Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (25 page)

“ ’Cause with every guy I ever been with, sooner or later I find out what the worst thing they ever done is. And usually it’s what they done to me.” She turned to him. “I figured this time I’d get it out of the way first thing. Then maybe we could work our way up from there.”

“Well, now you know.” Paul yanked on the door latch, but Callie leaned down the seat and caught his arm.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “Now we know the worst about each other.”

Not quite, Paul thought. He still hadn’t told her about Charlotte’s ghost.

“Now I know two things about you,” Callie said. “One is, I got to watch you like a hawk around other women, but what else is new?”

“What’s the other thing?”

“That there’s at least one way I don’t have to worry about you hurtin’ me.”

“What’s that?” His arm was still burning.

“I don’t have a cat,” Callie said, and she kissed him.

Paul’s head was spinning as he fumbled for his keys at the door of his apartment. Behind him Callie’s truck banged over the loose grate at the center of the parking lot, then grumbled out onto the road. As he fitted his key into the lock and opened the door, he heard her roaring away, heard the stuttering whine of each gearshift—first, second, third—and he imagined the marvelous flexion of her gear-shifting arm. Then he sort of floated into his apartment, amazed to think that at the end of this long, impossible, humiliating day, he had had ecstatic, sweaty sex under the stars in the bed of a pickup truck with a passionate girl; that he’d told her the worst thing he’d ever done (more or less); and that, miraculously, the girl was still speaking to him afterwards. He felt more relief than joy, it was true, but as he felt for the light switch inside the door, he was certain that nothing could make this day any stranger.

Certain, that was, until he turned on the light. Someone had been in his apartment and tidied it up. Paul was not the most fastidious person in the world, and it was instantly obvious that the small-scale chaos of his little flat had been put in some sort of order. The chair from his dining table, which he had set in the middle of the floor for Callie, had been returned to the table. The table itself was clean and uncluttered, the thrift shop salt-and-pepper shakers set to the side, the little stack of paper napkins wedged between them. His secondhand dishes—the battered pot he’d boiled the hot dogs in, and his purple plastic plate—had been washed and set to dry in his dish drainer. Paul saw all this instantly, and as he closed the door behind him and edged warily into the apartment, he saw that the floor of his kitchenette had been swept, that his little counter was clean of
crumbs and stains, and that the enameled top of his dinky little three-burner stove had been scrubbed spotless.

“Who’s here?” Paul whispered, afraid to move any deeper into his own room. “Mrs. Prettyman, are you in here?”

But the apartment was too small for anyone to hide in. He peered through his bathroom door and saw that the tub gleamed a little brighter, and his towel hung a little straighter.

“Charlotte?” he said, his voice beginning to tremble. “Did you do this?”

But Charlotte was nowhere to be seen, having vanished into the ether, or wherever ghost cats went. He turned slowly away from the kitchenette, as if afraid to turn his back on his newly gleaming stove and countertop, and saw that his bed was still pulled out but that someone had tucked the sheets and blanket in all around, military style, tight enough to bounce a quarter. The pillow had been smoothed flat and centered at the head of the bed.

And then, as Paul’s pulse pounded in his ears, he saw, neatly centered on the bed, resting lightly on the taut drumhead of his blanket, the little blue Tiffany’s box that he had discarded that afternoon at work, the Outstanding Stand-in award that he had jammed in among the crushed and sticky cans in the recycling box. It sat on the middle of his bed, almost glowing, as if at the center of a little spotlight.

“Oh boy,” Paul said, to no one in particular.

A
FTER A FITFUL NIGHT
, miraculously uninterrupted by Charlotte, Paul gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed at 6:30. As a result of last night’s energetic lovemaking, he ached in muscles he hadn’t known he had, so he showered longer than usual, letting the hot water soak into his thighs and his shoulders. As he shaved he was pleased to find a bright purple hickey just above his left nipple, and he took a moment in the glare of the overhead light to twist this way and that in the mirror, looking for another. But his anxiety crept up on him again as he dressed, so, as he prepared his breakfast, he made some executive decisions about the carnival ride of the previous day. His graduate training in literary theory had taught him that there was no one, indisputable interpretation of any situation. There is no truth; all reality—Paul reminded himself as he poked at his scrambled eggs with his plastic spatula—is linguistic. So there was no reason to accept the hegemonic construction of yesterday’s events.

In other words, Paul decided, I do not work for Olivia Haddock,
and this morning I’m going to make that fact clear to that spineless little milquetoast Rick. That’s number one. Next, Paul decided, the recycling box is a recycling box, not the portal to some bottomless, infernal pit. I was upset, he thought, my mind was playing tricks on me. Just as it was—decision number three—when I thought I saw the Colonel give a thumbs-up to Boy G and the others on the bridge. For obvious reasons—thank you, Charlotte—I am prone to seeing the bizarre around every corner.

Paul sloshed the eggs, still runny, onto his purple plate, and retrieved the salsa from the dank recesses of his fridge. Number four: no more lunches with the Colonel and his stooges. I don’t know what they want from me, and I certainly don’t want anything from them. He doused the eggs liberally with salsa, then hesitated with a forkful halfway to his lips. What number am I up to? he wondered, then decided, I tidied up my own apartment last night, before Callie showed up. I just don’t remember doing it. And finally, I stuck the Tiffany’s box in my pocket without thinking about it, brought it home myself, and left it on the bed. ‘Nuff said. The end.

After breakfast, Paul put the Tiffany’s box into his lunch bag with his cheese sandwich and his little baggie of pickles. As he carried it out to his car in the early morning heat, he was intercepted by Mrs. Prettyman, who came teetering down the parking lot in her high heels as if walking on tiptoe. “Oh, Mr. Trilby!” she sang.

Paul didn’t care if she saw him roll his eyes. “Good morning, Mrs. Prettyman.” He opened his creaking door and slung his lunch onto the passenger seat.

“The owner would like to know,” said Mrs. Prettyman as she clicked around the rear of Paul’s car, “if you have a roommate.”

Paul slouched in the open door of his car with his hand on the roof, a very Snopesish pose.

“Because the terms of the lease explicitly state,” she went on, with her hand at her throat, “that each extra occupant costs an extra one hundred dollars a month.”

Paul had never signed a lease; he had never ever seen one. “I don’t have a roommate,” he said. Mrs. Prettyman must have seen Callie last night, but he didn’t know what to call her in front of his prying landlady. Yes, she was his squeeze, his inamorata, but she certainly wasn’t his roommate. “A friend of mine came by last night,” he said, “but she doesn’t live with me.”

“I don’t mean the young lady in the pickup truck,” Mrs. Prettyman said with an insinuating intonation. Did this woman do nothing but peer through her curtains? “I meant the pale gentleman.”

“The pale gentleman?” Even in the morning heat, Paul felt a chill.

“Well, I don’t know his
name.”
Mrs. Prettyman rubbed her clavicle with her long, nicotine-stained middle finger. “I just noticed him fiddling with the grate.”

“The grate? What grate?”

“The storm sewer?” chirped Mrs. Prettyman helpfully. “In the middle of the parking lot?” She half turned, and Paul lifted himself on his toes to peer at the square, rusty grate behind her.

“What do you mean, fiddling with it?”

“Well, truly,
I
don’t know,” his landlady said, leveling her gaze at him. “But he was fiddling with it, then he stood up and went into your apartment. So I figured
surely
he must be a friend of yours.”

“How did he get in?” Paul felt chilled all over. What did she mean by “pale gentleman”?

“Honey, you must have given him a key because I surely did not.”

Paul glanced back at his door. He was positive he had locked it when he left with Callie.

“Then I happened to look up from my program about, oh, twenty minutes later?” sang Mrs. Prettyman. “And out he come and commenced to fiddling with the grate again.”

Paul swallowed. “Where did he go?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“Well.” Mrs. Prettyman canted her hip. “I got up to come out and have a word with him—I figured the owner would like to know?—but by time I got to the door, he was gone.”

Paul glanced along the balcony across the parking lot. “Did anybody else see him?” He wondered if he could pluck up the nerve to question his hard-bitten neighbors.

Mrs. Prettyman narrowed her gaze. “So I can tell the owner that you do not know this man?”

“No, I don’t know him.”

Mrs. Prettyman edged closer to Paul, and for the first and last time, she seemed to take pity on him. “Are you missing anything? Did he take anything?”

Paul warded her off with a gesture. This was not what he wanted to hear; this was not the construction he wanted to impose on the events of the previous evening. He had intervened against the hegemonic discourse—there had been no pale gentleman in my apartment bearing Tiffany’s boxes, tidying up. Because if there
had
been, then Paul’s own construction of the day before, his brave little house of cards, would come tumbling down, and he would have to reckon with the Colonel signaling the men on the bridge, with the groaning void below the recycling box, with the froggish croak of Dennis the Dying Tech Writer whispering,
“They’re up there. . . .”

“Nothing was taken,” Paul insisted.

Mrs. Prettyman dropped her voice to a whisper. “Because I
do not
want to have the police out here. Not if I don’t have to.” The moment of pity was over; this sounded like a warning.

Paul stepped around her and walked back to his apartment door and gave the knob a good, hard twist. “See?” he said. “Locked up tight.” Maybe she hadn’t seen anything, he wanted to tell her. Maybe she ought to lay off the gin and tonics after dinner, or whatever it was that floated Mrs. Prettyman’s boat. Maybe, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, she’d tidied up his apartment herself and was concocting a story to cover her behavior. But if that was the case, why did she have to mention that the gentleman she saw was
pale?
It certainly hadn’t been
Mrs. Prettyman who had left the Tiffany’s box glowing balefully in the middle of his bed.

He edged past her again and got into his car. “I have to go to work,” he said, starting the car.

Mrs. Prettyman stepped back and raised her voice over the tin can rattle of the Colt. “Is there something the owner needs to know?” she said as Paul backed out. “You don’t want to be keeping anything from the owner.”

Paul threw her a nervous little wave and pulled away. Fifteen minutes later he was waiting in traffic in the middle of the Travis Street Bridge, peering anxiously between the looming SUVs and back through his rearview and side mirrors looking for Boy G. His pulse fluttered; his mouth was dry. But the pale, homeless man was nowhere to be seen, nor were any of his pale compatriots, and Paul rattled across the bridge and into the TxDoGS lot. He found a space against the river embankment and rolled up his windows and locked the car. Then he climbed the embankment and descended the other side nearly to the river. The sky was still a delicate blue—the sun had not yet bleached it white—and the slanting light picked out the bright yellow jerseys of a pair of rowers on the river, sculling in rhythm across the water like a pair of long-legged insects. Paul dug in his lunch bag and brought out the sharp-edged square of the Tiffany’s box. He hefted it for a moment. Then, as the rowers passed under the bridge, he hurled it as hard as he could out over the river. It sailed, tumbling, over the humped back of the storm drain culvert and landed far enough out in the water that Paul could not hear a splash. The morning light caught a little sparkling crown of water, but to Paul’s dismay, the box did not sink. Instead it wobbled slowly away on the greenish current, bobbing in the rounded swell thrown up by the two rowers. He watched it for a moment, hoping it would go under, but finally he furled his lunch bag shut and went inside.

A
S PAUL PASSED THROUGH THE MAIN LOBBY
, Preston beckoned him. “You got a minute?” he said.

“I have a badge, remember?” Paul plucked the new ID out of his pocket. “I don’t have to sign in anymore.”

“Just take a second,” Preston said, beckoning again.

Paul stopped but kept his distance. “I’m kinda late . . .”

Preston glanced to either side. “I’m sort of conducting my own investigation of”—he lowered his voice—“recent events.” He beckoned Paul one more time and leaned over the desk. “You ever see anything weird, you’d tell me, right?”

Paul started to edge away again. He really did not want to talk about this. “Preston,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder, “I really have to get to work.”

Preston started to say something else, but suddenly he stood back from the counter and stiffened.

“Gentlemen,” boomed the Colonel. He sailed gut first, spine erect, across the lobby between Preston and Paul. Preston’s leathery face turned red, and he picked up a clipboard and studied
it hard. Paul caught the Colonel’s slipstream but not too close.

He stashed his lunch and took the stairs to the second floor. His stomach knotted as he passed the elevator and the recycling box and came into the subterranean light of cubeland. Who knew what horrors awaited him? Dennis the Dying Tech Writer sprawled in Paul’s chair, gray skinned and grinning like a skull? Boy G crouched in a corner of Paul’s cube, his eyes glowing green like Gollum’s out of the shadows? Or Charlotte herself, sprawled like the Cheshire cat across the top of Paul’s monitor, her switching tail strobing across Paul’s screen? Or perhaps all three—Paul’s skin tightened at the thought—hunched around his monitor and turning slowly, in eerie unison, to grin at him as he came through the door. . . .