James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Callie switched on the light, and she and Paul squinted at each other in the sudden glare. She was kneeling next to the bed; she had set the Norton Anthology on the edge of the mattress. Paul eased down from the wall, but he said nothing.

“I shouldna kicked this,” Callie said, and Paul saw she was near tears. “You probably think I’m stupid. You know everything in this book, and it don’t mean much to you anymore.”

Paul said nothing, but he edged towards her. His heart was still racing, and he was unnerved to see a woman cry, especially one he had been so joyfully fucking only an hour or two before. Callie touched him on the back of his hand, which meant, Thank you, but don’t come closer .

“Where I come from, nobody’s got much, so I didn’t know what I was missing.” She pressed the book to her breasts. “But when I got to Tulsa?” She drew a deep breath. “I know that must sound stupid to you, Tulsa as. . as. .”

“Babylon.” He sat very still.

She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. “Some people got the best of everything. They got the best food, they got the best clothes, they got the best places to live.” She gripped the anthology tightly in both hands and held it up; the blue veins stood out between her knuckles. “But this is free. This is the best, too, and I can have as much of it as any rich man. I can know as much about what’s in this book as any college girl. And there’s nothing they can do about it.” She was trembling, and her voice was shaking. Through her tears, her eyes were piercingly blue.

“I can know as much about it as you do!” she nearly shouted, rattling the book at him. Then her face crumpled, and the book drooped in her grasp. Paul got his hands under it and lowered the volume to the carpet, and he tugged Callie onto the bed. He kissed her and wiped her tears with his thumbs, and he lifted her face in his hands and said, “I’m gonna try real hard with you, Callie.” To his surprise, he was nearly in tears himself. Callie sobbed and curled onto her side and pressed her back against him, and he wrapped his arms and legs tightly around her. “I’m really gonna try,” he murmured, and at least until he fell asleep again, he believed it.

PAUL CAME TO WORK A FEW MINUTES EARLY ON MONDAY.

“There must be a winter carnival in hell this morning.” Preston bounced on the balls of his feet and glanced at his watch.

“Not only that,” Paul said as he took the temporary badge, “but this is the last time I’ll have to sign in.”

“You get another job someplace?” Preston lifted his eyebrows hopefully.

“It’s not that cold in hell.” Paul stepped back from the desk, swinging his lunch. “I’m getting a permanent badge today.”

“How’d you swing that?” Preston said. “I thought you was only here temporarily.”

Paul smiled as he backed away. Yesterday, during a long, leisurely, postcoital Sunday morning, he had been eating pancakes naked at Callie’s kitchen counter when she brushed his hip with hers and said, “Come see me tomorrow. I’ll get you a permanent ID.”

“That answers my question,” he had said.

“What question?”

“Who do I have to fuck to get an ID at TxDoGS?”

“Asshole,” she’d said, and had flicked her fork at him, spattering him with maple syrup. He’d flicked her back, and she had laughed as he clutched her round the waist and licked the sweet brown specks off her collarbone.

“Let’s just say,” Paul said now as he backed down the hall from Preston’s desk, “I’ve got a friend in high places.”

He put his lunch in one of the refrigerators outside the lunchroom, then took the stairs two at a time and hustled down the hall and around the corner to Building Services. He hadn’t seen Callie’s truck in the parking lot, but perhaps she’d come in while he was stashing his lunch. He felt jaunty and virile this morning; all his extremities tingled.

“We gotta keep it cool at work, okay?” she’d said to him, when they had finally parted on Sunday. “No PDA at TxDoGS. I mean it, Paul.”

He’d agreed, but surely she wouldn’t object if he nuzzled her a bit in her inner office, in the deeper recesses of Building Services, the two of them alone among the laptops and the video projectors; but as he rounded the corner and saw Preston at parade rest behind his desk below, he found the Building Services door closed and locked. Not even the florid Ray was in attendance yet. Paul started back down the hall towards his cube, feeling only a tad less jaunty and virile. Things are definitely looking up, he thought, Charlotte and spooky homeless guys notwithstanding. I’ve got a raise, I’ve got the respect of my boss, I’ve got a girl — hell, if my life were a musical, I’d start singing .

He swung around the corner of his aisle, trying to decide if he wanted to be Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, and found his petite, nervous coworker Renee standing in the aisle outside the dying tech writer’s cube. Normally he’d have pulled himself up short and gasped an apology for nearly bowling her over, but today even Renee couldn’t puncture his good mood. He gave her a jaunty salute, more Astaire than Kelly, and paused in the doorway of his cubicle. Renee turned to him with a ghastly, wide-eyed look, her pale fingers pressed to her mouth.

“You okay?” Paul said. This morning he loved all women, even this one. Renee shook her head and leveled her horrified gaze through the tech writer’s doorway, both hands now pressed to her mouth. Paul came into the aisle, and she backed up a step as he edged past her.

The dying tech writer was dead. He lay back in his office chair with his legs splayed and his arms dangling to the sides, his bony wrists and knuckles hanging perfectly motionless. His baggy trousers and oversized sweater seemed to be draped across the chair, empty. His head was tipped back over the backrest, and his gaunt, lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling. The ceiling panel directly over him was askew, leaving a little isosceles triangle of perfect blackness. The yellowed breathing tube poking out of the gauze around the tech writer’s neck pointed straight up at the gap in the ceiling.

All the air went out of Paul. His mouth hung open, but he was unable to speak. He looked from the gap in the ceiling panels to the body in the chair and back again. The tech writer’s screen saver was running, an endless, slow-motion spray of stars.

“Ohhhh,” sighed Renee, and Paul turned to see her swaying, her eyes rolling white. He caught her as she fainted and draped her over the chair of the empty cube across from the tech writer’s. She immediately started to slide to the floor, and for a terrible moment Paul was afraid she too had died, that some deadly gas was flowing from the dark triangle in the suspended ceiling. But clutching her under her arms, he felt her rabbitty pulse, and he lifted her onto the desk of the empty cube, pillowing her head with a dusty ring binder. Then he ducked across the aisle to his own cube, avoiding even a glance at the dead man. He picked up the phone to call Preston, realized he didn’t know the guard’s number, then rooted around in his drawer for the phone list. His hands were trembling so badly he could scarcely punch the buttons, and his voice was equally palsied when he got Preston on the phone.

“It’s Puh, Paul,” he gulped. “Up in juh, General Services. You better come up. And call an am, am, ambulance.”

He hung up before Preston could say anything and collapsed in his chair. He saw specks drifting across his gaze, so he closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. Then he opened them again, and saw a Post-it note stuck to the middle of his computer screen. It said: