James Hynes - Next

He empties his trouser pockets onto the counter — wallet, keys, a handful of change — and panics for a moment when he can’t find his Swiss Army knife, until he remembers he left it on the dresser at home, knowing he couldn’t take it on the plane. He’s feeling a little naked without it — and in fact, now that he’s stripping off his ruined trousers and stuffing them in the trash, he is nearly naked in the mirror, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs that have gone saggy in the heat. The semi-erection that stirred when he was thinking about Stella in Chicago has gone saggy, too, drooping down one leg of his shorts. He sniffs his armpits and hits the faucet and pulls out another fistful of paper towels. He soaks them, squeezes them out, and runs the makeshift sponge over his bare chest and down his arms and into his armpits. The water is barely lukewarm, and the AC chills his wet skin. He arches his spine and reaches as far as he can behind his back. In the mirror he’s happy to see his ribs and not to see a gut, but while he’s got a flat belly — mostly — it’s no Patrick Stewart six-pack, never was and never will be. And he can already see where his pecs and his upper arms are going to slacken and droop in the not-distant future, no matter how many bench presses he does. I’m not going to have another shot at a younger woman, he thinks. Stella’s my last chance.

He lathers up more milky soap between his palms and rubs coconut scent across his chest and under his arms and down his back. So that’s the choice, he thinks as soapy water dampens the waistband of his saggy shorts. Lose Stella and find a woman his own age who’s already had her kids. Learn to love, or at least live with, wrinkles, wattles, a thickening waist, spreading hips. Or hang on to Stella and lose his life, basically. With a kid there’d be less sleep, less sex, less time to exercise. Fatherhood would mean he’d lose what muscle tone he still has. No more hour-long runs in Gallup Park, no more lifting free weights after work, no more brisk hikes around Silver Lake, because every waking moment would be devoted to, or at least planned around, the kid, the kid, the kid. What’s the kid doing, where’d she get to, is she okay, is she safe? I thought you were watching her. Where did she go? Did somebody take her? Because it’s not like when Kevin was a child, when he could disappear with his friends for hours — playing with matches, frying ants with a magnifying glass, setting off firecrackers — or take off on his own — wandering up alleys, breaking bottles in vacant lots, gliding on his Stingray through traffic — no, these days you can’t leave them alone for an instant, every moment has to be accounted for, every contingency foreseen, which is why they carry cell phones like tracking devices, why they have to be fingerprinted and microchipped like cats, why they have to be padded and helmeted like middle linebackers just to ride a bicycle. Because the world’s full of crazed, childless women who will murder you and steal your kid for their own; pedophiles lurking on the Internet pretending to be twelve-year-olds; angry working-class white guys taking whole schoolrooms of little girls hostage. And that’s not even taking into account the kid’s peers: the distracted teenaged girl behind the wheel of daddy’s SUV with a learner’s permit and a cell phone and your daughter in the passenger seat, not buckled in; the hulking guy dropping Rohypnol in her punch at a party; the sullen little Columbine wannabe striding up a school hallway with a Mac-10 under his long black overcoat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And terrorists — oh my God, they watch cable news, they’re not stupid, they know an opportunity when they see it. Forget Al Qaeda, there’s no central planning anymore, it’s all eager beaver freelancers now, or so Kevin understands from Frontline. It’s only a matter of time before some nasty, self-pitying little fuck takes a whole school hostage, decapitating children one by one, live on CNN. It could happen; it’s already happened elsewhere in the world. There was that massacre not so long ago in Russia, a whole cell of terrorists storming a school and killing kids; he’s forgotten the name but he remembers the video: desperate parents running under fire with limp, bloodied children in their arms. The guys who did that were Muslims, weren’t they? He’s not actually sure, but what does Kevin’s instinctive racial profiling mean anymore when some round-faced white guy like the Other Kevin could memorize a few verses of the Koran and carry out his own jerry-rigged jihad under the streets of Glasgow? It’s the worst of both worlds, adolescent rage meets religious fanaticism, Dylan Klebold meets Mohammed Atta. That’s what fatherhood gets you — your kid’s either a monster or a victim. A father is either guilty or grieving.

He rinses with another damp handful of towels, then wipes himself with some dry ones, chafing his skin. The trash bin is filling up with wadded paper; he can’t even see his discarded clothes anymore. He props his bare right foot on the rounded edge of the counter and scrubs the sticky blood away with soap and water. Coconut between his toes, behind his ears, in his armpits — he’s going to smell like a Piña Colada. With his knee bent and the stained bandage pulled tight, he feels the ache of his scrape, and he yanks the bandage painfully off and tosses it. Pinpricks of fresh blood ooze through the orange stain on his patella, so he puts his foot down on the cool floor, steps into the handicapped stall — only now does it occur to him that maybe he shouldn’t be walking around barefoot in a public restroom — and fishes the clean bandage out of his jacket pocket. He peels off the backing, props his foot back up on the counter, and pastes the new bandage against the scrape, smoothing down the edges.

Then Kevin tugs his new trousers out from under the shirt and socks on the changing table, tearing off the tag and picking out the threads with his teeth and fingernails, missing his Swiss Army knife again. He balances for a moment like a stork on one bare foot, the other foot poised over the empty waist of his new trousers, and surveys one more time his own pale, slackening, coconut-scented flesh. He hasn’t washed and changed his clothes in public since he used to go swimming at Silver Lake, and he hasn’t done that in years. Kevin doesn’t even like to take his shirt off in public anymore. He thinks of the Other Kevin, ritually bathing himself in the dank bathroom of some gloomy Glaswegian tower block, just before he strapped on his suicide vest and blew himself and a lot of other people to smithereens, and Kevin thinks, maybe if the Other Kevin’d had a girl, maybe if he’d gotten laid once in a while, he wouldn’t have felt that loathing for his own flesh, wouldn’t have felt the need to express his rage through plastic explosives.

Wobbling, Kevin thrusts one leg and then the other into the pants and zips them up. A little snug, but not too bad. He’s aware that he’s squaring his shoulders and sticking his chest out, even though he’s alone in the restroom with the Muzak. He’s been tuning it out until now, perhaps because it’s been playing songs he doesn’t know. But now it’s a song he recognizes, “Tempted” by Squeeze, more boomer comfort food, and now Kevin just feels tired. He doesn’t want to think about fatherhood anymore. He wishes the interview were over with, he wishes he were on his way to the airport, he wishes he were already on the plane. No, it’s more than that: he wishes he’d never come to Austin in the first place, wishes he’d never applied for the job, wishes he were back at his desk in Willoughby Hall, editing some deadly dull manuscript, reading his e-mail, mollifying some paranoid junior academic on the phone. He wishes he were on his deck drinking a Molson’s, waiting for Stella to come home from Chicago.