James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

“Hey, Paul!” Rick called out from the other side of the modesty barrier.

“Yeah,” said Paul from the urinal. From habit, he kept an eye on the ceiling panel over his head.

“Y’all took a look at Olivia’s edits, right?”

“Sure.” Paul zipped up and flushed the urinal with his elbow.

In front of the mirror Rick was still carefully trawling his comb through his hair. “We all set for the big pow-wow this morning?”

“Yes,” said Paul, washing his hands.

Rick stepped back from the mirror, turned his head and smiled, turned his head the other way and smiled. “Faaaan tas tic!” he said, and he slipped the comb into his back pocket and swung out the door, letting it bang behind him.

“Fantastic,” murmured Paul. He leaned heavily on the counter and surveyed his face in the mirror for a moment. Then he straightened, wiped his hands, and banged out the door. Rounding the corner into the elevator lobby, he ran straight into Boy G.

“Jesus Christ!” cried Paul, jumping back.

The homeless man stood at the recycling box, his fat, bloodless fingers curled under the lid. He was wearing the same clothes he always wore — trousers, baggy in the seat, a threadbare white shirt with a breast pocket full of mismatched pens, his astronomical tie, wire rims with bulbous lenses. He still sported his smudgy name badge with its bold block printing. His milky scalp gleamed under the fluorescent lights. For the first time Paul noticed his shoes, lace-up black Oxfords scuffed along the sides and gleaming with wet.

“Am I still dreaming?” Paul said out loud. He glanced over his shoulder and then through the door into the twilight of cubeland. “Are you real?” he gasped.

Boy G slowly turned his bug-eyed stare in Paul’s direction. “Boy G’s no fool,” he said, in his whispery undertone.

Paul felt a clammy chill that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning, and he edged slowly around the homeless man. Boy G rotated slowly in place to follow him.

“Who are you?” Paul said.

“Myself,” breathed Boy G.

Paul edged closer to the door. “What are you?” he said.

“Myself,” said Boy G. “Can you say the same?”

There was a long, mournful, hydraulic groan as the elevator arrived at the second floor. Boy G hissed and flashed his savage teeth, then dashed round the corner. Paul was afraid to move until he heard the thump of the men’s room door, and then he leaped forward himself, nearly bowling over Renee as she stepped out of the elevator. She shrieked and leaped back, but by then Paul had rounded the corner. He stiff-armed the men’s room door and held it open, his muscles trembling. In the glare of the lights Paul saw no one, only his own reflection in the mirror, wild-eyed and panting, but in the far corner, over the farthest stall, the one where Paul occasionally caught a nap in the morning, he saw something black — the scuffed heel, perhaps, of a lace-up black Oxford — rising into a gap in the ceiling, and then the ceiling tile scraping back into its frame. Then he heard a long, slow creaking as something large moved above the ceiling towards the door.

Paul jumped back into the hall and let the door thump shut. He hustled round the corner into cubeland and into his own aisle. His heart pounded, and his hands shook. Please be at your desk, Preston, he prayed, please please please be at your desk. He halted for a moment just outside the doorway of his cube and lifted his eyes to the ceiling, making an anxious circuit of the ceiling tiles around his cube. Nothing moved or bulged or creaked. He held his breath and listened. Nothing.

He exhaled and stepped into his cube and froze. On the desk next to the keyboard, squarely at the center of the pool of light from his desk lamp, sat the Tiffany’s box, wilted and warped and stained with river water.

“WHY ISN’T HE WRITING ALL THIS DOWN?” said Olivia, who was seated to the left of Rick.

“Why isn’t who writing what down?” said Rick, from the head of the table.

“Why isn’t Paul writing down what everyone is saying?” Olivia twirled a pencil between her fingers as skillfully as a majorette.

To the right of Rick, Paul kept his gaze on the glowing screen of the laptop. “I’m waiting for the consensus,” he muttered.

“For the what?” said J.J., out of the twilight somewhere to Paul’s right. Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier all sat on Paul’s side of the table, while Olivia sat all by herself on the other side.

“What the professor’s trying to say,” said Colonel, “is that he’s waiting for us’n’s to come to an agreement on how the paragraph should read.”

“It’s not for him to decide how the paragraph should read,” said Olivia. In the glow from the screen at the far end of the room, her face floated as pale as ectoplasm.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” muttered Paul.

“That’s not what he’s saying, Olivia,” said Colonel. He balanced his laser pointer between his fingers, itching for a chance to switch it on.

“I think there should be a record of everyone’s ideas as we go along,” said Olivia. “Of who proposed what.”

There was a general sigh from the men down the length of the table, and Colonel said, “With all due respect, Olivia, what we need is a firm consensus on the finished document, not a record of the process . Who cares who says what?” He glanced either way down the table. “Am I right, gentlemen?”

“Fuckin’ A,” mumbled J.J.

“Amen,” breathed Bob Wier.

“Hm,” said Rick, gazing at the backs of his hands.

“The professor here,” said Colonel, “is a tech writer, not a stenographer.”

Paul hunched his shoulders and avoided meeting Olivia’s eyes, but even so her gaze drilled through Paul’s forehead and out the back of his skull.

“And anyway,” Colonel continued, “I don’t think he can type that fast.”

The men laughed, and Olivia sighed. Once again she beat a tactical retreat on this subject. It was not the first time she had brought it up, but it was the first time since lunch. She laid her pencil against the tabletop with a distinct click and folded her hands over it, as if sheathing her weapon. Across the table J.J. slumped in his seat, his head propped in one hand, and Bob Wier shifted restlessly, both of them silvered by the glow from paragraph 4.3.3 of section 4.3, “Parts, Supplies, and Fluids”:

4.3.3 The Vendor shall be responsible for damage and costs caused by the use of substandard or non-OEM parts, supplies, or fluids.

“I thought. .,” Bob began, stabbing the air meekly with his hand.

“Yessir!” barked Rick. A vent in the rear of the projector threw a hot sliver of glare back across the tip of Rick’s nose and the bulge of his cheekbones. “Speak up there, Bob!”

“I mean,” Bob Wier went on, jerking his hand back, “what was wrong with the RFP the way it was?”

“Yeah,” said J.J.

Olivia gasped in exasperation and looked beseechingly at Rick. Rick, however, merely puffed out his cheeks and made popping noises with his lips. All day Rick had been spiritually hors de combat, staring into space or fussing with his tie while Olivia and Colonel conducted a light-saber duel in the dark over the conference table. Olivia gestured with her pencil, and Colonel parried with his laser pointer, bouncing the little red dot all over the screen. Olivia pushed to tear out every paragraph and start over, and Colonel dug in his heels as if each passage were scripture. Rick had stepped in to adjudicate only two or three times during the morning, and since lunch he had been mostly silent, letting the battle wash back and forth across the table before him.