Kings of Infinite Space

THIRTY-THREE

PAUL STARTED AWAKE IN A HEART-HAMMERING PANIC, sprawled nude along the edge of a narrow mattress. In the crepuscular light he saw a clumsily plastered ceiling, a scruffy carpet littered with discarded clothes, a half-open doorway into an empty room. He sat up and nearly swooned from the pain in his head, as if two great hands were squeezing his temples together, trying to crack his skull like a coconut. He groaned and put his head between his knees, and tried to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there.

He heard a noise behind him, and he turned to see Callie wedged against the wall on the other side of the mattress, snoring face down into her pillow, her back bare to the waist. Paul sighed and tugged the crumpled sheet up to her shoulder blades. Bits and pieces of the end of karaoke night were coming back to Paul. J.J. had bellowed “Patton!” from the La-Z-Boy until Colonel had mounted the stage and worked the touch pad. A giant American flag had filled the TV screen, and as Colonel stepped before it and squared his shoulders, Bob Wier rose to his feet and cried, “Tennn-hut!” J.J. struggled to rise from the recliner and gave up, but Yasumi sat up straight on the loveseat. Paul was slumped on the couch as if he’d been poured there, with Callie propped against him. Olivia was nowhere to be seen. During a long trumpet fanfare, Colonel sucked in his gut and saluted. Callie started to laugh, but Yasumi glared at her and Callie clapped her hand over her mouth. At last the fanfare faded, and Colonel stood at ease. The “Patton March” played quietly through the speakers.

“Now I want you to remember,” growled Colonel, without the microphone, “that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.” He began to pace, pumping his fist. “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Shortly after that, Paul began to pass out in a slow fade, interrupted by exclamations from Colonel—“Wade into them! Spill their blood!”—and repressed hilarity from Callie. The next thing he remembered clearly was staggering up the basement stairs, propped up by Callie; with his shoulder he knocked every photograph on the staircase wall askew. When he tried to go back to straighten them, Callie hauled at him from above and a pair of small hands, probably Yasumi’s, pushed at him from below.

Then they were tottering across Colonel’s front lawn, in the dark under the tree, where the paper lanterns had gone out. Callie took Paul’s keys from his pocket and leaned him up against the passenger door of his car. It seemed to take her forever to make her way around the car and let herself in and unlock the passenger door, and in that eternity Paul remembered Olivia stalking towards him across the lawn, out of the dark, dangling her own car keys, scarier and more determined even than George Patton.

“So,” she’d said, “will I see you tomorrow morning?”

Thank God! Paul remembered thinking. She’s still here; she hasn’t been spirited off into the dark by Stanley Tulendij like some maiden carried off by the Erlkönig.

“You bet!” Paul had declared happily, with no idea what she was talking about. “I’ll be there.”

Now, as he struggled with his hangover on the edge of Callie’s mattress, he wasn’t sure how much of the night before had actually happened — Olivia approaching him in the dark like a marauding angel; Colonel channeling George C. Scott; the creepy confab in Colonel’s backyard, with the pale faces floating in the creek bed — and how much of it he had simply dreamed after tumbling drunkenly into bed at Callie’s apartment.

“You bet,” he said now, squatting naked on the edge of the mattress, mimicking his own drunken chipperness. “I’ll be there.” Then suddenly he remembered where he was supposed to be this morning — assuming it was Saturday morning — and he lurched to his knees on the carpet and pawed through the litter of clothes by the side of the bed. After a frantic search he found his watch and squinted at it in the dim light of the windowless bedroom. Quarter after two, it said, and the two palms against his temples pressed harder until he groaned. “Oh fuck,” he said, over and over, until it occurred to him to turn the watch right side up. Now it read quarter to eight, which wasn’t much better. He wasn’t entirely certain, but he was pretty sure he was due to meet Olivia at TxDoGS at eight. He found his shorts and rolled onto his back to pull them on.

“Callie,” he whispered. “Callie.” Pulling on his shirt, he knelt by the mattress and gently shook Callie’s arm.

“Unh,” said Callie, into her pillow.

“Where are my keys?” he said, still whispering.

Callie lifted her face a millimeter from the pillow and painfully cracked a crusty eye. “There’s no need for you to shout,” she rasped.

“Forget it, I found them,” said Paul, treading on the keys as he hopped one leg at a time into his trousers.

The traffic between Callie’s apartment and TxDoGS wasn’t too bad on a Saturday morning, and he even rolled into the empty parking lot a minute or two early. Olivia was just locking up her trim little Corolla as his Colt clattered alongside at the main entrance. She had exchanged her capri pants for sensible shoes, slacks, and a cotton sweater for the air-conditioning. As Paul hauled himself out of his car, his head throbbing, she glanced at her watch and then looked him up and down. She didn’t say a word, but he could tell she had noted that he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night. Fuck her, Paul thought, wishing he’d had time to shower and brush his teeth.

“Good morning,” he managed to say, squinting against the pain in his temples.

“Good morning,” sang Olivia, and she marched towards the door, digging in her purse for her badge. She swiped it through the card reader, and as the lock clicked open, Paul scooted forward to hold the door for her. She minced ahead of him without a word, and he followed her out of the heat and into the darkened lobby.

The door clicked shut behind him, and the emptiness of the building on a Saturday morning closed around them both, swelling out of the hallways and down from the balcony. Paul shivered, feeling a chill. Olivia didn’t seem to notice, sailing past Preston’s empty security desk and up the stairs. Paul tiptoed after her, along the balcony past the locked door of Building Services and around the corner into the main hallway, where only every third or fourth light was on. The rumble of the ventilators seemed louder in the gloom, and Paul shot nervous glances into the shadows of the door wells and at the corners of the ceiling. Olivia marched heedlessly up the hall, illuminated only when she passed under one of the infrequent lights, and fading again in the dark between, a busy silhouette against the glare from the tall windows at the far end of the hall. Paul trotted to keep up with her, not wanting to go any deeper into the empty building but not wanting to be left behind.

The lights were out in the elevator lobby, and the sunlight through the glass wall seemed to taunt Paul with its inaccessibility. He edged round the recycling box as Olivia’s switching backside retreated into the deeper gloom of cubeland, where all the lights were out. Paul hesitated in the doorway, peering at the dim, labyrinthine outline of the cube horizon. Objects that rose innocently above the horizon in the light — the top of a filing cabinet, a hard hat, someone’s ficus plant — looked menacing in the gloom; Paul expected the round outline of the hard hat, halfway across the room, to lift slowly and reveal a pair of eyes watching from below the brim.

Olivia turned on her desk lamp, filling her cube with yellow light. The light struck across her cheekbones and nose, turning her eyes into hollows, and she lifted her purse off her shoulder and glanced back at the doorway.

“Paul?” she said. “Are you coming?”

“Sure.” Paul edged past the darkened conference room and then rounded the corner and went into his cube, keeping close to the fabric wall. He fumbled for the switch to his own desk lamp, nearly panicking when he couldn’t find it. At last it clicked on, and the yellow glow that filled his cube only made the gloom all around seem darker. Across the aisle, Olivia perched on the edge of her chair, switching on her monitor and moving her mouse to deactivate the screen saver. Paul winced as his own chair squeaked under him, as if worried that it might give him away. With an unsteady hand he turned on his own monitor.

“Would you like some coffee?”

Paul jumped in his seat; he hadn’t heard Olivia get up and cross the aisle. She watched him wide-eyed, her palms pressed together just below her breastbone. His head began to pound again, as if she were squeezing it between her hands.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Sure.”

Olivia held out her hand. “Twenty-five cents, please.”

Paul, speechless, only blinked at her.

“For the coffee fund.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to put a quarter in the cup for every cup you drink.”

Paul stood to dig in his pocket, his shoulders hunched against the dark. He handed her a quarter, then glanced around him, over the cube horizon.

“Why don’t you call up the RFP from the server?” she said. “It will take me a few minutes to make the coffee.”

She turned and disappeared silently up the aisle, and Paul watched anxiously over the top of his cube until the doorway of the coffee room filled with bright, fluorescent light.

“Olivia?” he called out weakly. When she didn’t answer, he raised his voice. “Olivia!”

Olivia stepped into the bright doorway with the coffeepot in one hand and a paper filter in the other. She lifted her eyebrows at him.

“I’m, uh, I’m just going to splash a little water on my face.” Paul gestured over his shoulder. Olivia said nothing, but simply stepped out of the doorway.

The men’s room was pitch-black when Paul gingerly pushed open the door, so he stood in the hall, snaked his arm inside, and groped for the light switch. Through the crack in the door he watched the fluorescents flicker on, filling the room with a bluish glare. Then he pushed the door wide and surveyed the room, squatting down in the doorway to check under the sides of the stalls. At the sink he ran the water full blast, for the sound of it, and in the mirror he kept an eye on the ceiling as he bent over the sink and splashed two handfuls of water on his face. He pumped a little liquid soap into his palms, then, glancing once more at the ceiling in the mirror, closed his eyes and quickly scrubbed his face. He opened his eyes again, blinking against the water dripping off his eyebrows, and fumbled a handful of towels out of the dispenser. He mopped his face and turned off the water, pausing with his hand on the tap to listen hard. With the crumpled paper towels in his fist, he surveyed the ceiling tiles above him. But he saw nothing and heard only the water gulping down the drain.

“Suck it up,” he told himself, but not too loud. “Grow up.”

He turned off the men’s room light as he left, though he did it from the hall, reaching back through the door for the switch. His face tingling, his head throbbing less painfully, his nerves buzzing less anxiously, he walked through the bright sunlight of the elevator lobby, passing the recycling box without even a glance. As he came into cubeland he noted immediately the twin, square pools of light in his and Olivia’s cubes, printed against the gloom, and the bright rectangular glare of the coffee room doorway. Over the rumble of the AC he could even hear the busy little trickle of the coffeemaker. He successfully resisted the urge to scan the cube horizon again, and he allowed himself to fall heavily into his squealing chair. His screen saver streaked slowly across his monitor, so he bumped the mouse, and then called up the RFP from the server. The trickle stopped, and a moment later Olivia arrived. “I noticed you don’t have your own cup,” she said, and he took a Styrofoam cup from her, secretly pleased that she hadn’t startled him.

“I forgot to ask if you wanted sugar or creamer,” Olivia said as she carried her own cup — FOLLOW YOUR BLISS, it said — into her cube.

“Black’s fine.” Paul turned away, blowing across the coffee as he lowered it to his desktop. “So, Olivia,” he said, lifting his voice as he faced the glow of his monitor, “how do you want to work this?”

He heard a bump and scrape from across the aisle, as if she were moving a ring binder along her desktop. “Do you want to look over my shoulder,” he said, “or shall we work together from our own separate monitors?”

He heard her chair creak, heard it roll against the carpet.

“What do you think?” Paul said. “Olivia?”

He picked up his coffee and, slouching in his chair, turned slowly to look across the aisle. Olivia’s chair was spinning slowly in place, empty. Then, as he watched, her shoe dropped onto her desk from above with a soft slap, and Paul lifted his eyes to see Olivia’s wriggling legs, one foot bare, rising into a gap in the suspended ceiling. Several pairs of pale hands were grappling with her, hauling her from above into a black square where a ceiling tile had been a moment before. Olivia’s sweater was rucked up, baring her doughy midriff; her legs kicked and pedaled at nothing. Paul heard a muffled cry, and the groan and squeak of the ceiling tiles all around the gap. The tiles bulged and sagged, and out of the dark Paul heard thumps and grunts. Suddenly Olivia’s legs jerked a little higher into the ceiling, and Paul felt a searing heat on the back of his hand.

“Agh!” he cried, instinctively dropping his cup from his violently trembling hand. Hot coffee splashed across the carpet, soaking immediately into a dark stain. An unusually loud thump made him look up again; only Olivia’s flailing calves hung from the hole in the ceiling.

“Oh, God,” breathed Paul, and a moment later, to his astonishment, he had crossed the aisle, jumped up on Olivia’s desk, and leaped to grab her ankles. He caught one and held on, his feet crashing against her desktop, making her cup jump and slosh coffee all over her computer. Smoke and sparks began to sputter out of the unit, filling the air instantly with an acrid chemical reek, but Paul hung doggedly onto Olivia’s ankle, stretching himself to his full length like a cat reaching for a treat. With a grunt he lunged for her other ankle and caught it, and he managed to haul her slightly down out of the gap, as far as her thighs.

The computer on the desk was popping and sizzling, and a gray thread of smoke stung Paul to the back of his nostrils. “Olivia, knock it off!” Paul cried as she began to kick harder. “Quit kicking!”

Then one of the pale arms reached out of the ceiling and, with a cold, clammy grip, peeled the fingers of Paul’s right hand off Olivia’s ankle, bending his fingers back so painfully that he let go with a cry. He leaped again, trying to regain her foot, and another pale hand descended out of the dark and gave Paul’s left hand a vicious slap.

“Goddammit!” cried Paul, smoke rising all around his waist, sparks flying round his ankles, but before he could leap again, a pair of arms grasped him round the knees and hauled him violently off the desk. Olivia’s ankles were wrenched from his grasp, and he crashed painfully against Olivia’s clattering chair. The chair heeled over, and Paul landed in a heap on the floor, the wind knocked out of him.

“Ahhhhhh,” Paul groaned, twisting off his bruised hip onto his back, and the last two things he saw were Olivia’s twitching heels — one shod, the other bare — vanish into the dark above him, and the round, bleached face of Boy G — his glasses awry, but as expressionless as ever — looming over Paul with his clenched fist cocked over his shoulder.

“Boy G,” said Boy G in his breathless monotone, “the one and only.” Then his fist fell, and Paul was out cold.