James Hynes - Next

“Can you turn it up?” says a man standing under the flatscreen.

“Ain’t supposed to,” says the black security guard.

“I tell you what,” murmurs the white guard, in a deep, confidential drawl, “I’d like to hear it, too.”

“At least put on the captions,” says another one of the flatscreeners.

Kevin notes the floor of Hemphill Associates—52—and looks up at the two guards.

“Excuse me,” he says, but the black woman is fussing through the clutter on her desktop. Without taking his eyes off the screen, the white guard says, “Can’t you find it?”

“No.” She’s sliding stuff around.

“Well, how’d you turn it on this morning?” His eyes still on the cable news.

“I didn’t, ” she says, peeved at him, at the missing remote, at herself. “We don’t never turn it off.”

“Excuse me,” Kevin says again, and the white guard slowly lowers his gaze.

“Sir.”

“Which elevator goes to Hemphill Associates?” Kevin jerks his thumb toward the alcoves.

The black woman looks up wide-eyed at Kevin; he’s not sure if she recognizes him from a few hours before. “What floor they on?” she says.

Kevin consults the screen. “Fifty-two?” he says.

The white guard sighs and looks back at the television. The black woman widens her eyes a fraction. She points over Kevin’s head. “Can you read?”

Kevin turns and sees big black numbers over the entrance to each elevator alcove, 11–26 over one, 26–52 over the other. He feels his face get hot. Suddenly the black woman stands up straight, clutching the remote. “Found it!” she cries.

“Fine.” Kevin lifts both his palms; now he’s peeved, too. “That’s all I wanted to know.” He swivels away from the desk, and his gaze glides away from the distracted guards, over the knot of people straining like sunflowers toward the television, and past the cluttered graphics of the flatscreen itself — the speeding crawl, the bright red tab reading BREAKING NEWS, the helmet-haired anchor centered against the out-of-focus newsroom. As he enters the alcove for floors 26 through 52, he performs an involuntary little stutter step — did he just see the caption ATTACK IN ST. PAUL in bold white sans serif against a livid red? — but under the momentum of his own impatience Kevin presses the elevator button. Immediately one of the elevators pings, the doors slide open, Kevin enters. As he presses the button for 52, an amplified voice swells out of the museum reverb of the lobby, saying, “We’re getting reports of what seems to be another missile attack, in another American city,” and Kevin involuntarily glances through the closing doors. But he can’t see the TV, can’t even see the security desk.

“A building appears to be burning in downtown Baltimore,” says the flatscreen as the doors slide shut and the elevator accelerates at an absurd speed, nearly buckling Kevin’s knees. His stomach drops, his balls tighten, and in the burnished door of the car Kevin glimpses his own blurred incredulity. Did I just hear, he wonders, what I thought I heard? It’s like the time in high school when a girl a couple grades ahead of him cut school to go to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, and she came back with a copy of the April 1 edition of the Michigan student paper, with the giant headline NIXON DECLARES MARTIAL LAW. In the cafeteria at lunchtime she sat with the headline ostentatiously displayed, and Kevin fell for it, leaping from his seat and stalking across the dining room and yanking the paper from her hands, all the while saying loudly, over and over again, “I don’t fucking believe it, I do not fucking believe it,” until she pointed out the date on the paper. “April Fool’s,” she said, laughing. As the entire cafeteria rose as one to applaud Kevin’s righteous if unnecessary outrage, he blushed and carefully refolded the paper and handed it back to the girl — he still remembers that she had pretty green eyes — and he said to her, “Really. I didn’t believe it.” Then walked the long mile back to his own table where his buddies gagged with laughter on their sloppy joes.

But this is different, because it’s not April 1, because the whole world is jumpier than it was in 1974, and because he’s thirty-five years older and resigned to the fact that sometimes the worst thing that you can imagine happening, actually does. Of course, arguably he understood that earlier in life than most people, with the death of his father. He sighs and tightens the knot of his tie again. He lifts his chin and runs his finger under his collar. The car wobbles ever so slightly in its breathless ascent, and the glowing red floor indicator, which has remained on 1 ever since he left the ground, suddenly starts to beep through the floors—26, 27, 28—and he realizes that, these days, hearing of simultaneous attacks in Minnesota and Maryland is not much more shocking than hearing “Your father is dead” or “Your mother drinks too much” or “Your sister’s a lesbian.” Or “Stella used to cut herself.” Or “Stella’s pregnant.”

Now his heart is racing, but he’s not sure why. Is it because of what he just heard on the television, or is it because Stella’s trying to trap him into fatherhood, or is it because he has a sudden case of nerves over this interview for a job that he doesn’t even want any longer? Or is it just the g-forces of his rapid ascent up the gullet of Barad-dûr? The red numbers are flicking as fast as his pulse—47, 48, 49—but even as the elevator slows, relieving the pressure on Kevin’s knees, his heart keeps racing. Kevin leans against the back wall of the car, bracing his feet. Compared to its jackrabbit start, the car crawls the last couple of floors — fiiiiiffty, fiiiiiifffty-onnnnne — and Kevin feels a pressure in his ears that he’s surprised to realize is because of the altitude. He’s yawning to make them pop when the elevator comes to a stop so slow, so gentle, that Kevin’s surprised again when the doors slide open.

He steps tentatively into the elevator alcove of the fifty-second floor, which flows uninterrupted into a severe black and gray reception area. Beyond the glass wall of an empty conference room the chairs are all awry around the table as if everyone just left in a hurry, and beyond the table a floor-to-ceiling glass wall gives a jaw-dropping vista of Austin. Even as Kevin stops dead, he knows he looks like a rubbernecking rube, but under the bleached sky beyond the window he can see the flat green river between leafy parkland, tiny glittering cars streaming both ways over a freeway bridge in the distance, and beyond that, the rampart of hills, their dull green foliage studded with red tile roofs. He’s viewing it all through the tint of two windows, which lends it the slightly dark, digitally graded grandeur of a glossy film: Austin, Texas, directed by Ridley Scott. The condo towers under construction look even grander somehow when seen from slightly above — heroic, even. The tall, T square crane above the nearest one rises almost as high as the floor where Kevin is standing, and he can see a little man in an orange vest and hardhat climbing slowly up a ladder up the center of the crane’s framework near the top, just under the cab. Kevin nearly gasps at the idea of simultaneously being that high up and that exposed.

“May I help you?”

Kevin starts and, embarrassed, turns to a very pretty dark-haired young woman seated behind a low reception desk, an artful sweep of dark wood with a black marble top. She’s lean and sharp-featured, and she wears a tight black knit top over form-fitting gray slacks; her top is sleeveless, showing off her impeccably toned arms. She sits with perfect posture in her chair, watching him with professional brightness, and maybe even a little bemusement at his reaction to the view out the window.