Although the three men were Paul’s coworkers on the outsourcing project, they had never invited him to lunch with them, and he had never attempted to sit in the empty chair. One time Paul had taken the table next to theirs, reading his book and eating his sandwich and pretending not to listen to their conversation. He hoped to convey that he was ignoring them, rather than being ignored by them, but he never really succeeded and ended up instead staring sightlessly at the same page for twenty minutes while the Colonel held forth with the overbearing certainty of the autodidact.
“Certainly the West owes a great deal to the Jews,” he had been saying that day. “Take the ‘Judeo’ out of ‘Judeo-Chrisrian,’ and you have a mighty thin soup indeed.”
“Amen.” Bob Wier nodded thoughtfully.
“And there is no gainsaying that they are mighty warriors,” rasped the Colonel. “The Six Day War. Entebbe. And hell, let’s not forget the Masada.”
“ ‘The roar of battle will rise against your people,’ ” intoned Bob Wier, “ ‘so that all your fortresses will be devastated.’ Hosea ten, verse fourteen.”
“But there’s no denying,” continued the Colonel, “that certain nineteenth-century German Jews have a good deal to answer for. I refer, of course, to that unholy ménage à trois of relativistic values, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.”
“Don’t forget Darwin,” Bob Wier said.
“Ménage à what?” J.J. paused in his Sherman’s March across his burger to glare at the Colonel.
“Ménage à trois,” said the Colonel, then, to Bob Wier, “Darwin wasn’t a Jew, Reverend.”
“He wasn’t?”
“C of E,” said the Colonel. “Bit of a freethinker, actually.”
“Ménage à twat?” J.J. widened his eyes.
“J.J., c’mon.” Bob Wier’s cheeks burned bright red.
“Twa” enunciated the Colonel. “Ta-wa.”
“That’s a three-way, innit?” J.J. said.
The Colonel manufactured an avuncular laugh. “Perhaps I should have said ‘troika,’ my lubricious friend.”
“Guys, please.” The heat colored Bob Wier’s temples and forehead.
By now Paul’s ears had been burning. I know what a ménage à trois is, he’d thought. And Darwin was a theist. This daily roundtable of the Colonel’s was the closest thing at TxDoGS to intellectual intercourse, and Paul had been a little offended that he hadn’t been asked to join in. Of course, if the Colonel had invited him to take the empty chair, he’d have declined — nothing irritated Paul like some blowhard with no trace of irony — but still. The Colonel probably didn’t have the nerve to ask a real intellectual to sit at their table.
So today Paul turned on his heel, squeezed past the microwave crowd, edged through the cafeteria line, and went back upstairs to eat his lunch in his cube. Olivia was in the crowd downstairs, and the dying tech writer, thank God, disappeared who knew where during lunch. As he sat at his desk munching a dry cheese sandwich and store-brand chips from a store-brand baggie, he read the last couple of chapters of The Time Machine from a fat, battered old Dover book, Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells. Paul had long since been forced by circumstances to sell off his library, and now he could only afford to buy books at the Friends of the Library shop at the Lamar Public Library, where hardcovers sold for a dollar and paperbacks for fifty cents. But what the hell, he told himself, I’m only reading for diversion these days, like any other working stiff plowing through the latest Grisham or Tom Clancy. H. G. Wells was easy to read, and Paul enjoyed the author’s gleeful late-Victorian sense of apocalypse, as Wells eagerly overturned the dominant culture with Martians, invisible men, and beasts surgically altered into consciousness. In The Time Machine Wells seemed to imply that the end of the world would come from sheer inanition, with the Eloi as the ne plus ultra of slackers. Fighting to stay awake in his cube every midmorning and midafternoon, Paul understood inanition in his marrow.
Still, even these lurid old potboilers had the power to alarm. Paul had reached the penultimate chapter of The Time Machine, where the Time Traveller rockets forward thousands of years into a future of bleak seashores and giant crabs and a waning sun. As Paul sucked down the last warm mouthful of Coke, he was blindsided by a sentence: “I cannot convey the sense of the abominable desolation that hung over the world.” This triggered an emotional chain reaction in Paul that left him trembling by the time he reached the end of the next page. The Traveller’s every leap forward in time only made Paul’s horror worse. “Silent?” he read. “It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives — all that was over.” Paul felt his skin tighten as he sat in the unnatural twilight of his cube; the lunchtime silence all around buzzed in his ears. All the ghostly clattering and clicking and chattering Paul heard when the office was at full throttle was gone, and he half entertained the notion that he was the only one left alive in the building. Then he read Wells’s description of the Traveller’s furthest south into the future, with its giant, dying sun and its blood-red sea and some hideous, tentacled thing on the beach “hopping fitfully about,” and the Traveller himself on the verge of fainting, with his “terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight,” and Paul bolted straight up out of his squealing chair, trembling like a child.
“So where is he?” he demanded a moment later in the doorway of Rick’s office, his hands in his pockets so no one would see them shake. Rick took his lunch at eleven, which meant that he was often in his office while everyone else was out to lunch. But instead Paul discovered Nolene and a couple of other secretaries, Lorilei and Tracy, seated at the little round table in the corner of Rick’s office watching Days of Our Lives on the portable TV Rick used to review videos from the field. All three women goggled at the screen, where some sort of fight was taking place, the salads in plastic shells before them momentarily ignored.
“Excuse me?” Paul said again over the shouting and thumping from the television. He was disturbed to hear the tremor in his voice.
Nolene sharply raised her index finger and brandished the underside of a long fingernail at Paul, who knew better than to speak again. A moment later a gunshot and a final thump erupted from the TV, and all three women flinched.
“Oh. My. God,” breathed Lorilei.
“Damn,” said Tracy, clenching her fists. “I knew it was him.”
“Sumbitch had it coming,” said Nolene grimly, and she theatrically twisted her hand in the air and pointed with her long nail out the window. Paul lifted himself on tiptoe and saw Rick sitting alone on the bench underneath the live oak in the courtyard.
“Thank you,” he muttered, and he bolted out of the office, around the corner past Nolene’s cube, and through the exit door. Pushing into the blazing Texas heat was like wading into molasses, and Paul paused to grip the railing of the little walkway that ran across the entrance to the courtyard. Down below Rick slouched on the wooden bench with his fingers laced over his belly and his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. The price tag on his shoe was plainly visible; Rick looked as if he were on sale. Paul let go of the railing and trotted down the stairs to the courtyard. He was sweating already.
“Rick, could I talk to you for a second?” He kicked through the brittle leaves on the deck; his feet thumped against the redwood.