James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Still, even these lurid old potboilers had the power to alarm. Paul had reached the penultimate chapter of The Time Machine , where the Time Traveller rockets forward thousands of years into a future of bleak seashores and giant crabs and a waning sun. As Paul sucked down the last warm mouthful of Coke, he was blindsided by a sentence: “I cannot convey the sense of the abominable desolation that hung over the world.” This triggered an emotional chain reaction in Paul that left him trembling by the time he reached the end of the next page. The Traveller’s every leap forward in time only made Paul’s horror worse. “Silent?” he read. “It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives — all that was over.” Paul felt his skin tighten as he sat in the unnatural twilight of his cube; the lunchtime silence all around buzzed in his ears. All the ghostly clattering and clicking and chattering Paul heard when the office was at full throttle was gone, and he half entertained the notion that he was the only one left alive in the building. Then he read Wells’s description of the Traveller’s furthest south into the future, with its giant, dying sun and its blood-red sea and some hideous, tentacled thing on the beach “hopping fitfully about,” and the Traveller himself on the verge of fainting, with his “terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight,” and Paul bolted straight up out of his squealing chair, trembling like a child.

“So where is he?” he demanded a moment later in the doorway of Rick’s office, his hands in his pockets so no one would see them shake. Rick took his lunch at eleven, which meant that he was often in his office while everyone else was out to lunch. But instead Paul discovered Nolene and a couple of other secretaries, Lorilei and Tracy, seated at the little round table in the corner of Rick’s office watching Days of Our Lives on the portable TV Rick used to review videos from the field. All three women goggled at the screen, where some sort of fight was taking place, the salads in plastic shells before them momentarily ignored.

“Excuse me?” Paul said again over the shouting and thumping from the television. He was disturbed to hear the tremor in his voice.

Nolene sharply raised her index finger and brandished the underside of a long fingernail at Paul, who knew better than to speak again. A moment later a gunshot and a final thump erupted from the TV, and all three women flinched.

“Oh. My. God,” breathed Lorilei.

“Damn,” said Tracy, clenching her fists. “I knew it was him.”

“Sumbitch had it coming,” said Nolene grimly, and she theatrically twisted her hand in the air and pointed with her long nail out the window. Paul lifted himself on tiptoe and saw Rick sitting alone on the bench underneath the live oak in the courtyard.

“Thank you,” he muttered, and he bolted out of the office, around the corner past Nolene’s cube, and through the exit door. Pushing into the blazing Texas heat was like wading into molasses, and Paul paused to grip the railing of the little walkway that ran across the entrance to the courtyard. Down below Rick slouched on the wooden bench with his fingers laced over his belly and his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. The price tag on his shoe was plainly visible; Rick looked as if he were on sale. Paul let go of the railing and trotted down the stairs to the courtyard. He was sweating already.

“Rick, could I talk to you for a second?” He kicked through the brittle leaves on the deck; his feet thumped against the redwood.

“In’t this your lunchtime?” Rick squinted up through the bare, crooked branches at the sky above the courtyard.

“Yes, but—” Paul’s t-shirt was already stuck to his back.

“You’re so serious this morning,” Rick said, still without looking at him. “Come take a look at that sky.”

“Sorry?”

Rick patted the bench beside him. “Have a seat, Paul. Let’s just take a moment.”

Paul glanced at the blank amber gaze of the wide windows all around him, then he slowly lowered himself onto the bench next to Rick.

“Now just set and take a look at that sky,” said Rick. “In’t that a beauty?”

Paul sat stiffly on the bench. The heat was reflected off the windows and the deck; it beat down from the sky. He felt sweat trickling along his sideburns and down the back of his neck. Still, he lifted his eyes up through the dying branches of the oak. Even if Nolene hadn’t told him about the oak wilt, Paul would have noticed that something was wrong with the tree; most of its leaves had turned a mottled brown and fallen off. Its branches seemed contorted as if in pain. Every week, a Hispanic guy with a leaf blower strapped to his back came and blasted away the dead leaves; even in the depths of his cube, Paul could hear the whine of the machine. Beyond the tree, beyond the sharp roofline of the building, there was nothing remotely attractive about the sky, which was the whitish glare of high summer in Texas, with a blazing blot of sun. Paul blinked up through the branches painfully, grateful only that the sheer oppressive weight of the heat had stopped his trembling. What the hell am I looking at? he wanted to say.

The moment extended itself almost beyond Paul’s endurance. He glanced sidelong at Rick. Not only was his boss looking up at the sky with the wide-eyed wonder of a child at a planetarium — his kinetic eyebrows at rest for once — but there wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. He could have been sitting in a snow bank.

I can’t stand it, thought Paul. He could feel his hands begin to shake again.

“Welp,” barked Rick, slapping his thighs and sitting upright, folding himself nearly in two, “sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Back to work.”

He shot to his feet and started across the deck through the litter of dead leaves.

“Um, Rick!” cried Paul, heaving up from the bench through the viscid air. “I need—”

Rick stopped and pivoted on the ball of his foot, grinding that indestructible price tag against the redwood planking. His eyebrows shot up.

“—a raise?” Paul said, sounding much less certain about it than he wanted to.

Rick’s eyebrows shot up even higher. It’s now or never, Paul thought, I’ll never work up the nerve again.

“It’s just that the temp agency sent me here as a typist, okay?” He heard his voice rising in pitch the way his students’ used to when they were pleading with him about their grades, and it disgusted him. “But you’ve been working me as a tech writer? And I think. . well, it’s just. . I was wondering. .”

That’s it, I’ve blown it again, he thought. I should have kept my big mouth shut. He’s going to fire me and get another temp from the agency. Fucked again.

“Way-ul, you’re right, goddammit.” Rick turned and started up the steps. “Let’s go in and work it out with the personnel honchos. But when you’re right, you’re right.”

“I’m sorry?” Paul could scarcely breathe.

“I say, you’re right , son.” Rick looked down from the walkway. “I’ll have to clear it with Eli, but that won’t be a problem.”

“Uh. . great!” Paul realized he was standing with his palm on top of his head, and he snatched it off.

“Don’t look so dang surprised, Paul. You been doing a terrific job, and you know what the man says: Good things come to them that toot their own horn. Now let’s go in and get Nolene started on the paperwork.”

Suddenly the air seemed cooler, and the tree overhead less decayed. The sun shone with a mellower light. It was as if the Time Traveller had found the saddle again on the Time Machine, and the sky was wheeling backwards, away from the awful silence and the dying sun and the flopping thing on the beach, back towards the good life in his comfortable study centuries before. Paul found his feet at last and dashed up the stairs after Rick, and Rick held the door for him as they went in.