“I’ve seen you at the gym,” she said, still standing.
“Yes.” Kevin brightened — she remembers me!
“I assume that’s your lunch hour?” Still she wouldn’t meet his eye, but instead glanced from a wine-red swatch in her left hand to a blue one in her right.
“Yeah,” he said casually. “I play a pickup game with some guys two, three days a week.”
“So,” she said, laying down the blue swatch and picking up a bluer one, “the game itself lasts, what, forty-five minutes?”
“Maybe a little less.” Uh oh.
“So by time you walk over there, change your clothes, warm up, play the game, shower—”
And sauna, thought Kevin, but he knew better than to say so.
“—and walk back to your office, that’s what? An hour and a quarter? An hour and a half?” Still she wasn’t looking at him.
“Come on, Eileen,” Kevin said, collegially. “I see you at the gym all the time.”
“I’m not on the clock.” She let both swatches fall from her hands in disgust, and then said, with icy politesse, “May I call you Kevin?”
“Of course.” He could feel himself dwindling in the chair.
“Kevin.” Eileen fixed him with glacially blue eyes. “You’re not salaried like I’m salaried.”
His feet dangled above the carpet, his head shrank into his collar.
“Do we understand each other?” Eileen said.
“Perfectly,” said Kevin, the Incredible Shrinking Man.
The meeting was over. “I’ll look over your budget,” she said as he walked, vibrating with rage, across the crummy old carpet to the door, “and we’ll have a talk about it, soon.” On his way through the outer office, he heard her call for the center’s administrative associate.
“Mira!” cried Eileen. “Call Building Services. These can’t really be the only swatches they have. These are just unacceptable.”
Two minutes later, in his own office up under the eaves of Willoughby Hall, Kevin had dropped into his chair, slapped the latest issue of Publishers Weekly onto his desk, and begun to pore through the job postings at the back of the magazine. His PW subscription was like his long basketball lunches, a little perk he allowed himself on the Center’s nickel, buried deep in a sub-sub-basement of Excel. The bitch slap he’d just received from Eileen wasn’t the worst humiliation he’d ever endured from an employer — the manager at Big Star had called him “adolescent” to his face, and the speedfreak manager at Central Café had fired him for being too slow — but as he began to limn likely jobs with an orange highlighter, he decided that it was going to be the last humiliation. And it wasn’t just petulance or wounded pride, he told himself. The state of Michigan was dying all around him, leading the nation in unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. The auto industry was in its last throes, Detroit itself slowly reverting to nature, Flint was such a wasteland no one but Michael Moore went there anymore. Five years ago, Kevin would have said that his own job was as secure as you could get without actually having tenure — the academics he worked for loved the idea of having their own little publishing unit — but now the legislature was cutting the money for higher education year after year, and the U itself was trimming budget lines in every department. Even his profession didn’t look so secure anymore: young academics still needed to publish or perish, but now they could distribute their monographs worldwide instantly, and pubs programs like Kevin’s were beginning to look as quaint as floppy discs or newspapers.
Reflecting on all this, Kevin highlighted an intriguing if mysterious ad from Hemphill Associates in Austin, Texas. Hemphill offered “innovative and effective outsourcing solutions” in booming Austin, according to their PW ad, and while Kevin’s tender Ann Arbor heart trembled at the implications — wasn’t it outsourcing that was killing the Michigan economy? — they did want a managing editor — to edit what exactly, they didn’t say — for 20K more than Kevin makes now. He knew better than to think that the private sector would be any less stressful, but at least it would be straightforward, no-bullshit stress: meet the deadline, work under budget, earn your keep. The iron fist is there for all to see, without the velvet glove of “collegiality.”
“It’s all about chi, brother,” the cabbie’s saying. He lifts a big-knuckled hand off the wheel and flicks the yin-yang medallion with his fingernail. It spins, glittering: yin-yang, yin-yang, yin-yang. “Hot and cold,” says the cabbie. “Moist and dry. Shit like that.”
“What?” Kevin is suddenly alarmed. Did I say out loud that I work for the Asia Center? God forbid he should incite an exchange on Eastern spirituality with some half-crazy old Texas Buddhist, some self-taught syncretist who mocked up his own religion out of a split-backed I Ching, a dog-eared Portable Nietzsche, and a lot of Thai stick. Just like McNulty, Kevin thinks, and then his heart nearly hammers to a stop. What if this guy is McNulty? Austin’s just the sort of place a guy like McNulty would wash up, kind of a Southern-fried Ann Arbor, an Ann Arbor with bigger portions. Hailfire, son, ever’thang’s bigger in Texas. Guy’s the right age, that dirty white hair could have been blond once, and McNulty had big bones and powerful hands just like the guy’s hands on the wheel.
But the cabbie’s gaze behind his aviator lenses, framed in the rearview, isn’t heavy-lidded, only watery and weak. And the name on the license, which Kevin can’t read without leaning forward, is shorter than McNulty. And this guy sounds like a native Texan. In the mirror, his glance shows that he knows Kevin hasn’t been listening. His skeletal shoulders sag. They ride without speaking, and as if to fill the awkward silence, the radio voices seem to speak louder, all on their own.
“Turns out one of these guys was a white guy,” says the host, with a deep, old-school radio voice like Rush Limbaugh, or that Canadian guy who used to be on CKLW out of Windsor.
“Kevin something,” says the caller. It sends a chill through Kevin to hear his own name on the radio in this context.
“MacDonald,” says the Limbaugh clone, who adds, with leaden sarcasm, “Oh, excuse me, I mean ‘Abdul Mohammed.’ ”
“They’re calling it ‘666,’ ” says the cabbie, lifting his voice over the radio and raising his gaze to the rearview again. “You heard that?”
“What?” says Kevin, though he knows exactly what the guy’s talking about. 666 said the Fox banner. IS THIS THE END?
“Last Thursday? All that shit in Europe?”
“Sure,” says Kevin.
“They’re calling it 666.”
“Huh.”
“Six bombings, on June 6.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Kevin says.
“They search you at Metro?”
“Sorry?” says Kevin. The cab has angled off the freeway onto a four-lane road between scruffy tin-roofed houses on the left, and on the right a new subdivision of oversized houses on freakishly green lawns. The meter’s already up to $11.50.
“Fella traveling alone? No luggage?” The cabbie’s rearview gaze interrogates Kevin. “They didn’t take you aside and search you?”