Next

by James Hynes

  The cabbie shakes the cell phone like a rattle or a talisman, knuckling tears away with his other hand. “Sixth and Congress, mister, you gotta get out now. I gotta go.”

  “Okay, sure, yeah.” Kevin fumbles for the seat belt release. “What do I owe you?” He looks at the meter and yanks out his wallet, hoping he still has enough after the last cab ride and lunch with Dr. Barrientos.

  “Just go, man. No charge.”

  “Sorry?” Kevin freezes with his fingers in his wallet.

  The cabbie’s facing forward again, scraping the heel of his hand over his sharp cheekbones, wiping away tears.

  “Just be gettin’ out of my cab, okay?” He draws a sharp breath and lets it out. “My brother’s alive and I gotta go, so it’s free, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kevin says warily, wondering if the guy’s trying to pull some sort of scam. “You’re sure?”

  “Man, will you go?” cries the cabbie, nearly sobbing, and Kevin flinches and stuffs his wallet away and fumbles for the door. “Listen, thanks,” he says, untangling the seat belt, yanking on the door. “I appreciate it, I hope everything’s okay with your, with your…”

  The cabbie’s hammering the steering wheel with his wrist, already checking his mirrors so he can pull away as soon as this stammering idiot is out of his cab. “Gonna be a bad day for everybody today.” He glances back at Kevin one last time. “You need to pay attention, man.”

  Kevin’s out in the heat again, patting his pockets, making sure he hasn’t left anything behind. The cab starts to pull away before he’s even shut the door, and he yells, “Wait! Lemme get the door!” But without stopping the cabbie reaches back with his long arm and hauls it shut, then guns the cab through the intersection as the light turns yellow, leaving Kevin curbside by the rush of downtown traffic, with the unforgiving sun beating straight down on the top of his head.

  Kevin’s a little disoriented, and he looks up and down the street to situate himself—south down the canyon of Congress toward the two squashed ziggurats by the river, then up at the capitol squatting under the steep sun of midafternoon. The sidewalk is crowded with lunchtime pedestrians, businessmen and women traveling in packs, or alone and chatting on cell phones, all of them sifting through the scruffy homeless orbiting a bus stop. The clock on the corner of Sixth and Congress tells him his interview is still forty-five minutes away, but it’s time to quit screwing around, so he cuts across the stream of pedestrians to the tower, hauls at the glass door—pongggg—and steps into the arctic AC. Time to get this over with so he can go back to the airport, get on the plane, and go home.

  As he squeaks across the lobby floor toward the elevator alcoves, he buttons the top button of his shirt and tightens the knot of his tie. He’s a little queasy with adolescent test anxiety—instead of wandering and woolgathering he should have been thinking all this time about the interview, he should have brought with him the Web pages he printed off from the Hemphill Associates site and reviewed them on the plane—but he quashes the feeling, reminds himself he doesn’t even want the job. He loosens the tie again. The tower’s lobby reverberates with indistinct voices, like a museum. The black woman in the blazer is standing behind the rampart of the security desk, and she’s been joined by another blazered colleague, a tall, rangy white guy with a bushy Josef Stalin moustache, and together they’re watching the big, silent flatscreen on the lobby wall. In fact, a loose group of people has gathered under the screen just beyond the security desk, faces all tilted up at the unnaturally vivid image. Kevin notes only the aggressive red, white, and blue of Fox as he turns to the touch screen in the prow of the desk, where the Texas flag waves on its endless loop. He thumbs the cool glass, the video keyboard flickers up, and he touches H for Hemphill Associates.

  “Can you turn it up?” says a man standing under the flatscreen.

  “Ain’t supposed to,” says the black security guard.

  “I tell you what,” murmurs the white guard, in a deep, confidential drawl, “I’d like to hear it, too.”

  “At least put on the captions,” says another one of the flatscreeners.

  Kevin notes the floor of Hemphill Associates—52—and looks up at the two guards.

  “Excuse me,” he says, but the black woman is fussing through the clutter on her desktop. Without taking his eyes off the screen, the white guard says, “Can’t you find it?”

  “No.” She’s sliding stuff around.

  “Well, how’d you turn it on this morning?” His eyes still on the cable news.

  “I didn’t,” she says, peeved at him, at the missing remote, at herself. “We don’t never turn it off.”

  “Excuse me,” Kevin says again, and the white guard slowly lowers his gaze.

  “Sir.”

  “Which elevator goes to Hemphill Associates?” Kevin jerks his thumb toward the alcoves.

  The black woman looks up wide-eyed at Kevin; he’s not sure if she recognizes him from a few hours before. “What floor they on?” she says.

  Kevin consults the screen. “Fifty-two?” he says.

  The white guard sighs and looks back at the television. The black woman widens her eyes a fraction. She points over Kevin’s head. “Can you read?”

  Kevin turns and sees big black numbers over the entrance to each elevator alcove, 11–26 over one, 26–52 over the other. He feels his face get hot. Suddenly the black woman stands up straight, clutching the remote. “Found it!” she cries.

  “Fine.” Kevin lifts both his palms; now he’s peeved, too. “That’s all I wanted to know.” He swivels away from the desk, and his gaze glides away from the distracted guards, over the knot of people straining like sunflowers toward the television, and past the cluttered graphics of the flatscreen itself—the speeding crawl, the bright red tab reading BREAKING NEWS, the helmet-haired anchor centered against the out-of-focus newsroom. As he enters the alcove for floors 26 through 52, he performs an involuntary little stutter step—did he just see the caption ATTACK IN ST. PAUL in bold white sans serif against a livid red?—but under the momentum of his own impatience Kevin presses the elevator button. Immediately one of the elevators pings, the doors slide open, Kevin enters. As he presses the button for 52, an amplified voice swells out of the museum reverb of the lobby, saying, “We’re getting reports of what seems to be another missile attack, in another American city,” and Kevin involuntarily glances through the closing doors. But he can’t see the TV, can’t even see the security desk.

  “A building appears to be burning in downtown Baltimore,” says the flatscreen as the doors slide shut and the elevator accelerates at an absurd speed, nearly buckling Kevin’s knees. His stomach drops, his balls tighten, and in the burnished door of the car Kevin glimpses his own blurred incredulity. Did I just hear, he wonders, what I thought I heard? It’s like the time in high school when a girl a couple grades ahead of him cut school to go to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, and she came back with a copy of the April 1 edition of the Michigan student paper, with the giant headline NIXON DECLARES MARTIAL LAW. In the cafeteria at lunchtime she sat with the headline ostentatiously displayed, and Kevin fell for it, leaping from his seat and stalking across the dining room and yanking the paper from her hands, all the while saying loudly, over and over again, “I don’t fucking believe it, I do not fucking believe it,” until she pointed out the date on the paper. “April Fool’s,” she said, laughing. As the entire cafeteria rose as one to applaud Kevin’s righteous if unnecessary outrage, he blushed and carefully refolded the paper and handed it back to the girl—he still remembers that she had pretty green eyes—and he said to her, “Really. I didn’t believe it.” Then walked the long mile back to his own table where his buddies gagged with laughter on their sloppy joes.

  But this is different, because it’s not April 1, because the whole world is jumpier than it was in 1974, and because he’s thirty-five years older and resigned to the fact that sometimes the worst thing that you can imagine happening, actually does. Of course, arguably he und
erstood that earlier in life than most people, with the death of his father. He sighs and tightens the knot of his tie again. He lifts his chin and runs his finger under his collar. The car wobbles ever so slightly in its breathless ascent, and the glowing red floor indicator, which has remained on 1 ever since he left the ground, suddenly starts to beep through the floors—26, 27, 28—and he realizes that, these days, hearing of simultaneous attacks in Minnesota and Maryland is not much more shocking than hearing “Your father is dead” or “Your mother drinks too much” or “Your sister’s a lesbian.” Or “Stella used to cut herself.” Or “Stella’s pregnant.”

  Now his heart is racing, but he’s not sure why. Is it because of what he just heard on the television, or is it because Stella’s trying to trap him into fatherhood, or is it because he has a sudden case of nerves over this interview for a job that he doesn’t even want any longer? Or is it just the g-forces of his rapid ascent up the gullet of Barad-dûr? The red numbers are flicking as fast as his pulse—47, 48, 49—but even as the elevator slows, relieving the pressure on Kevin’s knees, his heart keeps racing. Kevin leans against the back wall of the car, bracing his feet. Compared to its jackrabbit start, the car crawls the last couple of floors—fiiiiiffty, fiiiiiifffty-onnnnne—and Kevin feels a pressure in his ears that he’s surprised to realize is because of the altitude. He’s yawning to make them pop when the elevator comes to a stop so slow, so gentle, that Kevin’s surprised again when the doors slide open.

  He steps tentatively into the elevator alcove of the fifty-second floor, which flows uninterrupted into a severe black and gray reception area. Beyond the glass wall of an empty conference room the chairs are all awry around the table as if everyone just left in a hurry, and beyond the table a floor-to-ceiling glass wall gives a jaw-dropping vista of Austin. Even as Kevin stops dead, he knows he looks like a rubbernecking rube, but under the bleached sky beyond the window he can see the flat green river between leafy parkland, tiny glittering cars streaming both ways over a freeway bridge in the distance, and beyond that, the rampart of hills, their dull green foliage studded with red tile roofs. He’s viewing it all through the tint of two windows, which lends it the slightly dark, digitally graded grandeur of a glossy film: Austin, Texas, directed by Ridley Scott. The condo towers under construction look even grander somehow when seen from slightly above—heroic, even. The tall, T square crane above the nearest one rises almost as high as the floor where Kevin is standing, and he can see a little man in an orange vest and hardhat climbing slowly up a ladder up the center of the crane’s framework near the top, just under the cab. Kevin nearly gasps at the idea of simultaneously being that high up and that exposed.

  “May I help you?”

  Kevin starts and, embarrassed, turns to a very pretty dark-haired young woman seated behind a low reception desk, an artful sweep of dark wood with a black marble top. She’s lean and sharp-featured, and she wears a tight black knit top over form-fitting gray slacks; her top is sleeveless, showing off her impeccably toned arms. She sits with perfect posture in her chair, watching him with professional brightness, and maybe even a little bemusement at his reaction to the view out the window.

  “Hi!” says Kevin, a little too chipper.

  “Hi,” she says back, squaring her office chair with both hands on the desktop below the marble counter. Her response is slightly firmer this time, as if she’s bracing herself to deal with an idiot.

  “Is this, uh, Hemphill Associates?” He cringes inside, realizing he ought to be projecting confidence, not asking dumb questions that he should already know the answer to.

  “Yes, it is,” she says, lifting her fastidiously maintained eyebrows like a kindergarten teacher with a dull student who unexpectedly gave the right answer.

  God, she’s pretty, Kevin’s thinking, and stepping up to the counter he draws a breath and gathers his threadbare professionalism about him. The thing to do now, he’s telling himself, is to empty his mind of all the sturm and drang of the last few hours—his seminostalgic, semihorndog stalking of Joy Luck; his fateful fall on the bridge; his emotionally tumultuous lunch with Dr. Barrientos; his epiphanic sponge bath in the men’s room in Wohl’s; his erotic reverie in the cab; his apocalyptic aural fantasy in the elevator just now—and just calm the fuck down. But as he lays his hands lightly on the frosty countertop, he finds himself wondering how this girl in her thin sleeveless blouse stays warm in the icy AC. It’s all he can do not to say, “Aren’t you freezing?” and offer her his jacket.

  “I’m Kevin Quinn,” he manages to say instead. “I’m here for an interview.”

  The girl’s face brightens, almost as if she’s genuinely happy to see him, and Kevin’s heart brightens, too, even though he knows her smile is purely professional. How many more smiles like that, he wonders, smiling back, can a man my age expect to see in his lifetime? So what if it’s not personal. He’ll take what he can get.

  “You’re early!” She widens her eyes at a computer screen under the counter. Then she rises, and Kevin’s even more thrilled to see that she’s nearly as tall as he is. Kevin’s always been an easy touch for tall women. “But I’ll go let Patsy know you’re here.” She steps away from the desk, her perfect shoulders squared, the hollow of her back perfectly erect, and disappears up a hallway that runs parallel to the dazzling view.

  Stop it! thinks Kevin, resisting the temptation to edge around the end of the reception desk to watch her walk away. Enough already! Haven’t you already made enough of a fool of yourself for one day? He pinches his lips together to keep from laughing out loud. He’s not normally like this, at least he doesn’t think he is. Certainly he has no problem admiring a good-looking young woman, he’s a standard-issue middle-aged man, but he normally doesn’t walk around like a cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, his tongue unscrolling to the floor. He doesn’t usually erupt into a full-blown reverie within the first seconds of meeting someone, or at least he doesn’t go from zero to ninety quite so quickly. What’s going on with me today, he wonders—is it the change of scene, or the slightly exotic, subtropical women he’s met here, or is it just the heat? Or, now that he’s fifty-two stories up, is it the altitude? Or is it because he’s actually contemplating going back to Ann Arbor as if this whole episode in Austin never happened? Is it because he’s thinking he might actually go back and be a father to Stella’s child? Is this the death of the old Kevin or the birth pangs of the new, and how can he tell the difference?

  In spite of himself, he’s stepped far enough into the lobby to peer down the hall where the receptionist went. But it’s empty, a long row of glass-walled offices that he can’t see into. He walks to the wall of the empty conference room and looks through it at the view again. Over the leaden river he can see the two bridges at Lamar Avenue, the old traffic bridge and the pedestrian bridge where he fell down. Even now, in the ungodly midday heat, there are joggers crossing the pedestrian bridge, simultaneously vivid and featureless at this distance, like Sims. In fact, the whole scene below has the aspect of a fantastically detailed computer animation, from the bustling film crew of clean-cut young men with their three tripods—WOW, how many cameras do they need?—down to the tiny white sliver of a rowing scull dragging a miniature V across the green surface of the river, its tiny oars dimpling the water on either side. It’s Austin by Pixar Studios, with their characteristic eye for busy detail.

  “Mr. Quinn?”

  Kevin’s startled again by the dazzling receptionist, who’s giving him a spokesmodel smile from only a couple of feet away.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it,” she says in a way that implies that Kevin’s not really entitled to it. She swivels her gaze out the window and then fixes on Kevin again, lowering her voice a register. “Patsy’s just finishing up a phone call, but she’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  Kevin gives her a halfhearted smile, but he’s distracted by a bright flash from the pedestrian bridge. Wow, thinks Kevin, what’s that? Even a movie light wouldn�
��t be that bright in this sunlight, but instead of zeroing in on the bustling little group on the bridge, his gaze instinctively follows an equally dazzling streak trailing a tight spiral of smoke in a long smooth curve that stops abruptly at one of the new, finished condo towers. Kevin’s gaze automatically keeps tracking beyond the tower, so that he has to correct himself and jerk his head back to see a black flower of smoke threaded with flame bursting from an upper floor.

  “Sir?” The receptionist is tilting her head. “Perhaps you’d like to have a seat.”

  Kevin turns to the girl, but he’s speechless and his mouth is suddenly dry and his pulse is racing. He hears a sharp, hollow boom, and he jerks his gaze out the window again, where he sees not one, but two dazzling streaks rising from the bridge, brightening as they come, gushing smoke as they rise in a fatal arc, straight for him. The beautiful young receptionist has flinched slightly at the sound of the boom, but instead of following his gaze out the window at the furious missiles miraculously threading the construction cranes and ziggurats and condominiums—now only an inch away, now half an inch, now a quarter-inch—she has placed one hand near Kevin’s elbow without quite touching him, gesturing spokesmodelishly with her other hand to a pair of square, black leather chairs angled toward each other at the center of the severe lobby.

  “Please sit down,” she says.

  PART THREE

  Next

  KEVIN IS AIRBORNE, but unlike his moment of caesura on the bridge, he’s not falling, he’s rising straight up into the air. The lovely receptionist is rising, too, her eyes wide, her hair flying, her mouth a startled O, her sweater rucked up to bare her firm midriff. In this alarming and vivid moment of super slo-mo, Kevin recalls a picture he saw years ago, by a famous photographer of his youth, that showed a young Richard Nixon with his jacket buttoned and his legs together, jumping straight up off the floor of some government office or hotel suite. His hands were spread beatifically and there were two or three inches of air between the pointed toes of his Oxfords and the nap of the carpet. He wore a bemused smile. Imagine that, thinks Kevin—Nixon, beatific, bemused—as the interior window of the conference room disintegrates into infinite points of light. Beyond the glittering scrim of splintering glass, the conference table hangs in the air, the chairs orbiting it six inches off the floor, their little wheels spinning. Meanwhile the outer window bursts out into the void, fifty-two stories up. Kevin’s ears fill with the disintegrating hiss of glass and a cracking rumble like rocks tumbling in a drum.