The only emotions that penetrated the rind of Paul’s numbness were fear and lust. What he feared mainly was that everyone around him — Colonel, J.J., Bob Wier, and Rick and Preston and Nolene, even Callie — would learn his secret, that at the top of the striding, insect-jointed legs and under the gleaming metal carapace of the machine, he was a Martian, a soft, palpitating, defenseless thing, vulnerable to the tiniest terrestrial virus. Charlotte, of course, already knew how vulnerable he was, but she had been strangely dormant all week, limiting herself to fleeting appearances in the shadowy corners of his apartment, dashing along the edges of his peripheral vision.
Callie tilted Paul’s face towards hers with the tips of her fingers. “I’ll count to three if I have to,” she said.
Her unblinking blue eyes seemed both remote and bright to him, as if he were looking up at her from the bottom of a well. Apart from his fear of being found out, the only other emotion that reached Martian Paul in his dark little control room was his piercing desire for Callie, who somehow transmuted his fear and rage — magically, alchemically — to tenderness.
“You’re the only. .,” he began, and Callie sighed ostentatiously and looked away, down the length of their twined legs to the television, which they had been running with the sound off as a love light. Tonight Charlotte was treating them to Born Free.
“Does your TV ever show anything without lions in it?” She drummed her fingers lightly on his chest.
“Sometimes I get tigers,” Paul said, relieved that she’d changed the subject. “Or cheetahs. The odd panther, now and then.”
“And’s that all because of. . what’s her name?”
“Charlotte.”
“Charlotte. Huh.” Callie lowered her head to his shoulder and curled against him. She reached for his wrist and pulled his arm around her. “What do you boys talk about at lunch?” she said, her jaw working against his shoulder. “You and Colonel and them others.”
Paul wondered why Callie wanted to know. In his numbness he remembered the past five days as a blur. Only Monday was still clear to him, when a bored, heavy-set woman in Human Resources had conducted a pro forma interview with him in an empty conference room, asking him questions off a checklist without really listening to the answers. Then she had handed him a paper cup with a plastic lid and sent him to the men’s room, where he squeezed out six ounces of warm pee for the state of Texas. By Tuesday morning, barring a bad result from the drug test, he was a Tech Writer II for the Texas Department of General Services, with a salary of nearly $27,000 a year — the largest sum, Paul was alarmed to realize, he’d ever earned in his life. That same day a gum-smacking techie in a Hawaiian shirt spent two minutes at Paul’s keyboard and gave him access to the World Wide Web, and Callie herself photographed him again for a new badge, one with an electronic stripe, like Olivia’s.
After that, the blur set in. At the moment, as Callie breathed against him, he couldn’t remember whole blocks of the week — what he’d had for breakfast on Tuesday, say, or whether he’d spent Wednesday night at his place or hers.
“It’s up to Colonel,” Paul said. “He decides what we talk about.”
“And the rest of you just sorta sit there and nod?” She shifted her head against his chest.
Paul wasn’t sure what to say about that either. He now permanently occupied the fourth chair at Colonel’s table in the corner of the TxDoGS lunchroom. Indeed, Colonel had started to call Paul’s seat the Paul Trilby Chair in Literary Studies, or, worse, the Olivia Haddock Memorial Chair; Paul was still working up the nerve to tell him to knock it off. The last of his bag lunches — one final sandwich of nameless cheese on no-brand bread — slowly desiccated in one of the office fridges, until (unbeknownst to Paul) someone swiped it. Paul could now afford to buy hot lunches from the cafeteria, and he remembered eating a burger and fries, and a slab of meatloaf with mashed potatoes, and chicken fried steak with cream gravy, and a surprisingly good platter of cheese enchiladas with refried beans and rice. He couldn’t remember which day had been enchiladas and which had been meatloaf, but he did remember Colonel’s greeting the first day he had arrived at the table bearing a tray.
“Welcome to the good life, Professor,” Colonel had said.
“I don’t think Colonel likes me,” Callie said, hugging Paul a little more tightly. “I run into him in the hall the other day, and I told him I had a good time at his party last week, and he just looked at me like. .”
“Like what?” Paul said, but he already knew the answer. In his general emotional torpor, he only remembered pieces of Colonel’s lunchtime performance, such as a lecture on the decline of the American presidency. “The last twenty years. . hell, the last forty years of presidents have been whiners and perverts and headcases,” Colonel had declared. “Degenerates, like the later Roman emperors.” And a disquisition on the superiority of the American Browning automatic rifle to the British Lewis gun. “Not to take away from our brothers across the Pond,” Colonel had said, “but give me an American weapon any time.” And a history of the British Empire on film, from The Four Feathers to The Man Who Would Be King. “The sequel to Zulu, the egregious Zulu Dawn? A slander on the English fighting man.”
But the lunchtime conversation Paul remembered best had taken place on the embankment along the river, where Colonel had invited him, without J.J. and Bob Wier, for a postprandial stroll. Had it been Wednesday? Paul wondered. Thursday? Today? He couldn’t remember, but he did remember vividly what Colonel had said as they paced up and down the yellowed grass alongside the sluggish glide of the river.
“Now that you’ve ascended to the middle class, Professor,” Colonel said, his arm around Paul’s shoulders, “you need to get yourself a quality woman.”
“I beg your pardon?” Paul said.
“I understand what you see in Miss Oklahoma.” Colonel squeezed Paul. “We all like a ride on a frisky young colt now and then. But she’s wild, Paul, an untamable mustang, and you deserve a thoroughbred, something with breeding and dignity—”
“Whoa!” Paul cried, twisting free of Colonel’s grip. “You seriously need to back off.”
Colonel shook his head ruefully at the hormonal folly of younger men. “The girl is trash, Paul. You want a solid woman who knows her place, not some lippy bitch who’ll lead you around by your cojones.” Colonel narrowed his gaze. “I think you know what I’m talking about. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to give her up.”
“What do you mean, give her up?” Walk away, Paul told himself, but there he stood, waiting.
“Do you love her?” Colonel had said with a wicked smile, and Paul had stalked away at last, with a dismissive gesture.
“You just answered my question,” Colonel had called after him.
“Oh, you know,” Callie was saying now. “Like I was the mail girl or something.”
“Want me to beat him up for you?” Do you love her? Colonel had said. Paul tightened his arms around Callie.
“Wouldja?” She tilted her face so that he could see her eyes. “You never answered my question.”
“What question?”
“Why do you sit with them? Are you part of the club now or what?”
Christ, thought Paul. Was he part of the club? He was still convinced that nothing unusual had happened on Friday night or Saturday morning, that he had been drunk and insensible for much of those twenty-four hours. And yet, when he had arrived at work every morning these past few days, the RFP had been waiting for him on his desktop, each of Rick’s changes from the previous day already entered into the document. All Paul had to do was. . nothing. Paul had nothing to do. Colonel had winked at him at lunch one day — which day? — and said, “What are you going to do with all that free time, Professor?” He had a dim, drunken memory of someone — J.J. or Bob Wier or Colonel himself — asking him, “Do you know the story of the shoemaker and the elves?” Or, Paul wondered during his break, as he turned the pages of Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells without reading them, was it more like the Eloi and the Morlocks? And if we are Eloi — Colonel and J.J. and Bob Wier and me — then what do the Morlocks want from us? They do our work, but what do they want in return?