Kings of Infinite Space

FIFTEEN

PAUL CAME TO WORK A FEW MINUTES EARLY ON MONDAY.

“There must be a winter carnival in hell this morning.” Preston bounced on the balls of his feet and glanced at his watch.

“Not only that,” Paul said as he took the temporary badge, “but this is the last time I’ll have to sign in.”

“You get another job someplace?” Preston lifted his eyebrows hopefully.

“It’s not that cold in hell.” Paul stepped back from the desk, swinging his lunch. “I’m getting a permanent badge today.”

“How’d you swing that?” Preston said. “I thought you was only here temporarily.”

Paul smiled as he backed away. Yesterday, during a long, leisurely, postcoital Sunday morning, he had been eating pancakes naked at Callie’s kitchen counter when she brushed his hip with hers and said, “Come see me tomorrow. I’ll get you a permanent ID.”

“That answers my question,” he had said.

“What question?”

“Who do I have to fuck to get an ID at TxDoGS?”

“Asshole,” she’d said, and had flicked her fork at him, spattering him with maple syrup. He’d flicked her back, and she had laughed as he clutched her round the waist and licked the sweet brown specks off her collarbone.

“Let’s just say,” Paul said now as he backed down the hall from Preston’s desk, “I’ve got a friend in high places.”

He put his lunch in one of the refrigerators outside the lunchroom, then took the stairs two at a time and hustled down the hall and around the corner to Building Services. He hadn’t seen Callie’s truck in the parking lot, but perhaps she’d come in while he was stashing his lunch. He felt jaunty and virile this morning; all his extremities tingled.

“We gotta keep it cool at work, okay?” she’d said to him, when they had finally parted on Sunday. “No PDA at TxDoGS. I mean it, Paul.”

He’d agreed, but surely she wouldn’t object if he nuzzled her a bit in her inner office, in the deeper recesses of Building Services, the two of them alone among the laptops and the video projectors; but as he rounded the corner and saw Preston at parade rest behind his desk below, he found the Building Services door closed and locked. Not even the florid Ray was in attendance yet. Paul started back down the hall towards his cube, feeling only a tad less jaunty and virile. Things are definitely looking up, he thought, Charlotte and spooky homeless guys notwithstanding. I’ve got a raise, I’ve got the respect of my boss, I’ve got a girl — hell, if my life were a musical, I’d start singing.

He swung around the corner of his aisle, trying to decide if he wanted to be Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, and found his petite, nervous coworker Renee standing in the aisle outside the dying tech writer’s cube. Normally he’d have pulled himself up short and gasped an apology for nearly bowling her over, but today even Renee couldn’t puncture his good mood. He gave her a jaunty salute, more Astaire than Kelly, and paused in the doorway of his cubicle. Renee turned to him with a ghastly, wide-eyed look, her pale fingers pressed to her mouth.

“You okay?” Paul said. This morning he loved all women, even this one. Renee shook her head and leveled her horrified gaze through the tech writer’s doorway, both hands now pressed to her mouth. Paul came into the aisle, and she backed up a step as he edged past her.

The dying tech writer was dead. He lay back in his office chair with his legs splayed and his arms dangling to the sides, his bony wrists and knuckles hanging perfectly motionless. His baggy trousers and oversized sweater seemed to be draped across the chair, empty. His head was tipped back over the backrest, and his gaunt, lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling. The ceiling panel directly over him was askew, leaving a little isosceles triangle of perfect blackness. The yellowed breathing tube poking out of the gauze around the tech writer’s neck pointed straight up at the gap in the ceiling.

All the air went out of Paul. His mouth hung open, but he was unable to speak. He looked from the gap in the ceiling panels to the body in the chair and back again. The tech writer’s screen saver was running, an endless, slow-motion spray of stars.

“Ohhhh,” sighed Renee, and Paul turned to see her swaying, her eyes rolling white. He caught her as she fainted and draped her over the chair of the empty cube across from the tech writer’s. She immediately started to slide to the floor, and for a terrible moment Paul was afraid she too had died, that some deadly gas was flowing from the dark triangle in the suspended ceiling. But clutching her under her arms, he felt her rabbitty pulse, and he lifted her onto the desk of the empty cube, pillowing her head with a dusty ring binder. Then he ducked across the aisle to his own cube, avoiding even a glance at the dead man. He picked up the phone to call Preston, realized he didn’t know the guard’s number, then rooted around in his drawer for the phone list. His hands were trembling so badly he could scarcely punch the buttons, and his voice was equally palsied when he got Preston on the phone.

“It’s Puh, Paul,” he gulped. “Up in juh, General Services. You better come up. And call an am, am, ambulance.”

He hung up before Preston could say anything and collapsed in his chair. He saw specks drifting across his gaze, so he closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. Then he opened them again, and saw a Post-it note stuck to the middle of his computer screen. It said:

A watermark,

with our compliments

Paul blinked numbly at the Post-it. It was blazoned with a smudgy thumbprint, like a seal, and it was creased diagonally, so that it didn’t lay flat against the screen. Behind it, his screen saver trailed endlessly and rapidly across a black void, “I could be bounded in a nutshell. . I could be bounded in a nutshell. . I could be bounded in a nutshell. . ” Paul lifted his trembling hand and nudged his mouse, and the screen saver flickered out, revealing the gray-and-white screen of Microsoft Word. The RFP file was open, the pages displayed two to a screen, the print too tiny to read. Across each page was a large, gray-scale, diagonal watermark that read, DRAFT DOCUMENT. Slowly, fearfully, Paul lifted his gaze to the black gap in the ceiling tiles, certain he was going to see some pale, bespectacled face gazing back at him, grinning at him with sharpened teeth.

He heard the jingle of keys and the rhythmic thump of rapid footfalls, and he stood and saw Preston’s buzz cut bobbing above the cube horizon. Paul stepped out of his cubicle as Preston jogged breathlessly into the aisle with the heel of his hand on his holstered sidearm. His keys jangled at his belt; his tight little potbelly bounced against the buttons of his shirt.

“What is it?” Preston gasped, his face the color of baked ham. But Paul only stared numbly at Preston’s gun; he hadn’t noticed before that the security guard was armed. But why wouldn’t he be? Paul thought dully. It’s Texas. Everybody carries a gun.

“Son?” said Preston, breathing hard. “What’s goin’ on?”

Paul stepped back and gestured wordlessly through the tech writer’s doorway. With his hand poised over his holster, Preston peered past Paul into the cube, where he noted the dead man’s wide-eyed stare, his gaping mouth, the plastic tube pointed at the zenith.

“There’s a hole in the ceiling,” murmured Paul, and he pointed at the triangular gap overhead with a shaking finger. But Preston didn’t even look. Instead he stepped gingerly past the body in the chair and bent over the tech writer’s desktop, scanning the shingled papers and notepads. He hooked his finger through the handle of the dead man’s coffee cup, lifted it, and sniffed, once, twice. Then he put the cup very carefully back where he’d found it and turned.

“What about her?” He lifted his chin past Paul, towards Renee lying comatose on the desk in the cube across the aisle.

“She fainted,” Paul said.

Preston grunted and stepped across the aisle, his palm against the butt of his pistol. He laid two fingers along Renee’s throat, grunted again when he detected a pulse, and stepped back into the aisle. He clutched Paul’s arm and swung him into the cube with Renee.

“You just set there,” he said, “and keep an eye on her.” He waved his hand at the tech writer’s cube. “And don’t touch nothin’ in that cube there.”

“No chance of that.” Paul dropped into the chair across from Renee.

Paul remembered the next half hour in disconnected pieces. At some point, before the EMS guys came, Renee sat straight up off the desk like the Bride of Frankenstein, took one look at the corpse across the aisle, and passed out cold again. Either before or after that, but before the paramedics, Olivia Haddock marched briskly into the aisle, halted, and gave a little, high-pitched gasp. Paul poked his head out of the unassigned cube, and she gasped again, clutching her purse before her with both hands.

“He died,” was all Paul could manage to say, and she bolted into her own cube, where he remembered seeing her sometime later, perched on the edge of her chair, her purse toppled over on her knees, both hands pressed to her mouth.

He remembered beefy Hispanic paramedics in white, short-sleeved shirts and black, thick-soled shoes; he remembered a pair of cops with professionally even voices, a man and a woman each with a hissing radio clipped to a shoulder. He remembered the clank of an oxygen bottle and the clatter of a collapsible gurney. He remembered the snap of rubber gloves.

“There’s a suspicious white powder in the cup.” Preston hovered at the edge of the scene. “Should I notify the Hazmat team? Should I call the FBI?”

A paramedic sniffed the cup. His plastic name tag read P. HERNANDEZ. “That’s creamer,” he said.

“This fella was in bad shape to begin with,” said the other medic, who had plugged his ears with a stethoscope and was placing the metal disc here and there over the dead tech writer’s body. His name tag read H. QUIROGA. He glanced across the aisle at Paul. “What was wrong with him?”

“Cancer,” said Paul. “I think.”

“Well, bag the cup,” said H. Quiroga. “But I don’t think you can pin this one on Al Qaeda. This ol’ boy just up and died.”

“There’s a hole in the ceiling,” murmured Paul.

“Say what?” said H. Quiroga.

Paul swallowed and said louder, “There’s a hole in the ceiling. A gap.” He pointed, without looking. “In the tiles.”

H. Quiroga peered at Paul, and Preston narrowed his eyes. P. Hernandez, who was lifting the coffee cup by one finger into a large Ziploc bag, looked at Paul as well. Then all three men lifted their eyes to the ceiling. Paul drew a breath and lifted his gaze, too. The suspended ceiling was smooth and undisturbed, all the panels firmly settled in place. Preston and the paramedics craned their necks and surveyed the ceiling in all directions, but the panels as far as anyone could see were flawlessly rectilinear, dwindling in perfect perspective.

“That one,” Paul insisted, his finger shaking, “that one was crooked when I came in.”

The paramedics exchanged a look, but Preston continued to watch the ceiling, turning slowly in place as if he were surveying the constellations. He stroked his moustache, across and down. H. Quiroga coiled up his stethoscope and lifted an eyebrow at Paul. “Did he say anything before he died?” he asked.

“I wasn’t here when he died.” Paul’s throat was so dry he could scarcely speak.

“Did he cry out, ‘The speckled band!’ “ H. Quiroga suppressed a smile. “Sherlock Holmes joke. Nobody ever gets it.”

I get it, you asshole, thought Paul, but he said nothing. P. Hernandez came out of the cube, dangling the cup in the plastic bag, and said to Paul, “Don’t mind him, bro. Hector thinks he sees all this weird shit.”

“I’m just saying,” said H. Quiroga, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the corpse, “this one looks like he was just plain scared to death.” Then he winked at his partner, and both men laughed.

The next thing Paul remembered, the tech writer was zipped up in what looked like a large, plastic garment bag. He remembered P. Hernandez murmuring to H. Quiroga, when he thought Paul couldn’t hear, “Don’t be scaring the civilians, amigo.” He remembered the rattle of wheels as the gurney rolled away, remembered giving his name and phone number to one of the cops, remembered the ring of blank faces gazing in his direction from all around. He remembered the faces of the Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier lined up like three pale moons rising over the cube horizon. The Colonel was in the middle and his mouth was moving, though he was too far away for Paul to hear what he was saying. On either side of him J.J. and Bob Wier nodded slowly. Just as long as they don’t smile, thought Paul.

Nolene arrived, and Paul seemed to remember Preston lifting his gaze silently to the ceiling over the dead man’s cube, and Nolene lifting her eyes to the same spot. A glance passed between them, and Nolene nodded. Then she put her massive arm around the trembling Renee and escorted her back to her own cube; from behind, Paul thought numbly, they looked like Pooh and Piglet. He remembered sitting in his own chair in his own cube, drinking a paper cone of water that Preston had brought him. Preston glanced up at the ceiling tiles and lowered his voice. “Are you okay?”

“He must have lain there all weekend.” Paul glanced across the aisle at Olivia, but she was gone. When had she left? “He stayed late to work, and he died.”

“What a way to go, huh?” said Preston.

“Jesus, sometime over the weekend, he did something for me.” Paul gestured over his shoulder at his computer. “He got onto my computer and put the watermark Rick wanted in the document I’m working on.” He shuddered. “At least, I think it was him.” Paul turned suddenly in his chair and looked at his computer screen. The Post-it was gone. He stood abruptly and glanced all over his desk; it must have fallen off. Or maybe one of police officers took it.

“Who else would it be?” Preston said, behind him.

“I don’t know,” said Paul.