Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (20 page)

Paul started back from the box. The last can was sitting on
the corner of the cardboard lid. Paul picked up the can and, at arm’s length, slowly slid it halfway into the hole. He held his breath, but before he could release it, the can was jerked from his fingers, as if something
inside
the box had grabbed it. Paul leaped back, all the way across the lobby, until he was pressed against the floor-length window. Through the pounding of his pulse in his ears, he swore he could hear, issuing from the infernally black little hole on top of the box, a long, inhuman sigh.

B
UT IT WAS ONLY THE ELEVATOR
, making its groan of hydraulic ennui as it reached the second floor. The door rattled open, and a pert young woman in a trim, green business suit stepped blinking into the entry. She was clipping a TxDoGS visitor’s badge to her lapel, and as Paul peeled himself off the window, she turned a blank, overly made-up face to him. Her eyes lit up and she delivered a megawatt smile.

“Paul?” she chirped, cocking her head. “Paul Trilby?”

“Yes?”

“I was just coming to see you!” She stepped towards him, beaming. “The security guard sent me up! I almost didn’t recognize you!”

“Okay.” Paul warily noted the exits—he could bolt around the corner to the men’s room or back through the doorway into cubeland.

“How you doin’?” The young woman spoke as if she knew him, canting her head so that her bangs bounced.

“Good.” Paul shot a glance at the recycling box, half expecting to see the lid lifted from within by pale fingers.

“I got somethin’ for you,” said the woman in a kittenish growl, pursing her bright lips. She was clearly a little too much for TxDoGS. The waist of her jacket was nipped in too tight, her skirt was too short, and her legs were too trim. She reminded Paul of a younger, prettier, more fuckable version of his landlady, Mrs. Prettyman.

Erika! he nearly cried aloud. The young woman from the temp agency who had found him the job at TxDoGS! And she’s here with my retroactive paycheck!

“Oh, good!” Paul said, with a great deal of relief. After the shock of finding himself yoked to Olivia Haddock, and after his semihallucinatory little encounter just now with the recycling box, fate had wheeled the lovely Erika into view, with her bright mouth and narrow waist and lovely legs, bringing him money.

“I hope you like it,” Erika said. She turned up her lovely palm and offered him a little blue cardboard box.

“I beg your pardon?” Paul took the box.
TIFFANY & CO.,
read the lid.

“It’s our Outstanding Stand-in award!” squeaked Erika.

Paul lifted the little lid and found a silvery tiepin on a cushion of cotton.

“You’ve been doing
such
a great job for us here,” Erika was saying, “I can’t begin to tell you! When Rick called us last week to tell us about your raise—and congratulations, by the way!” she cried, touching him lightly on the wrist. “Well, he just
raved
about you! Said he wished he had a permanent position for you!”

Paul tipped the little box onto his palm. The Outstanding Stand-in tiepin was a reproduction of the agency’s logo, a tiny, sexless, stylized figure, arms outstretched, inscribed in a circle.

“It’s genuine silver plated!” Erika sounded as happy as if she were receiving the award herself. “It’s designed specially for us by Tiffany’s of New York City! You can’t buy it in stores!”

“I’m not surprised,” said Paul. So much for his extra money.
He felt like the little figure trapped in the tiepin—tiny, dickless, crucified.

“Now I made real sure you got the tiepin and not the earrings.” Erika sounded a little worried at Paul’s lack of enthusiasm. “Unless you
want
the earrings.”

“No,” said Paul. “This’ll do.”

“Fantastic!” Erika revved up to full force again. “Keep up the good work!” Her smile dimmed as she turned towards the elevator. The click of her heels into the car was like the last nail being tapped into the coffin of Paul’s dignity.

“Erika,” Paul said, jumping forward, “about my raise—”

“Sorry?” Erika brightened slightly as the elevator door slid shut, and then she was gone.

Paul fumbled the tiepin back into the little box, then he stuffed the box in his pocket and went back to his desk, his shoulders sagging, his legs like lead. He endured an hour or so in his cube, trying to ignore Olivia’s vibe from across the aisle, until finally he snatched up the Wells volume and went down to the corner table in the empty, dusky lunchroom. After only five minutes of pretending to read
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, Paul was in luck; Callie appeared at the far end of the room and weaved between the empty tables towards him, her head down, her arms crossed. Paul closed the book, so relieved he almost teared up.

“You have no idea,” he said, before she even sat down, “what a crummy fucking day I’ve had.”

Callie sagged into a seat across the table without looking at him. But Paul scarcely noticed, launching into a recitation of the day’s disappointments so far. He didn’t tell her about the encounter with the recycling box, but he did tell her about Olivia’s reassignment to the outsourcing project and about the Dickless Wonder award, or whatever it was called, that Erika had brought him. He was about to pull the offending tiepin out of his pocket and show her when he noticed how singularly unperturbed Callie seemed by his news. “Did you hear what I said?” He leaned across the table, trying to catch her eye. “I’m
working for Olivia now! It’s my worst fucking nightmare!” He clenched his fists. “She’s already
killed
a guy!”

“Yeah,” said Callie, barely stirring. “It’s what you were saying last night.”

“It’s different since last night,” Paul protested. “Now we’re on the same project.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Callie scowled at the floor.

“And to top it all off,” Paul said, losing steam, “I get this insulting little award from some corporate zombie. . . .”

“Is that what’s eatin’ you?” Callie looked at him sharply. “Or is it that you’re working for one woman, while another woman gets to decide when you get your money?”

Paul sat up in his seat as if he’d been slapped. He hadn’t felt this way since the first year of graduate school when Elizabeth, his future wife, had berated him in a crowded seminar for his insufficient appreciation of Jane Eyre’s sapphic rage—it was Lizzie’s contention that the real love story in
Jane Eyre
was between Jane and the original Mrs. Rochester—and now, as then, Paul was reduced to stammering. “I didn’t . . . that’s not what . . . is that what you . . . ?”

“Forget it,” Callie said.
Fergit it
. She waved her hand as if brushing away cobwebs. “I’m sorry.”

Paul stammered on. “What I meant was . . .”

Callie sighed; her face was slowly turning red. “I can’t see you tonight.”
Cain’t
, she said.

“Why not?” Paul suddenly felt even more forlorn. At the very least, this meant a long evening alone with Charlotte.

Callie fiddled with her fingers in her lap; she would not meet his eye. “I gotta do something.” She glanced at him sidelong. “I gotta meet somebody.”

“Gotta meet who?”

She returned her gaze to her lap. “Mr. X,” she murmured. Paul was speechless for a moment, but finally he said, “The musician?”

“Yeah, the musician,” she said wearily. “He wants to talk to me about something.”

Paul blinked across the empty lunchroom, seeing nothing. “Okay. Fine.” How much disappointment could a man take in one day? He drew his book to him across the table and clutched it with both hands. “Why are you telling me? It’s none of my business.”

Callie frowned. “Guess it ain’t.”

Paul stood suddenly so that his chair screeched behind him. “I have to get back to work.”

“Me too,” mumbled Callie, and she was out of her chair in an instant, swinging between the tables. Paul watched her go, then he dropped back into his seat. He drummed his fingers on the fat book before him.
“Motherfucker,”
he said out loud, to no one.

A few minutes later, Paul started up the stairs. As he came around the corner into the elevator lobby, he stopped before the recycling box and its hellish little hole. What a day: a lunch he couldn’t afford, after which Olivia had blindsided him, Rick had slapped him in the face, and Erika had humiliated him. And now Callie had just kicked him in the balls. Like a nagging little reminder, the sharp angles of the little jewelry box in his pocket dug into his thigh. In a surge of anger, he yanked the box out of his pocket and shoved it down the hole. To his surprise he heard a
clink!
right away, and he wrenched off the loose lid of the box. It was two-thirds full of crushed and sticky cans.

“Oh,
come on,”
cried Paul. He dropped his book to the floor, tossed aside the lid of the box, and yanked the box with both hands away from the wall. The cans rattled and the box nearly toppled, but under where it had been standing against the wall, Paul saw only the scuffed tiles of the floor.

“I don’t get it,” he said, his anger leaching away. He shook the box again; the Tiffany’s box settled a little farther into the rattling cans, until only a corner of it was visible. Then he tilted the recycling box back into place and stooped to retrieve the lid. Without a further glance into the box, he squared the lid over the top and stepped back. He felt drained, bone tired.

I’m losing my mind, he thought, as he picked up his book and went back to his cube.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Wednesday, Paul did not see Callie’s truck in the TxDoGS parking lot. He circled the lot twice in his rattling little Colt until he was certain it wasn’t there. Inside, Preston gave him a look of manly concern, which Paul chose to ignore, and after stashing his wretched lunch in the refrigerator, he stuck his head in Building Services and asked Ray as casually as he could where Callie was. Ray’s cheeks bulged with a mouthful of breakfast burrito, and Paul had to wait until Ray swallowed, which was like watching a rat pass through a cobra.

“Out sick,” Ray said.

“Ah,” said Paul, a little less casually than before.

After an hour in his cube of listening to Olivia across the aisle working on the RFP—she
tsked
and
hmm’d
and sighed—Paul worked up the nerve to cross to her doorway and ask if she had any questions so far about the document or the project. He needed to keep this job, and if keeping the job meant swallowing shit from Olivia Haddock, then, by God, he would close
his eyes and open wide. “I’d be happy to hear any suggestions,” he said, his jaw clenching involuntarily.

Olivia scarcely lifted her eyes from the page before her, which she was converting into a palimpsest of emendations, marginalia, and the bold lime-green tracks of her highlighter. “When I’ve finished,” was all she said, and Paul retreated to his cube.

The morning crawled by. Paul noodled on the RFP, certain that all the work he had put into it so far was about to be overridden or contradicted in the next day or two by Olivia. He worked himself into a zone of numbness where each passing moment was like a fat drop of water accumulating at the mouth of a leaky faucet, growing and growing and growing until Paul didn’t think he could stand it for another instant. Then at last the drop fell in slow motion and plinked into the drain, an utter waste of effort, and another tiny drop began to accumulate, glistening and slow. By the end of the morning he was trying to lose himself in an equally futile sexual daydream about the lovely Erika of his temp agency, in which he never got any further than fumbling at the buttons of her blouse. The fantasy kept stuttering back to the start like a tape loop, and Paul sat gazing sightlessly at his monitor, his head propped in his hand, the side of his face squeezed out of all proportion.

“How are you fixed for lunch, Professor?”

Paul nearly overturned his chair. “What?” he gasped, righting himself.

The Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier huddled in the doorway to his cube. The Colonel pursed his lips, while Bob Wier beamed at Paul and J.J. glowered into the empty cube next door.

“Pull up your socks and follow me.” The Colonel grasped Paul firmly by the biceps and hauled him to his feet. “We’re taking you to lunch.”

A moment later his three colleagues were marching him in a flying wedge up the hall.

“Where are we going?” said Paul.

“Someplace special.” J.J. rubbed his palms together. “Hoo-
wee
.”

“Lord forgive us,” said Bob Wier.

As they passed through the lobby, Paul twisted around to glance up at the balcony, at the doorway of Building Services, only to see Ray lumbering out of the office. Preston watched the flying wedge pass with a narrow gaze, but before he could say anything, they were out the door. In the heat of the parking lot the four men approached a massive, silvery SUV; the Colonel beeped the enormous vehicle from twenty paces away, and the beast’s doors unlocked with a hearty
chunk
.

“Shotgun!” cried J.J., trotting towards the vehicle, but the Colonel brought him up short. “Not today, son.” He gave Paul a look of manly approbation. “Mr. Trilby’s our guest of honor.”

Shotgun?
Paul hadn’t heard that since high school. He endured a petulant glance from J.J. as he climbed up into the front passenger’s seat; J.J. and Bob Wier hoisted themselves into the back. Paul settled into a deep bucket seat and hauled the shoulder strap, as wide as an ammo belt, across his chest. The SUV’s leather upholstery and dashboard were a rich wine-red, like the appointments of a private club. With the push of a button the Colonel locked the doors again, and the solid, metallic
chunk
sounded like a penitentiary lockdown. When he started the engine the whole vehicle purred with power.

The Colonel followed the lunchtime line of vehicles out of the lot, then crossed the bridge. Paul could never see over the parapet from his own low-slung heap, but now he seemed to be looking down at the sluggish green water from an impossible height. Dry, freezing air poured out of the AC vents all along the dashboard, and the Colonel lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror and said, “Cold enough back there for you boys?”