Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (5 page)

“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.

“As
I
understand it,” Olivia continued in her steel magnolia singsong, “you don’t receive your final paycheck until I’m satisfied with the work. And I certainly can’t call unfinished work
satisfactory
.”

Another desperate, dying wheeze. “It
is
finished,” said the tech writer.

“Not until it’s tested.”

Paul could feel the grinding of Olivia’s joined palms like a pressure on his heart.

“You hired me to write it.”
Inhale
. “Beta testing is not my job.”

“But until it’s beta tested, it’s not
finished
, and you haven’t
done
your job.”

They went on, but Paul was already preoccupied with his own racing thoughts. First, Olivia’s bound to win, if only because she can breathe. Next, my life could be worse—I could be working for Olivia. Then, if the state legislature has its way, someday we’ll all be temps—except for La Cucaracha, who’ll always find a way to survive. And, tech writers have agents? Like actors and authors? Even if it does mean working for Olivia Haddock, this guy must make, what, twenty, twenty-five bucks an hour? I have to talk to Rick, Paul decided. Today.

“Do what you have to,” Olivia said, “but don’t forget? You don’t get that last paycheck until
I
sign off on it.”

Olivia marched past Paul’s door and into her own cube. Paul stared unseeing at his computer screen, trying to gauge if the rhythmic whine of the tech writer’s breathing was more agitated than usual. There was no way to tell.

On the dot of noon, Paul took a book out of the cabinet over his desk and went downstairs to the hall outside the lunchroom, where he retrieved his bag lunch and bought a Coke from one of the machines. A line snaked out the door of the cafeteria, and the smell of deep-fried potatoes and grilling hamburgers was almost visible, like a haze. Paul edged past the crowd around the microwaves—men reheating last night’s cheese enchiladas, women heating up their lo-cal frozen lunches—and from the archway of the dining room, at the edge of its busy roar, he looked for a small table where he might sit by himself and read. The only empty table was the one next to the Colonel’s in the far corner of the room, between two wide expanses of amber-tinted window overlooking the river. The Colonel sat at this same table every day, with his back to the corner, where he could command the widest field of fire. His wife was Japanese, and today, as always, the Colonel used his chopsticks to eat the marvelously compact lunch she’d prepared him—rice, sushi, seaweed—out of a beautiful, enameled black
box, his only purchase a steaming Styrofoam cup trailing the string of a tea bag. To the Colonel’s left, J.J. glowered over his hamburger, fries, and jumbo soda the way he glowered at his computer screen, while on the Colonel’s right, Bob Wier crunched carrot sticks out of a Tupperware tub, his mournful eyes as bright as polished buttons. Across from the Colonel was an empty seat where no one ever sat, and which no one even dared borrow for another table.

Although the three men were Paul’s coworkers on the outsourcing project, they had never invited him to lunch with them, and he had never attempted to sit in the empty chair. One time Paul had taken the table next to theirs, reading his book and eating his sandwich and pretending not to listen to their conversation. He hoped to convey that he was ignoring them, rather than being ignored
by
them, but he never really succeeded and ended up instead staring sightlessly at the same page for twenty minutes while the Colonel held forth with the overbearing certainty of the autodidact.

“Certainly the West owes a great deal to the Jews,” he had been saying that day. “Take the ‘Judeo’ out of ‘Judeo-Chrisrian,’ and you have a mighty thin soup indeed.”

“Amen.” Bob Wier nodded thoughtfully.

“And there is no gainsaying that they are
mighty
warriors,” rasped the Colonel. “The Six Day War. Entebbe. And hell, let’s not forget the Masada.”

“ ‘The roar of battle will rise against your people,’ ” intoned Bob Wier, “ ‘so that all your fortresses will be devastated.’ Hosea ten, verse fourteen.”

“But there’s no denying,” continued the Colonel, “that certain nineteenth-century German Jews have a good deal to answer for. I refer, of course, to that unholy ménage à trois of relativistic values, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.”

“Don’t forget Darwin,” Bob Wier said.

“Ménage à what?” J.J. paused in his Sherman’s March across his burger to glare at the Colonel.

“Ménage à trois,” said the Colonel, then, to Bob Wier, “Darwin wasn’t a Jew, Reverend.”

“He wasn’t?”

“C of E,” said the Colonel. “Bit of a freethinker, actually.”

“Ménage à
twat?”
J.J. widened his eyes.

“J.J., c’mon.” Bob Wier’s cheeks burned bright red.

“
Twa
” enunciated the Colonel. “Ta-
wa
.”

“That’s a three-way, innit?” J.J. said.

The Colonel manufactured an avuncular laugh. “Perhaps I should have said ‘troika,’ my lubricious friend.”

“Guys,
please.”
The heat colored Bob Wier’s temples and forehead.

By now Paul’s ears had been burning. I know what a ménage à trois is, he’d thought. And Darwin was a theist. This daily roundtable of the Colonel’s was the closest thing at TxDoGS to intellectual intercourse, and Paul had been a little offended that he hadn’t been asked to join in. Of course, if the Colonel had invited him to take the empty chair, he’d have declined—nothing irritated Paul like some blowhard with no trace of irony—but still. The Colonel probably didn’t have the nerve to ask a real intellectual to sit at their table.

So today Paul turned on his heel, squeezed past the microwave crowd, edged through the cafeteria line, and went back upstairs to eat his lunch in his cube. Olivia was in the crowd downstairs, and the dying tech writer, thank God, disappeared who knew where during lunch. As he sat at his desk munching a dry cheese sandwich and store-brand chips from a store-brand baggie, he read the last couple of chapters of
The Time Machine
from a fat, battered old Dover book,
Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells
. Paul had long since been forced by circumstances to sell off his library, and now he could only afford to buy books at the Friends of the Library shop at the Lamar Public Library, where hardcovers sold for a dollar and paperbacks for fifty cents. But what the hell, he told himself, I’m only reading for diversion these days, like any other working stiff plowing through the latest Grisham or Tom Clancy. H. G. Wells was easy to read, and Paul enjoyed the author’s gleeful late-Victorian sense of apocalypse, as Wells eagerly overturned the dominant culture with Martians, invisible men, and beasts surgically altered
into consciousness. In
The Time Machine
Wells seemed to imply that the end of the world would come from sheer inanition, with the Eloi as the ne plus ultra of slackers. Fighting to stay awake in his cube every midmorning and midafternoon, Paul understood inanition in his marrow.

Still, even these lurid old potboilers had the power to alarm. Paul had reached the penultimate chapter of
The Time Machine
, where the Time Traveller rockets forward thousands of years into a future of bleak seashores and giant crabs and a waning sun. As Paul sucked down the last warm mouthful of Coke, he was blindsided by a sentence: “I cannot convey the sense of the abominable desolation that hung over the world.” This triggered an emotional chain reaction in Paul that left him trembling by the time he reached the end of the next page. The Traveller’s every leap forward in time only made Paul’s horror worse. “Silent?” he read. “It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.” Paul felt his skin tighten as he sat in the unnatural twilight of his cube; the lunchtime silence all around buzzed in his ears. All the ghostly clattering and clicking and chattering Paul heard when the office was at full throttle was gone, and he half entertained the notion that he was the only one left alive in the building. Then he read Wells’s description of the Traveller’s furthest south into the future, with its giant, dying sun and its blood-red sea and some hideous, tentacled thing on the beach “hopping fitfully about,” and the Traveller himself on the verge of fainting, with his “terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight,” and Paul bolted straight up out of his squealing chair, trembling like a child.

“So where is he?” he demanded a moment later in the doorway of Rick’s office, his hands in his pockets so no one would see them shake. Rick took his lunch at eleven, which meant that he was often in his office while everyone else was out to lunch. But instead Paul discovered Nolene and a couple of other secretaries, Lorilei and Tracy, seated at the little round table in the corner of Rick’s office watching
Days of Our Lives
on the portable
TV Rick used to review videos from the field. All three women goggled at the screen, where some sort of fight was taking place, the salads in plastic shells before them momentarily ignored.

“Excuse me?” Paul said again over the shouting and thumping from the television. He was disturbed to hear the tremor in his voice.

Nolene sharply raised her index finger and brandished the underside of a long fingernail at Paul, who knew better than to speak again. A moment later a gunshot and a final thump erupted from the TV, and all three women flinched.

“Oh. My. God,” breathed Lorilei.

“Damn,”
said Tracy, clenching her fists. “I
knew
it was him.”

“Sumbitch had it coming,” said Nolene grimly, and she theatrically twisted her hand in the air and pointed with her long nail out the window. Paul lifted himself on tiptoe and saw Rick sitting alone on the bench underneath the live oak in the courtyard.

“Thank you,” he muttered, and he bolted out of the office, around the corner past Nolene’s cube, and through the exit door. Pushing into the blazing Texas heat was like wading into molasses, and Paul paused to grip the railing of the little walkway that ran across the entrance to the courtyard. Down below Rick slouched on the wooden bench with his fingers laced over his belly and his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. The price tag on his shoe was plainly visible; Rick looked as if he were on sale. Paul let go of the railing and trotted down the stairs to the courtyard. He was sweating already.

“Rick, could I talk to you for a second?” He kicked through the brittle leaves on the deck; his feet thumped against the redwood.

“In’t this your lunchtime?” Rick squinted up through the bare, crooked branches at the sky above the courtyard.

“Yes, but—” Paul’s t-shirt was already stuck to his back.

“You’re so serious this morning,” Rick said, still without looking at him. “Come take a look at that sky.”

“Sorry?”

Rick patted the bench beside him. “Have a seat, Paul. Let’s just take a moment.”

Paul glanced at the blank amber gaze of the wide windows all around him, then he slowly lowered himself onto the bench next to Rick.

“Now just set and take a look at that sky,” said Rick. “In’t that a beauty?”

Paul sat stiffly on the bench. The heat was reflected off the windows and the deck; it beat down from the sky. He felt sweat trickling along his sideburns and down the back of his neck. Still, he lifted his eyes up through the dying branches of the oak. Even if Nolene hadn’t told him about the oak wilt, Paul would have noticed that something was wrong with the tree; most of its leaves had turned a mottled brown and fallen off. Its branches seemed contorted as if in pain. Every week, a Hispanic guy with a leaf blower strapped to his back came and blasted away the dead leaves; even in the depths of his cube, Paul could hear the whine of the machine. Beyond the tree, beyond the sharp roofline of the building, there was nothing remotely attractive about the sky, which was the whitish glare of high summer in Texas, with a blazing blot of sun. Paul blinked up through the branches painfully, grateful only that the sheer oppressive weight of the heat had stopped his trembling. What the hell am I looking at? he wanted to say.

The moment extended itself almost beyond Paul’s endurance. He glanced sidelong at Rick. Not only was his boss looking up at the sky with the wide-eyed wonder of a child at a planetarium—his kinetic eyebrows at rest for once—but there wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. He could have been sitting in a snow bank.