Kings of Infinite Space

EIGHT

THE MEETING LASTED UNTIL NEARLY LUNCHTIME, which meant Paul had to hustle to return the laptop and the projector to Building Services without losing any of his own lunch hour. Callie was no longer minding the sign-out sheet, so Paul returned the equipment to a large, red-faced gentleman named Ray (according to his ID badge) who was parked immovably behind the desk in the inner room. He blew out a sigh at the sight of the projector.

“Say, do me a favor, bud, and slide that thang up on the shelf, willya?”

“You’re kidding, right?” The shelf was shoulder high. Ray only shrugged, so Paul left the projector on the floor, and slid the laptop onto a lower shelf.

“By the way, that girl who was here before,” Paul said, signing the book. “She always work in here?”

“Callie?” said Ray from behind his desk.

“Is that her name?” said Paul, though of course he already knew it. “So does she? Work here? Usually?”

Ray pursed his lips and folded his doughy fingers over his spreading belly, a Buddha of bureaucracy, and he looked very significantly from the projector on the floor to the shelf where it belonged. Paul sighed and stooped and, remembering to lift with his legs, hoicked the damned projector up into its berth.

“Callie?” said Ray. “Sometimes she’s up here, sometimes she’s down in the mail room.”

“Okay,” said Paul breathlessly, his heart hammering from the effort. Thanks for nothing, he thought.

“Word to the wise, chief.” Ray dropped his voice. “She don’t like boys.” He was trying, at least, to give Paul fair exchange for his effort.

“That so,” said Paul.

Ray shrugged. “I’m just saying is all.”

After lunch the only landmark on the horizon was an RFP team meeting that Rick had called for four o’clock to evaluate the meeting with the maintenance managers. To make the time go faster, Paul thought of the day as the twentieth century. By ten o’clock of an eight-hour workday (not counting lunch), it was already 1925. World War I was over; the Russian Revolution had already occurred; The Wasteland and Ulysses had already been published; the Rite of Spring had already been performed; modernism was in full spate. By lunchtime, World War II was over; the bomb had been dropped; Milton Berle was already a television star. Sometimes it made the afternoon go faster to glance at the time and think, now the Beatles are on Ed Sullivan, now Jimmy Carter is president. But today, by half an hour after lunch, Paul realized that it was only March 1956. The Beatles haven’t even met each other yet, he groaned silently. Jesus Christ, I haven’t even been born yet.

He toughed it out until the Nixon administration and then decided to take his break. As a temp, he was entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, which he usually stretched to half an hour each. Since he had missed his break this morning, thanks to the meeting, he figured he was due an hour this afternoon, though he doubted he could get away with it. Still he waited until Olivia was out of her cube so that she couldn’t note when he left, then he retrieved Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells and went downstairs.

The lunchroom was usually empty at this hour of the afternoon. The lights had been dimmed and the sun was on the other side of the building, so Paul was able to read in a pleasant dusk, all alone amid the empty tables and chairs. As he came in, he passed Callie hurrying out, her arms crossed over her t-shirt, her hands rubbing her bare upper arms. She avoided his eye as she passed, hustling around the corner towards the mail room. As he headed towards the Colonel’s table in the corner — his usual seat during his breaks — he noticed that someone had left a fat book open on one of the tables against the window. A chair was still pulled out, and a half-empty bottle of Coke stood at a corner of the book. Was this Callie’s mystery volume, the one she hadn’t wanted him to see?

He weaved between the intervening tables and stood across the table from the pulled-out chair; the book was facing the other way. It was an enormous volume, the pages Bible thin and packed with tiny print. He glanced back at the doorway, then turned the book around. He lifted the cover and saw, to his astonishment, that it was The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 1. He stooped over the open pages and read a couple of lines of crowded print:

VOLPONE. [springing up] Excellent Mosca!

Come hither, let me kiss thee.

MOSCA. Keep you still, sir.

Here is Corbaccio.

“That’s mine,” said Callie, nearly in his ear. Paul jumped back, and Callie reached past him and snatched the book off the table with both hands, slamming it shut and pressing it to her chest. She was wearing a sweater now over her t-shirt, somebody’s huge old cardigan with a little woven belt dangling untied at her hips.

“You just lost your place,” Paul said.

“That’s okay.” Callie clutched the book with one hand and waved her other hand as if to ward him off. She would not meet his eye.

Paul gestured at the table. “I’m sorry. I thought somebody had left it.”

“I just went to get a sweater.” Callie reached past him again for the bottle of Coke. “They keep the AC so fuckin’ high in here.” She started to turn away.

“It was open to Ben Jonson,” Paul said. “Act one of Volpone.”

Callie hesitated, not quite looking at Paul. “What did you say?”

“Act one of Volpone. Ben Jonson.”

“That’s not what I. .” She waved the plastic bottle; flat Coke sloshed within. “I mean, how did you say it, just now? The name.”

“Ben Jonson.”

She gave a little gasp of exasperation and turned away.

“Vol-po-nee,” Paul said. “It’s Italian. It means—”

“ ‘Fox.’ ” She was blushing bright red. “I know what it means. I can read.”

“I’m sorry.” He shifted his own book under his arm. “I was trying to be cute.”

“Didn’t work.” Her eyes flashed.

Paul shrugged. “Story of my life.”

“How’d you know that?” Her eyes burned a little less hot, but there was still a very attractive blush over her cheeks, making her freckles stand out. “How to say ‘Vol-po-nee’ ”—she enunciated slowly, as if testing each syllable before she put her full weight on it—“instead of ‘Vol-pone’?” Here she exaggerated her own accent; Paul wished he could place it.

Paul laughed nervously. How could he tell her without sounding. . pompous? Arrogant? Bitter? “You wouldn’t know it from my present circumstances,” he said, “but I have a Ph.D. in literature.”

She narrowed her gaze. “What do you mean, your ‘present circumstances’?”

He gestured through the ceiling at the weight of the Texas state agency above them. “I never thought Ben Jonson would come up in the dining room of the Texas Department of General Services.”

Callie’s eyes brightened again, but more with bemusement than anger. “Came up today, didn’t it?”

“I guess it did.”

“What are you reading?” Callie had been balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to flee, but Paul noticed that she had shifted her weight onto one heel. He pulled his book out from under his arm and held the cover out for her to see.

She leveled her gaze at him again. “You need a Ph.D. in English literature to read that?”

Paul stuck the book back under his arm. “No. That’s why I like it.”

Callie nodded. Her cheeks had faded to freckles against pale skin. She started to turn away and hesitated again.

“Vol-po-nee,” she said again.

“You got it.” He smiled — charmingly, he thought. “My head’s full of useless crap like that.”

Her eyes blazed at him again, but she checked it. He could tell she wanted to say something sharp, but instead she asked him, “What’s your name?”

“Paul,” he said, then he added, “Trilby.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling again. “I work up in—”

“I know where you work.” She was walking away now, the book still clutched to her chest with one hand, the Coke dangling at her hip. Paul watched her go, then he found his seat in the corner and took a moment to settle in — one chair to sit in, another to prop his feet on. He opened his book to the first pages of The Island of Dr. Moreau. He sat for half an hour with the volume open on his lap and didn’t read a word.