Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (3 page)

“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 hear 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.

M
AKING 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 big, 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.”

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.