James Hynes - Next

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 ahead, 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 $15 °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.