“Yeah, actually,” says Kevin. “They did.” They’d wanded him, anyway. Does that count?
“Funny, you don’t look Muslim.” The cabbie drops his gaze to the road. “I mean, you’re blond, right? Though that don’t mean you’re not a Muslim. I mean, look at that one guy in Buchanan, Scotland, or wherever.”
Kevin’s Irish and his Ann Arbor instincts kick in simultaneously, and at the same moment he glimpses the Austin skyline for the first time, blurred and dull like a painted backdrop, like the Emerald City of Oz. In between the squarish skyscrapers, Kevin glimpses thin, skeletal spires like radio masts. Then the road dips and the skyline sinks behind a screen of trees.
“You think they should search Muslims?” he hears himself say. “For being Muslim?” What does he care? He secretly believes the same thing himself.
“I’m just saying, you got all these guys blowing themselves up and a lot of other folks, too. I seen their pictures on the news, and they ain’t Southern Baptists. Except maybe that Scotch guy, I don’t know what religion they got over there.” The cabbie’s watching the rearview for Kevin’s reaction.
Behind his amber lenses, Kevin is speechless. McNulty would never have been a bigot, but then who isn’t anymore? Watching the display of mugshots on TV over the weekend, he had the same thought himself. He can’t help thinking that if Muslims had been banned from Glasgow public transit, no matter what they looked like, no matter what their ethnicity, Buchanan Street Station wouldn’t have become a charnel house. Sometimes, though, in order to be decent, you have to fight your own instincts, and at last he says, “A lot of Muslims died in those bombings.”
He’s only guessing, of course, he actually doesn’t know if this is true. In Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris, it probably is, but he doesn’t know about Glasgow or Moscow. And how many Muslims are there in Bern? In the whole of Switzerland?
“Well, hell, search everybody then.” The cabbie sounds peeved and resigned; he watches the road again. Christians, Muslims. Moist, dry. It’s all about chi, brother. “It’s only fair. I mean, why single anybody out, right?”
Why, indeed? thinks Kevin. Life goes out of its way to single you out, it doesn’t need any help from the Department of Homeland Security. Take Eileen Burks, for example — five weeks after she lowered the boom on Kevin’s lunchtime hoops, she collapsed in a seizure on the rec center running track. A few days after that she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She returned to work for a few weeks wearing colorful headscarves like a fortune-teller, then went home for good to be nursed by her husband — Huh! thought Kevin — and by finals week, she was dead.
The Austin skyline pops up again behind the screen of trees, a little sharper this time. Kevin sees the narrow nipple of the Texas capitol dome. The skeletal masts are construction cranes, each one tall and spindly and one-armed like a carpenter’s square; they hover over narrow tower blocks in various stages of construction, which rise in silhouette like the uneven bars on his stereo equalizer. Condominiums, Kevin guesses, counting five of them before the skyline dips out of sight again. Now the cab’s rolling by an anonymous apartment complex, a herd of dirty-pastel boxes with peaked roofs like Monopoly hotels, their tiny balconies crowded with lawn furniture and Weber grills and potted plants. A limp banner slung between two palms — palm trees! — says $99 MOVE-IN and FREE CABLE. Never mind those pricey downtown high-rise condos, thinks Kevin, that’s where I’d be living if I moved here, or someplace just as bleak and anonymous. At least at first. That would be my bicycle upended on a hook on the balcony, that would be my forlorn cactus hanging in the stifling heat. That would be my palm tree, sort of. Say he comes to Texas, say he sells his house in Ann Arbor right out from under Stella. What would freak her out more, her boyfriend moving to Austin, or her landlord selling the house? In the back of the cab Kevin closes his eyes. Stella — not now. He opens them again behind his sunglasses, sees nothing. That’s assuming he could even sell the house on Fifth Street — he knows people who live in nicer parts of town, Burns Park or the Old West Side or out on Geddes Avenue, who have had their houses on the market for months. He’d be lucky to get what he paid for it. And what do houses cost in Austin? Today, even after the housing bubble’s burst, probably more than he can afford. Christ, they’re still building luxury high-rise condos here, even now. So, move to Austin and be a renter again. Move to Austin for a fresh start, and start from scratch. He can see Beth, his ex, bouncing one of her children on her hip and shaking her head; he can see the ironic twist of her lip, hear her saying, “At your age.”
Kevin nearly groans aloud. He’s on the very horns of the dilemma, damned if does and damned if he doesn’t. Six of one, as his father used to say, and half a dozen of the other. Settle for senescence, or pull his life out by the roots. It’s not a real choice so much as it’s a choice between two equally risible clichés: Count Your Blessings, or Follow Your Dreams. The fact that his dilemma is so predictable, so utterly and laughably banal, doesn’t make it any less pointed. Look it up (\mid-lif kri-ses\ n) and find a line drawing of Kevin Quinn in a sporty little convertible, with his perky young — well, younger—girlfriend beside him, her hair loose in the breeze. See MIDDLE-AGED MAN.
“I think that’s Longhorn Place right there,” says the cabbie, and Kevin leans forward for his first real view of Austin’s skyline, shockingly close. It’s like a beautifully crafted and intricately detailed miniature for a film, shot in slow-motion to make it look massive. It’s the city of the future from Metropolis or Things to Come, all it needs is a silvery biplane buzzing between the buildings. Several of the older buildings are neo-deco, broadchested and square, the color of concrete and topped with blunt little Masonic pyramids. Sprouting like saplings among them are three or four construction cranes like T squares and more new condo towers.
“Which one?” Kevin says.
“The tall one,” the cabbie says, “with the pointy top.”
One building is much taller than the others, sleek and narrow and straight-sided, clad in ice-blue panels; on top, four sharp steel and glass triangles tilt toward each other, like a pyramid left slightly ajar, or a grasping, four-fingered mechanical claw. The tower glints icily in the sun, looking slightly unreal and miniature and menacing, the lair of a Bond villain. Kevin can imagine those four sharp panels slowly flowering with an almighty Dolby rumble and the doomy, minor-key blare of horns to reveal the blunt red foreskin of some rogue nuclear warhead purchased from bristle-jawed Russian mobsters, all set to hoist itself atop a billowing gush of smoke and dazzling flame. Or perhaps it’s a corporate Barad-dûr, the four icy panels concealing a huge, fiery red eye with a slit like a cat’s, ready to cast its baleful light on the hapless residents of Austin.
“There’s your future, huh?” says the cabbie.
“My future?” Kevin’s leaning far enough forward to read the cabbie’s name now. Kidd it says on his license, next to an overlit ID photo that makes him look drunk.
“If you get the job,” says Kidd the Cabbie. “That’s where’ll you be. Top of the world.”
Kevin sits back against the stiff seat. Top of the world, ma. That’s a different movie altogether, with a different sort of explosion. He’s not so sure he likes that. He sees the fare click over to $15.75.
“Huh,” he says.
The traffic thickens as they cross over a freeway, and the cabbie breaks off to watch the road. Kevin closes his eyes, but that only seems to make the radio louder, and he hears the caller — the same one? A new guy? — declare, “Nuke Mecca, dude. I’m serious. Nuke it from the air.”