Kings of Infinite Space

THIRTEEN

ON 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.

Paul’s pulse began to pound, and his breath came short. Boy G looked the same as he had a few days ago, down to the crumpled name tag. He stared expressionlessly across the intervening tables at Paul, and for an instant Paul thought that the egg-shaped man hadn’t seen him. But then Boy G smiled, and Paul caught his breath. Even across the room Paul could see that there was something odd about the homeless man’s teeth. They weren’t even, but they weren’t discolored or gapped like an ordinary homeless person’s. Rather, they were dazzlingly bright and serrated like a saw blade, a jagged row of sharp points.

Paul gasped and stepped back from the table, brushing the homeless guy who had been shadowing him. Paul recoiled from the man, and the man smiled at Paul, revealing his own glossy, jagged teeth, each tooth filed down to a sharp point like a New Guinea tribesman’s. Both men were smiling ferociously at Paul now, while all around them the other customers shuffled obliviously, their heads lowered, their shoulders hunched, their eyes cast down. Paul felt a scream rising from his solar plexus.

“Alright!” someone shouted, and every eye in the place flickered towards the sound. The kid in the Luckenbach t-shirt was flapping an old LP in the air while the girl in the funky glasses smiled up at him.

“Check it out!” cried the kid. “The Strawbs!”

Even the homeless guy next to Paul had turned to watch the commotion. Paul edged away from him, step by step, and then hustled up the aisle. He didn’t dare glance back at Boy G, but made a beeline for the door. He swerved around the card table at the entrance, and the old gent manning the cash box reached out and clutched Paul by the wrist. His touch was electric to Paul, and he tried to break away, but the old man held him tight.

“That’s fifty cents, son,” said the old man.

Paul’s rising scream nearly broke loose. He could feel Boy G’s jagged teeth nipping at his shoulders and the back of his neck. The old man tightened his grip, and Paul expected to see him bare his own serrated teeth. But the cashier smiled, and his teeth were even and ordinary and yellowed by nicotine. He gestured with his eyes at the book in Paul’s white-knuckled grip, the battered old copy of Worlds in Collision. Paul released it instantly; the book flopped to the floor. The old man released Paul’s wrist, and Paul bolted through the door without looking back and took the steps to the library’s main floor two at a time. At the top of the stairs, brilliant Texas sunlight poured through the library’s tall front windows. Paul whirled and looked back and saw no pale homeless men coming after him, only a little black girl clutching a copy of A Spelunker’s Guide to Texas.

Paul groaned and sat heavily on the top step, alarming the little girl. He stayed there until his heart stopped pounding and his knees stopped trembling. Then he rose and trotted back down the stairs into the meeting room. But all he saw was the sale’s regular clientele, slowly grazing. Boy G and his sidekick were gone. Paul stepped into the hall and glanced up the stairs to the main floor, then down the basement hallway towards a locked door labeled NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. He stepped inside the meeting room and tapped the shoulder of the old fellow at the cash box.

“You dropped your book,” said the old man.

“Is there another way out of here?” Paul murmured.

The old man cocked an eye at Paul. “Somebody after you, chief?” he said.

“Forget it,” Paul said, and walked away.