Kings of Infinite Space

THIRTY-SIX

LATE FRIDAY NIGHT, Callie roused Paul from a doze as they lay postcoitally entangled by the flickering light of the TV.

“So what’s eatin’ you?” she said. Paul blinked up at the TV light on the ceiling and stirred, Callie’s arm across his chest, her warm thigh across his lap.

“What makes you think anything’s eating me?” He massaged the sleep from his eyes with the heels of hands.

“Something is,” Callie said. “I can feel it.”

“Nothing,” insisted Paul.

“Bullshit,” Callie said, and under the sheet she twisted a handful of love handle.

“Ow!” cried Paul.

“I ain’t fixin’ to play this game with you every goddamn night.” She vigorously propped herself on an elbow, making the mattress bounce. “I asked you a question, mister.”

Paul sighed. It was true, he had passed the last four days numbly. He felt as if he had retreated to the center of his own head: He could see out of his eyes, he could hear through his ears, but he reached and touched and moved things just with the tips of his fingers. Smells seemed to come to him distantly; food had no taste. When he got up from his desk and walked the aisles of TxDoGS, or down the hall and out the lobby and across the parking lot to his car, he felt like he was in one of the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds, as if he was some sort of slithery, boneless, alien polyp sitting in the control room of a giant machine, working the blinking controls with big, spatular flippers as the machine strode, whirring and clanking, across a miniature landscape. When he turned his head, he seemed to be looking down on the world from a height, dispassionately scanning the villages and roadways below for a house or a hay wagon or a frantic, antlike refugee he could fry with his heat ray.

“I’m waitin’,” said Callie, who got folksier as she got more demanding. She rapped his sternum with her forefinger.

The only emotions that penetrated the rind of Paul’s numbness were fear and lust. What he feared mainly was that everyone around him — Colonel, J.J., Bob Wier, and Rick and Preston and Nolene, even Callie — would learn his secret, that at the top of the striding, insect-jointed legs and under the gleaming metal carapace of the machine, he was a Martian, a soft, palpitating, defenseless thing, vulnerable to the tiniest terrestrial virus. Charlotte, of course, already knew how vulnerable he was, but she had been strangely dormant all week, limiting herself to fleeting appearances in the shadowy corners of his apartment, dashing along the edges of his peripheral vision.

Callie tilted Paul’s face towards hers with the tips of her fingers. “I’ll count to three if I have to,” she said.

Her unblinking blue eyes seemed both remote and bright to him, as if he were looking up at her from the bottom of a well. Apart from his fear of being found out, the only other emotion that reached Martian Paul in his dark little control room was his piercing desire for Callie, who somehow transmuted his fear and rage — magically, alchemically — to tenderness.

“You’re the only. .,” he began, and Callie sighed ostentatiously and looked away, down the length of their twined legs to the television, which they had been running with the sound off as a love light. Tonight Charlotte was treating them to Born Free.

“Does your TV ever show anything without lions in it?” She drummed her fingers lightly on his chest.

“Sometimes I get tigers,” Paul said, relieved that she’d changed the subject. “Or cheetahs. The odd panther, now and then.”

“And’s that all because of. . what’s her name?”

“Charlotte.”

“Charlotte. Huh.” Callie lowered her head to his shoulder and curled against him. She reached for his wrist and pulled his arm around her. “What do you boys talk about at lunch?” she said, her jaw working against his shoulder. “You and Colonel and them others.”

Paul wondered why Callie wanted to know. In his numbness he remembered the past five days as a blur. Only Monday was still clear to him, when a bored, heavy-set woman in Human Resources had conducted a pro forma interview with him in an empty conference room, asking him questions off a checklist without really listening to the answers. Then she had handed him a paper cup with a plastic lid and sent him to the men’s room, where he squeezed out six ounces of warm pee for the state of Texas. By Tuesday morning, barring a bad result from the drug test, he was a Tech Writer II for the Texas Department of General Services, with a salary of nearly $27,000 a year — the largest sum, Paul was alarmed to realize, he’d ever earned in his life. That same day a gum-smacking techie in a Hawaiian shirt spent two minutes at Paul’s keyboard and gave him access to the World Wide Web, and Callie herself photographed him again for a new badge, one with an electronic stripe, like Olivia’s.

After that, the blur set in. At the moment, as Callie breathed against him, he couldn’t remember whole blocks of the week — what he’d had for breakfast on Tuesday, say, or whether he’d spent Wednesday night at his place or hers.

“It’s up to Colonel,” Paul said. “He decides what we talk about.”

“And the rest of you just sorta sit there and nod?” She shifted her head against his chest.

Paul wasn’t sure what to say about that either. He now permanently occupied the fourth chair at Colonel’s table in the corner of the TxDoGS lunchroom. Indeed, Colonel had started to call Paul’s seat the Paul Trilby Chair in Literary Studies, or, worse, the Olivia Haddock Memorial Chair; Paul was still working up the nerve to tell him to knock it off. The last of his bag lunches — one final sandwich of nameless cheese on no-brand bread — slowly desiccated in one of the office fridges, until (unbeknownst to Paul) someone swiped it. Paul could now afford to buy hot lunches from the cafeteria, and he remembered eating a burger and fries, and a slab of meatloaf with mashed potatoes, and chicken fried steak with cream gravy, and a surprisingly good platter of cheese enchiladas with refried beans and rice. He couldn’t remember which day had been enchiladas and which had been meatloaf, but he did remember Colonel’s greeting the first day he had arrived at the table bearing a tray.

“Welcome to the good life, Professor,” Colonel had said.

“I don’t think Colonel likes me,” Callie said, hugging Paul a little more tightly. “I run into him in the hall the other day, and I told him I had a good time at his party last week, and he just looked at me like. .”

“Like what?” Paul said, but he already knew the answer. In his general emotional torpor, he only remembered pieces of Colonel’s lunchtime performance, such as a lecture on the decline of the American presidency. “The last twenty years. . hell, the last forty years of presidents have been whiners and perverts and headcases,” Colonel had declared. “Degenerates, like the later Roman emperors.” And a disquisition on the superiority of the American Browning automatic rifle to the British Lewis gun. “Not to take away from our brothers across the Pond,” Colonel had said, “but give me an American weapon any time.” And a history of the British Empire on film, from The Four Feathers to The Man Who Would Be King. “The sequel to Zulu, the egregious Zulu Dawn? A slander on the English fighting man.”

But the lunchtime conversation Paul remembered best had taken place on the embankment along the river, where Colonel had invited him, without J.J. and Bob Wier, for a postprandial stroll. Had it been Wednesday? Paul wondered. Thursday? Today? He couldn’t remember, but he did remember vividly what Colonel had said as they paced up and down the yellowed grass alongside the sluggish glide of the river.

“Now that you’ve ascended to the middle class, Professor,” Colonel said, his arm around Paul’s shoulders, “you need to get yourself a quality woman.”

“I beg your pardon?” Paul said.

“I understand what you see in Miss Oklahoma.” Colonel squeezed Paul. “We all like a ride on a frisky young colt now and then. But she’s wild, Paul, an untamable mustang, and you deserve a thoroughbred, something with breeding and dignity—”

“Whoa!” Paul cried, twisting free of Colonel’s grip. “You seriously need to back off.”

Colonel shook his head ruefully at the hormonal folly of younger men. “The girl is trash, Paul. You want a solid woman who knows her place, not some lippy bitch who’ll lead you around by your cojones.” Colonel narrowed his gaze. “I think you know what I’m talking about. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to give her up.”

“What do you mean, give her up?” Walk away, Paul told himself, but there he stood, waiting.

“Do you love her?” Colonel had said with a wicked smile, and Paul had stalked away at last, with a dismissive gesture.

“You just answered my question,” Colonel had called after him.

“Oh, you know,” Callie was saying now. “Like I was the mail girl or something.”

“Want me to beat him up for you?” Do you love her? Colonel had said. Paul tightened his arms around Callie.

“Wouldja?” She tilted her face so that he could see her eyes. “You never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“Why do you sit with them? Are you part of the club now or what?”

Christ, thought Paul. Was he part of the club? He was still convinced that nothing unusual had happened on Friday night or Saturday morning, that he had been drunk and insensible for much of those twenty-four hours. And yet, when he had arrived at work every morning these past few days, the RFP had been waiting for him on his desktop, each of Rick’s changes from the previous day already entered into the document. All Paul had to do was. . nothing. Paul had nothing to do. Colonel had winked at him at lunch one day — which day? — and said, “What are you going to do with all that free time, Professor?” He had a dim, drunken memory of someone — J.J. or Bob Wier or Colonel himself — asking him, “Do you know the story of the shoemaker and the elves?” Or, Paul wondered during his break, as he turned the pages of Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells without reading them, was it more like the Eloi and the Morlocks? And if we are Eloi — Colonel and J.J. and Bob Wier and me — then what do the Morlocks want from us? They do our work, but what do they want in return?

“Paul? You fadin’ on me again?”

Paul sighed. “The first day I sat with him this week,” he said, to the crown of Callie’s head, “Colonel said to me, ‘Welcome to the good life, Professor.’ ”

Callie looked up at him again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The obvious, I guess,” Paul said. “I’ve got a permanent job and a salary and a dental plan. A better ID badge. Web access. The American Dream.”

“It’s more than a lot of people got,” Callie said. He could feel her tense up against him.

“I’m not complaining, Callie, truly I’m not.” And why should I? he thought. It’s better than what I had before.

“It’s not like you’re better than anybody else,” she said.

She might as well have slipped a shiv between his ribs. He lifted his arm away from her. “Olivia Haddock told me the same thing,” he said.

Callie sat up with her back to Paul, her cheekbone and breast limned by the silvery light from the TV. “Sorry.” She glanced back at him. “It’s just. .”

“It’s just what?” Paul said icily.

Callie spoke to the TV screen, hunched over in bed. “Well, ever since I met you, all you done is. . complain about how far you’ve fallen, and now when things are looking up, when you’re making a little progress, you seem. .”

“You were going to say ‘whine’ just now, weren’t you?” Paul’s fear and anger were contending in equal measure just now; the returning memory of Saturday morning was scaring the bejesus out of him. The image of Olivia Haddock’s last stand had popped up uncomfortably a number of times during the week: while he was drowsing before his monitor, surfing the Web, or in between forkfuls of enchilada at lunch with Colonel, or even when he was tumbling happily in bed with Callie. No matter what he was doing, he could see behind his eyeballs Olivia’s legs flailing in the air; the pale hand descending from the gap in the ceiling to slap him; the fish-eyed gaze of Boy G.

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like the Red Queen,” Callie said, chopping the air with her hand, “but why can’t you be happy with what you got? Why can’t you be happy with. .”

“The Red Queen?” Paul laughed. “Jesus, where’d you come up with that?”

“It’s from—”

“I know what it’s from,” he said. “How do you know what it’s from?”

Callie whirled on him in bed, looming over him with her finger inches from his nose. “Don’t you dare condescend to me,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”

Paul started to get aroused. “We all like a ride on a frisky young colt,” Colonel had said. “Do you love her?” He smiled and slid his hand around her hip to the small of her back, and he tried to work his thigh between her legs, but Callie pushed herself away from him. She bounded awkwardly off the bed and stumbled through the clothes on the floor. She crossed her arm over her breasts and clutched her shoulder, and she stooped to pick through the limp jeans and underwear.

“Oh, c’mon,” said Paul, pulling the sheet over his tumescent lap. “Aren’t we going to work this out?”

“I ain’t in the mood for ‘working it out.’ ” Callie gestured a pair of quotation marks in the air, without looking at Paul.

“Callie, I’m sorry.” Paul scootched to the edge of the bed and tried to catch her eye. “I’m being a jerk.”

Callie tugged on her panties and then her jeans. All Paul heard from her was the angry hiss of her breath. She stooped again for her shirt.

Paul mouthed a silent fuck and flopped back on the bed. On the TV screen the Born Free lions sprawled across a rock in the African sun, their fat tongues lolling between their enormous canines. On top of the TV Charlotte sprawled in exactly the same attitude, her front paws pushed forward, her head sunk between them, eyes half open. Her back legs were splayed off the edge of the set, and her tail strobed slowly back and forth across the screen. Paul glanced at Callie to see if she had noticed, but she was buttoning her shirt with her back to him. Paul let his head drop onto the pillow, and he watched the TV’s light flicker across the ceiling.

“Callie,” he said, “without you. .”

She looked at him over her shoulder. “Without me, what?” she said.

“Without you. .,” Paul began. He had no idea how to finish the sentence.

Callie turned and stooped for her sandals, dangling them by their straps, and to Paul’s surprise she dropped to her knees next to the bed. She set the sandals neatly to one side, and she leaned over Paul, her hand lightly on the sheet over his chest.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Okay,” murmured Paul, and he pushed himself up to kiss her. But she pushed him back.

“That’s not what I mean.” Her eyes were clear, and she watched him calmly. “I mean, let’s go. Let’s git. Let’s get out of this town and not come back.”

“What?” Paul said.

She met his gaze with her own; wherever he tried to look, she was looking back at him. “You hate Texas, you hate the heat, you hate your job, you hate the folks you work with.”

“Yeah, but. .,” breathed Paul. All his muscles were pulling tight under the sheet. His stomach was clenching.

“Well, me too, cowboy.” Her hand was warm and firm against his chest. “Don’t let it go to your head, ’cause it ain’t saying much, but you’re the best thing to happen to me in this whole goddamn state.”

“Really?” said Paul.

“There’s nothing in this shitty little apartment that’s yours, ‘cept your clothes, right? So let’s toss ’em in my truck and take off. We could be in Mexico by sunup.”

“Mexico?” He felt his stomach clench.

“Or wherever. We could be in California the day after tomorrow.”

Finally Paul managed to lift himself on his elbows. Her hand pressed lightly on his chest. “Are you serious?” he said.

“Serious as a heart attack, lover.” She slid her hand over his shoulder and curled her fingers around the back of his neck. “I followed one boy to Tulsa, and another boy here, but I never asked a boy to follow me before.”

“Wow,” said Paul.

Callie moved her face close to his, her eyes half shut. “C’mon, Paul,” she breathed. “Let’s. Just. Go.”

She kissed him very tenderly, and Paul stopped breathing. He could feel his blood pulsing in his lips. Callie pulled away, and he couldn’t help himself: He turned his gaze away from hers and looked down the bed at black-eyed Charlotte on top of the TV, her tail swishing metronomically across the screen. Callie half turned to see what he was looking at, but caught herself. She pushed back from the bed and stood; she stubbed her feet into her sandals.

“She ain’t there, Paul,” she said quietly, as if to a sleepless child.

“Yes she is,” said Paul, unable to take his eyes off the cat. “Turn around and look.”

“I don’t have to. She ain’t there.” Callie bent over the bed and kissed Paul on the forehead. “She’s in here.” Then she turned and crossed to the door, swinging her hips.

“Callie,” Paul said.

She hesitated with the door half open, but she didn’t look back.

“See ya,” she said, and then she was gone.

Paul lay on his elbows, gasping. He could still feel the imprint of her kiss on his forehead and on his lips. On top of the TV Charlotte split her flat head in a vast, black, jagged yawn.

“Fucking bitch!” Paul shouted, and he flung his pillow at her. She vanished and the pillow swept the jerry-rigged rabbit ears off the set and onto the floor; Born Free vanished in a blizzard of static. Outside, Paul heard the starting grumble of Callie’s truck, heard the whine of reverse gear, heard the rattle of the drainage grate in the middle of the parking lot as Callie backed over it. Paul propelled himself from the bed towards the door, tangled his legs in the sheets, and fell to his knees. Snarling in frustration he stripped the sheet away and lunged for the door. He wrenched it open and stood there, breathless and naked and semi-aroused, and saw only his battered Colt and the dusty wrecks of his neighbors’ ancient automobiles and, printed in silhouette against a yellow doorway, a single, slouching Snopes dangling a beer at his hip. Callie was gone, and Paul could only hear the rising gulp of her truck, climbing through its gears, away from him. Paul looked down at himself, and he stepped back and slammed his door.

“Paul?” said a voice behind him, and Paul started violently. He whirled and flattened his back against the inside of his apartment door.

Bob Wier stood rubbing his hands in the middle of Paul’s room, while behind him a couple of pale homeless guys in white shirts and ties were peeking out of Paul’s bathroom. The lower half of another guy hung from a gap in the suspended ceiling over Paul’s bed, his shirt pulled tight over his soft torso. He dropped to the bed, landing on his feet and making the springs twang, and as he bounced he adjusted his glasses. The glare in his lenses from the TV obscured his eyes.

Bob Wier inclined his head solicitously towards Paul. “Is this a bad time?” he said.