James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

“I don’t see what the difficulty is,” she sang, as Paul lowered himself gingerly into his squeaking seat. “I read the contract to mean that you work until the job is done.”

From the other side of the partition came an extra long, extra loud wheeze from the dying tech writer.

“That’s not how it works,” he said in a ragged, froggy rumble that was exhausting to listen to no matter how many times Paul heard it. The tech writer drew an even longer breath through his tube. “My agent books me for a fixed period of time.” Another long, whistling breath. “If I work past that time, I’m not being paid.”

The next few words dropped below Paul’s hearing as the tech writer ran out of breath. Paul had been listening to this argument for a week now, in halting installments, as Olivia posed in the dying tech writer’s doorway and delivered ultimatums with a sadism barely disguised as professionalism, and the dying tech writer responded in ragged gusts of hard-won air. After a bloodbath of downsizing several years ago, many workers in the General Services Division had been asked to take on extra responsibilities beyond their expertise in purchasing. Olivia had been tasked with the design and implementation of an intranet Web site where TxDoGS offices statewide could order their own office supplies; this site would automatically monitor supply usage and regulate the inventory, even to the extent of automatically generating bids from vendors when necessary. The dying tech writer had been hired as a freelance Web designer to create the page. In other words, on top of keeping the Texas Department of General Services in highlighters, manila folders, and jam-free printer paper, Olivia was also pursuing her own redundancy with kamikaze determination. If the project worked the way it was supposed to, she’d be out of a job.

“As I understand it,” Olivia continued in her steel magnolia singsong, “you don’t receive your final paycheck until I’m satisfied with the work. And I certainly can’t call unfinished work satisfactory .”

Another desperate, dying wheeze. “It is finished,” said the tech writer.

“Not until it’s tested.”

Paul could feel the grinding of Olivia’s joined palms like a pressure on his heart.

“You hired me to write it.” Inhale . “Beta testing is not my job.”

“But until it’s beta tested, it’s not finished , and you haven’t done your job.”

They went on, but Paul was already preoccupied with his own racing thoughts. First, Olivia’s bound to win, if only because she can breathe. Next, my life could be worse — I could be working for Olivia. Then, if the state legislature has its way, someday we’ll all be temps — except for La Cucaracha, who’ll always find a way to survive. And, tech writers have agents? Like actors and authors? Even if it does mean working for Olivia Haddock, this guy must make, what, twenty, twenty-five bucks an hour? I have to talk to Rick, Paul decided. Today.

“Do what you have to,” Olivia said, “but don’t forget? You don’t get that last paycheck until I sign off on it.”

Olivia marched past Paul’s door and into her own cube. Paul stared unseeing at his computer screen, trying to gauge if the rhythmic whine of the tech writer’s breathing was more agitated than usual. There was no way to tell.

On the dot of noon, Paul took a book out of the cabinet over his desk and went downstairs to the hall outside the lunchroom, where he retrieved his bag lunch and bought a Coke from one of the machines. A line snaked out the door of the cafeteria, and the smell of deep-fried potatoes and grilling hamburgers was almost visible, like a haze. Paul edged past the crowd around the microwaves — men reheating last night’s cheese enchiladas, women heating up their lo-cal frozen lunches — and from the archway of the dining room, at the edge of its busy roar, he looked for a small table where he might sit by himself and read. The only empty table was the one next to the Colonel’s in the far corner of the room, between two wide expanses of amber-tinted window overlooking the river. The Colonel sat at this same table every day, with his back to the corner, where he could command the widest field of fire. His wife was Japanese, and today, as always, the Colonel used his chopsticks to eat the marvelously compact lunch she’d prepared him — rice, sushi, seaweed — out of a beautiful, enameled black box, his only purchase a steaming Styrofoam cup trailing the string of a tea bag. To the Colonel’s left, J.J. glowered over his hamburger, fries, and jumbo soda the way he glowered at his computer screen, while on the Colonel’s right, Bob Wier crunched carrot sticks out of a Tupperware tub, his mournful eyes as bright as polished buttons. Across from the Colonel was an empty seat where no one ever sat, and which no one even dared borrow for another table.

Although the three men were Paul’s coworkers on the outsourcing project, they had never invited him to lunch with them, and he had never attempted to sit in the empty chair. One time Paul had taken the table next to theirs, reading his book and eating his sandwich and pretending not to listen to their conversation. He hoped to convey that he was ignoring them, rather than being ignored by them, but he never really succeeded and ended up instead staring sightlessly at the same page for twenty minutes while the Colonel held forth with the overbearing certainty of the autodidact.

“Certainly the West owes a great deal to the Jews,” he had been saying that day. “Take the ‘Judeo’ out of ‘Judeo-Chrisrian,’ and you have a mighty thin soup indeed.”

“Amen.” Bob Wier nodded thoughtfully.

“And there is no gainsaying that they are mighty warriors,” rasped the Colonel. “The Six Day War. Entebbe. And hell, let’s not forget the Masada.”

“ ‘The roar of battle will rise against your people,’ ” intoned Bob Wier, “ ‘so that all your fortresses will be devastated.’ Hosea ten, verse fourteen.”

“But there’s no denying,” continued the Colonel, “that certain nineteenth-century German Jews have a good deal to answer for. I refer, of course, to that unholy ménage à trois of relativistic values, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.”

“Don’t forget Darwin,” Bob Wier said.

“Ménage à what?” J.J. paused in his Sherman’s March across his burger to glare at the Colonel.

“Ménage à trois,” said the Colonel, then, to Bob Wier, “Darwin wasn’t a Jew, Reverend.”

“He wasn’t?”

“C of E,” said the Colonel. “Bit of a freethinker, actually.”

“Ménage à twat?” J.J. widened his eyes.

“J.J., c’mon.” Bob Wier’s cheeks burned bright red.

“ Twa ” enunciated the Colonel. “Ta- wa .”

“That’s a three-way, innit?” J.J. said.

The Colonel manufactured an avuncular laugh. “Perhaps I should have said ‘troika,’ my lubricious friend.”

“Guys, please.” The heat colored Bob Wier’s temples and forehead.

By now Paul’s ears had been burning. I know what a ménage à trois is, he’d thought. And Darwin was a theist. This daily roundtable of the Colonel’s was the closest thing at TxDoGS to intellectual intercourse, and Paul had been a little offended that he hadn’t been asked to join in. Of course, if the Colonel had invited him to take the empty chair, he’d have declined — nothing irritated Paul like some blowhard with no trace of irony — but still. The Colonel probably didn’t have the nerve to ask a real intellectual to sit at their table.

So today Paul turned on his heel, squeezed past the microwave crowd, edged through the cafeteria line, and went back upstairs to eat his lunch in his cube. Olivia was in the crowd downstairs, and the dying tech writer, thank God, disappeared who knew where during lunch. As he sat at his desk munching a dry cheese sandwich and store-brand chips from a store-brand baggie, he read the last couple of chapters of The Time Machine from a fat, battered old Dover book, Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells . Paul had long since been forced by circumstances to sell off his library, and now he could only afford to buy books at the Friends of the Library shop at the Lamar Public Library, where hardcovers sold for a dollar and paperbacks for fifty cents. But what the hell, he told himself, I’m only reading for diversion these days, like any other working stiff plowing through the latest Grisham or Tom Clancy. H. G. Wells was easy to read, and Paul enjoyed the author’s gleeful late-Victorian sense of apocalypse, as Wells eagerly overturned the dominant culture with Martians, invisible men, and beasts surgically altered into consciousness. In The Time Machine Wells seemed to imply that the end of the world would come from sheer inanition, with the Eloi as the ne plus ultra of slackers. Fighting to stay awake in his cube every midmorning and midafternoon, Paul understood inanition in his marrow.