James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Paul simply stared at the Colonel as J.J. slouched off and Bob Wier swung away. The Colonel leaned back and folded his fingers over his belt buckle.

“I know what I wanted to say.” Paul kept his voice low. The rumble of the lunchroom was diminishing behind him. He heard the scrape of chairs as other people stood to return to work.

The Colonel lifted his palm. “I should have let you speak for yourself. I know our luncheon conversation is a little overwhelming for a newcomer. The cut and thrust. The attack and parry. I know you want to contribute — I could see it in your eyes, son — but your time will come, don’t worry.” He watched Paul with a hint of a smile. “I apologize.”

Paul smiled tightly and said, “No harm done.”

“My two compatriots are both of them fine men,” said the Colonel, placing his hands on the table edge. He let his gaze drift past Paul’s shoulder to where J.J. and Bob Wier were threading their way out of the room. “Bob’s a simple man, but godly. And J.J.’s youthful enthusiasm. . well, I see myself, thirty years ago.” He focused on Paul again. “But there’s no culture in them, Professor. Not like there is in you and I.” He smiled. “Perhaps even a bit of the artiste , no?”

Paul simply stared at him.

“But that’s a conversation for another time.” The Colonel pushed himself to his feet and slid his chair up to the table. He lifted his glossy lunch box. “You’re onto something extraordinary here, son, but you just don’t know it yet. In the weeks and months to come, you will look back on yesterday afternoon and say, ‘That was the day I first met Stanley Tulendij.’ ” He glanced across the lunchroom and lowered his voice. “I think you’ll come to find our luncheon repartee the high point of your day. Infinitely more interesting, say, than napping in the toilet.”

Paul glanced quickly over his shoulder. The lunchroom was nearly empty; only a few people, one or two to a table, still sat chewing and staring blankly into space. Paul turned back to the Colonel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Not to worry, Professor.” The Colonel put a finger to his lips. “Our little secret.” He winked at Paul. “A demain, mon frère .”

Paul, astonished to speechlessness, turned and watched the Colonel stride, stiff-backed, gut first, between the tables of the empty lunchroom towards the door.

AFTER LUNCH, Paul sulked in his cube for an hour and a half. What was the big deal with Stanley Tulendij? The Colonel and his coterie talked about him like he was. . what? A general beloved of his troops? A captain who went down with his ship? A titan in fleet management? As far as Paul could tell, the man was not only a disgraced, pensioned-off old buzzard with an unsavory whiff of decay about him, but a man at least indirectly responsible for the disappearance, and possibly death, of a busload of unemployed men. But more importantly, Paul wondered, how did the Colonel find out about my midmorning naps in the men’s room? Do they have a camera in there, God forbid? Paul resisted the urge to glance at the ceiling over his head.

How did the Colonel know, Paul fumed, that I prefer Red River to Chisum? Paul hated it when anybody read him that easily. He further resented the Colonel’s presumption of a commonality of taste and interest. Fellow intellectuals, indeed. Back at Midwest, in his grad school days, he’d known undergraduates, for cry yi, who’d have made that pompous autodidact look like. . look like. . well, they’d have reduced him to a cinder, that’s what. Artiste , my ass.

It wasn’t long before the soporific effect of the cube smothered Paul’s rage. By two-thirty, as his eyelids drooped and his chin dipped towards his chest and watchful Olivia’s gaze prickled the back of his neck, he grabbed his volume of H. G. Wells and went down to the midafternoon dusk of the lunchroom. He hadn’t planned it, exactly, but this was roughly the same time he’d run into Callie the day before. The lunchroom was empty, so he sat in the Colonel’s seat facing the door, with the fat volume open to the beginning (still) of The Island of Dr. Moreau . After five minutes of staring at the doorway didn’t produce her, Paul lowered his eyes to the book.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

In the Dingey of the “Lady Vain”

I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vam . As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao The long-boat with seven of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by H.M gun-boat Myrtle, and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as the far more terrible Medusa case.

But today Wells read like an instruction manual; Paul’s eyes tripped over “Callao” and were completely derailed by “Medusa.” His gaze drifted through the yellowish tint of the windows to the parking lot, past the humpbacked ranks of Sports and Trackers and pickups, to the embankment that blocked the view of the river. Where had Stanley Tulendij gone yesterday after he crested the rise? Who was the man on the bridge? Had it really been Boy G? And had Boy G been waving at Paul or signaling Stanley Tulendij? And what was it, Paul wondered, his eyelids pulling down like shades, his chin tugging towards his sternum, what was it that Nolene had been about to tell him yesterday? What was it that the Colonel, Bob Wier, and J.J. never did?

Paul jerked his head up, and the narrow print of the book swam before his eyes. His eyes focused and he read, “But I knew now how much hope of help for me lay in the Beast People.”

He glanced away from the page and groaned. As he had dozed, the pages had flipped forward on their own to just before Chapter the Thirteenth. How had that happened? Dear God, thought Paul, please don’t let me sleep on my break. Not on my own time . He pushed the book away and pressed his fingers into his eyes, and when he pulled them away he saw a string dangling from the ceiling fifteen feet away. Paul squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again. The string was still there, hanging over a lunchroom table straight as a plumb line, suspended from a little, black, triangular gap where a ceiling panel was askew. At the lower end of the string a little noose was being raised and lowered over a salt shaker in the middle of the table. The noose draped once over the shaker without catching it, then twice, then again, the string above slackening each time. Then, one more try and it caught around the neck of the salt shaker. The string went taut, and the salt shaker swung silently up off the table.

Paul clapped his hands over his eyes and moaned, “Oh, fuck.” The room swallowed up the epithet, and in the dark behind his palms he heard only the starship hum of the building’s air-conditioning. He thought he heard, just at the edge of audibility, down among the white noise, the surface hiss of his life, the tiniest little scrape , as of someone sliding a ceiling panel back into place.

“It’s Paul, right?”

He whisked his hands away from his eyes. Callie stood across the table from him, her Norton anthology clutched to her bosom; the book was open and she pressed the wide spine with both hands. She was balanced on the ball of one foot, ready to flee. Oh fuck , Paul thought, silently this time, and he glanced past her at the ceiling, where the tiles receded towards the vanishing point in perfect rectilinearity.

“You alright?” It was clear from her intonation that she was asking for her sake, not his.

Paul waved his hands. “I was, uh, resting my eyes.” He tried to smile. For the first time in his memory, Callie was wearing a skirt, a shapeless denim skirt that came to her knees but a skirt nonetheless. “I stare at a screen all day,” Paul said, “and it makes my eyes. .”