James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

Finally, Paul passed the orderly cube of Bob Wier, with his color-coded state purchasing manuals and his ring binders arranged in descending order of size. In his desk drawer he kept a can of compressed air, and Paul had often seen him blasting the grit from between the keys of the computer keyboard he never seemed to use. He also kept a spray bottle of Windex to keep spotless the curved screen of his monitor and the glass in his array of family photographs — his dead wife and three well-scrubbed children and an eight-by-ten portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. Bob wore polo shirts and penny loafers, and he was handball trim and aggressively good-humored, but there was something attenuated about him, as if his skin was stretched too tight over his skull. He never stopped smiling, but his eyes were watery, which Paul attributed to the loss of his wife. As a temp Paul was off the circuit for office lore, but one morning, while Bob was temporarily away from his cube, Nolene had given Paul the highlights on fast forward. Bob’s wife had vanished, she said, and most folks thought she had simply run off, but Bob referred to her as his “late wife.” “And I reckon he ought to know,” Nolene added darkly. He’d sent his kids to live with his sister in Amarillo—“As far away as they could git from Lamar,” Nolene whispered, “and still be in the state of Texas”—and he filled his time by trying to sell his coworkers on Christian speed-reading courses, Christian real estate schemes, and Christian cleaning products. “He don’t know what ‘no’ means,” warned Nolene. “You ever hear him mention ‘distributed sales,’ run the other way.”

But Paul was a temp and luckily out of range of Bob’s evangelical salesmanship. Still, Bob Wier was one of the few people in the office to note Paul’s presence. Today Bob sat behind his desk ostentatiously speed-reading a book, thumbing aside each page with a crisp snap as his JESUS IS LORD! screen saver flowed endlessly across the bright screen behind him. He glanced up as Paul passed, and his face pulled in two directions as he gave Paul his wide, desperate smile and his mournful eyes drooped to either side. Paul returned the look with a wince, and then brought himself up short again between the uprights of Rick’s doorway.

But once again he had run the gauntlet uselessly, for Rick was on the phone. FLEET MANAGER read the plaque on Rick’s door; the privatization project that Paul was the typist for — whoa, whoa, whoa, make that tech writer —was only one of Rick’s many responsibilities. Rick sat tipped back in his chair, head framed by the brittle branches of the dying tree beyond the window, feet up on the desk displaying the purple bar code price tag still pasted to the sole of one new shoe—$89.95 from Texas Shoe Corral. He was bellowing into the headset of his phone, his eyebrows bouncing up and down. Paul hovered in the doorway, the RFP coiled tightly in both hands. Rick beckoned him in with an abrupt curl of his fingers and then continued his phone conversation, his hands fiddling at the folds of his shirt around his waist.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I hear ya. Uh-huh.” He recrossed his ankles on his desk. “Well, I always say, if you’re gonna change horses, you gotta get ’em all in line. Yessir. Uh-huh.”

Paul shifted from foot to foot and silently practiced his opening. He had decided to take the Socratic approach, presenting the RFP as a visual aid. “Is this not a technical document? Am 1 not the writer of this document? Then is it not the case that I am a technical writer?” Paul unrolled the RFP to make sure he had it right side up.

“Yowzah,” said Rick into the phone, his eyebrows shooting nearly up to his hairline. “The whole enchilada?”

After a minute or two of shuffling in place, Paul backed out of the office and hovered near the network printer, rolling the RFP between his hands again. Nolene gave him a glance and then ignored him, and Paul faded into the gray fabric of the nearby cube walls and listened to the unseen life of the office around him. Paul was still spooked by the eerie invisibility of most of his coworkers. Spread out before him in the weird, undersea light, the gray metal strips on top of the cube partitions outlined, like a map of itself, the labyrinth of right angles in all directions. A few items stuck up above the cube horizon — a row of fat red ring binders across the top of a filing cabinet, a lonely cactus in a green plastic pot, a schoolbus-yellow hard hat, a softball trophy, a pink plastic pig. What Paul could not see from where he stood was another single living human being, yet he heard the clatter of computer keyboards, the rhythmic burr of a ringing phone, the squeaking flex of an office chair. He heard the whirr of the printer and the buzz of the fax machine, the rumble of a drawer sliding out and sliding in. He saw the flash of the copier on the suspended ceiling and heard the beep of its buttons and the whine of its carriage shuttling back and forth. He heard the hard-drive purr of a PC. The clatter of a phone returned to its cradle. A laugh. The thump of a stapler, the snick of a ballpoint, the rattle of paper, the bass crepitation of the mail cart against the carpet. All of it, every rattle, click, and chirrup, without being able to see a soul. It was like being surrounded by ghosts, and Paul knew a thing or two about that.

“Hon?” said a voice in Paul’s ear, and he started violently.

Nolene was leaning out of her cube, her pale fingers not quite touching Paul’s shoulder. “If you want to go back to your cube,” she said, lifting her manicured eyebrows, “I’ll let you know when Rick’s free. You don’t need to keep making the trip.”

Paul cleared his throat and strangled the rolled-up document between his hands. “Uh, thanks,” he choked, and he ran the gauntlet in the reverse direction, past Bob Wier’s miserable smile, the clatter of the Colonel’s keyboard, J.J.’s glowering back. Someone else was in the library now, one of the other secretaries, photocopying. As he turned right down the aisle, he glimpsed the top of Callie’s bobbing head across the office, as she trundled her mail cart up the aisle like Mother Courage. Renee froze in her doorway, clutching her throat in rage as Paul thundered past, muttering an apology. Then left past the empty cube of the dying tech writer — Where had he gone? — and into his own cube.

“Keeping busy?” sang out Olivia from across the aisle, her wrists cocked over her keyboard.

“Yeah,” said Paul, feeling his stomach clench at the sound of her voice. He dropped the RFP, now permanently curled from his grip, and regarded his computer screen. He had been gone long enough for the screen saver to kick in; this, no doubt, had not escaped Olivia’s notice. In his time at TxDoGS Paul had tried out a couple of screen saver messages— The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation or Arbeit macht frei —and had settled on a line from Shakespeare, red, boldfaced, and italic, streaming across a black background:

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space .

“What’s it mean?” Olivia had asked him once, poised at the opening of his cube with her hands clasped and her eyes wide, as if she were about to declaim something.

“Ahhhh,” Paul had stalled, staring at the screen, until at last he said, “It means that whatever your station in life, you can, um, accomplish great things.” He had added, because he knew it would shut her up, “It’s from the Bible.”

“Oh!” Olivia had said.

Now Paul watched the line slide endlessly across his blackened screen, and he pivoted sharply and stalked out of his cube. Were it not that I have bad dreams , he thought, completing the line as he came into the main hallway of the second floor. On the other side of the glass wall, leaning against the rail on the landing of the outdoor stairway, the dying tech writer was having a smoke. Even in the ninety-something heat, the emaciated little man was bundled in a sweater he had buttoned up to the base of his ropy neck. His throat was wrapped in a gauze bandage, and a little plastic tube protruded just below his Adam’s apple. He blocked off the tube with his thumb, lifted his cigarette with his other hand, and inhaled. He blinked his deep-socketed eyes, savoring, then lifted his thumb and blew a stream of smoke out of the tube. Paul shivered at the sight, and, as if to evoke Paul’s horror, the elevator suddenly groaned at the top of its climb. Paul bolted around the corner of the hallway and banged through the men’s room door.