Kings of Infinite Space

FORTY-ONE

A FEW DAYS LATER, on a hot, sunny Texas afternoon, Paul Trilby — failed academic, former employee of the Texas Department of General Services, born-again vegetarian — was ferrying his last few remaining possessions into the hatchback of his battered old Dodge Colt. He had rolled down the windows of the car, and he kept the door of his apartment propped wide as he went back and forth; it wasn’t like he needed to worry about the cat getting out. The parking lot was nearly empty; only a couple of his neighbors were taking their ease along the balcony, slouching over the rail and sucking back on long-necked bottles of beer. Mrs. Prettyman was watching from behind her curtains, he knew, but she had only come out once, her fingers twitching at her throat.

“You’re paid up till the end of the month,” she’d said. She almost sounded sorry to see him go. “I’m afraid the owner don’t allow partial refunds.”

“Tell him to keep it, with my compliments.” Paul stood up from laying the backseat of his car flat, his t-shirt already soaked through with sweat. “Get him to take you out to dinner.”

As he went back inside, Mrs. Prettyman stepped under the balcony and peered into the dim recesses of his apartment, but she wouldn’t come through the door. She pressed her fingers to her collarbone. “Where should I forward your mail?” she said.

“What mail?” Paul asked from the sink, as he slung his plastic plates into a box.

Finally she went away, and now Paul was almost done. None of the furniture was his, and he had already loaded his dishes and his clothes. He yanked out the sofa bed and began to strip the sheets off the mattress, stuffing them into a pillowcase. He hadn’t slept in the bed since last Friday but had been staying in Preston’s trailer south of the river. Paul, indeed, had not been in his apartment after dark since the week before, and even during the day, as now, he kept a weather eye on the grate in the center of the parking lot.

He slung the pillowcase into the back of the car and went back inside the apartment. He still hadn’t made up his mind whether to take the TV or not. On the one hand, he was tired of cat shows, but on the other hand, if he ended up in the middle of nowhere someplace, Charlotte’s programming might be preferable to whatever he could pull in from some podunk local station. So he tugged the plug out of the wall with the toe of his sneaker, lifted the set in his arms, and carried the TV out to his car. He tread carefully; it was still painful for him to walk, or even to stand for too long. Inside his sneakers, his lacerated feet were taped up in gauze, which he had to change twice a day at least. Preston had doctored him in the narrow living room of his trailer, picking the glass out of Paul’s soles with a pair of tweezers and painting the cuts deep purple with Betadine. Friday night, as they had raced away down empty streets under traffic lights blinking yellow, Preston and Nolene had explained why they couldn’t take Paul and Callie to the emergency room.

“The docs’d take one look at y’all,” Nolene said, watching Paul in the rearview mirror, “and call the po-lice.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t they?” said Paul, still trembling from fear and exhaustion.

“And tell them what, chief?” Preston sagged in the deep passenger seat up front, daubing the sweat off his forehead with a massive red bandanna. He turned and focused his tired eyes over his shoulder at Paul. “Huh?”

“Shouldn’t they know?” said Paul. Callie’s palm lay limp in his, and he squeezed it, glancing at her for moral support. But she was crumpled against the door, taking shallow breaths and gazing at nothing out the window.

“We know,” said Nolene. “And we know how to take care of ’em.”

“But. .,” said Paul.

“ ‘Nuff said, Professor,” said Preston.

In the end Nolene didn’t even take him home but dropped him off a few blocks away from TxDoGS, where Preston had parked his truck in the empty lot of another state building. By now the adrenaline had worn off, and the walk across the pavement to Preston’s pickup had been excruciating. Even so, Paul had shaken off Preston and limped back to the van to crawl back in next to Callie. He kissed her sweaty temple, but she said nothing. She didn’t even look at him.

“Nolene’ll look after her,” said Preston, and Paul let himself be led away again, leaving bloody footprints on the asphalt.

“I told you, didn’t I,” Nolene called after him. “I told you not to go in that building after dark.”

Preston took Paul to his small but fastidiously kept trailer in a little park tucked behind a taqueria and a boot repair shop, where he cleaned and dressed Paul’s feet and then gave Paul his own bed while he slept on the sofa. Paul slept all day Saturday and into Sunday, waking up at noon to the smell of slow-roasted meat. He limped out of the cramped bedroom at the end of the trailer, past a row of framed commendations and pictures of Preston and other men in fatigues, and found his host in the kitchenette.

“Sit,” Preston said, hooking Paul under the arm to help him into a chair. “I got you some ’cue.”

But as soon as Paul popped open the large Styrofoam takeout shell and saw the barbecue steaming before him — a limp heap of crumbling brisket and bias-cut slices of hot sausage — he put his hand to his mouth and began to gag.

“Whoa there!” said Preston, whisking it away. “Sorry, bud, I wun’t thinking.” He snapped the shell shut and buried it deep in his little dollhouse fridge, and then — rather expertly, Paul thought, once his stomach settled — steamed some vegetables for Paul, broccoli and peppers and squash. As Paul ate, Preston sat with him and nursed a cup of coffee, shooting concerned glances across the little table.

“Colonel approached me once,” Preston said quietly, without any preamble, “back when I first came to TxDoGS.”

Paul said nothing; he kept his eyes on his plate.

“Nearly took him up on it, too.” Preston pushed his coffee cup to one side and rested his forearms on the table. “I was a career marine, a colonel by time I retired. A real one,” he added, his eyes flaring. “I commanded men in battle, Paul, and now, here I was working as a security guard for minimum wage.” Paul met his eyes, and Preston must have seen something in his look because he added, “Let’s just say that from the bottom of a bottle, security guard looked like a step up.” Preston held Paul’s gaze. “But in the end,” he said, “I couldn’t stand that jumped-up little pastry chef. He was plenty pissed when I turned him down, but there wun’t a whole hell of a lot he could do about it.”

Preston explained how he had watched Bob Wier and J.J. fall into Colonel’s orbit. “I didn’t try hard enough to talk ’em out of it,” he said with some regret. “The way I was raised, Paul, I don’t hold with self-pity. You play the cards you’re dealt. Like the man says,” Preston went on, lifting his eyes to the ceiling as he quoted from memory, “ ‘I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.’ ”

“Who said that?” Paul looked up from his vegetables.

“John Wayne.” Preston blushed. “In The Shootist. His last picture,” Preston added helpfully.

Paul resisted the urge to smile or roll his eyes, but he couldn’t help wondering how many East Texas platitudes he was required to endure. Still, it would be impolite to accept a man’s generosity and then call him on his clichés.

“When you come in Monday morning,” Preston was saying, “I think you’ll be surprised at just how little has changed.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Paul said. “Why would I ever go back there?”

Preston opened his mouth, but then resigned himself to a smile. “I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me. You’ll just have to come in and see for yourself.”

“I don’t understand.” Paul sagged in his seat. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“I wouldn’t work too hard at it,” Preston said, smiling.

“How can I go on working there?”

“You don’t have to.” Preston gazed hard at Paul. “If I was a young fella like you, with no ties, I’d come in, collect my pay, and take off.”

“You stay, though.”

Preston nodded. “Yeah, well, me and Nolene, we’ve sorta made it our business to keep an eye on things.” He lifted an eyebrow at Paul. “You might say, I got myself a mission. More vegetables?”

That afternoon Preston offered to take Paul to his apartment to pick up some clean clothes and his car, but Paul wanted to see Callie first. He directed Preston up South Austin Avenue to Callie’s complex, but her truck was not in the parking lot.

“Maybe she’s at Nolene’s,” Paul said.

“She ain’t,” said Preston. “I talked to Nolene, and she said Callie insisted on coming home yesterday.”

Even so, Paul made Preston stop. He got out of the truck and limped up the stairs to Callie’s door. He rang the buzzer and knocked, and finally tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, so he opened the door a crack and called her name. Then he pushed it open all the way and stepped into Callie’s empty living room. He limped to the window and looked down to see Preston walking across the lot towards the manager’s office. Then Paul made his painful way to the kitchen, where the cupboards stood open and bare. His heart began to beat a little faster, and he hobbled to the bedroom and propped himself in the doorway. In the glare of the overhead light, the bedroom seemed even emptier than the living room; the mattress and chair were gone, the closet was empty. Not a scrap of clothing remained on the floor. The only thing in the room, in fact, sitting square in the center of the floor under the overhead fixture, was Callie’s copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Fixed to the cover was a square, yellow Post-it, and Paul limped to the center of the room and stooped for the book. The only thing on the Post-it was a three-digit number, so Paul hefted the spine of the book in his left hand and thumbed through the tissuey pages to the number. It was Love’s Labour’s Lost, and one line of a speech was highlighted in bright yellow: “Love is a familiar; Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.”

“You find it?”

Paul turned to see Preston in the doorway. “Find what?” he said.

Preston nodded at the book. “Manager, he said Callie moved out this morning, just tossed her stuff in her truck and took off.”

“Did he say where?”

“He don’t know,” Preston said. “She didn’t say.” He glanced round the bare room. “He did say that she said to tell you, if you came by, that she left a book for you.” His eyes landed on the open volume in Paul’s hands. “What’s it say?”

“Nothing.” Paul flipped it shut.

On Monday Paul called in sick and spent the day sleeping on Preston’s couch. But he went to work on Tuesday, and Preston offered to walk Paul to his cube.

“Is it safe to go up there?” Paul said.

“Go see for yourself,” Preston said, so Paul went up alone. As he came out of the groaning elevator, the first thing he saw was the broken chair with the note taped to its back, propped against the window. Paul drew a breath, then lifted the lid of the recycling box. It was full of cans, so he replaced the lid and tilted the box to one side to look at the dusty tiles beneath. They looked like all the other tiles.

Just inside the door to cubeland he paused and surveyed the ceiling. Every panel was in place, as far as the eye could see, especially over the library cube, where Paul was surprised to see no ragged hole, and no sign of repair. He limped around the corner into his own cube, switching on the monitor to watch the motto on his screen saver stream annoyingly by. There was a note on his chair, in Rick’s vivid scrawl — SEE ME — so Paul started up the aisle, one painful step at a time. Even though he was walking like an arthritic old man, Renee glared at him as he passed her cube. Paul laughed. As he came to the junction of the two aisles, he saw nothing out of the ordinary — no broken glass, no fragments of ceiling panel, no litter of office supplies. The bookcase in the library cube stood erect as always, and the worktable looked positively dusty; the three-hole punch and the big stapler looked as if no one had touched them for years.

Then he hobbled past the three cubicles of J.J., Colonel, and Bob Wier. The personal effects of all three men still sat on their desks or along the shelves, but all three were absent. Paul paused the longest in the doorway of Bob Wier, where he gazed along the shelf above Bob’s desk at the speed-reading manuals and the TexGro literature, his gaze coming to rest on the portraits of Bob’s wife and children, arranged by height. Paul stared longest at the picture of Bob’s wife, a scrubbed young woman with a helmet of blonde hair and the vacant look preferred by the Sears photographer. Paul felt a thickening in his throat.

“Rick’s waiting for you, Paul,” said Nolene from behind him, and Paul turned. She was gazing down at something on her desk and expertly twirling a pencil in her right hand. Paul stared at her until she looked up and met his gaze. Very slowly she shook her head, then lowered her eyes again.

“Paul!” cried Rick from inside his office. “Git on in here.”

As Paul limped through the door, he glanced quickly round Rick’s office. The ceiling was undisturbed; the chair was tucked neatly under the table; Rick’s monitor and desk lamp and telephone sat where they always had. Not only was his window intact, there wasn’t a scratch or a chip on it. Beyond the glass the thick limb of the dying oak seemed to cock its elbow at Paul.

“Way-ul, it never rains, but it rains,” Rick said, as Paul propped himself against the table to take some weight off his feet. “Colonel, J.J., and Bob have jumped ship.” He gestured at three letters laid side by side on his desk, each one on TxDoGS stationery, each one smudged in a different place. “They say they’ve quit to open their own pit barbecue establishment, can you believe that?”

Rick looked as flustered as Paul had ever seen him. He lifted his eyes beseechingly to Paul. “What the hell do these birds know about barbecue?”

Paul bit his lip and said nothing. Rick heaved himself back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head. “Damnedest thing I ever heard,” he muttered, addressing the ceiling. Then he heaved himself forward, shuffled the three letters of resignation together, and folded his hands.

“That makes you the go-to guy on the RFP,” he said. “You’re the lead honcho now, Paul. Well, truth be told, you always was, but now it’s official.” Rick’s antic bonhomie seemed to founder a bit as he met Paul’s steady gaze. “Unless you’re leaving, too,” he said, with a nervous laugh.

“Actually. .” Paul shifted his weight to his other foot. The pain was a dull ache, but it never went away.

Rick’s shoulders sagged, and for a moment Paul thought the man might actually cry. He’d never seen anyone look so crestfallen, and he took it as some kind of compliment.

“I just came in to say good-bye,” Paul said.

“You got another job?” Rick said.

“Actually,” Paul said, “I’m going back to school.” Then he smiled and said, “I think I’ve had my fill of government work.”

Paul took nothing from his cube. He even left behind his copy of Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells, placing it on the desk next to his mouse pad for the next temp to find. Then Preston walked him out of the TxDoGS Building to his car, and he helped Paul open the doors and the hatchback to let the heat out. As Paul settled behind the wheel and started the engine, Preston slammed the hatchback for him and came around to Paul’s window. He tossed an envelope on Paul’s lap, and Paul pried it open to find three hundred dollars in twenties.

“I can’t take this,” Paul said. He felt tears forming in the corners of his eyes.

“Son, you can’t not take it,” Preston said.

“I’ll pay you back,” Paul said, struggling to control his voice.

“Well.” Preston squinted away towards the river, then peered through the window at Paul. “You pass that money along to somebody else someday, and we’ll call it square.” He stuck his big, rough hand through the window, and Paul took it. Paul didn’t know what else to say, so he put the car in gear and Preston stepped back and crossed his arms. Halfway out of the parking space, Paul stopped and looked out the window and said, “Hey, Preston, you ever been to Beaver, Oklahoma?”

Preston smiled, thinking of the obvious joke, but he resisted the temptation. “Can’t say that I have,” he said. “What’s in Beaver, Oklahoma?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Paul.

Now, two hours later, Paul was finished loading his car. The only thing of his left in the apartment was the Norton Anthology, resting on the kitchen table; the Post-it with the page number on it was folded over and tucked tenderly between the pages like a billet-doux. Paul pried the apartment key off his key ring and placed it on the table next to the book. Then he glanced around the apartment, even lifting his eyes to the ceiling.

“Charlotte?” he said, though he didn’t expect any kind of answer. He hadn’t seen her since that crucial moment in the tree Friday night, but then he hadn’t spent any time in his apartment since then. He still could not puzzle out her presence in Rick’s office on Friday night, nor could he make sense of what she had done there. Not only had he never seen her outside of his residence before, she had certainly never done him any favors. Yet she had saved his life and Callie’s. That was what he couldn’t understand. It was too much to hope, he supposed, that maybe her curse was broken, that he would never see her anymore, that somehow, by doing more or less the right thing — even a few seconds late — he had dispelled Charlotte’s juju, repaid his debt to her, alleviated her feline rage. That would be too much to ask.

“Alright, I’m leaving now,” he said aloud, lifting the anthology off the table. “Um, thanks, I guess.”

He turned and carried the book out of the apartment, pulling the door shut after him and twisting the knob to make sure it was locked. Then he hobbled to his car, hauled open the screeching door, and settled himself behind the wheel. He turned to drop the book on the passenger seat, and there sat Charlotte, looking nearly as she had done when she was alive, her paws tucked neatly under her, her tail curled all the way around her. She looked up at him with her indifferent gaze.

“Well, this is new,” said Paul. He tossed the book behind the seat, onto the heap of boxes. He glanced at Charlotte and shrugged. He started the car, and the engine clattered to life, the metallic banging from the undercarriage bouncing off the walls of the Angry Loner Motel. He laid his hand on the gearshift and looked back through the rear window, but then he sagged in his seat and sighed, the car vibrating noisily under him. He looked down at the ghost of a cat beside him.

“You still hate me, right?” he said. “So why didn’t you let them kill me? Do you care if I live or die, or are you just being territorial?”

Charlotte did not move or make a sound, but she watched him steadily.

“Okay, I get it,” Paul went on. “It’s not that you don’t want me to be tormented, you just don’t want anybody else to do it.” Paul narrowed his gaze at her. “Or is it possible you didn’t want anything to happen to Callie, and I just rode along in her slipstream. Is that it? Do you love Callie? Is that even possible?”

The car chugged almost expectantly under him. Jesus H. Christ, he thought, I’m talking to a cat. Hell, I’m talking to a dead cat. He looked down at Charlotte, curled calmly on the seat. It occurred to him that she might even be purring, but he’d never be able to tell over the racket of the car. He wondered what she’d do if he touched her and decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to try.

“Never mind,” he said, his fingers curled round the gearshift. “Forget I asked. Screw it. Because you know what, Charlotte?” He settled himself firmly in his seat and gave her a defiant look. “I don’t care. You do whatever you want, and I’ll do whatever I want. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Whether you’re real or imaginary, whether you haunt me in public or in private, I just don’t care. You want to know why, Charlotte?”

She was watching him wide-eyed. Her tail had come uncurled, and it lashed back and forth across the worn corduroy of the seat.

“Because in the last four weeks, Charlotte, I have seen it all. Of all the strange things that have happened to me in my life, you’re not even at the top of the list anymore. Okay? Got that?”

He leaned towards her, brandishing his index finger.

“Whatever you do,” he said, “wherever you follow me, there’s not a single goddamn thing you can do to surprise me anymore. Not one.”

Charlotte yawned, splitting her sharp little muzzle nearly in two. She blinked up at Paul.

“Shut up and drive,” said the cat.