“C’mon, caller,” says the Limbaugh-resonant voice. “Do you really think that would solve anything?”
“It’s like Aliens, man,” sputters the caller. “You try to kill ’em one at a time when they come at you, you’re never gonna win. You gotta wipe out the nest.”
“No no no,” the host is saying over this — apparently even talk radio ranters draw the line at genocide — but even so, Kevin says, without opening his eyes, “Could you turn that off, please?”
“What’s that?” says the cabbie.
“The radio. Would you mind turning it off?”
The cabbie says nothing, but a moment later the voices are gone. Kevin sways in the darkness behind his eyelids, bumping against the padding under the window. He senses the cabbie’s anger, but fuck him. The older he gets, the less eager to please Kevin feels. After Eileen Burks went into the hospital, Kevin returned to his basketball lunch as soon as he was sure he wasn’t going to run into her at the gym anymore. He was guilty over this for about ten minutes, until he missed an easy layup and one of his teammates, a perennial ABD with a single ginger eyebrow like a werewolf, snatched the ball away and growled at Kevin to get his head in the fucking game. Then, when he heard she had died, he thought — for one awful moment for which he’s still ashamed — I win! He didn’t say it out loud to anyone, thank God, but even so his conscience began to throb, and a moment later he was wondering, win what? The right to ninety-minute lunches? Freedom to read PW at my desk? The woman’s dead, and I’m still just the pubs guy, the editorial assistant, and if the economy continues to tank, maybe not even that. When times were fat, when Lansing was generous, he had an assistant editor and a typist, and now he’s lucky to get a work-study student for ten hours a week to help with the packing and shipping. He doesn’t even hire freelancers anymore, but does most everything himself. The only line left to cut in his budget is himself.
Kevin can feel the car turning, and he opens his eyes. Now they’re galloping over the expansion joints of a six-lane bridge, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, the Austin skyline looming ahead. Over the low rail of the bridge he sees glassy, greenish water, and away to the left, beyond more bridges in diminishing perspective, low green hills dotted with pastel boxes and red roofs, picked out by the sun and blurred by haze. More condos under construction rise along the river, the lower floors already sheathed in glass, the middle floors in bright yellow Tyvek sheeting, the top floors open to the sky and sprouting tufts of rebar. Straight ahead the squashed ziggurats loom on either side, and Congress Avenue rises slowly between them toward the state capitol at the far end. The dome has a creamy limestone tint, like French vanilla, while the slanting morning light casts a curl of shadow in the scoop of the capitol’s portico. Even though the office towers are taller, some trick of perspective or some quality of the morning haze makes the capitol look improbably massive, like a predator resting on its forearms and lifting its bald head.
As they reach the end of the bridge, Kevin notes the fare—$20.50! Jesus H. Christ! He should’ve taken the shuttle with Joy Luck. He has to press his temple to the warm glass of his window to see the blue claw now. The giant tower — Longhorn Place, the Ernst Blofeld Building, Barad-dûr, whatever — is partially obscured by a couple of intervening buildings, but its four panels still look as if they’re just about to rub their cold, razor fingertips together.
Twenty-one seventy-five now. Hurry up, thinks Kevin, mentally inventorying the cash in his wallet. In front of the ziggurat on the right, a businesswoman in a tight silk suit — a bust like a figurehead and an ass like two dogs fighting in a sack — marches up the sidewalk; Kevin can almost hear the sharp tattoo of her heels. Her black hair’s drawn painfully back like the Aztec warrior’s in the airport, and Kevin turns to watch her as the cab passes. The red nails of one hand swing a chic leather briefcase down by the straining, shimmering fabric of her thigh, while the claws of her other hand press a cell phone to her ear. She’s fleshier than the fierce girl in the airport, but she has the same bronzed aspect, the same raptorish nose and cheekbones, the same brown-eyed gaze fixed fiercely ahead. She might be the Aztec’s mother, and he realizes that he would never see a woman like that striding up State Street in Ann Arbor. Hispanics are pretty thin on the ground in Ann Arbor, and even a full professor at Michigan wouldn’t dress like that. You might see a tailored suit on a law professor — Kevin was glared at once on the Diag by Catherine MacKinnon, who caught him staring at her — or on an administrator, but even they don’t march with the triumphal strut of this magnificent woman. He’s both thrilled and terrified to think he might find himself in the same city, maybe even in the same office, with a woman like that.
Then the cab crosses an intersection and he’s blinded by the sunlight falling steeply down the side street. He shields his eyes. A shadow sweeps alarmingly across the windshield and he presses his temple to the window in time to see one of the construction cranes sweeping overhead, a massive red pulley swinging free. Up ahead, between the looming office towers, the state capitol gets smaller the closer Kevin comes to it.
“Longhorn Place,” announces Kidd the Cabbie, as he pulls up to the curb.
The cab accelerates away, and now Kevin’s well and truly in Texas, feet firmly on the pavement. The breathless heat is a pressure around Kevin’s chest, as though he were wrapped in bandages. He associates this kind of heat with the dull rattle of locusts on a August afternoon in Ann Arbor, when the trees droop over the sidewalks and stunned midwesterners wade through the humidity as if through water up to their waists. But here the heat is noisy—Kevin’s startled by the grumbling of buses, the rush of cars from light to light, the reverberating tap of hammers from a construction site. The heat clings to his skin the way it never does in Michigan; even in the long shadow of the office tower, he feels the sweat prickling under his arms, and it’s not even ten o’clock in the morning! Meanwhile a trio of trim young Texans in crisp khakis and unwilted polo shirts, carefully barbered behind their mirrored sunglasses, laugh at something one of them just said. An enormous Hispanic guy lumbers by, not a drop of moisture on his bulging jowls or even the hint of a stain on his Tommy Hilfiger jersey. Even the fat people here don’t sweat, marvels Kevin.
Could I live in heat like this? he wonders. Could I stand the constant glare? The light bleeds even into the blue shadow of the office tower, and the autumnal tint of his sunglasses doesn’t seem to make much difference. He wades through the heat toward the wide bank of doors, where a middle-aged guy in a billowy shirt and a gaudy tie, his slacks cinched under his paunch, dangles a Diet Coke by four fingers of one hand and lifts a smoke mechanically with the other. His whole face puckers as he inhales, and the smoke just hangs around his head in the heat. He catches Kevin looking at him and shrugs, Kevin doesn’t know why. He looks like he’s about to speak, too, but then both men are distracted by the tattoo of a woman’s heels, and both gazes swing to watch the Aztec in silk striding toward them. Three blocks after Kevin first saw her, she’s still on her cell, briskly nodding and staring fiercely ahead, swinging her chic little briefcase alongside her flashing thigh. Even in the tower shadow the sheen of her skirt glimmers, and she strides purposefully toward the lobby doors at the same time as Kevin, who’s still wading in molasses. The three of them — paunchy smoker, silk-suit Amazon, sweating Michigander — are drawn together as if by a seine, the eyes of the two men tracking the dogfight bustle of the woman’s silken backside. Without breaking stride she lifts her briefcase hand to grasp the door handle, and both men galvanically leap to open it for her. The midmorning smoker is closer and quicker, grinding the pavement with the ball of his foot and hauling at the ice-blue door with his cigarette hand. The door opens with a satisfying bass pong like the ring of a bell, and Ms. Silk Suit, for all her bulk, shimmies through the widening gap. Her tight little bun of black hair swivels as she rewards the smoker with a glance, and the smoker shrugs again and hauls the door wider for Kevin, who trots after the woman into a gust of frigid air.