Kings of Infinite Space

TWO

BY THE TIME PAUL PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT, all the spaces in the shade next to the General Services Division Building had been taken by trucks and SUVs, lined up along the wall like piglets at the teat. Paul’s watch said 8:06, and he drove frantically up and down the lanes looking for a spot, the angry rattle under his car reflected back at him by the rows of vehicles. But all the shady spots were taken, and he was forced to park along the river embankment in the sun. Before the car shuddered and gasped to a stop, he had rolled up the windows and bent with a grunt to snatch his shirt and his bag lunch off the floor. He trotted across the lot in the stifling heat, pulling on the shirt as he ran, his bag lunch dangling from between his teeth.

“Tech writer,” he snarled through clenched lips, “not typist.”

Preston, the security guard, lifted his eyebrows at the sight of Paul tucking in his shirt as he came breathlessly into the dank air-conditioning of the lobby.

“You oughta get a regular badge.” Preston had big shoulders, a steel-grey crew cut, and a massive Joseph Stalin moustache. He stood behind the counter at parade rest, one hand clasping the other wrist below his tight little potbelly, and he unclasped his wrist and leaned forward just enough to turn the sign-in sheet towards Paul with his long fingers. “You been here long enough,” he continued, in a thick East Texas accent like a mouth full of grits.

“I’m only here temporarily,” Paul gasped. Sweat trickled down his collar. He wrote “7:59” on the sheet and dashed out his signature. “It’s a temporary situation.”

“Prit’ near six weeks.” Preston slid a visitor’s badge across the desk and returned to parade rest. “Save you a few minutes is all.”

But Paul was already jogging down the first-floor hall to the refrigerators outside the cafeteria, where he stashed his lunch amid bulging plastic grocery bags and snap-top containers crammed with last night’s casserole. He glanced through the door at the cafeteria’s morning trade: large white men with belts cinched up under their bellies purchasing breakfast burritos from squat, buxom Hispanic women in hair nets and white aprons. Paul decided against a burrito — it wouldn’t do to have salsa on his breath when he talked to Rick — and hurried around the corner to the tiny elevator. The stairs were faster — the GSD Building only had two floors — but riding the elevator gave Paul a moment to catch his breath, to pretend that he hadn’t just dashed in out of the heat. As the door slid shut, he loosened the sticky waistband of his shorts, and, through his shirt, pinched his t-shirt front and back, peeling it away from his humid skin, flapping it like a bellows to cool himself. He tipped his head back against the wall of the car and sighed.

Are we not men? he thought. What does that mean?

At the second floor the elevator itself groaned, a long sigh that sounded as if it were giving up. But the door slid open, and Paul stepped out, turned left past the aluminum can recycling box, and slipped through the doorway into cubeland.

The General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services — the GSD of TxDoGS — was housed in a wide, low-ceilinged, underlit room in the shape of a hollow square. In the center of the square was a courtyard where a sun-blasted redwood deck surrounded an old live oak, which was fighting a losing battle with oak wilt. The offices along the outer walls, with views of the parking lot and the river, were taken by senior managers. Middle managers had offices along the inner wall with a view of the dying oak tree, and everybody else occupied the honeycomb of cubicles in between, where nearly every vertical surface was grown over as if by moss with stubbly gray fabric. Some enterprising ergonomist for the state of Texas had calculated to the photon the minimum lighting necessary to meet code, and then had removed enough fluorescent bulbs from the suspended ceiling to make the room look candlelit. Everybody works better, went the theory, in the pool of light from his or her own desk lamp. Helps ’em concentrate. The drywall of the outer offices kept any sunlight from reaching the interior, and the amber tint of the courtyard windows filtered the Texas glare. No matter the time of day or the weather, the room always looked the same. It was like working underground, Paul thought.

Just now, across the room, over the cube horizon, Paul saw his boss, Rick McKellar, lope out of his office with his chin lifted like a rooster’s and his impressive eyebrows raised as he started up one of the main thoroughfares of the labyrinth of cubes. Paul instantly ducked his head and hunched his shoulders like a soldier dashing from one trench to another, and he scuttled past the empty conference room, then left into the first side street, then immediately left again into his cube. The woman in the cube opposite, Olivia Haddock, was for once looking the other way, and her slave, the dying tech writer in the cube next to Paul’s, luckily never lifted his head. Made it, Paul thought, and then saw the latest draft of the RFP on his chair, already emended in Rick’s bold, red felt tip. In the beginning Paul had interpreted Rick’s huge, brusque lettering as rage, but eventually he understood it as a sign of restlessness and not directed at him in particular. Rick corresponded with all his employees that way.

WATERMARK???? read the scrawl in bright red across the top of the title page. A long, bold, blunt arrow descended to the bottom of the page, and alongside it Rick had dashed, in even larger letters, GLOBAL!!!!

“A watermark?” Paul muttered. “He wants a watermark?”

“Mornin’!” Paul heard Rick say to someone, still twenty paces away, and Paul snatched the document off his chair and dropped into his seat, which squeaked like a small animal. Without looking, he was conscious of Olivia’s gimlet glance from across the aisle, while from the adjacent cube he heard the Darth Vader wheeze of the dying tech writer’s breathing tube. With one hand he turned on the fluorescent light under his cabinet and with the other nudged the mouse of his PC so that the screen saver deactivated. He could hear the crepitation of Rick’s shoes on the carpet outside his cube, so he picked up the RFP with both hands and leaned back in his squealing chair.

“You’re here!” barked Rick, stepping straight into Paul’s cube and looming over him. “D’ja take a look at my glads and happies?” He rested his hand on the top edge of the cube, then nervously plucked it away.

“Um, yeah,” Paul drawled, as if he were concentrating hard, and he stuck his thumb at random in the stack of pages and flipped it open over the hinge of the staple, as if he were looking for something specific in the interior of the document. He was desperately hoping to convey by this maneuver that he had been sitting here for some time deep in contemplation of the RFP, that he had not just put his ass in the seat, that he was not still breathing hard from the dash across the parking lot, that he was not sweating like a triathelete. From the corner of his eye he saw Rick’s hands twitching at the loose, blousy folds of his dress shirt, which was already coming untucked. Squinting at some indecipherable hieroglyph of Rick’s, Paul said, “Hmmm,” hoping to convey a degree of awe and intellectual curiosity.

“You know how to do a watermark, right?” Rick went on, in his nasal Texas drawl. But before Paul could respond, Rick executed a jerky little pirouette, during which he revolved a complete 360 degrees on the ball of his foot, thrust his palms deep inside his waistband, completely retucked his shirt, and returned to his original position, hoisting his trousers with his thumbs through a pair of belt loops.

“I’ll show you.” Rick leaned abruptly across Paul, forcing Paul to wheel back in his chair. Rick splayed one broad hand against the surface of Paul’s desk and clutched the mouse with the other, his index finger trembling over the clicker like the unsteady needle of a compass. Nothing made him happier than to demonstrate to Paul some arcana from Microsoft Word. Meanwhile Paul was getting a strong whiff of Rick’s aftershave and an intimate look at the tiny hairs like wheat stubble riding the folds at the back of Rick’s neck.

“You just click on this cheer,” Rick mumbled, as he launched the wrong program from Paul’s computer desktop.

“Ah, that’s PowerPoint, Rick,” Paul said, as the start-up screen blossomed. Rick fumbled with the mouse, driving the cursor all over, trying to find a way to shut it down.

“Way-ul,” he muttered, “you can’t close the barn door after the chickens have roosted.”

Paul knew exactly what would happen next; Rick was as easily distracted as a cat. He turned his head away from the screen to look at Paul. His bushy, semicircular eyebrows glided up and down, his forehead creased and uncreased. He seemed utterly unfazed by the fact that he and Paul were close enough to kiss.

“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.