Kings of Infinite Space

NINE

WHEN PAUL LEFT HIS CUBE FOR THE FOUR O’CLOCK meeting, he passed Rick in the main aisle going the other way.

“Head on down and grab a seat,” Rick said as he sailed by. “I’m getting our guest a cup of coffee.”

What guest? Paul wondered. To his surprise, he saw Olivia Haddock hovering just outside the door of Rick’s office, while Nolene typed something and scowled at her computer screen. Through the office door he saw the Colonel and J.J. and Bob Wier seated around the little table in the corner, leaning forward and listening to someone out of sight.

“He’s got some nerve showing up here,” Nolene muttered, as she hammered at her keyboard, refusing to look at Olivia. “Some people just don’t know when they’re not wanted.”

“Well, he did work here for thirty years, Nolene.” Olivia clutched her elbows and lifted herself on tiptoe, craning to see through the door. “When I first got here, he was a legend.”

“What I’d like to know is, who authorized his visitor’s badge?” Nolene lifted her angry gaze and it landed on Paul, who stopped in his tracks. “What part of ‘You’re fired’ dun’t he understand?”

Before Paul could think of anything to say, a gust of male laughter erupted through the doorway. Olivia flinched back, as if afraid of being seen.

“Don’t you have some work to do, hon?” Nolene placed a heavy emphasis on the last word, crushing any endearment out of it. She leveled her gaze at Olivia who, without a word, pushed off from the side of the door and marched away, her arms swinging, her cheerleader’s backside twitching.

“Hey, Professor, step on in here,” said the Colonel from inside the office. Nolene returned to her computer screen, and Paul moved into the doorway. The faces of the RFP team swung towards him, smiling. A stranger was sitting behind Rick’s desk, an older man in a jacket and tie. He had a high, pale forehead and bright eyes, and his sparse white hair was combed straight back in perfect striations. He seemed a little lost in the jacket; the lapels ballooned out from his shirt, and the cuffs came down to his knuckles. The man’s shoulders barely rose above the backrest of Rick’s chair, but his pale fingers were unusually long, clutching the armrests.

“Professor, meet Stanley Tulendij,” said the Colonel, “the man who made the TxDoGS fleet what it is today.”

The old man swiveled slowly towards Paul, an unexpectedly chilling sight, since Paul doubted that the man’s feet reached the floor. How did he do that? Stanley Tulendij had a prominent jaw and a wide, lipless mouth, and he pointed his chin and his sparkling eyes at Paul and said in a hollow voice, “Is this the young fella?”

“Paul is our tech writer on the outsourcing project,” said Bob Wier, his voice trembling. “Paul, Stanley was TxDoGS’s fleet manager for twenty-five years.”

“The original TexDog,” said the Colonel.

“This man’s a fucking legend,” said J.J., looking uncharacteristically reverent.

“Now son,” whispered Stanley Tulendij, “that kinda language—”

“I’m sorry!” gasped J.J. To Paul’s astonishment, J.J. actually blushed, and his eyes burned as if he might start to cry. “God, I’m such a fucking idiot.”

“No harm done.” The man behind the desk made a benedictory gesture, and he swiveled his bright gaze at Paul again. “Come shake my hand, young man.” His hand, skeletal and pale, levitated out of his roomy cuff as if on the end of a broomstick. The other men nodded at Paul, urging him on, and he reached across the desk. Who is this guy? he thought. Why is he sitting in Rick’s chair?

Stanley Tulendij had a loose grip; his hand was very cool and dry, all papery skin and knobbly knuckles. His fingers reached nearly all the way around Paul’s hand. He may be the palest person I’ve ever seen, thought Paul. In direct sunlight, I’ll bet you could see the outline of the old guy’s bones. Why, he’s as pale as that homeless guy yesterday.

“Stanley Tulendij,” said the old man. “A privilege.”

“Paul Trilby.” He gave a wince of a smile. “All mine.”

Paul tried to let go, but the old man leaned forward in the seat and grasped Paul’s wrist with his other hand. The light in his eyes brightened, and he looked past Paul to the men around the table. “Oh, he’s good,” said Stanley Tulendij. “I like this young fella.”

“Might could be he’s one of us,” said the Colonel, behind Paul. “Don’t you think so, boys?”

“Absolutely!” declared Bob Wier. “Praise Jesus!” He smiled broadly, but his eyes were anxious. He looked as if he were about to break into a sweat.

“I suppose,” said J.J., glowering at Paul.

Paul tugged his hand free. The old man winked at Paul, and Paul felt the temperature drop in the room, the way it sometimes did when Charlotte was present.

“Hey!” chirped Rick, coming in with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “I see y’all have made your own introductions.” He leaned past Paul and gingerly set the cup in front of Stanley Tulendij. Then he clapped Paul on the shoulder, putting Paul between him and the man behind the desk. “This man is a titan in fleet management, Paul,” he said. “I’m honored just to be in his presence.”

“Pah!” Stanley Tulendij flapped his pale hand. “Just did my job is all.” He put his hands on the armrests and pushed himself up out of the chair in a smooth, swift motion — so swift, in fact, that Paul took a step back, afraid that the old man was going to float right over the desk at him.

“You’re not leaving?” said Rick, sounding relieved. “I thought you might sit in.” The Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier all glanced at each other, Paul noted, while Rick maneuvered to keep Paul between himself and the old man. Stanley Tulendij was taller than he’d looked sitting down; he had long legs and a short torso, like a man walking on stilts. This disproportion, and his preternatural paleness, gave him a rather spiderish look as he glided around the end of Rick’s desk. As he passed, his jacket gave off a strong whiff of thrift store disinfectant — an odor Paul knew well — and beneath it was something both sharp and sour, like the smell of excrement. Stanley Tulendij paused in the doorway to take his leave. One at a time, Bob Wier, J.J., and the Colonel rose from their seats, shook his hand, and sat down again. Stanley Tulendij gave a puppetish wave, his bony hand wobbling as if on a ball socket.

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said, looking at Paul, and Paul felt the chill again. He watched the old man’s strange, arachnid gait as he walked out the door and down the aisle.

Somebody clapped his hands once, and Paul turned to see the Colonel sitting erect in his chair, grinding his palms together. His eyes were aglow. “Well!” he said. “It seems giants still walk among us.”

“Yessir,” said Rick, rather distantly. He had moved behind his desk, and he was staring warily down at his chair. He shoved the backrest with the tips of his fingers, setting the chair spinning slowly in place. “I tell you what,” he said, “let’s put the meeting off till tomorrow. No sense crossing our bridges until they’re burned.” He looked up. “Y’all check your schedules and let me know what’s good for y’all.” He waved his hand, dismissing the team. Paul waited for the others to file out ahead of him. Bob Wier’s smile was drawn painfully tight, his eyes so sad he looked as though he might cry, and he gave Paul a thumbs-up as he passed. J.J. looked him sourly up and down, and the Colonel winked at him. Paul started after them, but Rick called him back.

“Get rid of this, willya?” Rick held out the still steaming cup of coffee.

Paul hesitated — toss it yourself, Rick, I’m a tech writer, not a busboy — until he saw the look on Rick’s face. He held the cup as if it were full of acid about to eat through the Styrofoam.

“Please,” said Rick, and Paul leaned across the desk and took the cup. As he left, Rick was still watching his spinning chair, as if counting the revolutions.

Paul ditched the coffee in the trash by the fax machine, then he went around Nolene’s cube to the side away from Rick’s door and rapped on the metal strip on top of the partition. From Rick’s doorway, he heard the tentative creak of a chair.

“So, Nolene,” he whispered, when he finally got her attention, “did you ever work with Stanley Tulendij?”

Nolene slowly lifted her gaze to Paul and regarded him coldly. Paul was on the verge of retreating when she lowered her eyes, visibly banked her anger, and looked up at him again. “Hit’s no secret. No reason you shouldn’t know.” She lowered her voice. “Most of the folks here are new in the five years since Stanley. .” She snapped her fingers. “But I worked under him for six months.” She closed her eyes and mastered herself again. “Let’s just say that Stanley was old school about women in the workplace? ‘My wife don’t let me tell her how to make biscuits, and I don’t let her tell me how to buy parts for a backhoe.’ ”

“So what does this mean?” Paul snapped his fingers. “Did he retire?”

Nolene put her finger to her lips. “They yanked him,” she whispered. She glanced around her and syllable by syllable mouthed the words, “Sex-u-al har-ass-ment.”

“Really!” Paul lowered his voice further. “Who did he harass?”

She turned abruptly back to her computer screen, and an instant later Rick sailed out of his office and up the aisle. She watched him go, then looked at Paul and slowly shook her head. She wouldn’t talk about it.

“At least tell me, did the Colonel and J.J. and Bob work for him?”

“Oh no! That’s the funny thing.” She glanced up the aisle. “They never did. They all come here since.” She kept her voice low, hissing at Paul across the partition. “And yet he comes around to see them every few months or so. In’t that the darnedest thing?”

“Huh,” said Paul.

“You know what else is funny about those three?” Nolene’s voice dropped so low that Paul had to lean over the partition to hear her. “As far as I can tell, they never do. .”

She broke off and nailed her gaze to the computer screen again. Paul looked up and saw the Colonel loitering by the fax machine, idly fingering the buttons. Nolene slowly shook her head.

“Right,” Paul said, raising his voice. “So, uh, when can I expect my first check at the new rate?”

“I dunno, hon.” Nolene clattered away at her keyboard. “That’s up to your temp agency, not the great state of Texas.”

“Okeydoke,” Paul said. “Thanks.” He started briskly up the aisle. Just ahead of him, the Colonel stepped back into his cube and turned in his doorway. He winked at Paul. “Professor,” he said.

“Colonel,” replied Paul, hurrying past.

Back in his cube, he almost e-mailed Nolene. They never do what? he wanted to know, his hands hovering over his keyboard. But he doubted that Nolene was so indiscreet as to commit gossip to cyberspace. He’d have to catch her alone again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it was nearly quitting time, and he began to shut down his computer and tidy his desk. He swept a couple of pencils into his top drawer and let the drawer slide shut. After a moment he opened the drawer again and peered in at the litter of pens, pencils, paper clips, and pushpins. Something’s missing, he thought. He bit his lip and stared harder at the clutter in the drawer. Something was here that isn’t now, he thought. But what? To hell with it, he decided, and he let the drawer slide shut, glimpsing the mild yellow of a Post-it pad.

He jerked the drawer open again. The note he’d found on his monitor this morning was gone, the Post-it that read, “Are we not men?” He pulled the drawer all the way out and peered into the shadows in the back; he ran his fingertips through the litter in the sharp corners of the drawer — gingerly, in case of a stray pushpin — and came up only with a steel letter opener he hadn’t known was there and a smudgy three-by-five card. He pushed through the paper clips, the soggy heap of rubber bands, the tangle of clenched binder clips. But the note was gone. With both hands in the drawer, Paul lifted his gaze to the ceiling tiles above him. “They’re up there,” the dying tech writer had said. He listened for his neighbor’s wheeze and heard nothing; he must have left already. He jerked his hands out of the drawer and stood. Go ahead, he thought. Play games with me, asshole, whoever you are.

He heard a sharp hiss and glanced over his shoulder. Maybe the tech writer hadn’t left yet. Then he heard it again, a little louder. He caught his breath and thought, I hope that’s not coming from the ceiling.

“Ssss! Paul!” Olivia Haddock peered wide-eyed at him around the partition of her cube. “Did you see him?” she whispered.

Paul sighed. “See who?”

Olivia shushed him, then beckoned him sharply, and Paul sighed again and crossed the aisle. Olivia backed into the deepest corner of her cube, glancing past him at her doorway. “Did you meet Stanley Tulendij?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Paul shrugged.

“How was he?” Olivia’s eyes shone as though she were a cheerleader asking him if he’d met the star quarterback.

“Well,” said Paul, “I hear he was a titan in fleet management.”

“What they did to him, you shouldn’t do to a dog.” Olivia clutched her elbows; her mouth was puckered with distress. “They tossed him away like he was just trash.”

“I heard he was fired for. .”

She shushed him again, sharply. “Listen,” she began, and she told him that Stanley Tulendij had been a TxDoGS legend for thirty years, twenty-five of them as fleet manager. He had been personally responsible for the modernization of the state of Texas’s fleet of official vehicles in the mid-seventies, skillfully negotiating the prerogatives of the legislature, the bureaucratic inertia of the agency, and the greed of contractors. “That man never, and I mean never, put a foot wrong.” Olivia shuddered, her hand at her throat. Stanley Tulendij, she continued, had been a shoo-in to be chief of the whole division—“Eli’s job,” she added, in case Paul was not clear on the hierarchy — and probably the head of the agency, if it hadn’t been for. .

She lifted herself on tiptoe and glanced around again, then lowered her voice a fraction and continued telegraphically. “Five years ago. Budget cuts. Statewide, hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of people lost their jobs. Twenty-year veterans. And Stanley? Out of all those managers? The only one who said no. Not my people.” In the end the man who had accomplished miracles in state government for years without ticking off anybody — which was in itself a miracle — managed to tick everybody off all at once. “Suddenly he couldn’t do anything right,” Olivia said, “and one day he was just gone. He was on the job on Tuesday, and on Wednesday it was like he’d never even existed.”

All around him, Paul could see the tops of people’s heads as they glided up the aisle on their way home. “Nolene told me,” he said, “that they fired him for. .”

“That’s a lie!” hissed Olivia. “Don’t you believe it! They just made that up.” She widened her eyes at Paul. “The next week Rick was in Stanley’s old office, and the first thing he did — the first thing—was shitcan thirty guys.” She only mouthed the word shitcan. “And those thirty guys? Most of them had been around for years. It was like Rick just pulled a lever and whoosh! They dropped right out of the bottoms of their cubes. Like trash. Which only made it worse when. .”

Olivia shuddered again, and Paul, in spite of himself, felt a little of the chill. She glanced wildly past him, and he turned to glimpse Renee hustling by, clutching her oversized purse. Olivia stooped and snatched her own purse from under her desk and held it before her. She looked like she might flee before she finished the story, so Paul put his arm across the doorway.

“When what?” he whispered.

“The bus!” Olivia gasped. “Don’t tell me you never heard about the tragedy at Lonesome Knob! That fateful bus ride? The sinkhole?”

“Well, no?” said Paul, tentatively.

Olivia dropped her voice even lower so that Paul had to lean in, close enough to smell her shampoo — something fruity — and to see through the tree line of her scalp to the hint of darkness at her roots. Oh, my God, thought Paul, Olivia dyes her hair!

But she was too wrapped up in her story to notice where he was looking. Even in disgrace, she was saying, Stanley Tulendij had refused to let his men lose their jobs without ceremony, so he had chartered a bus — at his own expense! Out of his retirement money! — to treat the thirty cashiered TexDogs to a final, unofficial outing at Lonesome Knob State Park, just outside the Lamar city limits. The signal feature of the park (Paul knew) was Lonesome Knob itself, a great, bald dome of ancient granite, under which ran a warren of caves, largely unexplored; no one knew how far they went. Stanley Tulendij called his outing a “retirement party” and insisted that his men wear their coats and ties. Likewise out of his own pocket, he ponied up for barbecued brisket and hot sausage and a big steel tub full of beer on ice.

“That day there was a terrible storm,” whispered Olivia, and for a moment Paul had the same childish thrill he used to get from campfire ghost stories. Olivia clutched her purse and dropped her voice so low that Paul caught only snatches of what she said. He wasn’t even sure they were the important snatches: a sudden Texas thunderstorm — the men took refuge in the bus — a flash flood — the bus carried away — that awful sinkhole — the bus swept clean—

“What?” said Paul.

Olivia narrowed her eyes at Paul. “The force of the water busted out the windows of the bus, and just scoured it out. All those men. .” She blinked back tears. All those men, it seemed, had been washed away into the caves without a trace. Only Stanley Tulendij was ever found, clinging to a juniper bush at the lip of the sinkhole, still in his coat and tie, soaked to the skin, nearly drowned.

“And he’s never been the same man since,” suggested Paul, trying not to smile. He didn’t believe a word of this. It had the almost pornographic allure of an urban legend or some mournful, minor-key folk song about a train wreck or a mining disaster. “So now he haunts the halls of TxDoGS, looking in vain for the faces of his missing men. .”

Olivia’s face hardened, and she slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “I suppose you think losing your job is funny,” she snapped, and Paul was stung to silence.

“Not really,” he managed to say.

“You think because you’ve got a pee aitch dee,” she spat, “you’re too good for this job.”

“Not really,” Paul said again, hoarsely.

“Excuse me.” Olivia snapped her purse strap between her breasts and pushed past Paul, sailing out the door of her cube and up the aisle.

Paul sighed, then stepped across the aisle into his own cube long enough to switch off his light. He took the rear stairs and passed the mail room, hoping for a glimpse of Callie, but he didn’t see her. He signed out and deposited his visitor’s pass at the front desk, then threaded his way through the parking lot to his lucky spot under the tree, along the river embankment. He rolled down the windows and opened the creaking hatchback to let out the day’s accumulated heat; he took off his dress shirt and tossed it on the passenger seat. Behind him, the departing column of SUVs and pickups rumbled out of the lot; Paul slammed the hatchback shut and lowered himself behind the wheel.

I’m supposed to believe all that? he wondered. A busful of sacked state employees washed into a sinkhole? Stanley Tulendij clinging for dear life to a juniper bush? All of them in business attire?

“They died with their boots on,” Paul murmured, and smiled to himself. He started his engine, and the car shook itself like an old dog. Through the windshield glare he squinted over the embankment and across the river. Some of his coworkers’ vehicles were already lumbering across the Travis Street Bridge in a haze of heat and exhaust, past insane Texas joggers pounding along the pedestrian walkway during the worst heat of the day. One pedestrian, however, had stopped on the bridge. He was not a stalled jogger: He wore trousers, a shirt and tie, and glasses, and he seemed to be looking this way. His features were hard to make out with the sun behind him, but the shape was unmistakable — a small oval atop a larger oval. It’s the homeless guy from yesterday, realized Paul, the egg-shaped man, Señor Huevo, what was his name? Boy G — that was it! Mr. Are We Not Men himself! Paul leaned forward and tilted his hand against the glare. Is he looking at me? he thought, and just then the figure on the bridge lifted his hand and waved.

Paul snapped back in his seat as if he’d been struck across the face. Another movement caught his eye through the driver’s side window, and he turned to see Stanley Tulendij step out from behind the tree. Without a glance back, the old man spidered up the embankment on his long legs, and in a moment he had crested the rise and disappeared down the other side.

Paul fumbled at the latch and heaved his door open on its whining hinges. He hesitated, then dashed through the heat up the slope. At the top of the embankment Paul was halted by the sour reek of the river. On the far side of the sluggish water lay the unfashionable end of Lamar’s hike-and-bike trail, but on this side, the yellowed grass sloped directly into the weeds at the water’s edge, with no interruption but the humped concrete back of a storm drain that emptied into the river. Paul looked both ways; to his left, the embankment curved away around a bend in the river, to his right, it ran unbroken to the bridge. Stanley Tulendij was nowhere to be seen in either direction. Paul turned and looked back down at the nearly empty parking lot. His own car trembled below him, motor running, door open. He turned towards the bridge and shaded his eyes with his palm. The figure at the railing, the oval-on-oval silhouette, was gone. All Paul saw were candy-colored SUVs, nose to tail along the bridge, and the lean silhouettes of joggers, pounding through the Texas glare.