The sudden clamp of cold air almost stops him gasping in his tracks, as if he has plunged into freezing water. The lobby of Barad-dûr is air-conditioned like a meat locker, instantly chilling the sweat on his forehead and tightening his skin. He pauses to fold his sunglasses into his jacket pocket, and Ms. Silk Suit’s magnificent booty recedes from him under the cavernous vault of the lobby, two stories of creamy marble and herringbone teakwood panels and mild, recessed lighting. He follows her progress in the blue-green diamonds of the glittering marble floor, where her bustling, inverted reflection meets the sharp points of her heels and toes. Even with the teak to soak up the echo, her heeltaps sound like pistol shots, and the fat treads of his own shoes — a pair of $15 °Cole Haan oxfords which Beth would have told him were too young for him, but Stella said were way cool when he tried them on at Macy’s in Briarwood — send a screech ricocheting against the unbroken curve of the ceiling, into the elevator alcoves, and off the tall outer windows.
He has no idea where he’s going — his interview isn’t until two — but he can’t resist following the lubricious vaudeville bump-bumpa-bump-bumpa-bump of Ms. Silk Suit’s old-time ecdysiast strut, and when she stops short and laughs out loud, he nearly blunders into her from behind. She cants all her weight on one sharp heel and tosses her head back; her laugh, an artificial squeal, bounds all around the lobby, followed by a rapid burst of Spanish. Kevin swerves around her and heads for the security desk, a rounded island off to one side of the lobby. On the teak wall above the desk a flatscreen TV is showing Fox News, still blazing its red BREAKING NEWS tab as a pair of commentators in split screen — heavy woman with blond hair, balding dark-skinned man — dissect the life of the late Kevin MacDonald, or so Kevin assumes from the white-on-red caption: HAS JIHAD COME TO SCOTLAND? He can’t tell for sure because the sound is turned off. He turns to the prow of the security desk, where a widescreen video monitor shows a bright Texas flag waving endlessly against a flawlessly blue sky. Across the flag in red letters is the message TOUCH TO START. Ms. Silk Suit’s heeltaps are receding, the echo of her Spanish diminishing, and by time Kevin turns she’s already disappearing into an elevator alcove.
“Help you?”
Kevin snaps to attention, wide-eyed and blinking. “Pardon?”
“Can I help you?” The security guard, a bored black woman, looks up from behind the breastwork of the desk. She’s bulky and dark, with gold hoop earrings and blood-red lipstick and a sleek, striated helmet of ebony hair. She wears a white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie, and a shapeless blue blazer. “Who you looking for?” she says, folding her hands.
Kevin wonders, is this standard operating procedure, her demanding so abruptly that he account for himself, or is it an Orange Alert thing? Do bombings in Glasgow subway stations resonate all the way down to lobby guards in Austin, Texas? Is there a photo display of suspicious types taped to the inside of her desk? Is one of them a picture of the Other Kevin, aka Abdul Mohammed, prompting the frowning guard to suspect all Celtic-looking guys who wander past her desk? Moments like this, Kevin turns motormouth. Maybe it’s an authority thing, or just his midwestern eagerness to please, but he always explains way more than he needs to.
“Um, yeah, right, I’m Kevin Quinn? From Ann Arbor, Michigan? Just flew in this morning for a job interview with uh… that is, I have an appointment here, this afternoon with uh, just a sec, with uh…” Christ, he’s spaced on the name, so he digs inside his jacket, pulls out notebook, sunglasses, pen, everything but the letter, which he fumbles out at last. “Hemphill Associates?” He lifts his eyebrows at the woman, tries to fold the letter back into his pocket.
“Touch the screen, sir.”
“Beg pardon?”
She lifts her chin. “Big screen there? With the flag on it? Touch it.”
“Ah.” The letter’s all sharp corners for some reason and won’t go back in his jacket, so he folds it roughly and thrusts it into a side pocket. “Of course.” He touches the screen, the flag vanishes, replaced by a luminous green alphabet. Kevin touches the H and up pops HEMPHILL ASSOCIATES, 52 ONE LONGHORN PLACE.
“Fifty-two?” Kevin peers hopefully at the guard.
“Fifty-second floor,” she enunciates slowly, as if to an idiot. “Right up at the top.”
“Do I need to sign in or anything?” He plunges into his inside pocket again, feeling for his pen. “Do you need to call them and let them know?”
The look on her face, and he lets the sentence dwindle away.
“No, hon.” She slowly shakes her head. “You just go on up. When’s your appointment?”
Kevin grimaces sheepishly. “Two?”
“Two!” The woman puckers her lips. “You a little early, ain’t you?”
“Well, I just flew in from Ann Arbor? Michigan?” Motormouth again. “I wanted to make sure I knew where I was supposed to go.”
“Mission accomplished.” The security guard refolds her hands.
Kevin tiptoes slowly back from the desk.
“So,” says the guard, “you got someplace to go for the next”—she glances to the side—“four and a quarter hours?”
“Ah.” Stops. “Thought I’d, you know, take a walk on the riverwalk or something.”
The guard goggles at him. “Riverwalk!”
“No?” Kevin balances on his toes.
“You in Austin,” says the guard. “Ain’t no riverwalk here.”
“Oh.”
“Riverwalk, that’s San Antonio.”
“Ah.” Even in the arctic AC, Kevin can feel himself blush.
“What we got is a hike and bike trail.” She says “hike’n’bike” like it’s one word, and her eyes glide up and down. “But you ain’t exactly dressed for it. I tell you what.” She unfolds her hands and places her pink palms on the desktop and slowly presses herself up. The security desk stands a little higher than the lobby floor so that she looms over Kevin. “They’s a Starbucks right across the street.” She slices the air with her hand, across the lobby. “Have you a cup of coffee or whatever, buy you a newspaper, figure out someplace cool to go till”—she smiles—“one thirty, anyway.”
Kevin gives her a double thumbs up and backs away. “Starbucks.”
“Starbucks be catty corner, right across the street.” She slices the air again.
Kevin pivots on his squeaking toe, nearly blunders into the paunchy smoker, who’s slouching back to work across the lobby. They do a brief Alphonse and Gaston dance, side to side in the arid air, and the smoker gives Kevin another shrug. Kevin sidles round him at last, through his faint tang of tobacco, then hits the blue door with both hands—ponggg—and steps out again into the heat.
Crossing Sixth Street, Kevin passes through a cascade of sunlight. An old, round clock on a lamppost, some restored relic of old Austin, tells him it’s coming up on ten; he instinctively starts to set his watch back an hour, then decides not to. He’s here less than twelve hours, might as well stay on Michigan time. Now he’s got the walk signal, so he veers left across Congress. In harsh sunlight at the end of the avenue, framed by office towers and a row of exhausted trees on either side, the capitol looks shrunken now and faded, like a dusty model in a museum, the Texas statehouse rendered in matchsticks or sugar cubes. Everybody else in the crosswalk — more khaki businessmen, a pair of bare-shouldered girls in camisoles and jeans (oh, Joy Luck! Oh, Lynda!), a shuffling homeless guy in a huge Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and sandals worn down to his bare heels — each moves more slowly than Kevin, metabolically adjusted to the heat. Halfway across, he pauses and takes a deep, calming breath of the viscid air. He’s sticky under his shirt; sweat prickles out of his hairline. Starbucks is just ahead, the cornerstone of a big, blond, vaguely deco office block. Against Kevin’s inclination — progressive, Ann Arbor, buy local — Starbucks looks like a haven, and instantly he’s irritated at himself for falling for the mendacious seduction of the chain store: reassurance, familiarity, a spurious homecoming. Near campus in Ann Arbor there’s a Starbucks at the corner of State and Liberty, a ninety-second walk from his office in Willoughby Hall, but he’s never been inside, not once. Of course he’s been in other Starbucks — who hasn’t? — but this one supplanted his favorite local coffeehouse, Gratzi, where he used to run into other university staffers every midmorning and midafternoon, where behind the counter the cute girl (not always the same one) remembered his preference, where he bought his coffee every day in his own Gratzi cup, which collects dust now on his desk up under the eaves of Willoughby, as forlorn an artifact as a big-haired troll or a pet rock. So he won’t set foot in the State Street Starbucks, out of his stubborn and admittedly useless nostalgia for the funky Ann Arbor of song and story — which, to be honest, he only caught the last act of. He came to Ann Arbor too late for Tom Hayden at the Daily, for the Black Action Movement strike, for the torching of the ROTC building, for John and Yoko at Crisler Arena, for the first Hash Bash where a state representative fired up a spliff in public on the Diag right in front of the A-Squared pigs, man. Kevin was half a generation behind the town’s heyday, but even so, during his undergraduate days and his years as a waiter and a record store clerk, he caught the scent of it like the last April Fool’s whiff of Panama Red. He heard all about it after work from old-timers like McNulty and others, sitting breathless at their every word over pizza in Thanos Lamplighter (gone now, too), over a beer at the Del Rio (also gone), or over a plate of fries at the Fleetwood (still there, but not the same), listening to world-weary guys only five years older as if they were flinty old veterans of the Ardennes or Guadalcanal.