James Hynes - Next

“No!” she shouts fiercely, her palms dragging against the floor. At the last instant she clutches the armrest of the one remaining chair, but the chair’s sliding, too. Then she slithers over the edge and she’s gone, followed by the chair, its little wheels spinning uselessly.

Kevin convulses away from the crack in the floor. He’s really shaking now, it’s not just his racing pulse. His palms are burning and dripping blood. Oh God, he thinks, oh God oh God oh God. He’s trembling so hard he’s afraid he’ll vibrate right over the edge and out the window after her, so he curls his stinging hands over his chest and scrabbles with his feet away from the crack, banging past a leather chair on its side, plowing through the spilled soil of the potted plant, leaving a wake through broken glass, until his back is up against the inside wall of the lobby and his knees are drawn up to his chest, the soles of his feet — one socked, one shoed — pressing hard on the floor.

Oh God, he thinks, I just saw someone die. He presses the back of his head against the hard, merciless wall behind him and squeezes his eyes shut, but then all he sees is the girl splayed against the Austin skyline, just hanging there, arms and legs spread like a skydiver’s. Which is not even what he actually saw, but it’s what he sees now in the pulsing darkness behind his eyelids. One moment she was just beyond his reach, and the next she was over the edge. I almost had her, he thinks, but I waited too long, I hesitated. If I’d spoken to her sooner, if I’d nudged her quicker with my foot, if I’d gone to her right away…

… you’d be dead, too, says his fucking little devil, you’d have been on the wrong side of the crack, and you’d be spinning weightless through the air, watching the pavement hurtling toward you.

“Oh God, ” he says aloud, but he’s afraid to open his eyes for fear of seeing worse, for fear of seeing the crack widen and the floor tilt again, of seeing the Austin skyline framed by the maw of the shattered window, in the last minute before he himself is pinned against the sky like a specimen. Still not opening his eyes, he tugs his rucked-up pant leg down over his bandage and slowly lets his feet slide forward. As soon as his legs are spread against the floor, as if a passage has been unblocked, a damp warmth spreads through his groin. The skin of his inner thigh begins to sting lightly, and then he’s stung as well at the back of his nostrils by the smell. He cracks an eyelid. The stain of his piss is darkening the inside of his left trouser leg. The ammoniac tang joins the other acrid smells, of fried chemicals and burned plastic and powdered concrete and Christ knows what else — ozone, maybe, whatever ozone smells like, from that loose, crackling, still-invisible wire. The stain spreads nearly halfway to his knee; it’s all that tea he’s been drinking since he landed, he thought he’d emptied his bladder in the men’s room at Wohl’s, but no, there’s a reserve he hasn’t tapped, and now his brand-new trousers are ruined. Second pair today, and he’s damned if he’s buying another. He starts to laugh and cry at the same time. Two ruined pairs of dress slacks in one day, that’s his limit.

He slumps against the wall. Pissing himself has calmed him a little; the stinging warmth is reassuring. He’s not dead yet. He plucks the wet cotton away from his leg and then remembers the glass in his palms, and he turns his hands over. Blood has darkened the cuffs of his jacket — I’m just leaking all over, thinks Kevin — but the glass in his hands doesn’t look as bad as it feels. It’s not in jagged shards, but rough little kernels, like broken auto glass, a few in one palm and even fewer in the other. He’s tempted to just slap his hands together as if he has sand all over them, but even now he’s still got enough sense to know that that would really, really hurt. So instead he licks blood off the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, then lifts his knee and steadies his left hand against it as he attempts to pluck a fragment out of the heel of his palm. The glass is slick with blood and hard to get a grip on, and oh God, it stings like a bitch, but he pries the nugget loose with his nails and flicks it away, watching blood well into the tiny white hole it has made. He squeezes his eyes shut and shudders all over like a wet dog, then opens his eyes again and brings his trembling fingers to bear on another fragment of glass.

Something buzzes rhythmically nearby, over and over, like a wasp trapped behind a window screen. Fuck off, thinks Kevin, whatever you are — another loose wire, a shredded ceiling tile thrumming in the hot wind, some crumbling bit of masonry about to vibrate onto his head and kill him. Fuck off. You’re in shock right now, says one of his little familiars — could be the angel, could be the devil, he can’t tell the difference — you should pull yourself together, clear your head, start thinking about what you need to do to get out of here. Yeah, says Kevin back, but what about my hands? They hurt. He flicks another kernel of glass away like a booger.

The buzzing continues, angry, insistent, suspiciously regular, and Kevin lifts his head from his minor surgery to listen, holding his breath. It’s a familiar sound, and he latches onto it, numbly wondering if the buzzing is proof that this is all a dream — it’s his alarm going off and he’s going to wake up any second now, disoriented and groggy, to see the pale green numerals of his clock glowing in the dark, he’s going to feel Stella stirring against him, muttering for him to shut it off. The buzzing is like a rope thrown into his well of sleep, and all he has to do is grab on and haul himself to safety.

It comes in threes: Buzz, buzz, buzz. Pause. Buzz, buzz, buzz. It’s quite near, and suddenly his devilish little angel says in his ear, answer the fucking phone. Kevin lowers his knee and drops his hands palm up in his damp lap and stares slack-jawed beyond his shoeless toes at a little black flip phone buzzing amid the glass near the crack in the floor. The phone rotates a quarter turn with each trio of pulses.

“Oh,” breathes Kevin, and then, as if that electrical snake has at last sunk its fangs into him, he jerks his legs under him, curls his hands spastically against his chest, and slides knee by knee, his toes pressed flat behind him, toward the phone dancing on the edge of the abyss. The weight on his right knee revives the pain of his first laceration of the day and squeezes blood through the bandage into his brand-new trousers, but then they’re already ruined, says his angelic devil, so what the hell difference does it make? His heart’s pounding again because any second now another foot or so of the truncated floor is going to crumble off like pie crust and tilt him into oblivion. When he’s within fingertip reach of the vibrating cell he sinks back on his butt and leans forward, but his hand trembles so hard that he jerks back, afraid he’ll fumble the throbbing little phone — his lifeline, his ray of hope, his salvation — over the side.

He inches forward on his knees, heart thundering. Not so fucking close! The phone vibrates through another cycle, and Kevin snatches the cell and yanks it back to his chest. He rocks painfully back onto his toes, and plucking at his lapel with two smeary fingers he shoves the phone inside his jacket. Then he swivels onto his butt again and, crying out at the sting of glass pressed deeper into his palms, hauls himself back from the crack and up against the wall, his wake through the debris punctuated with bloody palm prints. The phone pulses against his chest like another heart. Braced against the wall, his legs splayed, he can hear someone whimpering, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s him.