Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read online

  Finally, Paul passed the orderly cube of Bob Wier, with his color-coded state purchasing manuals and his ring binders arranged in descending order of size. In his desk drawer he kept a can of compressed air, and Paul had often seen him blasting the grit from between the keys of the computer keyboard he never seemed to use. He also kept a spray bottle of Windex to keep spotless the curved screen of his monitor and the glass in his array of family photographs—his dead wife and three well-scrubbed children and an eight-by-ten portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. Bob wore polo shirts and penny loafers, and he was handball trim and aggressively good-humored, but there was something attenuated about him, as if his skin was stretched too tight over his skull. He never stopped smiling, but his eyes were watery, which Paul attributed to the loss of his wife. As a temp Paul was off the circuit for office lore, but one morning, while Bob was temporarily away from his cube, Nolene had given Paul the highlights on fast forward. Bob’s wife had vanished, she said, and most folks thought she had simply run off, but Bob referred to her as his “late wife.” “And I reckon he ought to know,” Nolene added darkly. He’d sent his kids to live with his sister in Amarillo—“As far away as they could git from Lamar,” Nolene whispered, “and still be in the state of Texas”—and he filled his time by trying to sell his coworkers on Christian speed-reading courses, Christian real estate schemes, and Christian cleaning products. “He don’t know what ‘no’ means,” warned Nolene. “You ever hear him mention ‘distributed sales,’ run the other way.”

  But Paul was a temp and luckily out of range of Bob’s evangelical salesmanship. Still, Bob Wier was one of the few people in the office to note Paul’s presence. Today Bob sat behind his desk ostentatiously speed-reading a book, thumbing aside each page with a crisp snap as his JESUS IS LORD! screen saver flowed endlessly across the bright screen behind him. He glanced up as Paul passed, and his face pulled in two directions as he gave Paul his wide, desperate smile and his mournful eyes drooped to either side. Paul returned the look with a wince, and then brought himself up short again between the uprights of Rick’s doorway.

  But once again he had run the gauntlet uselessly, for Rick was on the phone. FLEET MANAGER read the plaque on Rick’s door; the privatization project that Paul was the typist for—whoa, whoa, whoa, make that tech writer—was only one of Rick’s many responsibilities. Rick sat tipped back in his chair, head framed by the brittle branches of the dying tree beyond the window, feet up on the desk displaying the purple bar code price tag still pasted to the sole of one new shoe—$89.95 from Texas Shoe Corral. He was bellowing into the headset of his phone, his eyebrows bouncing up and down. Paul hovered in the doorway, the RFP coiled tightly in both hands. Rick beckoned him in with an abrupt curl of his fingers and then continued his phone conversation, his hands fiddling at the folds of his shirt around his waist.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I hear ya. Uh-huh.” He recrossed his ankles on his desk. “Well, I always say, if you’re gonna change horses, you gotta get ’em all in line. Yessir. Uh-huh.”

  Paul shifted from foot to foot and silently practiced his opening. He had decided to take the Socratic approach, presenting the RFP as a visual aid. “Is this not a technical document? Am 1 not the writer of this document? Then is it not the case that I am a technical writer?” Paul unrolled the RFP to make sure he had it right side up.

  “Yowzah,” said Rick into the phone, his eyebrows shooting nearly up to his hairline. “The whole enchilada?”

  After a minute or two of shuffling in place, Paul backed out of the office and hovered near the network printer, rolling the RFP between his hands again. Nolene gave him a glance and then ignored him, and Paul faded into the gray fabric of the nearby cube walls and listened to the unseen life of the office around him. Paul was still spooked by the eerie invisibility of most of his coworkers. Spread out before him in the weird, undersea light, the gray metal strips on top of the cube partitions outlined, like a map of itself, the labyrinth of right angles in all directions. A few items stuck up above the cube horizon—a row of fat red ring binders across the top of a filing cabinet, a lonely cactus in a green plastic pot, a schoolbus-yellow hard hat, a softball trophy, a pink plastic pig. What Paul could not see from where he stood was another single living human being, yet he heard the clatter of computer keyboards, the rhythmic burr of a ringing phone, the squeaking flex of an office chair. He heard the whirr of the printer and the buzz of the fax machine, the rumble of a drawer sliding out and sliding in. He saw the flash of the copier on the suspended ceiling and heard the beep of its buttons and the whine of its carriage shuttling back and forth. He heard the hard-drive purr of a PC. The clatter of a phone returned to its cradle. A laugh. The thump of a stapler, the snick of a ballpoint, the rattle of paper, the bass crepitation of the mail cart against the carpet. All of it, every rattle, click, and chirrup, without being able to see a soul. It was like being surrounded by ghosts, and Paul knew a thing or two about that.

  “Hon?” said a voice in Paul’s ear, and he started violently.

  Nolene was leaning out of her cube, her pale fingers not quite touching Paul’s shoulder. “If you want to go back to your cube,” she said, lifting her manicured eyebrows, “I’ll let you know when Rick’s free. You don’t need to keep making the trip.”

  Paul cleared his throat and strangled the rolled-up document between his hands. “Uh, thanks,” he choked, and he ran the gauntlet in the reverse direction, past Bob Wier’s miserable smile, the clatter of the Colonel’s keyboard, J.J.’s glowering back. Someone else was in the library now, one of the other secretaries, photocopying. As he turned right down the aisle, he glimpsed the top of Callie’s bobbing head across the office, as she trundled her mail cart up the aisle like Mother Courage. Renee froze in her doorway, clutching her throat in rage as Paul thundered past, muttering an apology. Then left past the empty cube of the dying tech writer—Where had he gone?—and into his own cube.

  “Keeping busy?” sang out Olivia from across the aisle, her wrists cocked over her keyboard.

  “Yeah,” said Paul, feeling his stomach clench at the sound of her voice. He dropped the RFP, now permanently curled from his grip, and regarded his computer screen. He had been gone long enough for the screen saver to kick in; this, no doubt, had not escaped Olivia’s notice. In his time at TxDoGS Paul had tried out a couple of screen saver messages—The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation or Arbeit macht frei—and had settled on a line from Shakespeare, red, boldfaced, and italic, streaming across a black background:

  I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.

  “What’s it mean?” Olivia had asked him once, poised at the opening of his cube with her hands clasped and her eyes wide, as if she were about to declaim something.

  “Ahhhh,” Paul had stalled, staring at the screen, until at last he said, “It means that whatever your station in life, you can, um, accomplish great things.” He had added, because he knew it would shut her up, “It’s from the Bible.”

  “Oh!” Olivia had said.

  Now Paul watched the line slide endlessly across his blackened screen, and he pivoted sharply and stalked out of his cube. Were it not that I have bad dreams, he thought, completing the line as he came into the main hallway of the second floor. On the other side of the glass wall, leaning against the rail on the landing of the outdoor stairway, the dying tech writer was having a smoke. Even in the ninety-something heat, the emaciated little man was bundled in a sweater he had buttoned up to the base of his ropy neck. His throat was wrapped in a gauze bandage, and a little plastic tube protruded just below his Adam’s apple. He blocked off the tube with his thumb, lifted his cigarette with his other hand, and inhaled. He blinked his deep-socketed eyes, savoring, then lifted his thumb and blew a stream of smoke out of the tube. Paul shivered at the sight, and, as if to evoke Paul’s horror, the elevator suddenly groaned at the top of its climb. Paul bolted around the corner of the hallway and banged through the men’s
room door.

  He nearly groaned to himself in relief: He was alone. He entered the stall at the far end of the room and locked the door. This was Paul’s escape hatch, his refuge from the soul-destroying boredom of his cube. Every morning about this time, when he dozed slack jawed in front of his monitor, his whole body Novocain numb, his drooping eyelids dragging his whole head towards his chest, he would rise like one of the living dead, stumble to this particular stall, and take a nap. For verisimilitude, he now dropped his trousers but not his underwear, then sat and planted his feet. He propped his elbow on the toilet paper dispenser, planted his cheek in his palm, and closed his eyes. All he heard was the nasal hiss of his own breath and the subliminal hum of the fluorescent lights. He tried to steady his breathing, but he could feel his pulse racing in his wrist and in his temples. Calm down, he told himself. You don’t work for Olivia. No space vampire’s gonna get you.

  Usually he was able to drift off for a restorative minute or two, but today he was aware of the chill of the air-conditioning on his knees, of the hard plastic under his thighs. The insides of his eyelids glowed red with the bright light of the men’s room, and he was sure he could see the blood beating through his capillaries. No sleep today, pal. Today, like it or not, was an occasion for self-laceration. How had he wound up here? How could this have happened? He was smarter than anybody in a hundred-yard radius; he was better read; he was wittier; he was—by God!—a better writer. He had a Ph.D. from a well-regarded university; he had won awards, for chrissake. He had been a finalist for a Guggenheim! He’d almost been a Fulbright!

  And then he’d fumbled the ball. Screwed the pooch. Pissed it away. The litany of Paul’s mistakes made up his own stations of the cross: He’d picked the wrong postdoc. Hadn’t finished his book. Kissed the wrong asses and hadn’t kissed the right ones. Married the wrong woman. Then blew that all to hell by sleeping with another wrong woman. Then followed her to Texas. Ran up his credit cards. Got a job he hated and lost it. Started another book and hadn’t finished it. Gained weight. Lost the woman he’d followed to Texas to a weatherman. Ended up in state government. Started out as a player and ended up as a temp, making eight dollars an hour, sweating blood, pulse pounding as he worked up the nerve to ask for a raise to eleven.

  And all because of Charlotte. All because of that motherfucking cat. That devious, cocksucking, motherfucking, bitch whore cunt of a cat. The biggest mistake I ever made. It all starts there, and it all goes downhill. I should have fed Her Royal Fucking Highness on albacore and sweet cream and all the fishy fishy fish snacks she could stuff down her fucking throat. I should have kept the apartment ankle deep in catnip, knee-high in cat toys. I should have stuffed her in her fucking carrier and put her on the bus to Chicago. I should have rented her a fucking limo and driven her to fucking Chicago and dropped her on Elizabeth’s fucking doorstep, safe and sound, washed my hands of her, good fucking riddance. So long, suckah. But that’s not what you did, is it, moron? Is it, asshole? Is it, you dumb motherfucker? No, instead you . . . instead . . .

  Something scraped and Paul jerked his head up, sitting up straight on the toilet seat. Was I talking to myself? he thought. Did I say any of that out loud? He heard another scrape, accompanied by a kind of creak, and he cleared his throat and pulled off a handful of toilet paper. But the little spindle didn’t squeak enough for authenticity, so he rattled the dispenser for good measure. He must have fallen asleep because someone was in the men’s room with him, and he hadn’t heard the telltale thump of the swinging door. God, I hope I wasn’t snoring. I hope I wasn’t mumbling to myself.

  The scrape came again, closer now, almost a sort of slither. Paul froze at the sound, a coil of toilet paper slung between his hands. The sound wasn’t coming from the center of the men’s room. It was coming from above. It was coming from the ceiling.

  The door to the men’s room banged open, once, then again. Paul pulled the toilet paper taut between his hands and snapped it in two. He heard two sets of footsteps shuffling up to the urinals, heard one man clear his throat, heard the other cough. He heard the creak above him again, and he lifted his eyes to the suspended ceiling. Did that panel move?

  One of the urinating men cleared his throat again and said, “D’ja get that file I sent you?”

  “Yeah,” said the other man. “It’s cute.”

  “Have you seen the alien yet?” said the first man.

  “What alien?” said the second.

  “After the sheep get taken up into the ship.”

  “No.”

  “There’s a little alien.”

  “I haven’t seen that.”

  “He waves his arms and legs and his little, whattayacallem, his little antenna around.”

  “I haven’t seen that.”

  “Then he cuts the field up into little squares and disappears.”

  “Who, the sheep?”

  “No, the alien. He cuts the field up into little squares, and then he disappears.”

  “I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Have you seen the black sheep?”

  “What black sheep?”

  “The black sheep. He butts heads with the little alien.”

  “I haven’t seen the alien yet.”

  Throughout this illuminating exchange Paul sat perfectly still, his eyes searching the section of ceiling he could see from the stall. The scrape, the moving tile—it couldn’t be a rat or a snake, even the tightfisted state of Texas wouldn’t stint on vermin control. But the possibility of vermin didn’t even occur to Paul. More than anyone else in the building, he had experience with odd sounds when they were least expected, and the thought of what it could be made his skin tighten all over his body, goose pimpling the bare flesh of his legs, tightening his scrotum, making his scalp crawl. He was keenly aware of his own vulnerability, his pants around his ankles, his loins practically exposed. It can’t be her, he thought, it couldn’t be. Her absence during the day was the only reason he looked forward to coming to work; the only reason he could stand the daily humiliation was because he knew he’d be free for nine hours of the ammoniac stink of his carpet, of the brittle click of her claws on the kitchen floor. He wouldn’t feel the freezing, clammy drafts around his ankles in the night or the rub of her bristling fur. He wouldn’t be awakened from his sleep—as he was every morning, half an hour before his alarm—by her icy little teeth biting his toes.

  “Charlotte?” he whispered in a kind of squeak.

  One of the men at the urinals hawked and spat, and both men zipped up and moved around the privacy barrier to the sinks, where Paul lost track of what they were saying. He took advantage of the commotion to stand, keeping an eye on the ceiling panels above. As scared as he was, he didn’t want his coworkers to know that he came in here every day at the same time and for what purpose. While the faucets hissed and the men laughed, he hauled up his trousers. But he waited until he heard the door open and the men’s voices echo down the hall before he let himself out of the stall and hurried to the sinks. He watched the ceiling behind him in the mirror as he washed his hands. It’s not her, he told himself. I was dreaming. But his hands shook as he dried them with a length of paper towel, and with one last, nervous glance at the panels overhead, he fled.

  FOUR

  BY LUNCHTIME PAUL HAD managed to convince himself that the creaking he’d heard in the men’s room ceiling was a product of his imagination brought on by his anxiety; no doubt he’d simply dozed for a moment and dreamed the noise. In the meantime he’d come back to his cube to find Olivia Haddock in the middle of a tense exchange with the dying tech writer. Paul could not see the poor man, could only hear the wheeze of his breath, but as he slipped into his own cube he got a good look at Olivia posed in the tech writer’s doorway, one foot slightly behind the other, her hands clasped palm to palm just below her breasts. It was a stance from her college cheerleading days, no doubt, taught to her by a dance instructor or a drama coach. She looked ready to fill her lungs and deliver a soli
loquy or launch into a pirouette, but instead she aimed her wide-eyed gaze down her sharp nose at the tech writer.

  “I don’t see what the difficulty is,” she sang, as Paul lowered himself gingerly into his squeaking seat. “I read the contract to mean that you work until the job is done.”

  From the other side of the partition came an extra long, extra loud wheeze from the dying tech writer.

  “That’s not how it works,” he said in a ragged, froggy rumble that was exhausting to listen to no matter how many times Paul heard it. The tech writer drew an even longer breath through his tube. “My agent books me for a fixed period of time.” Another long, whistling breath. “If I work past that time, I’m not being paid.”

  The next few words dropped below Paul’s hearing as the tech writer ran out of breath. Paul had been listening to this argument for a week now, in halting installments, as Olivia posed in the dying tech writer’s doorway and delivered ultimatums with a sadism barely disguised as professionalism, and the dying tech writer responded in ragged gusts of hard-won air. After a bloodbath of downsizing several years ago, many workers in the General Services Division had been asked to take on extra responsibilities beyond their expertise in purchasing. Olivia had been tasked with the design and implementation of an intranet Web site where TxDoGS offices statewide could order their own office supplies; this site would automatically monitor supply usage and regulate the inventory, even to the extent of automatically generating bids from vendors when necessary. The dying tech writer had been hired as a freelance Web designer to create the page. In other words, on top of keeping the Texas Department of General Services in highlighters, manila folders, and jam-free printer paper, Olivia was also pursuing her own redundancy with kamikaze determination. If the project worked the way it was supposed to, she’d be out of a job.