“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.”
Could you turn that off, please? Kevin almost says, but doesn’t, because he’s afraid of drawing the cabbie’s attention to the subject. But not to worry, the cabbie’s not listening, the cabbie’s off on another topic of his own.
“You know, a few years back?” the cabbie’s saying, speaking up over the radio and the noise of the car. “I had an idea for a book. It was when I was in rehab? This’d be eight, nine years ago, I was sitting out on the patio, you know, thinkin’. I’m a deep thinker sometimes, I just like to sit and think. Anyway, I was wondering, what if we’re all just computer programs? I mean, this goes against my beliefs — I’m a Buddhist? Since 1969?—but I was just thinkin’, what if we’re all just computer programs, and the world’s not the world, you know, just some computer programs runnin’ into each other?”
“Huh,” says Kevin. The cab muscles its way, engine straining, across three lanes of freeway traffic toward an exit. Kevin rocks in his seat and steadies himself with a hand on the window. The glass is warm to the touch.
“Then a coupla years later, that Matrix movie comes out? Before I had a chance to…”
“Yeah, you shoulda jumped on it,” Kevin sighs.
“Yeah, I reckon.” The cabbie’s narrow shoulders rise and fall. “But it’s okay. It’s not my kinda thing. I prefer your classic themes, you know, the classic struggle of good and evil. Like Blade. Or them Rings movies. You know?”
Kevin’s not really listening anymore. He’s tuned out the cabbie and the ranters on the radio, watching through the windshield for the Austin skyline, but all he sees are giant airport hotels on a bare, treeless ridge, looking gaudy and flimsy, fodder for some apocalyptic Texas tornado that will reduce them to kindling, suctioning splintered lumber and shredded drywall into the bleached sky like straw. And I want to move here, Kevin thinks, I want to put myself in the path of that biblical weather, I want to endure the blistering heat and the titanic thunderstorms. Seven months ago, in the crepuscular gloom of a Michigan November, leaving Ann Arbor had seemed like a pretty good idea. Especially after his inaugural meeting with Eileen Burks, the day she took over as the new director of the Center for Asian Studies. He knew her slightly already, as a member of the pubs committee and a rising star of the history department. He had seen her from time to time at the university rec center, where she came to run and he came to play pickup basketball two or three days a week on his lunch hour. She’d trot past him up the stairs in filmy shorts and a sports bra, sheened with sweat, and they would exchange a collegial nod. Kevin didn’t delude himself — there wasn’t a flicker of electricity between them, and anyway, he’d assumed she was gay — but even so, in the middle of his game, lifting his eyes from the slap and screech of the court to the running track above, he’d steal a glimpse of her at full throttle and admire her long-legged stride and the glide of muscles in her back.
Now she was his boss, and Kevin looked forward to a working relationship unpoisoned by testosterone. Male academics were as hierarchical as dogs, sniffing the assholes above them and snarling at the lesser mutts, and a mere staffer like Kevin was expected to roll over and bare his belly to anyone with a graduate degree. This unavoidable humiliation was compounded by the awkward fact that Kevin was the same age as or even, in recent years, older than most of the men he had worked for. A couple of the younger ones had even shown a moment of uncertainty — but only a moment, because arrogance and ambition always trump age and experience — when they realized that Kevin had been editing monographs for the center while they were still in high school. For his part, meetings like this made Kevin sympathize with Hillary Clinton, or even John McCain, at the spectacle of a seasoned veteran losing out to some jug-eared upstart.
But Eileen Burks was not that much younger than Kevin, and he knew from working with her on the pubs committee that she was brisk and straightforward. He also knew that she was more feared than respected, especially by the male junior faculty, who secretly considered her gender an unfair competitive advantage. And her grad students, a couple of whom had worked for Kevin as freelance copy editors, told him she was notorious for blowing off her office hours and taking her own sweet time reviewing dissertation chapters. Eileen Shirks, they called her.
Still, she’d always been pleasant enough to him, and coming into the director’s office for their first meeting after her appointment, Kevin had helped himself to a seat before she’d offered him one. Thus he found himself sitting while she was still standing behind her desk, sorting through carpet swatches. After a moment Kevin made as if to stand again, but she cocked an eyebrow at him and said, “No, stay,” like she would to a dog.
She continued to stand and sort through swatches while he delivered his little State of the Pubs Program address, complete with a spreadsheet printed out that morning from Excel. She scowled at the carpet samples the entire time he was talking, and when he offered her the spreadsheet she lifted her sharp chin toward a corner of the desk. He lay the folder gingerly on the desktop. The only sound he heard was a thin whine, which was all the good will and high hopes he’d brought into the office escaping into the air at a pitch that only he could hear. He also had the sinking feeling that the new carpet she was busy selecting was going to be paid for, at least in part, out of the publications budget.