by James Hynes
That’s the coolest story I ever heard, Kevin thinks, and it occurs to him with a pang that he’s older now than McNulty was then. Trudging around the gleaming glass cube of the airport’s newsstand, instinctively ignoring the alarming headlines, Kevin wearily wonders if admiring McNulty has done him any good at all. Back in his twenties, it had never occurred to Kevin to ask what a guy McNulty’s age had been doing working for four dollars an hour in a record shop, where even the manager was fifteen years younger. Kevin cringes at the memory, partly out of pity for McNulty—who knows where he is now, he’d be in his late sixties at least—and partly out of fear that he, Kevin, may not have much more to show at fifty than McNulty did at forty. He has a much better job than McNulty ever did, of course, and a mortgage and a retirement plan, and good friends he’s known since his Big Star days and before. But no kids, no career, really, no overriding passion in his life, and an ex-girlfriend who at long last heaved him over the side to have children with a man younger than Kevin—and certainly no happy memories of balling English Marxists and being the first American in Lincolnshire to read Naked Lunch.
GROUND TRANSPORTATION declares a sign, and a fat arrow points to the left, where Kevin joins a narcoleptic conga line shuffling toward the down escalator. The line is watched by a fierce-looking, heavily armed young woman in camouflage fatigues, another harbinger of Orange Alert. She’s a Hispanic girl with a lot of Indian in her (thinks Kevin), a woman warrior, an Aztec Amazon. She stands with her legs apart, her black jump boots tightly laced, a semi-automatic pistol bulging at her hip. She holds her ugly black automatic rifle diagonally across her chest, the corner of the butt propped on her shoulder, the fierce muzzle pointed at the marble floor. Her fine, inky hair is drawn tight into a bun under her beret, sharpening the raptorish edge of her cheekbones and her nose, making her black-eyed glare even fiercer. While she may be a reservist or a National Guard, this young woman is a real soldier, this woman is no McNulty, she’s no irreverent, Beat-reading shirker, probably no seducer of earnest young Englishwomen (though you never know). No, in work and in play, this young woman is clearly all business; this girl is on the job. This girl would empty a clip into Bertrand Russell without a second thought.
Even for an Ann Arbor liberal like him, Kevin’s glad to see the young woman, especially today. Four days after Buchanan Street—funny how quickly a name becomes iconic and needs no further explanation, like Watergate or Guantánamo—there are no bleeding hearts on public transportation, and he’s grateful for the guard’s sacrifice in that dutiful way mandated by the White House, network anchormen, and country music stars. But even so, Kevin wants to know, is this the best use of her time? Wouldn’t she be more effective patrolling the perimeter of the airport in a jeep, looking for suspicious characters in rented cars, dusky and not-so-dusky guys watching planes take off and land through binoculars? Shouldn’t she be looking for wired-up bottles of shampoo in checked luggage? Mysterious vials of white powder? Stingers in the grass? Not to tell you your job, soldier, I’m just saying, if something’s going to happen, is it really going to happen here, in the terminal? Then the soldier swivels her head and meets Kevin’s gaze, and Kevin jerks his eyes away.
And nearly stumbles getting on the escalator. The corrugated step splits under the soles of his shoes, and he shuffles back and catches himself on the rubbery handrail. But when he glances back, the woman warrior is already watching someone else. Kevin sighs and descends into the cool, gray atrium of baggage claim, into a magnifying, mall-ish echo of voices, an oceanic murmuring. A diffuse crowd mills around the steely hippodrome of a baggage conveyer, and for a moment his heart lifts at the prospect of catching another glance of Joy Luck and her tattoos. But she was already carrying her luggage; she’s long gone by now. Kevin feels like a movie director riding the camera crane down into a crowd scene—he was a film major once, for half a semester—John Ford or William Wyler chewing the stem of his pipe, his feet dangling from his trouser cuffs and showing a pair of tartan socks and a little pale shin. This gives Kevin the momentary illusion of control, the feeling that he could bark at the crowd below and they’d all look up at him as one, waiting for direction. Hey, maybe he’s even some young director, a veteran of hip-hop videos making his first feature, a chunky white kid in a Raiders jersey and a vast pair of cargo shorts and a backward ball cap, watching his milling extras with a critical eye and calling out, “Where’s our star, yo? The fuck’s my leading lady? She in this shot, or what?” Ms. Joy Luck in the role of Lynda—Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. “She’s in her trailer, Mr. Quinn.” Mister Quinn—Kevin likes the sound of that. “Well, go ask her if she’d like to join us this morning, dog. We’re losing the fucking light.” But as the crane descends, the people below become less and less foreshortened, less and less under Kevin’s control, until with a gentle bump the escalator deposits Kevin sole to sole with his own dim reflection in the dully gleaming floor. Now he’s at eye level with everyone else, just another arriving passenger, just another guy in the crowd, just another extra in somebody else’s movie.
He passes through the sliding doors into his first real embrace by the Texas heat. It’s not so bad; the air presses warmly against his skin, that’s all. Plus he’s in the shade of an overpass, under a ceiling of massive rectangular beams held up by squat, square pillars of dirty white concrete. The Texas sunlight leaks in from the far ends, where the passenger pick-up lanes curve beneath the overpass. Vehicles coming out of the glare dim as they roll into the shade, a slow parade of SUVs and pickup trucks inching over speed bumps and braking impatiently for the crosswalks. Beyond a median, shuttle buses with broad foreheads line up nose to tail like baby elephants, and beyond that rises the cliff face of the parking garage, each pier embossed with a big, five-pointed Texas star, just in case the armadillo tiles in the men’s room and Asleep at the Wheel over the public address have left him in any doubt as to where he is.
Truth is, he feels like he’s not just in another state, but in another country. He knows no one in Texas; the folks waiting to see him this afternoon have never laid eyes on him. And no one in Ann Arbor even knows he’s here. He could hardly tell the folks at the Asia Center where he was going, so he took a personal day—annual checkup, he told Mira, the center’s administrative associate and his immediate superior—and to be on the safe side, he didn’t tell any of his friends, either. Even Stella doesn’t know he’s gone. Especially Stella. He plans to be back in Ann Arbor by eleven p.m. tonight, and Stella won’t be back from her sales conference in Chicago till late tomorrow. Unless the folks today offer him the job and he decides to take it, no one will ever know he was here. When he was a young backpacker, feeling invulnerable and immortal, he’d loved the thrill of knowing that he could step off a cliff in Donegal or fall down a sinkhole on the North York moors and no one would ever know what happened to him. But now his anonymity pierces him like a hook and hauls him up short. It’s not too late, he thinks, I could go back inside, change my ticket, and be back in Ann Arbor by midafternoon.
He realizes that he’s stopped walking. Other passengers step around him, the little wheels of their suitcases clacking over the joints in the pavement. He hears the mutter of the PA, first in English—“Due to heightened security, knives are not allowed on planes”—and then in Spanish—“Debido a la seguridad aumentada, cuchillos no se permiten en los planos.” The guttural grind of buses, the hiss and squeal of brakes, the slam of car doors reverberating off the concrete all around. A tepid breeze full of diesel exhaust brushes by him, and Kevin realizes he’s not even in Texas yet. The airport doesn’t count; it’s only an island in an archipelago nation of glassed-in atolls where everybody speaks a sort of English and lives off warm cinnamon buns and day-old turkey sandwiches.
He joins the pedestrians funneled into the crosswalks by concrete security barriers. ( Just because you’re on the ground, says his lizard brain, doesn’t mean you’re safe.) Under his clothes the sweat prickles out of his skin. At t
he median he joins the queue at the taxi stand, behind a large woman in a broad-beamed pair of jeans and a voluminous shirt who is talking to herself in short, disjointed bursts and with much frantic gesturing. There is nothing in her hands. Time was, on the Diag in Ann Arbor where the homeless congregate, Kevin would circle around someone talking to herself in public, but now everyone does it. He feels aged by the fact that he’s still surprised to see people conducting phone conversations in public.
“I know that,” the woman says. “Don’t think I don’t know that.” From behind, Kevin watches her shake her helmet of hair. “Listen, I’ve been saying exactly the same thing.” She lowers herself into the next cab. “Doggone it, Pearl, that’s what I’ve been saying.” She’s shaking her head as the cab pulls away. “Doggone it, Pearl.”
Kevin approaches a green Chevy Lumina with JAY’S TAXI printed unceremoniously along the side; the cabbie’s already reached back to open the rear door.
“Luggage?” he says hoarsely, peering through the purple tint of his aviator glasses. A long, gaunt face. Scooped-out cheeks, pale, slack skin.
“No,” says Kevin. He lifts his knee to slide into the seat and the cabbie says, “Close that trunk for me, willya, bud?”
Kevin pushes back from the car and walks around to slam the trunk with both hands. Then he slides grumpily into the backseat of the Lumina—the meter’s already running, he notices—and the cab starts to roll even before he’s pulled the door shut. That’s when he sees Joy Luck in the crosswalk, swaying up to a shuttle bus with her duffle on her shoulder and the paperback dangling at her hip, her finger still holding her place.
“Whoa,” Kevin says involuntarily, and the cabbie hits the brake. Kevin rocks forward, and the door slips from his hand and bangs all the way open.
“You okay?” The pale cabbie levels his gaze at Kevin, an edge of irritation in his voice.
“Yeah.” Kevin reaches for the door again. Up ahead Joy Luck stands her duffle on end and shares a smile with the shuttle driver, a bull-chested Hispanic with his uniform shirt tucked into bulging bicycle shorts. He slings the duffle up into the shuttle, and Joy Luck pauses at the door, one long leg bent on the bottom step. She twists her hair one-handed off the back of her neck, just like Lynda used to. Oh Lynda, Lynda, Lynda, thinks Kevin, where are you now?
“Meter’s running, sir,” says the cabbie. “We comin’ or goin’?”
“Go,” says Kevin. He lunges for the door and slams it. Joy Luck is swallowed by the shuttle as the cab hauls away from the curb.
Kevin’s more aware of the noises a car makes when he’s not driving: the crepitation of tread against pavement, the throaty roar of acceleration, the galloping slap—thump-thump, thump-thump—of tires over the joints in the road.
“Where we headed?” The cabbie watches Kevin in the rearview mirror. The AC vents are whooshing; the dispatch radio spits unintelligibly; voices on the car radio mutter in an unidentifiable language, something rapid-fire and vehement. The meter ticks relentlessly, and the dull red numbers already register $2.75. Pasted across the dash is a SEMPER FI bumper sticker in scarlet and gold; a small medallion, silver and black, dangles from the rearview, twisting in the breeze of the AC. Kevin finds one end of the seat belt and digs for the other in the crack of the seat. It’s not too late to go back, he’s thinking, it’s not too late to get on the shuttle with Joy Luck, or even to offer her a ride in his cab, anywhere she wants to go, his treat. She’s hooked him somehow and she’s holding the other end of the line, and any second now all the slack will be played out and he’ll be yanked like a tuna right out of the cab. Then he snags the blunt end of the belt and claws it two-fingered out of the seat, and the cab shoots out of the echoing cavern of the underpass into the light. Even behind the tinted windows of the taxi, Kevin squints against the Texas glare. Thump-thump, thump-thump go the tires. The line tugging at his heart tautens and snaps. Too late.
“Downtown,” says Kevin, yanking on both ends of the belt until they connect. “One Longhorn Place.” Three twenty-five, and they haven’t even left the airport yet. Together Kevin and the cabbie ride in a Lumina-shaped bubble of dank air-conditioning, the air tainted with the farting of the dispatch radio and their own mild, mutual ill will. Kevin notes the cabbie’s dirty white hair combed straight back over a sun-reddened bald spot, his raggedly trimmed beard, his long-boned arms, his big-knuckled hands on the wheel. He wears a faded Hawaiian shirt that hangs off his shoulders as if off a wire hanger. Kevin pulls out his sunglasses.
“Street address?” says the cabbie.
Kevin grunts and reaches into his jacket for his notebook; he sets the sunglasses on the seat. The details of his interview are buried in the middle, of course, and he hunts past grocery lists; Stella’s cell number; instructions on how to jump a battery; Stella’s e-mail; prices for a new battery; directions to a brunch in Dexter; a list of chick-lit authors Stella wants him to read, none of whom he’s ever heard of; a Michigan license number for a red Toyota pickup, he can’t remember why; Stella’s cell number again, this time in her own hand; a list of cities where he’d be willing to live, none of which is Austin.
“Ummm,” he says, stalling, “is there a Congress Street?”
“Congress Avenue?” Kevin can hear the smirk in the cabbie’s voice. “I reckon I can find that.”
Kevin gets right away that asking for Congress Avenue is like asking for Times Square or Picadilly Circus. He lowers the notebook for his first proper look at Texas, a rolling, yellowish savannah under a cloudless sky. Miles and miles of Texas. The sky really is bigger here, though it isn’t the deep cerulean you see in Michigan this time of year; even this early in the morning it’s bleached like an old blue sheet left out in the sun. There’s too much light for the sky to soak up and it glitters everywhere, off the cars in long-term parking, off the light standards bent at the neck over the roadway, off the pavement itself.
“You from up north, right?”
“Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, thinking the name may not mean anything this side of the Mississippi, “Michigan.”
“Go Blue,” drawls the cabbie. “You here for a meeting, right? Just for the day?”
“Job interview.” The dangling rearview medallion twists this way. It’s a pair of nestled black-and-white spermatozoa, yin and yang.
“My next guess. No luggage, that’s how I can tell.”
What are you, Sherlock Holmes? Kevin nearly says, mouthy as a New Yorker, but his midwestern reticence buttons his lip. A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The midwesterner’s credo: keep it to yourself.
“What’s the job?” says the cabbie. “Don’t mind my asking.”
Kevin never knows what to do with his hands in a taxi—fold them in his lap? Cross his arms?—and he lays them flat on the seat to either side. Thus he rediscovers his sunglasses, and he puts them on. The bleaching glare becomes a warm, amber, sunset glow. WELCOME TO AUSTIN reads a sign, silver sans serif against limestone.
“I’m not sure,” he says. Another midwesternism—someone asks you a question, it’s impolite not to answer, even if you don’t have one.
“Oh yeah?” Guy’s watching him again in the rearview. “Kind of a mystery job, or what?”
“Well, no, the job’s not a mystery,” says Kevin, at once eager to explain and hating the eagerness in his voice. “It’s an editing job, they’re looking for an editor.”
“Oh yeah,” says the cabbie, knowingly. “Like a proofreader, that kind of deal?”
“Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.” He hates the defensiveness in his voice, too, but the cabbie’s touched a sore spot. For the last twenty years, Kevin’s made his living as an editor at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, the last eight as the Pubs Program’s executive editor, and even now, after all those years and all the monographs he’s acquired, edited, designed, copyedited, proofread, and marketed, he still has a hard time getting
anyone to understand that editing is a profession and that he is a professional. Too often, when Kevin has been introduced as an editor at the university, he’s had to append so many qualifications that it sounds like he’s backpedaling. No, he doesn’t work for the U of M Press. No, he’s not an academic himself. No, he has no background in Asian studies—or any interest either, though he’d never say that. No, he doesn’t speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. No, he’s never been west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And no, he has no final say over what the Pubs Program publishes—that rests with the publications committee, the publications director, and the center director, all of them academics in Asian studies, and all of them as amiable and collegial as scorpions.
“Oh sure,” the cabbie’s saying. “You gotta find the books and read ’em and all that stuff, right?” They’re on an access road now and the ride is rougher, the tires thumping arrhythmically over potholes and cracks. They pass a low, mean, flat-roofed building called Club Vaquero, whose sign features a silhouette of a big-assed, big-titted woman with a wild mane of hair. It’s the same sort of business he sees around Detroit Metro, but here the light’s sharper and dustier, the bold colors of the sign both brighter and bleached somehow. Here, in this steeply angled light, even shade is for rent, Kevin notices, as they pass a private long-term parking lot where travelers can leave their cars under enormous blue canvas pavilions.
“That’s right,” says Kevin. And all that stuff—guy doesn’t know the half of it. Much of the job experience Kevin’s acquired over the years isn’t the sort you can put on a résumé. His only credential is an utterly useless bachelor of General Studies from Michigan—he never did settle on a major—but he has a frigging Ph.D. in bureaucratic savvy, with another fifteen years of painstaking postgraduate work in the survival skills of the midlevel university staffer. So far he’s survived eight different directors of the Asia Center, five pubs directors, and two dozen iterations of the pubs committee. He knows the taxonomy of academic rank the way a physicist knows the periodic table, and he knows the infinite gradations of academic condescension the way an oenophile knows Bordeaux. As recently as five years ago, when he was already running pubs, one pubs director, a Napoleonic little poli-sci professor, introduced Kevin to a new pubs committee as the Center’s “editorial assistant.”