Next

by James Hynes

  Kevin nearly groans aloud. He’s on the very horns of the dilemma, damned if does and damned if he doesn’t. Six of one, as his father used to say, and half a dozen of the other. Settle for senescence, or pull his life out by the roots. It’s not a real choice so much as it’s a choice between two equally risible clichés: Count Your Blessings, or Follow Your Dreams. The fact that his dilemma is so predictable, so utterly and laughably banal, doesn’t make it any less pointed. Look it up (mid-lif kri-ses n) and find a line drawing of Kevin Quinn in a sporty little convertible, with his perky young—well, younger—girlfriend beside him, her hair loose in the breeze. See MIDDLE-AGED MAN.

  “I think that’s Longhorn Place right there,” says the cabbie, and Kevin leans forward for his first real view of Austin’s skyline, shockingly close. It’s like a beautifully crafted and intricately detailed miniature for a film, shot in slow-motion to make it look massive. It’s the city of the future from Metropolis or Things to Come, all it needs is a silvery biplane buzzing between the buildings. Several of the older buildings are neo-deco, broadchested and square, the color of concrete and topped with blunt little Masonic pyramids. Sprouting like saplings among them are three or four construction cranes like T squares and more new condo towers.

  “Which one?” Kevin says.

  “The tall one,” the cabbie says, “with the pointy top.”

  One building is much taller than the others, sleek and narrow and straight-sided, clad in ice-blue panels; on top, four sharp steel and glass triangles tilt toward each other, like a pyramid left slightly ajar, or a grasping, four-fingered mechanical claw. The tower glints icily in the sun, looking slightly unreal and miniature and menacing, the lair of a Bond villain. Kevin can imagine those four sharp panels slowly flowering with an almighty Dolby rumble and the doomy, minor-key blare of horns to reveal the blunt red foreskin of some rogue nuclear warhead purchased from bristle-jawed Russian mobsters, all set to hoist itself atop a billowing gush of smoke and dazzling flame. Or perhaps it’s a corporate Barad-dûr, the four icy panels concealing a huge, fiery red eye with a slit like a cat’s, ready to cast its baleful light on the hapless residents of Austin.

  “There’s your future, huh?” says the cabbie.

  “My future?” Kevin’s leaning far enough forward to read the cabbie’s name now. Kidd it says on his license, next to an overlit ID photo that makes him look drunk.

  “If you get the job,” says Kidd the Cabbie. “That’s where’ll you be. Top of the world.”

  Kevin sits back against the stiff seat. Top of the world, ma. That’s a different movie altogether, with a different sort of explosion. He’s not so sure he likes that. He sees the fare click over to $15.75.

  “Huh,” he says.

  The traffic thickens as they cross over a freeway, and the cabbie breaks off to watch the road. Kevin closes his eyes, but that only seems to make the radio louder, and he hears the caller—the same one? A new guy?—declare, “Nuke Mecca, dude. I’m serious. Nuke it from the air.”

  “C’mon, caller,” says the Limbaugh-resonant voice. “Do you really think that would solve anything?”

  “It’s like Aliens, man,” sputters the caller. “You try to kill ’em one at a time when they come at you, you’re never gonna win. You gotta wipe out the nest.”

  “No no no,” the host is saying over this—apparently even talk radio ranters draw the line at genocide—but even so, Kevin says, without opening his eyes, “Could you turn that off, please?”

  “What’s that?” says the cabbie.

  “The radio. Would you mind turning it off?”

  The cabbie says nothing, but a moment later the voices are gone. Kevin sways in the darkness behind his eyelids, bumping against the padding under the window. He senses the cabbie’s anger, but fuck him. The older he gets, the less eager to please Kevin feels. After Eileen Burks went into the hospital, Kevin returned to his basketball lunch as soon as he was sure he wasn’t going to run into her at the gym anymore. He was guilty over this for about ten minutes, until he missed an easy layup and one of his teammates, a perennial ABD with a single ginger eyebrow like a werewolf, snatched the ball away and growled at Kevin to get his head in the fucking game. Then, when he heard she had died, he thought—for one awful moment for which he’s still ashamed—I win! He didn’t say it out loud to anyone, thank God, but even so his conscience began to throb, and a moment later he was wondering, win what? The right to ninety-minute lunches? Freedom to read PW at my desk? The woman’s dead, and I’m still just the pubs guy, the editorial assistant, and if the economy continues to tank, maybe not even that. When times were fat, when Lansing was generous, he had an assistant editor and a typist, and now he’s lucky to get a work-study student for ten hours a week to help with the packing and shipping. He doesn’t even hire freelancers anymore, but does most everything himself. The only line left to cut in his budget is himself.

  Kevin can feel the car turning, and he opens his eyes. Now they’re galloping over the expansion joints of a six-lane bridge, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, the Austin skyline looming ahead. Over the low rail of the bridge he sees glassy, greenish water, and away to the left, beyond more bridges in diminishing perspective, low green hills dotted with pastel boxes and red roofs, picked out by the sun and blurred by haze. More condos under construction rise along the river, the lower floors already sheathed in glass, the middle floors in bright yellow Tyvek sheeting, the top floors open to the sky and sprouting tufts of rebar. Straight ahead the squashed ziggurats loom on either side, and Congress Avenue rises slowly between them toward the state capitol at the far end. The dome has a creamy limestone tint, like French vanilla, while the slanting morning light casts a curl of shadow in the scoop of the capitol’s portico. Even though the office towers are taller, some trick of perspective or some quality of the morning haze makes the capitol look improbably massive, like a predator resting on its forearms and lifting its bald head.

  As they reach the end of the bridge, Kevin notes the fare—$20.50! Jesus H. Christ! He should’ve taken the shuttle with Joy Luck. He has to press his temple to the warm glass of his window to see the blue claw now. The giant tower—Longhorn Place, the Ernst Blofeld Building, Barad-dûr, whatever—is partially obscured by a couple of intervening buildings, but its four panels still look as if they’re just about to rub their cold, razor fingertips together.

  Twenty-one seventy-five now. Hurry up, thinks Kevin, mentally inventorying the cash in his wallet. In front of the ziggurat on the right, a businesswoman in a tight silk suit—a bust like a figurehead and an ass like two dogs fighting in a sack—marches up the sidewalk; Kevin can almost hear the sharp tattoo of her heels. Her black hair’s drawn painfully back like the Aztec warrior’s in the airport, and Kevin turns to watch her as the cab passes. The red nails of one hand swing a chic leather briefcase down by the straining, shimmering fabric of her thigh, while the claws of her other hand press a cell phone to her ear. She’s fleshier than the fierce girl in the airport, but she has the same bronzed aspect, the same raptorish nose and cheekbones, the same brown-eyed gaze fixed fiercely ahead. She might be the Aztec’s mother, and he realizes that he would never see a woman like that striding up State Street in Ann Arbor. Hispanics are pretty thin on the ground in Ann Arbor, and even a full professor at Michigan wouldn’t dress like that. You might see a tailored suit on a law professor—Kevin was glared at once on the Diag by Catherine MacKinnon, who caught him staring at her—or on an administrator, but even they don’t march with the triumphal strut of this magnificent woman. He’s both thrilled and terrified to think he might find himself in the same city, maybe even in the same office, with a woman like that.

  Then the cab crosses an intersection and he’s blinded by the sunlight falling steeply down the side street. He shields his eyes. A shadow sweeps alarmingly across the windshield and he presses his temple to the window in time to see one of the construction cranes sweeping overhead, a massive red pulley swinging free. Up ah
ead, between the looming office towers, the state capitol gets smaller the closer Kevin comes to it.

  “Longhorn Place,” announces Kidd the Cabbie, as he pulls up to the curb.

  The cab accelerates away, and now Kevin’s well and truly in Texas, feet firmly on the pavement. The breathless heat is a pressure around Kevin’s chest, as though he were wrapped in bandages. He associates this kind of heat with the dull rattle of locusts on a August afternoon in Ann Arbor, when the trees droop over the sidewalks and stunned midwesterners wade through the humidity as if through water up to their waists. But here the heat is noisy—Kevin’s startled by the grumbling of buses, the rush of cars from light to light, the reverberating tap of hammers from a construction site. The heat clings to his skin the way it never does in Michigan; even in the long shadow of the office tower, he feels the sweat prickling under his arms, and it’s not even ten o’clock in the morning! Meanwhile a trio of trim young Texans in crisp khakis and unwilted polo shirts, carefully barbered behind their mirrored sunglasses, laugh at something one of them just said. An enormous Hispanic guy lumbers by, not a drop of moisture on his bulging jowls or even the hint of a stain on his Tommy Hilfiger jersey. Even the fat people here don’t sweat, marvels Kevin.

  Could I live in heat like this? he wonders. Could I stand the constant glare? The light bleeds even into the blue shadow of the office tower, and the autumnal tint of his sunglasses doesn’t seem to make much difference. He wades through the heat toward the wide bank of doors, where a middle-aged guy in a billowy shirt and a gaudy tie, his slacks cinched under his paunch, dangles a Diet Coke by four fingers of one hand and lifts a smoke mechanically with the other. His whole face puckers as he inhales, and the smoke just hangs around his head in the heat. He catches Kevin looking at him and shrugs, Kevin doesn’t know why. He looks like he’s about to speak, too, but then both men are distracted by the tattoo of a woman’s heels, and both gazes swing to watch the Aztec in silk striding toward them. Three blocks after Kevin first saw her, she’s still on her cell, briskly nodding and staring fiercely ahead, swinging her chic little briefcase alongside her flashing thigh. Even in the tower shadow the sheen of her skirt glimmers, and she strides purposefully toward the lobby doors at the same time as Kevin, who’s still wading in molasses. The three of them—paunchy smoker, silk-suit Amazon, sweating Michigander—are drawn together as if by a seine, the eyes of the two men tracking the dogfight bustle of the woman’s silken backside. Without breaking stride she lifts her briefcase hand to grasp the door handle, and both men galvanically leap to open it for her. The midmorning smoker is closer and quicker, grinding the pavement with the ball of his foot and hauling at the ice-blue door with his cigarette hand. The door opens with a satisfying bass pong like the ring of a bell, and Ms. Silk Suit, for all her bulk, shimmies through the widening gap. Her tight little bun of black hair swivels as she rewards the smoker with a glance, and the smoker shrugs again and hauls the door wider for Kevin, who trots after the woman into a gust of frigid air.

  The sudden clamp of cold air almost stops him gasping in his tracks, as if he has plunged into freezing water. The lobby of Barad-dûr is air-conditioned like a meat locker, instantly chilling the sweat on his forehead and tightening his skin. He pauses to fold his sunglasses into his jacket pocket, and Ms. Silk Suit’s magnificent booty recedes from him under the cavernous vault of the lobby, two stories of creamy marble and herringbone teakwood panels and mild, recessed lighting. He follows her progress in the blue-green diamonds of the glittering marble floor, where her bustling, inverted reflection meets the sharp points of her heels and toes. Even with the teak to soak up the echo, her heeltaps sound like pistol shots, and the fat treads of his own shoes—a pair of $150 Cole Haan oxfords which Beth would have told him were too young for him, but Stella said were way cool when he tried them on at Macy’s in Briarwood—send a screech ricocheting against the unbroken curve of the ceiling, into the elevator alcoves, and off the tall outer windows.

  He has no idea where he’s going—his interview isn’t until two—but he can’t resist following the lubricious vaudeville bump-bumpa-bump-bumpa-bump of Ms. Silk Suit’s old-time ecdysiast strut, and when she stops short and laughs out loud, he nearly blunders into her from behind. She cants all her weight on one sharp heel and tosses her head back; her laugh, an artificial squeal, bounds all around the lobby, followed by a rapid burst of Spanish. Kevin swerves around her and heads for the security desk, a rounded island off to one side of the lobby. On the teak wall above the desk a flatscreen TV is showing Fox News, still blazing its red BREAKING NEWS tab as a pair of commentators in split screen—heavy woman with blond hair, balding dark-skinned man—dissect the life of the late Kevin MacDonald, or so Kevin assumes from the white-on-red caption: HAS JIHAD COME TO SCOTLAND? He can’t tell for sure because the sound is turned off. He turns to the prow of the security desk, where a widescreen video monitor shows a bright Texas flag waving endlessly against a flawlessly blue sky. Across the flag in red letters is the message TOUCH TO START. Ms. Silk Suit’s heeltaps are receding, the echo of her Spanish diminishing, and by time Kevin turns she’s already disappearing into an elevator alcove.

  “Help you?”

  Kevin snaps to attention, wide-eyed and blinking. “Pardon?”

  “Can I help you?” The security guard, a bored black woman, looks up from behind the breastwork of the desk. She’s bulky and dark, with gold hoop earrings and blood-red lipstick and a sleek, striated helmet of ebony hair. She wears a white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie, and a shapeless blue blazer. “Who you looking for?” she says, folding her hands.

  Kevin wonders, is this standard operating procedure, her demanding so abruptly that he account for himself, or is it an Orange Alert thing? Do bombings in Glasgow subway stations resonate all the way down to lobby guards in Austin, Texas? Is there a photo display of suspicious types taped to the inside of her desk? Is one of them a picture of the Other Kevin, aka Abdul Mohammed, prompting the frowning guard to suspect all Celtic-looking guys who wander past her desk? Moments like this, Kevin turns motormouth. Maybe it’s an authority thing, or just his midwestern eagerness to please, but he always explains way more than he needs to.

  “Um, yeah, right, I’m Kevin Quinn? From Ann Arbor, Michigan? Just flew in this morning for a job interview with uh… that is, I have an appointment here, this afternoon with uh, just a sec, with uh…” Christ, he’s spaced on the name, so he digs inside his jacket, pulls out notebook, sunglasses, pen, everything but the letter, which he fumbles out at last. “Hemphill Associates?” He lifts his eyebrows at the woman, tries to fold the letter back into his pocket.

  “Touch the screen, sir.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  She lifts her chin. “Big screen there? With the flag on it? Touch it.”

  “Ah.” The letter’s all sharp corners for some reason and won’t go back in his jacket, so he folds it roughly and thrusts it into a side pocket. “Of course.” He touches the screen, the flag vanishes, replaced by a luminous green alphabet. Kevin touches the H and up pops HEMPHILL ASSOCIATES, 52 ONE LONGHORN PLACE.

  “Fifty-two?” Kevin peers hopefully at the guard.

  “Fifty-second floor,” she enunciates slowly, as if to an idiot. “Right up at the top.”

  “Do I need to sign in or anything?” He plunges into his inside pocket again, feeling for his pen. “Do you need to call them and let them know?”

  The look on her face, and he lets the sentence dwindle away.

  “No, hon.” She slowly shakes her head. “You just go on up. When’s your appointment?”

  Kevin grimaces sheepishly. “Two?”

  “Two!” The woman puckers her lips. “You a little early, ain’t you?”

  “Well, I just flew in from Ann Arbor? Michigan?” Motormouth again. “I wanted to make sure I knew where I was supposed to go.”

  “Mission accomplished.” The security guard refolds her hands.

  Kevin tiptoes slowly back from
the desk.

  “So,” says the guard, “you got someplace to go for the next”—she glances to the side—“four and a quarter hours?”

  “Ah.” Stops. “Thought I’d, you know, take a walk on the riverwalk or something.”

  The guard goggles at him. “Riverwalk!”

  “No?” Kevin balances on his toes.

  “You in Austin,” says the guard. “Ain’t no riverwalk here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Riverwalk, that’s San Antonio.”

  “Ah.” Even in the arctic AC, Kevin can feel himself blush.

  “What we got is a hike and bike trail.” She says “hike’n’bike” like it’s one word, and her eyes glide up and down. “But you ain’t exactly dressed for it. I tell you what.” She unfolds her hands and places her pink palms on the desktop and slowly presses herself up. The security desk stands a little higher than the lobby floor so that she looms over Kevin. “They’s a Starbucks right across the street.” She slices the air with her hand, across the lobby. “Have you a cup of coffee or whatever, buy you a newspaper, figure out someplace cool to go till”—she smiles—“one thirty, anyway.”