James Hynes - Next

On the concourse Kevin allows himself only one glance at a dangling television, where a soigné, cheekboned überblond on Fox mouths silently over a banner that reads, with characteristic subtlety, 666: IS THIS THE END? Christ, thinks Kevin. Then, worried that he’s going to see the round, abstractly familial face of the Other Kevin once more, which will only rattle him further, he resolves not to look at a TV again, not until he’s back home in Ann Arbor. He has enough to worry about, and anyway, he’s on the ground in Texas, and Austin doesn’t even have a subway. Get thee behind me, Osama.

In a men’s room halfway down the concourse Kevin micturates, his nerves thrumming like wires. As relieved as he is to be on the ground and not in pieces all over central Texas, he’s still anxious about the interview this afternoon. He’s taking a flyer here, after all, applying for a private-sector job he picked almost at random out of the back pages of Publishers Weekly; to his astonishment, they responded by inviting him down to Austin for a brief interview, rather than interviewing him over the phone. “We’ll pay for your ticket,” said the woman on the phone, Patsy something of Hemphill Associates, whoever they are, and Kevin was too surprised to ask if maybe they could put him up for a night in Austin. He knows that businessmen and women fly twenty-four hundred miles roundtrip in a single day all the time to take an hour-long meeting, but this is sort of new in Kevin’s experience. Still, here he is, twelve hundred miles from home at 8:30 in the morning, draining his bladder into a Texas urinal, with no luggage or traveler’s checks, just his interview suit, a little extra cash in his wallet, and a pair of e-ticket boarding passes. Welcome to the global economy.

His middle-aged bladder at last more or less empty, he shakes, tucks, and zips up. Then he takes off his jacket again, carefully, and hangs it on a hook as he washes his hands and face. The dazzling white tiles of the lavatory are studded with colorful intaglios of Texas iconography — an armadillo, a cactus, a bright green jalapeño pepper — and the Muzak here isn’t Muzak, but Texas swing: Asleep at the Wheel, playing “Miles and Miles of Texas.” Kevin was a record store clerk once, back in the age of vinyl, at Big Star Records in Ann Arbor, and peering at his dripping face in the mirror he remembers how, whenever it was Mick McNulty’s turn to pick the music, it was always Asleep at the Wheel, until everybody on the afternoon shift knew all the words whether they wanted to or not, or could imitate the singer’s sleepy bass-baritone drawl. “Ray Benson’s a genius,” McNulty’d say in his own sleepy, midwestern mumble, “the new Bob Wills.” McNulty had a gift for stating the obvious about an artist as if it were revealed truth, though everything he knew was culled from the liner notes. Kevin blots his face with a couple of paper towels, then runs the damp towels under his collar and over the back of his neck. He lifts his jacket off the hook and watches himself in the mirror as he puts it on. Meanwhile the goddamn song penetrates his lizard brain: “I saw miles and miles of Texas”—now it’ll be stuck in his head all goddamn day—“Gonna live here till I die.”

Where’s McNulty now? he wonders as he steps out onto the echoing concourse again. Whatever happened to McNulty? Back when Kevin knew him, McNulty had been in his early forties, a tall, slope-shouldered guy with a round little belly and a slouching, easy, keep-on-truckin’ walk. He had wispy blond hair turning already to gray, which he kept short like a Beach Boy’s, and heavy-lidded eyes, and his manner was part aging stoner and part aging athlete. Improbably, for his age and general lassitude, he was the best player on the Big Star softball team, where he played first base with his glove on one hand and a cigarette in the other. Somehow, whenever the ball wafted into his general vicinity, he managed to pull it into his gravitational field by sheer karma, reeling it into his mitt without even stepping away from the bag. Then he’d put the smoke between his lips, throw the ball unerringly wherever it needed to go, take a drag on his cig, and return to his original slouch. He could make a double play without even losing the ash from his Marlboro. Not a great employee, though, Kevin recalls. McNulty took fewer shifts at the register than everybody else because the manager knew he’d screw up every third or fourth transaction. Instead he spent a lot of time restocking, which he did very, very slowly, with obsessive but idiosyncratic accuracy, lingering for ten minutes at a time over a particularly difficult decision.

“Fairport Convention,” he’d say. “Not really rock. Not really folk.” He’d shake his head slowly. “I just don’t know.”

“The sixties were very, very good to Mick,” the manager told Kevin once, when they were taking a break in the alley behind the store. Though the circumstances of the observation strike Kevin as ironic now — they had been sharing a joint at the time — the disjunction between the remark and its context went unnoted back then. In a hip, regionally famous, independent record store in Ann Arbor in the late seventies — long gone now, of course, strangled by the chains and the Internet and iTunes — reliability and even competence weren’t necessarily the first things you looked for in an employee. Entertainment value counted for a lot, and McNulty had entertainment value to burn. During the long reaches of slow, midweek, midsummer days when Big Star was nearly empty, Kevin would stand with McNulty behind the counter or in the back of the store by the jazz section, and McNulty would smoke and slouch and, from the depths of a heavy-lidded midafternoon coma, relate fantastic stories from his youth.

Like the Battle of Bertrand Russell. In 1960, McNulty had been stationed at Althorpe Air Force Base near the east coast of England, and one day the base had been besieged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the gate stormed by the cream of the British left: doughty old pacifist women wearing sensible shoes and wielding signs; ruddy, strapping vegetarians who wore socks with sandals and sported fantastic beards like William Morris; humorless, porcelain-skinned Communist girls in black turtlenecks; their scrawny boyfriends with unkempt hair and toggle coats covered with badges; reedy academics in woolen waistcoats and baggy trousers; and in the vanguard the elfin philosopher himself, a wave of white hair atop an elegant black overcoat. The assault had all the menace of a warm spring rain, but the base went on full alert anyway, with klaxons blaring and jeeps roaring everywhere and all personnel recalled to duty. Except for McNulty, who was off duty at the time and didn’t hear the klaxons because he was in his favorite spot at the far end of the runway with his shirt off, vainly trying to get a tan from the pale English sun. As the base, unbeknownst to him, hustled to repel the gentle barbarians of the CND, McNulty alternated between dozing and reading Naked Lunch and watching B52s lumber over his head.

“ Naked Lunch, ” he’d said, his eyes almost shut. “It was a new book at the time.” And Kevin, who was twenty-two or twenty-three when McNulty told him this story, almost swooned with admiration. This was the apotheosis of cool for him, and it still is, even now, as he trudges middle-aged down the concourse in Austin past the food court. It had the all elements to awe an impressionable young dilettante of a bohemian bent: irreverence, contempt for military authority, catching some rays while bombers glided overhead, and the happy conjunction of William S. Burroughs and Bertrand Russell. Even better (at least for the purposes of the story), once McNulty’s inadvertent dereliction had been discovered, he had been busted from sergeant back down to airman, and McNulty had turned the demotion to his advantage, boldly walking in uniform into a local pub (The Frog and the Scorpion) to chat up one of those intense, porcelain Communist girls, telling her that he’d offered up his career in the United States Air Force as a sacrifice to nuclear disarmament.