Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

Additional Acclaim for
Kings of Infinite Space

“What makes this novel scarier—and more ambitious—than
The Lecturer’s Tale
and
Publish & Perish
, Hynes’s previous books, is that it isn’t about the academy. It’s about all of us—porters, waitresses, office schlubs and TV anchorwomen, as well as people who read
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
. They, we, are all trying to rise or at least not fall, haunted by the idea that someone—no matter where we are on the totem pole—is richer, more important, hipper, less humiliated than us.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that too.”

—Laura Miller,
Salon.com

“[A] brilliantly twisted new satire . . . a slapstick apocalypse, part H. G. Wells, part
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

—Time Out
New York

“Marvelous. Dark and funny and well paced. If you liked
Publish & Perish
, you’ll get down with this one too.”

—
Maudnewton.com

“It’s one of the funniest, creepiest books to come around in a long while, and perhaps the best novel to be set in Texas to appear in years.”

—Bookslut

“A strange, suspenseful, and splendidly written novel. Think Stephen King writing satire . . . a very funny, very macabre novel, filled with unforgettable characters (the living dead among them).”

—Nancy Pearl,
The Seattle Times

“People really do laugh out loud when reading Hynes novels. . . . Funny, frightening, smart, and sexy! It is absolutely unlike anything you have ever read.”

—Keith Taylor,
Ann Arbor Observer

“Funny, scary, supernatural . . . wanders across genre lines in a delightful and unexpected way. Four stars.”

—
Rawbrick.net

“Part
Office Space
, part
The Office
, and part
The X-Files
. . . Full of feeling and funny as hell.”

—
The Austin Chronicle

“A darkly comic portrait of the job from hell . . . By turns ominous, hilarious, and genuinely scary: Hynes offers a highly original send-up of the most unnatural activity ever conceived by the human mind—work.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Kings of Infinite Space
is at turns frightening and laugh-out-loud funny. Hynes has captured many of the realities of office work while contorting them to nightmarish fantasies. From office politics to bloodthirsty zombies, from classic literary references to a steamy love affair, Hynes erases lines between genres. . . . You will never look at the ceiling tiles above your desk the same way again.”

—
Bookreporter.com

“A hilarious natural send-up of office life . . . readers will be on the edge of their seats.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“In the best tradition of Baum, Carroll, and Orwell, Hynes crafts a mordantly incisive satire.”

—
Booklist

“Hilarious . . . It’s part
Falling Down
. . . part Lars von Trier’s
The Kingdom
. . . part
Temp Slave!
’zine, part erotic love story and part (of course)
The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

—
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A whack job of narrative collating that mixes the black comedy of an office satire with a hot love story with a crazy and gruesome horror tale. That Hynes can blend this all together and come up with a novel touching, sexy, scary, and funny is proof of his wizardry.”

—John Griesemer, author of
Signal & Noise

ALSO BY JAMES HYNES

The Lecturer’s Tale

Publish and Perish

The Wild Colonial Boy

JAMES

HYNES

KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE
. Copyright © 2004 by James Hynes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.picadorusa.com

Picador
^®
is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.

For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.
Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763
Fax: 212-677-7456
E-mail: [email protected]

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hynes, James.

        Kings of infinite space : a novel / by James Hynes.
                 p. cm.

        ISBN 0-312-31966-5

        EAN 978-0312-31966-3

        1. Government contractors—Fiction. 2. Temporary employees—Fiction.
    3. Technical writing—Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Divorced
    men—Fiction. 6. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

    PS3558.Y55K56 2004

    813'.54—dc22                                                                    2003058563

First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press

First Picador Edition: March 2005

D  10  9  8  7  6  5

TO MIKE AND TOM,

A COUPLE OF HARDWORKING GUYS

Not to go on all-Fours;
that
is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink;
that
is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Flesh or Fish;
that
is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw Bark of Trees;
that
is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men;
that
is the Law. Are we not Men?

—H. G. Wells,
The Island of Dr. Moreau

O
NE BRUTALLY HOT SUMMER’S MORNING
, Paul Trilby—ex-husband, temp typist, cat murderer—slouched sweating in his t-shirt on his way to work, waiting behind the wheel of his car for the longest red light in central Texas. He was steeling himself for a confrontation with his boss, screwing up his nerve to ask for a raise, but his present circumstances were conspiring against him. His fourteen-year-old Dodge Colt rattled in place in the middle of the Travis Street Bridge, hemmed in on all sides by bulbous, purring pickup trucks and gleaming sport utility vehicles with fat, black tires. The electric blues and greens of these enormous automobiles reflected the dazzling morning glare through Paul’s cracked and dirty windshield; they radiated shimmering heat through his open window. Waiting for the light, the fingers of his left hand drumming the scalding side of his car, the skin of his forearm baking to leather in the heat, Paul felt less like a man who deserved more out of life than a peasant on a mule cart trapped in the middle of an armored division.

“You’re paying me as a typist,” Paul said aloud, practicing, “but you’re working me as a technical writer.”

In the heat, and in the rumble of idling engines, this sounded especially feeble. Paul sighed and peered ahead, where a homeless man was walking through the waves of heat between the lines of hulking trucks and SUVs, turning slowly from side to side as if he were lost in a parking lot looking for his car. Unlike most panhandlers, he didn’t carry a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard, telegraphing some tale of woe; even more strange, he wore a white, short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie instead of the usual sun-bleached denims and filthy t-shirt. The bluntness of his large, egg-shaped head was exaggerated by a severe buzz cut and a pair of wire-rim glasses, and his body was egg shaped as well—he looked unusually well fed for a homeless guy. Indeed, in his white shirt and polyester slacks, he looked like a caricature of a middle manager from some draw-this-puppy matchbook school of art, one large oval topped by a smaller one. The shirt and tie are a mistake, Paul thought, he needs a sign—
WILL TYPE AND FILE FOR FOOD
. But that cut too close to the bone for Paul; he was only a paycheck away from panhandling himself. And anyway, it wasn’t his job to offer marketing advice to the homeless. I’ve got my own problems, he told himself, and he lifted his gaze through the heat shimmering off the trucks ahead and saw, at the far end of the bridge, the time and temperature endlessly chasing each other across the shadow side of the Bank of Texas Building. It was just barely eight o’clock, and already 85 degrees. In the morning glare the bank’s brass logo along the sunlit side of the building blazed as if it were burning.

“Bot,” said Paul, pronouncing the bank’s acronym aloud. “Bee. Oh. Tee.” Sweat trickled down his breastbone. Both front windows of his unair-conditioned Colt were rolled down, in the unlikely event of a breeze, and his own dress shirt was tossed on the passenger seat so that he wouldn’t sweat through it on the drive to work. A racket like someone violently battering a cookie sheet came from the undercarriage of his unevenly idling
car and was reflected back at him by the enormous, neon blue Trooper to his left.

This is not the climate for ambition, Paul thought, and at the edge of his consciousness flickered a retort from his former, more politically engaged persona as a university professor: that this kind of thinking was prejudiced and possibly even racist. Old buzzwords flickered dialectically at the back of his brain like heat lightning along the horizon—colonial/postcolonial; First World/Third World; North/South—but Paul was only barely aware of them. During this moment of distraction, each of the red numerals streaming across the bank at the end of the bridge had grown by one. Now it was 86 degrees and 8:01, and Paul was late for work.

The egg-shaped man had come closer, only a couple of vehicles away. All the other drivers on the bridge sat high up behind their tinted windows, ignoring the man in air-conditioned comfort. Paul had come to think of these more affluent drivers as “the truckoisie,” middle-class state employees who faced, at worst, a forty-minute, stop-and-start commute every morning, but who did it in vehicles capable of fording a jungle stream or hauling half a ton of manure. These vehicles had names that bespoke Spartan virtues, a semimilitary asceticism—Explorer and Pathfinder and Samurai—but within, even in the cabs of the pickup trucks, the vehicles were as comfy as suburban living rooms, where the truckoisie drank from huge plastic flagons of specialty coffee, talked on their cell phones, and listened to hyperventilating, drive time DJs on the radio or best-selling self-help books on tape. Paul’s own tape player had long since choked to death on a cassette of Jan and Dean’s greatest hits, stuck at last on the screeching tires of “Dead Man’s Curve,” and the FM band on his radio no longer worked, leaving him with only the shrill democracy of AM—jammin’ oldies, oompah Tejano accordion music, and Dr. Laura. At this moment he waited with the radio off, his car noisily juddering itself to pieces beneath him, and he sat smelling exhaust, his own sweat, and the nitrous aroma of bat shit rising off the sluggish green river below.