James Hynes: Next

“Street address?” says the cabbie.

Kevin grunts and reaches into his jacket for his notebook; he sets the sunglasses on the seat. The details of his interview are buried in the middle, of course, and he hunts past grocery lists; Stella’s cell number; instructions on how to jump a battery; Stella’s e-mail; prices for a new battery; directions to a brunch in Dexter; a list of chick-lit authors Stella wants him to read, none of whom he’s ever heard of; a Michigan license number for a red Toyota pickup, he can’t remember why; Stella’s cell number again, this time in her own hand; a list of cities where he’d be willing to live, none of which is Austin.

“Ummm,” he says, stalling, “is there a Congress Street?”

“Congress Avenue?” Kevin can hear the smirk in the cabbie’s voice. “I reckon I can find that.”

Kevin gets right away that asking for Congress Avenue is like asking for Times Square or Picadilly Circus. He lowers the notebook for his first proper look at Texas, a rolling, yellowish savannah under a cloudless sky. Miles and miles of Texas. The sky really is bigger here, though it isn’t the deep cerulean you see in Michigan this time of year; even this early in the morning it’s bleached like an old blue sheet left out in the sun. There’s too much light for the sky to soak up and it glitters everywhere, off the cars in long-term parking, off the light standards bent at the neck over the roadway, off the pavement itself.

“You from up north, right?”

“Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, thinking the name may not mean anything this side of the Mississippi, “Michigan.”

“Go Blue,” drawls the cabbie. “You here for a meeting, right? Just for the day?”

“Job interview.” The dangling rearview medallion twists this way. It’s a pair of nestled black-and-white spermatozoa, yin and yang.

“My next guess. No luggage, that’s how I can tell.”

What are you, Sherlock Holmes? Kevin nearly says, mouthy as a New Yorker, but his midwestern reticence buttons his lip. A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The midwesterner’s credo: keep it to yourself.

“What’s the job?” says the cabbie. “Don’t mind my asking.”

Kevin never knows what to do with his hands in a taxi — fold them in his lap? Cross his arms? — and he lays them flat on the seat to either side. Thus he rediscovers his sunglasses, and he puts them on. The bleaching glare becomes a warm, amber, sunset glow. WELCOME TO AUSTIN reads a sign, silver sans serif against limestone.

“I’m not sure,” he says. Another midwesternism — someone asks you a question, it’s impolite not to answer, even if you don’t have one.

“Oh yeah?” Guy’s watching him again in the rearview. “Kind of a mystery job, or what?”

“Well, no, the job’s not a mystery,” says Kevin, at once eager to explain and hating the eagerness in his voice. “It’s an editing job, they’re looking for an editor.”

“Oh yeah,” says the cabbie, knowingly. “Like a proofreader, that kind of deal?”

“Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.” He hates the defensiveness in his voice, too, but the cabbie’s touched a sore spot. For the last twenty years, Kevin’s made his living as an editor at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, the last eight as the Pubs Program’s executive editor, and even now, after all those years and all the monographs he’s acquired, edited, designed, copyedited, proofread, and marketed, he still has a hard time getting anyone to understand that editing is a profession and that he is a professional. Too often, when Kevin has been introduced as an editor at the university, he’s had to append so many qualifications that it sounds like he’s backpedaling. No, he doesn’t work for the U of M Press. No, he’s not an academic himself. No, he has no background in Asian studies — or any interest either, though he’d never say that. No, he doesn’t speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. No, he’s never been west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And no, he has no final say over what the Pubs Program publishes — that rests with the publications committee, the publications director, and the center director, all of them academics in Asian studies, and all of them as amiable and collegial as scorpions.

“Oh sure,” the cabbie’s saying. “You gotta find the books and read ’em and all that stuff, right?” They’re on an access road now and the ride is rougher, the tires thumping arrhythmically over potholes and cracks. They pass a low, mean, flat-roofed building called Club Vaquero, whose sign features a silhouette of a big-assed, big-titted woman with a wild mane of hair. It’s the same sort of business he sees around Detroit Metro, but here the light’s sharper and dustier, the bold colors of the sign both brighter and bleached somehow. Here, in this steeply angled light, even shade is for rent, Kevin notices, as they pass a private long-term parking lot where travelers can leave their cars under enormous blue canvas pavilions.

“That’s right,” says Kevin. And all that stuff —guy doesn’t know the half of it. Much of the job experience Kevin’s acquired over the years isn’t the sort you can put on a résumé. His only credential is an utterly useless bachelor of General Studies from Michigan — he never did settle on a major — but he has a frigging Ph.D. in bureaucratic savvy, with another fifteen years of painstaking postgraduate work in the survival skills of the midlevel university staffer. So far he’s survived eight different directors of the Asia Center, five pubs directors, and two dozen iterations of the pubs committee. He knows the taxonomy of academic rank the way a physicist knows the periodic table, and he knows the infinite gradations of academic condescension the way an oenophile knows Bordeaux. As recently as five years ago, when he was already running pubs, one pubs director, a Napoleonic little poli-sci professor, introduced Kevin to a new pubs committee as the Center’s “editorial assistant.”

“Executive editor, actually,” Kevin said, giving his official title.

“Of course,” said the director with an insufferable wink, as if humoring an eight-year-old. An equally insufferable murmur of laughter went round the table, and Kevin simply swallowed his rage. For one thing, it wasn’t like he had any choice, and for another he had broken his own rule, which he had written out years before on an index card and taped to the slide-away typing table on his old Steelcase desk. KYMS read the card. Keep Your Mouth Shut.

“If you want to understand the workings of an academic department,” a slightly less condescending pubs director, a Marxist with a graying ponytail and a leather jacket, had once told Kevin, “study The Sopranos. ” To which Kevin nearly replied, “If you want to understand the life of the university staffer, study The Remains of the Day. ” But he knew better not to. Even with a Marxist — perhaps especially with a Marxist — you KYfuckingMS.

But there’s a limit, thinks Kevin, which is why he’s sitting in a cab in Austin, Texas, this brilliant Monday morning, on his way to a job interview when everybody at the Asia Center back in Ann Arbor thinks he’s gone to the doctor. The muttering on the car radio, which he thought was something foreign, suddenly resolves into English, spoken rapidly and forcefully, in the unmistakable manner of talk radio. “Buchanan Street,” he hears the radio voice say, using the already-iconic shorthand. “I mean whattaya do with people like that?”

“Freakin’ animals,” says the caller, in a tinny cell phone voice. “Round ’em up, is what I say.”