Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

three purchasers who served on the RFP Development Team. First he passed Joe John Toepperwein, a beetle-browed, slope-shouldered young man who hunched before his computer as if he expected to be clobbered from behind at any moment. Squeezing the mouse as if he wanted to crush it, his eyes flicking angrily back and forth, J.J. pushed the little arrow of the cursor around the screen as if he were trying to stab something. Every time Paul passed, J.J. was switching from one Web page to another; he never seemed to settle on one site, but constantly, restlessly surfed. Yet as each page clicked by, J.J. sat sullenly immobile before the screen like a diorama of early twenty-first-century office work, a tableau non vivant.
    Then Paul passed Colonel Travis Pentoon, late of the United States Army, a square-shouldered, broad-chested, crinkly eyed man in his late fifties whose fastidiously creased khakis and dress shirt conceded little to civilian laxity. He had let his military buzz cut grow out a full quarter of an inch, and though he removed his sport coat when sitting at his desk, he kept hiscuffs buttoned and his tie cinched tight up under his dewlaps. He was usually typing furiously, his fingers arched, his hands rebounding off the keyboard as energetically as a concert pianist’s, and he watched whatever he was typing with a penetrating squint, while the black, polarizing screen across his monitor kept anyone else from seeing what he was working on. When he wasn’t typing, he was on the phone, holding the handset lightly between the tips of his blunt fingers as he managed his money market account on the state’s time, jotting figures on a pad with his free hand. Today he was multitasking, simultaneously hammering the keyboard and cradling the phone between his cheek and his shoulder. “I hear what you’re saying,” he was telling his broker in a throaty, George C. Scott rasp, “but we’re either on the bus with this one, son, or off the bus.”
    Finally, Paul passed the orderly cube of Bob Wier, with his color-coded state purchasing manuals and his ring binders arranged in descending order of size. In his desk drawer he kept a can of compressed air, and Paul had often seen him blasting the grit from between the keys of the computer keyboard he never seemed to use. He also kept a spray bottle of Windex to keep spotless the curved screen of his monitor and the glass in his array of family photographs—his dead wife and three well-scrubbed children and an eight-by-ten portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. Bob wore polo shirts and penny loafers, and he was handball trim and aggressively good-humored, but there was something attenuated about him, as if his skin was stretched too tight over his skull. He never stopped smiling, but his eyes were watery, which Paul attributed to the loss of his wife. As a temp Paul was off the circuit for office lore, but one morning, while Bob was temporarily away from his cube, Nolene had given Paul the highlights on fast forward. Bob’s wife had vanished, she said, and most folks thought she had simply run off, but Bob referred to her as his “late wife.” “And I reckon he ought to know,” Nolene added darkly. He’d sent his kids to live with his sister in Amarillo—“As far away as they could git from Lamar,” Nolene whispered, “and still be in the state of Texas”—and he filled his time by trying to sell his coworkers on Christianspeed-reading courses, Christian real estate schemes, and Christian cleaning products. “He don’t know what ‘no’ means,” warned Nolene. “You ever hear him mention ‘distributed sales,’ run the other way.”
    But Paul was a temp and luckily out of range of Bob’s evangelical salesmanship. Still, Bob Wier was one of the few people in the office to note Paul’s presence. Today Bob sat behind his desk ostentatiously speed-reading a book, thumbing aside each page with a crisp
snap
as his JESUS IS LORD ! screen saver flowed endlessly across