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PART ONE. The Battle of Bertrand Russell

AS THE GROUND rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again. One missile in particular, a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, blasted from a tube balanced on the bump where some guy’s clavicle meets his scapula. What guy — a Saudi? An Egyptian? A Yemeni? Some pissed-off Arab anyway, kneeling in the bed of a dinged-up pickup truck with Texas plates, or crouching on the springy backseat of a rented convertible on a dirt track just outside the airport fence. One of those portable weapons from Afghanistan, back when Afghanistan was somebody else’s problem, called… something, a Slammer or a Tingler or something like that. Kevin recalls that it’s the same name as a cocktail — a Whiskey Sour? A Tom Collins? A shoulder-fired Banana Daiquiri? No, a Stinger, that’s it! Four parts brandy to one part crème de menthe in a cocktail glass, or a fat olive-green tube that farts flame out the back while the missile erupts from the front, its backside trailing a wobbly spiral of smoke until the missile gets its bearings and climbs like a sonuvabitch in a long smooth curve into the heat-hazy Texas sky toward the sleek underbelly of Kevin’s plane, a Pringles can with wings, packed full of defenseless Pringles.

Trouble is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters. Used to be they just shook the camera and Ronald Colman or whoever would grit his teeth and bug his eyes and dig his fingers into the armrests, and then a wobbly model airplane would plow up a miniature of a mountainside in the Hindu Kush, breasting snowbank after snowbank like a speedboat. Now of course they rub your nose in it, and you see planes split apart from the inside: the skin peels away like foil, the cabin fills with flying magazines and gusts of condensation, oxygen masks dance like marionettes. Then there’s the money shot, no movie air disaster these days is complete without it: the awful, thrilling, gut-wrenching cum of the whole sequence when some poor extra still strapped in his seat is sucked out of the plane, or a whole row of seats is yanked as if by cables out the ragged gap where the tail used to be and spins ass over tit into a freezing, fatal darkness.

But now it’s broad daylight, and Kevin’s flight from Michigan is coming down in Austin, Texas. He was even more worried about missiles during their predawn takeoff from Detroit Metro. How could he not have been, what with the security check-in line running out of the terminal all the way to the parking structure, and with every ceiling-hung TV along the concourse tuned to CNN or Fox, still streaming images from the bombings in Europe last Thursday? Crumpled subway cars, rows of bodies under sheets, cops and paramedics in orange vests, deltas of blood on pale, wide-eyed faces. The usual images — for all he knows they could be running file footage from earlier catastrophes: London, Madrid, Mumbai. Not to mention the usual grainy CCTV images of the usual round, dusky, beard-fringed faces of pleasant-looking young men—those people, Kevin can’t help thinking, against his better nature — guys only just out of adolescence, with a death wish and a remarkable talent for synchronization. Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, all within a few minutes of each other. And Bern — who bombs Switzerland? And Glasgow! If the first, botched attempt on Glasgow was farce — a couple of pissed-off professionals torching a Jeep Cherokee, not quite enough to bring Western civilization to its knees — this new attack was tragic, but it still felt unlikely to Kevin. Who knew Glasgow even had a subway system, and now Kevin remembers the name of Buchanan Street Station (a place he’s never heard of before) as indelibly as if he’d ridden through it every day of his life. Creeping in the check-in line through the terminal, he passed a Wayne County sheriff every thirty feet posed like a Cylon centurion in Kevlar vest and riot visor. At the checkpoint itself, he saw the surest sign of Orange Alert, a couple of paunchy Michigan National Guards in fatigues and combat boots, carrying automatic weapons and eyeing Kevin with a caffeinated gaze as he stood crucified in his stocking feet while a TSA drone swept him with a wand. Have a nice flight, sir!

And it didn’t help that Detroit Metro is a ten-minute drive from Kevin’s favorite Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, where no doubt some deeply disgruntled dishwasher dreams of airliners dropping from the sky like ducks in duck season, or — who knows? — where some Al Qaeda sleeper out of an episode of 24 is waiting tables and biding his time for a chance to sneak out to a two-track behind the airport with a piece of cast-off American ordnance and blow one of his better customers — and Kevin’s a big tipper, he used to wait tables himself — out of the sky. But now, deep in the privacy of his brainpan, in the plane descending over Texas, Kevin feels guilty for thinking this. Those people—what a thing to say! In the cozy, progressive cocoon of Ann Arbor, where he’s lived nearly all his life, you don’t openly speculate about terrorists in Dearborn, not in polite society you don’t, not even four days after a six-city European bombing spree. And if you do, it’s only to concede that it serves us right for looking the other way while our government handed out Stingers to radical Islamists in Peshawar like a corrupt Indian agent handing out Winchesters and firewater to angry Comanches in some glossy fifties western. Read your Chomsky, friend, we’re only reaping the whirlwind, and anyway, Islam’s a big, complicated religion like Christianity, it’s not a monolith, it’s not like every Muslim in the world wants you dead. Apart from the waiters in Dearborn, Kevin doesn’t even know any Muslims, or at least he doesn’t think he does. In college he slept a couple, three times with a girl named Paula who called herself a Sufi, but probably only to épater les père et mère back in Grand Rapids, and anyway that was thirty-some years ago, and who knows where she is now. Probably not shooting down airplanes, is a safe bet.

And those people, it turns out, can be guys just like Kevin. Just this morning, keeping an eye on CNN as he dressed for the flight, Kevin learned that the Buchanan Street bomber, according to the surveillance footage, was a pale, green-eyed, red-haired Celt — another Kevin, in fact, a young white Scotsman named Kevin MacDonald, who’d changed his name to Abdul Mohammed — SLAVE OF MOHAMMED read the helpful caption beneath his grainy visage — and who carried a backpack full of plastic explosives into a crowded Glasgow subway car. The cable ranters are already hyperventilating about the Glasgow bomber’s ethnicity, parsing his motives — whatever they may have been — and either blaming the grinding poverty of his upbringing for his desperation, or blaming permissive Britain for allowing radical Islam to infect the white working class. Kevin, to his mild shame, understands how unsettling this other Kevin is, how each new attack seems to strike closer to home. The first Glasgow terrorists were doctors, for chrissakes, sworn to do no harm, but at least they were, you know, foreigners, or at least foreign to the country they were attacking. Not to mention inept, especially the one idiot who managed to set only himself on fire, thus scoring one for the other team. But how much scarier is it if it’s a guy who looks just like you? Kevin’s half Polack, so this morning he can cling to his mother’s heritage for consolation, but the fact is, looking at the guy’s ID photo on the television as he pulled on his dress trousers, Kevin thought, he could’ve been my cousin on my father’s side, or my nephew, if I had any nephews. Twenty-three years old was Kevin MacDonald, says the CNN caption, and Kevin thinks, hell, if I’d ever gotten lucky in Glasgow — where, thank God, he’s never been — this kid could’ve been my son.

So the lingering images of Buchanan Street, the blunt Celtic face of the Other Kevin, and the prospect of sudden, violent death on takeoff worried our Kevin enough to distract him from his pretty seatmate, a long-limbed Asian American girl some twenty-five years younger than he who had already curled next to the window with youthful limberness, and who had plunged into a fat paperback even before Kevin got on the plane at Metro. He folded his suit coat and laid it flat on somebody’s garment bag in the overhead, and settling into the aisle seat he exchanged a glance and a smile with the young woman, who was reading, it turned out, a mass-market edition of The Joy Luck Club. An Asian girl reading Amy Tan — at first this seemed kind of predictable to Kevin, and then kind of redundant, a coals-to-Newcastle kind of thing. What could Amy Tan tell this girl that she didn’t already know? Then his Ann Arbor brainpan brimmed over with guilt again and he thought, maybe I should be reading Amy Tan, what do I know? He’s never read the book, but he’s seen the movie, a glossy melodrama — he saw it with Beth, years ago — and mainly what he remembers is a series of yuppie young women whining about their jobs and their boyfriends, until they’re flattened by their no-nonsense immigrant mothers, who say things like, hey, you think you got it bad, back in China I had to drown my baby.

But as the plane lurched back from the gate and rumbled slowly out to the runway, thoughts of the Other Kevin and of terrorist Lebanese busboys from Dearborn drove Kevin to ignore the girl and peer anxiously past her instead into the predawn gloom beyond the glare of the runway, where of course he couldn’t see a thing. She glanced at him a couple of times, probably thinking that he was just another melancholy middle-aged guy checking her out, and maybe he was, just a little bit. She wore jeans and a green camisole top with teensy little straps, and she had kicked off her sandals to tuck her heels under the tight denim curve of her rump. While scanning the bright amber-and-green circuit board of suburban Detroit below — I-94 streaming with white lights one way, red the other — for the telltale flash and blinding streak of a shoulder- fired missile, Kevin managed to admire how the straps of her camisole angled over her collarbone, how the jagged cut of her hair brushed the long, smooth slope of her shoulders, and, when she fixed him with a clear, brown-eyed gaze, how the golden nose stud twinkled in her left nostril.

“Do you want to switch?” she said to him in a flat, midwestern accent like his own.

“It’s okay,” he said, forcing a laugh. “It’s just that I don’t like to fly.” Especially not today, he almost added, but why belabor the obvious?

“Then maybe you shouldn’t look out the window,” she said evenly, her thumbs keeping The Joy Luck Club pried apart in her lap.

“Well,” he said, “you’re right.” He shifted his backside in his seat. He folded and refolded his fingers over the buckle of his seat belt. He refocused his gaze down the aisle. “That’s a good idea.”

But now, enduring an ear-popping descent into Texas, where there may or may not be fewer Arab terrorists — fewer Lebanese restaurants, perhaps, but more Middle Eastern students of petroleum engineering — Kevin shifts uneasily in his seat. During the flight, out of Stinger range at thirty thousand feet (or so Kevin hopes, he really has no idea), his imagination had shifted again to the Other Kevin, the baby-faced Scottish jihadist, the freckled Islamo-Celt, and Kevin found himself profiling every person who walked past him down the aisle to the bathroom: every young guy in jeans, to be sure, especially the dark or swarthy or bearded ones, but also pale guys his own age in polo shirts and Dockers, and even the weary blond stewardess with the crow’s feet. Who knows what she might be embittered about? High over southern Illinois or Missouri, Kevin wasn’t thinking of Stingers, but of rogue bottles of shampoo and mouthwash, holding household chemicals that the guy in Dockers could mix in the tiny bathroom sink and then spark with the battery from his iPod or his cell phone, blowing a hole in the plane, sucking everybody out one at a time through the toilet like Goldfinger at the end of Goldfinger. Still, perhaps because the latest bombs in the news were backpack devices in subway cars, Orange Alert this time around hasn’t meant the confiscation of personal grooming products, but in the last year or two, Kevin has been on flights whose passengers were relieved of shampoo, mouthwash, toothpaste, shaving gel, sunblock, cologne, perfume, moisturizer, not to mention any implement for the care of one’s nails: clippers, scissors, nail files, emery boards. On those flights Kevin saw a vision of a new world in the sky, a dirtier, scruffier world with planes full of passengers unshaven, unwashed, unscented, untanned, undeodorized, unmoisturized, and unmanicured, their untrimmed nails inching over the armrests they gripped so tightly.

But right now, descending into Austin, Kevin’s thinking is old school: he’s thinking that whatever gets them is going to be a good, old-fashioned, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, and he glances once more past Ms. Joy Luck and through the sun glaring in the scratches across the little oval of window. All he can see is a dull silver expanse of wing, dinged and dented and streaked, and beyond the wing a little wedge of desiccated brown ranch land sectioned by white dirt roads and fence lines and littered with tin-roofed houses and metallic trailers and oblong stock ponds full of greenish water. Even if the plane splits open like a piñata, he won’t have far to fall. He angles from side to side, wondering what’s the point of these fucking little windows if you can’t see anything, and his heart begins to pound almost as if he’s actually glimpsed the silver streak of the Stinger atop its billowing gush of smoke. Joy Luck was right — he’s better off on the aisle, where he won’t be able to see anything, where he won’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. Even if he were able to watch the entire, fatal, rising arc of the missile, he’s just another Pringle in the Pringles can gliding belly down out of the sky, with no control over the plane, no say over his fate. What would he do if he actually saw it coming? Clutch Joy Luck’s hand for that last moment of human contact? Tighten his seat belt? Put his head between his knees? Pray?

His seatmate lifts her eyebrow at him. She’s barely moved for three hours, except to shift her knees from one side to the other. The thick sheaf of pages in her lap has shifted inexorably from right to left, unread to read. She says, “Maybe you should’ve sat here. You’d have felt less, you know.” She wobbles her hand in the air.

“Maybe,” gasps Kevin. “Maybe not. Partly it’s just…” He curls his arms over his head, evoking the long, enclosed, hermetically sealed tube of the plane. “And the way we’re all…” He pushes his palms toward each other at an angle. Pringles in a Pringles can, he nearly says.

“Yeeaah,” she drawls, sympathetically. “You’re all…”

“Yup,” gulps Kevin, his hands curled in his lap. His heart pounding, his fingers numb, his stomach rolling over and over. He hears the windy thunder of descent, the anxious hiss of ventilators, the electric whine of the landing gear. Down the aisle of the tube he sees the fragile crowns of every defenseless Pringle’s head — black, gray, blond, tousled, kinky, curly, straight, buzz-cut, cowlicked, and pinkishly bald — none of them potential terrorists anymore, but his fellow innocents, the people he’s going to die with. Earlier in the flight, a cherubic infant was propped up in his seat looking back at Kevin with the twinkly, ruddy-cheeked smile of a bemused old man — Winston Churchill without his cigar — and now the kid is out of sight, wrapped up and belted in. Who’s going to save that baby, he wants to know, who’s going to save us all, who’s going to save me from the furious Stinger whizzing closer and closer to the belly of the plane, now only an inch away, now half an inch, now a quarter of an inch? The only thing that’ll save us is Zeno’s paradox — Kevin was a classics major once, for about three weeks — all we have to do is trust in the pre-Socratics and that sonuvabitching missile will never catch up. Though of course if you follow that line of reasoning, the plane itself will never reach the earth, the fat black wheels will come closer and closer to, but never… quite… touch, the tarmac, the fat-bellied plane and the shark-nosed little missile will streak together forever at a hundred and sixty miles an hour, never coming in contact, never coming to earth.

Then they do, or anyway the plane does, the wheels screeching and smoking against the runway as all the Pringles lurch forward against their lap belts. (Some breakage may occur in shipping.) Kevin feels the jolt through his backside and up his spine, and he grunts in alarm. The braking engines scream, the overhead bins rattle, the whole plane shudders with relief. Joy Luck rocks in her seat but never lifts her eyes from the book, and out the window Kevin sees the flat Texas horizon looking greener edge on, while the strange little growths between runways — junction boxes on metal stems and unlit yellow lights like tulip bulbs and arcane little signs that say G3 or E1—glide by. Behind the plane the angry Stinger sputters out in exhaustion, shark-nosed no more, but red-faced with bulging cheeks and eyes rolled white like Thomas the Tank Engine or the Little Engine That Could, only this is the Little Missile That Couldn’t, doubled over gasping in midair, pooting out a last couple of comic little puffs of exhaust, comedy clouds for a cartoon rocket, before it tumbles fuelless and unfulfilled, bent and blunted, end over end down the runway behind the plane. Meanwhile the pickup full of glowering Saudi engineering students simply evaporates.

Kevin sags into his seat like a sack of meal. From the tiny speakers overhead comes the pilot’s syncopated Chuck Yeager drawl: “Welcome to Austin, folks, it’s eight forty-eight in the ay em, we’re juuust a tad early, the temperature is a balmy eight-tee-two degrees,” blah blah blah. Enough with the Right Stuff already, thinks Kevin, just park the fucking plane. All around him the other passengers rustle restlessly in their seats, stretching, collecting, cell-phoning, watch-glancing, yawning, all except Joy Luck, who will not lift her eyes from her book. Beyond the girl’s admirable clavicle he glimpses the low half shell of Austin’s terminal, blanched with morning light, airliners nosed up under the tall tinted windows, an accordion jetway affixed to each plane like a remora to a shark. Thrust up behind, the tail fin of each aircraft shimmers in the heat.

At last, at last, at last Kevin’s plane bumps to a stop, and with the clacking of unbuckled seat belts passengers surge into the aisle. Kevin’s one of the first up, tipping back on his heels from the swing of the overhead door, then rocking forward to snatch his suit coat. Waiting now with chin tucked to breastbone, Kevin finds himself looking down the front of his seatmate’s camisole. She’s already flipped up the armrest and stretched across both seats, her finger still stuck in the paperback, while reaching behind with the other to pull on her sandals. In the cool green shadow where the camisole droops away on its straps, Kevin can see her nipples, and perhaps even the shadow of a tattoo snaking up from under one of her velvety breasts. Her eyes are hidden under her bangs. Now he is the melancholy middle-aged guy copping a look, and as she scootches up onto the aisle seat, tucking one knee under her, Kevin drapes his jacket over his clasped hands and rolls his eyes upward, an altar boy contemplating a prank.

Inch by inch the snake of passengers unkinks up the aisle, making the floor panels thump. Kevin steps back to let Joy Luck ahead of him, and she unfolds herself into the aisle, still holding her place in the paperback. She’s nearly as tall as he is, and she pops open the next overhead compartment and, still holding the goddamn book, effortlessly hoists out a fat, cylindrical, olive-green duffle. It’s so big Kevin’s surprised they counted it as a carry-on, but she swings it over her shoulder and sways up the aisle like a sailor. Kevin treads right behind her, his nose a couple of inches from the bulging round bottom of the duffle. He shuffles up the aisle past the flight attendant with the crow’s feet, and he follows the girl through the gap between the plane and the jetway where the Texas heat leaks in like steam. Then they’re walking faster up the slightly cooler slope of the ramp, where he can encompass Joy Luck from head to toe in one glance. She’s long-waisted and slim-hipped, and she sways up the jetway with one bare arm curled round her duffle and her other arm swinging at her hip, the paperback pinched around her middle finger. The abbreviated hem of her top reveals the matching dimples at the small of her back and the small tattoo of a green apple between them, just over the beltless waistband of her jeans. Kevin cannot help but admire the enormously fetching way she moves, a sort of well-lubricated slouch by which she lets her shoulders droop and leads with her hipbones. It’s not an aggressive catwalk strut, it’s much less self-conscious and much more feral, and as Kevin follows her into the filtered light and cathedral echo of the terminal itself, into the delta of debarking passengers fanning across the carpet and onto the cool marble, he thinks, I know that walk, I’ve seen that walk before. And for one thrilling moment, his heart swells with the possibility that I know that girl! But of course, he couldn’t possibly — she’s twenty-five, maybe thirty years younger than him, he’s never seen her before in his life, and if he had, he’d have remembered. But by God he knows that walk, someone else used to walk that way, he’s felt that walk up close, he’s curled his fingertips around those hipbones from behind, and then his heart fills up again, only this time with honest-to-God, hundred-proof middle-aged melancholy. It’s Lynda, he realizes, Lynda used to slink like that, Lynda used to glide away from his touch just like that. Lynda on the dance floor, Lynda à la plage. Lynda on the railing.

Then something tangles round his ankles and he staggers forward, the fat treads of his shoes sticking at the icy floor. In that pre-accident moment of crystal-clear slo-mo, he realizes that his jacket has slipped off his clasped hands and fallen to the floor between his feet. In a desperate little tap dance he kicks the jacket free, and it slithers across the marble floor like the cloaked shadow of a Ringwraith. He hops and pirouettes and catches himself with both hands on the top of a trash bin, while the other folks streaming out of the jetway step briskly around him as if he were a dog chasing its tail. He’s blushing, he can feel the heat rising off his face, and he pushes himself erect from the trash can, stiffening his back and lifting his chin. Then he stoops to the limp jacket, which is laughing at him from the floor, and jerks it into the air. Of course the carefully assembled contents of his left inside pocket all tumble to the floor: his notebook with a loud slap, the letter inviting him to the job interview gliding like a paper airplane, his pen and sunglasses skittering end to end. Clutching the jacket to his chest, he stoops red-faced again to snatch everything up, smiling sheepishly at no one in particular. A young mother pushing a slack-jawed infant — young Winston at rest — twists the stroller in a sharp angle to avoid him. The terminal’s arctic air-conditioning clamps around him then, and he shakes the jacket out by the collar as if disciplining a child. His heart hammers from embarrassment, his hands tremble a little as he slots the notebook, the pens, the glasses, and finally the letter back into the jacket’s inside pocket. He puts the jacket on and glances around to see if anyone has noticed his spastic little routine, but all he sees are a couple of men dozing in the black leatherette chairs and an old woman paging through a magazine. By now the plane is empty behind him and the rest of the passengers are trailing away down the long cathedral arcade of the terminal through the pillars of light streaming in the windows: silhouettes fat and lean, major and minor, limping, striding, slouching, swinging briefcases, dangling backpacks, towing wheeled suitcases, in twos and threes, or weaving through the crowd, alone. None of the silhouettes ahead is swaying. None of them is carrying a duffle. None of them is dangling a book at her hip and holding her place with a finger. Kevin can no longer see his slinky seatmate, Ms. Joy Luck Club, the girl in the camisole, the girl with the tattoos, the girl who walks like Lynda.

On the concourse Kevin allows himself only one glance at a dangling television, where a soigné, cheekboned überblond on Fox mouths silently over a banner that reads, with characteristic subtlety, 666: IS THIS THE END? Christ, thinks Kevin. Then, worried that he’s going to see the round, abstractly familial face of the Other Kevin once more, which will only rattle him further, he resolves not to look at a TV again, not until he’s back home in Ann Arbor. He has enough to worry about, and anyway, he’s on the ground in Texas, and Austin doesn’t even have a subway. Get thee behind me, Osama.

In a men’s room halfway down the concourse Kevin micturates, his nerves thrumming like wires. As relieved as he is to be on the ground and not in pieces all over central Texas, he’s still anxious about the interview this afternoon. He’s taking a flyer here, after all, applying for a private-sector job he picked almost at random out of the back pages of Publishers Weekly; to his astonishment, they responded by inviting him down to Austin for a brief interview, rather than interviewing him over the phone. “We’ll pay for your ticket,” said the woman on the phone, Patsy something of Hemphill Associates, whoever they are, and Kevin was too surprised to ask if maybe they could put him up for a night in Austin. He knows that businessmen and women fly twenty-four hundred miles roundtrip in a single day all the time to take an hour-long meeting, but this is sort of new in Kevin’s experience. Still, here he is, twelve hundred miles from home at 8:30 in the morning, draining his bladder into a Texas urinal, with no luggage or traveler’s checks, just his interview suit, a little extra cash in his wallet, and a pair of e-ticket boarding passes. Welcome to the global economy.

His middle-aged bladder at last more or less empty, he shakes, tucks, and zips up. Then he takes off his jacket again, carefully, and hangs it on a hook as he washes his hands and face. The dazzling white tiles of the lavatory are studded with colorful intaglios of Texas iconography — an armadillo, a cactus, a bright green jalapeño pepper — and the Muzak here isn’t Muzak, but Texas swing: Asleep at the Wheel, playing “Miles and Miles of Texas.” Kevin was a record store clerk once, back in the age of vinyl, at Big Star Records in Ann Arbor, and peering at his dripping face in the mirror he remembers how, whenever it was Mick McNulty’s turn to pick the music, it was always Asleep at the Wheel, until everybody on the afternoon shift knew all the words whether they wanted to or not, or could imitate the singer’s sleepy bass-baritone drawl. “Ray Benson’s a genius,” McNulty’d say in his own sleepy, midwestern mumble, “the new Bob Wills.” McNulty had a gift for stating the obvious about an artist as if it were revealed truth, though everything he knew was culled from the liner notes. Kevin blots his face with a couple of paper towels, then runs the damp towels under his collar and over the back of his neck. He lifts his jacket off the hook and watches himself in the mirror as he puts it on. Meanwhile the goddamn song penetrates his lizard brain: “I saw miles and miles of Texas”—now it’ll be stuck in his head all goddamn day—“Gonna live here till I die.”

Where’s McNulty now? he wonders as he steps out onto the echoing concourse again. Whatever happened to McNulty? Back when Kevin knew him, McNulty had been in his early forties, a tall, slope-shouldered guy with a round little belly and a slouching, easy, keep-on-truckin’ walk. He had wispy blond hair turning already to gray, which he kept short like a Beach Boy’s, and heavy-lidded eyes, and his manner was part aging stoner and part aging athlete. Improbably, for his age and general lassitude, he was the best player on the Big Star softball team, where he played first base with his glove on one hand and a cigarette in the other. Somehow, whenever the ball wafted into his general vicinity, he managed to pull it into his gravitational field by sheer karma, reeling it into his mitt without even stepping away from the bag. Then he’d put the smoke between his lips, throw the ball unerringly wherever it needed to go, take a drag on his cig, and return to his original slouch. He could make a double play without even losing the ash from his Marlboro. Not a great employee, though, Kevin recalls. McNulty took fewer shifts at the register than everybody else because the manager knew he’d screw up every third or fourth transaction. Instead he spent a lot of time restocking, which he did very, very slowly, with obsessive but idiosyncratic accuracy, lingering for ten minutes at a time over a particularly difficult decision.

“Fairport Convention,” he’d say. “Not really rock. Not really folk.” He’d shake his head slowly. “I just don’t know.”

“The sixties were very, very good to Mick,” the manager told Kevin once, when they were taking a break in the alley behind the store. Though the circumstances of the observation strike Kevin as ironic now — they had been sharing a joint at the time — the disjunction between the remark and its context went unnoted back then. In a hip, regionally famous, independent record store in Ann Arbor in the late seventies — long gone now, of course, strangled by the chains and the Internet and iTunes — reliability and even competence weren’t necessarily the first things you looked for in an employee. Entertainment value counted for a lot, and McNulty had entertainment value to burn. During the long reaches of slow, midweek, midsummer days when Big Star was nearly empty, Kevin would stand with McNulty behind the counter or in the back of the store by the jazz section, and McNulty would smoke and slouch and, from the depths of a heavy-lidded midafternoon coma, relate fantastic stories from his youth.

Like the Battle of Bertrand Russell. In 1960, McNulty had been stationed at Althorpe Air Force Base near the east coast of England, and one day the base had been besieged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the gate stormed by the cream of the British left: doughty old pacifist women wearing sensible shoes and wielding signs; ruddy, strapping vegetarians who wore socks with sandals and sported fantastic beards like William Morris; humorless, porcelain-skinned Communist girls in black turtlenecks; their scrawny boyfriends with unkempt hair and toggle coats covered with badges; reedy academics in woolen waistcoats and baggy trousers; and in the vanguard the elfin philosopher himself, a wave of white hair atop an elegant black overcoat. The assault had all the menace of a warm spring rain, but the base went on full alert anyway, with klaxons blaring and jeeps roaring everywhere and all personnel recalled to duty. Except for McNulty, who was off duty at the time and didn’t hear the klaxons because he was in his favorite spot at the far end of the runway with his shirt off, vainly trying to get a tan from the pale English sun. As the base, unbeknownst to him, hustled to repel the gentle barbarians of the CND, McNulty alternated between dozing and reading Naked Lunch and watching B52s lumber over his head.

“Naked Lunch,” he’d said, his eyes almost shut. “It was a new book at the time.” And Kevin, who was twenty-two or twenty-three when McNulty told him this story, almost swooned with admiration. This was the apotheosis of cool for him, and it still is, even now, as he trudges middle-aged down the concourse in Austin past the food court. It had the all elements to awe an impressionable young dilettante of a bohemian bent: irreverence, contempt for military authority, catching some rays while bombers glided overhead, and the happy conjunction of William S. Burroughs and Bertrand Russell. Even better (at least for the purposes of the story), once McNulty’s inadvertent dereliction had been discovered, he had been busted from sergeant back down to airman, and McNulty had turned the demotion to his advantage, boldly walking in uniform into a local pub (The Frog and the Scorpion) to chat up one of those intense, porcelain Communist girls, telling her that he’d offered up his career in the United States Air Force as a sacrifice to nuclear disarmament.

“Did it work?” Kevin had said, as wide-eyed as a kid. Daddy, tell me about the sixties again.

“God, yes,” said McNulty, almost energetically, and he went into some detail about a bloodlessly pale girl named Judy who had led him through a twisting maze of redbrick houses set close as teeth, each street narrower than the last, the raw night air full of coal smoke, until they came to Judy’s bedsit, where they took off their shoes and crept up the stairs past her landlady. In her tiny, unheated room they grappled silently on her narrow, swaybacked bed while she whispered to him about Althusser and Lukács and E. P. Thompson and he tried to peel off her black turtleneck. She consented at last, not so much out of lust as out of a grim determination to show that she wasn’t bourgeois, but even so she dug her ragged, bitten fingernails painfully into his shoulders whenever she thought the bed was creaking too loudly. She had a point, McNulty told Kevin; the floors were so thin they could hear the landlady snoring directly below them, but once again McNulty made lemonade and turned Mrs. Allenby’s honking to his advantage, murmuring to Judy that as long as her landlady didn’t stop snoring, they were probably all right. Soon McNulty was balling — that was his word for it, balling, Jurassic-era hipster slang — in that lovely, loose-hipped American way the English girls loved (said McNulty).

“But my mind wandered,” McNulty told Kevin, “it always does when I’m balling, I can’t help it.” Propped up on his strong American arms over the self-consciously ardent Judy, he started to think about the names of the streets they’d passed on the way to her bedsit: General Gordon Road, Gallipoli Lane, Sebastopol Row. “Nobody celebrates their own military disasters like the British,” McNulty said, and he told Kevin he’d begun to laugh, right there in the saddle, as it were. Judy looked more puzzled than hurt, perhaps she wasn’t used to laughter during sex, McNulty didn’t know, but he said “Sebastopol” out loud, puzzling her even more, and to make it up to her he began to thrust in a breathless, galloping, Tennysonian rhythm—half a league, half a league, half a league onward, forward the Light Brigade! Judy went stiff as a two-by-four when she came, her eyes wide, her lips a wordless O, and for an awful moment McNulty thought he’d killed her or something, because at the same moment, eight feet below, Mrs. Allenby stopped snoring, and in that instant he seemed to be the only one in the house with a beating pulse. Then Judy melted with a whimper, Mrs. Allenby began to trumpet again, and McNulty collapsed happily in Judy’s pale, undernourished arms. Afterward, she explained Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to him while he stretched out and lit a cigarette and silently recollected how the French called an orgasm le petit mort. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred, thought McNulty, blowing smoke rings at the oppressive floral wallpaper and trying not to laugh.

That’s the coolest story I ever heard, Kevin thinks, and it occurs to him with a pang that he’s older now than McNulty was then. Trudging around the gleaming glass cube of the airport’s newsstand, instinctively ignoring the alarming headlines, Kevin wearily wonders if admiring McNulty has done him any good at all. Back in his twenties, it had never occurred to Kevin to ask what a guy McNulty’s age had been doing working for four dollars an hour in a record shop, where even the manager was fifteen years younger. Kevin cringes at the memory, partly out of pity for McNulty — who knows where he is now, he’d be in his late sixties at least — and partly out of fear that he, Kevin, may not have much more to show at fifty than McNulty did at forty. He has a much better job than McNulty ever did, of course, and a mortgage and a retirement plan, and good friends he’s known since his Big Star days and before. But no kids, no career, really, no overriding passion in his life, and an ex-girlfriend who at long last heaved him over the side to have children with a man younger than Kevin — and certainly no happy memories of balling English Marxists and being the first American in Lincolnshire to read Naked Lunch.

GROUND TRANSPORTATION declares a sign, and a fat arrow points to the left, where Kevin joins a narcoleptic conga line shuffling toward the down escalator. The line is watched by a fierce-looking, heavily armed young woman in camouflage fatigues, another harbinger of Orange Alert. She’s a Hispanic girl with a lot of Indian in her (thinks Kevin), a woman warrior, an Aztec Amazon. She stands with her legs apart, her black jump boots tightly laced, a semi-automatic pistol bulging at her hip. She holds her ugly black automatic rifle diagonally across her chest, the corner of the butt propped on her shoulder, the fierce muzzle pointed at the marble floor. Her fine, inky hair is drawn tight into a bun under her beret, sharpening the raptorish edge of her cheekbones and her nose, making her black-eyed glare even fiercer. While she may be a reservist or a National Guard, this young woman is a real soldier, this woman is no McNulty, she’s no irreverent, Beat-reading shirker, probably no seducer of earnest young Englishwomen (though you never know). No, in work and in play, this young woman is clearly all business; this girl is on the job. This girl would empty a clip into Bertrand Russell without a second thought.

Even for an Ann Arbor liberal like him, Kevin’s glad to see the young woman, especially today. Four days after Buchanan Street — funny how quickly a name becomes iconic and needs no further explanation, like Watergate or Guantánamo — there are no bleeding hearts on public transportation, and he’s grateful for the guard’s sacrifice in that dutiful way mandated by the White House, network anchormen, and country music stars. But even so, Kevin wants to know, is this the best use of her time? Wouldn’t she be more effective patrolling the perimeter of the airport in a jeep, looking for suspicious characters in rented cars, dusky and not-so-dusky guys watching planes take off and land through binoculars? Shouldn’t she be looking for wired-up bottles of shampoo in checked luggage? Mysterious vials of white powder? Stingers in the grass? Not to tell you your job, soldier, I’m just saying, if something’s going to happen, is it really going to happen here, in the terminal? Then the soldier swivels her head and meets Kevin’s gaze, and Kevin jerks his eyes away.

And nearly stumbles getting on the escalator. The corrugated step splits under the soles of his shoes, and he shuffles back and catches himself on the rubbery handrail. But when he glances back, the woman warrior is already watching someone else. Kevin sighs and descends into the cool, gray atrium of baggage claim, into a magnifying, mall-ish echo of voices, an oceanic murmuring. A diffuse crowd mills around the steely hippodrome of a baggage conveyer, and for a moment his heart lifts at the prospect of catching another glance of Joy Luck and her tattoos. But she was already carrying her luggage; she’s long gone by now. Kevin feels like a movie director riding the camera crane down into a crowd scene — he was a film major once, for half a semester — John Ford or William Wyler chewing the stem of his pipe, his feet dangling from his trouser cuffs and showing a pair of tartan socks and a little pale shin. This gives Kevin the momentary illusion of control, the feeling that he could bark at the crowd below and they’d all look up at him as one, waiting for direction. Hey, maybe he’s even some young director, a veteran of hip-hop videos making his first feature, a chunky white kid in a Raiders jersey and a vast pair of cargo shorts and a backward ball cap, watching his milling extras with a critical eye and calling out, “Where’s our star, yo? The fuck’s my leading lady? She in this shot, or what?” Ms. Joy Luck in the role of Lynda — Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. “She’s in her trailer, Mr. Quinn.” Mister Quinn — Kevin likes the sound of that. “Well, go ask her if she’d like to join us this morning, dog. We’re losing the fucking light.” But as the crane descends, the people below become less and less foreshortened, less and less under Kevin’s control, until with a gentle bump the escalator deposits Kevin sole to sole with his own dim reflection in the dully gleaming floor. Now he’s at eye level with everyone else, just another arriving passenger, just another guy in the crowd, just another extra in somebody else’s movie.

He passes through the sliding doors into his first real embrace by the Texas heat. It’s not so bad; the air presses warmly against his skin, that’s all. Plus he’s in the shade of an overpass, under a ceiling of massive rectangular beams held up by squat, square pillars of dirty white concrete. The Texas sunlight leaks in from the far ends, where the passenger pick-up lanes curve beneath the overpass. Vehicles coming out of the glare dim as they roll into the shade, a slow parade of SUVs and pickup trucks inching over speed bumps and braking impatiently for the crosswalks. Beyond a median, shuttle buses with broad foreheads line up nose to tail like baby elephants, and beyond that rises the cliff face of the parking garage, each pier embossed with a big, five-pointed Texas star, just in case the armadillo tiles in the men’s room and Asleep at the Wheel over the public address have left him in any doubt as to where he is.

Truth is, he feels like he’s not just in another state, but in another country. He knows no one in Texas; the folks waiting to see him this afternoon have never laid eyes on him. And no one in Ann Arbor even knows he’s here. He could hardly tell the folks at the Asia Center where he was going, so he took a personal day — annual checkup, he told Mira, the center’s administrative associate and his immediate superior — and to be on the safe side, he didn’t tell any of his friends, either. Even Stella doesn’t know he’s gone. Especially Stella. He plans to be back in Ann Arbor by eleven p.m. tonight, and Stella won’t be back from her sales conference in Chicago till late tomorrow. Unless the folks today offer him the job and he decides to take it, no one will ever know he was here. When he was a young backpacker, feeling invulnerable and immortal, he’d loved the thrill of knowing that he could step off a cliff in Donegal or fall down a sinkhole on the North York moors and no one would ever know what happened to him. But now his anonymity pierces him like a hook and hauls him up short. It’s not too late, he thinks, I could go back inside, change my ticket, and be back in Ann Arbor by midafternoon.

He realizes that he’s stopped walking. Other passengers step around him, the little wheels of their suitcases clacking over the joints in the pavement. He hears the mutter of the PA, first in English—“Due to heightened security, knives are not allowed on planes”—and then in Spanish—“Debido a la seguridad aumentada, cuchillos no se permiten en los planos.” The guttural grind of buses, the hiss and squeal of brakes, the slam of car doors reverberating off the concrete all around. A tepid breeze full of diesel exhaust brushes by him, and Kevin realizes he’s not even in Texas yet. The airport doesn’t count; it’s only an island in an archipelago nation of glassed-in atolls where everybody speaks a sort of English and lives off warm cinnamon buns and day-old turkey sandwiches.

He joins the pedestrians funneled into the crosswalks by concrete security barriers. (Just because you’re on the ground, says his lizard brain, doesn’t mean you’re safe.) Under his clothes the sweat prickles out of his skin. At the median he joins the queue at the taxi stand, behind a large woman in a broad-beamed pair of jeans and a voluminous shirt who is talking to herself in short, disjointed bursts and with much frantic gesturing. There is nothing in her hands. Time was, on the Diag in Ann Arbor where the homeless congregate, Kevin would circle around someone talking to herself in public, but now everyone does it. He feels aged by the fact that he’s still surprised to see people conducting phone conversations in public.

“I know that,” the woman says. “Don’t think I don’t know that.” From behind, Kevin watches her shake her helmet of hair. “Listen, I’ve been saying exactly the same thing.” She lowers herself into the next cab. “Doggone it, Pearl, that’s what I’ve been saying.” She’s shaking her head as the cab pulls away. “Doggone it, Pearl.”

Kevin approaches a green Chevy Lumina with JAY’S TAXI printed unceremoniously along the side; the cabbie’s already reached back to open the rear door.

“Luggage?” he says hoarsely, peering through the purple tint of his aviator glasses. A long, gaunt face. Scooped-out cheeks, pale, slack skin.

“No,” says Kevin. He lifts his knee to slide into the seat and the cabbie says, “Close that trunk for me, willya, bud?”

Kevin pushes back from the car and walks around to slam the trunk with both hands. Then he slides grumpily into the backseat of the Lumina — the meter’s already running, he notices — and the cab starts to roll even before he’s pulled the door shut. That’s when he sees Joy Luck in the crosswalk, swaying up to a shuttle bus with her duffle on her shoulder and the paperback dangling at her hip, her finger still holding her place.

“Whoa,” Kevin says involuntarily, and the cabbie hits the brake. Kevin rocks forward, and the door slips from his hand and bangs all the way open.

“You okay?” The pale cabbie levels his gaze at Kevin, an edge of irritation in his voice.

“Yeah.” Kevin reaches for the door again. Up ahead Joy Luck stands her duffle on end and shares a smile with the shuttle driver, a bull-chested Hispanic with his uniform shirt tucked into bulging bicycle shorts. He slings the duffle up into the shuttle, and Joy Luck pauses at the door, one long leg bent on the bottom step. She twists her hair one-handed off the back of her neck, just like Lynda used to. Oh Lynda, Lynda, Lynda, thinks Kevin, where are you now?

“Meter’s running, sir,” says the cabbie. “We comin’ or goin’?”

“Go,” says Kevin. He lunges for the door and slams it. Joy Luck is swallowed by the shuttle as the cab hauls away from the curb.

Kevin’s more aware of the noises a car makes when he’s not driving: the crepitation of tread against pavement, the throaty roar of acceleration, the galloping slap—thump-thump, thump-thump—of tires over the joints in the road.

“Where we headed?” The cabbie watches Kevin in the rearview mirror. The AC vents are whooshing; the dispatch radio spits unintelligibly; voices on the car radio mutter in an unidentifiable language, something rapid-fire and vehement. The meter ticks relentlessly, and the dull red numbers already register $2.75. Pasted across the dash is a SEMPER FI bumper sticker in scarlet and gold; a small medallion, silver and black, dangles from the rearview, twisting in the breeze of the AC. Kevin finds one end of the seat belt and digs for the other in the crack of the seat. It’s not too late to go back, he’s thinking, it’s not too late to get on the shuttle with Joy Luck, or even to offer her a ride in his cab, anywhere she wants to go, his treat. She’s hooked him somehow and she’s holding the other end of the line, and any second now all the slack will be played out and he’ll be yanked like a tuna right out of the cab. Then he snags the blunt end of the belt and claws it two-fingered out of the seat, and the cab shoots out of the echoing cavern of the underpass into the light. Even behind the tinted windows of the taxi, Kevin squints against the Texas glare. Thump-thump, thump-thump go the tires. The line tugging at his heart tautens and snaps. Too late.

“Downtown,” says Kevin, yanking on both ends of the belt until they connect. “One Longhorn Place.” Three twenty-five, and they haven’t even left the airport yet. Together Kevin and the cabbie ride in a Lumina-shaped bubble of dank air-conditioning, the air tainted with the farting of the dispatch radio and their own mild, mutual ill will. Kevin notes the cabbie’s dirty white hair combed straight back over a sun-reddened bald spot, his raggedly trimmed beard, his long-boned arms, his big-knuckled hands on the wheel. He wears a faded Hawaiian shirt that hangs off his shoulders as if off a wire hanger. Kevin pulls out his sunglasses.

“Street address?” says the cabbie.

Kevin grunts and reaches into his jacket for his notebook; he sets the sunglasses on the seat. The details of his interview are buried in the middle, of course, and he hunts past grocery lists; Stella’s cell number; instructions on how to jump a battery; Stella’s e-mail; prices for a new battery; directions to a brunch in Dexter; a list of chick-lit authors Stella wants him to read, none of whom he’s ever heard of; a Michigan license number for a red Toyota pickup, he can’t remember why; Stella’s cell number again, this time in her own hand; a list of cities where he’d be willing to live, none of which is Austin.

“Ummm,” he says, stalling, “is there a Congress Street?”

“Congress Avenue?” Kevin can hear the smirk in the cabbie’s voice. “I reckon I can find that.”

Kevin gets right away that asking for Congress Avenue is like asking for Times Square or Picadilly Circus. He lowers the notebook for his first proper look at Texas, a rolling, yellowish savannah under a cloudless sky. Miles and miles of Texas. The sky really is bigger here, though it isn’t the deep cerulean you see in Michigan this time of year; even this early in the morning it’s bleached like an old blue sheet left out in the sun. There’s too much light for the sky to soak up and it glitters everywhere, off the cars in long-term parking, off the light standards bent at the neck over the roadway, off the pavement itself.

“You from up north, right?”

“Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, thinking the name may not mean anything this side of the Mississippi, “Michigan.”

“Go Blue,” drawls the cabbie. “You here for a meeting, right? Just for the day?”

“Job interview.” The dangling rearview medallion twists this way. It’s a pair of nestled black-and-white spermatozoa, yin and yang.

“My next guess. No luggage, that’s how I can tell.”

What are you, Sherlock Holmes? Kevin nearly says, mouthy as a New Yorker, but his midwestern reticence buttons his lip. A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The midwesterner’s credo: keep it to yourself.

“What’s the job?” says the cabbie. “Don’t mind my asking.”

Kevin never knows what to do with his hands in a taxi — fold them in his lap? Cross his arms? — and he lays them flat on the seat to either side. Thus he rediscovers his sunglasses, and he puts them on. The bleaching glare becomes a warm, amber, sunset glow. WELCOME TO AUSTIN reads a sign, silver sans serif against limestone.

“I’m not sure,” he says. Another midwesternism — someone asks you a question, it’s impolite not to answer, even if you don’t have one.

“Oh yeah?” Guy’s watching him again in the rearview. “Kind of a mystery job, or what?”

“Well, no, the job’s not a mystery,” says Kevin, at once eager to explain and hating the eagerness in his voice. “It’s an editing job, they’re looking for an editor.”

“Oh yeah,” says the cabbie, knowingly. “Like a proofreader, that kind of deal?”

“Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.” He hates the defensiveness in his voice, too, but the cabbie’s touched a sore spot. For the last twenty years, Kevin’s made his living as an editor at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, the last eight as the Pubs Program’s executive editor, and even now, after all those years and all the monographs he’s acquired, edited, designed, copyedited, proofread, and marketed, he still has a hard time getting anyone to understand that editing is a profession and that he is a professional. Too often, when Kevin has been introduced as an editor at the university, he’s had to append so many qualifications that it sounds like he’s backpedaling. No, he doesn’t work for the U of M Press. No, he’s not an academic himself. No, he has no background in Asian studies — or any interest either, though he’d never say that. No, he doesn’t speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. No, he’s never been west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And no, he has no final say over what the Pubs Program publishes — that rests with the publications committee, the publications director, and the center director, all of them academics in Asian studies, and all of them as amiable and collegial as scorpions.

“Oh sure,” the cabbie’s saying. “You gotta find the books and read ’em and all that stuff, right?” They’re on an access road now and the ride is rougher, the tires thumping arrhythmically over potholes and cracks. They pass a low, mean, flat-roofed building called Club Vaquero, whose sign features a silhouette of a big-assed, big-titted woman with a wild mane of hair. It’s the same sort of business he sees around Detroit Metro, but here the light’s sharper and dustier, the bold colors of the sign both brighter and bleached somehow. Here, in this steeply angled light, even shade is for rent, Kevin notices, as they pass a private long-term parking lot where travelers can leave their cars under enormous blue canvas pavilions.

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

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.

These days, where he buys his coffee depends on which way he walks to work. Say he comes up behind the Union and along Maynard under University Towers and through the Arcade, in which case he stops at Expresso Royale and carries his cardboard cup steaming along State Street. That’s his route on cloudy days. When it’s sunny, though, he walks all the way up Fifth to Liberty, then straight up Liberty into the rising sun, because one of his favorite sights in the world is the view up Liberty on a brisk autumn morning or on a mild spring one, under a scrubbed blue midwestern sky, with the Michigan Theater’s black marquee soaking up the slanting light and Burton Tower printed against the sky at the end of the street, limned in astringent northern light. Here, at least in Kevin’s youth, was once the epicenter of funky retail Ann Arbor, the heart of elvendom on earth. Within two minutes walk of each other were three world-class record stores: Liberty Music, where a middle-aged clerk in a tie escorted you to a booth so you could listen to six different recordings of Shostakovich’s Fifth; hip Big Star, where if you didn’t know what you wanted, you were in the wrong place; and Discount Records, where Iggy Pop once worked. And five bookstores: overlit Follett’s, fussy Charing Cross, overstuffed David’s, bohemian Centicore, and the original, independent, prelapsarian Borders, whose clerks had to pass a book test to get the job and afterward strutted the carpeted aisles as arrogant as Jesuits. “Romance novels? We don’t sell romance novels. Why don’t you try Walden’s? At the mall.”

Not to mention a shoe store and a barbershop and a pharmacy and a five-and-dime and a declining old midwestern department store. And two Greek diners, a gourmet hot dog stand, a vegetarian restaurant, a five-dollar steak house, a Japanese restaurant, two or three sub shops, an ice cream shop, a cookie shop. And Drake’s, where he first met Beth, not long after he started at the Asia Center as an editorial assistant. As an undergraduate Kevin had never liked Drake’s, with its sickly green decor and cramped, unpadded, wooden booths, unupholstered since 1935. The place survived on nostalgia — misty alums on football Saturdays sharing a pot of weak tea, and the rest of the week homesick undergrads who’d been steered there by sentimental parents or older siblings. By Kevin’s time it was cluttered and dark, the entryway heaped with boxes, the counter lined with dusty jars of mummified candy. The owner, an enormous, bald old man, bloodless as a slug, his trousers pulled up to his armpits, slumped immovably on a stool at the end of the counter, doing God knows what; Kevin never saw him stir or speak. And the portions were small: a Coke came in an eight-ounce glass, more crushed ice than cola, and a sandwich was a flavorless scoop of something pink in mayonnaise on wilted lettuce and dry white bread, cut into fussy little triangles skewered with toothpicks. Worst of all, you had to fill out your own order ticket with a blunt pencil stub and then try to catch the attention of one of the sullen girls behind the counter.

The first time Kevin laid eyes on Beth, he vainly waved his ticket at her as she whispered with another haughty Drake’s girl, the two of them casually ignoring him. He hadn’t been in Drake’s since he’d graduated, despite working only a block away at Big Star for years, but this was his first week at the Asia Center, and he figured, if you work at the U, you might as well eat at Drake’s at least once. Plus the girls behind the counter were usually cute, despite the shapeless green tunics they wore, and looking back at that first exchange of glances now, as he steps up out of the crosswalk at Sixth and Congress in Austin, Texas, it comes to him as a much-belated revelation that it was probably her Drakette hauteur that drew him to Beth in the first place. At last she pried herself away from her conversation with the other girl — Debra, Kevin learned later, shorter but equally cute; how different would his life have been if she’d come to take his order? — and carried herself down the narrow aisle behind the counter as imperiously as a runway model, tall, clear-skinned, wide-eyed. She fixed him with her gaze and, without a word, plucked the ticket from Kevin’s hand with two fingers and pivoted away, her hair swinging. Kevin, who fell easily and hard, felt a tingle that started in his balls and reverberated all the way up his spine and down his arms to the tips of his fingers. And she knew it, too. When she called him back to pick up his sandwich, she thrust her lower lip at him and slid the plate across the counter with a surly clatter, fixing him with her gaze again as if daring him to say something. He started back to his booth, heart pounding, then turned and carried it back to the counter, where he lifted his finger to get the tall girl’s attention. She exchanged a look with Debra — what does this idiot want? — and carried herself down the aisle to Kevin again. She placed her long, pale fingers on the countertop, canted her hip, and lifted an eyebrow.

Kevin leaned on the counter, extracted a toothpick, and peeled back the top of one quarter of his sandwich. He frowned sheepishly. “Is this tuna?” he said.

For a long, thrilling moment she locked eyes with him, then deigned to drop her gaze to the pink clot of chunky paste he’d laid bare. They both regarded it for a moment, then looked at each other again. “What do you think it is?” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

She angled her head, as if to regard the sandwich in a slightly better light. “Why don’t you try it and see?”

“Well,” said Kevin, keenly aware, in his peripheral vision, of the lovely Debra trying not to laugh, “if I’m not sure what it is, I don’t think I want to put it in my mouth.”

“I see,” said the tall girl, speaking with faux gravity. She pinned him once more with her gaze, and Kevin thought he might never breathe again. Then he felt the sandwich moving under his hands as the girl slid her hand across the counter and hooked one long, pale finger over the lip of the plate. She never took her eyes off Kevin’s as she pulled it toward her. The little flap of bread Kevin had lifted curled slowly back down.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and she picked up the triangle of sandwich and bit it in two. Kevin gasped and stood up straight. Debra turned sharply away, lips pinched bloodlessly shut, while the enormous old man on his stool at the end of the counter sat as immobile as the Buddha. Meanwhile the tall girl deliberately masticated one-eighth of Kevin’s lunch, gazing pensively upward.

“Well,” she said, and paused to push a loose fleck of whatever back into the corner of her lips with her pinky, “it tastes like tuna to me.”

Kevin watched the girl in astonishment. His blood was singing. Finally she swallowed and replaced the uneaten half of the triangle with a little pat and nudged the plate back toward Kevin. Who picked it up, fastidiously turned her teethmarks toward him, and put the rest of the section in his mouth. As he swallowed it whole, nearly choking on tuna and his own laughter, the girl smiled and turned a dark shade of red.

“You’re right,” he said, tapping his sternum lightly. “It is tuna.”

Thus began a battle of wills that lasted thirteen years. God knows it was her Drakette hauteur on display that day in the bath when she told him she was leaving. Several years ago now, and it still stings as if it had happened this morning. It stings right now, in fact, along with the sudden, unbidden taste of tuna in the vault of his palate. Beth, what hath thou wrought? If it weren’t for her, he probably wouldn’t be sweltering outside Starbucks on a street corner in subtropical Austin. He touches the taste of tuna with the tip of his tongue, the taste of Beth. The men in khakis are walking toward the capitol, still laughing, while the camisole girls sway fetchingly in the other direction, as hearty as Minoan dancing girls. On a bus stop bench a couple of Hispanic girls hunch together in matching fast-food uniforms and consult a sheet of paper. One girl runs her blunt finger along a line, syllable by syllable, while the other girl reads haltingly, “Heh, hel-lo. Wel-come. To. Pancho’s Taco. Ex, express. Hah, how. May I. Heh, heh, help you?”

“Bueno.” The first girl nods and moves her finger down a line. “El siguiente,” she says. Next.

Kevin veers to the steps of Starbucks, which are guarded by a street musician — dirty gray beard, sleeveless T-shirt, pale upper arms — standing against the wall, aimlessly but vigorously strumming a guitar. Is he in his forties, Kevin wonders, or his fifties? He’s so frayed by bad luck it’s hard to tell, but even in the heat Kevin feels the cold breath of time brush them both. The guy’s eyes shift mournfully from side to side, following passersby, and Kevin wonders, what memory is he trying to erase? Is he another McNulty, hitting rock bottom? The man’s scuffed guitar case is closed at his feet. Perhaps he’s forgotten to open it, or maybe it’s a rare example of ars gratia artis. Kevin steps past him up into the coffee shop.

The morning rush is nearly over, and the place is disheveled — napkins on the floor, crumbs underfoot, a plastic stirrer in a little pool of coffee on the countertop. Behind the counter a black girl with dreadlocks hangs on a lever at the espresso machine, and a golden-haired white girl with a stain on the breast of her company tunic slouches at the register. They each have that end-of-shift, thousand-yard stare that Kevin recognizes from his own days in retail. Meanwhile a rotund young woman with a buzz cut works up a sweat changing out the trash bins; she yanks a bulging bag of cups into the air and twists it sharply, as if snapping its neck. The only person ahead of Kevin is a businesswoman in her late thirties — no, thinks Kevin, looking closer through her makeup at the crinkled corners of her eyes, mid forties. She steps aside and smiles at him. “I’m waiting,” she says.

Kevin needs to wash the taste of Beth out of his mouth, so he orders an iced tea.

“With legs?” says the golden blond, absently pressing a key on the register.

“Pardon?” Starbucks is like its own country, you have to know the silly argot.

“To go?” says the fortysomething woman, in a rising, Texas singsong. “ ‘With legs’ means ‘to go.’ ”

Cheerleader, thinks Kevin. Sorority girl, marketing major, party girl once upon a time. A Republican, maybe, but a fun Republican, a sexy Republican. He smiles and she purses her lips — nicely red, but not too red, sort of business sensual — which Kevin finds mildly flirty, and instinctively, in spite of himself, before his forebrain can get a word in edgewise, he looks her up and down. She’s pretty, formerly pert, now softening around the edges. Brown hair pulled back with a ribbon the same color as her lipstick. Wide eyes, cornflower blue, a little too made-up for close range, but just right (Kevin’s guessing) for a presentation in front of a boardroom. Snug jacket, but not too snug, knee-length skirt. Matching nail polish, no wedding ring. A little wide in the hips, but nice calves. Kevin’s appraising gaze glides back up to her face, and she blushes and looks away, over the counter, at nothing in particular.

“Yes,” says Kevin, his forebrain at last wresting the controls away. “I mean, no.”

“What?” says the barista. The middle-aged are so boring.

“It’s for here,” says Kevin. “No legs.”

The girl slouches away for his legless tea, and Kevin smiles sidelong at the woman and says, “ ‘With legs,’ huh?”

She smiles warily.

“What am I,” says Kevin, “Damon Runyon?”

Her eyebrows lift, her smile widens ever so slightly, and Kevin can see his joke sailing deep into the cornflower blue yonder, without striking a goddamn thing. She doesn’t get it, she’s just being polite — guess they never did Guys and Dolls at Texas A&M — and the embarrassment pulls tight as a wire between them until it’s blessedly snapped by the dreadlocked girl reaching over the counter with the woman’s steaming paper cup of venti double cap something, and Kevin and the woman turn from each other with relief. Kevin pretends to study the baked goods under glass next to the register while the woman taps across the floor in her sensible heels. One of the pastries, he notices, is a madeleine. Good thing he didn’t make a joke about that.

Kevin watches the rotund barista swipe at tables with a damp cloth until the blond barista returns and money and iced tea are exchanged across the retail membrane of the countertop. Kevin hesitates, buys a muffin, and then juggles cup, muffin, and change past the love seat where the businesswoman, legs crossed, displays her excellent calves and swings her toe as she consults a very thin, very stylish silver laptop. A little wheeled suitcase waits at her feet like a faithful dog. She glances up, he glances back, they look away, and Kevin makes for a small round table in the corner, still gleaming from the stout barista’s damp cloth. He sets his tea and muffin before him and takes a bentwood chair where the businesswoman is at the corner of his eye. The windows look up both Sixth and Congress, offering a wide, 270-degree vista of the street corner, like Captain Nemo’s observation bubble in the Nautilus, only instead of flashing schools of fish and lumbering manta rays, he sees just beyond the glass a gangly man in a sleeveless, gold lamé minidress teetering on platform heels, his calves and thighs ropy, his arms veined and hairy. He wears badly applied lipstick and a crooked wig, a Bizarro Mary Tyler Moore circa The Dick Van Dyke Show. A frayed evening bag that doesn’t quite match the minidress dangles from the guy’s knotty forearm.

Kevin sips at his tea. For the first time he notices the rhythmic world music over the speakers — women singing wordlessly over drums — and he hears the padded tapping of the businesswoman at her keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye he notes her pretty pout as she concentrates on her e-mail or whatever. He nibbles the muffin; it’s sweet, but still Beth troubles Kevin like indigestion, a sour backwash that his snack can’t extinguish. Bitch, he thinks, without saying it out loud. Thirteen years they were together, until he was forty-six and she was thirty-eight, and the day Beth told Kevin she was leaving him, he had been lying in the bath in four inches of warm water, a little square of sodden gauze on the loose flesh around his belly button. Somehow, during a walk out at Silver Lake the weekend before, he’d gotten poison ivy. Not on his arms or ankles where he usually got it, but on this little patch of belly. How it got there, under the elastic of his shorts, he had no idea, but now he had a reddened cordillera around the crater of his navel, a little archipelago of pustules that oozed clear liquid, and he was lying in warm water with a coffee cup full of warm Domeboro’s solution on the edge of the tub. It was a black promotional cup, the logo for The Sopranos with its semi-automatic R printed in red on the side. He was reading an old Martin Amis novel with a black cover as he soaked, and every couple of pages he carefully balanced the split-spined paperback on the edge of the tub and ladled another teaspoon or two of warm, grainy solution onto his belly, little white flecks of powder catching in the soaking weave of the gauze. When Beth came in, Kevin looked up cluelessly, thinking she’d just come for a leisurely chat, and for a moment he contemplated lunging out of the tub, damn the cup and the book, and dragging her in, jeans and T-shirt and all. He’d done it before, though not for years, but why not? She looked good, and, if he did say so himself, he didn’t look too bad for forty-six, even stretched out pale and hairy in lukewarm bathwater. His arms and chest were firm and his legs strong, though he’d got this little pouch just below his belly button that he couldn’t make go away, no matter how many crunches he did. But Beth perched on the lid of the toilet, the toes of her Birkenstocks pressed to the tile and her heels lifted, her knees primly together. She leaned forward with her forearms together and her long fingers tightly laced and looked intently at him for a moment before she reached over the edge of the tub and lifted the book out of his hand. Then, without preface, she said, “I’m pregnant and it’s not yours.”

He lay there with the water cooling all around him, the gauze turning chill on his slack belly. As he listened to her—“I’m in love with him, and I want to have a child with him”—he reached for the cup. Instead of ladling out more solution, he put the wet spoon on the open book, where a wet patch instantly soaked into the page, and he poured the rest of the cup slowly over his belly, watching the milky water pool in his navel and overflow through the thicket of hair into the bath. Then he set the cup back on the edge of the tub, very carefully so that it didn’t make a sound, and he turned it around so that he was reading the Sopranos tagline on the other side, in fat red letters against the black ceramic: FAMILY. REDEFINED. Beth said she wouldn’t make a fuss, she didn’t want his money or his house, and she hoped he wouldn’t make a fuss either. “I want a child,” she said, squeezing her fingers bloodless, “and you won’t give me one.” Now the urge to grab her and haul her into the tub was almost overwhelming. Not out of rage, Kevin thought — though he couldn’t be sure — but for some reason he felt an overpowering lust for her that he hadn’t felt in a couple of years. He really wanted to fuck her right there in the tub, the way they used to, in a rubbery tangle of limbs and bumping elbows and splashing water. There was probably some evolutionary reading of his desire — she’d been with another man and now his genes needed to reassert their dominance over the guy who’d knocked her up, or some Dawkins shit like that. But even knowing that, Kevin thought there was something irreducible and elemental about the emotion. It was what it was: she’d been with another man, and it made him hot. In the tub he’d been aware of his penis lolling, the black nimbus of hair at its root shifting like seaweed in the sloshing bathwater. God help me if it gets hard, thought Kevin, because he knew that what would have been friskiness a few years before would be something close to assault now. Plus, even he could read her body language: toes and knees together, hands clenched into a single white-knuckled fist. His lust cooled like the water lapping his flanks and thighs, and he was filled with sorrow at the thought that he’d already made love to this woman, whom he used to love and maybe still did, sorta, kinda, for the last time.

Now, in Starbucks, slumped over his muffin, he’s not the least bit aroused, just really, really sad. The morning sunlight pours through the window and across the table before him, warming his iced tea. The muffin has a scallop in it, though he doesn’t remember taking a bite, couldn’t even say exactly what kind of muffin it is. He’s almost nauseous with melancholy now, and he pushes the dead muffin across the tabletop. He’s angry, too, for letting this get to him, today of all days. It’s been four years, for chrissakes, going on five, he has a new lover, a striking, high-maintenance woman even younger than Beth. And Beth — boy, has she moved on, she has a kid who’s almost as old as their breakup. Even so, he’s always pissed off when he stumbles over another hidden trip wire of regret. The insipid moaning of the women over the stereo only makes it worse, and the rattle of the businesswoman’s keyboard behind him makes him want to snap at her. Still, he’s sorry he ever called Beth a bitch, even silently. Then he sits up a little straighter in the chair because he’s got nothing to be sorry for, goddammit, it’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle-age, buddy, everybody regrets something. He and Beth were together for thirteen years, and that’s a lot of emotional momentum, a runaway freight train rolling downhill, nothing but tanker cars full of toxic waste and high explosives, and sometimes he feels like he’s tied to the fucking track.

“Excuse me?” trills a voice with a rising, singsong inflection. Kevin turns; the businesswoman is smiling at him. At this distance her makeup is just right, and his heart fibrillates with unexpected pleasure that this yellow rose of Texas is beaming at him over the screen of her silvery laptop.

“Do you know another word for ‘regret’?” she says.

Wow, thinks Kevin, that’s a little on the nose. Can former Texas cheerleaders read minds? Do they teach telepathy at Baylor? Outside the window, a school of colorful fish enters the crosswalk from each direction, sifting neatly through each other. Another couple of girls in tank tops stride away from him — do they travel only in pairs? — and Kevin turns back to the beaming woman.

“Regret, huh?” he says. “Sounds serious.”

“That’s just it,” says the Yellow Rose of Starbucks. “It sounds too serious.” She tilts her head. “I want to say, ‘I regret the misunderstanding,’ but on the other hand”—she tilts her head the other way—“I don’t really think it was my fault.”

“Huh.” Kevin looks down at his muffin, sneaks a glance at the sunlit girls, but someone carrying a big green duffel bag is blocking his view. Move, he thinks.

“Business or personal?” He takes a nip of his muffin. Cranberry, that’s what it is.

“Wellll,” drawls the Yellow Rose, “mostly business.” She really does have a rather fetching, crooked smile.

This should be easy, thinks Kevin, I’m an editor. A professional. This is my job, helping folks find the right word. He furrows his brow to show he’s mulling it over, but what flashes across his eyeballs is big green duffel bag.

“I mean, I’m sorry he misunderstood?” says the woman, crinkling her nose, which is going a little too far. “But I’m not really sorry?”

The big green duffel bag is balanced on the shoulder of a tall, swaying Asian girl threading her unsmiling way through the knot of homeless and day laborers on the corner, neatly sidestepping the woozy stagger of Mr. Mary Tyler Moore. She sails by Kevin’s window, just beyond the glass, and all the pagan priestesses on the stereo sing alleluia! Kevin nearly chokes on his muffin. O frabjous day! Callooh, callay! It’s Joy Luck!

Kevin chases the chunk of muffin with a gulp of tea. The Yellow Rose is still talking but he’s not listening; instead he’s rising from his chair and shuffling like a zombie to the window.

“Uh huh,” he says, splaying a hand against the warm glass and peering sideways up Sixth Street after Joy Luck. Her arm curls around the duffel, her head is neatly obscured, so that she looks like a hybrid creature, a land-bound hammerhead shark with a very sexy walk. But she keeps close to the building and after a moment all he can see is the butt end of the duffel before it too disappears. “Sorry,” he says, pushing back from the window, leaving his palm print on the glass. “What was the question?”

The businesswoman has stopped talking, her bright red nails hooked over the upright screen of her laptop. Kevin’s heart sinks at the sight: a frost has touched the Yellow Rose. She’s seen what he was looking at; she’s watched him levitate from his chair and stumble to the window, all the blood rushing from his head. Her bright mouth has crumpled, her eyes have hardened, and all at once she looks ten years older. It breaks his heart to see, and inwardly he lacerates himself even as his tongue stumbles uselessly in every direction at once.

“She’s, uh…” He gestures at the window. “I know her from…”

The Yellow Rose’s petals turn brittle in the chill. She spreads her fingers as if to say, whatever, none of my damn business.

“I know her father.” Kevin’s face burns as he sidles toward the door. But the businesswoman has withdrawn within her suit as if behind a rampart, so Kevin snatches his iced tea. Then turns back and grabs the muffin — at these prices, he’s not leaving it behind.

“I’m sorry you misunderstood,” Kevin says as he slips past the Yellow Rose, and she snaps her head back as if he’s slapped her. “Just say that,” he adds, gesturing at the laptop before he plunges out the door into the heat.

He hustles around the corner onto Sixth Street. Half a block ahead, without breaking stride, Joy Luck swivels the duffel from her left shoulder to her right, jogging a little like a sailor to hike the load up higher. The muscles in her arm, the glide of her shoulder blades, the little apple in the dimple of her back — all are nicely picked out by the sunlight pouring down Sixth from behind. Kevin feels a little surge of, well, joy.

“Nice,” someone says next to him. Kevin pulls up short and instantly dances away from the wavelet of tea sloshing from his cup. He’s still standing outside Starbucks, and from the window above the chunky barista glowers at him and rubs away the palm print he’s left on the glass. It’s not her speaking, but another shaggy homeless guy hunkered against the building, smoking a cigarette. No, not a cigarette — Kevin recognizes the sweet, resinous smell. The homeless man — cadaverous in T-shirt and jeans and an ancient tweed sport coat — watches Joy Luck walk away. He draws deep on the joint, then turns his dilated gaze to Kevin.

“Friend of yours?” he rasps.

“I know her father.” He has no idea why he keeps repeating this lie, especially to strangers.

The guy cocks a bird-bright eye at Kevin and says, “O-kay. What’s her name?”

Kevin laughs. In cannabis veritas. He weighs the cup in one hand and the half-eaten muffin in the other, and impulsively, as if propitiating some local deity, he offers them to the homeless man, who peers at them warily, then slowly takes the muffin and stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket. He waves away the cup. Up ahead, Joy Luck pauses at the next cross street, stoops to look right under her duffel, then sways into the intersection. Meanwhile, with grave hippie generosity, the homeless man offers the joint to Kevin with a smooth, palm-down gesture, the smoke pooling under his hand and rising through his fingers. He lifts his scraggy eyebrows and holds his own toke as he waits. For the tiniest increment of time Kevin considers it — in Ann Arbor, under the right circumstances, he wouldn’t hesitate — and then a train of considerations rumbles by — strange city, Texas drug laws, job interview in a few hours — and he shakes his head subtly, as cool as the homeless guy making the offer. The international brotherhood of dopers. No thanks, bro. The homeless guy shrugs and gasps out a puff of smoke. Kevin starts up the street after Joy Luck.

“Go get her, dude,” rasps the homeless guy.

What am I doing? thinks Kevin, treading on his own shadow. Who am I kidding? What am I going to do, strike up a conversation with her like some drunken Shriner? Hey honey, I’m only in town for the day, what’s a fella do for fun in this burg, har har har? The very thought shrivels him, but he keeps walking. Cars pour west down Sixth toward the bright, hazy hills in the distance, but there’s no other foot traffic, only Joy Luck and him. Get a grip, he thinks, she’s twenty-five years younger, maybe even thirty. But so what? The first day he met Stella, in Expresso Royale, she told him she was twenty-nine. The fact that she lied about her age — he knows because after she moved into his rental apartment downstairs and started spending most of her nights upstairs with him, he snuck a peek at her driver’s license and found out she was actually thirty-five — is sort of beside the point. Fact is, the look on Beth’s face when he told her how old his new lover was — it was worth all the grief he knew she’d give him. Who cares if Stella’s actually five, six years older? Whatever the actual difference, the gap in their ages is the running gag of their relationship, it’s the grain around which their relationship formed.

“The Black Crowes” was the first thing she’d ever said to him, as they both waited in line at the Royale one bright spring morning. They’d been taking turns glancing at each other for the past minute or so, and at last she’d turned and caught him admiring her firm calves and the way she dangled her slim briefcase before her, her slender fingers linked through the leather handle. And what she said was “The Black Crowes.”

“Sorry?”

She dipped her broad forehead toward him. It was a calculated effect, he knew it the moment she did it, but even so it worked and he leaned closer.

“The Black Crowes?” She shimmied a little in place. “On the stereo?”

Kevin lifted his chin and put on his listening face. One of the harried undergrads on the morning shift at the Royale was feeling retro this morning; the speakers were broadcasting “Brown Sugar,” the first song Kevin had ever danced to, back in the Pleistocene. Before he could stop himself, Kevin laughed.

The young woman pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She had a mane of kinky, dirty-blond hair, barely restrained in a shaggy ponytail; clear skin pulled tight across a flawless forehead; a strong jaw. She was very slightly bandy-legged, accentuated by the boxy heels of her pumps. A black-and-white polka-dot skirt, wasp-waisted blazer.

“Can’t a girl like the old bands?” she growled, and in spite of himself, in spite of her lovely narrow waist and strong-looking legs, Kevin laughed again.

“How old are you?” he asked her, before he had time to think.

“Twenty-nine?” she said, blushing. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Sorry.” Kevin brushed her elbow with the tips of his fingers. “It’s the music. It’s just…” He smiled. “You made me feel old is all.”

She looked puzzled, but turned a little more in his direction. Kevin was aware without looking that the twenty-year-olds ahead of and behind them were rolling their eyes and exchanging smirks at this elderly flirtation, but fuck ’em. The young \’yeη\ n, pl: those on whom youth is wasted.

“The band’s older than you think.” Kevin lowered his voice and gestured with his eyebrows into the aural space above their heads, where the song had reached the climactic moment when Mick and the lads chanted, “Yeah… yeah… yeah… whoooo!” The very point at which, in the sweaty, paneled, suburban basements of his youth, Kevin and his tube- or halter-topped partner, shaking their hip-huggers to the thumpa-thumpa Watts and Wyman beat, would chant along and waggle their hands in the air. “How come ya, how come ya dance so good?”

“It’s not the Black Crowes,” he murmured, inclining his head toward hers. “It’s the Rolling Stones.” Then he added, “The Black Crowes of their day,” never sure how much a young person would know of the popular music of the Pleistocene. “Sort of.”

“I know that,” said the young woman, and she unlaced the long fingers of one hand from the grip of her briefcase, her nails a deep but not unprofessional shade of red, and playfully rapped his arm with her knuckles. “How old are you?”

Good question, thinks Kevin, trotting through the Texas heat after a girl who’s even younger than Stella, a girl whose father he is old enough to be. Up ahead Joy Luck dashes on tiptoe across Sixth Street, the duffel bouncing heavily on her shoulder, her arm thrown out for balance, her sandals flapping loose of her heels. A block behind her Kevin crosses, too. She turns left down a side street, and when he reaches the corner, Kevin pauses to slug down the rest of his tea in one long, wobbling gulp. By now it’s as warm as his sweating palm, it’s like drinking some bodily fluid of his own, and as Joy Luck sways downhill toward the river, he tosses the empty cup in a trash can and plods after her. His shirt’s wilting under his jacket, sweat courses along his sideburns and down the groove of his spine.

What will he say if he catches her? Will he say anything at all, or just watch her longingly from a distance, some cow-eyed, sweaty loser in a wilted suit? What if she recognizes him and asks him, point-blank, why he’s following her? Does he even know why? Say he tells her it’s because she walks like a girl he slept with for three months back in the eighties — Christ, that’s even more ridiculous than simple, middle-aged lust. What would a young woman say to such an avowal? What could she say? Would she find it poignant or touching, or just pathetic? Is it pathetic? It makes him feel old just to think about it. This is way out of the ordinary for Kevin, he doesn’t follow young women in strange cities as a general rule, but still he keeps walking. Certainly he expects nothing to happen. In Ann Arbor he knows the ground, has a clearer sense of where he has a shot and where he doesn’t. Indeed, his flirtations in Ann Arbor, like that first morning in Expresso Royale, have paid off occasionally, though rarely as precipitately as they did with Stella.

“Let an old man buy you coffee,” he’d said when they reached the counter, and “Brown Sugar” had segued into “Sway.” Half an hour later, they had a dinner date, and that evening, during a pleasantly anticipatory meal at the Mongolian Barbecue downtown, where he took all his first dates, he got the Stella backstory: sales rep for a textbook company, just moved here from St. Louis, didn’t know a soul, did he know of any apartments for rent? Funny you should ask, he said, not really thinking it through. Forty-five minutes later he was showing her the empty apartment on the ground floor of his house on Fifth Avenue. Where, up against a bare wall, in the dark, and against his better judgment, he agreed on the spot to rent her the apartment—“French doors!” she’d exclaimed. “Oh God, a fireplace!”—and then uttered not a word of demurral as she dropped to her knees on the newly revarnished hardwood floor and fellated him. Well, maybe it was the other way around, she blew him first and then he offered her the apartment — he’s hazy on the details, he was a little drunk at the time — but either way it was an epic fellation. She took her time, she acted as if she enjoyed it, she had technique. Whatever warnings the Jiminy Cricket in his forebrain might have had about a young woman who was willing to blow her potential landlord on the first date were sluiced away in the patella-rattling rush of pleasure, and by his relief, considering where she was putting her mouth, that she hadn’t ordered the bird peppers with her stir-fry.

The street before him descends toward the river between low, old, brick warehouses converted into bars and restaurants. A half-built condo tower looms over the end of the street, the giant crane above it sweeping as slow as a second hand. Joy Luck crosses an alley and sails up a raised sidewalk under an awning. Kevin jogs to close the gap, and suddenly a battered white van pulls out of the alley right in front of him, and a young driver with a jigging Adam’s apple cranes over the steering wheel, looking both ways. Kevin dodges left to go round the back of the van, but it’s too close to a telephone pole, and he finds himself nose-to-nose with an old red flyer, now faded to pink, stapled to the splintered wood — DOES MARX MATTER? Sponsored, Kevin notes, by the Intercontinental Socialist Alliance, six months ago, on the University of Texas campus. He sees flyers like this every day of his life in Ann Arbor, and over thirty years he’s gone from a mildly guilty, dilettantish interest through grumpiness to eye-rolling bemusement. He can see the sparse crowd, most of them coreligionists of the speaker, and most of them, men and women both, fatally uncool: humorless, pedantic, puritanical little narcissists with burning eyes and a Talmudic grasp of infinitesimal ideological details. During Kevin’s undergraduate years, people like this seemed like the vanguard of something, but now, after the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Two Towers and the Fall of Kevin’s Fiftieth Birthday, a meeting like this seems as quaint as college boys in raccoon coats strumming ukuleles. Nowadays disaffected young men like the Other Kevin — slave of the Prophet, blessings be upon him — turn to actual religions for their ideology. Same sort of cheerless meetings, Kevin suspects, in the same sort of cheerless, overlit meeting rooms, only with fewer girls. Or probably no girls at all.

The van’s driver guns the engine and lurches forward, all of six inches. Kevin bounces on his toes. “Come on.” Somewhere the Intercontinental Socialists are laughing mirthlessly at his middle-aged longing — another instance, no doubt, of the cultural alienation of late monopoly capitalism. Or maybe some dark-eyed mullah is cursing Kevin’s corrupt Crusader lust, quoting chapter and verse from the Koran. If only the Other Kevin had been luckier with girls, thinks Kevin, maybe he wouldn’t have taken his frustration and rage out on the defenseless commuters of Buchanan Street. The only reason to go to meetings like that, in Kevin’s day, was to meet girls, and if there aren’t any girls, what’s the point? In fact, the last time he went to a meeting like that was with none other than Lynda herself — Lynda à la plage! Lynda on the railing! He was still working at Big Star that summer, and she’d been a fairly regular customer, so he began flirting with her one afternoon as she diffidently flipped through the jazz section, clearly with no intention of buying anything, but slouching in her jeans and tank top over the record bin, bending back the toe of her sandal, pushing aside her strawberry blond hair with the tips of her fingers as she smiled sidelong at him. After some desultory conversation—“Are you into Sun Ra?” “Sort of”—she said she was going to a meeting that night, and would he like to come?

“What kind of meeting?” he’d said, as his Jiminy Cricket started jumping up and down in his brain, shouting, “Watch out! Danger! She’s a Moonie! A Maranatha! A Young Spartacist! All she wants is your soul!”

“Oh, I dunno,” she sighed. “Some nuclear freeze, pro-Sandinista, fuck Reagan kind of thing.” With one hand she lifted her hair at the nape of her neck, exposing to Kevin the pale, expertly shaved scallop of her underarm. “I promised some boy I’d go, but I don’t want to show up, you know, alone?”

“Sure,” said Kevin, throttling Jiminy. “Cool.”

Indeed, it was that same afternoon, shortly after she left, that Mick McNulty had told him of the Battle of Bertrand Russell, and he told Kevin he should definitely go with Lynda to her meeting.

“You ever see the usual guys who show up at those things?” McNulty said in his hipster mumble, politely expelling his cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth away from Kevin. “Scrawny vegetarians, man. Guys who bathe once a week, if that. Guys who wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if one dropped in their lap.” He squinted across the store through his haze of smoke, at something only he could see. “Tom Courtenay,” he said.

“Tom Courtenay?”

“In Zhivago, man. You ever see that flick?”

“Sure,” said Kevin.

“Yeah, Dr. Zhivago,” McNulty continued, slowly remembering. “Julie Christie’s his girlfriend — Julie Christie, man! — but he has a hard-on for Trotsky.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you, you’re Omar Sharif, okay?” McNulty gestured with his cigarette, dragging tendrils of smoke through the air. “Take it from me, man, these political chicks are desperate for some red meat.” He tapped Kevin meaningfully on his sternum. “So you go be Yuri Zhivago.”

Kevin laughed, and McNulty shrugged and dragged the last out of his Marlboro. “You’ll have to listen to some political shit,” he gasped, “but so what? At least you don’t have to tell her you love her.”

And so, after hearing balalaika music in his head all afternoon, Kevin went. He can’t remember now what the meeting was about, except that it rapidly devolved into an argument about the number of women of color on the organizing committee. He vividly remembers the venue, though, a windowless, subterranean classroom in the Modern Languages Building — he can picture it down to the subliminal strobing of the fluorescents, the unswept candy wrappers in the corners, the useless fragments of chalk in the chalkboard tray. Christ, he can smell it even now, the dank air-conditioning of MLB, the years of floor polish and disinfectant. And he remembers Lynda introducing him to the boy who’d invited her, a rodent-faced little guy in a leather vest who looked more like Ratso Rizzo than Tom Courtenay, who limply shook Kevin’s hand and said to Lynda, with barely disguised anger, “I think it’s cool that you brought somebody.”

Most of all, though, Kevin remembers sitting in the back of the room with Lynda, the two of them slumped in classroom desks like a couple of bored sixteen-year-olds. Lynda had brought a pint of Jack Daniels in a little paper sack, and they passed it back and forth, sneaking swigs and stifling their laughter. Poor, luckless Ratso Rizzo would have murdered them with his gaze, but as luck would have it, he ended up as one of the chief combatants in the climactic contretemps, violently shaking his miniature forefinger at a plump black girl with cornrows, who waved her more substantial forefinger back at him and shouted, “Motherfucker, don’t you shake that finger at me!” At which point, Lynda grabbed Kevin by the wrist with her cool fingers and dragged him out of the room, where they ran doubled over with laughter down the hall. Ten minutes later, they were seated halfway up the steps of the grad library, looking over the Diag in the long midwestern twilight, the top of Burton Tower golden in the last of the day’s light, and they finished the Jack swig by swig, turn and turn about, getting a nice, mutual buzz on. Kevin sat on the step above her and Lynda sat between his thighs, drumming her fingers on his knees, the bottle on the step between her legs. He lightly pulled at the hair at the nape of her neck, and she tilted her head back and handed up the last of the whiskey, pursing her lips when she caught him enjoying the view down the front of her tank top.

“What are you looking at?” she said. And half an hour after that, in Lynda’s summer sublet, a steamy attic room at the top of a cooperative house on Jefferson Avenue, they were happily balling on her sketchy mattress — yes, balling, Kevin thought, that’s exactly the word — and he laughed out loud, right in the saddle as it were, thrusting away in that lovely, loose-hipped way the girls loved. The two of them slick as seals in the heat, the window wide open, their grunts and moans wafting into the treetops just under the eaves, eine kleine nachtmusik for an Ann Arbor summer evening.

“Why were you laughing?” she asked him afterward, pursing her lips at him again as they sprawled together, hot and panting and reeking of sweat and semen and pussy.

“I’m just really… happy!” Kevin laughed, just drunk enough to be telling the truth.

“Move,” he shouts now, rapping on the side of the van with his knuckles, filling it with a hollow rumble. The driver guns it into the street, wheels smoking against the pavement. Kevin hears a muffled, diminishing, “Fuck you, asshole!” from the driver, and feels, without actually seeing it, the guy’s middle finger thrust in his direction. But he doesn’t care, because right there, up ahead, silhouetted against the blazing Texas sky, lifting her hair away from the sweaty nape of her neck in a gesture he hasn’t seen in a quarter of a century, a gesture that makes his heart tumble like a gymnast, is Lynda herself, swaying round the corner out of sight, the ends of her duffel bounding slowly with every step.

Okay, not Lynda, actually, but close enough. He rounds the corner and finds another, funkier coffeehouse called Empyrean, with a hand-painted sign, purple letters across a starry sky between a grinning sun and a sultry moon. Through a side window he sees swaybacked sofas, blowsy easy chairs, a vintage floor lamp with a fringed shade. In the shade of an awning, he tiptoes between the empty tables of a patio — formerly a loading dock — and plays peekaboo behind the flyers taped in the front window, watching Joy Luck prop her duffel on end against a couch at the back of the shop. As Kevin pretends to read flyers for a poetry slam and a band called Titty Bingo, Joy Luck smiles at someone he can’t see and tugs at a zipper at the bulging end of the duffel. He watches her yank The Joy Luck Club free and with a backhand snap of the wrist sail it toward her unseen interlocutor. Then she gives the duffel a proprietorial little pat and disappears down a dim hallway into the back.

And before Kevin has a chance to think, he’s pulled the door open and entered. Empyrean is self-consciously contra-Starbucks, aggressively laid-back, an echoing old warehouse with a high ceiling and bare rafters, a scuffed hardwood floor in need of a sweeping, mismatched tables and chairs. Earnest and slightly amateurish paintings in black and red line the bare brick wall along one side, each with a little card announcing its asking price with calligraphic self-importance. Even the air-conditioning is laid-back, a dank, shadowy breeze instead of the industrial, fluorescent deep freeze of Starbucks. The counter is an old wooden bar top, and the boy behind it is slender to the point of gauntness, with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin and a high forehead. His narrow sideburns hang as low as the tips of his earlobes, his black T-shirt hangs from his collarbone, his jeans from the points of his pelvis. He’s puckering his lips and thumbing through The Joy Luck Club, as if trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. As Kevin crosses the creaking floor, the boy stows the paperback out of sight and lifts his eyebrows.

“Iced tea,” Kevin says. The boy carries Kevin’s glass in knuckly fingers; Kevin drops his change in the tip jar. The boy nods, then stoops to retrieve the paperback from under the counter. Sweating tea in hand, Kevin plucks a disheveled newspaper out of a rack and sinks into a worn corduroy sofa the color of oatmeal, just inside the door, facing toward the back. Knees higher than his lap, he grunts to set his tea on the scruffy little table before the sofa. Then he spreads the paper in front of his face, watching for Joy Luck over the top of the page.

The only other customer is a guy with a shaved head, who is slightly older than the barista, though not by much, and who slumps in his chair at another table, nodding slowly to himself as he peers into a laptop. His clothes seem to have just barely survived some apocalyptic blast — his short-sleeved shirt is faded blue plaid, and the knees of his jeans have simply vanished. He’s crossed an ankle over the other leg, exposing his entire knee and a long reach of white, hairless thigh. He extends his long arm to the laptop and gives the keyboard a sharp tap.

Just then Joy Luck reemerges from the hallway at the back, and Kevin ducks behind his paper. Without thinking, he’s picked up a section of the Wall Street Journal, and his leathery middle-aged pupils laboriously refocus on the close-ranked print, his heart racing at the sight of Joy Luck, at the memory of Lynda, at the mild thrill of his own shamelessness.

“So.” It’s Joy Luck’s voice, he recognizes it from the plane: flat, midwestern, uninflected. “Any more sentimental crap you want me to read?”

Maybe not midwestern, thinks Kevin. Midwesterners aren’t that tart, usually. Maybe she’s a Texan, maybe he got the accent all wrong. Kevin risks another peek. The gaunt barista is shrugging. The book is out of sight.

“Thought you’d like,” he says. “Sorry,” he adds, though he doesn’t really mean it.

“Whatever,” says Joy Luck, waving her fingers. It might almost be an apology. Then, “Where’s Ian?”

“Ian,” says the barista. “Oh.”

“Tall guy?” says Joy Luck. “Kind of funny-looking? Claims to be my boyfriend?” She’s standing at the counter now, hip canted, fingertips just touching the countertop.

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Didn’t he tell me what?” She’s doing it again, that Lynda thing she does, twisting her hair one-handed away from her neck, her long arm bent at the elbow in a perfect triangle, a taut triceps displayed.

“I so don’t want to be in the middle of this.” The barista backs away from his side of the counter, as if he expects her to reach across like Lee Marvin grabbing the barkeep by the lapels.

“He knew I was coming back today, right?” She looks like she might do it, too. She’s certainly got the upper-body strength for it. “He had the flight number and all?”

The barista glances away toward Kevin, who ducks behind his paper.

“He started at Gaia last week,” Kevin hears him say. “Didn’t he tell you?”

There’s a long, tense silence.

“Gaia?” she says at last. “Since when?”

“Since last week?”

“Is that where he is now?” For the first time she sounds not just angry, but hurt.

“Sweetie, I don’t know his schedule.”

The Wall Street Journal swims before Kevin. Joy Luck and the barista lower their voices, their exact words lost in the rafters, under the hum of the AC and the music on the sound system. Kevin’s surprised to realize that this self-consciously hip little coffeehouse is playing an oldies station — some ironic whim of the gaunt barista, no doubt — and the song that’s drowning out the conversation he’d like to hear is, of all things, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” Jesus Christ, when was the last time he heard that? He peeks around the left edge of the paper. Barista and Joy Luck are leaning toward each other over the counter. Barista’s eyes are wide in sympathy. He nods slowly as he speaks. Joy Luck’s kneading the edge of the counter with her fingers. She looks stricken.

Whatever she says next is drowned out by the rat-a-tat beat of the idiotic song, and Kevin thinks, these two weren’t even born yet when this song was on the charts. I’m the oldest guy in here. I’m the oldest guy for blocks in any direction.

Kevin turns the page and sees his tea, untouched, sweating on the table beyond his knee, but he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by reaching for it, doesn’t want to reveal his face. The sweat along his hairline is evaporating in the AC; the smell of his armpits rises from between the lapels of his jacket. Tucking his chin, he leans slowly to the right to peek around the paper.

“Can I leave this here?” Joy Luck has pushed away from the counter, but she sways on her long legs, almost as if she’s going to fall over. Almost as if someone has hit her. She gestures wanly to her duffel. There’s a tremor in her voice.

“Bring it around,” the gaunt barista says. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

With a thump like a body hitting the floorboards and a long, gritty scrape, Joy Luck drags her duffel one-handed around the far end of the counter. Kevin dips guiltily to the paper again.

“That’s fine, sweetie. It’ll be fine with me.”

Now she’s sailing down the length of the coffeehouse, and Kevin can hear the creak of the floorboards, the rhythmic slap of her sandals.

“You good?” the barista calls after her.

“No,” she says.

He peeks, not a good idea because she’s headed in his direction, but it doesn’t matter. He could be right in her path and she’d never see him. Her eyes glisten, her gaze is fixed straight ahead. Behind her the barista blows out a sigh. The other customer, the laptop guy with the shaved head, is watching her sidelong as his bony fingers tremble over his keyboard.

“Hey,” he says, with the ghost of a smile.

Joy Luck pauses, glances, then says, “Hey!” and breaks into a sad, heartfelt smile and pivots on the toe of her sandal. She coos at the laptop guy, who murmurs something back, and Kevin’s heart tumbles again in his chest. Joy Luck is smiling down at the guy, and he’s beaming shyly up at her as if he can’t believe his good luck. She’s holding his hand by the thumb and waggling his long arm playfully back and forth. Laptop grins sheepishly, baring his pink gums. Even at this distance, in the crepuscular cool of the café, Kevin can see the guy blush. Joy Luck’s eyes have brightened and she’s laughing — a musical laugh, a charming laugh, a laugh that makes Kevin’s balls tingle — and the laughter and the carefree grasp of the man’s hand pierce Kevin right through to his spine, because it’s a gesture that reminds him of another old flame — not Lynda this time, but the Philosopher’s Daughter, his great unrequited crush, the girl that got away. She had a laugh like that, mocking and affectionate all at once, and an effortlessly flirtatious manner. Kevin never made a bigger fool of himself over anyone than he did over her.

Across the room Joy Luck drops the guy’s hand, and the poor guy almost involuntarily reaches for her again. Then he catches himself, as spastic as Dr. Strangelove, and jerks his hand back over the sheen of his head, rubbing so hard he furrows the back of his scalp. That was the other side of the Philosopher’s Daughter, of course — jolt you awake like a nine-volt battery, then cut you off at the knees. Not to mix a metaphor or anything, thinks Kevin, but she could cut you dead in an instant, stick a shiv between your ribs, yank your heart out of your chest, and drop-kick it into the next county. Even after all these years, Kevin can feel the little blood pressure gauge in his head throb into the red zone. Half a moment more and he’ll be as red-faced as a cartoon character, veins bulging and steam shooting out of his ears.

“Do you want to know why I don’t think I could love you, Kevin?” said the Philosopher’s Daughter, in that voice at once sensible and pixieish.

“Not really,” said Kevin, and then she told him anyway.

“Curses, foiled again!” goes the singer on the radio, and Kevin’s another victim of the Red Baroness of Washtenaw County: he’s shrieking toward earth, his legs shot off at the knees, his guns jammed, his craft in flames and trailing a winding spiral of bitter black smoke. Many men died trying to end that spree, and he’s just another stencil on her fuselage. Mere moments to live, he should be making peace with the Almighty, but all he can see is her porcelain face and the cool, appraising light in her eye as she watches him bleed slowly to death.

“Shit,” Kevin says aloud, and too late he realizes he’s gripped the paper so hard that the section has doubled over as if in pain. I can’t believe, he almost says aloud, I can’t believe that I still let this get to me after twenty-five years. It’s not like he still loves her — he’s seen her a couple, three times since then, he even went to her wedding with no ill effect — but he still experiences that one moment, when she told him what she told him, as if it happened ten minutes ago. Love fades, but rage and humiliation endure forever.

And so it’s now, while Kevin’s glowering like a serial killer, that Joy Luck turns away from the laptop guy with a final, flirty wag of her fingertips, and walks straight toward him. Kevin’s right in her eye line, and as his eyes refocus from the memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter’s cold victory to the midmorning twilight of Empyrean, he finds himself looking straight at Joy Luck. Her eyes were fixed and glistening before, now they’re hard. She’s angry again, and Kevin’s breath catches in his throat, his heart thumps like an animal trying to burst out of his chest. She’s knows who I am! He cannot look away — but Joy Luck does. Her glare glides right over him as she sails past his sofa and pushes out the door. A little gust of warmth from the hot morning outside brushes Kevin’s knees.

Kevin sags into the cushions, relieved, but also disappointed. She doesn’t recognize me, he thinks. She sat next to me for three hours on the plane, six inches apart for three hours, and she doesn’t fucking recognize me. I’m wearing my magic ring of middle-aged invisibility, a dog-faced old burgher like Bilbo Baggins, only taller.

He starts to laugh, and the two other men in Empyrean look up from behind the counter and a dimly glowing laptop screen. Kevin discovers that he’s standing, clutching the crumpled newspaper in one hand. The laptop guy sighs (over what, Kevin wonders, over whom?) and raps at his keyboard. The gaunt barista, The Joy Luck Club in his hands once again, watches Kevin with professional wariness. His eyes slide to the untouched glass of tea and back to Kevin. Kevin forces a smile and drops the paper on the couch behind him.

“Bad news,” he says. The barista says nothing, doesn’t even nod, just watches, and Kevin slides around the coffee table and pushes out the door, after Joy Luck.

Walking into the heat again is like wading fully clothed into warm water, and the air itself drags Kevin to a halt just beyond the shadow of Empyrean’s awning. Across the empty street the low old buildings have been divvied up into trendy bars and restaurants, nighttime facades of dark brick and tinted glass like the bars along Liberty and Washington in Ann Arbor, only here, on a Texas morning, they have a hungover squint against the unblinking sunlight. The street is empty. Where’s Joy Luck?

There she is! Empyrean’s patio, the old loading dock, pushes out into the intersection like a prow, and he can see the top of her head as she descends the steps and pauses for the wall of oncoming traffic to pass. He sidles between the little round tables, wondering what he’ll do if he gets to the corner before she crosses. How can she not recognize him from the plane? And how can she not wonder what the hell he’s doing right next to her on an Austin street corner, radiating longing and strenuously acting like he doesn’t recognize her?

But then she crosses the street against the light, not slinking now, but marching, because she’s out for blood. At the corner Kevin waits for another shoal of cars, their tires making a hollow rumble against the pavement. Up ahead Joy Luck marches past a bar, the Ginger Man, and the little green apple in the small of her back winks at him over the martial but still sensual switch of her jeans. I wouldn’t want to be Ian right now, Kevin thinks. Ian’s in for it, Ian has no idea what’s coming.

Kevin keeps his distance, passing the Ginger Man and another bar, The Fox and Hound. What’s up with this, two English pubs on the same block — these royal thrones of kings, these sceptered isles, these earths of majesty, desiccating in the unforgiving Texas heat. Joy Luck and Kevin, girl and man, are the only pedestrians in sight. From the blank, tinted gaze of the square windows of the office building across the street, is some bored middle manager watching her with the same longing Kevin is? And is he watching Kevin following her? Give it up, bud, says Mr. Middle Manager, you haven’t got a prayer. Or is he the Noel Coward of central Texas, watching in fey bemusement as Kevin — pale, sweating, overdressed — follows the silken-skinned Oriental in a fever of lust and longing past this corner of a foreign land that is forever England. A fox and a hound, indeed, dear boy, how wonderfully droll! Kevin’s dad used to sing Noel Coward in the car, to the mutual embarrassment of Kevin and his sister: Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday, out in the noonday, out in the noonday sun.

But if he stops now, he’ll never know how Joy Luck does that, how she manages to embody not one, but two old flames from Kevin’s Summer of Love, the summer he fell harder for a woman than he ever had before, and the summer he had the most wanton and least guilty sex of his life — but not with the same woman. And Joy Luck reminds him vividly and unmistakably of both. Is she some kind of succubus? Or is it incubus?

At the next corner, cars rushing past her heels, she crosses against the light again into a little park. Keeping well back, Kevin trots after her past a tall, verdigris green sculpture, two elongated, abstract, but sensual figures, one broad in the shoulders, the other broad in the hips, who look like they’re just about to kiss. Succubus, Kevin suddenly concludes, that’s the female version, though he’s not sure why he thinks so. Perhaps it’s because it sounds like “suck.” God, laughs Kevin, am I still that much of an adolescent? She said “suck,” heh heh heh heh. He’s got Stella to thank, he supposes, trudging past the canoodling sculptures. Stella’s epic fellation on the first evening of their acquaintance, the one that emptied his brain of all common sense, is still a high point of their relationship. Beth never was particularly enthusiastic or skillful at going down—“Teeth,” he always had to warn her — and she did it only when she was really excited for some reason, nodding furiously over his cock with her eyes squeezed shut. Stella, God bless her, tickles and teases and takes her time, she knows tricks as if she’s actually thought about it. And she keeps her eyes open, watching him wide-eyed over his heaving rib cage. When he reciprocates — a specialty of his, another American practice McNulty told him that the girls all love — he keeps his own eyes shut, nose buried in wiry pubic hair, glancing up only occasionally past her flattened breasts at the straining muscles in her throat. Beth always seemed distracted when he went down on her, as if her own pleasure irritated her somehow, though she always climaxed convincingly enough. There’s a lot of theater in Stella’s ecstasy, though: she arches her back, she claws the sheets, she thrashes her head from side to side. Her voice cracks as she calls his name; a blue vein pounds in her neck. Kevin’s never entirely convinced he’s actually gotten her off, her response is too self-consciously intense, too pornographically hysterical. God knows, though, she takes him in gratefully afterward, when, in another one of his signature moves, he launches himself up between her legs and enters her in one smooth thrust, without looking or guiding himself with his hand. At that moment Beth always turned her face away with a grimace and swiped his lips with the palm of her hand, an exasperated mother wiping her messy brat. But Stella, praise Jesus, mashes her mouth against his and sucks her own juices greedily off his lips.

Now Lynda, Kevin recalls, watching Joy Luck’s angry strut at the far corner of the park — the legendary Lynda, the Lynda of song and story, Lynda à la plage, etc., etc. — Lynda was good at it, too, but she never took him all the way, not once in three months. She’d lower her lips to his cock, gathering her hair one-handed away from her face, baring her lovely throat, and she’d dip, once, twice, three times, until he was straight and hard and taut, and then she’d pull away and give him a filthy grin. “Oh, God, don’t stop,” Kevin moaned, his cock chilled by her saliva, but she swung her long, freckled thigh over him and slid slickly onto him, doubling over him with her hair pooling coolly on his chest, nuzzling him and laughing in his ear.

Jesus, Kevin thinks, if Joy Luck knew what I’m thinking back here, she’d scream bloody murder, or call a cop, or — more likely, he thinks, focusing on the glide of her back muscles beneath her flawless skin — she’d go all Michelle Yeoh on his melancholy middle-aged ass, leaping straight up into the air and slapping the side of his face in slow motion with the hot sole of her sandal, quivering his flesh like Jell-O, spinning his head a spine-splintering 180 degrees.

Kevin stops to peel off his jacket as if readying himself for single combat. The street ahead is a garden of new condo towers, some completed, some still under construction with tall T square cranes affixed to their sides, like the stalks from which they grew. One finished tower is wide and flat like the monolith in 2001, another rises in the same proportions as a Zippo lighter, the farthest one, still skeletal on top, sheathed halfway up in green panels that throw the sun back in Kevin’s eyes, is tall and narrow like a Pez dispenser without the head. He fishes inside his jacket for his sunglasses and looks back toward downtown Austin’s foreshortened skyline, like a three-quarters-scale Manhattan in some imperial Las Vegas casino. What looked like a great big urban canyon when he was coming up it in the cab is now, he realizes, just an arroyo. He sees the sleek, narrow, ice-blue tower, Barad-dûr, much taller than all the other buildings, too tall, really, for this theme-park skyline. It’s only three or four blocks away, its glassy spires bleached a little paler in the sun. He puts on his sunglasses and it dims a little more.

Then something moves behind the translucent panes of the spires, something dark and quick and massive, and Kevin is chilled all over. The hell is that? he wonders, his pulse racing. The hand holding his jacket seizes up, and a wave passes down the coat like a shiver. Something sleek is issuing now from between the spires, as if the tower really is the lair of Sauron, the Dark Lord. It’s a snake… it’s a dragon… holy shit, it’s a winged Nazgûl! Kevin’s heart thumps in his chest, and even behind the amber tint of his glasses the glare of sunlight off the spires is magnified into an enormous, burning eye…

No, it’s a jet, coming out from behind the tower, climbing from Austin’s airport over the city so steeply and slowly it looks as if it’s winching itself into the sky. Kevin breathes again and folds his jacket over his elbow as he rolls his shirt cuffs back. The aircraft is gray with a long, white underbelly, its wings swept back, its long throat bared, a migrating goose straining for altitude. And though Kevin’s pulse has slowed, the still surprising and indelible conjunction of two formerly unrelated compound nouns — airplane, skyscraper — makes his stomach drop. What’s worse is that he can’t even hear the jet yet, and its silence as it crawls glittering against the bleached sky makes the sight even creepier. And he can’t help thinking again of shoulder-fired missiles; from where he’s standing at the center of the park he could bring down this plane. Or maybe it’ll be brought down by Another Kevin, sweatily mixing liquid explosives in the lavatory and urgently murmuring “Allahu akbar” over and over again. Stinger or no Stinger, jihadist or no jihadist, the plane looks as if it’s barely going to make it, and Kevin expects it any moment to stall and slide sickeningly backward, then tumble wing over wing straight down into the city below, hitting the earth with an echoing boom and a roiling cloud of black smoke.

Then at last he hears the hollow, throbbing roar of the jet, trailing like a banner just behind the plane. Wow, thinks Kevin, his pulse still racing a little. It’s weird how much the climbing jet has freaked him out, and he only saw the two towers fall on television like most people. What if he’d actually been there? What if he’d actually seen the planes hit the towers, seen the falling bodies, watched the towers flower hideously into dust, run for his life through the midmorning darkness, breathed the choking air, felt the acrid sting of burning plastic and jet fuel and God knows what else at the back of his sinuses? All he’d seen — sheer repetition has graven the image permanently into his lizard brain — was a toy plane colliding with a scale model of a skyscraper and a little silent orange bloom against the blue September sky. It looked like a special effect and a mediocre one at that — a blurry, trembling, telephoto image with none of the digital polish and Dolby rumble of an A-list production. If something he’d seen on TV could take him by the throat like that years later, imagine if he’d actually been there.

He turns, his jacket still draped over his arm. The chill is fading, the heat folds around him again. He really should go back, sit in goddamn Starbucks for three hours, but it’s too late, he’s already walking, damp all over with sweat, his shirt stuck to his spine. The broiling sky opens high and wide before him. By the time he gets to the curb — the corner of Fifth and San Antonio, says the street sign — Joy Luck is halfway up San Antonio, turning left on Sixth Street, heading west, so Kevin turns left on Fifth, walking parallel to her on a covered walkway underneath one of the half-built condo towers. His feet thump on the flooring, and through the plywood overhead he can hear the ricocheting ring of mallets, the insistent beeping of a vehicle backing up, some guy yelling in Spanish. The traffic rushes up Fifth Street toward him, springing from light to light in quantum bursts, enormous, candy-colored trucks with bulbous curves, spotlessly clean, piloted by pink-cheeked, freshly barbered young evangelicals in crisp shirts talking on cell phones.

Across the stream of traffic, between buildings and up side streets, Kevin watches Joy Luck on Sixth Street, but at the next cross street he’s lost her, and he dithers for a moment, not sure whether to go forward or back. His heart beginning to race, he walks the next block more quickly. Under a big condo block bristling with balconies, he crosses Fifth, trotting north past the snouts of a row of SUVs. He’s already halfway across before he realizes that the traffic was already moving, but he doesn’t stop, and four lanes of SUVs lurch forward on their toes as he wards them off with his palm. He hardly notices, because Joy Luck should be crossing the intersection ahead of him, but he still can’t see her, and he’s thinking she’s gotten away, he’s lost her, but suddenly, when he’s ten paces from the corner, she appears from behind the building and stops for the light. Kevin’s heart soars, but his relief is cut short by the fact that in another three seconds he’ll be right next to her on the curb. Kevin pivots on the toe of his shoe, grinding the fat black tread into the hot pavement, slapping his trouser pockets like he’s forgotten his keys or something, swinging the jacket off his shoulder and rummaging in every pocket, lifting his eyes to the sky like he’s concentrating. Doesn’t matter, though, he’s already caught, busted, blown; he expects a tap on the shoulder any moment now, or even something way less demure, way more Michelle Yeoh, an iron grip spinning him around, grinding another millimeter of shoe sole into the pavement, and an angry, beautiful young woman nose to nose with him, her eyes blazing, demanding to know, “Why are you following me? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

When he finally peeks over his shoulder, her swaying backside is disappearing behind the liquor store across the street, and he sags with relief. At the corner, he sits on a ledge outside a bar called Molotov to catch his breath and let her get ahead of him. In the shade for the first time since he left Empyrean, he clutches his limp jacket to his chest with both arms, watching Joy Luck stride up Sixth toward a massive redbrick building like a fortress. He peers through the tinted window into Molotov, taking off his sunglasses and shading his eyes against the warm glass. The place is empty at this hour: an unpainted concrete floor; a long, featureless curve of space-age banquette; a pair of thirty-year-old, piss-yellow La-Z-Boys. There’s a mock socialist realist painting along the back wall, an idiotically smiling rocket scientist holding up an ICBM like it was a banana. Six months from now — if he’s offered the job and he takes it — he could be on the other side of this window listening to music he doesn’t recognize, chatting up women much too young for him, and paying extortionate prices for some cocktail they’d seen on The Hills or whatever they’re watching now. Not like his days at the Central Café back in Ann Arbor, when just after closing he and the rest of the immortally young waitstaff used to do a line each right off the prep table — hello, Mr. Health Inspector! — and then swagger en masse to the Rubiyat, where they would do more blow in the bathroom and dance to “It’s Raining Men” or “Atomic Dog” until three or four in the morning, and where one memorable dawn — a dawn he has never spoken of to another living soul and never will, a dawn that both mortifies and titillates him until this very moment — he woke up in Ypsilanti in the bed of a man he didn’t recognize and never saw again, and walked all the way up Washtenaw back to Ann Arbor in the freezing rain even before the buses were running, with a crippling headache and a taste in his mouth that he hoped never to identify. Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay!

Or — as he turned away from the gloom of Molotov’s window — there were his less cringe-worthy Big Star days, when he had an arrangement with the bouncer of Second Chance across the street — he gave Danny advance copies of reggae records and Danny comped him into shows — and he saw the Ramones for free. Those were the days when he took the Philosopher’s Daughter to see R.E.M. not once, but twice — once at the Blind Pig and again at Joe’s Star Lounge — and she spurned his advances both times. Once because he wasn’t tender enough, and the other because he wasn’t sufficiently passionate. Stop! he nearly says aloud, and reminds himself that most nights at the Pig or Joe’s, he could buy a girl three or four beers in a plastic cup and at least count on making out with her later on, sometimes even right outside the club in the narrow back seat of his yellow Pinto. “A Pinto?” she’d say, half-drunk. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll, like, blow up?” And Kevin, tugging at the strap of her tank top and clumsily trying to find her nipple with the tip of his tongue, would pause to say, “Kinda adds to the thrill, doesn’t it?”

But the thing is, standing here now in the heat, twenty-five years later and fifteen hundred miles from Michigan, he knows he couldn’t say a word about any of this to any of the girls he’d meet in a lounge like Molotov; they wouldn’t give a shit that he’d seen the Police at Bookie’s on their first American tour. Or that he once drunkenly yelled, “I wanna have your child!” to Patti Smith in Second Chance and that Patti gave him the finger. Or that once, in the Fleetwood Diner at two in the morning, he sat next to James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop — a tiny little guy in eyeliner, Ypsilanti’s favorite son — and that Iggy accepted a steak fry from Kevin’s plate. Hell, apart from their first conversation vis-à-vis the Rolling Stones and the Black Crowes, he couldn’t even have this conversation with Stella, even though she isn’t quite as young as she said she was. The thing is, Kevin thinks, still sitting in the shadow of the lounge’s awning, Stella would like Molotov, just like she likes watching reruns of Sex and the City over and over again. They usually watch from his bed, Stella clinging to him like a limpet, tapping his chest with her red nails, asking him, what does he think of the shoes Carrie’s wearing? Or does he ever wonder if Miranda is too much of a bitch? Or is Samantha empowered, or just a slut? She asks him like it matters what he thinks, but then shushes him when he tries to answer. So he has no doubt she’d love this pretentious little lounge in Austin: she’d want to live in a hideously expensive condominium in one of the new blocks, right up at the top, and she’d doll herself up every night and come down here and drink too much and laugh too loud, her eyes swimming in Absolut, and she’d wriggle her delightful ass in that awful La-Z-Boy like a happy little girl in the teacup ride at Disneyland, because to her a La-Z-Boy is funny, wonderfully retro, not a stomach-churning reminder (as it is to Kevin) of the suburban anomie of the hideous paneled basements of his youth. That’s what a twenty-year difference in age (okay, fifteen, if we’re going by Stella’s driver’s license) does to a relationship: artifacts that make Kevin suicidally despondent — a recliner, his mother’s cocktail glasses, his father’s golf trophies, his sister’s Partridge Family 45s — are exotic objets d’art to Stella, like African masks or Indonesian batik. Kevin’s depressing Ice Storm boyhood is Stella’s theme park.

He sighs. In the bright sunlight ahead, Joy Luck has crossed a bridge and started up a hill toward the redbrick fortress. She’s dwindled in the sunlight from a flesh-and-blood girl, with muscles gliding beneath her skin, her apple tattoo winking over her jeans, to an incorporeal, impressionist squiggle that means Girl, a couple of charcoal lines narrow in the middle and wide at the hips. He stands and steps out into the sunlight again and starts after her. Stella, Stella, Stella, he’s thinking, how’d that happen? She’s even met his mother, once, through no fault of Kevin’s, the day his mother asked him and his sister to come sort through the junk in the basement in Royal Oak. At last she was selling the old house and moving into a condo—“If you want any of this stuff,” she warned him over the phone, “it’s speak now or forever hold your peace”—and Stella invited herself along, as pert as Sarah Jessica herself in white tennis shorts and a ball cap with her bushy pony tail tugged through the back. She and Mom yakked it up in the kitchen, drinking highballs at one on a Saturday afternoon while Kevin and Kathleen sweated and sneezed in the basement, going through mold-spotted cardboard boxes full of nameless crap that Kevin, honest to God, had hoped never to see again.

“Ohmigod!” he heard Stella cry as he stumbled up out of the basement. “You’re not getting rid of this, are you?” Through the archway he saw Mom in the living room, swinging her leg in the rocking chair, dangling her second or third highball from her bent wrist. He got himself a glass of water at the kitchen sink, then came in and saw Stella bent over the back of the sofa, running her palms sensuously over the nubbly fabric. It used to be white, but now it was dirty white like an old dog, kind of gray, really, with cigarette burns and other unidentifiable stains that no combination of flipping the cushions could disguise.

“If you want to haul it out of here, hon,” Kevin’s mother said, “it’s all yours.”

Stella characteristically overdid her gratitude, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes at Mom. “No way,” she said, stamping her foot. “You are not.”

Mom shrugged and swiveled the tall glass up to her lips. Even backlit, with the afternoon light pouring in the picture window behind her, Kevin could see the lipstick print on the glass. “Take it,” she said.

Stella pivoted to Kevin and theatrically batted her eyes, a little girl who wants a pony. But before she actually said a word, Kevin slumped in the archway — God, he hated that fucking couch — and said, “Where you gonna put it?”

Not “Where are we going to put it?” He was careful never to say “we” with Stella, not like Stella ever noticed. But Mom did.

“Well.” Stella actually shifted her hip and cupped her elbow and put a forefinger to her cheek — just like Jack Benny, though she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who Jack Benny was. “We could put it in my place,” she said, watching him, “until you get rid of that awful futon, slash sofa, slash whatever in your living room.”

Kevin’s mom gave him a look, and they each drank from their respective glasses, like a salute.

A little later, as Stella was squealing with delight over God knows what in the basement with Kathleen, Kevin’s mother asked him, “So how old is this one.” Very flat, more a statement than a question.

Kevin hesitated, because he didn’t know what Stella had told her. “Early thirties?” he said, like he wasn’t sure himself. He knew better than to try to lie to his mother. “Never kid a kidder” was her motto.

“How do you do it?” she said.

“Do what?” This was an old routine, Mom sounding more like an ex-wife than his mother.

“You don’t make that much money,” she said. “You’re not the best-looking guy in the world.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Well, you’re not bad,” she said. “For your age.”

Kevin drained his water and set the glass on an end table, pointedly missing the coaster.

“And how did you meet her?”

“I told you, Mom.”

“Tell me again.”

Kevin crossed his arms. “She’s my tenant.”

“Your tenant! You mean, she pays rent?”

“That’s what a tenant does, Mom.”

“What do you charge her?”

Now she’s just messing with me, Kevin thought. “She’s on commission, Mom. She makes more money than I do.” He wasn’t actually sure about that, but it sounded good, and it made Mom pause for a moment.

“So she’s in sales.”

“Yup. She’s a saleswoman.”

“What’s she sell?”

“Books,” he said. “Textbooks.”

“Hm.” Mom held her glass up to the light and regarded the level. He knew what she was thinking. She doesn’t seem like a reader to me. Never kid a kidder, bub. But instead, turning the glass in the light, admiring the stream of bubbles and the swirl of Dewar’s amidst the melting ice cubes, she said, “Now that Beth, she was a neat lady.”

“A little louder, Mom, I don’t think Stella heard you.”

“I’m just saying,” his mother said. “You shouldn’t have let that one go so easily.”

“She let me go, Mom, remember? She moved out.”

Things were about to get uglier when they were interrupted — rescued, really — by Stella herself, thumping quickly up the basement stairs. She had erupted into the kitchen beaming like a kid at Christmas, bearing in both hands his father’s old ice bucket, the silvery round one with the embossed penguins on it.

“Look at this!” she’d cried. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

Joy Luck is nearly at the redbrick fortress. Kevin crosses a bridge over a creek bed of bleached stones and a stagnant trickle of water, unwholesomely green, the banks overgrown with untrimmed bushes and trees and clotted with weeds full of sun-bleached trash. The walls of the fortress up ahead turn out not to be redbrick at all, but some sort of reddish panels. The sun stings the back of Kevin’s neck; his shortening shadow glides ahead of him up the sidewalk. Joy Luck has crossed a little street that runs between a vacant lot and the building, and she’s passing under the lee of the building itself, which rises seven stories above Sixth Street. But by the time Kevin gets to the corner, Joy Luck has vanished. Kevin stops dead in his wilted shirt and hot, heavy shoes, dangling his limp suit coat over his shoulder. She’s vanished into thin air, squirted from the universe (as McNulty used to say) like a watermelon seed. He could swear he feels the thick soles of his shoes melting into the pavement, and he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s a mere puddle himself, running back down into the dry creek bed behind him. He turns, looking wildly around him, but he’s the only pedestrian in sight. He looks up at the big block of building looming over him, where a sign says GAIA MARKET, and it slowly dawns on him where Joy Luck is going. Up ahead an SUV turns left off Sixth and disappears into the building itself, and Kevin breaks into a run despite the heat. A moment later, pouring sweat, a little light-headed, he’s in the echoing, exhaust-scented parking garage under Gaia Market, and there she is again, crossing the garage toward a bank of sliding doors.

Of course there was going to be a Gaia Market here. Hadn’t Kevin heard that Austin was just like Ann Arbor, only bigger, hipper, hotter? His eyes adjust to the shadowless fluorescent light of the garage, and his ears to the starship hum of ventilators and the echoing percussion of car doors. Kevin weaves between Beemers and Mercedes and high-end SUVs, zigzagging toward the sliding doors where Joy Luck is just now slipping through. In Ann Arbor every car from junker to luxury auto is marked by the stigmata of a Michigan winter — patches of rust, a rime of road salt — but here even a lowly Corolla has a gleaming finish and tinted windows, like a B-list actress with perfect skin and impenetrable sunglasses. Just as in the Gaia lot in Ann Arbor, many of the vehicles display Obama bumper stickers.

Just as Kevin gets to the glass doors, they slide shut, breathing a puff of cool air into his sweating face. Even though he craves the arctic AC, even though he sees Joy Luck gliding up the escalator within, even though she’s doing the thing with her hair again that pierces his heart like a blade, he hesitates. She’s nearly at the top of the escalator, her head rising between the twin ramparts of a massive floor display of red wine. But Kevin stands just out of range of the photocell, warded off like a vampire by a sign on the door that commands

Love

Where You Shop

Or what? thinks Kevin. His stomach clenches. The peevish professional in him wants to put a period at the end of that sentence, but his inner suburbanite — the guy who goes to Gaia Market in Ann Arbor only when his girlfriend drags him there, the defensively proud patron of real grocery stores like Kroger and the late, great Farmer Jack’s — that guy immediately resents the poster’s imperative voice, its implicit superiority, its barely disguised snob appeal. You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice — no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers — and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Meijer’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized packages of chicken, five-pound bags of frozen french fries, big plastic tubs of chunky peanut butter. Does your lumbering prole, stuffed into jeans and a gaudy sports jacket like a sausage in its casing, love where he shops? Because if you don’t love where you shop, then where you’re shopping isn’t good enough. In fact, if loving where you shop doesn’t matter to you, then maybe you shouldn’t shop here. That’s right, the sign’s telling Kevin, I’m talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You’d Be Happier at Sam’s Club. It’s the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year-old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Washtenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discount carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It’s the voice that’s telling him that he’s an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.

But it’s not just the snobbery that gets to him. He grew up with snobbery, he spent his teens hanging out at Somerset Mall and making time with rich, smart-mouthed Jewish girls from Franklin or Huntington Woods, or even richer Kingswood School girls, spooky-intense WASP princesses from Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe, and by age sixteen he was used to being cut dead for his store-brand jeans or his haircut or his shitty Pinto. Hell, he wasn’t just used to it — he wore their condescension like a badge, he thought it was funny. (And it’s even funnier in retrospect, because in the years since, he has gone to work in academia, which means that on a daily basis he’s condescended to by experts.) It’s just that once upon a time, Ann Arbor was different, Ann Arbor was above all that suburban class-warfare bullshit. Okay, maybe it never was, not really, maybe it’s the soft-focus blur of mid-life nostalgia, maybe he’s been soaking for too long in Ann Arbor’s marinade of pretension and infinite self-regard — but he remembers his college days and a few years after as a time of great leveling, when even the mouthy daughters of Southfield furriers and the guilty-rich daughters of GM executives found the lanky son of a middle manager from Royal Oak exotic; when everybody he knew voted for the Rainbow People’s Party candidate for mayor, a sexy manager from Borders; when the owner of Big Star Records used to hold parties in the basement of his house in Burns Park and supply the weed himself; when the term “politically correct” was a joke that lefties told on themselves. Sure we were smug, thinks Kevin, sure we were superior, but I was part of something then, I belonged in Ann Arbor in a way that I never belonged at Somerset Mall or in Bloomfield Hills or even Royal Oak for that matter. I was one of them.

Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor’s righteousness could be a pain in the ass. Kevin can still hear the humorless whine of some grim little rich girl whose painter’s pants he tried to get into one summer evening, the painter’s pants that she wore just tight enough to make her unattainable ass perfectly round. They were toking up on the battered couch on the porch of her communal house on Greenwood Street, and she told him that the personal is political, that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, that she’s sure he’s a nice guy and all, but has he read Shulamith Firestone on love? (He had, and it depressed him for a month, not because he believed a word of it, but because every girl he had a crush on did.) And besides, she continued, sadistically pressing herself closer to him on the ancient sofa, she was thinking maybe it was time for her take a woman for a lover.

“I’m just not that into penetration anymore,” she said, calibrating to the fucking millimeter exactly what effect that kind of talk has on a guy. But Kevin knew the drill, he knew the speech by heart by now, so he said, “I hear you. That’s cool.” And they each took another hit off the joint, thigh to thigh on the swaybacked couch during the long midwestern twilight, the girl weighing her lust against her ideological purity, and Kevin wondering — as the weed tugged at his dick with little silk strings — what would happen if he put his hand on her breast.

Without realizing it, he’s already floated through the doors of the Gaia Market in Austin as if on a little cannabis cloud, as if he’s tapped into some long dormant reserve of THC stored deep in his body fat. Frosty air smelling of produce curls around him like a big mitt, reeling him in, chilling the sweat all over his body, and he glides past three more iterations of the sign: LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP. The repetition is intended to plant the slogan deep in his medulla oblongata, making it instinctive like fear or hunger, while at the same time rendering it functionally meaningless to his conscious mind, like saying “cat” over and over again. That’s exactly what bothers him the most, in fact, and he wants to dig his heels in, but his feet aren’t even touching the ground, he’s floating up the escalator now under the big posterboard banners that proclaim Gaia’s brand identity with Newspeak directness: ORGANIC, PURE FOOD, QUALITY, WELLNESS. At the top Joy Luck is talking to one of Gaia’s whole-food jihadists, an überfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and a wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap. Maybe it’s Ian, about to have his ass handed to him, and Kevin thinks, you tell him, sister, because when you’re done, I want a piece of him, too. Kevin wants to dig his fingers into that smug green T-shirt and rock that grinning, gentle, clueless boy back on his heels and tell him what the problem is with Gaia: that they’ve taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love — the food, the politics, and the attitude — and they’ve packaged it, art-directed it, and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It’s just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it’s worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren’t like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia’s victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here’s this national, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-opers held dear and it’s successfully wooing away the co-op’s clientele on the same principle as Office Max or Home Depot. And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what’s happening to them: it’s the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell — first time as farce, second time as tragedy — as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.

Whoa, thinks Kevin, who am I kidding? Who the hell do I think I am? Let’s be honest here, he reminds himself, I was just another suburban counterculture dilettante. Doing blow at the Rubiyat and going to nuclear freeze rallies to meet girls didn’t exactly make him Walter Benjamin. Because it’s not like he was ever actually a member of the Food Co-op, basically he only ever shopped there to get close to the girl in the painter’s pants, who stood out mainly by virtue of being surrounded by squat lesbians in overalls. With a knowing, karmic nudge, Gaia’s escalator deposits him abruptly at the top and he nearly stumbles to his knees. Luckily Joy Luck’s looking the other way, as she and the Gaian gesture in the same direction. Kevin turns his back and shrugs on his jacket again, glancing back at them. So this isn’t Ian, she obviously doesn’t know the guy, she’s just asking for directions. Kevin hangs back a bit, pretending to read the label of a bottle of wine as he watches Joy Luck stride away in the mellow light up the wide aisle behind the checkout lanes, past giant stacks of organic popcorn and pesticide-free apple juice and jars of chipotle ketchup.

“Are you a fan of Chilean wine?”

“Sorry?”

“That’s a really nice Merlot.” It’s the kid Joy Luck was just talking to. “From Curicó province?”

But Kevin’s not even looking at the bottle in his hands, but gazing dumbstruck across the vast interior of Gaia Market, from the high ceiling like a forest canopy where every conduit and AC duct is painted the same sylvan green, to the woody labyrinth of custom shelving below. In between are bright constellations of track lights as far as he can see, which makes the store look like a lavish modernist set for the fairy wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a faux forest full of mysterious, twinkling lights, and beautiful and slightly alien creatures. (Almost an English major, was Kevin.) And music — not pan pipes, exactly, but something light and airy and subtly engineered to appeal to the better instincts of the boomer clientele. It’s the high, elven voice of Joni Mitchell, the Canadian Galadriel, singing in harmony with herself, “Hellllp me, I think I’m falling… in love with you…”

“It’s got subtle highlights of black pepper and sour cherries and beeswax,” says the Gaian, clasping his hands before him like a New Age sommelier. “It has a good attack with a roundish body, and a hint of tannin.”

Kevin rolls his eyes: this is why he’d rather shop at Wal-Mart, where none of the harried minimum wagers is likely to treat him like a rude mechanical, where the only question they ever ask him is “Paper or plastic?”

“Thanks anyway,” he says, and replaces the bottle with a glassy clank. The boy shrugs, and Kevin edges past him, deeper into the magic forest, after Joy Luck. He sees her swaying up the aisle, which isn’t as crowded as it would be on a Friday evening or a Sunday afternoon. One thing you have to say about Gaia is just how good-looking its clientele is. Even in Ann Arbor, in the gloomiest months of winter, when everybody’s swaddled in bulky parkas and padded boots and ugly woolen caps, the women and men Kevin sees at Gaia are clearly an order of magnitude more attractive than the wide loads he walks behind at Kroger. And here in sultry Austin, where everybody dresses year round like they’re at the gym, Kevin passes a svelte young woman with a midriff like a gymnast; a guy his own age with the bulging calves of a bicycle racer; and a couple of fantastically fit women, anywhere from thirty-five to fifty, in capri pants and tank tops, whose upper arms are better defined than Kevin’s — and Kevin works out twice a week with the free weights at CCRB. With a guilty pang he realizes that Stella would love it here. She drags him to Gaia once a week at least, dressing for the occasion like he’s taking her to a restaurant. At Kroger she wears sweatpants and wraparound sunglasses like a movie star hoping to go unrecognized, but to Gaia she wears her work blouse and skirt, her earrings, her heels. Stella loves where she shops. When he launches involuntarily into his I Hate Gaia rant, she rolls her eyes like an impatient teenager.

“Yadda yadda yadda,” she says, waggling her fingers. “Who cares, if everything here is so yummy?”

But it’s not just Gaia, she’d love Austin, too. She’d settle into the subtropical heat like a sauna, she’d shed her Midwestern pelt and show off her own firm midriff and muscular calves, she’d drag him every Friday to happy hour at Molotov. She’d be in Gaia two or three times a week asking for samples from every flirty young Gaian at every specialty counter. Suddenly Kevin’s wondering if he’d even be able to hang onto Stella in a town like this, full of fit, yummy guys her own age or younger who make ten times more money than he does, who drive the high-performance automobiles in the garage below, and who could chat knowledgeably for hours on end about Chilean fucking wine. Of course, if he gets the job he’s interviewing for today, he’s planning on leaving Stella. Though he hasn’t said it out loud to a soul, hasn’t even formulated it in so many words in the privacy of his own head, leaving Stella is half the reason he wants to move from Ann Arbor. But still, the frisson of guilt he feels sparks into a little flare of righteous anger, that she would dare follow him here, even if only in his imagination, and then dump him for a younger, richer, fitter guy! The nerve! That bitch! No way that’s happening to me twice, Kevin thinks, and just for an instant, the mellow sylvan light of Gaia turns a little red at the edges. It doesn’t help, of course, that the last time he saw Beth was in the Gaia in Ann Arbor, when he was with Stella.

It was the only time Stella and Beth have ever met — after work one frigid February evening. Gaia’s lot was nearly full, and everything glittered under the halogen lights: the luxury cars and SUVs where they weren’t streaked with slush; the gouts of exhaust from salt-rimed tailpipes; the heaps of plowed snow; the twinkling motes of new flakes; the air itself. Even their streamers of breath glittered as Kevin and Stella crunched across ridges of refrozen slush. They held hands like schoolkids, her trim leather glove in his vast Gore-Tex mitten. Stella’s woolen cap was jammed like a helmet over her hair, and Kevin breathed from within the hood of his parka, the opening cinched so tight that Stella said he looked like Kenny from South Park. But inside the hood Kevin felt like Darth Vader, seeing only through the narrow aperture of his helmet, hearing only the rhythmic rasp of his own breath. On the sidewalk in front of the store the crunch of their steps became the Styrofoam squeak of packed snow, and inside the Gaia airlock they performed the Michigan clog dance, stamping the snow off their boots on the squishy entry mat.

As always, Kevin pushed the cart while Stella tapped up and down each aisle in her high-heeled boots, her quilted coat billowing after her like a cape. By now he had learned to keep his mouth shut—“Would it kill them to sell a little Diet Coke? Some fucking Ruffles?”—and to admire instead Stella’s consumer ruthlessness. He had no doubt that if civilization collapsed and they were reduced to living like australopithecines, it would be Stella who’d pluck up her spear and go out hunting, while Kevin tended the fire and sewed together the skins of the animals that she dragged back to their cave. Leaning wearily on the handle of the shopping cart, he had to admire the way Stella rocked on one sharp heel and briskly peeled off her leather gloves a finger at a time, the better to squeeze a kiwi fruit or an avocado, or spear a sample ball of marinated mozzarella. She’d offer him one first, putting it right in his mouth, then expertly spear another for herself with the same toothpick, watching for his reaction with a raised eyebrow. If he nodded, she’d brighten at the kid behind the counter and order a pound of the stuff, and if he didn’t, she’d crinkle her nose and waggle her fingers ta-ta and they would march on to the next counter. And even when she raced ahead of him and he ended up stranded with the cart, feeling simultaneously like an abandoned child and old enough to be Stella’s father, she often surprised him by coming up from behind and slipping her hand through his elbow, nuzzling him, ruffling the hair at the back of his neck. Right there in the condiments aisle, she’d kiss him on the ear.

“Love you,” she’d whisper, and then, “Oh! Capers! I love capers!”

That night, though, the bitter cold had chilled her effervescence somewhat, and she left her gloves on in the store. She moved a little more quickly than usual, and Kevin found himself hustling to keep up with her. Finally, at the prepared foods counter, she squeezed his wrist and said, “Wait here, okay? Don’t move,” and then marched away. Luckily the young woman behind the counter was busy with other customers, so Kevin propped himself on his cart, sweating in his parka, and surveyed the astonishing heaps of glossy foods under the glass: Grilled chicken breasts marinated in lemon. Mushrooms stuffed with spinach and feta. Smoked salmon crostini. Squares of pecan-encrusted tofu like Rice Krispie treats. Turkey meatloaf with hatch chilies, sliced crosswise for easy service. And none of it for under twelve bucks a pound. In his head he writhed with mixed emotions like a gaffed fish: Who can afford to eat like this? and I could make my own salmon crostini for half that — assuming I knew what salmon crostini was and Don’t they know there’s a war on? and And a recession? and I’d kill for a Blimpy burger right now and Okay, the salmon really does look yummy. He thought of McNulty, laughing his ass off at the sight of Kevin, middle-aged, middle-class, docile as a neutered spaniel, waiting to pay $15.99 a pound for salmon on behalf of his much younger girlfriend. He saw his mother, dipping her pinky into her highball glass and licking it, then looking at him over her half-glasses. Pecan-encrusted tofu?

“So, what looks good to you?” a woman said to him.

Kevin looked up, but the girl behind the counter was scooping curried chicken salad into a plastic takeout shell. He turned to see a mother in a parka, holding a bundle in a snowsuit in the crook of one arm and a small wire basket full of groceries hanging from the other. She was watching him wryly, like she knew him, but out of context he couldn’t place her at first — her hair was longer than she’d ever worn it for him, and she’d put on a little weight. The smile she was suppressing crinkled the corners of her eyes. God help me, thought Kevin, my younger ex-girlfriend is middle-aged.

“Beth,” he said.

The crow’s feet crinkled deeper. “You had to think about it, didn’t you?” Still she didn’t smile.

“Sorry.” He pushed himself erect behind his cart.

Now she did smile — mostly friendly, with a hint of I’ve-got-your-number. “How are you?”

“Good!” A little high-pitched, a little too loud. “Great! How are you?”

She mimed a shudder. “Cold.”

“Me too.” His heart was hammering, which surprised him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t already run into her several times the last couple of years, in Shaman Drum or Zingerman’s Roadhouse, or on line at the Michigan Theater. There had even been some stilted e-mails back and forth. When her son was born he had sent her flowers. “You look good,” he said.

“Really?” He could tell she didn’t believe him, but she wanted to. And he was being mostly honest. She was all bundled up in her parka and sweater and scarf, so he couldn’t really check her out, but the way her face had filled out suited her. He even felt a stab of guilt, remembering how gaunt she’d looked in those last months they lived together. Was that my fault, he wondered — her hollow cheeks, the dark skin under her eyes? After all this time he still went back and forth: was he a selfish bastard, or was there no making that woman happy? After all, Kevin thought, Beth couldn’t blame him for her own scary combination of intensity and indecision. But now, flushed in the heat of her winter clothes, she did look good, really, truly. She used to crop her hair boyishly short, but now it fell to her shoulders. Her cheekbones weren’t as sharp as they used to be, but neither were her nerves right on the surface anymore, radiating every tremor of emotion. Her eyes were brighter, warmer.

“Really,” he said. “You look… calmer.”

This he regretted immediately, but she only smiled and hefted the snowsuit bundle. Kevin glimpsed a little spheric section of pink forehead; Beth’s son appeared to be fast asleep inside the cinched hood of his suit.

“You hear that?” she said. “Mommy’s perfectly calm.”

He nearly repeated Stella’s joke about Kenny from South Park, but in the nick of time he remembered that Kenny dies at the end of each episode.

“How’s he doing?” he said instead. What do you say about the four-year-old kid of your ex, who left you to have him after thirteen years together? Especially if you can’t remember the kid’s name?

“It’s a she,” Beth said.

“A she?” Kevin’s brain ground to a halt. He was certain Beth had had a son. Dear God, he thought, how could I misremember that? Okay, so I spaced on his name, but I’m too young to have forgotten the kid’s sex.

“Naomi,” she said, enjoying Kevin’s confusion way too much. “My second child.”

“Whoa.” He couldn’t disguise his surprise. “I didn’t know.”

She shrugged. “No reason you should.”

“How old…?”

“Eighteen months.”

“Huh.” Kevin’s geriatric brain sparked and sizzled uselessly. “Well, she looks very relaxed.”

“She’s like her father that way.” She was looking at the child when she said this, but then she glanced at Kevin.

“Huh.” That name he did know: Noah. A junior professor in… something. A much younger guy than Kevin, younger even by a couple years than Beth. And already the father of two children. Huh.

“Not to bring the conversation to a screeching halt or anything,” Beth said, smiling.

I mean, who’s the injured party here? Kevin wondered. As miserable as I may have made her, in the end she left me. I’m the one who got the push.

“How is he?” he said, slipping about on the high ground. “Noah,” he added. She wasn’t going to do that to him again.

“Busy,” said Beth, still watching him closely. He knew that look, and even now, when it shouldn’t matter anymore what she thought of him, he hated it and feared it. It was the look she gave him when she was measuring him against some private standard in her head. It was a look that already held the expectation that he would disappoint her. The problem was that he never knew what the standard was, and she wouldn’t tell him. It was a look that still made him angry — not the implied judgment itself, but the fact that he still let it get to him.

“I’ll bet,” said Kevin. He had no idea what he meant by that.

“Sir?” The girl behind the counter was speaking to him.

He and Beth nodded at each other, a couple of sparring partners separated for a moment by the ref, catching their breath, gauging each other’s stamina.

“Sir? What can I get you?”

“I think she’s next,” he said, gesturing to Beth, who stepped right up to the counter. “I’d like a couple of slices of the turkey loaf,” she said, lifting her chin at the girl. The bundle on her arm shifted, and through the deep-sea diver porthole of her hood, Kevin could see that young Naomi, daughter of Noah and not-as-young-as-she-used-to-be Beth, younger sister of whathisname, was awake and watching Kevin with cool, blue, unblinking eyes.

Kevin looked quickly away, then back into the kid’s gaze. You don’t know me, Kevin thought, but for a while there, I was supposed to be your father. The child just stared at him, and Kevin thought, Jesus, even the kid’s judging me. He started inching away, without saying goodbye, but then something rattled into his cart — a box of couscous — and he felt a squeeze in the crook of his elbow.

“What looks good to you, sweetie?” Stella twined her arm through his and looked up at him calmly, then let her gaze drift slowly across the platters of chicken, salmon, and tofu. Nothing, he wanted to say, not a goddamn thing. Waiting for you, I’m a stationary target, a sitting duck, a great big bull’s-eye for any ex-girlfriend and her second kid who happens by. But before he could edit this for actual conversation, Beth turned away from the case, where the girl was lifting slices of turkey loaf with a pair of tongs, and Kevin’s ex narrowed her eyes at the young woman who had appeared beside him. She shot Kevin a look that made him blanch, a look that said (and Kevin ought to know) I want you dead, and not just dead, but crusted with pecans, stuffed with feta and spinach, and mounted on a platter with an organic apple in his mouth, sliced crosswise for easy service. Then she smiled and caught Stella’s eye.

“Hi,” she said.

Stella blinked, and said, “Hi” in her professional voice.

Beth looked at Kevin. By now Kevin had recovered enough to give Beth a look that said, You dumped me, remember? When Stella noticed the two of them looking at each other, she looked at Kevin, too.

“Um,” said Kevin.

“He’s too embarrassed to speak,” Beth said, hefting her child to show that she couldn’t shake hands, “but I’m Beth.”

There should have been a little rising inflection at the end of that, thought Kevin, at least the implication of a question mark. What made Beth think Stella should recognize the name? What made her think he’d ever uttered her name to his new lover? But he had, of course, and instantly Stella opened her eyes as wide as they would go.

“Oh, hi!” And still clutching Kevin with one hand, she squeezed Beth on the sleeve with her leather glove. Naomi twisted in her mother’s arm, swiveling her porthole toward Stella.

“Oh my God!” cried Stella, a whole octave higher. “Who’s this little cutie?” Her gloved hand floated in the air, and Beth swung the kid a little closer to Stella, who tugged on one of her blunt appendages.

“That’s Naomi,” Kevin said, before Beth could. My archenemy. My judge. My replacement.

“She’s so adorable.” For some reason Stella was clutching Kevin even tighter. “How old is she?”

“Eighteen months.” Beth let her eyes slide toward the counter, where the girl was holding her turkey loaf.

“Oh, let me!” Stella lunged for the container and slid it into Beth’s basket, all without letting go of Kevin.

“Thanks,” said Beth.

“Kev,” Stella said, tugging on Kevin, “don’t you think Naomi looks just like Kenny?”

Beth looked at him, and he could tell she was thinking, Kev?

But Stella just beamed at Beth. “I was just telling Kevin how much he looked like Kenny from South Park in his hood.” She tugged again at Naomi’s foot or whatever it was. “But you look just like him, don’t you, munchkin?”

Beth looked skeptically at Stella. “Isn’t Kenny the one who dies every episode?”

God help me, thought Kevin, but her crow’s feet are sexy.

Stella gasped and pressed her leather fingers to her mouth. She blushed. “Oh my God!” She gasped again and reached across Kevin and squeezed Beth’s arm. “I didn’t mean… oh, I’m so sorry!”

Even through her gloves and the stuffing of his parka, Kevin could feel Stella’s nails digging into his flesh.

“I didn’t mean that!” she was saying.

“I know,” Beth smiled. “It’s okay.”

Still, Kevin thought, she’s enjoying this. Point, Beth.

“I feel just awful!” Stella looked up at Kevin, as if to say, do something. She was squeezing his arm so hard he was losing the feeling in his fingers.

“Well,” he said, “Kenny always comes back in the next episode.”

“That’s right!” said Stella. In a minute she was going to drag him to his knees.

“The eternal return,” said Kevin, almost a philosophy major. “The phoenix rising from the ashes.”

Beth pursed her lips at him. Point, Kev.

“The ouroboros,” he said.

“The Euro-what?” said Stella.

“You asshole,” says Joy Luck.

She’s stopped short, and Kevin nearly blunders into her, swiveling away on the ball of his foot at the last moment. Without realizing it, he’s followed her out of the forest of shelves and into the archipelago of specialty islands, where shoppers carrying baskets are grazing at buffet tables and edging up to rounded counters with signs over them that say SPECIALTY ARTISAN CHEESES and CHARCUTERIE. Jesus Christ, thinks Kevin, insinuating himself between two young women at a buffet table, Charcuterie? Can’t they just say “deli meats” like a normal grocery store? Even the buffet he’s stepped up to can’t just be a buffet — GOURMET FLAVORS says the sign. He swipes his hand over his hair — damp with sweat — and blows out a sigh, as if he’s trying to decide between the heirloom tomato gazpacho or the ancho honey glazed pineapple. Under his elbow he glances back at Joy Luck, to make sure she’s not talking to him.

“You asshole,” she says again, even louder.

She’s radiating anger like a tuning fork, but her back, thank God, is to Kevin. Her fists are balled and her shoulders are hunched, like she’s ready to start swinging. The muscles in her long neck are pulled tight. She’s attracting the glances of other shoppers, who are oh-so-subtly veering around her. Her rage is being beamed — though Kevin can’t see her eyes — at a tall boy in a white, double-breasted smock and chef’s cap standing behind yet another curved counter, under a sign that says, in silver letters, TRATTORIA. It’s a little Italian café right in the middle of the store, with a blond wood counter and high, blond wood chairs. The tall guy is tending to some pots on a small stove behind the counter; he has a long nose and a narrow jaw and a frozen smile, and his eyes are dodging from side to side under Joy Luck’s murderous gaze. The muffin top of his cap is only a foot below the lower edge of the sign, which hangs over him at the moment like the blade of a guillotine. He’s holding a large wooden spoon stained with red, but even so he looks utterly defenseless against the focused rage of Joy Luck, who seems, even from behind, all sinew, claws, and teeth. Even the sexy little apple at the small of her back looks poisonous.

“Kelly!” says the boy, his eyes bouncing side to side like a doll’s. Kelly?

“Ian, what are you doing here?” says the girl, with a disbelieving shake of her head.

What kind of name is Kelly for an Asian girl? She’s the least Irish-looking young woman he’s ever seen in his life. But then, of course, there’s the late Kevin MacDonald, the world’s only freckled, ginger-headed Islamic terrorist.

“You’re back,” says Ian.

“You took a new job while I was gone?” She’s edging forward, but she’s not lowering her voice. Poor Ian glances to either side, but he can’t back up, and there’s only a dripping wooden spoon between him and the wrath of Kelly. Kevin ducks his head and moves slowly around the end of the buffet to the other side. He still can’t get over this Kelly business, though he supposes it could be worse. They could have named her Colleen. Or Bridget. Or Sinead.

“They called me on Tuesday,” says Ian, “and said they needed me to start right away.”

“Oh really,” says the girl formerly known as Joy Luck. “So… what? They picked your name out of the phone book?”

Ian sighs. Another trattorian has appeared behind the counter, a short, dark young woman in a stained smock, her black hair coiled tightly under a hairnet except for a sweaty strand pasted to her forehead. With obvious effort she’s holding a large, heavy, steaming stockpot by both handles, and she’s glancing anxiously from Ian to Kelly and back again.

“Kelly,” says Ian, gesturing with the wooden spoon.

“Ian,” gasps the short, dark girl. Her wrists are trembling as she holds the pot.

“Maria!” says Ian, startled, and he casts about for someplace to put the spoon, thrusts it under his arm, and takes the pot from her, hefting it onto a burner behind him.

“Golly,” says Kelly, “did I come at a bad time?”

The short girl glances at Kelly, then more meaningfully at Ian, and she scoots away. Ian lights the burner, raising an even rim of blue flame under the pot.

“We’re setting up for lunch, Kell.” Ian’s looking for his spoon, can’t find it anywhere. “Can we talk later?”

Aha! The spoon’s under his arm, and he plunges it into the pot.

“Ian!” She stamps her foot. “What the fuck?”

On the safe side of the buffet a couple of guys stand to either side of Kevin, another man in a business suit and a young guy in cargo shorts and T-shirt. The suit is loading up a takeout box with marinated teriyaki tofu with ponzu sauce, while Cargo Shorts is heaping his with smokey cavatappi pasta salad. All three men exchange glances with each other: Glad it’s not me!

Without looking at Kelly, Ian stirs his pot and gestures at her with his other hand. “It’s a great job, Kell. I couldn’t turn it down.”

“Then what the fuck was I doing in Ann Arbor, looking for an apartment?”

Ann Arbor! Kevin stands a little straighter. Huh!

“I was going to talk to you about it when you got back.” Ian’s stirring so hard that little spatters of red are appearing on his smock, like blood.

“This is how you tell me?” She stamps her foot again, and Kevin can almost feel the floor shake, as if from the approaching stomp of an angry T. rex. Behind the buffet, all three men lower their noses a little closer to the sneeze guard.

“I signed a lease, you asshole. I put down a deposit.”

Kelly’s rage has cleared a space around her in the middle of Gaia. She’s like a neutron bomb — there’s no blast damage, but no people left alive on the other side of the buffet table. Only Kelly shooting gamma rays in every direction, and poor Ian at the epicenter with his wooden spoon. Any second now he’s going to burst into flames, his skeleton turning to dust like a particularly slow-witted vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But he doesn’t, he only scowls at the sauce he’s stirring as if he expects to find a turd in it. The front of his smock is beginning to look like a butcher’s apron. Sweeney Todd, the Asshole Boyfriend of Sixth Street.

Kelly sighs. She droops. “We talked about this.” She’s near tears now, and Kevin feels like he personally let her down. “We decided.”

Ian sighs and stops stirring and drops his broad chin to his chest. Then he looks up and Kevin can see Kelly’s rage reflected back at her. Ian’s eyes are focused and hard. He gestures toward her with his free hand, all five fingertips splayed at her, like Harry Potter casting a spell. Or warding one off.

“You decided,” he says. “I’m not so sure I want to go to Ann Arbor.”

Kelly’s body tightens again. “Fine,” she says, all the hurt burned out of her voice. She and Ian glare across the trattoria counter at each other. The entire store seems to have gone utterly silent, like a forest holding its breath as two snarling jungle cats circle each other. The two men on either side of Kevin slink away with their gourmet flavors, leaving Kevin paralyzed like a rabbit.

Kelly turns abruptly away from the trattoria, and Kevin flinches. Furiously impassive, Ian watches her go, and he slowly starts stirring. Then Kelly stops and turns halfway back, and Kevin flinches again. Her body’s turned toward him, her legs slightly apart, but she’s looking along her handsome shoulder back at Ian. It’s like a dance position, or a martial arts stance, and she jerks her spectacularly firm right arm up at the elbow, and then lets it spring out to its full length, her middle finger cocked like a switchblade at Ian.

“Fuck you, asshole.” Every muscle in that magnificent arm is taut. You could hang a cinderblock off it. “Fuck. You.”

Then she’s gone. Kevin realizes he’s been holding his breath for so long he’s lightheaded, and he touches his fingertips to the edge of the buffet table to keep from toppling over. The murmur of voices flows into the silence, and the store’s music reasserts itself — another boomer anthem, “Stuck in the Middle with You.” Kevin turns as if in a daze, and sees Kelly parting the crowd, twisting her torso like a wide receiver. Folk feigning interest in the contents of their own baskets scurry out of her path, clowns to the left of her, jokers to the right. Kevin glances back once more at Ian, who is frowning at the splashes of red sauce on his jacket, then he draws a breath and starts after Kelly, giddily riding the eddies in her wake.

* * *

Outside the sliding glass doors, the air clings to his skin like cotton, but he just brushes it aside like cobwebs. He doesn’t even take off his jacket. His feet aren’t even touching the ground. All he’s thinking is, she’s moving to Ann Arbor!

Up ahead Kelly glides between the gleaming cars in the Gaia parking lot; the glitter makes Kevin fumble for his sunglasses. His inner Jiminy Cricket is hauling on the reins, pounding his little fists on the inside of Kevin’s skull, screaming in Kevin’s inner ear, “You’re leaving Ann Arbor! You’re moving here! You’ve got a girlfriend! What do you think is going to happen?”

“Shut up,” says Kevin out loud, threading between the cars. Heat radiates off the hot metal, off the pavement at his feet. Kelly waits impatiently at the busy corner of (say the signs) Fifth and Lamar, a phalanx of vehicles streaming down Fifth while a perpendicular phalanx on Lamar idles at the light. But before the light even changes, she sprints across on her toes. In the middle of Fifth her sandal comes off. Kevin’s heart stops as she staggers, turns, and hops on one foot back across the hot asphalt. Cars swerve, horns blare, and Kevin nearly dashes forward, gallant as Sir Walter Raleigh, to sweep her in his arms and carry her to safety. But then she jams her foot into the flip-flop, grips it with her toes, and marches to the curb, while angry vehicles pass only inches behind her. By time Kevin gets to the corner, cars are streaming before him, and Kelly is marching south, toward the river, down into an underpass beneath a railroad bridge. As Kevin jigs on the lee shore, frantic as a five-year-old with a full bladder, she disappears down the hill. Now he sees her only from the waist up, now only the top of her head. And now she’s dropped below the horizon, out of his life, forever.

“Wait!” Kevin says, and steps into the street. Kelly’s his last chance, his escape route from Stella, the last younger woman he’ll ever need! And she’s available! A turning car jams on its brakes, its driver leans on the horn, but it’s a Lexus, so fuck you, asshole, and your forty-thousand-dollar car. Kevin nearly gives him the finger, but by time he’s thought of it, he’s on the other side, jogging through the viscous heat into the underpass. He should stop and take off his jacket again, he should stop and think about what he’s doing — in Kevin’s control room a klaxon is rhythmically blaring and red lights are flashing and a central mainframe’s calm voice (a woman’s, like in Star Trek or Alien) is counting down t-minus 30, t-minus 29, and Jiminy Cricket’s clutching, what, a strut or something for dear life and kicking back desperately with his little spats at a control stick jammed all the way forward to full speed ahead. But Kevin’s not slowing down, he’s walking a narrow, gritty sidewalk in his fat-soled shoes, only inches from the hot cars backed up down the hill, waiting for the light behind him, because up ahead, striding toward the river, is his last chance — Kelly, Joy Luck, the Girl Formerly Known as the Girl Who Walks Like Lynda. He’s not kidding himself, he knows she’s not Lynda, and that’s okay, because she’s better than Lynda — Lynda was always too diffident, she fucked like a man, selfishly, taking what she wanted and not really giving a damn about him — which, don’t get him wrong, was lots and lots of fun for the three months they were lovers, because nine times out of ten, Kevin totally got what he wanted, too. Up ahead Kelly skirts the plastic fencing of another construction site, nothing but concrete piers and rebar so far, as she makes her way toward a gleam of water through the trees along the river. The last time he followed that same stride toward the water, it was the afternoon of Lynda à la plage, only a week or so after his first night with her, when he took her to the beach at Silver Lake in his deathtrap Pinto. Well, okay, the beach at Silver Lake isn’t really a beach, only a strip of gravelly sand a foot wide where the lawn crumbles away, so maybe he should think of her as Lynda du lac. Either way she’d worn a not-very-sexy Speedo one-piece, black, that went all the way up to her neck and flattened her breasts, but there was no way to unflatter her delicious backside, or her flat belly, or the fetching points of her pelvis. When it was wet, the suit glimmered in the bright July sunlight, and despite the mobs of splashing children and raucous teens and the speedboats foaming just beyond the floats marking off the swimming area, Kevin saw nothing but the glitter of the water and the sheen of the suit as Lynda waded into the lake, the waterline swallowing her thighs, her swaying ass, the small of her back, creeping toward the wings of her shoulder blades. Then she plunged in and Kevin’s heart stopped where he lay with his hands folded behind his head on a beach towel on the grass, wearing a raggedy pair of cutoffs and trying unsuccessfully not to have an erection. A moment later Lynda surfaced, her strawberry hair slicked back from her freckled forehead, and she stood in shoulder-deep water and squeezed the water out of her hair with both hands, and Kevin, losing the battle with his erection, launched himself from the blanket and down the bank and splashed into the cool water with crazy, high steps, and then dived, gliding slick as a seal, his eyes open in the grainy, greenish water, his hard-on like a homing tracker, until he shot up right in front of her, gasping. She gave him a slow, heavy-lidded smile and draped her hands over his shoulders and kissed him, and he slid his hands up her Speedo’d back and lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his waist underwater. And then, right there, wordlessly, nose to nose with each other, in front of the families lunching at picnic tables on the shore and the dripping kids crowded around the snack bar, in full sight of the screened-in porches across the lake and the slow-paddling canoeists and the speedboats buzzing by only twenty yards away, Lynda rocked herself against Kevin under the surface of the lake. You could hardly call it dry humping under the circumstances, and even through the thick, sodden denim of his shorts, the slick glide of the crotch of her suit was exquisite. It wasn’t even that so much that made Kevin’s pulse pound, made him pinch his lips bloodless to keep from moaning out loud, but rather the warmth of her under the water, both firm and weightless all at once, her flattened breasts pressing rhythmically against his bare chest, her warm thighs clenched around his waist. Looking between them at her foreshortened, refracted body, he glimpsed her sheathed belly flexing with each thrust; looking up, she was so close she seemed to have a third eye in the middle of her face, and he focused instead on the shining droplets caught in the fine blond hairs before her ear. She said nothing, but only breathed a little harder and smiled without losing that look of being half-asleep. Apart from the rhythmic rings of ripples radiating from their shoulders, you’d never know what was going on, or at least that’s what Kevin told himself, and when he came his choked groan was smothered by a series of waves from a passing speedboat that slapped over his and Lynda’s faces, making them both gasp and sputter. He staggered back in slow motion through the water, and she pushed off and glided away on her back, while he let the speedboat’s wake and his pleasure lift him off his feet and float him toward shore.

But he never loved her. So that when she dumped him — or rather when he walked in on her fucking one of her housemates in her bare little room up under the eaves on Jefferson Avenue and she sat up on the mattress without even bothering to pull the covers up, she smiled and just kind of shrugged at him, and he just kind of shrugged back. Because that was the same summer he was in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter, and what he sees now in Kelly/Joy Luck/TGWWLL is the best of both worlds — both Lynda’s effortless sensuality and the imperious passion of the Philosopher’s Daughter, or at least the passion the Philosopher’s Daughter said she was looking for — and now this is his last chance, while he’s still young enough, fit enough, good-looking and charming enough to persuade a girl possibly half his age that, despite what Ian did to her — that feckless asshole — and despite what the Philosopher’s Daughter told him — that vain, heartless bitch — he is capable of tenderness and passion.

Kelly’s veering from Lamar Avenue now, away from the waterfall rumble of traffic crossing a bridge over the river, toward a pedestrian bridge running parallel to it. Under the shadows of the exhausted, drooping trees along the riverbank, Kevin can see figures improbably jogging along a dirt trail. Kelly pauses at a crosswalk to slam a lamppost button with the heel of her hand, then sprints across without waiting for the light. Kevin jogs to catch up, sweat pouring off him, his own scent rising like steam from the open collar of his wilted shirt, and this time he reaches the crosswalk just as the signal flashes WALK. Kelly disappears under a wide spiral ramp that descends from the end of the pedestrian bridge, and Kevin hangs back at the edge of the running trail, his heart pounding from the heat, his exertion, his excitement. In the shadow of the bridge and the trees it’s just as hot as it is in the sun, like being stuck in a windowless, airless room. Two runners in opposite directions labor past each other on the trail, dust puffing behind their shoes: a bare-chested young man in skimpy shorts, his calves and thighs bulging, and a firm-limbed young woman in a sweat-splotched sports bra, her taut muscles gliding under her skin, her blond ponytail swinging metronomically, the hem of her shorts — the Texas state flag — swaying like a bell. Kevin notes the rictus of effort on their faces, the knotted foreheads, the tightened mouths; it’s almost like they’re having sex with each other, but they pass without a glance. Beyond them, even the river looks exhausted — a dull, unmoving sheen of olive green. These people, Kevin thinks, these jogging Texans, they’re like a whole other race of creatures, subtropical übermenschen genetically engineered to run in the heat, killer androids from the future walking through flame. It makes him even hotter to watch them; he can feel his shirt clinging to him like wet tissue. He glances at his watch; it’s nearly twelve o’clock, but then he remembers that he didn’t set his watch back, which means it’s only eleven here, but even so, his interview is at two. What does he think is going to happen if he actually catches up to Kelly? For an instant Jiminy Cricket nearly gets the upper hand — she just broke up with her boyfriend, you idiot, like, ten minutes ago, so go back the way you came, scuttle from coffee shop to air-conditioned coffee shop, drink lots of iced tea, let your shirt air out, and act your age—but then he sees Kelly again, on a flight of stairs that rises to the pedestrian bridge under the winding ramp. Her back is erect with rage and hurt, but her walk is still as feral as a cat’s, a stain of sweat plastering the back of her camisole to her spine.

He’s tugged forward by the sight, he can’t help himself. He’s never felt this excited about Stella, not even at the beginning. Stella was an accident, a mistake, and now she’s practically living with him. She’s even talking about children, for God’s sake. In the car on the way home from Gaia, the same frigid February night they’d run into Beth, Stella was quieter than usual as they crawled through the dark toward home. She held their dinner — two fat slices of turkey loaf — on her lap, under the roaring heat vent to keep it warm. Normally she’d have been talking a mile a minute, restlessly dipping into their takeout and eating crumbling pieces of turkey loaf with her fingers, but instead she sat with her cap pulled down to her eyebrows and watched the blurred lights of oncoming cars and the snow gliding in long streaks toward the windshield, all the while making those abrupt little gestures that meant she was having a conversation with herself in the Stella Continuum. At last she sighed and turned to him, and he thought: this won’t be good.

“What?” He shifted in his seat, his parka hissing.

“We haven’t talked about kids,” she said.

Wherever Beth was at the moment — Kevin realized with a pang that he had no idea anymore where she and Noah lived — she was picking up the vibe of this conversation, hearing it in real time over whatever jungle telegraph women are hooked into and, of course, laughing her ass off. Joining her from wherever he was, was McNulty, though his laughter was less sarcastic and triumphant and I-told-you-so, and more rueful and world-weary and I-been-there-buddy. Back when they were both working at Big Star, McNulty had somehow managed to score a younger girlfriend for a time, a tall, spooky redhead, and he’d gotten her pregnant. He told Kevin about it late one soporific weekday afternoon when they were both at the cash register. McNulty wreathed his head in a cloud of cigarette smoke as if he was trying to hide behind it.

“Is she going to have it?” Kevin dropped his voice, even though there were no customers in the store. He could only wonder what that would be like, to be a father at McNulty’s advanced age of forty.

“No,” said McNulty, wearily rubbing his face. “I’m paying for an abortion.” He breathed smoke. “Least I could do.” He sucked the smoke back in. “But she doesn’t want to see me after that.”

Kevin stammered something, but McNulty only shook his head and stared through the swirling smoke as if at something on the horizon. “The thing is,” he said, “at my age, if you want to hang onto a younger woman, you have to be willing to give her children.”

Only now did he focus on Kevin through the blue haze.

“I don’t expect you to understand this now,” McNulty said, in his diffident stoner drone. “But someday, you will.”

And now, Kevin did. In the stifling silence of the car, the tires of his Accord crunching over packed snow and the chains of the cars in the opposite lane rattling like maracas, Kevin thought of all the things he could say. We haven’t talked about kids? I’ll say we haven’t! And we’re not going to! Not now, not ever. It was one of those heart-freezing moments, when they wait to let you have it until you’re in an enclosed space, with no place to run. (When Beth cornered him in the bath, for example.) What are you talking about — kids? Are you crazy? We’re not like that, Stella. Their relationship was predicated on a cute meet and a blow job, and maintained on the basis of a lot of semisincerely enthusiastic sex. But of course he couldn’t say that, so he said nothing, listening to the chains of the oncoming cars clinking at him like Marley’s ghost.

“So what do you think?” she said.

His mouth was so dry, he wasn’t sure he could speak, even if he wanted to.

“I’m almost fifty,” he said at last.

“So?”

“So, figure it out. Say we start tonight, I’d be fifty-one by time the kid would be born. That means I’d be”—God help him, was this true? — “nearly seventy before he graduates from high school.”

This would have silenced Beth, because it would have made her furious, leading to an explosion later on. But give Stella credit, he’s thinking now, in the heat under the pedestrian bridge in Austin, Stella’s not an idiot, Stella can read subtext like a Kremlinologist. And Stella’s wily, she’s not a slugger like Beth was. Stella would never ask him point-blank, “Don’t you want to be with me for the next eighteen years?” No, Stella’s got footwork, Stella floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Stella knows how to not take no for an answer.

“You’d be so cute,” she’d said, reaching across the car. His hood was pushed back around his earlobes, and her glove rasped along the fabric as she stroked the side of his head. “You’ll have graying sides at her graduation, like that guy on The Sopranos.”

“Paulie Walnuts?” Kevin said. “That’s your role model for fatherhood?”

Stella laughed and said, in her best HBO Jersey accent, “He’s a good earner!”

Then she cracked open the plastic shell and filled the car with the warm scent of turkey loaf, popping a piece between her lips. Leaving Kevin’s head ringing with the idea of children, just like she meant to.

But who would bring children into the world, now? The pillars under the ramp of the pedestrian bridge are spattered with stickers and stenciled slogans, which Kevin recognizes from the kiosks and sidewalks around the Diag back home. HAPPY OILDEPENDENCE DAY says one sticker. 100,000 DEAD IRAQIS — HAD ENOUGH WAR YET? says another. That’s the pitch he needs to try on Stella, to discourage her from childbearing. New York, Madrid, London, Mumbai — it’s only a matter of time before it happens again: not if, but when — and next time it’ll be a car bomb on State Street, a suicide bomber at Briarwood Mall, an airliner dropped from the sky over Metro by a Stinger. Plague virus in a reservoir, nerve gas in the subway, a nuke in a cargo container. Everybody knows it, even Stella. Buchanan Street Station freaked her out, too.

“When I’m in Chicago next week?” she told him that night, standing behind the couch, watching CNN over his shoulder, clutching her elbows. “I may have to ride the El. I mean, God!”

Maybe that’s why she clings to him at night, why she wakes up wild-eyed and trembling like a child. He passes another stenciled slogan that reads

ISLAM IS

NOT THE ENEMY,

and instinctively Kevin hears the dismissive grunt of his late Uncle Stan, his mother’s oldest brother. Stan was a jowly, gin-blossomed veteran of World War II, owner of a Polish bakery on Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck, and a habitué of the VFW hall, where he drank silently with his buddies and sometimes let eight-year-old Kevin have a sip of his Schlitz. “Tell it to the Marines, buddy boy,” that’s what Uncle Stan would’ve said if he’d lived to see the “war on terror.” Some of the other guys would’ve found some colorful way to mispronounce Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and one in particular, Uncle Stan’s best friend, a wiry, ginger-haired little guy everybody called Rooster, would have launched into a cheerfully racist rant about the goddamn Ay-rabs in goddamn Dearborn. He’d’ve called them sand niggers, camel jockeys, towel heads, goat fuckers, boy lovers—“You ever see that guy, Omar whatshisname, in Lawrence of Arabia? Fairy son-of-a-bitch was wearing eyeliner the whole goddamn movie, like some two-dollar whore out on Eight Mile.” Then he’d conclude, as he often did about the jigaboos, jungle bunnies, and spear chuckers who had ruined Detroit, “Ah hell, at least they’re not Jews.” Throughout all of this, Uncle Stan never joined in, but he never objected, either. He just shook his head and smiled. The closest he ever came to a demurral was when he’d noisily swallow a mouthful of beer, clear his throat, and roll his rheumy eyes toward the impressionable young Kevin. “C’mon, Rooster. My sister’s kid, for chrissakes.”

All that — Stan’s boozing, his passive racism — was on the one hand. On the other, Uncle Stan had provided Kevin’s entrée into the middle class. That’s what Stella probably didn’t understand. Perhaps she assumed that because he owned a rental property two blocks from the Michigan campus, Kevin had money he wasn’t telling her about, but the house was a fluke, a one-time deal. Stan had never married — he knew a thing or two, Kevin supposes, about two-dollar whores on Eight Mile — and never had any kids of his own—“That he knows about, har har har,” said Rooster — and he left all his money to his nieces and nephews when he died. Who knew that fifty years of making pierogi could be so lucrative? Kevin had used his share to make the down payment on his house on Fifth Street, a purchase he’d never have been able to swing on his salary as a university staffer, and which enables him to say to Kelly — if he ever catches up to her, if he ever works up the nerve — come to Ann Arbor anyway! Forget that loser Ian! Don’t worry about your deposit! I have a place where you can stay, rent free! Thank you, Uncle Stan!

That’s assuming he does catch up to her. Kelly’s disappeared around the turn at the landing, and all Kevin sees above him is a wedge of bleached blue sky. He can smell the river under the bridge, sour and organic, not especially unpleasant. The water is seamlessly green, soaking up the light and giving little back. Just below the surface floats a turtle, its snout thrust up for air; even it seems exhausted, its flippers barely moving.

Kevin quickens his pace up the stairs. So what if Kelly is thirty years younger? I could be Warren Beatty to her Annette Bening, I could be Michael Douglas to her Catherine Zeta-Jones. Hey, thinks Kevin, rounding the landing and starting up the next flight, I could be Sinatra to her Mia Farrow! Even if she insisted on kids — he’s dimly remembering now that Mia Farrow has, what, fifteen or twenty children — Kelly would never get heavy after childbirth, she’d never lose her feral strut, never thicken around the middle, never become distracted and demanding like Beth has. He thinks of his own hollow-eyed, high-strung mother swirling a scotch on the rocks, tinkling the ice cubes, her gaze on something a million miles away. He thinks of his father, who — even more than Kevin does right now — wanted to be Frank Sinatra, wanted to be the Irish chairman of the board. An engineer for Ford, he rose without much ambition to middle management and no further, bumping along the ceiling like a half-deflated helium balloon the morning after a party. But Kevin’s dad had the same first name as Ol’ Blue Eyes, didn’t he? And didn’t Kevin’s mother like to say, even affectionately sometimes, “It’s Frank’s world, we just live in it”? What wouldn’t his father have given to have Angie or Mia hanging on his arm as he walked into the Sands? What wouldn’t he have given to have some meaty goon in a cheap suit precede him into the London Chop House and say, “That’s Mr. Quinn’s seat you’re sitting in”? Climbing the steps, Kevin remembers how his father used to sing Sinatra in the bathroom — oddly enough, never the cocky, up-tempo, ring-a-ding tunes, but always the slow, melancholy, I-had-Ava-Gardner-and-I-lost-her ones — until he was usually interrupted by his wife’s sardonic rap on the bathroom door. Two minutes, Mr. Sinatra.

Kevin pauses on the top step, back in the sunlight. He’s looking north, back the way he’s come, over the trees along the riverbank toward the imperial bulk of Gaia, toward the garden of half-built condominium blocks, the toy dome of the state capitol, and the white smokestacks of the City of Austin power plant. Something overhead is buzzing, and Kevin realizes that when he heard his father singing those sad songs all alone in the bathroom, it never occurred to him to wonder — youthful narcissist that he was — what makes my father so sad? Because now, right this moment, he totally gets where his father’s melancholy came from, and the realization presses down on him with all the force of central Texas’s brutal sunshine. His jacket drags at him like chain mail, his shoes weigh like bricks, he’s not sure if he could move even if he wanted to. And what’s that buzzing, anyway? He swats at the air around his ear.

A jogger is coming toward him up the spiral ramp, another Latina Amazon like the soldier in the airport, or the bustling woman in the tight skirt on Congress. Only this one is older than the soldier and younger than the businesswoman, a no-nonsense woman in her thirties, glossy hair pulled scalp-tight, powerful thighs pistoning as she charges up the ramp, black eyes fierce on either side of her sharp Aztec nose. Her fists clench and unclench as she runs, her shoes slap the pavement, her breath comes in sharp bursts, huh-huh-huh-huh. She pounds by him without a glance, close enough for him to smell the ammoniac tang of her sweat, her ponytail whipping like a lash.

And there’s Kelly halfway across the bridge, tightly gripping the railing with both hands, gazing back along the river at Austin’s boomtown skyline. He can’t see her face from here, can’t read her expression, but her hair is pushed back behind her ear, the ends of it plastered to the long, lovely curve of her neck. If he gets a little closer, maybe he can read her mood, guess what she’s thinking, figure out what to say to her. He moves along the bridge, which is wide and sinuous and paved with cream and pink lanes of concrete, with square planters and green benches along the sides. Kelly is standing at a buffed steel railing next to a short lamppost with a flat steel shade like a monsignor’s hat, and now she’s gazing up at a little single-engine plane buzzing high over the river, dragging behind it a limp orange banner that Kevin can’t quite read. HOT something. Or is it OTT? As the plane banks back toward the skyline in the breathless heat, the banner only folds a different way instead of straightening, and Kevin sees the letters ERS. Can that be right? Is someone paying to advertise OTTERS over Austin, Texas?

Well, there’s your opening line, thinks Kevin, edging forward. His feet are burning, and he’s pretty sure the sour odor he smells now is not the sluggish river, but the steam from his own armpits, under his jacket. Despite the utter lack of wind, the buzzing of the little plane comes and goes; maybe the heat dampens the sound. He’s hoping Kelly is as puzzled by the banner as he is.

“ ‘Otters’?” he’ll say.

But won’t she freak when she sees it’s the guy from the seat next to her on the airplane? Or what if it’s worse — what if she doesn’t recognize him at all? She hasn’t yet; she walked right past him in the coffeehouse and the grocery store, and somehow she hasn’t noticed him treading after her like a faithful mutt for the last hour. Could it be that he’s that anonymous, that middle-aged? Now he knows why his father sang melancholy Sinatra in the shower, and the memory of his father’s bass-baritone — too low for Sinatra, he strained for the high notes — unexpectedly tightens his throat. It kills Kevin to think he never put it together, the difference between what his father sang when he was alone and thought no one could hear, and what he sang when he was harmonizing with his SPEBSQSA buddies two Saturdays a month, one hideous old chestnut after another: By the liiiight… (by the light, by the light)… of the silvery mooooon… (that silv’ry moon!).

“Oh God,” Kevin used to moan, slouching into the family room where Mom watched TV with the sound way up, while Dad and his florid friends preserved and encouraged barbershop quartet singing in America from the paneled basement below, “make it stop.”

“Shh.” His mother cradled her drink in one hand and with the other aimed the huge remote at the Zenith, clicking M*A*S*H up even louder.

“He can’t hear me,” Kevin whined.

“I don’t care if he can hear you,” said his mother. “I’m trying to watch Alan Alda.”

“Fuck Alan Alda,” muttered Kevin.

“What’s that?” She heard that, even over the tinny laughter from the Zenith.

“Nothing.” Slouching away again, down the hall toward his room.

“What did you say, young man?”

“Nothing, okay? Jee-zus.” Rolling his eyes as the idiot laugh track swelled and the blowhards in the basement swung with terrifying enthusiasm into some awful tune from The Music Man. Oh Lida Rose, oh, Lida Rose, oh, you put the sun back in the skyyyyy… God! Another Saturday night in Royal fucking Oak, the armpit of the fucking universe. Another fucking Saturday night in hell. He slammed his bedroom door and switched on the stereo, twirling the volume as high as it would go, to WRIF. The fucking turntable was broken and he’d spent all his money last week on weed — weak shit, too, fucking worthless — and the thought of that stalled him in the middle of his littered bedroom floor while Arthur Penhallow breathed heavily out of the speakers. If only Mom’d have another highball, he could tiptoe past her snoring on the sectional couch and ride his ten-speed up Twelve Mile to the mall, where he was pretty sure he could score some better weed off a guy who worked at Spencer Gifts. Worse yet, ’RIF was bumming him out; it’s always fucking “Stairway to Heaven” or fucking Bob Seger or J. fucking Geils — and tonight it’s fucking “Aqualung,” he fucking hates that song. So he switched the stereo off and flung himself onto his bed and piled both pillows over his face and screamed as loud as he could, “I wish I was an ORPHAN!”

And later that evening, he was halfway there. Cruising home at eleven with no light on his bike, standing on the pedals, his pupils dilated wide as dimes, he found an ambulance in the driveway and a police car at the curb, and the Murrays and the Nowakowskis on his front lawn. Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Nowakowski each struck the same pose, one arm pressed across her midriff, one hand pressed to her mouth. Mr. Murray stood with his arms crossed talking in low tones to Mr. Nowakowski, who had his hands thrust in his pockets. Nancy Nowakowski, with whom Kevin had almost lost his virginity another Saturday night not long before—“Aren’t we naughty?” he’d said to her before she peeled his hand off her warm breast — Nancy gave him a look of wide-eyed pity, brushing his arm in passing with her fingertips as he dropped his bike on the grass and went up the steps. Inside, in the living room, his gawky sister, Kathleen, all knees and elbows, was doubled over on the sofa, sobbing, while Mom’s priest, Father Vince, perched on the cushion next to her and patted her awkwardly on the back. Kevin floated through the room toward the hallway, at the end of which he could see his mother standing just outside the master bedroom in the same pose as Mesdames Murray and Nowakoski, arm over midriff as if she’d been punched, hand to her mouth. Kevin’s growing alarm sparked uselessly through the fog of his high like a flint that wouldn’t light, and a cop like a middle linebacker stopped Kevin by putting his beefy hands on Kevin’s shoulders and looked knowingly into the boy’s dilated pupils.

“Are you Kevin?” he said with surprising tenderness.

Wow, thinks Kevin on the bridge. He turns his back on Kelly and palms the tears out of the corners of his eyes. I don’t need this now, I really, really don’t, but there’s no stopping it: thirty-five years later, the night of his father’s death can still sneak up on him. Sitting on the end of the bed after his barbershop buddies went home, Kevin’s father died as he bent over to untie his shoes, a pair of Hush Puppies that he wore around the house. Mom was talking to him through their open bathroom door. She saw him puff out his cheeks and pat his stomach as if he had indigestion, then she turned away. When she turned back, he was already dead, in a heap on the carpet. It was that quick. Unlike Grandpa Quinn’s death later in a morphine fog from colon cancer, which was slow and unpleasant and as well- attended as an English king’s, half a dozen people crowded into the bedroom watching each whispery breath from his blue lips, Kevin’s father vanished when no one was looking. No one ever talked to Kevin about it, so everything he knows about what a heart attack is like is from that old Richard Pryor routine, and the older he gets, the more he thinks about it, not just because it might foreshadow what will happen to him, but because he can’t help but wonder what his father thought in that last moment. Was it painful? Did he feel a blow to the chest? A seam of fire up his left arm? Did he hear the voice of God, pace Pryor, telling him to stay down, motherfucker? Was it a good way to go, not seeing it coming, not having to think about it, blindsided by death? Did his life fast-forward before his eyes? Was he scared? Was he resigned? Was he relieved? Annoyed? Angry? Did he think it was funny to die like that, bending over to untie your Hush Puppies, with your wife ignoring you from across the room? Did he even know it was happening, or was it, now you see me, now you don’t? Going, going, gone. Did he snuff out like a candle, like a spark floating away from a fire? Or did he just bend over into oblivion, like someone diving into dark water?

Is it the heat that’s making Kevin breathless? Or is he having a heart attack right now, just like his dad? He steadies himself on the railing, which is warm to the touch, on the other side of the bridge from Kelly, facing west. Directly before him is the Lamar Avenue Bridge, a gray, weather-stained, WPA-era span that springs wearily across the river on five low arches. Kevin can hear the clack of tires over expansion joints as cars charge too fast onto the bridge, and then the squeal of tires as one impatient SUV lurches to a stop where the snake of traffic has kinked up at the light at the south end of the bridge. Beyond it tiny, glittering cars flash along a highway bridge over a distant bend in the river, and on the hills beyond that the mansions Kevin saw from Congress Avenue rise more clearly now, cream-walled and red-roofed.

He glances sideways. The Amazon runner has stopped to stretch, folding herself in two and grabbing her ankles from behind, a sight that is alternately painful and thrilling to see. Nearer to Kevin, a portly young guy with an unkempt black beard and a distended black T-shirt sits on a bench smoking, while a plump, liver and white springer spaniel pants at his feet, the two of them connected by a long, red canvas leash that winds around the fat guy’s wrist. Kevin turns a little more, and there’s Kelly still gazing east up the river where the plane is still weaving a weary figure eight over the skyline, still unsuccessfully trying to make that stupid banner unfurl. An old, rust-red railroad trestle supported by cement pylons comes out of the treetops of one bank and disappears into the treetops on the other, and over each pylon graffiti writers have left a fat-lettered slogan like a tangle of yellow pythons, completely unreadable, except for one, SCOPE LORIC, whatever that means, right in the middle of the trestle, in bold white letters. Beyond the trestle, more bridges, with cars shuttling silently back and forth, and on the north bank the coppery pyramids and pale deco skyscrapers and the thicket of cranes. The ice-blue tower of Barad-dûr rises out of the sunlit haze, improbably tall and narrow. Meanwhile another jet climbs steeply over Austin’s skyline, baring its long neck. Kevin can hear its hollow roar trailing behind it, a bass note to the annoying treble buzz of the little plane, and he wonders, which one is Snoopy and which the Red Baron? Is it wise these days to let either plane fly so close to a city skyline? Thinks Kevin, am I the only one who worries about stuff like this? Or does everybody, these days?

Kelly steps back from the railing, and pushes her hair back with both hands, arching her back. Kevin flinches and looks over his side of the bridge at a moiré of ripples on the water below. Closer to the shore, five startlingly white swans, two big ones and three baby ones, paddle idly among the reeds along the bank. On the jogging trail above them a single file of jogging mothers push fabulously engineered strollers like little Formula One racers, and when the mother in the lead turns and starts galloping sideways, her legs scissoring, all the other mothers do the same. Out of the deep bucket seat of the last stroller flies a petulantly flung stuffed animal, which rolls in the dust, and the last mother stops and stoops to retrieve the toy. Some of the jogging mothers are a bit broad in the beam yet, still losing their baby weight, but as the last woman returns the stuffed animal to her invisible little tyrant in the stroller, Kevin admires the long, lean line of her leg as she bends over. She’s a MILF, thinks Kevin, an acronym he never knew until he heard it on The Daily Show, which he watches in bed with Stella. Oh God, he thinks, is Stella already a Mother I’d Like to Fuck? A year from now, is that going to be Stella, in Gallup Park or the Arb, pushing her expensive, high-tech jogging stroller along the river with her child? With my child?

Now Kevin’s heart is racing. He’s feeling breathless again. Maybe he is having a heart attack. Or at least heatstroke. He grips the warm railing with both hands and takes a couple of deep breaths, but the air is so hot he can’t draw it deeply enough. It’s like drowning in warm water, and he squeezes the railing to steady himself. There’s a bench nearby, and he wonders if it’s better to hang onto the railing before his dizziness passes, or risk the few paces and have a seat. The fat guy with the hefty spaniel is standing and stubbing his cigarette out on the side of a planter, and his dog is on its feet, too, looking up at its master with a goofy, gummy grin, his long tongue draped sideways over his teeth like a big pink necktie. Beyond him the Amazon runner stands with her legs apart and her hands clasped under her ponytail, elbows in the air, and she’s bending slowly from side to side. Kevin starts slowly toward the bench; he’s feeling a little less lightheaded, but he trails one hand along the railing. From the Lamar Avenue Bridge he hears another squeal of brakes and the sharp blare of a horn. The fat guy looks up and loosens his grip on the leash, which unloops from his fat wrist, and the goofy spaniel trots toward Kevin. Nearly to the bench now, Kevin sees that Kelly has turned away from the railing on her side of the bridge and she’s looking at him, as if trying to remember where she’s seen him. Kevin’s not sure where to look. The wet nose of the spaniel brushes his left hand, and Kevin hears the fat guy say, “It’s cool, he’s friendly.” But Kevin ignores the dog, which circles round him to the railing, trailing the slack leash. Instead Kevin looks past Kelly, past the railing, past the railroad trestle to see the single-engined plane climbing like mad, whining like an angry lawnmower. The orange banner has at last snapped straight behind the plane. HOOTERS, it says.

In spite of himself, in spite of the heat, in spite of his racing heart, Kevin starts to laugh. In spite of his lightheadedness, in spite of his fear of incipient fatherhood, in spite of the prospect of Kelly recognizing him, in spite of the prospect of her not recognizing him, he laughs. Kelly’s expression turns quizzical. Their eyes have met, it’s too late to turn back now, so he just grins like the sad, middle-aged loser that he is, and points at the banner in the sky. She turns to see what he is pointing at. The dog is nuzzling Kevin’s leg; the fat guy is saying, “Barney, not your party, buddy, not your party,” and reeling in the leash. Then just as another long squeal of brakes peals from the traffic bridge, Kelly sees the banner and her spine stiffens. A horn blares, the squeal of tires goes on and on, Kelly turns back toward Kevin, and before their eyes even meet, he can see the withering, soul-shriveling look of disdain on her lovely face. Oh boy, thinks Kevin, but still, he laughs.

And then — the squeal of brakes ends in a loud, metallic bang. Kelly starts at the sound. The spaniel flinches and darts between Kevin and the railing. And the leash tightens around Kevin’s calves and jerks him off his feet.

Kevin knows he’s falling, but at the same time he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. Events seem to slow and to become more inevitable all at once. It’s a moment of perfect, blissful contradiction: it feels like it could last forever, as if Kevin falling is something that has always happened and always will, but he also knows it’s only an instant, and will be over almost before it’s started. A moment like this is the closest Kevin has ever come or ever will come to a spiritual experience, when he is perfectly aware of everything around him even as he loses all control. He’s thrilled by the vastness and infinite complexity of the world, even as he’s aware of its utter indifference to him. And so he’s calm, in spite of the pain he knows is coming and doesn’t have time to brace for, and yet it’s not as if he’s watching someone else. He’s fully present in himself and in the moment, and yet he, too, feels a sublime indifference, because the outcome is inevitable, so why worry about it? There’s nothing you can do, so just enjoy this vivid clarity, this glimpse of eternity, this momentary lifting of the veil. He wonders, is this what my father felt — bending over, falling into darkness — did he feel this peeling back of the senses, this simultaneous stillness and tumult of sound and light? As the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin wonders, is this what it’s like to die?