by James Hynes
Then he’s bouncing painfully on the hard, cold floor of the reception area. He hasn’t landed on his feet (the way Nixon did, presumably), but on his hip, bruisingly, his shoes over his head, the heel of his hand skidding across the floor. Everything around him is also bouncing—the two stylish black leather chairs, a large potted fern, the receptionist—and from behind the reception desk all sorts of things that were airborne a moment ago—pens, pencils, a legal pad, a stapler, a cell phone, a ring binder—are tumbling end over end. Marble from the desktop shatters against the floor, and atomized glass skitters like popcorn, surging across the floor like incoming surf. Kevin tumbles through all this chaos, just another bouncing thing, until he hits his shoulder blade against the floor, whacks his knee on something, and lands finally on his back with his arms curled over his head and his fists clenched. Directly above him the suspended ceiling is rippling, panels cracking, cables and wiring jigging like snakes. Grit streams toward the floor. Dust trembles in the air all around him.
Kevin is shaking all over, though whether that’s just him or the floor is still moving, it’s too early to tell. All around him he hears cracking and clattering and rumbling, and from a more specific direction, somewhere out of sight, the sharp, percussive spitting of something electrical. He lifts his head but he can’t see sparks anywhere. He does see that he’s lying with his feet splayed and the right leg of his new trousers pushed up past his knee, baring his bandage with its pink stain in the center. From his left foot he’s missing his shoe, and beyond the reinforced toe of his brand-new sock he sees that the conference room has been nearly emptied out. The long table is gone and only three chairs remain, two of them lying on their sides coated in dust and glass and shredded drywall. The third chair has landed on its wheels, its seat slowly turning on its axis as if somebody has just gotten up out of it. Harsh sunlight streams through the swirling dust where the outer window used to be, and Kevin can already feel the blush on his face as the heat from outside swells into the room.
Now his trembling has become rhythmic and rapid, synchronous with the thunder of his own pulse. The air is dusty and acrid, something chemical stinging the back of his nostrils. Oh God, does he smell smoke? He can’t tell, he can’t place the odor, and he tells himself desperately that it’s probably not smoke. His throat is dry, though, and he gags on the dust in the air and spits to the side to expel the grit from his mouth.
“What happened?” he says aloud. He loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his new shirt. The cracking and rumbling has diminished, though it hasn’t entirely stopped—something, somewhere, creaks menacingly like ship timbers—and he can still hear that electrical smacking sound like someone cracking a whip. His whole body still shakes. Warm air courses all around him now, cutting the dust a little, and he lifts his head. Through the gap to the outside he sees the bleached Texas sky and the skeletal top of the nearest unfinished condo tower, the Tinkertoy crane above it still slowly turning. Whatever’s happening over here, those guys over there are still working. Maybe what’s happening isn’t what he thinks it is. Maybe it isn’t happening at all.
Above him the ceiling has stopped rippling, but from broken ceiling panels and twisted framing hang loose wires and bent pipes and an AC duct split at a seam. A crack in a concrete beam slowly drips a stream of dust, and it occurs to Kevin that maybe he should get out from under it. But he can hardly move. His entire body beats like a drum, and when he unclenches his fists his fingers tremble so alarmingly that he clenches them white again. What do you do in a situation like this? What’s the first step? Should he pinch himself? Maybe this isn’t real, maybe he’s only nodded off in the cab listening to the radio, or maybe he’s still on the plane from Michigan, maybe he’s asleep high over Kansas with Joy Luck deep in her novel next to him, and he’s worried himself into a nightmare. Maybe he’s still in bed back in Ann Arbor, with more room to be restless than usual because Stella’s away in Chicago and not pressed against him with her hair scraping his cheek and her humid breath against his chest. Wake up, Kevin tells himself. Computer, freeze program.
Then he remembers the receptionist, and he starts violently, as if he’s been stung by that electric whip he keeps hearing. Oh God, where is she? He jackknifes to a sitting position without touching his hands to the floor, which is graveled with broken glass and shards of black marble. Before he can imagine the worst he sees the girl curled in a fetal ball on the floor a few feet away, just this side of a heap of crumpled wall where a corridor used to run deeper into Hemphill Associates. She’s clenched like a fist, her knees drawn up, her fingers dug into her upper arms, her hair spilled over her face and jeweled with broken glass. Kevin tries to speak, but his mouth is dry and his tongue seizes up, and he hacks and clears his throat and spits again. Careful of the glass all around him, he sets his heels against the floor, one shoe and one sock, and drags himself on his backside a quarter-inch toward the girl.
“Hey,” he rasps, then pauses to spit more dust. He can’t tell if she’s conscious, but at least her rib cage is rising and falling. She’s just a couple feet beyond his stocking foot, and if he could only bring himself to unclench the muscles in his leg and extend his knee, he could nudge her with his toe. But he can still hear that nautical creaking, and he’s wondering if he should move at all. What if the slightest gesture from him brings the ceiling down? What if he slides forward and the whole goddamn peak of the building comes down on top on them? He’s not doing either of them any good if he does that. What if all it takes is the thunder of his pulse? Or a sharp intake of breath?
Another startling, electrical whip crack freezes him. It sounds like it’s getting closer, as if the wire is snaking through the rubble, seeking him out, and he says aloud, “That’s really getting on my nerves.” At which the girl shudders all over, to Kevin’s vast relief. “Hey,” he rasps, “can you hear me?”
She stiffens, catches her breath, gingerly lifts her head. Fragments of glass tumble from the hair spread over her face.
“Careful.” Kevin scoots another quarter-inch. “You’ve got glass in your hair.”
Someone is shouting in his head that he should go to the young woman and brush the glass off her, but someone else is shouting equally loud, don’t you fucking move. He’s afraid of the glittering glass all around, afraid he’ll embed it in his hands and his stocking foot. He’s afraid the room will start lurching again, that the electrical snake will bite him finally and fry him to a blackened crisp like a cartoon cat, that the cracked beam overhead will split and pulp his head like a melon. Through the windowless gap a hot, steady wind is clearing the room of its haze of dust. He can breathe a little easier. Meanwhile the girl has propped herself on her elbow. With trembling fingers she parts the hair over her face, gingerly combing kernels of glass to the floor. Now Kevin’s like the guy at the toga party in Animal House, alone with a passed-out sorority girl, a tiny angel on one shoulder and a diminutive devil on the other, but this time their roles are reversed. Go to her, says the angel. Stay where you are, says the devil.
“That’s good,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. He manages to extend his feet toward her. “You’re getting it.”
Through her hair he can begin to see her more clearly; her face is bloodlessly white and her eyes are squeezed shut. She licks her lips, she blinks, she opens her eyes and looks up at him, and then the floor abruptly splits under Kevin’s thighs with an almighty crack, expelling a puff of dust all along the seam, leaving Kevin’s feet dangling in the air as the floor beyond it tilts violently away. On the other side of the crack everything—broken glass, office chairs, girl—slides toward the gap to the outside. Instinctively Kevin lurches back, heedlessly pressing his palms into glass, hauling himself frantically away from the split. Downhill from the sliding girl, the upright conference room chair rolls over the edge and out into the air, its seat still turning. One of the upended chairs slides after it. The girl meanwhile has erupted into frantic action, scrambling uphill on
her hands and knees through the cascading glass and drywall and debris, her wild eyes fixed on Kevin from behind her jeweled veil of hair. Before angels or devils tell him otherwise, he twists on his bruised hip and thrusts his hand over the edge for her, his palm stinging with glass and already oozing blood, but before she can even reach for it she puts her foot on something sliding past her—it’s Kevin’s missing shoe—and loses her purchase, landing flat on her belly, sliding backward.
“No!” she shouts fiercely, her palms dragging against the floor. At the last instant she clutches the armrest of the one remaining chair, but the chair’s sliding, too. Then she slithers over the edge and she’s gone, followed by the chair, its little wheels spinning uselessly.
Kevin convulses away from the crack in the floor. He’s really shaking now, it’s not just his racing pulse. His palms are burning and dripping blood. Oh God, he thinks, oh God oh God oh God. He’s trembling so hard he’s afraid he’ll vibrate right over the edge and out the window after her, so he curls his stinging hands over his chest and scrabbles with his feet away from the crack, banging past a leather chair on its side, plowing through the spilled soil of the potted plant, leaving a wake through broken glass, until his back is up against the inside wall of the lobby and his knees are drawn up to his chest, the soles of his feet—one socked, one shoed—pressing hard on the floor.
Oh God, he thinks, I just saw someone die. He presses the back of his head against the hard, merciless wall behind him and squeezes his eyes shut, but then all he sees is the girl splayed against the Austin skyline, just hanging there, arms and legs spread like a skydiver’s. Which is not even what he actually saw, but it’s what he sees now in the pulsing darkness behind his eyelids. One moment she was just beyond his reach, and the next she was over the edge. I almost had her, he thinks, but I waited too long, I hesitated. If I’d spoken to her sooner, if I’d nudged her quicker with my foot, if I’d gone to her right away…
… you’d be dead, too, says his fucking little devil, you’d have been on the wrong side of the crack, and you’d be spinning weightless through the air, watching the pavement hurtling toward you.
“Oh God,” he says aloud, but he’s afraid to open his eyes for fear of seeing worse, for fear of seeing the crack widen and the floor tilt again, of seeing the Austin skyline framed by the maw of the shattered window, in the last minute before he himself is pinned against the sky like a specimen. Still not opening his eyes, he tugs his rucked-up pant leg down over his bandage and slowly lets his feet slide forward. As soon as his legs are spread against the floor, as if a passage has been unblocked, a damp warmth spreads through his groin. The skin of his inner thigh begins to sting lightly, and then he’s stung as well at the back of his nostrils by the smell. He cracks an eyelid. The stain of his piss is darkening the inside of his left trouser leg. The ammoniac tang joins the other acrid smells, of fried chemicals and burned plastic and powdered concrete and Christ knows what else—ozone, maybe, whatever ozone smells like, from that loose, crackling, still-invisible wire. The stain spreads nearly halfway to his knee; it’s all that tea he’s been drinking since he landed, he thought he’d emptied his bladder in the men’s room at Wohl’s, but no, there’s a reserve he hasn’t tapped, and now his brand-new trousers are ruined. Second pair today, and he’s damned if he’s buying another. He starts to laugh and cry at the same time. Two ruined pairs of dress slacks in one day, that’s his limit.
He slumps against the wall. Pissing himself has calmed him a little; the stinging warmth is reassuring. He’s not dead yet. He plucks the wet cotton away from his leg and then remembers the glass in his palms, and he turns his hands over. Blood has darkened the cuffs of his jacket—I’m just leaking all over, thinks Kevin—but the glass in his hands doesn’t look as bad as it feels. It’s not in jagged shards, but rough little kernels, like broken auto glass, a few in one palm and even fewer in the other. He’s tempted to just slap his hands together as if he has sand all over them, but even now he’s still got enough sense to know that that would really, really hurt. So instead he licks blood off the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, then lifts his knee and steadies his left hand against it as he attempts to pluck a fragment out of the heel of his palm. The glass is slick with blood and hard to get a grip on, and oh God, it stings like a bitch, but he pries the nugget loose with his nails and flicks it away, watching blood well into the tiny white hole it has made. He squeezes his eyes shut and shudders all over like a wet dog, then opens his eyes again and brings his trembling fingers to bear on another fragment of glass.
Something buzzes rhythmically nearby, over and over, like a wasp trapped behind a window screen. Fuck off, thinks Kevin, whatever you are—another loose wire, a shredded ceiling tile thrumming in the hot wind, some crumbling bit of masonry about to vibrate onto his head and kill him. Fuck off. You’re in shock right now, says one of his little familiars—could be the angel, could be the devil, he can’t tell the difference—you should pull yourself together, clear your head, start thinking about what you need to do to get out of here. Yeah, says Kevin back, but what about my hands? They hurt. He flicks another kernel of glass away like a booger.
The buzzing continues, angry, insistent, suspiciously regular, and Kevin lifts his head from his minor surgery to listen, holding his breath. It’s a familiar sound, and he latches onto it, numbly wondering if the buzzing is proof that this is all a dream—it’s his alarm going off and he’s going to wake up any second now, disoriented and groggy, to see the pale green numerals of his clock glowing in the dark, he’s going to feel Stella stirring against him, muttering for him to shut it off. The buzzing is like a rope thrown into his well of sleep, and all he has to do is grab on and haul himself to safety.
It comes in threes: Buzz, buzz, buzz. Pause. Buzz, buzz, buzz. It’s quite near, and suddenly his devilish little angel says in his ear, answer the fucking phone. Kevin lowers his knee and drops his hands palm up in his damp lap and stares slack-jawed beyond his shoeless toes at a little black flip phone buzzing amid the glass near the crack in the floor. The phone rotates a quarter turn with each trio of pulses.
“Oh,” breathes Kevin, and then, as if that electrical snake has at last sunk its fangs into him, he jerks his legs under him, curls his hands spastically against his chest, and slides knee by knee, his toes pressed flat behind him, toward the phone dancing on the edge of the abyss. The weight on his right knee revives the pain of his first laceration of the day and squeezes blood through the bandage into his brand-new trousers, but then they’re already ruined, says his angelic devil, so what the hell difference does it make? His heart’s pounding again because any second now another foot or so of the truncated floor is going to crumble off like pie crust and tilt him into oblivion. When he’s within fingertip reach of the vibrating cell he sinks back on his butt and leans forward, but his hand trembles so hard that he jerks back, afraid he’ll fumble the throbbing little phone—his lifeline, his ray of hope, his salvation—over the side.
He inches forward on his knees, heart thundering. Not so fucking close! The phone vibrates through another cycle, and Kevin snatches the cell and yanks it back to his chest. He rocks painfully back onto his toes, and plucking at his lapel with two smeary fingers he shoves the phone inside his jacket. Then he swivels onto his butt again and, crying out at the sting of glass pressed deeper into his palms, hauls himself back from the crack and up against the wall, his wake through the debris punctuated with bloody palm prints. The phone pulses against his chest like another heart. Braced against the wall, his legs splayed, he can hear someone whimpering, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s him.
Then the phone stops and it’s as if his own heart has stopped, as if whoever was calling has already given him up for dead. “No!” he cries, and thrusts his hand inside his jacket again, smearing his tie and his new shirt with blood. He holds the cell by the tips of his fingers, steadying his wrist with his other hand. The glossy black burnish of the phone is alrea
dy dappled with red. He wipes his fingertips on his trousers and licks his lips. He tries to breathe more deeply, but it’s as if his ribs are wrapped tight in gauze. He flips open the phone. The keypad is impossibly miniature and pristine and he nearly flips it shut again, not wanting to bloody this immaculate little artifact. And anyway, who’s he going to call? What’s he going to say? Then the phone starts to buzz again, and Kevin nearly drops it. After everything that’s just happened, his startle reflex should be fried, but he’s still jumpy as a cat. So jumpy, in fact, that for a moment he’s not sure what to do with the phone, how it works, what it’s for. The little screen has lit up with the message BLAKE CALLING. Blake who, Kevin wonders. I don’t know anyone named Blake. He licks his forefinger clean and presses Talk and shakily lifts the phone to his ear. He can’t think of a thing to say.
“Hey sweetie, can you talk?” says the phone.
Kevin can’t make a sound. His throat feels like someone’s crushing it with both hands. He can’t even grunt or groan or squeak. The inside of his mouth feels like it’s coated with talc.
“Sweetie?” says a young man’s voice. “You there?”