James Hynes - Next

Now Lynda, Kevin recalls, watching Joy Luck’s angry strut at the far corner of the park — the legendary Lynda, the Lynda of song and story, Lynda à la plage, etc., etc. — Lynda was good at it, too, but she never took him all the way, not once in three months. She’d lower her lips to his cock, gathering her hair one-handed away from her face, baring her lovely throat, and she’d dip, once, twice, three times, until he was straight and hard and taut, and then she’d pull away and give him a filthy grin. “Oh, God, don’t stop, ” Kevin moaned, his cock chilled by her saliva, but she swung her long, freckled thigh over him and slid slickly onto him, doubling over him with her hair pooling coolly on his chest, nuzzling him and laughing in his ear.

Jesus, Kevin thinks, if Joy Luck knew what I’m thinking back here, she’d scream bloody murder, or call a cop, or — more likely, he thinks, focusing on the glide of her back muscles beneath her flawless skin — she’d go all Michelle Yeoh on his melancholy middle-aged ass, leaping straight up into the air and slapping the side of his face in slow motion with the hot sole of her sandal, quivering his flesh like Jell-O, spinning his head a spine-splintering 180 degrees.

Kevin stops to peel off his jacket as if readying himself for single combat. The street ahead is a garden of new condo towers, some completed, some still under construction with tall T square cranes affixed to their sides, like the stalks from which they grew. One finished tower is wide and flat like the monolith in 2001, another rises in the same proportions as a Zippo lighter, the farthest one, still skeletal on top, sheathed halfway up in green panels that throw the sun back in Kevin’s eyes, is tall and narrow like a Pez dispenser without the head. He fishes inside his jacket for his sunglasses and looks back toward downtown Austin’s foreshortened skyline, like a three-quarters-scale Manhattan in some imperial Las Vegas casino. What looked like a great big urban canyon when he was coming up it in the cab is now, he realizes, just an arroyo. He sees the sleek, narrow, ice-blue tower, Barad-dûr, much taller than all the other buildings, too tall, really, for this theme-park skyline. It’s only three or four blocks away, its glassy spires bleached a little paler in the sun. He puts on his sunglasses and it dims a little more.

Then something moves behind the translucent panes of the spires, something dark and quick and massive, and Kevin is chilled all over. The hell is that? he wonders, his pulse racing. The hand holding his jacket seizes up, and a wave passes down the coat like a shiver. Something sleek is issuing now from between the spires, as if the tower really is the lair of Sauron, the Dark Lord. It’s a snake… it’s a dragon… holy shit, it’s a winged Nazgûl! Kevin’s heart thumps in his chest, and even behind the amber tint of his glasses the glare of sunlight off the spires is magnified into an enormous, burning eye…

No, it’s a jet, coming out from behind the tower, climbing from Austin’s airport over the city so steeply and slowly it looks as if it’s winching itself into the sky. Kevin breathes again and folds his jacket over his elbow as he rolls his shirt cuffs back. The aircraft is gray with a long, white underbelly, its wings swept back, its long throat bared, a migrating goose straining for altitude. And though Kevin’s pulse has slowed, the still surprising and indelible conjunction of two formerly unrelated compound nouns — airplane, skyscraper — makes his stomach drop. What’s worse is that he can’t even hear the jet yet, and its silence as it crawls glittering against the bleached sky makes the sight even creepier. And he can’t help thinking again of shoulder-fired missiles; from where he’s standing at the center of the park he could bring down this plane. Or maybe it’ll be brought down by Another Kevin, sweatily mixing liquid explosives in the lavatory and urgently murmuring “ Allahu akbar ” over and over again. Stinger or no Stinger, jihadist or no jihadist, the plane looks as if it’s barely going to make it, and Kevin expects it any moment to stall and slide sickeningly backward, then tumble wing over wing straight down into the city below, hitting the earth with an echoing boom and a roiling cloud of black smoke.

Then at last he hears the hollow, throbbing roar of the jet, trailing like a banner just behind the plane. Wow, thinks Kevin, his pulse still racing a little. It’s weird how much the climbing jet has freaked him out, and he only saw the two towers fall on television like most people. What if he’d actually been there? What if he’d actually seen the planes hit the towers, seen the falling bodies, watched the towers flower hideously into dust, run for his life through the midmorning darkness, breathed the choking air, felt the acrid sting of burning plastic and jet fuel and God knows what else at the back of his sinuses? All he’d seen — sheer repetition has graven the image permanently into his lizard brain — was a toy plane colliding with a scale model of a skyscraper and a little silent orange bloom against the blue September sky. It looked like a special effect and a mediocre one at that — a blurry, trembling, telephoto image with none of the digital polish and Dolby rumble of an A-list production. If something he’d seen on TV could take him by the throat like that years later, imagine if he’d actually been there.

He turns, his jacket still draped over his arm. The chill is fading, the heat folds around him again. He really should go back, sit in goddamn Starbucks for three hours, but it’s too late, he’s already walking, damp all over with sweat, his shirt stuck to his spine. The broiling sky opens high and wide before him. By the time he gets to the curb — the corner of Fifth and San Antonio, says the street sign — Joy Luck is halfway up San Antonio, turning left on Sixth Street, heading west, so Kevin turns left on Fifth, walking parallel to her on a covered walkway underneath one of the half-built condo towers. His feet thump on the flooring, and through the plywood overhead he can hear the ricocheting ring of mallets, the insistent beeping of a vehicle backing up, some guy yelling in Spanish. The traffic rushes up Fifth Street toward him, springing from light to light in quantum bursts, enormous, candy-colored trucks with bulbous curves, spotlessly clean, piloted by pink-cheeked, freshly barbered young evangelicals in crisp shirts talking on cell phones.

Across the stream of traffic, between buildings and up side streets, Kevin watches Joy Luck on Sixth Street, but at the next cross street he’s lost her, and he dithers for a moment, not sure whether to go forward or back. His heart beginning to race, he walks the next block more quickly. Under a big condo block bristling with balconies, he crosses Fifth, trotting north past the snouts of a row of SUVs. He’s already halfway across before he realizes that the traffic was already moving, but he doesn’t stop, and four lanes of SUVs lurch forward on their toes as he wards them off with his palm. He hardly notices, because Joy Luck should be crossing the intersection ahead of him, but he still can’t see her, and he’s thinking she’s gotten away, he’s lost her, but suddenly, when he’s ten paces from the corner, she appears from behind the building and stops for the light. Kevin’s heart soars, but his relief is cut short by the fact that in another three seconds he’ll be right next to her on the curb. Kevin pivots on the toe of his shoe, grinding the fat black tread into the hot pavement, slapping his trouser pockets like he’s forgotten his keys or something, swinging the jacket off his shoulder and rummaging in every pocket, lifting his eyes to the sky like he’s concentrating. Doesn’t matter, though, he’s already caught, busted, blown; he expects a tap on the shoulder any moment now, or even something way less demure, way more Michelle Yeoh, an iron grip spinning him around, grinding another millimeter of shoe sole into the pavement, and an angry, beautiful young woman nose to nose with him, her eyes blazing, demanding to know, “Why are you following me? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”