Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (9 page)

Paul left the submarine hush of cubeland and hustled down the bright main hallway towards Building Services. Today’s meeting was likely to be a tense one. At the suggestion of the free-spending lobbyists of several large multinational corporations, the contribution-hungry Texas state legislature had mandated that TxDoGS outsource, or privatize, the maintenance of its fleet of vehicles—everything from sedans to forklifts to dump trucks—in three of the agency’s twenty-five maintenance districts. If private maintenance turned out to be cheaper than using TxDoGS’s own mechanics, then the program would be extended to the entire state, and several hundred state employees would be out of work. This morning the maintenance managers in the three districts selected for the pilot program—Odessa, San Antonio, and Nacogdoches—would be introduced to the project. They would be shown the PowerPoint slideshow Paul had concocted, and each man would be given a draft of the project’s Request for Proposal, or RFP. The RFP Development Team—Rick, the Colonel, J.J., Bob Wier, and Paul—would explain how it was a good thing that three dozen minimum-wage mechanics in Odessa, San Antonio, and Nacogdoches were about to lose their jobs.

At the end of the hall Paul had a glimpse over the balcony into the lobby below, where Preston rocked on the balls of his feet and smoothed his bushy moustache with two quick strokes, down and across. Then Paul stepped into Building Services, a windowless, two-room suite lined with shelves loaded with slide projectors, video projectors, overhead projectors, tape recorders, and laptops. Nobody sat at the desk in the first room, so Paul went deeper and found Callie the Mail Girl behind the desk in the farther room hunched over something in her lap. She was massaging the back of her long neck with one hand, and as Paul came in, she turned a page with her other hand. Paul cleared his throat, and she whisked her hand away from her neck onto her lap, covering up whatever she was reading.
She blushed a deep red, which made her freckles glow even in the harsh fluorescent light.

“I booked a laptop and a projector for this morning.” Paul came up to the desk and tried to see what Callie was reading. She shoved it into the kneehole of the desk.

“Let’s go, um, check the sign-out sheet,” she said, in her subdued drawl. Under the desk she let go of the volume she was holding, and it made a phonebook-sized thump on the floor. Paul backed up as Callie came around the desk, still blushing. She was easily as tall as Paul, maybe even an inch or two taller. She was also very pale, and Paul swore he could feel the heat from her blazing face as she passed. Standing behind her as she bent over the sign-out book on the desk in the other room, he let his eyes drift down Callie’s long waist to her full hips, admiring the tautness of her t-shirt.

Paul backed up as she moved to the shelves. She handed him a laptop without a word, then lifted her long arms and forcefully yanked a bulky video projector off an upper shelf. Paul admired the sudden definition of her upper arm as she lowered the projector onto its little wheels and jerked the towing handle out of its slot. Paul dipped his head and saw a thick volume on the floor under the desk, a computer manual perhaps or an almanac. Callie has aspirations, thought Paul. Don’t we all?

“Don’t forget to sign it in again,” she said, deftly kicking the book under the desk out of sight, “when you bring it back.”
Fergit
, she said, and
brang
. Paul smiled at her as he backed out of the office lugging the laptop and dragging the projector on its little wheels, but she had stooped under the desk to retrieve her book and wasn’t watching him.

In the conference room, Paul hoisted the projector with a grunt onto the conference table—damn, she must work out, he thought, flashing on Callie’s biceps—and plugged both units into the wall and into each other. He started the laptop and dashed back to his cube for the PowerPoint disk as well as the stack of RFPs he’d copied during his fit of conscientiousness yesterday. He placed a copy in front of every chair around the
table, then he yanked down the screen at the end of the room and fired up the projector and ran quickly through the slideshow. He clicked on the last slide just as Rick came in the door leading the maintenance managers and the rest of the RFP team. The men distributed themselves around the table in a basso rumble of bonhomie and joshing. Rick edged down the room to sit at the end of the table, with Paul at his right hand.

“This cheer’s our
technical
writer,” Rick announced, and all eyes turned to Paul. “He used to be an English professor, so make sure you dot your p’s and q’s.”

Paul’s face got hot, and he hoped he wasn’t blushing as bright as Callie had.

“Tech
writer?” The Colonel settled into the chair on Paul’s right and gave him a long look. “Since when?”

“Since yesterday,” mumbled Paul, desperate to change the subject. “The PowerPoint thing is all loaded and ready to go,” he said to Rick, pushing over a copy of the slideshow’s script.

“Way-ul, let’s try this shoe on and see who salutes,” said Rick. “Somebody get the lights and shut the door.”

“Tech writer,” said the Colonel, regarding Paul sidelong. “Huh.”

The projector’s little fan hummed as the first slide flashed on the screen at the far end of the table. In the pearly reflection of the screen, Paul noted that the visiting managers all sat on one side of the table, the RFP team on the other. To Paul’s right sat the Colonel, leaning forward on his elbows with his hands manfully clasped, as if he were in a briefing room at the Pentagon. On the other side of him, J.J. slumped in his chair, glowering at the screen, while in the chair beyond him Bob Wier nodded solemnly as Rick clicked to the next slide, which read:

Districts Selected

1. Odessa
2. San Antonio
3. Nacogdoches

“This is y’all,” said Rick, which wasn’t in the script. “Your names in lights.”

“Ain’t we lucky,” said the Nacogdoches manager dryly. The other two managers looked on impassively. Odessa was a thin, balding, colorless guy with a turquoise belt buckle who looked like he’d rather be someplace else; San Antonio was a barrel-chested, bullet-headed Mexican American with a canny light in his eye. But the focus of the room, the one man Rick seemed to direct his pitch to, was the Nacogdoches manager, a big, raw-boned, slope-shouldered East Texan, who scowled at the screen. He had found a seat at the corner of the table that allowed him to stretch his long legs, and now he sat with his big hand on the table, drumming his enormous fingers a little more slowly with each successive slide. In the presence of the man’s obvious displeasure, Paul was glad he had deleted the obnoxious little animations from the presentation. Rick, however, scarcely seemed to notice the man’s disdain, narrating the presentation in his usual clipped singsong. The Colonel kept interrupting, plucking a laser pointer from his breast pocket—“Rick, if I may?”—and directing the managers’ attention to a particular bullet point with a wobbly little red dot. He spoke to Nacogdoches directly, man to man.

“Now if you think about it, Mike,” he said, in the hearty manner of a general addressing his officers informally, “half the time your boys are sitting on their behinds. They’re on the clock whether they have anything to do or not.” The laser dot danced across the screen. “Now, with a private vendor, we can work it so we’re only paying ’em when they’re actually turning wrenches.”

“Well hell, how much cheaper you want it done?” Nacogdoches’s big paw lay still on the tabletop. “Half my guys’re on food stamps, that’s how well the state of Texas pays ’em to sit on their behinds.”

Before anyone could answer that, San Antonio chimed in. “Your private vendor. He gonna come out in the rain, in the middle of the night, when I got a loader broke down halfway to Uvalde?”

“Now that’s a fantastic point,” said Bob Wier, selfconsciously enthusiastic. “We’re real glad you brought that up, Tom.”

“The thing is,” said Nacogdoches, drumming his fingers again. Everyone else fell silent, leaving only the whirr of the laptop and the hum of the projector’s fan. The staticky heat off the projector’s bulb was beginning to cancel out the air-conditioning.

“I’m sure y’all put a lot of work on this.” He laid his hand on the copy of the RFP on the table before him; like the other managers, he had not touched it yet. “And I appreciate that.” He hefted the document and let it drop. “But don’t take a dog turd and dress it up like a popsicle and expect us to lick it.”

The room erupted in laughter, and Rick took the opportunity to suggest a coffee break. Bob Wier leaped up, switched on the lights, and offered to lead the managers to the coffeepot. Odessa, San Antonio, and J.J. followed him out, while Rick bounded off on his own. The Colonel switched off his laser pointer and clipped it back in his shirt pocket. He edged round the table and paused with his hand on the doorsill, as if he might say something to the Nacogdoches manager, but then he ducked his head and went out. Paul leaned across the table and switched off the hot bulb of the projector, then put the laptop on standby.

“You don’t say much.”

Paul glanced up. Nacogdoches still leaned back in his chair, his cowboy boot crossed over one knee, his hand still on the conference table. But now he was watching Paul, sizing him up.

“I’m, uh, just a temp.” He lowered the laptop’s screen and stood. He couldn’t think of anything else to say; he felt like a schoolboy waiting to be excused.

Nacogdoches nodded. “Why ain’t you teaching English someplace?”

Paul searched for an answer that excluded adultery and a drowned cat, then boiled it down to, “I got downsized.”

Nacogdoches jerked his head back and said, “
Downsized
?”

“Last teaching job I had was at the community college, but
they had some budget cuts and I was low man on the totem pole, so . . .”

“Huh.” Nacogdoches took another long, appraising look at Paul. “And now you’re . . .” He fingered the edge of the RFP, flipping the pages with his broad thumb. Once again, Paul was speechless: No doubt Nacogdoches was thinking about his own guys about to be downsized, with Paul’s help. Paul swallowed; he heard a burst of male laughter from the coffee room. Nacogdoches pushed the RFP away from him. He drew a deep breath, drummed his fingers once, twice, three times. Then he let out a sigh and stood, rising to his full height.

“It’s a funny ol’ world, innit?” he said, and he walked out of the room.

T
HE MEETING LASTED UNTIL NEARLY LUNCHTIME
, which meant Paul had to hustle to return the laptop and the projector to Building Services without losing any of his own lunch hour. Callie was no longer minding the sign-out sheet, so Paul returned the equipment to a large, red-faced gentleman named Ray (according to his ID badge) who was parked immovably behind the desk in the inner room. He blew out a sigh at the sight of the projector.

“Say, do me a favor, bud, and slide that thang up on the shelf, willya?”

“You’re kidding, right?” The shelf was shoulder high. Ray only shrugged, so Paul left the projector on the floor, and slid the laptop onto a lower shelf.

“By the way, that girl who was here before,” Paul said, signing the book. “She always work in here?”

“Callie?” said Ray from behind his desk.

“Is that her name?” said Paul, though of course he already knew it. “So does she? Work here? Usually?”

Ray pursed his lips and folded his doughy fingers over his spreading belly, a Buddha of bureaucracy, and he looked very significantly from the projector on the floor to the shelf where it belonged. Paul sighed and stooped and, remembering to lift with his legs, hoicked the damned projector up into its berth.

“Callie?” said Ray. “Sometimes she’s up here, sometimes she’s down in the mail room.”

“Okay,” said Paul breathlessly, his heart hammering from the effort. Thanks for nothing, he thought.

“Word to the wise, chief.” Ray dropped his voice. “She don’t like boys.” He was trying, at least, to give Paul fair exchange for his effort.

“That so,” said Paul.

Ray shrugged. “I’m just saying is all.”

After lunch the only landmark on the horizon was an RFP team meeting that Rick had called for four o’clock to evaluate the meeting with the maintenance managers. To make the time go faster, Paul thought of the day as the twentieth century. By ten o’clock of an eight-hour workday (not counting lunch), it was already 1925. World War I was over; the Russian Revolution had already occurred;
The Wasteland
and
Ulysses
had already been published; the
Rite of Spring
had already been performed; modernism was in full spate. By lunchtime, World War II was over; the bomb had been dropped; Milton Berle was already a television star. Sometimes it made the afternoon go faster to glance at the time and think, now the Beatles are on
Ed Sullivan
, now Jimmy Carter is president. But today, by half an hour after lunch, Paul realized that it was only March 1956. The Beatles haven’t even met each other yet, he groaned silently. Jesus Christ, I haven’t even been
born
yet.

He toughed it out until the Nixon administration and then decided to take his break. As a temp, he was entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, which he usually stretched to half an hour each. Since he had missed his break this morning, thanks to the meeting, he figured he was due an hour this afternoon, though he
doubted he could get away with it. Still he waited until Olivia was out of her cube so that she couldn’t note when he left, then he retrieved
Seven Science Fiction Novels of H
. G.
Wells
and went downstairs.

The lunchroom was usually empty at this hour of the afternoon. The lights had been dimmed and the sun was on the other side of the building, so Paul was able to read in a pleasant dusk, all alone amid the empty tables and chairs. As he came in, he passed Callie hurrying out, her arms crossed over her t-shirt, her hands rubbing her bare upper arms. She avoided his eye as she passed, hustling around the corner towards the mail room. As he headed towards the Colonel’s table in the corner—his usual seat during his breaks—he noticed that someone had left a fat book open on one of the tables against the window. A chair was still pulled out, and a half-empty bottle of Coke stood at a corner of the book. Was this Callie’s mystery volume, the one she hadn’t wanted him to see?