James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Callie’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Really,” she said.

“Yes.” Paul met her eye as best he could. “Probably. Rick’s looking into it.”

“That’s quick,” she said. “I mean, her chair’s still warm, id-nit?” A slow smile spread across Callie’s face.

“What?” he said. He felt his face get hot.

“You’re gonna be a lifer,” she said, with an ironic twist to her lips. “A TexDog.”

Paul laughed bitterly and said, “Fuck you.”

She let her hand trail off his shoulder. “Pretty soon,” she said, “you’re gonna be too good for the mail girl.”

What happened next astonished them both. He seized her tightly around the waist and kissed her hard. She put her palms against his shoulders, but she didn’t push him away, and after a moment, she folded her arms around him and pressed herself as tightly against him as he was pressing himself against her. He could feel her heart pounding, could feel the blood rushing through her arms, could feel the warm slide of muscles in her back. The heat rising off them was more than the sum of their two bodies, and Paul, his eyes squeezed shut, thought he might happily die in this hot darkness, that he might spin away with her into the void and never come back.

They parted, gasping for breath, both of them wide-eyed and flushed.

“Callie,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

She put her fingers to his lips. “You’re having a good day,” she said. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Callie,” he insisted, trying to pull her close again.

“Shh.” She cupped his face in her palms and wiped his tears with her thumbs. “You got the job. Olivia’s gone.” She smiled. “That means you win, right?”

“Right.” Paul sniffled. “I win.”

LATE FRIDAY NIGHT, Callie roused Paul from a doze as they lay postcoitally entangled by the flickering light of the TV.

“So what’s eatin’ you?” she said. Paul blinked up at the TV light on the ceiling and stirred, Callie’s arm across his chest, her warm thigh across his lap.

“What makes you think anything’s eating me?” He massaged the sleep from his eyes with the heels of hands.

“Something is,” Callie said. “I can feel it.”

“Nothing,” insisted Paul.

“Bullshit,” Callie said, and under the sheet she twisted a handful of love handle.

“Ow!” cried Paul.

“I ain’t fixin’ to play this game with you every goddamn night.” She vigorously propped herself on an elbow, making the mattress bounce. “I asked you a question, mister.”

Paul sighed. It was true, he had passed the last four days numbly. He felt as if he had retreated to the center of his own head: He could see out of his eyes, he could hear through his ears, but he reached and touched and moved things just with the tips of his fingers. Smells seemed to come to him distantly; food had no taste. When he got up from his desk and walked the aisles of TxDoGS, or down the hall and out the lobby and across the parking lot to his car, he felt like he was in one of the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds , as if he was some sort of slithery, boneless, alien polyp sitting in the control room of a giant machine, working the blinking controls with big, spatular flippers as the machine strode, whirring and clanking, across a miniature landscape. When he turned his head, he seemed to be looking down on the world from a height, dispassionately scanning the villages and roadways below for a house or a hay wagon or a frantic, antlike refugee he could fry with his heat ray.

“I’m waitin’,” said Callie, who got folksier as she got more demanding. She rapped his sternum with her forefinger.

The only emotions that penetrated the rind of Paul’s numbness were fear and lust. What he feared mainly was that everyone around him — Colonel, J.J., Bob Wier, and Rick and Preston and Nolene, even Callie — would learn his secret, that at the top of the striding, insect-jointed legs and under the gleaming metal carapace of the machine, he was a Martian, a soft, palpitating, defenseless thing, vulnerable to the tiniest terrestrial virus. Charlotte, of course, already knew how vulnerable he was, but she had been strangely dormant all week, limiting herself to fleeting appearances in the shadowy corners of his apartment, dashing along the edges of his peripheral vision.

Callie tilted Paul’s face towards hers with the tips of her fingers. “I’ll count to three if I have to,” she said.

Her unblinking blue eyes seemed both remote and bright to him, as if he were looking up at her from the bottom of a well. Apart from his fear of being found out, the only other emotion that reached Martian Paul in his dark little control room was his piercing desire for Callie, who somehow transmuted his fear and rage — magically, alchemically — to tenderness.

“You’re the only. .,” he began, and Callie sighed ostentatiously and looked away, down the length of their twined legs to the television, which they had been running with the sound off as a love light. Tonight Charlotte was treating them to Born Free .

“Does your TV ever show anything without lions in it?” She drummed her fingers lightly on his chest.

“Sometimes I get tigers,” Paul said, relieved that she’d changed the subject. “Or cheetahs. The odd panther, now and then.”

“And’s that all because of. . what’s her name?”

“Charlotte.”

“Charlotte. Huh.” Callie lowered her head to his shoulder and curled against him. She reached for his wrist and pulled his arm around her. “What do you boys talk about at lunch?” she said, her jaw working against his shoulder. “You and Colonel and them others.”

Paul wondered why Callie wanted to know. In his numbness he remembered the past five days as a blur. Only Monday was still clear to him, when a bored, heavy-set woman in Human Resources had conducted a pro forma interview with him in an empty conference room, asking him questions off a checklist without really listening to the answers. Then she had handed him a paper cup with a plastic lid and sent him to the men’s room, where he squeezed out six ounces of warm pee for the state of Texas. By Tuesday morning, barring a bad result from the drug test, he was a Tech Writer II for the Texas Department of General Services, with a salary of nearly $27,000 a year — the largest sum, Paul was alarmed to realize, he’d ever earned in his life. That same day a gum-smacking techie in a Hawaiian shirt spent two minutes at Paul’s keyboard and gave him access to the World Wide Web, and Callie herself photographed him again for a new badge, one with an electronic stripe, like Olivia’s.

After that, the blur set in. At the moment, as Callie breathed against him, he couldn’t remember whole blocks of the week — what he’d had for breakfast on Tuesday, say, or whether he’d spent Wednesday night at his place or hers.

“It’s up to Colonel,” Paul said. “He decides what we talk about.”

“And the rest of you just sorta sit there and nod?” She shifted her head against his chest.

Paul wasn’t sure what to say about that either. He now permanently occupied the fourth chair at Colonel’s table in the corner of the TxDoGS lunchroom. Indeed, Colonel had started to call Paul’s seat the Paul Trilby Chair in Literary Studies, or, worse, the Olivia Haddock Memorial Chair; Paul was still working up the nerve to tell him to knock it off. The last of his bag lunches — one final sandwich of nameless cheese on no-brand bread — slowly desiccated in one of the office fridges, until (unbeknownst to Paul) someone swiped it. Paul could now afford to buy hot lunches from the cafeteria, and he remembered eating a burger and fries, and a slab of meatloaf with mashed potatoes, and chicken fried steak with cream gravy, and a surprisingly good platter of cheese enchiladas with refried beans and rice. He couldn’t remember which day had been enchiladas and which had been meatloaf, but he did remember Colonel’s greeting the first day he had arrived at the table bearing a tray.