James Hynes - Next

“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. “ River walk!”

“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.”

Kevin gives her a double thumbs up and backs away. “Starbucks.”

“Starbucks be catty corner, right across the street.” She slices the air again.

Kevin pivots on his squeaking toe, nearly blunders into the paunchy smoker, who’s slouching back to work across the lobby. They do a brief Alphonse and Gaston dance, side to side in the arid air, and the smoker gives Kevin another shrug. Kevin sidles round him at last, through his faint tang of tobacco, then hits the blue door with both hands— ponggg —and steps out again into the heat.

Crossing Sixth Street, Kevin passes through a cascade of sunlight. An old, round clock on a lamppost, some restored relic of old Austin, tells him it’s coming up on ten; he instinctively starts to set his watch back an hour, then decides not to. He’s here less than twelve hours, might as well stay on Michigan time. Now he’s got the walk signal, so he veers left across Congress. In harsh sunlight at the end of the avenue, framed by office towers and a row of exhausted trees on either side, the capitol looks shrunken now and faded, like a dusty model in a museum, the Texas statehouse rendered in matchsticks or sugar cubes. Everybody else in the crosswalk — more khaki businessmen, a pair of bare-shouldered girls in camisoles and jeans (oh, Joy Luck! Oh, Lynda!), a shuffling homeless guy in a huge Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and sandals worn down to his bare heels — each moves more slowly than Kevin, metabolically adjusted to the heat. Halfway across, he pauses and takes a deep, calming breath of the viscid air. He’s sticky under his shirt; sweat prickles out of his hairline. Starbucks is just ahead, the cornerstone of a big, blond, vaguely deco office block. Against Kevin’s inclination — progressive, Ann Arbor, buy local — Starbucks looks like a haven, and instantly he’s irritated at himself for falling for the mendacious seduction of the chain store: reassurance, familiarity, a spurious homecoming. Near campus in Ann Arbor there’s a Starbucks at the corner of State and Liberty, a ninety-second walk from his office in Willoughby Hall, but he’s never been inside, not once. Of course he’s been in other Starbucks — who hasn’t? — but this one supplanted his favorite local coffeehouse, Gratzi, where he used to run into other university staffers every midmorning and midafternoon, where behind the counter the cute girl (not always the same one) remembered his preference, where he bought his coffee every day in his own Gratzi cup, which collects dust now on his desk up under the eaves of Willoughby, as forlorn an artifact as a big-haired troll or a pet rock. So he won’t set foot in the State Street Starbucks, out of his stubborn and admittedly useless nostalgia for the funky Ann Arbor of song and story — which, to be honest, he only caught the last act of. He came to Ann Arbor too late for Tom Hayden at the Daily, for the Black Action Movement strike, for the torching of the ROTC building, for John and Yoko at Crisler Arena, for the first Hash Bash where a state representative fired up a spliff in public on the Diag right in front of the A-Squared pigs, man. Kevin was half a generation behind the town’s heyday, but even so, during his undergraduate days and his years as a waiter and a record store clerk, he caught the scent of it like the last April Fool’s whiff of Panama Red. He heard all about it after work from old-timers like McNulty and others, sitting breathless at their every word over pizza in Thanos Lamplighter (gone now, too), over a beer at the Del Rio (also gone), or over a plate of fries at the Fleetwood (still there, but not the same), listening to world-weary guys only five years older as if they were flinty old veterans of the Ardennes or Guadalcanal.

These days, where he buys his coffee depends on which way he walks to work. Say he comes up behind the Union and along Maynard under University Towers and through the Arcade, in which case he stops at Expresso Royale and carries his cardboard cup steaming along State Street. That’s his route on cloudy days. When it’s sunny, though, he walks all the way up Fifth to Liberty, then straight up Liberty into the rising sun, because one of his favorite sights in the world is the view up Liberty on a brisk autumn morning or on a mild spring one, under a scrubbed blue midwestern sky, with the Michigan Theater’s black marquee soaking up the slanting light and Burton Tower printed against the sky at the end of the street, limned in astringent northern light. Here, at least in Kevin’s youth, was once the epicenter of funky retail Ann Arbor, the heart of elvendom on earth. Within two minutes walk of each other were three world-class record stores: Liberty Music, where a middle-aged clerk in a tie escorted you to a booth so you could listen to six different recordings of Shostakovich’s Fifth; hip Big Star, where if you didn’t know what you wanted, you were in the wrong place; and Discount Records, where Iggy Pop once worked. And five bookstores: overlit Follett’s, fussy Charing Cross, overstuffed David’s, bohemian Centicore, and the original, independent, prelapsarian Borders, whose clerks had to pass a book test to get the job and afterward strutted the carpeted aisles as arrogant as Jesuits. “Romance novels? We don’t sell romance novels. Why don’t you try Walden’s? At the mall. ”

Not to mention a shoe store and a barbershop and a pharmacy and a five-and-dime and a declining old midwestern department store. And two Greek diners, a gourmet hot dog stand, a vegetarian restaurant, a five-dollar steak house, a Japanese restaurant, two or three sub shops, an ice cream shop, a cookie shop. And Drake’s, where he first met Beth, not long after he started at the Asia Center as an editorial assistant. As an undergraduate Kevin had never liked Drake’s, with its sickly green decor and cramped, unpadded, wooden booths, unupholstered since 1935. The place survived on nostalgia — misty alums on football Saturdays sharing a pot of weak tea, and the rest of the week homesick undergrads who’d been steered there by sentimental parents or older siblings. By Kevin’s time it was cluttered and dark, the entryway heaped with boxes, the counter lined with dusty jars of mummified candy. The owner, an enormous, bald old man, bloodless as a slug, his trousers pulled up to his armpits, slumped immovably on a stool at the end of the counter, doing God knows what; Kevin never saw him stir or speak. And the portions were small: a Coke came in an eight-ounce glass, more crushed ice than cola, and a sandwich was a flavorless scoop of something pink in mayonnaise on wilted lettuce and dry white bread, cut into fussy little triangles skewered with toothpicks. Worst of all, you had to fill out your own order ticket with a blunt pencil stub and then try to catch the attention of one of the sullen girls behind the counter.