Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (34 page)

“I
didn’t do a goddamn thing to her.” Colonel’s eyes blazed across the desk. “And I don’t know where she is. What’s more,
you
don’t know where she is.”

“No, I don’t,” murmured Paul. “But I know what I saw.”

“Paul,” said Colonel, “when you left my house Friday night, you were drunker than a whole boatload of sailors on a three-day liberty. If I told you that you saw Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa, and baby Jesus step out of the mothership on South Austin Avenue and sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ could you tell me I was wrong?”

“No,” said Paul miserably.

“Goddamn right you couldn’t.” Colonel caught himself and glanced to either side. Paul followed his gaze and saw just the eyes and forehead of J.J. over one wall of the cube, and the eyes and forehead of Bob Wier over the other.

“Git,”
snapped the Colonel, and J.J. and Bob Wier dropped out of sight. Paul twisted the RFP between his hands.

“Now there’s only one question you should be asking yourself, Paul.” Colonel pinched his thumb and forefinger so tightly together that they turned white and pointed them across the desk at Paul. “Is your life better this morning than it was last week?”

Paul could scarcely bear Colonel’s burning gaze, but he couldn’t look away. In spite of himself he thought back to a week ago, when, just about this time of the morning, he was gazing down at the gray, sunken features of Dennis, the Dead Tech Writer.

“Tell me true, Professor,” breathed Colonel. “You get points for honesty.”

“Yeah,” gasped Paul finally. It felt like his last breath. “It is better.”

“ ’Nuff said.” Colonel unpinched his fingers. Without taking his eyes off Paul, he heaved a sigh and settled back in his chair. Then he stood, gestured for Paul to stand, and met him in the doorway. He put his arm around Paul and gave him a manly squeeze.

“Relax, Professor,” he said, as he gently shoved Paul up the aisle. “You just got tenure.”

“W
HERE
’
D SHE GO
?” Preston asked Paul a few minutes later. He slid Olivia’s ID badge across Paul’s desktop and then stepped back, filling the doorway of the cube. Behind him Ray, from Building Services, was cleaning out Olivia’s cube, collecting her personal effects—her
FOLLOW YOUR BLISS
coffee cup, her lumbar pillow, a little bouquet of imitation daisies—in a cardboard box. Preston draped a large hand over the partition on either side of Paul’s door.

“What’s this?” Paul glanced at the badge.

“Found it on the security desk this morning,” said Preston, watching Paul.

“Didn’t you hear?” Paul returned his gaze to his monitor, where he was paging through the revised RFP. “She quit.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“She must have left it on her way out the door.”

“On a Saturday?”

Paul glanced at the badge again, noting its little, square picture
of an unsmiling Olivia Haddock. “Maybe she didn’t like long good-byes.”

“Maybe.” Preston shifted in the doorway, blocking Paul’s view of Ray in the cube across the aisle. “You know why she quit?”

Paul stared hard at the text on the screen, every word gone blurry. “Check with Rick.”

“I did,” Preston said. “He says you saw her after he did. Says you was supposed to meet her here Saturday morning.”

Paul paged down to the next section. He was slouching in his seat, but it was getting harder to feign boredom with Preston looming over him.

“Look, Paul.” Preston lifted one of his hands. “I ain’t accusing you of anything. It’s just, we need to know where to send her stuff.” He stepped aside just enough to give Paul a glimpse across the aisle. Ray stood with the box curled under one arm, his other hand digging through the shadows at the back of Olivia’s desk.

“She’s got a home phone, right?” Paul lifted his gaze to Preston. “Call her up.”

“She ain’t there neither,” Preston said. “Phone’s been disconnected.”

Paul pushed himself up in his seat. “I give up,” he said. “Where is she?”

“So you wasn’t here Saturday,” Preston said, “when she resigned.”

Paul swiveled in his chair, hunched forward, and clasped his hands between his knees. He was aiming for a look of exasperated sincerity. “No, I wasn’t here Saturday,” he said. “I was home, in bed, sleeping off Friday night, if you really want to know.” He looked up at Preston with wide eyes. “I didn’t come in until Sunday. Colonel let me in.”

Preston scowled. “Colonel.”

“Yeah.”

“He
let you in.”

“Yep.”

“On Sunday?”

Paul gave Preston a look of sincere exasperation.

“Be real easy for me to check if Colonel’s badge was used yesterday,” Preston said.

Paul hadn’t thought of that. It was getting difficult to hold Preston’s gaze, and he began to wonder if there might not be a surveillance camera in the lobby and a tape somewhere showing a pixilated image of him and Olivia crossing the lobby on Saturday morning. But then, plucking up the courage of his conviction that this was all a dream, he reminded himself that none of what he remembered from Saturday morning had really happened. For all he knew, Colonel was telling the truth, and all the tape showed—assuming there was a tape—was Colonel and Paul scooting across the lobby on Sunday. Or, for that matter, Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa, and baby Jesus.

“I thought you weren’t accusing me of anything,” Paul said.

“No, I ain’t.” Preston sighed heavily. “I’m sorry.” Preston glanced over his shoulder. “It’s just . . . remember what we talked about t’other day?”

“About . . . ?”

Preston dropped his voice. “About you tell me if you see anything. You know, out of the ordinary.”

“That’s funny,” said Ray, out of sight behind Preston.

“You remember that?” Preston said, narrowing his eyes.

“This ain’t her computer,” Ray said. “Number don’t match.”

With some reluctance, Preston turned slowly away from Paul. “What?” he said.

Paul glimpsed Ray around Preston’s belly. Ray had set the box down and was cataloguing the contents of Olivia’s cube against a checklist on a clipboard.

“This ain’t her computer,” Ray said. “Serial number don’t match up with the number she was assigned.”

“Then whose computer is it?” said Preston.

Ray licked his fat thumb and paged through the papers on the clipboard. The mild exertion of cleaning out the cube was making him sweat, and his broad forehead glistened in the fluorescent light.

“Huh,” said Ray. Paul could hear him breathing all the way across the aisle.

“What?” said Preston and Paul, simultaneously.

“That’s funny,” said Ray.

“What?”
chorused Preston and Paul.

“Used to belong to what’s his name.” Ray rotated slowly on his own axis, and with his blunt chin indicated the empty cube next to Paul’s. “Fella who sat over there.”

“Dennis?” gulped Paul.

“You mean the fella who—?” Preston began.

“Whatever,” said Ray. “It’s his computer. Or was his, before he—”

“Don’t say it,” Paul groaned.

“What’s it doing in
her
cube?” Preston moved across the aisle.

“Good question,” said Ray. “I thought it was down in storage.”

“Then where’s
her
computer?” Preston stooped past Ray, peering past the computer at the cabinet over the desk. He felt under the cabinet and stood again, rubbing his fingers together. His fingertips were smudged with black. He looked across the aisle. “Paul?” he said. “You know anything about this?”

Paul pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “No,” he whispered.

Preston sniffed his fingers and wrinkled his nose, then he stepped across the aisle and snatched Olivia’s ID off Paul’s desk. “Excuse me,” he said, marching up the aisle with the heel of his hand on his sidearm.

“Twitchy son of a bitch, ain’t he?” said Ray.

“I guess,” Paul said, watching Preston’s head and shoulders glide away through the labyrinth of cubes.

“Say listen,” Ray said, “I don’t suppose you’d give me a hand getting this computer out of here. She’s got to go all the way back down to storage. . . .”

“Excuse me,” Paul muttered, and he glided up the aisle, in the opposite direction from Preston. A minute or two later, he was in Building Services, where he found Callie bent over the sign-up book in the outer room.

“Hey,” she said, giving him an equivocal look, but he caught her by the elbow and tugged her into the inner office. She
brightened a little, misunderstanding his intent, and as soon as they were out of sight of the hallway, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Apology accepted,” she said.

“Apology?” Paul said. They stood with their foreheads touching.

She widened her eyes at him. “No?” she said. “Where the hell were you all weekend? I figured you’d be out of it all day Saturday—God knows I felt like shit—but when I come over Sunday morning, I hammered on your door for prit’ near fifteen minutes.”

“Was my car there?” Paul searched her face.

Callie stared at him. She loosened her grip, but kept her hands draped over his shoulders. “Don’t you know?” she said.

“Callie.” Paul curled his hands around her long wrists. “Where was I Saturday morning?”

Callie blew out a sigh. “Um, well,
Saturday.”
She let go of him and stepped past him into the doorway where she could watch both him and the outer office. “Last I remember is driving your car back to my apartment—you got short legs, by the way.” She glanced into the outer office and lowered her voice. “Then I remember dragging your sorry ass up the stairs to bed.”

“Was I there when you woke up?”

“No. You wasn . . .” She winced. “You weren’t. But then I didn’t wake up till noon. I figured you went to meet Olivia at work.”

Paul sighed and turned away, pacing a nervous little circle in the inner office. “Olivia’s gone,” he said.

Callie looked puzzled. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

Paul’s mouth was very dry. With Callie looking at him so intently, it was hard to think straight. He heard a voice that sounded just like his in his head, saying, don’t tell her anything, just take her by the hand and lead her out into the parking lot, and get in her pickup truck and drive away and don’t look back.

Don’t be stupid, he heard another voice say, sounding much like the first one, you can’t run forever. You lost your career and your wife and everything you ever worked for. You have to hit bottom sometime. Colonel’s right, the voice went on, you’ve
got it good, finally, after much too long. You’ve got a permanent job, a sweet deal, a safe harbor. Okay, so it’s not exactly what you planned on, not tenure at a research university—no book-lined office overlooking the leafy quad, no slim, influential volumes from major university presses, no fetching graduate students hanging on your every word. It’s just a job in state government, life in a cube, but it’s also a steady income and benefits and job security like nobody else has except maybe the pope and federal judges.

“Olivia quit,” Paul heard himself say.

“Quit?” Callie looked even more puzzled. “How come?”

He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. The voices in his head were still contending with each other. Think what you’re doing, said the first voice, while the second one said, for chrissakes, what you’re being offered here is
better
than tenure. Yes, Colonel’s magnum opus is probably unreadable, but at least he’s writing a book. Think what
you
could do with access to a computer and all that time in a cube with
nothing else to do
. . . .

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “She just did.”

“When?” Callie put her hand to her throat. “We just saw her on Friday night.”

“She came in on Saturday morning and left a letter for Rick.” Paul drew a breath and continued. “Then she left her badge at the security desk and took off.”

“Did you see her?” Callie glanced once more towards the hallway, then stepped towards Paul. “I mean, was she here when you got here?”

Tell her what happened! said the first voice. This girl’s the best thing you’ve got going right now. Be a man for once in your life and tell her the truth!

Don’t be an idiot, said the second voice, you saw nothing on Saturday, you heard nothing. Olivia’s gone, and everybody’s better off. Hell, maybe even
Olivia
is better off wherever she is. Callie doesn’t need to know.

Callie’s the one untainted thing in your life! said the first voice.

Why not keep it that way? said the second. What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.

“I don’t remember what happened.” Paul’s throat clenched, and he could barely get the words out. “I don’t remember anything until I woke up this morning.”

Callie peered at him. “Really?”

He looked away from her. “Really,” he said hoarsely. The voices in his head had gone silent.

“Jesus,” breathed Callie, and she brushed his shoulder with her fingertips. “Aw, honey, you really can’t hold your liquor, can you?”

Paul was on the verge of tears, and he didn’t know why. “That’s not all.” He drew a deep breath. “They’re giving me her job.”

Callie’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Really,” she said.

“Yes.” Paul met her eye as best he could. “Probably. Rick’s looking into it.”

“That’s quick,” she said. “I mean, her chair’s still warm, id-nit?” A slow smile spread across Callie’s face.

“What?” he said. He felt his face get hot.

“You’re gonna be a lifer,” she said, with an ironic twist to her lips. “A TexDog.”

Paul laughed bitterly and said, “Fuck you.”

She let her hand trail off his shoulder. “Pretty soon,” she said, “you’re gonna be too good for the mail girl.”

What happened next astonished them both. He seized her tightly around the waist and kissed her hard. She put her palms against his shoulders, but she didn’t push him away, and after a moment, she folded her arms around him and pressed herself as tightly against him as he was pressing himself against her. He could feel her heart pounding, could feel the blood rushing through her arms, could feel the warm slide of muscles in her back. The heat rising off them was more than the sum of their two bodies, and Paul, his eyes squeezed shut, thought he might happily die in this hot darkness, that he might spin away with her into the void and never come back.