James Hynes - Next

Then the phone stops and it’s as if his own heart has stopped, as if whoever was calling has already given him up for dead. “No!” he cries, and thrusts his hand inside his jacket again, smearing his tie and his new shirt with blood. He holds the cell by the tips of his fingers, steadying his wrist with his other hand. The glossy black burnish of the phone is already dappled with red. He wipes his fingertips on his trousers and licks his lips. He tries to breathe more deeply, but it’s as if his ribs are wrapped tight in gauze. He flips open the phone. The keypad is impossibly miniature and pristine and he nearly flips it shut again, not wanting to bloody this immaculate little artifact. And anyway, who’s he going to call? What’s he going to say? Then the phone starts to buzz again, and Kevin nearly drops it. After everything that’s just happened, his startle reflex should be fried, but he’s still jumpy as a cat. So jumpy, in fact, that for a moment he’s not sure what to do with the phone, how it works, what it’s for. The little screen has lit up with the message BLAKE CALLING. Blake who, Kevin wonders. I don’t know anyone named Blake. He licks his forefinger clean and presses Talk and shakily lifts the phone to his ear. He can’t think of a thing to say.

“Hey sweetie, can you talk?” says the phone.

Kevin can’t make a sound. His throat feels like someone’s crushing it with both hands. He can’t even grunt or groan or squeak. The inside of his mouth feels like it’s coated with talc.

“Sweetie?” says a young man’s voice. “You there?”

What Kevin feels like doing, what he wants to do, is start screaming. In fact he can feel a scream boiling up inside him all the way from his bowels, like vomit, and he actually pinches his lips shut.

“Leslie, c’mon.” The guy on the other end sounds impatient. He’s a just a kid, Kevin can tell. Just a boy.

“Lez?” says the boy. “Quit goofing around.”

Kevin unpinches his lips and whispers, “Hello?”

“Hello?” Now the caller is puzzled. Even at a whisper, Kevin’s voice doesn’t sound like the person the guy on the other end expected to hear. “Who’s this?” he says.

“Who’s this?” answers Kevin, stupid as a monkey.

“Where’s Leslie?” Right now the kid, wherever he is, is looking at his own screen to make sure he’s got the right number. “Who is this?”

Kevin’s exhausted. It’s all he can do to keep his head up. He has no idea whose phone this is, for all he knows it could have bounded in from another room, but as he slumps in the dusty ruin of Hemphill Associates, as a sultry breeze blows in from the vast hole of the empty window and courses uphill along the fatally tilted floor, carrying the distant wail of sirens, Kevin figures he has to act on the assumption that the little black phone belongs — belonged — to the girl who just slid over the edge.

“I’m all alone here,” Kevin manages to rasp through his tight, dry throat.

“I’m serious, dude,” says the kid’s voice, trying to sound tough. “Where’s Leslie and why have you got her phone?”

“It was buzzing, and I picked it up.”

“Okay.” The kid’s voice is noncommittal. The boy has decided to bank his anger because clearly he thinks the guy he’s talking to is some kind of moron. “Where’d Leslie go?”

Involuntarily, Kevin’s gaze drifts across the crack and down the tilted floor and over the edge, where, through the haze of dust and the glare of sunlight, he can see the condo tower with a ragged-edge hole in it, two floors laid bare like a doll house, a tangled venetian blind flapping in the breeze forty stories up. A thin haze rises out of the hole, but no gouts of flame or smoke. That’s good, thinks Kevin.

“Where’s Leslie?” the kid demands again, no longer disguising his anger. “Why have you got her phone?”

“She’s gone. I’m all alone here.” Across the street, on an upper floor of the neo-deco building with the Starbucks on the ground floor, a woman in a red blouse stands in a window, looking in Kevin’s direction. She presses both hands to her mouth while someone behind her rubs her neck — Kevin can just make out the flexing hands. I’d get out of there, Kevin thinks, if I were you.

“Where’d she go?” Who is this idiot on his girlfriend’s phone, and what has he done with her?

“Out.”

“Out where?”

Kevin says nothing. He’s not certain of much at this moment, but he does know that he doesn’t want to be the one to tell this guy the worst thing he’s ever heard. He’s not getting this individually from either of his little Animal House familiars, he’s getting it both from the devil and the angel, loudly and simultaneously, cowardice and compassion in equal measure. Keep Your Mouth Shut, they remind him.

“What’s your name?” The kid tries another tack.

“Kevin,” says Kevin, dully.

“Well, Kevin, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

“I’m sorry.” Kevin’s as monotone as a somnambulist. “That’s not my intention.”

“Can you at least tell me, is Leslie coming back soon?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Seriously, dude, who are you?”

Just hang up, say Kevin’s voices, so he says, “I gotta go” and lowers the phone, searching for the End Call button with his trembling finger while the tiny voice of the kid chirps at him.

“Is she okay?” the boy is saying. “Can you just tell me that?” Kevin presses the button, the voice goes dead, the screen tells him helpfully CALL ENDED. He shuts off the phone, flips it closed, and sticks it inside his jacket. He sags back against the wall, bone tired. He closes his eyes.

I need to stay awake, he’s thinking. I can sleep later, but there’s something I need to attend to right now, if I could only remember what it is. It’s a mix of feelings he’s had before, a simultaneous urgency and lassitude, sort of like his competing angel and devil, but with no obvious moral component: Get up and do something in a tug of war with Just let me sleep for a minute, like the night his grandfather died on the Quinn family farm west of Lansing, a couple miles of dirt road north of the Grand Ledge Highway. Like courtiers hanging about the death chamber of a king, the family had congregated at Grampa Quinn’s eighty-acre empire, in his sagging old farmhouse where the floors creaked alarmingly underfoot and all the doorways were slightly out of true. Kevin was a new graduate of Michigan and working at Central Café, and he had driven up from Ann Arbor through a late Christmas Eve blizzard in his deathtrap Pinto, braving whiteout on I-96, the snow finally limiting visibility to the fuzzy cones of his headlights. He saw no other cars, coming or going; no one else was stupid enough to be driving in weather like this. He crawled the last few miles up the unplowed county road to Grampa’s at fifteen miles an hour — which was still too fast, but any slower and the Pinto would terminally stall out — and he watched for Grampa’s drive through the snow streaking at his windshield, afraid that he’d never find the farm in the dark, afraid that he might already have passed it. Just when he despaired of ever seeing the mailbox, just when he thought he’d either freeze to death in a snowbank or drive all the way to Mackinac City, out of the blizzard crawled Grampa’s indestructible steel mailbox on its sturdy length of iron pipe, with the family name, missing the Q, in sliding letters across the top. UINN said the snow-covered letters, making the name sound even more Gaelic than it already was. Kevin inched off the road and fishtailed up the snowed-in driveway, squeezing in between the weighty pickup trucks of his farm cousins. The trucks, the lawn, the leafless maples were all thickly blanketed by snow, and more snow fell endlessly through the yard light that hung from the roof beam of the barn.