James Hynes - Next

“Hi!” says Kevin, a little too chipper.

“Hi,” she says back, squaring her office chair with both hands on the desktop below the marble counter. Her response is slightly firmer this time, as if she’s bracing herself to deal with an idiot.

“Is this, uh, Hemphill Associates?” He cringes inside, realizing he ought to be projecting confidence, not asking dumb questions that he should already know the answer to.

“Yes, it is,” she says, lifting her fastidiously maintained eyebrows like a kindergarten teacher with a dull student who unexpectedly gave the right answer.

God, she’s pretty, Kevin’s thinking, and stepping up to the counter he draws a breath and gathers his threadbare professionalism about him. The thing to do now, he’s telling himself, is to empty his mind of all the sturm and drang of the last few hours — his seminostalgic, semihorndog stalking of Joy Luck; his fateful fall on the bridge; his emotionally tumultuous lunch with Dr. Barrientos; his epiphanic sponge bath in the men’s room in Wohl’s; his erotic reverie in the cab; his apocalyptic aural fantasy in the elevator just now — and just calm the fuck down. But as he lays his hands lightly on the frosty countertop, he finds himself wondering how this girl in her thin sleeveless blouse stays warm in the icy AC. It’s all he can do not to say, “Aren’t you freezing?” and offer her his jacket.

“I’m Kevin Quinn,” he manages to say instead. “I’m here for an interview.”

The girl’s face brightens, almost as if she’s genuinely happy to see him, and Kevin’s heart brightens, too, even though he knows her smile is purely professional. How many more smiles like that, he wonders, smiling back, can a man my age expect to see in his lifetime? So what if it’s not personal. He’ll take what he can get.

“You’re early!” She widens her eyes at a computer screen under the counter. Then she rises, and Kevin’s even more thrilled to see that she’s nearly as tall as he is. Kevin’s always been an easy touch for tall women. “But I’ll go let Patsy know you’re here.” She steps away from the desk, her perfect shoulders squared, the hollow of her back perfectly erect, and disappears up a hallway that runs parallel to the dazzling view.

Stop it! thinks Kevin, resisting the temptation to edge around the end of the reception desk to watch her walk away. Enough already! Haven’t you already made enough of a fool of yourself for one day? He pinches his lips together to keep from laughing out loud. He’s not normally like this, at least he doesn’t think he is. Certainly he has no problem admiring a good-looking young woman, he’s a standard-issue middle-aged man, but he normally doesn’t walk around like a cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, his tongue unscrolling to the floor. He doesn’t usually erupt into a full-blown reverie within the first seconds of meeting someone, or at least he doesn’t go from zero to ninety quite so quickly. What’s going on with me today, he wonders — is it the change of scene, or the slightly exotic, subtropical women he’s met here, or is it just the heat? Or, now that he’s fifty-two stories up, is it the altitude? Or is it because he’s actually contemplating going back to Ann Arbor as if this whole episode in Austin never happened? Is it because he’s thinking he might actually go back and be a father to Stella’s child? Is this the death of the old Kevin or the birth pangs of the new, and how can he tell the difference?

In spite of himself, he’s stepped far enough into the lobby to peer down the hall where the receptionist went. But it’s empty, a long row of glass-walled offices that he can’t see into. He walks to the wall of the empty conference room and looks through it at the view again. Over the leaden river he can see the two bridges at Lamar Avenue, the old traffic bridge and the pedestrian bridge where he fell down. Even now, in the ungodly midday heat, there are joggers crossing the pedestrian bridge, simultaneously vivid and featureless at this distance, like Sims. In fact, the whole scene below has the aspect of a fantastically detailed computer animation, from the bustling film crew of clean-cut young men with their three tripods — WOW, how many cameras do they need? — down to the tiny white sliver of a rowing scull dragging a miniature V across the green surface of the river, its tiny oars dimpling the water on either side. It’s Austin by Pixar Studios, with their characteristic eye for busy detail.

“Mr. Quinn?”

Kevin’s startled again by the dazzling receptionist, who’s giving him a spokesmodel smile from only a couple of feet away.

“Quite a view, isn’t it,” she says in a way that implies that Kevin’s not really entitled to it. She swivels her gaze out the window and then fixes on Kevin again, lowering her voice a register. “Patsy’s just finishing up a phone call, but she’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Kevin gives her a halfhearted smile, but he’s distracted by a bright flash from the pedestrian bridge. Wow, thinks Kevin, what’s that? Even a movie light wouldn’t be that bright in this sunlight, but instead of zeroing in on the bustling little group on the bridge, his gaze instinctively follows an equally dazzling streak trailing a tight spiral of smoke in a long smooth curve that stops abruptly at one of the new, finished condo towers. Kevin’s gaze automatically keeps tracking beyond the tower, so that he has to correct himself and jerk his head back to see a black flower of smoke threaded with flame bursting from an upper floor.

“Sir?” The receptionist is tilting her head. “Perhaps you’d like to have a seat.”

Kevin turns to the girl, but he’s speechless and his mouth is suddenly dry and his pulse is racing. He hears a sharp, hollow boom, and he jerks his gaze out the window again, where he sees not one, but two dazzling streaks rising from the bridge, brightening as they come, gushing smoke as they rise in a fatal arc, straight for him. The beautiful young receptionist has flinched slightly at the sound of the boom, but instead of following his gaze out the window at the furious missiles miraculously threading the construction cranes and ziggurats and condominiums — now only an inch away, now half an inch, now a quarter-inch — she has placed one hand near Kevin’s elbow without quite touching him, gesturing spokesmodelishly with her other hand to a pair of square, black leather chairs angled toward each other at the center of the severe lobby.

“Please sit down,” she says.

KEVIN IS AIRBORNE, but unlike his moment of caesura on the bridge, he’s not falling, he’s rising straight up into the air. The lovely receptionist is rising, too, her eyes wide, her hair flying, her mouth a startled O, her sweater rucked up to bare her firm midriff. In this alarming and vivid moment of super slo-mo, Kevin recalls a picture he saw years ago, by a famous photographer of his youth, that showed a young Richard Nixon with his jacket buttoned and his legs together, jumping straight up off the floor of some government office or hotel suite. His hands were spread beatifically and there were two or three inches of air between the pointed toes of his Oxfords and the nap of the carpet. He wore a bemused smile. Imagine that, thinks Kevin — Nixon, beatific, bemused — as the interior window of the conference room disintegrates into infinite points of light. Beyond the glittering scrim of splintering glass, the conference table hangs in the air, the chairs orbiting it six inches off the floor, their little wheels spinning. Meanwhile the outer window bursts out into the void, fifty-two stories up. Kevin’s ears fill with the disintegrating hiss of glass and a cracking rumble like rocks tumbling in a drum.