Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read Online Free

elbows, as creased as an elephant’s knees. To his astonishment, Nolene actually stuck her pink, glistening tongue out at Olivia’s retreating backside. Then she swiveled massively in Paul’s direction, lifted her plucked eyebrows, and, only because he happened to be standing there, delivered a dismissively annotated rendition of Olivia Haddock’s résumé: homecoming queen at Chester W. Nimitz High School in Irving, Texas—big whoop. Head of a championship cheerleadingteam at SMU—as if I give a shit. Twenty-year veteran of a major energy corporation in Houston—like she’s
better
than anybody else! Which transferred her to Lamar and then abruptly downsized her—
serves her right!
Started at the bottom again at TxDoGS as a
temp
—“The wretched of the earth,” contributed Paul, under his breath—worked her way onto the permanent staff as a purchaser, and because certain
men
around here, and I’m not naming names, like to watch her
twitching cheerleader ass
, she survived the statewide job cuts in the department five years ago when men with
ten times
her seniority were out on the street after
twenty years. Can you believe it?
    “You know what we call her?” Nolene dropped her voice even lower. “La Cucaracha.”
    “Because . . . ?” Paul pictured a multilegged Olivia mincing up the aisle, antennae quivering.
    “Because
she won’t die,”
hissed Nolene. “Whatever you do to her, she always survives.”
    This contrasted with the nickname Olivia had picked for herself: As the purchaser for all of TxDoGS’s office supplies statewide, she referred to herself as the Paperclip Queen. For a week or so after he had started at TxDoGS, Paul thought he was being charming and mildly flirtatious by calling her the Toner Czarina or the Duchess of Whiteout or the Binder Clip Contessa. But one morning he had come in to find a Post-it stuck to his computer monitor briskly printed in very sharp pencil:
PLEASE DO NOT
DEPRECIATE MY
NICK-NAME. YOU
ARE ONLY A
TEMP AND I AM
A PERMANENT
EMPLOYEE
—O.H .
     
    “So you’re not leaving us?” Olivia was saying now.
    “No,” breathed Paul, as he watched Rick’s head gliding away between the tops of the intervening cubicles. He glanced at her across the aisle; Olivia had a small, very sharp nose and large eyes that widened whenever she spoke to him. Years ago it was a look that had probably driven the defensive line of the Mighty Vikings, or whatever they were called, wild with adolescent longing, but now it meant,
Nothing gets by me, buster
. Paul’s worst nightmare was that he, like the hapless, dying tech writer, would end up working for her.
    “No,” Paul said again, “I’m not leaving,” and he turned back to his desk.

THREE
     
    M AKING RICK’S LINE EDITS —his “glads and happies,” in Rick’s peculiar usage—took about fifteen minutes, and Paul burned up another forty or so trying to figure out the watermark function in Microsoft Word. Bored by that, he tried to kill some time checking his e-mail, but no one in the department had sent him anything this morning, and no one from his old life kept in touch with him anymore. As a temp, TxDoGS didn’t trust him on the Web, but his browser did allow him to explore the department’s intranet site. Unfortunately, after six weeks on the job, Paul had the TxDoGS site pretty well memorized—for a Ph.D. in English literature from the once-prestigious University of the Midwest, he had a surprisingly thorough knowledge of the hazmat regulations in the state of Texas—so he switched to the PowerPoint slide show he had assembled for Rick and idly monkeyed with the backgrounds, making them marbled or watery or sparkly or adding one of the program’s ready-made animations. On the title slide—
    Pilot Project
on
Vehicle Maintenance Outsourcing

Texas Department of General Services
     
    —he introduced a mooing little longhorn that clattered across the bottom of the slide, thrusting its horns this way and that. For the