by James Hynes
“Executive editor, actually,” Kevin said, giving his official title.
“Of course,” said the director with an insufferable wink, as if humoring an eight-year-old. An equally insufferable murmur of laughter went round the table, and Kevin simply swallowed his rage. For one thing, it wasn’t like he had any choice, and for another he had broken his own rule, which he had written out years before on an index card and taped to the slide-away typing table on his old Steelcase desk. KYMS read the card. Keep Your Mouth Shut.
“If you want to understand the workings of an academic department,” a slightly less condescending pubs director, a Marxist with a graying ponytail and a leather jacket, had once told Kevin, “study The Sopranos.” To which Kevin nearly replied, “If you want to understand the life of the university staffer, study The Remains of the Day.” But he knew better not to. Even with a Marxist—perhaps especially with a Marxist—you KYfuckingMS.
But there’s a limit, thinks Kevin, which is why he’s sitting in a cab in Austin, Texas, this brilliant Monday morning, on his way to a job interview when everybody at the Asia Center back in Ann Arbor thinks he’s gone to the doctor. The muttering on the car radio, which he thought was something foreign, suddenly resolves into English, spoken rapidly and forcefully, in the unmistakable manner of talk radio. “Buchanan Street,” he hears the radio voice say, using the already-iconic shorthand. “I mean whattaya do with people like that?”
“Freakin’ animals,” says the caller, in a tinny cell phone voice. “Round ’em up, is what I say.”
Could you turn that off, please? Kevin almost says, but doesn’t, because he’s afraid of drawing the cabbie’s attention to the subject. But not to worry, the cabbie’s not listening, the cabbie’s off on another topic of his own.
“You know, a few years back?” the cabbie’s saying, speaking up over the radio and the noise of the car. “I had an idea for a book. It was when I was in rehab? This’d be eight, nine years ago, I was sitting out on the patio, you know, thinkin’. I’m a deep thinker sometimes, I just like to sit and think. Anyway, I was wondering, what if we’re all just computer programs? I mean, this goes against my beliefs—I’m a Buddhist? Since 1969?—but I was just thinkin’, what if we’re all just computer programs, and the world’s not the world, you know, just some computer programs runnin’ into each other?”
“Huh,” says Kevin. The cab muscles its way, engine straining, across three lanes of freeway traffic toward an exit. Kevin rocks in his seat and steadies himself with a hand on the window. The glass is warm to the touch.
“Then a coupla years later, that Matrix movie comes out? Before I had a chance to…”
“Yeah, you shoulda jumped on it,” Kevin sighs.
“Yeah, I reckon.” The cabbie’s narrow shoulders rise and fall. “But it’s okay. It’s not my kinda thing. I prefer your classic themes, you know, the classic struggle of good and evil. Like Blade. Or them Rings movies. You know?”
Kevin’s not really listening anymore. He’s tuned out the cabbie and the ranters on the radio, watching through the windshield for the Austin skyline, but all he sees are giant airport hotels on a bare, treeless ridge, looking gaudy and flimsy, fodder for some apocalyptic Texas tornado that will reduce them to kindling, suctioning splintered lumber and shredded drywall into the bleached sky like straw. And I want to move here, Kevin thinks, I want to put myself in the path of that biblical weather, I want to endure the blistering heat and the titanic thunderstorms. Seven months ago, in the crepuscular gloom of a Michigan November, leaving Ann Arbor had seemed like a pretty good idea. Especially after his inaugural meeting with Eileen Burks, the day she took over as the new director of the Center for Asian Studies. He knew her slightly already, as a member of the pubs committee and a rising star of the history department. He had seen her from time to time at the university rec center, where she came to run and he came to play pickup basketball two or three days a week on his lunch hour. She’d trot past him up the stairs in filmy shorts and a sports bra, sheened with sweat, and they would exchange a collegial nod. Kevin didn’t delude himself—there wasn’t a flicker of electricity between them, and anyway, he’d assumed she was gay—but even so, in the middle of his game, lifting his eyes from the slap and screech of the court to the running track above, he’d steal a glimpse of her at full throttle and admire her long-legged stride and the glide of muscles in her back.
Now she was his boss, and Kevin looked forward to a working relationship unpoisoned by testosterone. Male academics were as hierarchical as dogs, sniffing the assholes above them and snarling at the lesser mutts, and a mere staffer like Kevin was expected to roll over and bare his belly to anyone with a graduate degree. This unavoidable humiliation was compounded by the awkward fact that Kevin was the same age as or even, in recent years, older than most of the men he had worked for. A couple of the younger ones had even shown a moment of uncertainty—but only a moment, because arrogance and ambition always trump age and experience—when they realized that Kevin had been editing monographs for the center while they were still in high school. For his part, meetings like this made Kevin sympathize with Hillary Clinton, or even John McCain, at the spectacle of a seasoned veteran losing out to some jug-eared upstart.
But Eileen Burks was not that much younger than Kevin, and he knew from working with her on the pubs committee that she was brisk and straightforward. He also knew that she was more feared than respected, especially by the male junior faculty, who secretly considered her gender an unfair competitive advantage. And her grad students, a couple of whom had worked for Kevin as freelance copy editors, told him she was notorious for blowing off her office hours and taking her own sweet time reviewing dissertation chapters. Eileen Shirks, they called her.
Still, she’d always been pleasant enough to him, and coming into the director’s office for their first meeting after her appointment, Kevin had helped himself to a seat before she’d offered him one. Thus he found himself sitting while she was still standing behind her desk, sorting through carpet swatches. After a moment Kevin made as if to stand again, but she cocked an eyebrow at him and said, “No, stay,” like she would to a dog.
She continued to stand and sort through swatches while he delivered his little State of the Pubs Program address, complete with a spreadsheet printed out that morning from Excel. She scowled at the carpet samples the entire time he was talking, and when he offered her the spreadsheet she lifted her sharp chin toward a corner of the desk. He lay the folder gingerly on the desktop. The only sound he heard was a thin whine, which was all the good will and high hopes he’d brought into the office escaping into the air at a pitch that only he could hear. He also had the sinking feeling that the new carpet she was busy selecting was going to be paid for, at least in part, out of the publications budget.
“I’ve seen you at the gym,” she said, still standing.
“Yes.” Kevin brightened—she remembers me!
“I assume that’s your lunch hour?” Still she wouldn’t meet his eye, but instead glanced from a wine-red swatch in her left hand to a blue one in her right.
“Yeah,” he said casually. “I play a pickup game with some guys two, three days a week.”
“So,” she said, laying down the blue swatch and picking up a bluer one, “the game itself lasts, what, forty-five minutes?”
“Maybe a little less.” Uh oh.
“So by time you walk over there, change your clothes, warm up, play the game, shower—”
And sauna, thought Kevin, but he knew better than to say so.
“—and walk back to your office, that’s what? An hour and a quarter? An hour and a half?” Still she wasn’t looking at him.
“Come on, Eileen,” Kevin said, collegially. “I see you at the gym all the time.”
“I’m not on the clock.” She let both swatches fall from her hands in disgust, and then said, with icy politesse, “May I call you Kevin?”
“Of course.” He could feel himself dwindling
in the chair.
“Kevin.” Eileen fixed him with glacially blue eyes. “You’re not salaried like I’m salaried.”
His feet dangled above the carpet, his head shrank into his collar.
“Do we understand each other?” Eileen said.
“Perfectly,” said Kevin, the Incredible Shrinking Man.
The meeting was over. “I’ll look over your budget,” she said as he walked, vibrating with rage, across the crummy old carpet to the door, “and we’ll have a talk about it, soon.” On his way through the outer office, he heard her call for the center’s administrative associate.
“Mira!” cried Eileen. “Call Building Services. These can’t really be the only swatches they have. These are just unacceptable.”
Two minutes later, in his own office up under the eaves of Willoughby Hall, Kevin had dropped into his chair, slapped the latest issue of Publishers Weekly onto his desk, and begun to pore through the job postings at the back of the magazine. His PW subscription was like his long basketball lunches, a little perk he allowed himself on the Center’s nickel, buried deep in a sub-sub-basement of Excel. The bitch slap he’d just received from Eileen wasn’t the worst humiliation he’d ever endured from an employer—the manager at Big Star had called him “adolescent” to his face, and the speedfreak manager at Central Café had fired him for being too slow—but as he began to limn likely jobs with an orange highlighter, he decided that it was going to be the last humiliation. And it wasn’t just petulance or wounded pride, he told himself. The state of Michigan was dying all around him, leading the nation in unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. The auto industry was in its last throes, Detroit itself slowly reverting to nature, Flint was such a wasteland no one but Michael Moore went there anymore. Five years ago, Kevin would have said that his own job was as secure as you could get without actually having tenure—the academics he worked for loved the idea of having their own little publishing unit—but now the legislature was cutting the money for higher education year after year, and the U itself was trimming budget lines in every department. Even his profession didn’t look so secure anymore: young academics still needed to publish or perish, but now they could distribute their monographs worldwide instantly, and pubs programs like Kevin’s were beginning to look as quaint as floppy discs or newspapers.
Reflecting on all this, Kevin highlighted an intriguing if mysterious ad from Hemphill Associates in Austin, Texas. Hemphill offered “innovative and effective outsourcing solutions” in booming Austin, according to their PW ad, and while Kevin’s tender Ann Arbor heart trembled at the implications—wasn’t it outsourcing that was killing the Michigan economy?—they did want a managing editor—to edit what exactly, they didn’t say—for 20K more than Kevin makes now. He knew better than to think that the private sector would be any less stressful, but at least it would be straightforward, no-bullshit stress: meet the deadline, work under budget, earn your keep. The iron fist is there for all to see, without the velvet glove of “collegiality.”
“It’s all about chi, brother,” the cabbie’s saying. He lifts a big-knuckled hand off the wheel and flicks the yin-yang medallion with his fingernail. It spins, glittering: yin-yang, yin-yang, yin-yang. “Hot and cold,” says the cabbie. “Moist and dry. Shit like that.”
“What?” Kevin is suddenly alarmed. Did I say out loud that I work for the Asia Center? God forbid he should incite an exchange on Eastern spirituality with some half-crazy old Texas Buddhist, some self-taught syncretist who mocked up his own religion out of a split-backed I Ching, a dog-eared Portable Nietzsche, and a lot of Thai stick. Just like McNulty, Kevin thinks, and then his heart nearly hammers to a stop. What if this guy is McNulty? Austin’s just the sort of place a guy like McNulty would wash up, kind of a Southern-fried Ann Arbor, an Ann Arbor with bigger portions. Hailfire, son, ever’thang’s bigger in Texas. Guy’s the right age, that dirty white hair could have been blond once, and McNulty had big bones and powerful hands just like the guy’s hands on the wheel.
But the cabbie’s gaze behind his aviator lenses, framed in the rearview, isn’t heavy-lidded, only watery and weak. And the name on the license, which Kevin can’t read without leaning forward, is shorter than McNulty. And this guy sounds like a native Texan. In the mirror, his glance shows that he knows Kevin hasn’t been listening. His skeletal shoulders sag. They ride without speaking, and as if to fill the awkward silence, the radio voices seem to speak louder, all on their own.
“Turns out one of these guys was a white guy,” says the host, with a deep, old-school radio voice like Rush Limbaugh, or that Canadian guy who used to be on CKLW out of Windsor.
“Kevin something,” says the caller. It sends a chill through Kevin to hear his own name on the radio in this context.
“MacDonald,” says the Limbaugh clone, who adds, with leaden sarcasm, “Oh, excuse me, I mean ‘Abdul Mohammed.’ ”
“They’re calling it ‘666,’ ” says the cabbie, lifting his voice over the radio and raising his gaze to the rearview again. “You heard that?”
“What?” says Kevin, though he knows exactly what the guy’s talking about. 666 said the Fox banner. IS THIS THE END?
“Last Thursday? All that shit in Europe?”
“Sure,” says Kevin.
“They’re calling it 666.”
“Huh.”
“Six bombings, on June 6.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Kevin says.
“They search you at Metro?”
“Sorry?” says Kevin. The cab has angled off the freeway onto a four-lane road between scruffy tin-roofed houses on the left, and on the right a new subdivision of oversized houses on freakishly green lawns. The meter’s already up to $11.50.
“Fella traveling alone? No luggage?” The cabbie’s rearview gaze interrogates Kevin. “They didn’t take you aside and search you?”
“Yeah, actually,” says Kevin. “They did.” They’d wanded him, anyway. Does that count?
“Funny, you don’t look Muslim.” The cabbie drops his gaze to the road. “I mean, you’re blond, right? Though that don’t mean you’re not a Muslim. I mean, look at that one guy in Buchanan, Scotland, or wherever.”
Kevin’s Irish and his Ann Arbor instincts kick in simultaneously, and at the same moment he glimpses the Austin skyline for the first time, blurred and dull like a painted backdrop, like the Emerald City of Oz. In between the squarish skyscrapers, Kevin glimpses thin, skeletal spires like radio masts. Then the road dips and the skyline sinks behind a screen of trees.
“You think they should search Muslims?” he hears himself say. “For being Muslim?” What does he care? He secretly believes the same thing himself.
“I’m just saying, you got all these guys blowing themselves up and a lot of other folks, too. I seen their pictures on the news, and they ain’t Southern Baptists. Except maybe that Scotch guy, I don’t know what religion they got over there.” The cabbie’s watching the rearview for Kevin’s reaction.
Behind his amber lenses, Kevin is speechless. McNulty would never have been a bigot, but then who isn’t anymore? Watching the display of mugshots on TV over the weekend, he had the same thought himself. He can’t help thinking that if Muslims had been banned from Glasgow public transit, no matter what they looked like, no matter what their ethnicity, Buchanan Street Station wouldn’t have become a charnel house. Sometimes, though, in order to be decent, you have to fight your own instincts, and at last he says, “A lot of Muslims died in those bombings.”
He’s only guessing, of course, he actually doesn’t know if this is true. In Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris, it probably is, but he doesn’t know about Glasgow or Moscow. And how many Muslims are there in Bern? In the whole of Switzerland?
“Well, hell, search everybody then.” The cabbie sounds peeved and resigned; he watches the road again. Christians, Muslims. Moist, dry. It’s all about chi, brother. “It’s only fair. I mean, why single anybody out, right?”
Why, indeed? thinks Kevin.
Life goes out of its way to single you out, it doesn’t need any help from the Department of Homeland Security. Take Eileen Burks, for example—five weeks after she lowered the boom on Kevin’s lunchtime hoops, she collapsed in a seizure on the rec center running track. A few days after that she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She returned to work for a few weeks wearing colorful headscarves like a fortune-teller, then went home for good to be nursed by her husband—Huh! thought Kevin—and by finals week, she was dead.
The Austin skyline pops up again behind the screen of trees, a little sharper this time. Kevin sees the narrow nipple of the Texas capitol dome. The skeletal masts are construction cranes, each one tall and spindly and one-armed like a carpenter’s square; they hover over narrow tower blocks in various stages of construction, which rise in silhouette like the uneven bars on his stereo equalizer. Condominiums, Kevin guesses, counting five of them before the skyline dips out of sight again. Now the cab’s rolling by an anonymous apartment complex, a herd of dirty-pastel boxes with peaked roofs like Monopoly hotels, their tiny balconies crowded with lawn furniture and Weber grills and potted plants. A limp banner slung between two palms—palm trees!—says $99 MOVE-IN and FREE CABLE. Never mind those pricey downtown high-rise condos, thinks Kevin, that’s where I’d be living if I moved here, or someplace just as bleak and anonymous. At least at first. That would be my bicycle upended on a hook on the balcony, that would be my forlorn cactus hanging in the stifling heat. That would be my palm tree, sort of. Say he comes to Texas, say he sells his house in Ann Arbor right out from under Stella. What would freak her out more, her boyfriend moving to Austin, or her landlord selling the house? In the back of the cab Kevin closes his eyes. Stella—not now. He opens them again behind his sunglasses, sees nothing. That’s assuming he could even sell the house on Fifth Street—he knows people who live in nicer parts of town, Burns Park or the Old West Side or out on Geddes Avenue, who have had their houses on the market for months. He’d be lucky to get what he paid for it. And what do houses cost in Austin? Today, even after the housing bubble’s burst, probably more than he can afford. Christ, they’re still building luxury high-rise condos here, even now. So, move to Austin and be a renter again. Move to Austin for a fresh start, and start from scratch. He can see Beth, his ex, bouncing one of her children on her hip and shaking her head; he can see the ironic twist of her lip, hear her saying, “At your age.”