along the inner wall with a view of the dying oak tree, and everybody else occupied the honeycomb of cubicles in between, where nearly every vertical surface was grown over as if by moss with stubbly gray fabric. Some enterprising ergonomist for the state of Texas had calculated to the photon the minimum lighting necessary to meet code, and then had removed enough fluorescent bulbs from the suspended ceiling to make the room look candlelit. Everybody works better, went the theory, in the pool of light from his or her own desk lamp. Helps ’em concentrate. The drywall of the outer offices kept any sunlight from reaching the interior, and the amber tint of the courtyard windows filtered the Texas glare. No matter the time of day or the weather, the room always looked the same. It was like working underground, Paul thought.

  Just now, across the room, over the cube horizon, Paul saw his boss, Rick McKellar, lope out of his office with his chin lifted like a rooster’s and his impressive eyebrows raised as he started up one of the main thoroughfares of the labyrinth of cubes. Paul instantly ducked his head and hunched his shoulders like a soldier dashing from one trench to another, and he scuttled past the empty conference room, then left into the first side street, then immediately left again into his cube. The woman in the cube opposite, Olivia Haddock, was for once looking the other way, and her slave, the dying tech writer in the cube next to Paul’s, luckily never lifted his head. Made it, Paul thought, and then saw the latest draft of the RFP on his chair, already emended in Rick’s bold, red felt tip. In the beginning Paul had interpreted Rick’s huge, brusque lettering as rage, but eventually he understood it as a sign of restlessness and not directed at him in particular. Rick corresponded with all his employees that way.

  WATERMARK???? read the scrawl in bright red across the top of the title page. A long, bold, blunt arrow descended to the bottom of the page, and alongside it Rick had dashed, in even larger letters, GLOBAL!!!!

  “A watermark?” Paul muttered. “He wants a watermark?”

  “Mornin’!” Paul heard Rick say to someone, still twenty paces away, and Paul snatched the document off his chair and dropped into his seat, which squeaked like a small animal. Without looking, he was conscious of Olivia’s gimlet glance from across the aisle, while from the adjacent cube he heard the Darth Vader wheeze of the dying tech writer’s breathing tube. With one hand he turned on the fluorescent light under his cabinet and with the other nudged the mouse of his PC so that the screen saver deactivated. He could hear the crepitation of Rick’s shoes on the carpet outside his cube, so he picked up the RFP with both hands and leaned back in his squealing chair.

  “You’re here!” barked Rick, stepping straight into Paul’s cube and looming over him. “D’ja take a look at my glads and happies?” He rested his hand on the top edge of the cube, then nervously plucked it away.

  “Um, yeah,” Paul drawled, as if he were concentrating hard, and he stuck his thumb at random in the stack of pages and flipped it open over the hinge of the staple, as if he were looking for something specific in the interior of the document. He was desperately hoping to convey by this maneuver that he had been sitting here for some time deep in contemplation of the RFP, that he had not just put his ass in the seat, that he was not still breathing hard from the dash across the parking lot, that he was not sweating like a triathelete. From the corner of his eye he saw Rick’s hands twitching at the loose, blousy folds of his dress shirt, which was already coming untucked. Squinting at some indecipherable hieroglyph of Rick’s, Paul said, “Hmmm,” hoping to convey a degree of awe and intellectual curiosity.

  “You know how to do a watermark, right?” Rick went on, in his nasal Texas drawl. But before Paul could respond, Rick executed a jerky little pirouette, during which he revolved a complete 360 degrees on the ball of his foot, thrust his palms deep inside his waistband, completely retucked his shirt, and returned to his original position, hoisting his trousers with his thumbs through a pair of belt loops.

  “I’ll show you.” Rick leaned abruptly across Paul, forcing Paul to wheel back in his chair. Rick splayed one broad hand against the surface of Paul’s desk and clutched the mouse with the other, his index finger trembling over the clicker like the unsteady needle of a compass. Nothing made him happier than to demonstrate to Paul some arcana from Microsoft Word. Meanwhile Paul was getting a strong whiff of Rick’s aftershave and an intimate look at the tiny hairs like wheat stubble riding the folds at the back of Rick’s neck.

  “You just click on this cheer,” Rick mumbled, as he launched the wrong program from Paul’s computer desktop.

  “Ah, that’s PowerPoint, Rick,” Paul said, as the start-up screen blossomed. Rick fumbled with the mouse, driving the cursor all over, trying to find a way to shut it down.

  “Way-ul,” he muttered, “you can’t close the barn door after the chickens have roosted.”

  Paul knew exactly what would happen next; Rick was as easily distracted as a cat. He turned his head away from the screen to look at Paul. His bushy, semicircular eyebrows glided up and down, his forehead creased and uncreased. He seemed utterly unfazed by the fact that he and Paul were close enough to kiss.

  “You finish that presentation I asked you for,” Rick said, “for the maintenance managers?”

  “I gave you the disk yesterday.” Paul tried not to wince at the minty sourness of Rick’s mouthwash.

  “Didja!” Rick unclutched the mouse and stood erect, his hands twitching at his waist. “Have I looked at it yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough,” Rick said, and he pivoted out of the cube.

  “Uh, Rick?” Paul half pushed himself to his feet. “Could I, uh, take a minute . . . ?”

  Rick pivoted again in the aisle. He rested a hand on the edge of the cube and then snatched it away. He bounced his eyebrows.

  “Um, well, not here.” Paul’s eyes flickered across the aisle, where Olivia perched erect at her computer screen, pretending not to listen. “Could we maybe talk in your office?”

  Rick’s eyes widened. “You’re leaving,” he declared with infinite sadness. Rick had gone through three unsuccessful temps before Paul.

  “Oh no!” Paul was disgusted to hea
r his voice shoot up an octave. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m . . .” He dropped his voice to a more commanding register. “I’m happy here. It’s just—”

  At that moment Rick’s beeper buzzed, and he executed another half turn before he managed to yank the little device out of his shirt pocket and peer at the readout.

  “Later!” he cried, and sailed off, chin lifted, eyebrows bouncing. Paul felt his shoulders sag.

  “So you’re not leaving us?” Olivia sang out from across the aisle, hands poised over her keyboard, head cocked over her shoulder. The sharp, blonde hemline of her hair swung just above her shoulder. Her spine was perfectly erect, bolstered by a stiff lumbar pillow at the small of her back like a bustle.

  Paul blinked at her. One day, waiting to ask a question of Nolene, the department’s chief secretary, Paul had witnessed a virtuoso duel of passive aggression between her and Olivia over the use of the fax machine. The skirmish ended with Olivia’s parting shot, with its pert rise in inflection at the end, as if she were asking a question, “Well, it’s not how I’m used to conducting business?” As Olivia marched away, her back as ramrod straight as a drill instructor’s, her hair swinging above her shoulders, Paul simultaneously noted the pep squad switch of her not unattractive bottom and her coarse, middle-aged elbows, as creased as an elephant’s knees. To his astonishment, Nolene actually stuck her pink, glistening tongue out at Olivia’s retreating backside. Then she swiveled massively in Paul’s direction, lifted her plucked eyebrows, and, only because he happened to be standing there, delivered a dismissively annotated rendition of Olivia Haddock’s résumé: homecoming queen at Chester W. Nimitz High School in Irving, Texas—big whoop. Head of a championship cheerleading team at SMU—as if I give a shit. Twenty-year veteran of a major energy corporation in Houston—like she’s better than anybody else! Which transferred her to Lamar and then abruptly downsized her—serves her right! Started at the bottom again at TxDoGS as a temp—“The wretched of the earth,” contributed Paul, under his breath—worked her way onto the permanent staff as a purchaser, and because certain men around here, and I’m not naming names, like to watch her twitching cheerleader ass, she survived the statewide job cuts in the department five years ago when men with ten times her seniority were out on the street after twenty years. Can you believe it?

  “You know what we call her?” Nolene dropped her voice even lower. “La Cucaracha.”

  “Because . . . ?” Paul pictured a multilegged Olivia mincing up the aisle, antennae quivering.

  “Because she won’t die,” hissed Nolene. “Whatever you do to her, she always survives.”

  This contrasted with the nickname Olivia had picked for herself: As the purchaser for all of TxDoGS’s office supplies statewide, she referred to herself as the Paperclip Queen. For a week or so after he had started at TxDoGS, Paul thought he was being charming and mildly flirtatious by calling her the Toner Czarina or the Duchess of Whiteout or the Binder Clip Contessa. But one morning he had come in to find a Post-it stuck to his computer monitor briskly printed in very sharp pencil:

  PLEASE DO NOT

  DEPRECIATE MY

  NICK-NAME. YOU

  ARE ONLY A

  TEMP AND I AM

  A PERMANENT

  EMPLOYEE

  —O.H.

  “So you’re not leaving us?” Olivia was saying now.

  “No,” breathed Paul, as he watched Rick’s head gliding away between the tops of the intervening cubicles. He glanced at her across the aisle; Olivia had a small, very sharp nose and large eyes that widened whenever she spoke to him. Years ago it was a look that had probably driven the defensive line of the Mighty Vikings, or whatever they were called, wild with adolescent longing, but now it meant, Nothing gets by me, buster. Paul’s worst nightmare was that he, like the hapless, dying tech writer, would end up working for her.

  “No,” Paul said again, “I’m not leaving,” and he turned back to his desk.

  THREE

  MAKING RICK’S LINE EDITS—his “glads and happies,” in Rick’s peculiar usage—took about fifteen minutes, and Paul burned up another forty or so trying to figure out the watermark function in Microsoft Word. Bored by that, he tried to kill some time checking his e-mail, but no one in the department had sent him anything this morning, and no one from his old life kept in touch with him anymore. As a temp, TxDoGS didn’t trust him on the Web, but his browser did allow him to explore the department’s intranet site. Unfortunately, after six weeks on the job, Paul had the TxDoGS site pretty well memorized—for a Ph.D. in English literature from the once-prestigious University of the Midwest, he had a surprisingly thorough knowledge of the hazmat regulations in the state of Texas—so he switched to the PowerPoint slide show he had assembled for Rick and idly monkeyed with the backgrounds, making them marbled or watery or sparkly or adding one of the program’s ready-made animations. On the title slide—

  Pilot Project

  on

  Vehicle Maintenance Outsourcing

  Texas Department of General Services

  —he introduced a mooing little longhorn that clattered across the bottom of the slide, thrusting its horns this way and that. For the slide that listed the project personnel—

  RFP Development Team

  • Rick McKellar, TxDoGS Fleet Manager, General Services Division

  • Colonel Travis Pentoon, J.J. Toepperwein, and Bob Wier of GSD

  • Paul Trilby, typist

  —he found a little soldier who marched to the middle of the screen, executed a perfect present arms, and saluted.

  Every twenty minutes or so, however, Paul bounded out of his chair, snatched up the RFP as an excuse, and then stopped short in the door of his cube. The upper edge of the gray cubescape came to Paul’s cheekbones, and, like most of the men in the office, he could gauge the traffic in the aisles from a distance—or some of it, anyway. It was different for women, both seeing and being seen. Callie the Mail Girl, for example, was tall enough so that you could see the cropped top of her head above the cube horizon as she trundled her cart up the aisle, but Renee—pronounced “Renny,” in true Texas fashion, a tiny, hollow-eyed woman who purchased replacement parts for massive earthmoving equipment—was invisible until you were nearly on top of her. Paul was an energetic walker, and no matter how he tried to check himself, he always seemed to be blundering into her. This elicited another angry Post-it on his computer screen:

  Please do not

  walk so fast in

  The Aisle. You

  are not the

  only person

  here.

  This note was unsigned, but he knew it was from Renee; the printing did not have Olivia’s needle-sharp precision but read rather like a child’s, or like someone trying to disguise her right hand by writing with her left.

  So now Paul felt that he was running the gauntlet every time he left his cube, as he did now. Clutching the rolled-up RFP in both hands like a club, Paul dipped his head and hurried past the doorway of the dying tech writer, almost superstitiously averting his gaze from the knobs of the man’s spine rising out of his frayed cardigan and the deepening groove between the wasting cords of his neck. It was uncharitable, perhaps even cruel, to dwell on it, but this wretched man had starred in an actual nightmare of Paul’s in which the dying tech writer had arrived at TxDoGS on his first day as a strapping six footer, as ruddy as a rugby player, only to have his vitality sucked dry by a furious, naked Olivia, reducing him to the shriveled and gray-skinned husk he was now. The imagery for this nightmare came from a space vampire video Paul had seen years ago, but recognition of its provenance couldn’t keep him from repressing a shudder every time he passed the man’s cube.

  Paul turned right down the main aisle, grateful he didn’t immediately bowl over Renee as he did two or three times a week, but noting the look of pure hatred she gave him even from the safety of her cube. At the next major intersection he glimpsed Callie the Mail Girl in the “library,” which was only a bi
g, open cube with a metal bookcase full of ring binders just inside the door and a photocopier in the corner. Callie was sorting mail at the long worktable across from the copier. As a member of the Building Services staff she was exempt from the regime of business casual, and in jeans and a t-shirt she pressed her belly up against the edge of the table, propped herself on one long arm, and sorted the mail into piles with a flick of her wrist. She had a long, oval face, sharp cheekbones, and reddish hair cropped to within an inch of her pale scalp, which had led to a few sniggering lesbo jokes in Paul’s hearing. She was long legged and hippy in a way that Paul found immensely appealing, though he’d never had an occasion to speak to her. Still, even as he flashed by the library doorway, he managed to admire her long neck and the cant of her hip against the worktable and the deep curve in the small of her back. Callie blew out a long, bored sigh and flicked another envelope, and Paul turned left, up the aisle towards Rick’s office.

  Here he ran another gauntlet, past the cubes of the three purchasers who served on the RFP Development Team. First he passed Joe John Toepperwein, a beetle-browed, slope-shouldered young man who hunched before his computer as if he expected to be clobbered from behind at any moment. Squeezing the mouse as if he wanted to crush it, his eyes flicking angrily back and forth, J.J. pushed the little arrow of the cursor around the screen as if he were trying to stab something. Every time Paul passed, J.J. was switching from one Web page to another; he never seemed to settle on one site, but constantly, restlessly surfed. Yet as each page clicked by, J.J. sat sullenly immobile before the screen like a diorama of early twenty-first-century office work, a tableau non vivant.

  Then Paul passed Colonel Travis Pentoon, late of the United States Army, a square-shouldered, broad-chested, crinkly eyed man in his late fifties whose fastidiously creased khakis and dress shirt conceded little to civilian laxity. He had let his military buzz cut grow out a full quarter of an inch, and though he removed his sport coat when sitting at his desk, he kept his cuffs buttoned and his tie cinched tight up under his dewlaps. He was usually typing furiously, his fingers arched, his hands rebounding off the keyboard as energetically as a concert pianist’s, and he watched whatever he was typing with a penetrating squint, while the black, polarizing screen across his monitor kept anyone else from seeing what he was working on. When he wasn’t typing, he was on the phone, holding the handset lightly between the tips of his blunt fingers as he managed his money market account on the state’s time, jotting figures on a pad with his free hand. Today he was multitasking, simultaneously hammering the keyboard and cradling the phone between his cheek and his shoulder. “I hear what you’re saying,” he was telling his broker in a throaty, George C. Scott rasp, “but we’re either on the bus with this one, son, or off the bus.”