Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (14 page)

“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.

T
HE 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.

After lunch he took his time sheet to Rick, a weekly humiliation, and Rick dashed off his signature without looking up.
Paul hesitated in the doorway and said, “Thanks again for the raise,” and Rick glanced up at him sharply, his eyebrows dancing. For an awful moment Paul thought Rick was going to say, “What raise?” But he only said, “You earned it,” and waved Paul away.

Then Paul ran the gauntlet of his erstwhile lunch companions. Bob Wier glanced up from his speed-reading and chirped, “Missed you at lunch today!” The Colonel narrowed his eyes as Paul hurried past his doorway. “Don’t be a stranger, Paul,” he called out. “You’re one of us now.” J. J. said nothing, slouched in front of his monitor, but a moment later Paul heard footsteps behind him, and he glanced back to see J.J. stumping after him. Paul ignored him, but then J.J. followed him around the corner into his aisle, and as Paul went into his cube and sat, J.J. loomed in the doorway, dangling his wrists over the partition on either side.

“We don’t need you,” he said, but diffidently, more as if he were stating a fact than making a threat.

Paul swiveled towards J.J. “I beg your pardon?”

“Guys like you.” J.J.’s gaze wandered all over, everywhere but towards Paul. “You think you’re better than everybody.”

Paul sighed. He glanced past J.J. across the aisle, but Olivia, for once, was not in her cube. “No,” he said, “I just think I’m better than you.”

Paul was surprised at himself, but he was even more surprised at J.J.’s reaction: He laughed, his gaze shooting all over the room. “That’s good,” he said. “I’m gonna use that one.” He nodded and smiled to himself. “It’s just . . .”

“What?” snapped Paul. “It’s just
what?”

J.J. slid his wrists off the partition and stepped into the cube. His eyes locked onto Paul’s at last.

“Colonel, he thinks you’re some kind of genius or something,” J.J. said in a low voice. “Whatever. But
I
know you’re a fuck up, ’cause I’m a fuck up, too. Okay?”

Paul said nothing. He perched tensely on the edge of his chair and fought to hold J.J.’s glare. From the neighboring cube he heard the hiss of the dying tech writer.

“We got a sweet thing going here,” said J.J. “and we don’t need you to screw it up.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” said Paul. “Lunch?”

“Hey, you wanna call it lunch, whatever.” J.J. backed out of the cube, but he pointed at Paul, fixing him in his chair. “Just don’t fuck it up.” Then J.J. abruptly walked away, leaving Paul turning slowly in his chair.

During his afternoon break in the empty lunchroom he scarcely read a word of H. G. Wells. He was still fuming over his encounter with J.J. Fine, Paul thought, I won’t sit at his fucking table during lunch. After a while, though, he realized he was watching the doorway for Callie. They had yet to set a time for Saturday night, and he didn’t know where she lived. He let his break drag on an extra ten minutes, turning the page of his book only once, and still she didn’t show. I can always look her up in the phone book, he thought as he went back upstairs, but then he realized that he didn’t even know her last name. He slouched before his computer screen for the next hour or so, canoodling on the RFP. He wasn’t about to track her down. He had already done his bit and asked her out; surely it was up to her to seek him out and tell him where she lived. Christ, Paul thought, I’m going out with a community college student, for all I know; why else would she be lugging around the
Norton Anthology?
Surely she doesn’t expect me to trail after her?

Just before quitting time he overheard another hissing exchange between Olivia Haddock and the dying tech writer.

“Today,” croaked the tech writer, “is my last day.”
Wheeze
. “My contract expires today.”

“It’s up to you.” Olivia’s voice ricocheted sharply off the ceiling tiles. “All I know is if the work isn’t revised by time I come in on Monday morning, I’m not signing off on your time sheet.”

“That’s.”
Wheeze
. “Blackmail.”

“Call it whatever you like. I’m not paying for work that isn’t finished.”

“It’s almost five o’clock.” A very long, painful
wheeze
. “On Friday.”

“Well, if it were
my
paycheck,” Olivia said, mincing away, “I’d make sure the work was done before I went home.”

Paul busied himself with shutting down his computer and tidying his desk; he hunched his back against any stray glance from Olivia. He stood, pushed his chair in, and stepped out of his cube just as Olivia stepped out of hers, wearing her purse strap like a bandolier.

“Paul,” she said, fixing him with a glare that defied him to bring up her moment of vulnerability the other day after Stanley Tulendij’s visit. Paul stepped aside to let her pass. Then he ducked the other way. As Paul passed, the dying tech writer lifted his gaze forlornly to the ceiling. A whine that might have been a sigh issued from his breathing tube.

In the parking lot Paul performed his ritual opening of the hatchback and car windows, catching a whiff of cooking pine as he tossed his shirt on the passenger seat. Well, this is great, he thought as he walked back around the car, slamming the hatchback shut. I drench myself in sweat—on my lunch hour—to clean the car for her, and not a word all afternoon. How am I supposed to find her tomorrow? Follow the bread crumbs? I asked
her
out; the least she could do is give me her number.

“Bitch,” Paul muttered, and just then an enormous pickup truck chugged to a stop, its gears grinding, right behind his Colt. The truck had to be at least twenty years old, formerly red, with dimples and dings and a long, rusty scrape along the side panel. The pickup idled unevenly, going
glug glug glug
as Callie draped her elbow out the window and leveled her sunglasses at Paul.

“Are you serious about tomorrow night?” She was wearing a blue tank top, yet somehow, even in the relentless Texas sun, the skin of her long arm was pale, with a sprinkling of freckles across her shoulders.

“Yes,” said Paul. “I am.” He approached the truck, straightening his spine to suck in his gut. He couldn’t read her expression behind the dark glasses, but he liked the quizzical way she pursed her lips.

“What time?” She rocked slightly behind the wheel to the glugging rhythm of her ancient truck.

What’s good for you? Paul nearly said, but he imagined Callie was the sort of girl who’d be put off by yuppie indecision, so he said, “Seven.”

She looked away, through her cracked windshield. Watching her face in profile, Paul was pierced by the image of him and Callie on a blanket in the bed of her truck in ecstatic carnal congress.

“Fifteen oh eight South Austin Avenue.” She worked her right arm on the gear shift, out of sight, her collarbone straining against the strap of her tank top. “Apartment two-thirteen.” The gears clashed; the pickup shuddered and went
Glug! Glug! Glug!

“Got it.” Dear God thought Paul, let her work that shift again.
Glug!
went the strings of his heart.

“That your car?” She pursed her lips at the Colt.

“My Jag is in the shop.”

“Smartass,” she said, and she popped the clutch and chugged away.

O
N SATURDAY MORNING
Paul stuffed his time sheet into the drop box at the temp agency, along with a note to Erika, asking when he’d see his retroactive raise. Then he did his laundry. He used to take his clothes to a coin laundry near campus called Lean’n’Clean, where he could work out on treadmills while his underwear tumbled dry and attempt to strike up conversations with firm, fit, brainy young graduate students in sports bras and swinging ponytails. But he found it too difficult to be simultaneously charming and breathless, and he began to do his laundry closer to home, in a strip mall off South Travis Avenue, at a mercilessly bright Laundromat with an unnecessarily large staff of Latinas who listened to boom box Tejano music at top volume as they folded other people’s sheets. The place was always packed on a Saturday morning, and Paul had trained himself in the raptorish watchfulness and hair-trigger reflexes of Laundromat Darwinism, competing for washers, dryers, and folding tables with young mothers dragging huge plastic tubs of laundry and gaunt Snopeses lugging pillowcases full of jeans
and t-shirts. Today the wiliest combatant was an elderly white woman who tried to steal Paul’s cart and then shouldered him aside at the wall of dryers as forcefully as a linebacker. When he glared at her, she waxed geriatrically coquettish, as fluttery as Blanche DuBois—“Oh darlin’, was that
your
dryer?” Paul ended up cramming all his clothes at once into a single dryer with a wonky thermostat.

That afternoon, thinking of his own long-lost
Norton Anthology
, he went to the central branch of the Lamar Public Library, where every Saturday the Friends of the Library sold used books out of cardboard boxes lined up on folding tables. The sale was held in the library’s basement in a wide, low-ceilinged meeting room, dankly air-conditioned and harshly overlit. The books were crammed spine up in cardboard boxes with the flaps cut off, divided into the broadest possible categories—hardcover fiction, paperback nonfiction—and people shopped in bulk, the way they might buy surplus cheese, filling up old grocery bags with fistfuls of books. Indeed, the rumbling ventilator and the lack of windows gave the room the Cold War feel of a bunker deep underground and gave the sale’s patrons the pasty, troglodytic aspect of survivors of an apocalypse fighting over the last remaining Jackie Collins novel. The struggle for split-spined beach paperbacks was no less Darwinian than the struggle for dryers at the Laundromat. Elderly women nudged past each other scavenging for mysteries with lurid covers, while late-middle-aged men with flinty gazes hunted for Jurassic-era thrillers by Alistair Maclean or Hammond Innes. The table of old vinyl was being strip-mined by a young couple in baggy shorts and flip-flops, she in funky black glasses and he in a faded t-shirt that proclaimed
I
’
VE BEEN TO LUCKENBACH, TEXAS
. They were tag teaming the boxes, walking their fingers at a trot through old albums looking for lounge (she) or seventies British rock (he), pausing only to display a find to each other—she showed him Enoch Light, he showed her Mott the Hoople.

Paul fancied himself the most discriminating buyer in the room, looking for just that one book, as if he were in Shakespeare & Company instead of a library basement. Today, however,
he wasn’t having any luck. Usually abandoned
Nortons
were as common as cast-off
National Geographics
, but someone, perhaps Callie herself, had cleaned out the library’s stock. Most of the old textbooks were heaped on a table in the corner, the elephant’s graveyard’s elephant’s graveyard, but even there Paul could not find a
Norton
. The closest thing to it was a multivolume anthology of English literature, thirty years old, edited and annotated by, of all people, Paul’s old nemesis from grad school, a bardolatrous old blowhard named Morton Weissmann. It would serve the same purpose as a
Norton Anthology
, but even at fifty cents a volume, it wasn’t worth lugging away ten pounds of obsolescent canon mongering.

He began to trawl the rest of the room, scanning the boxes quickly for a fat Norton binding. After a table or two he became aware that the same guy was always on his left, moving at the same rate, looping around the slower browsers a moment after Paul, following Paul instantly to the next table. Paul glanced at him and his pulse quickened: The man was wearing polyester slacks, a white shirt, a tightly knotted tie, a breast pocket full of pens, and a buzz cut. He wore no name tag, and he was thinner than Boy G, not to mention darker haired and not at all egg shaped. Still, his clothes, Paul noted, were clean but shabby like Boy G’s, with threads coming loose around his collar and along the hems of his short shirtsleeves. Paul skipped to the next table, and the man followed right behind him, never taking his eyes off the ranked spines of the books, but not really looking at them. His skin was as pale as Boy G’s; his milky scalp gleamed under the lights through the bristles of his thinning hair.

Paul broke away and crossed to the table behind him, and the man crossed with him, appearing on Paul’s right, moving ahead of him at a constant rate. Paul got a good look at the pale, creased skin at the back of the man’s neck; he smelled disinfectant and the faint tang of excrement. Who
are
these guys? Paul wondered. He kept his eyes on the massed spines before him. He stopped and the other man stopped; he plucked
a volume at random out of the box before him—a water-stained paperback of
Worlds in Collision
—and the man next to him did the same. With the paperback in his hand, Paul arched his back and stretched his arms and feigned a yawn, glancing around the room to see how far he was from the door. As he lowered his arms he saw Boy G himself peering through his glasses at him from two tables away.