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PART TWO. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?

“DON’T SIT UP.”

Kevin has no intention of sitting up. Sitting up is the furthest thing from his mind. He’s aware of someone near him — more than one person, in fact — but all he can see is faded blue sky, a spiderweb in an angle of railing, and the blurred silhouettes of dead bugs in the frosted dome of one of the flat-topped lights along the bridge. The sight is startlingly clear and strange all at once; the sunlight seems to be brighter than it was before. He feels like he does when he wakes up disoriented from a long nap on a Sunday afternoon, or after snoozing for an hour or two after dinner on a weeknight — unsure of where he is or what time it is, but everything around him vivid and bright. He’s aware that his fall represents a caesura, and it doesn’t really matter whether he’s been out for hours or minutes or only seconds: the break somehow stands for infinity, and now, on the other side of it, everything is strange and as sharply defined as a cartoon.

“Did you hit your head?” says the same voice, a woman’s.

Kevin blinks and tries to focus his attention on the back of his head. What just happened? Why is he flat on his back? The numbers 666 float before him, which jolts him a little further alert. Is this a Buchanan Street Station situation? He didn’t hear a bang, but then he wouldn’t have, would he? Or at least he wouldn’t remember it. His ears are ringing a little but then they always are, from all that loud music he heard years ago in Second Chance and Joe’s Star Lounge. Are there other people around him, flat on their backs as well? Or worse, pieces of other people? Is he all there himself, or is he bleeding to death from a severed leg? Maybe that’s why his head doesn’t hurt, because all his blood is draining out his femoral artery. He lifts his head to look.

“Barney, no,” somebody else says, and suddenly, in monstrous close-up, Kevin sees gummy, drooling jaws, yellowed incisors, bloodshot eyes. There’s a hoarse panting in his ear, a wet nose against his cheek, sour doggy breath all over his face.

“Could you please keep your dog back, please?” says the woman.

The dog recedes with a yelp and a scrabbling of claws.

“Sorry, sorry,” says the second voice, a man. Then, louder, “Dude, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“No,” says Kevin.

“Lie still,” says the woman, and at last Kevin sees a face — Aztec nose, dark eyes, glossy, scalp-tight black hair — between him and the sky. She holds her hand over his face. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Now Kevin’s Admiral Adama in the CIC of the Galactica, which is full of smoke and sparking wires, and he’s waiting for a damage control report. All decks are checking in: the bulkheads held, the hull’s intact, nobody was vented into space. He can wriggle his toes and fingers, his head feels fine. The pavement under his back is very warm. Meanwhile the Amazon runner is splaying her thumb and two fingers just beyond his nose, so close that they’re out of focus.

“Three,” says Kevin, and he lifts his own hand to push them away. “Let me up.”

She presses his chest with the tips of her fingers to keep him down, but he levers up onto his elbows anyway. Only now is he beginning to worry about his suit. Just beyond the toes of his shoes, the spaniel Barney reposes like the Sphinx, panting, while the fat guy holds the leash tight and bounces awkwardly on his toes as if he’s about to run away. The Amazon is squatting next to Kevin on her powerful thighs, peering at him intently. She’s close enough that he can smell her sweat.

“Easy.” She grips him firmly under one arm as he pushes himself up off the warm pavement. On his feet he feels lightheaded, and he’s aware of his heart hammering. He brushes the grit off his palms.

“Sit.” The Amazon’s warrior grip guides wobbly Kevin to a bench.

“Man, I’m so sorry,” says the fat guy. “Barney,” he snaps, “bad dog. Bad dog.” The dog only looks up at its master mournfully, his big pink tongue lolling out of his mouth.

“Here.” The Amazon offers Kevin his sunglasses, and he turns them over in his hands as if he’s never seen anything like them before. Then he notices that his hands are trembling a little, so he folds the glasses and slides them into his jacket to cover it up. Then he remembers what the glasses are for and takes them out again and puts them on. In their autumnal glaze the Amazon stands with her hands on her hips, watching him.

“Just let me catch my breath.” Kevin puts his hands on his thighs. It isn’t until then that he notices the rip in his right trouser leg, and the blood oozing through the grit embedded in the skin of his knee.

“Oh, man,” says Kevin, with a petulant, rising inflection. “Son of a bitch.”

And it isn’t until he actually looks at the scrape, at the blood running down his shin and into his sock, that he realizes how much it hurts. He lifts his foot to flex the knee; he can move the joint without any trouble, but the scrape burns.

“Ow!” he says, his hands twitching over the torn fabric of his trousers. He wants to brush away the grit embedded in his kneecap, but he’s afraid to touch it. He looks up at the sheepishly grinning fat guy, and now, along with the pain, Kevin’s aware that he’s angry.

“Goddammit, I have a job interview in a couple of hours.” He gestures at the irreparable rip in his suit trousers, at the blood trailing down his leg.

“Oh, man,” says the fat guy. “I’m really sorry. You should’ve—”

“I should’ve what? Kicked your fucking dog?”

The guy cringes and hauls on the leash, forcing the spaniel to his feet and out of range. Now Kevin feels bad. It’s not Barney’s fault, he was just being a dog. Kevin slumps back against the bench, wondering if he’s torn his jacket, too. In frustration he flops his hands into his lap.

“I mean, fuck. I have a job interview. In three hours.”

“Easy.” The Amazon has perched on one buttock on the bench next to Kevin. “Right now, we should do something about that scrape. Think you can walk on it?”

Kevin’s knee is really beginning to sting, and the sun is pressing down on him again. Even if the jacket isn’t torn, his whole suit is wilted now in the heat, wrinkled and dusty and marinated in his sweat.

“Yeah.” He flexes the knee again; the pain doesn’t seem to go any deeper than his lacerated skin. “I think so.”

The woman stands. “My vehicle’s right over there.” She nods toward the south end of the pedestrian bridge, where it empties into some drooping trees. “I’ve got a first aid kit.” Her hand hovers over his arm.

“I can make it.” Kevin waves her away. His hands are still shaking, though. He doesn’t even look at the fat guy as he pushes up off the bench and limps after the woman. The pain’s not so bad after the first couple of steps, and he’s aware again of the oppressive heat and the enervating sunlight and the angry buzzing of the little airplane overhead. Which is getting louder now, not so much a buzz as a deep, throbbing grind. He looks up to see the plane crawling straight overhead, hauling the HOOTERS sign at a steep, unreadable angle west, up the river. The plane’s so low he can see the cables that lead from the fuselage to the banner. He stops, and the woman stops, too, her hand discreetly poised at his elbow, but Kevin’s only scanning the sky for the jet as a gauge of how long he’s been out. Except for the dwindling dopplered drone of the Hooters plane, the sky is empty and silent, but Kevin looks around him for a moment longer. The fat guy has been following, and he stops, too, yanking the dog painfully tight on the shortened leash. “You lose something?” he says.

Kevin’s not sure. On the Lamar Avenue Bridge, the southbound traffic is backed all the way up the hill toward Gaia; halfway across the bridge, the front end of a small white car is accordioned under the rear bumper of an SUV, and two figures stand gesticulating in the heat. Kevin recognizes neither of them, but then he’s got it, what’s gone missing, what he’s lost: Kelly, Joy Luck, the Girl Who Walks Like Lynda, Kevin’s once and future lover. La belle dame sans merci, his last chance. He’s been flat on his back and bleeding from the leg long enough for her to vanish completely, as if she never existed in the first place. Her absence stings even worse than the scrape on his knee. He hasn’t just lost her, he’s lost the original Lynda, Lynda 1.0, Lynda Classic. Lynda on the dance floor, Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing.

“No,” says Kevin, and he starts walking again. As the three of them — four, if you count the dog — approach the end of the bridge, the fat guy blurts out a further apology.

“I’d offer to pay for the pants, sir?” he says. “But I’m sort of between jobs right now? But what I could do, I have a really nice pair of pants in my apartment — it’s not far from here? — and I could let you borrow them? Actually, you could have them, they’re a really nice pair of pants…”

Beyond the trees at the end of the bridge Kevin can see the flash of a passing car. He stops and sighs and looks the guy up and down. Kevin’s not particularly proud of much, but he is proud of the fact that at age fifty, he’s still wearing a 34-inch waist. This guy will never see the inside of 40 inches again. The kid notices Kevin looking, but Kevin doesn’t care.

“I’ve had them for a while.” Even in the heat, the guy is blushing. “I can’t get into them anymore—”

“It’s okay.” Kevin waves him away. “Don’t worry about it.”

The kid, Kevin can see, wants nothing more than to be let off the hook, and Kevin, even though he’s hot, angry, and frustrated, can’t for the life of him see any reason to make this boy more uncomfortable than he already is. Kevin’s a midwestern college-town liberal not just by accident of birth, but by temperament. It’s in his bones to see both sides of a question, and even now he knows just how this boy is feeling — simultaneously guilty and resentful, wanting to do the right thing but afraid he’ll have to pay for something that he doesn’t really think is his fault. Times like this, Kevin wishes he were a Republican, full of absolute certainty and righteous, tribal wrath: he’d yell at the guy, threaten to sue him, offer to visit some Old Testament shock and awe on the kid’s fat ass. He could even have the dog impounded — and then the very thought pierces Kevin’s congenitally bleeding heart, because the spaniel is looking up at his plump master with a goofy, endearing look of pure devotion. At the very least he should dress the kid down, tell him (like Kevin’s mother would) that some people shouldn’t be allowed to have dogs if they can’t keep them under control. But Kevin can’t even muster enough righteous anger to do that. Not to mention the Amazon is watching them both: if he loses his cool in front of her, she might leave him here, bleeding and limping, to fend for himself in a strange city. Suddenly I’m Blanche Dubois, thinks Kevin, depending on the kindness of strangers.

“Seriously,” Kevin says, softening his tone, “I’m not mad. I got a couple hours, I’ll just go buy another pair of pants. Don’t worry about it.”

He turns away, but the kid, God bless him, says, “I could give you my address, so when I get a job I could pay you back…”

Twenty years or so ago, Kevin stood with a weeping Rooster on the sticky roof of Uncle Stan’s bakery in Hamtramck and watched the popemobile glide between mobbed sidewalks under listless Polish flags along Joseph Campau Avenue, and he saw John Paul II in his bulletproof cube like an action figure in its original packaging, gently slicing the air from side to side before him. Now Kevin makes the same benedictory gesture.

“Ego te absolvo,” he says to the boy with the dog. “Go and sin no more.” Before the boy can say anything else, Kevin limps away alongside the Amazon.

“That was nice of you,” she says.

Kevin shrugs. His nerves are still jangling from his fall, his emotions are right at the surface, and the last thing he wants to do is lose it in front of this rather intense woman. He exaggerates his limp a bit so that he can hang back and get a grip on himself. And also, though this wasn’t his first thought, so that he can check her out from behind. She’s certainly powerful-looking. He likes leanness in a woman, but actual muscles, like this woman’s got, don’t do much for him. The fact that he’s not automatically attracted to her worries him a bit — is it possible that he’s not turned on by a woman that he doesn’t think he could overpower? Sometimes with Beth sex used to be a kind of wrestling match, and he’d enjoyed grappling with her as much as (so far as he knew) she’d enjoyed grappling with him, until he’d pinned her, breathless, to the bed. It wasn’t always like this, of course, but often enough, right to the end of their time together. What does that say about him? All these years later, does it turn out that Shulamith Firestone was right all along, that all men are rapists deep down? This woman is certainly solid, almost brawny, with a formidable gravitas; her military bearing tells him that she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If he tried to pin this woman to a bed, no matter how playfully, she’d break his neck. As he follows her off the pedestrian bridge and along the street toward a narrow parking lot under the looming, rusting span of the railroad trestle, Kevin gratefully leaps at the possibility that it’s her humorlessness, not her strength, that turns him off. That’s it, that’s the problem: it’s not who would win two out of three takedowns, it’s that he’s never known how to deal with a woman if he couldn’t make her laugh.

“How you doing?” she says without looking at him, and from a pocket of her running shorts she pulls a key remote and clicks it. The lights of an enormous, shiny red pickup truck blink and chirp.

“I’m hot.” Limping up to the truck, Kevin takes off his jacket and splays his fingers under the collar so he can slap the dust off the back of it. No rips, thank God, no permanent scrapes. If he’d had to replace the jacket, then he really would be angry.

“You’re a little overdressed for the trail, don’t you think?” Now the Amazon smiles back at him. It’s a knowing smile, showing some bright teeth. Okay, thinks Kevin, she’s capable of irony, that’s a start. She opens the driver’s door and pats the seat, and he climbs up into the baking heat of the cab and sits sideways in the bucket seat with his jacket folded across his lap and his knees sticking out the door. Meanwhile she leans over the side of the truck bed and rattles around in a big plastic storage box. His scrape is really burning now, and his sock is sticky and warm where the blood has soaked into it. New trousers, new socks — he draws the line at a new pair of shoes, no matter how much blood soaks into one of them. A hundred and fifty dollar shoes, he reminds himself, his anger flaring again. He slumps sideways in the seat, his temple against the padded headrest, the heat at his back even worse than the heat outside, the glitter from the traffic at the end of the Lamar bridge getting to him even through his sunglasses. Maybe I should just pack it in, he thinks, call a cab, go back to the airport, fly home. I can’t live in this wretched heat, in this merciless sunlight, surrounded by upscale Gaians and mouthy homeless guys and fat slackers with clumsy spaniels. Not to mention brawny, imperious women who could break me in two. I can’t take it. I’m not engineered for it.

“What’s that?” The Amazon is standing in front of Kevin again, twisting the cap off a bottle of water; there’s a red plastic first aid kit wedged under her arm. Now that he’s marginally less distracted by everything that’s happened in the last few minutes — falling, bleeding, sweating — Kevin takes a good look at her. She’s a little older than he thought — she has laugh lines, improbably enough, and a few more lines in her neck than he noticed before — but she truly is amazingly fit. Even when all she’s doing is twisting the cap off the bottle, her biceps flex under her glistening bronze skin. Sweat beads across her tight forehead and along the struts of her collarbone, and she peers at him with some sort of professional gaze, like she’s sizing him up.

“Sorry?” Kevin says.

“You said something about engineering.” She hands him the bottle. “Are you an engineer?”

“No.” Kevin’s alarmed that he spoke without realizing it. The bottle is blessedly cold in his hand, and he puts it to his lips and chugs a third of it. The shock of the cold water against his palate almost blinds him. Meanwhile the woman reaches into the truck bed again, and Kevin hears the hollow thump of a cooler lid and the liquid rattle of ice. She comes back with a bottle of orange Gatorade, which she twists open just as briskly.

“Editor,” gasps Kevin, the cold water freezing all the bones around his sinuses.

“Mm.” The woman nods with her mouth full, recaps the Gatorade, and sets it on the pavement.

“I’m an editor.” Kevin presses the cool lower half of the water bottle to his forehead.

“Okay,” she says. “Hold this.” She lays the first aid kit on top of Kevin’s jacket on his lap; it’s like the grade-school lunchboxes of his youth, only without gaudy pictures of the Monkees or the Man from UNCLE. She stands so close to him now that he can see the fine texture of her skin, but she doesn’t meet his eye; Kevin can’t tell if she’s being wary or demure. Of course, it has to be wariness — who’s demure anymore? She pops open the kit with her thumbs, reaches in, and snaps on a pair of surgical gloves.

“Wow,” says Kevin. “Is it that bad?”

“No.” She stoops to pry apart the rip in his pant leg with her latex fingers. The whitish gloves stand out on her dusky skin like she’s dipped her hands in paint. Kevin notes the Euclidean straightness of the part in her tight, glossy hair, admires its military precision.

“But I don’t know where your blood’s been, do I?” She says this abstractedly; it’s a line she’s used before. Then she looks up, fixes his gaze with her dark eyes, and smiles. “These pants are goners. Mind if I tear them a little wider to get at your knee?”

“Usually I’d expect dinner and a movie first,” Kevin says, “but go ahead.”

She smiles, but it’s a professional smile. She’s heard that one before, too. Kevin’s lizard brain begins to race. Who needs Kelly? Who needs the shopworn memory of Lynda on the railing? This moment right here, as the Amazon in latex tears his pant leg down to the middle of his shin with one sharp jerk, this is his official Austin Cute Meet. Yes, she’s formidable, and certainly fitter than Kevin — those biceps, those quads — but didn’t he used to fantasize about Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? And buff Linda Hamilton in the second Terminator? And, more recently, tough little Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica? Not to mention that the Amazon is more age-appropriate for him than Kelly or Stella or even Beth. Linda Hamilton, yeah, sort of crossed with that Latina actress he likes — not Jennifer Lopez, but the one who used to be in those John Sayles movies. She didn’t get those muscles and her brisk, no-nonsense manner from working in an office, thinks Kevin, and he remembers the first Amazon he saw today, the fierce National Guardswoman at the airport, and he wonders if this warrior priestess, dabbing the blood and grit away from his knee with a piece of gauze, might also be in the military. Wouldn’t that freak out his friends in Ann Arbor, if he ended up with a Texan, a Chicana, and a soldier!

“Am I hurting you?” She lifts the bloody gauze away from his knee.

“No,” Kevin says, so she presses a little harder. It does hurt, a little, but he’d never admit it to a woman like this. Obviously she’s some sort of health care professional — she snapped those gloves on without hesitation, and she’s probing expertly at his knee. Oh my God, she’s a nurse, concludes Kevin, this is my lucky day, not just because he’s getting his minor injury treated for free by a professional, but because she’s a nurse. Mick McNulty used to rhapsodize about nurses: among all the crummy jobs he’d held before his crummy job at Big Star Records, he’d been an orderly in a couple of nursing homes, and he used to tell Kevin that nurses made the best lovers, that they weren’t squeamish or sentimental about bodies, that they saw blood and shit and puckered flesh all day long, that fucking was just another natural function as far as they were concerned. In the years since, Kevin has realized that McNulty’s enthusiasm about the sexual sangfroid of nurses was just a variant of the male erotic mythology that celebrates the innate lubricity of cheerleaders, flight attendants, and waitresses. But on the other hand, McNulty claimed to be speaking from a deep and intimate experience of his subject.

“Get yourself a nurse, young man,” said McNulty, the Horace Greeley of guilt-free balling, and now Kevin can’t help but smile, because his inner nineteen-year-old is telling him that he’s hit pay dirt. Meanwhile Nurse Amazon is shaking up a little plastic bottle.

“Now this is going to sting,” she says, soaking a fresh piece of gauze.

But it doesn’t sting at first, it only stains his knee a rusty orange, and Kevin is relieved. It wouldn’t do to squeal like a girl in front of Nurse Amazon, but then of course his knee begins to sting like the slow burn of a hot sauce, and Kevin gasps in spite of himself.

“Told you,” she says.

“What is that,” Kevin says, as the burn creeps all the way through to his kneecap, “some sort of jalapeño marinade?”

“Actually,” says the woman as she rips the backing off a large, square bandage, “capsaicin, which is what makes jalapeños hot, is the active ingredient in some topical pain ointments.”

“It’s not working, then,” says Kevin, wincing as she presses the bandage across his scrape.

“Not this.” She smoothes the adhesive edges down with her thumbs. “This is an antiseptic, and it’s citrus-based. It’s supposed to burn.” She smiles at him again, and her laugh lines crinkle fetchingly. “That’s how we know it’s working.”

“Mission accomplished.” The sting of the antiseptic actually seems to be making Kevin sweat more, if that’s even possible. “Plus,” he says, “my wound will be lemony fresh.”

She laughs, this time for real. Suddenly Kevin’s tumble on the bridge, his embarrassment, the citric acid burning through his patella — now it all seems worth it. He’s gotten Nurse Amazon, the Priestess of Minor Injuries, to laugh.

She snaps off the gloves as briskly as she snapped them on — no wedding ring, notes Kevin — and pitches them into the truck bed. “You’ll want to keep that clean and dry. And here.” She hands him another, clean bandage from the first aid kit. “Just in case.”

She has to stand close to him again to shut the kit on his lap. This time he catches her eye, and she purses her lips and ducks her gaze — can it be? — demurely.

“Thanks. You’ve been really great.” Kevin tucks the bandage into the breast pocket of his shirt, while she returns the first aid kit to the storage box. “You take Blue Cross?”

Nurse Amazon has stepped back from the truck to swig some more Gatorade. It’s almost as if she wants Kevin to get a better look at her, but then he considers how he must look to her — pale, sweaty, rumpled — and thinks, I should be so lucky. But of course he takes a good long look anyway, admiring her solid, fat-free thighs, the definition of her biceps, the muscles in her throat as she tips her head back and swallows. Then she lowers the bottle, swipes her lips with the back of her hand, and says, “No charge.”

“Must be my lucky day, then,” Kevin says, pausing to swig the last of his water, which is noticeably warmer already. “Getting nursing care for free.”

Immediately Kevin realizes he’s said something he shouldn’t have. She stiffens; there’s a slight catch in her breathing, not quite a gasp. For a moment Kevin thought he’d seen a brightness in her gaze, not necessarily flirtatious, but the gleam of a good-looking, fit, fortysomething woman appreciating a man’s regard, even if she wasn’t particularly interested in return. But now that’s gone, as if a curtain has fallen.

“Nursing care?” Her voice, too, has noticeably cooled.

“It’s just you seemed to know your way around a bandage.” Kevin knows he ought to shut up, but that’s never stopped him before. “The way you snapped on those gloves…”

The Amazon slugs the last of her Gatorade and twists the top back on the empty bottle like she’s twisting Kevin’s neck. He’s trying to put it all together — the military bearing, the sculpted physique, the pickup truck — of course! She’s a lesbian — a weight-lifting, Latina, ex-military lesbian — and she thinks he’s coming on to her.

“I didn’t…,” Kevin starts to say, with no idea how he’s going to finish the sentence.

“Thoracic surgeon,” says the woman, tossing the empty bottle into the truck bed. “And I’m afraid I’m running a little late.”

“Ah,” says Kevin. “Of course.” Idiot, he thinks. Idiot, idiot, idiot.

“You’re going to need a department store to replace those trousers.” She holds her palm out for his empty water bottle. “Do you have a car?” She drills him with her gaze, daring him to apologize.

“No,” he says, his mouth suddenly dry again. “I’m just here for the day.” He gingerly hands her the bottle, and she practically flings it into the back. “I have a job interview.”

“Yes, you said.” She steps back and gestures to the side like a maitre d’, and it takes a moment for Kevin to realize she wants him to get out of the truck. Clutching his coat, he scrambles down to the pavement and turns awkwardly, his torn trouser leg flapping, his knee still smarting from the antiseptic. Meanwhile Dr. Amazon grips the side of the driver’s doorway and yanks herself in one go up into the seat.

“There’s a Nordstrom’s out at the mall.” She looks down at him from the truck. “Do you have a cell, to call a cab?”

“No, actually.” He deliberately left his cell in Ann Arbor, so that if Stella calls him from Chicago, he won’t have to lie.

The good doctor slams the door and starts her truck, and the well-tuned roar of the engine startles Kevin a few paces back. I guess a ride’s out of the question, he thinks. Then her darkly tinted window whirs down, and she drapes her elbow out the window. He moistens his lips and says, “I don’t suppose you have a cell I could borrow.” He has to raise his voice to be heard over the confident rumble of the truck.

“My cell’s for emergencies only.” She points past him toward the bridge. “You can catch a bus right over there, far side of Lamar.” She looks him up and down. “There’s a Target a couple miles south, at Ben White.”

Her truck jerks into gear, the engine roars. Did she just say Target?

“Hey, thank you!” Kevin cries over the rumble, minding his manners, hating the way his voice rises an octave. “You’ve been very kind, Miz…”

“Doctor Barrientos.” She guns her engine to drown out any further bleatings from Kevin. He steps back as her glossy truck reverses out of its space, screeches to a stop, then heaves forward, past the toes of Kevin’s shoes and out of the lot onto the street.

Kevin limps past the end of the pedestrian bridge, toward Lamar. He drapes his jacket over his arm, careful not to empty his inside pocket. His knee stings, his sock is sticky with blood, and his nerves are still jangling. He feels old and slow and a good deal more fragile than he felt just fifteen minutes ago, all because of his little accident, and it doesn’t help that he’s been insulted by his good Samaritan, through no fault of his own. His misunderstanding about her had been wholly inadvertent, and let’s face it, not all that much of an insult. What the hell’s wrong with being a nurse?

He sees her truck idling angrily at the intersection. Target, he thinks. She said that just to piss me off. I’ll have you know, Doctor, these trousers were picked out by my very stylish and much younger girlfriend at the Abercrombie & Fitch in Briarwood Mall, thank you very much. Say what you want about Stella, she has an eye for quality; she’d never take him to fucking Target. Say what you want about Stella, but she knows what she wants, and goes for it without hesitation. Her single-mindedness, her ferocity, is what still thrills him about her after three years, even though he’s certain that he doesn’t love her. Well, pretty certain: he’s a little surprised at the moment at the depth of his anger at the doctor’s implied insult of his girlfriend’s sartorial judgment. It’s one thing for him to roll his eyes at his girlfriend’s joy at the gaudiest artifacts of pop culture—American Idol, anyone? Project Runway? — and her guilt-free uninterest in the books and movies and music Kevin loves, but it’s another for some humorless bitch in a pickup truck to do it. Don’t say nothin’ bad about my baby, Doctor.

He hobbles a little faster toward the corner, almost as if he means to come alongside the surgeon’s truck and catch her eye and give her a piece of his mind. But the intersection where the bridge meets the cross street is crowded with vehicles, radiating heat and impatience; the fender bender on the bridge has reduced traffic to a single lane each way, and cars are backed up along Lamar. As Kevin comes to the corner, a motorcycle cop in a tight, dark uniform — now that guy must be hot — is weaving his massive bike through the gridlock toward the center of the bridge, his flasher bright even in the midday glare. By the time Kevin turns back to the doctor’s truck, she’s rounded the corner and accelerated south down Lamar, shifting up with a stuttering, guttural roar.

The motorcycle cop glides to a stop at the corner, right in front of Kevin. His helmet dips toward Kevin’s leg and then his mouth speaks loudly from under his tinted visor.

“You hurt?” he shouts. His idling bike makes his whole body vibrate, as if he’s just a little out of focus. He points at Kevin’s leg, and Kevin, like an idiot, looks down at his own injury as if he’s surprised to see it.

“No,” Kevin shouts back. “I just fell down. It’s got nothing to do with that.” He lifts his chin up the bridge toward the accident, and the cop gives him a brisk cop nod and rumbles away. Actually, Kevin feels a little wobbly, a little lightheaded, as if his brain is floating free of his head. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t wait for the walk sign and hobbles out into the clotted traffic across Lamar, his surgically incised trouser leg flapping. The heat reverberates off the backed-up vehicles, and the air stinks of exhaust. He turns left across the street and limps alongside an exhausted little park of underachieving trees and yellowed grass. Southbound cars rev up Lamar as they escape from the jam on the bridge, and over their rumble Kevin hears birds creaking and cawing from the drooping trees.

I should’ve rented a car, Kevin thinks. Even if all he’d done was drive it from the airport and back again, at the very least it would have kept him off the streets, where he has been lured by nostalgia and middle-aged lust into the labyrinth of a strange city, accosted by homeless men, tripped by a dog, condescended to by a surgeon. Right now, though, he’d settle for a place to sit down. The wide-open sky hammers the cartoon colors of the fast food franchises up ahead — Schlotzsky’s, Taco Bell, Jack in the Box — their bright colors simultaneously blanched by the sun and deepened by the tint of Kevin’s glasses. A low, stucco restaurant with a big pink sign that says TACO CABANA wafts a spicy, greasy aroma across all six lanes of Lamar, but Kevin’s still too hot, shaky, and pissed off to think about food. The racket of the birds taunts him. What he needs more than a meal right now is a bench, but along the sidewalk up ahead all he sees is a NO PARKING sign and the great big red and green Schlotzsky’s sign — but no bus stop, and no bench.

“Goddammit,” he says out loud, slapping the soles of his shoes against the pavement, as flat-footed as Willie Loman. “Motherfucker,” he adds for good measure, aware that he’s trudging even further away from where he’s supposed to be in a few hours. There’s a hill up ahead covered with trees, which means that thanks to Dr. Barrientos’s bum directions, he’s heading into residential Austin and away from downtown. He’s off the map, into terra incognita. Here there be Schlotzsky’s.

Where, it occurs to him, at least I can sit and cool off and collect myself, have a glass of iced tea. Where maybe I can lock myself in the restroom and wash my face, maybe even take off my shirt and sponge-bathe myself in the sink with paper towels. He hobbles toward the Schlotzsky’s sign, the angry rush of traffic on his left, the inhuman rattle of the birds on his right. Then up ahead he sees a bus stop sign and a bench. Kevin stops at the edge of Schlotzsky’s parking lot, trying to decide whether to go into the restaurant or wait for the bus. The vast, heatstruck Texas sky throbbing overhead, birds screaming in his ear, Kevin feels like he’s slowly melting into a puddle on the concrete. But before he can make his move one way or the other — bus stop or Schlotzsky’s — a glossy red wall of vehicle heaves to a stop right in front of him. Kevin’s too tired and lightheaded to jump back, so he just sways on his feet and blinks in alarm at the long, thin, red reflection of himself in the vast passenger door of the truck. He sees his own round, Irish-Polish peasant face in the tinted window, with the dark lenses of his sunglasses where his eyes ought to be. He looks like a ghost from a Japanese horror film. Then his image is decapitated as the window whirs down.

Saints preserve us, thinks Kevin, it’s Dr. Barrientos!

“Hey.” She gestures at him out of the tinted dusk of the truck’s cab. “I think you dropped this.”

She’s holding something pale in his direction, pinched between her fingers. Kevin blinks, sways, then steps forward, lifting his glasses onto his forehead to peer into the gloom of the cab. She’s holding his invitation letter for the job interview. He reaches slowly into the cool air blowing out the window, hears the sibilant roar of the AC ducts, and takes the letter from her gingerly, as if she might snatch it back at any moment.

“Thanks.” He roughly folds the letter into quarters and wedges it with some difficulty into the breast pocket of his shirt, crumpling the bandage she gave him.

“Would you like a ride?” says the doctor, but Kevin has suddenly swung his jacket off his arm and thrust his fingers into the inside pocket. What else has he dropped along the way? His fingers find his notebook, his boarding pass, but where are his sunglasses?

“Would you like a ride?” she says again, raising her voice. Her truck idles, a big, purring cat. “I can drop you off on South Lamar somewhere.”

Kevin just gawps at her, so she enunciates more slowly. “There are a couple of department stores I can take you to.”

But he’s not listening, he’s digging fruitlessly in every pocket of his jacket. He looks up at her. “You didn’t happen to find my sunglasses?”

Out of the gloom of her truck she says, “They’re on your head.”

Kevin pats his hot forehead, fingers the lenses like a blind man.

“Get in,” says Dr. Barrientos. “Out of the heat.”

Kevin doesn’t remember climbing into the truck, but next thing he knows he’s sitting in a padded leather bucket seat while the truck idles in Schlotzsky’s parking lot. The AC blasts in his face. Beyond the little park with the limp trees he sees the glitter of cars backed up on the bridge. Even through the closed windows and the rush of the AC, he can still hear the birds chattering in the trees. The sun shines at a steep angle through the windshield, a sharp line of light falling across his wrists. His jacket is folded on his lap, he’s holding another cold bottle of water, and Dr. Barrientos’s warm palm is pressed against his sweating forehead.

“Drink it slowly,” she says. “Just a sip at a time.”

He drinks. The water freezes his sinuses.

“How’s your blood pressure?” She turns his left arm palm up and presses two fingers firmly against his wrist.

“My blood pressure? How would I know?” You’re the doctor, he almost says.

“I mean generally, not right this minute.”

He drinks again. The cold is blinding. “Good,” he gasps.

She presses her knuckles lightly against his temple again. “Were you dizzy or nauseous before you passed out on the bridge?”

“No.”

“Good.” She rests her hand on his upper arm.

“And I didn’t pass out,” Kevin says, slightly annoyed now. “That guy’s dog tripped me.”

“So you didn’t feel lightheaded or…”

“No.” He lifts the bottle. “I’m fine. Really.”

The doctor cocks her head as if she’s considering his truthfulness. He can smell sweat, though he can’t tell if it’s hers or his or some commingling of both.

“Aren’t I?”

She nods. “I think you’re probably okay.”

“Probably?”

Her hand shifts on his arm. “I was a little worried when I saw you just now, but your pulse isn’t racing, and you’re still sweating freely, so you’re not presenting with heatstroke.”

“Glad to hear it.” Some bedside manner she’s got, Dr. Barrientos. But then she’s a surgeon: most of her patients are probably unconscious when she sees them, so she doesn’t really need a bedside manner.

“Look, I shouldn’t have left you so quickly back there,” she says. “I’m sorry if I was abrupt.” The way she’s composed her face tells Kevin that apologies don’t come easy to her, but that she has disciplined herself to make them when necessary. He is appropriately appeased that she’s taking the trouble for him.

“I’m sorry, too,” he says, ever the midwesterner.

“For what?”

“For assuming you were a nurse. I mean, this day and age, I should know better.”

She gestures dismissively and looks out the windshield. She has made up her mind to be nice, and nothing, evidently, will deter Dr. Barrientos after she’s made up her mind. She has that in common with Stella.

“That wasn’t about you,” she says. “That was about something else.” She gives him another surprising, sidelong smile, only instead of knowing, now she looks rueful.

“Well, I’m sorry anyway.”

She nods and puts the truck in gear. “You’re not heatstroked,” she says, checking her mirrors, “but I’d feel better if you’d just sit and drink your water and let me drop you off someplace where you can buy another pair of trousers. Okay?”

Kevin salutes her with his bottle. “How can I say no?”

“Buckle up,” she says.

* * *

Rehydrated, air-conditioned, buckled in, Kevin rides comfortably up South Lamar in the well-padded cab of Dr. Barrientos’s powerful red pickup.

“I’m Kevin.” He reaches across the cab to offer her his hand.

“Claudia.” Her handshake is not particularly firm, which surprises him, because you’d think a surgeon, not to mention someone with her obvious upper-body strength, would have a grip like a C-clamp. But he reminds himself that he’s through making assumptions, for now, anyway. Inside the cab the guttural roar of the engine is a vibrationless purr; it’s like riding in a recording booth. Beyond the tinted windows smaller cars and the fast food joints fall quickly behind. Up ahead some blocky brown condos rise out of the green mass of trees, atop a low cliff of crumbling yellow stone. Across a brownish lawn below the cliff is a line of stout palm trees, with squat pineapple trunks and spiky crowns. An hour or so ago the sight of palm trees startled him, but now Kevin’s too lightheaded to feel amazement.

“So you exercise in this heat?” he says.

“That surprises you?”

Dr. Barrientos is a confident driver, to say the least, accelerating through a big intersection, crowding a yellow light that turns red as they pass under it. She guns the truck up the hill and under the lee of the bluff.

“Well, my experience in Texas so far pretty clearly shows that I can’t even walk around in it,” Kevin says. “And here you are, running.”

A glance from the doctor. “Where are you from exactly?”

“Michigan.”

“And you’re here for an interview, no?”

“Yeah,” drawls Kevin, like he’s not so sure any longer.

“Is the job a good one?”

“It had better be, if I have to get used to this heat.”

The doctor laughs, not much more than a snort. “This is nothing.”

Kevin watches her sidelong, past the edge of his sunglasses. She drives like a man, her legs spread casually, her right hand loose on the top of the steering wheel, the way his dad used to settle in on long drives. At the same time she’s reaching behind her with her left hand, elbow in the air, squeezing the headrest and flexing her biceps. The smell of her sweat is powerful, even in the arctic AC, but it’s not unpleasant. It even reminds Kevin of sex, and he lets his sidelong gaze linger on her sweat-glistening thigh. He wonders if what McNulty assumed about nurses goes for doctors as well.

“I grew up in the Valley,” she says, “where it gets even hotter than here.”

“The Valley?”

“Brownsville? McAllen?” She glances at him. “Down along the Rio Grande.”

She says “Rio Grande” like a Spanish speaker, with flowing R’s and the E on the end. Rrrio Grrran-day.

“Laredo,” she says. “You’ve heard of Laredo, right?” Saying “Laredo” her tongue does something with the R that Kevin could never imitate.

“Sure.”

“Well, we never lived in Laredo. But it’s in the Valley.”

They sail effortlessly past an Austin city bus grinding up the hill. Lamar is five lanes wide here, but the canopy of trees hanging over either side of the street makes it feel narrow. Even the regular trees here look strange to Kevin, not just the palms. It’s the leaves, he decides, they’re smaller and sharper than the broad deciduous leaves of Michigan trees. Shinier, too, like green leather.

“So you were never out walking the streets of Laredo,” he says.

“Excuse me?” She looks at him as sharply as she did when he implied she was a nurse. Now she’s gripping the wheel with both hands. Oh hell, thinks Kevin, now she thinks I just called her a streetwalker. Maybe she noticed him checking her out and has decided she doesn’t like it. Keep Your Mouth Shut, he reminds himself. I should just get out and walk. But instead he starts singing.

“ ‘As I walked out on the streets of Laredo,’ ”—thank God for Grampa Quinn and his Sons of the Pioneers LPs—“ ‘as I walked out in Laredo one day…’ ” Kevin’s quavering rendition has none of his grandfather’s confident tenor — like his dad, Kevin’s more of a baritone, and he’s reaching for the high notes — and the padded upholstery of the truck muffles the music. But even so, it seems to have soothed Dr. Barrientos’s savage breast.

“Ah,” she says.

Kevin takes another gulp of water. With this woman, it’s always two steps forward, one step back. At the top of the hill ahead, a crowded strip-mall sign rises against the whitish sky. HEART OF TEXAS MUSIC says the top of the sign, with an electric guitar outlined in red neon. Phone and power lines cross and recross above the street like laces, slung between wooden telephone poles silhouetted against the glare. A haze blurs the signs and power lines and telephone poles ever so slightly, but it’s not humidity, it’s the light ricocheting off itself, glittering, fracturing. Even behind his sunglasses, even through the twilight tint of the doctor’s windows, it makes him squint. No wonder everybody here’s so testy.

“ ‘Beat the drum slowly,’ right?” she says, not quite smiling. She lifts her other hand to the headrest and starts squeezing and flexing. Kevin glimpses the blued shadow of stubble under her arm. He’s pierced with desire for her; he’d like to bury his nose in that armpit.

“My grandfather used to sing it.” He smiles at her. “Back where I come from, it’s all anyone knows of Texas.”

“ ‘The Streets of Laredo’? Really?” Her fingers press so deep into the leather of the headrest Kevin’s sure she’s going to puncture it. Her biceps throbs like a heart. He’s thinking that in bed she could clamp a man between her powerful thighs like a predator, and he’s wondering — in the vernacular of his old-school Polish uncle and his VFW buddies — if he’s even man enough for a woman like Dr. Barrientos.

“Well, you know. Cowboys. Cattle. Oil.” Lawless border towns, he nearly says. The Alamo, The Searchers. Docile, flat-faced Mexican peasants. Mariachi bands. Fiery, finger-snapping, hat-dancing señoritas.

“Chips and salsa,” he says instead.

“Chips and salsa.” She gives her little snorting laugh again and drapes both hands loosely over the wheel, just like his dad used to. That cools his ardor a bit. He can live with the idea that he might fall for a woman like his mother, but would he really fall for one like his dad?

“And Dubya,” Kevin says. “We blame Texans for that.”

Of course he shouldn’t have said that — what if she’s a Republican? A lot of them are, he knows — Bush-voting Hispanics, conservative Catholic Chicanos, who voted for Obama only because the rest of the Republican Party got so squirrelly about immigration. But to his relief, she gives him a heartfelt laugh, if a little grudging and melancholy. They sail under another yellow light, weaving between slower cars to the top of the hill, out from under the trees and into the glare again. Ahead is a little foreshortened forest of plainspoken signs — COLOR COPIES 69¢, SELF-STORAGE, SAXON PUB — punctuated by telephone poles.

“You can’t blame us for that,” she says. “He’s from Connecticut.”

“Ah, a Yankee. So it’s our fault.”

“A Norte Americano.” She lifts one finger off the wheel. “You don’t get more norte than Connecticut.”

“Hey, I’m from Michigan, remember?” says Kevin. “I’m practically a Canadian.”

She smiles, still attractively melancholy. “Oh, Canadians are all right.” Her eyes seem distracted again.

Now they’re passing the slightly scruffy sort of local businesses that he’d find on the down-market end of Stadium Boulevard back home, out toward Ypsilanti: a Mexican restaurant in bright orange stucco; a Goodwill shop; another Mexican restaurant; a gas station and convenience store where unleaded regular is twenty cents cheaper than in Ann Arbor. The very pavement of Lamar looks scruffy, as leached of color as a faded pair of jeans. Behind these roadside establishments rise masses of trees, their leaves glittering in the nearly vertical sunlight, deep green in the mutually reinforcing tints of Kevin’s glasses and the windows of the truck. Who knew Austin was so leafy? But even at a distance the treetops still look strange, more like the bristling feathers of some prehistoric bird than leaves, and all this archaeopteryx foliage unsettles him even more. Strange trees; strange car; strange, distracted woman — Kevin feels the mild but distinct queasiness of being a passenger in a stranger’s vehicle. And not just a strange vehicle, but a fastidiously antiseptic one — even the cab he caught at the airport had more character than Dr. Barrientos’s truck. There’s no yin-yang medallion spinning from her rearview, no CDs in the pockets between the seats, no crumbs in the upholstery, not even any dust on the padded dash. Apart from her sweat, it doesn’t even have a smell apart from the clammy chill of the AC. But then she’s a surgeon. Perhaps she maintains a sterile environment even in her car.

“You get used to it,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“The heat.”

A silence descends, like an awkward pause on a first date. There’s something about the furrowing of her forehead, about her headrest-squeezing and her gunning of the accelerator, that tells him her mind’s on something other than her passenger and his tolerance for the Texas climate. He recognizes distraction, because Stella is always carrying on a conversation with herself in her head. Sometimes in the car, when they’re riding without talking, she gestures suddenly; sometimes her lips move silently. Or she’ll say quietly to herself, “Uh huh” or “That’s right,” with a sharp little nod. Times like this Kevin thinks of her as wandering in the Stella Continuum, and early on he learned not to disturb her, because when he has, she’s started with a wild look in her eye, as frightened, and frightening, as a sleepwalker jolted awake. (Actually waking her up at night, in fact, from one of her feverish nightmares, is even scarier.) So he knows better than to say anything to this intense woman he’s only just met. Instead, instinctively, he does what he usually does when Stella’s lost in the Stella Continuum.

“Cartridge World,” he says absently, reading the first sign he sees, a big, square yellow one.

“Sorry?”

“That sign.” Kevin gestures, Claudia glances. Cartridge World glides by, a narrow storefront with tinted windows.

“I think I’m having a Texas moment,” he says.

“Right.” She nods slowly. “Everybody in Texas drives a pickup and carries a gun.”

Kevin gestures palms up to encompass the cab of the truck. “Pickup,” he says. Tips his head back toward the shop, dwindling in the rear window. “Cartridge World.”

“They sell toner,” she says. “Printer cartridges.”

“Ah.” Repeat after me: KYMS, KYMS, KYMS.

“You’ll pardon my saying so,” says Claudia, “but you seem to be a man who jumps to conclusions.”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m not. I mean, I don’t. Jump to conclusions. Not usually. It’s just…”

He’s not even sure what he means to say. Lamar winds through a series of slow curves, still climbing slightly. Trees with bristling little leaves crowd close to the road again, and now there are actual houses along the street, little one-story bungalows, decades old. Most of them are small, funky businesses now: a hair and nail salon, a chiropractor, a pawnshop that advertises PAYDAY LOANS. A colorfully hip vintage shop, an immigration lawyer named Gonzalez. A psychic palm reader — as opposed to what, Kevin wonders, a nonpsychic palm reader? — whose hand-painted sign declares that she can HABLA ESPAÑOL. Just beyond that he sees a billboard in Español—La nueva AT&T—and an exterminator’s sign that features a giant, brown, neon cockroach, all legs and antennae, unlit and unwriggling at midday. And then he sees another Mexican restaurant, an unlit neon sign with a stepped Mayan pyramid and the name MEXICO LINDO in red tubing. The phrase rings in his head in Dolby surround sound — it’s a line from The Wild Bunch, but he can’t remember who says it. Not William Holden or Ernest Borgnine, certainly not Warren Oates or Ben Johnson. No, it was the fifth guy, the Mexican member of the gang. The first time Kevin saw the film, he watched a bootleg print of the director’s cut on the Michigan campus during his Big Star days. Saw it with McNulty, in fact, who slumped in his seat next to Kevin in the back row and laughed quietly to himself all the way through the orgy of carnage at the end. Kevin’s seen it half a dozen times since on VHS and DVD, but he still remembers that raucous, grainy, badly focused first viewing, a film co-op screening attended mainly by whooping, drunken engineering students, who cheered at the end when Holden shot the beautiful señorita who’d just shot him, and called her, “Bitch.” What was that character’s name, the Mexican guy? The one whose cut throat was the incitement for all that subsequent bloodshed, the wholesale slaughter of peasants, little boys, and women? The whole situation made him uncomfortable at the time, and makes him uncomfortable still, and the best he can do in defense of it is to put it in the context of when he saw it and who he saw it with. And where he saw it: Auditorium A, Angell Hall. That’s it! That was the guy’s name! Angel! The Mexican in the bunch, the guy they went back to rescue from the bandit warlord at the end. Angel says “Mexico lindo” near the beginning of the film, as they leave Texas and cross the Rio Grande. The Rrrio Grrran-day. “Meh-hee-co leen-do,” Angel says. Lovely Mexico.

But Kevin can’t point that out, because he doesn’t want to be seen jumping to conclusions again, doesn’t want to tell this touchy Latina who grew up on the border that everything he knows about Mexican culture comes from the films of Sam Peckinpah. He might as well invoke Speedy Gonzales or the Taco Bell Chihuahua, might as well tell her, “We don’ need no steenking badges.” His default liberal guilt and his native midwestern decency jerk him short like a leash. But he can’t help what he’s thinking, and right now he feels like he’s riding into another country — a hot, dusty, sun-blanched place with immigration lawyers and bilingual palm readers and corporate billboards in Spanish and leaves that bristle like blades and giant neon cockroaches and palm trees. Sweaty, dehydrated, and enervated, his torn trousers flapping wide over his bandaged knee, Kevin feels like Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in either the first twenty minutes or the last twenty minutes of The Treasure of Sierra Madre; all he needs is two days of stubble and the shakes. But he can’t tell Claudia any of this, either. Oh Christ, thinks Kevin, his liberal guilt cinching tighter, she’s right. I do jump to conclusions.

“It’s just what?” says Claudia.

“You know how it is when you’re in a strange city?” His voice shoots up an octave, which he hates, but he can’t stop himself. “It’s like you’re fourteen years old again, big and gawky and clueless. You know? Everything you normally take for granted, in fact everything that everybody around you is taking for granted, you have to stop and think about. You know what I mean?”

“Hm,” she says.

Of course, Claudia — Dr. Barrientos, that is — has probably never felt defenseless or clueless in her entire life. Or if she has, she’d never admit to it.

“It’s just that here I am, in Texas, where I never thought I’d be, and I’m seeing all this stuff I just don’t see at home — Cartridge World and palm trees and that neon cockroach we just passed and all these Mexican restaurants…”

Shouldn’t have said that, of course, but just then he points excitedly through the windshield at yet another Mexican restaurant, this one with a line of fraying palms around the edge of its parking lot.

“And Mexican restaurants with palm trees!” He’s laughing now, he knows he sounds like an idiot, but she’s laughing, too, at his excitement, if nothing else. “And I try to link it all with what I bring with me from Michigan, and what little I know about Texas. Which is, of course, mostly clichés and stereotypes.” He’s gesturing with both hands now, which makes him even more self-conscious. “So of course I get everything wrong, and not only that, I get it wrong in front of a native Texan. Who’s been very kind to me. Which only makes me feel more like a fish out of water. Like I’m fourteen years old all over again.”

Breathlessly he stops and lets his hands drop. At least he didn’t mention The Wild Bunch. He’s almost afraid to look at her, but when he does, he sees that she’s still smiling.

“Good thing we didn’t drive up South Congress,” she says. “There’s a store there called Just Guns.”

Kevin’s laughter doesn’t lessen the ache of his alienation. Moving here would mean that he’d feel fourteen years old for months, maybe even years, before he became acclimated to Texas. All along the street for the last few minutes, between the bungalows and under the trees, he’s seen several one- and two-bay specialty garages of cinderblock, where, repair by repair, you can remake your aging auto until it’s been rebuilt from the treads up — replace your muffler, rebuild your transmission, reline your brakes, rotate your tires. Change the oil in fifteen minutes, precision tune the engine in thirty, tint the windows, customize the audio. A collision shop, a paint-and-body shop, reconditioned auto parts. And the funky little businesses in the bungalows in between offer to rebuild and customize Kevin himself: he could get his hair and nails done; he could be tanned, tattooed, and pierced; he could lose weight under the supervision of a physician. He could bulk up or slim down; he could have his teeth whitened and his vision laser-sharpened; he could have his bones chiropractically manipulated; he could have his aura read and his fortune told in two languages. He and his Honda Accord could start at one end of Lamar, and shop by shop, repair by repair, treatment by treatment, they could weave helically past each other from one side of the street to the other, until, at the far end — wherever and whenever that was — they would be remade as Texans, like the ship of Theseus, plank by plank and oar by oar, until the question becomes, is it the same ship any longer? Remade as a Texan, would Kevin be the same man any more? Does he even want to be? And is it even possible to remake a fifty-year-old man? Or has he been remade once too often already?

Kevin’s still laughing, though.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Is ranting a sign of heatstroke?”

“Not usually,” says Dr. Barrientos. “Fear of palm trees, though…” She wobbles her hand in the air between them. “And Mexican restaurants,” she adds. “What have you got against Mexicans?”

She says “Mexican” now with the hard X like a Norte Americano. He can’t tell if she’s being polite or condescending or both.

“Tell you what,” Kevin says, full of surprises, “you pick the place and I’ll buy you lunch.” He peeks at his watch; there’s two and a half hours yet until his interview.

Another silence, but not so awkward. Or at least awkward in a different way. Watching her sidelong he’s pretty sure she’s thinking it over.

“I’m not really dressed for it,” she says. “And I need a shower.”

“Look at me.” Kevin plucks at his wilted shirt, the knee of his torn trousers. “I look like I just survived a terrorist attack.”

Their gazes cross obliquely across the cab of the truck, neither quite looking at the other. Even here, light years from Glasgow, there’s a little Buchanan Street frisson between them.

“I appeal to your Hippocratic oath, Doctor,” Kevin says. “I’m still kinda wobbly. I may need a medicinal burrito.”

For the first time since Kevin got into the truck Dr. Barrientos has been stopped by a traffic light. It’s as if she’s been brought up short by his question, and the sudden lack of forward momentum seems to heighten the padded quiet of the cab. Her eyes look distracted again, and watching her past the edge of his sunglasses, Kevin’s not sure that what’s distracting her is his invitation, or even his presence. The silence stretches on as the vehicles waiting for the light on the far side of the intersection glitter and sizzle in the heat. Beyond them Lamar curves up and to the left, where he sees more colorful signs, more bilingual billboards, more power lines against the whitish sky. The cross street of the intersection cuts into Lamar at a bias, and on the arrowhead corner sits a scruffy little used car lot packed with five- and ten-year-old automobiles, mostly compacts and subcompacts, all a little the worse for wear. The dealer’s office is an old, flat-roofed, whitewashed, cinderblock service station with a sign in bright red letters that reads (with wholly unnecessary quotation marks and heavy-handed punctuation, thinks Kevin the professional editor), “IF YOU HAVE A CAR YOU CAN GET A JOB!!!”

I have a car, thinks Kevin. I have a job. I have a house, a mortgage, job security, a retirement plan, friends, a history, a life, all in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have a girlfriend, even, more or less — a live-in lover, at any rate, who, from the outside, from the point of view of his middle-aged, married male friends with children, looks like an improbable piece of guilt-free midlife arm candy, wholly undeserved, and the incitement for a fair amount of jealousy and disbelief, thinly disguised as salacious joshing. They slap his arm and say, “You lucky bastard,” or they laugh harshly and say, “What does she see in you?” Sometimes their rage is even undisguised, as when his friend Dale, at a Labor Day cookout in his suburban backyard, only half an hour after Kevin had introduced him to Stella, had shoved Kevin in the chest with both hands and said, “You motherfucker.” Of course, none of them have seen Stella when she wakes up sweating and shaking at three in the morning, recoiling from Kevin’s touch, no recognition of him in her wild eyes; none of them have seen the faint white scars along the insides of her forearms and her thighs, which she covers with makeup and will not talk about, will not even acknowledge the existence of. And none of them (at least not recently, at least not in the last month) has discovered the used plastic wand of a pregnancy test stuffed at the bottom of the kitchen trash, under coffee grounds and eggshells and rusty apple cores, wrapped in three layers of paper towels.

Yeah, thinks Kevin, I have a girlfriend, and he looks at the doctor again, not so sidelong this time, and wonders if it’s too late to… what? Leave Stella? Leave Ann Arbor? Start his life over in sun-bleached Austin? Live happily ever after with Claudia Barrientos, MD? Just as Kevin is thinking he should change the subject, let his luncheon invitation die unanswered, pretend he never said it, Claudia’s eyes refocus and she speaks.

“All right,” she says.

Almost before the light changes her pickup has surged through the intersection and glided into the left-turn lane — where, after an instant of hesitation, it roars in front of oncoming traffic and into a parking lot that rides like it’s unpaved, though Kevin can see ancient, bleached asphalt. The truck lurches to a stop in front of a low, makeshift building with a latticed awning and a faded redbrick front papered with faded flyers. On the flat roof above the door, a large plaster woman with unnaturally pink skin and black, Betty Page bangs spreads her bare arms wide like an invocation. The figure’s six-foot wingspan and fixed, upward gaze makes Kevin think it’s Wonder Woman, then Eva Peron, then Madonna playing Eva Peron. But it’s none of these women, for across her bosom where a Stars and Stripes bustier or a spangled ball gown should be, instead there’s a hand-painted sign that reads ANNA’S TACO RAPIDO. Don’t cry for me, Austin, Texas.

Kevin’s still hanging against his shoulder belt as Claudia opens her door and steps down to the pavement.

“Leave your jacket, why don’t you?” she says, and slams the door.

In the time it takes him to catch his breath, unharness himself, and climb gingerly down from the truck — his scraped knee throbbing, the heat enfolding him — Claudia has already passed through the narrow door. In the patterned shadow of the awning, Kevin limps across the wooden porch, hauls open the glass door, and steps into a clammy gust of AC heavily scented with grease and grilling onions. It’s cooler inside, but smoky and humid and so dim that Kevin can hardly see a thing until he remembers to take off his sunglasses, thrusting them absently toward his jacket pocket. But his jacket’s in the truck, so he slides them instead into his trouser pocket. The long, dusky room has a smooth concrete floor and a low ceiling of crumbling particleboard, lit only by a couple of thin, purple fluorescent tubes and some tiny red Christmas lights. Even with his glasses off he’s still adjusting to the gloom, and yet there’s a strong feeling of déjà vu. The room is bisected lengthwise by a wide wooden counter — on the left are high, narrow tables and stools, and behind the counter on the right, a couple of sweaty figures in stained aprons and baseball caps jostle each other in the narrow aisle before the sizzling grill. Behind a cash register at the end of the counter a figure is silhouetted against a grimy window, talking to another silhouette across from him. Just as Kevin recognizes her broad shoulders and powerful thighs, the second silhouette speaks to him.

“Sorry?” He can’t hear her over the clatter of the spatula against the grill and the wh-wh-whirl of the ceiling fans and the thumping dance beat of a Latin pop song, but still he seems to know this place instinctively. The wholly satisfying smell of frying meat, the insistent music, the narrow layout with high tables on one side and the grill on the other, the grease-laminated workers jostling each other — he’s been here before.

Claudia beckons him to the register, where a sad-eyed man in a white guayabera and crisp khakis turns his melancholy gaze to Kevin.

“He’s paying,” she says to the man, then, to Kevin, “right?”

“Absolutely!” Kevin jerks his wallet from his hip pocket. Only then does he see the big hand-lettered menu board behind Claudia, four columns of tight little letters, yellow and blue against black, listing tacos in all their infinite variety.

“You don’t even want to look at that,” Claudia says. “We’ll be here all day. I already ordered for both of us.”

“Great!” But as Kevin pops his wallet open, Claudia touches his wrist.

“Unless you’re a vegetarian. I should have asked.”

“Me? No,” says Kevin, and as he hands the guayabera a twenty a veil falls from his eyes and the déjà vu resolves; he almost hears a heavenly choir. It’s the menu board that’s put him over: all it needs is a couple of cartoon bears and the slogan “2,147,483,648 Combinations!” He starts laughing, causing Claudia and the cashier to exchange a glance.

“Blimpy Burger!” Kevin exclaims. “You’ve taken me to Austin’s Blimpy Burger!”

The guayabera frowns and hands Kevin his change and a receipt. “You’re number fifty-eight.” He hands a couple of plastic glasses over the counter to Claudia.

“Why don’t you find us a seat outside.” She nods toward an open door where the midday glare leaches in. “And I’ll get us some tea.”

Kevin stops to pee in a tiny toilet, no bigger than a broom closet. Then, with the greasy gust of AC at his back like a gentle shove, he steps down into a courtyard of packed dirt, surrounded by a wooden fence and overhung with an enormous, leafy tree. His torn trouser leg flapping, he limps under unlit strings of party lights and settles gratefully into a plastic chair at a rough, unsteady wooden table. A couple of lean young guys in shorts and T-shirts slouch at another table, talking quietly, while a pair of black birds looking for scraps strut in the dirt like little T. rexes. One of them boldly flaps up onto a nearby table and insolently fixes Kevin with one fathomless black eye. Kevin waves his hand until the bird flaps into the dirt again, then he settles back into the flexible grip of the chair.

The mottled shadow of the tree trembles in a breeze Kevin can’t feel, but it is cooler than in the direct sunlight, and the rumble of traffic on Lamar is muffled by the fence. An old Mobil sign with a faded Pegasus hangs on the fence, while across the side of the building is a colorful and very un-Texan mural of two clumsily drawn sheep in an alpine meadow full of freakishly large dandelions. Nailed to the whitish bark of the tree are three desiccated old cowboy boots, shriveled and colorless, with broken toes. The décor is accretive and eclectic, but authentically so (though as a scholarly editor Kevin knows better than to take “authenticity” at face value), not like the fastidiously art-directed eclecticism of the yuppie bars in Ann Arbor — the kind Stella likes — or the Disneyfied hominess of a chain family restaurant — the kind his mother frequents for lunch with her gal pals. Still, there’s something self-conscious about it — it’s a hip place that knows it’s hip — but then, what isn’t self-conscious anymore?

Indeed, Kevin’s experiencing a very self-conscious sort of metahappiness at the moment: relieved that Claudia has brought him to an unexpectedly familiar place, while at the same time surprised by his own relief. The strangeness and alienation of the morning, the uncharacteristic behavior he’s indulged in, the awkwardness of every exchange so far — all of it is temporarily eased by the familiar feel and smell of a place where he’s never been in his life. It’s like a little bit of Ann Arbor, and not just any bit, but Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger—“Cheaper Than Food!”—one of the few constants of his last thirty years. Ann Arbor has grown a thick crust like barnacles all around it, of strip malls and big box stores, which is surrounded in turn by vast plantations of McMansions, all the way out to Saline and Dexter. Most of the funky little bars and clubs and restaurants of his younger days are long gone. But Blimpy’s, God bless it, Blimpy’s endures. It’s been his unofficial polestar — for most of his adult life he’s lived within a five-minute walk of the place, at Packard and South Division, from his freshman year in the hive of South Quad to his middle age as a homeowner on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes he even wonders if the real reason he bought his house was just to stay in walking distance of his regular burger — a triple with provolone, grilled onions, and mushrooms on an onion roll. Beth objected to Blimpy’s at first, until he shrewdly made the buy-local, at-least-it’s-not-McDonald’s argument, after which she beat a tactical retreat and stopped giving him a hard time about it. Stella, however, won’t eat there at all anymore after their one disastrous visit together. She wrinkled her nose at the smell the moment they walked in, then tried to order a single patty, extra lean, on a whole wheat bun.

“Extra lean?” said the gloriously mouthy black woman at the grill. “Girl, you know where you are?” Part of the charm of the place, Kevin tried to explain later, was the surliness of the help.

Stella settled for a double without cheese on a regular roll, then sat with Kevin at his favorite spot in the wide front window — with its Cinemascope view of the old redbrick Perry School across the street and the leafy ridge of the Old West Side beyond — pinching her knees together and tucking in her elbows as if afraid to touch anything. With undisguised distaste she lifted the top of her bun between two sharp red fingernails. Kevin almost pointed out that at Zingermann’s Deli she regularly ordered the most enormous, and enormously calorific, sandwiches; what you’re objecting to, he almost said, is that the food here is cheap. But instead he repeated what the woman at the grill had said, which turned out to be another mistake.

“Have you ever seen a picture,” she said, wide-eyed with schadenfreude, “of a human heart encased in fat?”

“My heart’s fine,” he said, though his glorious mouthful of beef, provolone, mushroom, onion, and mayo had suddenly turned to offal in his mouth. “I’m a runner, remember?”

“A friend of my father?” she whispered. “A runner? For twenty years? Keeled over dead with a massive coronary. During a marathon.”

“Huh,” said Kevin, swallowing hard.

Since then they don’t talk about it, and Kevin’s visits are clandestine and guilty, as if he’s cheating on her instead of merely indulging in the occasional greasy cheeseburger. Luckily, her job takes her out of town for two or three days at a time, and in fact, Kevin ate at Blimpy’s just last night, indulging himself in a quad and a large order of rings, knowing that for once it didn’t matter if his breath smelled of onions afterward.

With a little electric crackle, the amplified voice of the guayabera issues from a loudspeaker bolted to the tree. “Number fifty-six, your order’s ready,” says the voice, and one of the young guys at the other table glances at his receipt, rises, and crosses the courtyard, scattering the black birds strutting at his feet. At the door he stands aside for Claudia, who is bearing a glass of iced tea in each hand. Without smiling, she fixes Kevin in her dark-eyed gaze like a raptor zeroing in on a rabbit, and Kevin, thrilled and terrified, sits up straighter in his wobbly chair. She switches her hips between the tables, never taking her gaze off him, and sets the sweating glasses on their table. She lifts her plastic chair back one-handed.

“I didn’t think to ask,” she says. “Do you take lemon? Sugar?”

Kevin would love some sweetener, but he says, “This is great,” lifting the glass. The tea is refreshing, but mostly what he tastes is ice.

“Good.” Claudia leans back in her seat, lifting both hands to loosen her ponytail. She shakes her hair back and sighs, as if she’s willing herself to relax. Kevin watches her over his glass. He hadn’t noticed it when her hair was pulled back, but she has a Susan Sontag streak of white. She isn’t looking at him now, but gazing distractedly across the courtyard. Then, having shaken out her hair, lank with sweat, she pulls it tightly back again and nimbly slips the elastic over her ponytail. Somehow she’s figured out how to make the streak of white disappear when she pulls her hair back, and now he’s not even sure he saw it. He wonders why she let her hair down if she was just going to tie it back up again.

“How are you feeling?” she says.

“Fine,” he says. “Thanks again, for everything.”

She lifts her own tea, scowling as she swallows. She looks across the table, sighs, and carefully sets her glass to one side.

“May I impose upon you a little?” She leans forward on her crossed arms, making the table wobble. “I have a favor to ask.”

Kevin wonders if Dr. Barrientos is able to do anything at all without you being able to see the wheels turning. That could be a kind of curse, especially if she’s aware of it, leading to an infinite regression of self-consciousness. He worries he’s about to hear a pitch for Amway, or testimony of the doctor’s personal relationship with Christ, or — oh hell — both, simultaneously.

“Sure,” he says warily.

“I want to talk to you about something important.” She’s hunched forward, watching him, gauging his reaction.

Oh fuck, thinks Kevin, here it comes. Have you thought about how you’re going to spend eternity? And are you familiar with distributed sales? But then her eyes slide away from him, and Kevin thinks, if she were about to pitch him Christ and/or laundry detergent, she’d be less nervous.

“Well, it’s important to me, anyway,” she says, staring across the courtyard at nothing in particular. “It may not mean that much to you. But I want to tell somebody.”

“Okay.” Kevin’s still wary, but now he’s also curious.

She looks down at the table, tightening her grip on her own biceps.

“It’s just that we don’t really know each other,” she says, “and the odds are we’ll never see each other after today.”

Kevin’s surprised at his own sharp dismay. Oh no! he almost says aloud. Don’t say that!

“It’s just that makes you the perfect person to tell this to.” She looks up at him. “Does that make any sense?”

Now he really is curious, but a little disappointed as well: is she about to come out to him? Just his luck, the day he meets a really attractive woman in a city where he might be moving, that’s the same day she decides to announce to the world, or at least to him, that she’s a lesbian.

“I guess that depends.” He leans forward and rests his own arms on the table. Now they’re only a couple feet apart, like two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes in some dimly lit bistro, over a little bowl of candlelight. “On what you want to tell me.”

He regrets having put it so bluntly, regrets having sat forward like this. Is that alarm in her gaze? He should’ve just stayed where he was, slumped in his chair, looking blasé. Now he’s afraid she won’t go on.

“Though whatever it is,” he adds, trying to inch back from this intimate proximity without being too obvious about it, “I’m sure it’s okay with me.”

She lets her gaze drift again, and as she opens her mouth, probably to tell him to forget the whole thing, the loudspeaker crackles and says, in the melancholy voice of the guayabera, “Number fifty-eight, your order’s ready.”

“Is that us?” Kevin slaps his pockets for the receipt.

“I’ll get it,” says Claudia, suddenly upright. “Don’t get up.” Halfway to the door, she looks back. “Salsa?”

“Not too hot.” Kevin leans back in his chair, and she disappears into the greasy gloom.

Kevin sighs. The moment’s gone, she’ll never tell him now, and he’ll wonder for the rest of the day what it was she wanted say to him, some random guy she never plans on seeing again. Then his Jiminy Cricket chirps up, saying, this is your chance, leave now while she’s gone. Whatever she wants to tell you, trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll regret it. This is your last chance, chump, get up and go. Vamoose. Scram. Skedaddle. Maybe Jiminy’s talking sense, thinks Kevin, God knows I should’ve listened to him earlier today. He sits up straight in the unsteady chair, puts his hands on the arms. He twists to look behind him, and sees a doorway in the courtyard fence that leads straight to the parking lot. If he gets up right now, without hesitating, he could be half a block up Lamar before she comes back. And no harm done, really; he’s already paid for her lunch. Of course, he’d have to do it right now…

Too late. He faces forward to see her in the doorway holding a plastic tray in both hands. She’s just standing there, watching him, which means that she caught him just now contemplating his escape. He shifts in his seat and ventures a smile, and she steps down out into the courtyard, carefully balancing the two paper cartons on the tray. As she sets it on the table between them, she smiles to herself, then directs the smile at him.

“You’re still here.” She lifts one carton to his side of the table and the other to hers. Each contains a fat, steaming soft taco, bulging with chunks of brown meat, grilled onions, and a liberal sprinkling of what looks like fresh cilantro. She also sets aside a small stack of paper napkins. “I haven’t scared you off,” she adds, setting a little plastic cup of lumpy red salsa before him. Her own cup of salsa is green and thick with what looks like stems and seeds.

“You don’t know me,” he says. “I’m not like that.” Not to mention he just remembered that his jacket’s still in her truck. He looks up at her. “Claudia,” he adds. It’s the first time he’s called her by name.

She’s standing with all her weight on one solid, glorious leg, her hand lightly on the back of her chair, as if she’s contemplating fleeing, too. Then she nods briskly, jerks the chair back, and sits. She squares her taco in front of her and opens it to coat the filling with salsa verde. Kevin moves aside the warm flap of his own taco and pours salsa over the meat and onions and green leaves. It smells wonderful. Lifting it with both hands, Kevin’s pleasantly surprised by his first bite. The taco’s spices, whatever they are, hit places on his palate that he didn’t know existed. His usual Mexican place in Ann Arbor, a little dive near campus, basically serves up ground beef and cheese with jalapeños. This is richer and much more subtle. “Wonderful,” he mumbles with his mouth full. “What is it?”

“Al pastor.” She picks up her own taco with the tips of her fingers. “Pork.”

“Wonderful.” Kevin takes another big bite, grease and salsa rojo sliding down his fingers. Then he swallows and says, “So. The doctor is in. I’m listening.”

Claudia chews for a moment, still making up her mind. She takes one more bite, lifts her tea. Then she sets the glass and the taco to one side and puts her forearms on the table.

“Okay,” she says. “I think I told you, I’m a surgeon.”

Kevin nods.

“Well,” she says, with steely calm, “I’m being sued for malpractice.”

She says “malpractice” with the emphasis on the first syllable. Malpractice. He’s glad his mouth is full. He can’t say anything, so he just nods again.

“Someone died during an operation, and now a lawsuit has been filed.”

Kevin the professional editor can’t help but notice the mistakes-were-made form of her disclosure, the lack of a pronoun, first-person or otherwise. He also notices that his heart has begun to race. This isn’t at all what he thought he was going to hear.

“Against me,” adds Dr. Barrientos.

Kevin plucks a napkin off the stack and wipes his lips and fingertips. She picks up her taco and sets it down again without taking a bite.

“And you haven’t told anybody this?” he says. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh no, everyone knows,” she says. “It’s a matter of public record.”

“Ah.” He’s not sure if he should continue eating, but as the silence stretches again he picks up his taco and takes another bite just for something to do.

“When I said no one else knows,” she says, “that’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to get into what happened.” She pushes her unfinished taco away from her. “That’s not really a mealtime conversation.”

“Mmph,” says Kevin.

By now their gazes are sort of feinting at each other, not really making eye contact, but just checking to see if the other is watching.

“What it is,” she’s saying, “it’s about my family. My father, specifically. He never finished high school, but he’s worked like a bull his whole life, taught himself everything he knows. Never put himself first, but never gave an inch.” She pauses, nodding slightly as if at something only she can see or hear. “He put everything he had into making sure his kids had the chances he never did. Pretty typical story, where I come from.”

“The Valley,” offers Kevin.

“The Valley.” She rewards him with a quick smile, to show that she appreciates that he’s been paying attention. “But the thing about my father is,” she continues, looking away, “the thing you need to know is, he wanted me to be a nurse.”

Their eyes meet for a moment.

“Ah,” says Kevin.

“You see what I mean.”

“I think so.” Though he doesn’t, really.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Dr. Barrientos. “It’s not that he’s not proud of me. He is. And he’s not shy about saying it. He loves to introduce me as his daughter, la cirujana.” Adding, “The surgeon.”

“Of course.”

“It’s just that…” She lifts her hand, her fingers parted as if she means to pluck the right words out of the air. “Where I come from, or maybe I should say, where my father comes from, a man has to be, well, tough is what people usually say, but a better word is, decisive.” She glances at Kevin. “You have to judge how things really are, how people really are, take their measure very quickly, and then act accordingly. A man like that, once he decides what you are, and what you can and cannot do, he doesn’t change his mind very easily.”

Which is a trait, Kevin suspects, that Dr. Barrientos shares with her father.

“On top of that, a man like my father, coming from that place and time, he saw people defeated more often than he saw them succeed. You see what I’m saying?”

Kevin does, surprisingly. What he sees, in fact, just for an instant, is his own father at the dinner table, looking older than his age, his face sagging in a mask of fatigue and resignation. What his sister Kathleen has called, in retrospect, long after their father died, “one of his Willie Loman moments.”

“What he decided about me, was that I was good enough to be a nurse, but no more than that. So when I told him I was studying pre-med at A&M, we had some… difficulties. They went away somewhat when I got into med school, and I really thought he’d come around by time I graduated and finished my internship and residency.”

Claudia shifts in her chair as if she’s uncomfortable, and Kevin is struck by how vulnerable this makes her seem. He’s never met a woman as physically self-possessed as Dr. Barrientos — not comfortable in her own body, exactly, but in complete command of every inch of it at all times — and there’s something about this restless movement that seems as shocking as if she’d burst into tears.

“It’s just that even now,” she’s saying, “after all this time, after twelve years of being a surgeon, I can still detect a… hesitation in him. Like he doesn’t really believe it. Like he thinks it’s some sort of clerical error. Like I’m not telling him the whole truth.”

“We all think that sometimes,” Kevin says. “About ourselves, anyway.” In fact, he thinks, it’s the story of my life.

“Not me,” says Dr. Barrientos definitively. “I’ve earned everything I have. I’ve worked damn hard for everything I’ve got.”

Just like her father, Kevin thinks, and this time he almost says it out loud. But Claudia has lifted her hand again, and caught her breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to…”

“It’s okay.” Kevin’s mouth is dry suddenly, and he wonders if he should reach for his tea.

“It’s just that when I told him,” she says, and stops. “About the lawsuit,” and stops. Her gaze is fixed in his direction, but she isn’t really looking at him. It’s an uncanny look, creepy, even, like meeting the inward gaze of a sleepwalker. It’s what he sees sometimes when he looks at Stella, even when she’s awake. He feels a rush of pity and tenderness for Dr. Barrientos, because he realizes she’d rather die than show vulnerability, and yet she’s showing it to him, a man she hardly knows.

“He didn’t say anything for a long time.” Her voice is taut as a wire. “Not a word. Just looked at me, drilled me with his eyes all the way down to my spine.” She breathes slowly in and out. “Then all he said was, ‘If you’d only gone to nursing school…’ ”

She’s nodding slightly, her gaze directed entirely within. Over the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence and the faint beat of Mexican pop through the courtyard door, Kevin can hear her breath hissing through her nose. Then, like a sleeper waking, she shudders, her gaze softens, and she looks at Kevin, sad but utterly dry-eyed.

“That look he gave me,” she says evenly, “that was my father making up his mind. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what he meant. If I’d only gone to nursing school, I wouldn’t be in this situation.” She breathes in, out. “If I’d only gone to nursing school, that woman would still be alive.”

Kevin says nothing. What can he say? He can hardly bear to look at her, but he can hardly look away. He can feel his heart pounding. What’s more, he’s flooded again with a strong feeling of déjà vu, which only adds to his anxiety, because he has no idea why this moment should feel so familiar. This place, this woman, this situation — she killed somebody, if inadvertently, and an admission like that, only an hour after he’s met her, is sort of new in Kevin’s experience.

She manages a rueful smile. “Have I freaked you out?”

Kevin blows out a sigh. “That’s serious stuff.”

“You don’t have to say anything.” She leans back in her seat. “I’m sorry to burden you with it.”

“And of course I said just the wrong thing, didn’t I,” Kevin continues, just to be saying something, “back by the river.”

“Oh, no no no.” Claudia lifts her hand from the table. “That’s not it. That’s not why I…”

“I know, I just meant…”

“Oh, no no no. It’s fine.”

“But what I said made you think of it.”

Claudia laughs sharply and looks away. “Trust me, I was thinking of it anyway. It’s pretty much all I think about lately.”

Kevin sits back and says nothing. A little of his anger comes back, just an echo. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume she was a nurse. Can I help it, he thinks, if her father’s a judgmental SOB? But now the déjà vu is stronger than ever, and mainly Kevin’s still puzzled. Why does this moment feel so familiar?

“That’s hard,” he says. “A thing like that. Somebody you love says the last thing you want to hear.”

“Yes.” Her gaze is withdrawing again. Another moment, and they’ll both be casting about for something to do with their hands, looking everywhere but at each other, like a first date gone bad. Gosh, look at the time. Suddenly he’s certain he’s disappointed her somehow — she’s just told him this story that she hasn’t told anyone else, thinking he might understand in a way that the men she usually deals with might not, and the best he can do is offer bromides. No doubt she’s just made up her mind about him as peremptorily as her father would have, and the last thing he wants to know is what she thinks of him, some soft-handed, sweaty, heatstruck, middle-aged white guy from up north. In fact, he suddenly has an unreasonable fear that that’s precisely what she’s about to do, fix him with her gaze across the table, drill him down to his spine, and tell him exactly what he doesn’t want to hear.

“Listen.” Kevin sits sharply forward, rocking the rickety table, sloshing tea over the lip of his glass. Both of them react instinctively, steadying the table with their palms, reaching for their respective glasses.

“Listen,” says Kevin again, and their eyes lock across the table. “I was in love with this girl once. This is, like… twenty-five years ago.”

Now that he says it out loud — twenty-five years! — it feels more like a century. It’s half his lifetime ago, but at the same time it feels like it was yesterday.

“She was the daughter of a professor of mine, a philosophy professor, in the town where I went to college. In the town where I still live, in fact.”

Where did this come from? He can’t believe he’s telling her this. He never told Beth, and certainly not Stella. He’s started speaking, in fact, before he’s even realized that this was what he was going to say. But it was on his mind earlier, in Empyrean, and now he’s sitting up straight in his chair, keenly aware of the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence, the tinny throb of amplified music, the tremor of leaves overhead, the black-eyed birds strutting in the dirt, the pressure of the heat all around their table. He’s aware of Claudia’s startled gaze over their never-to-be-finished lunch.

“I didn’t know her when I was in school,” he’s saying, “when her father was my professor. I only met her a few years after I graduated, when she was still in college and she used to share a house with a friend of mine.”

Who also loved her, though Kevin doesn’t say that. Half the guys Kevin knew in Ann Arbor in the mid-eighties were in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter.

“And even then, I didn’t really get to know her until a year or two later, one summer after she graduated from Michigan, and she was living in her parents’ attic, in this big old farmhouse halfway to Saline.” He pauses. “That’s a little town outside of Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, “Michigan.”

Claudia gestures, go on.

“Anyway, this girl, she always had a cloud of guys circling around her, waiting for whoever she was seeing at the moment to go away or be dumped, so they could take their shot. You know what I mean?”

Kevin’s dimly aware of the potential awkwardness of telling a middle-aged woman what a babe another, younger woman used to be — though, actually, she’d be older now than Claudia — but Dr. Barrientos seems to be taking it in stride. She nods, at any rate.

“I don’t know where her parents were that particular summer, but she always seemed to have the house to herself, and she used to have people out there all the time, for cook-outs or parties or whatever.”

One party in particular, thinks Kevin, but that’s not the half of this story that he’s telling right now.

“One night that spring, early May maybe, she had five or six of us out, just her and five or six guys, and we stayed up late watching movies on TV. And these five or six guys, all of us had crushes on her to varying degrees, though only one of us was her actual, official boyfriend at the time. And the thing was, he was leaving in a couple weeks to go to Europe or something, and the rest of us were, you know, circling, angling to take his slot. So you get the idea — five guys and this irresistible girl, all of us in our twenties, more or less, and we all kind of know why we’re there. It’s like a casting call, and she’s playing it very cool, but enjoying every minute of it.”

“Do you blame her?” says Claudia.

“Wait and see,” Kevin says. “So we ordered pizza or grilled hot dogs or something, and we stayed up really late watching whatever we could pull in on her parents’ shitty little black-and-white TV. This was before VCRs, understand. You’d think a full professor at Michigan would have a decent television, and cable, and a color TV, but no, it was a little Zenith black-and-white portable, yay big, with rabbit ears and one of those loops for UHF.” Kevin laughs. “Christ, they didn’t even have a roof antenna!”

Claudia smiles, if only at his enthusiasm.

“So we’re watching Channel 50 out of Detroit, this low-rent station that showed movies all the time, and I can still remember the movies we saw that night, in order.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Trilogy of Terror, The Snakepit, and The Big Country.” He laughs again. “Trilogy of Terror? Karen Black versus the devil doll?” He crosses his eyes, mimes stabbing with a carving knife, cries, “Ai yi yi yi yi!” loud enough to startle a bird and attract the attention of the two lean guys across the courtyard. Claudia shakes her head — she has probably never wasted her time watching horror movies — but she smiles slightly.

“Never mind. Point is, halfway through The Snakepit, which was this old forties melodrama, I realize I’m not watching the movie. I’m lying on the floor with my head on a throw pillow and instead I’m watching the Philosopher’s Daughter with her boyfriend, Tom or Bill or Gary or whatever his name was, the two of them draped over each other on the couch. I can see the TV light flickering over them, I can even see the little black-and-white reflection of the screen in her eyes. He’s behind her with one hand on her hip, and she’s curled against him with her head on his arm, and he’s, like, half-asleep, bored out of his mind, but she’s absolutely rapt, okay, she’s watching this dopey old picture like it’s, I dunno, Citizen Kane. And I’m watching her, I can’t take my eyes off her, and I’m thinking: I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy with her on the couch with my hand on her hip and her head on my arm. Only, believe me, I wouldn’t look so fucking bored.”

Kevin stares at nothing, reliving the moment.

“Anyway,” he starts up again, abruptly, “one by one, everybody else crawled off to find places to sleep, and it was just me and the Philosopher’s Daughter and her sleeping boyfriend. By now we’re watching The Big Country, which has got to be one of the most overblown, overproduced, boring Westerns I’ve ever seen. Nothing happens for, like, hours. Gregory Peck plays this sea captain who’s engaged to a rancher’s daughter, only he ends up in love with a schoolteacher played by Audrey Hepburn. Or maybe not Audrey Hepburn, but somebody just like her. Point is, for most of the movie, Peck gets insulted, beaten, and abused by all the cowboys, especially Charlton Heston, who all think he’s just the most pathetic”—almost says “pussy,” but says instead—“sissy imaginable. He’s got some sort of Quaker thing going, won’t talk back, won’t fight, unless he’s absolutely forced into it.”

Kevin inches forward.

“Lousy, frustrating, infuriating movie, because you want Gregory Peck to deck somebody, or shoot somebody, or at least take the girl he loves away from that bonehead Charlton Heston. Instead, he’s doing Atticus Finch, only with less balls.” Easy, thinks Kevin. “Meantime, I’m half-watching this goddamn movie, and half-watching the Philosopher’s Daughter nestled in the arms of this asshole who has no idea how lucky he is. And the thing is, she knows I’m watching her. She catches me at it, and she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown, just watches me back until I can’t stand it anymore, and I have to look back at the screen. And that’s the moment I knew I was in love with her, and it’s also the moment when I knew that I was as big a pussy as Gregory Peck in that movie, because I was afraid to do anything about it.”

“So do something,” says Claudia unexpectedly. “Tell her.”

He’s surprised she spoke up, he’s half-certain he’s boring her senseless, but she’s leaning across the table, watching him intently.

“I did!” he says. “Eventually. I mean, even Gregory Peck rode off in the sunset with the schoolteacher. So after her boyfriend left for Europe, I ended up taking her out to see bands two, three times a week. I was working at a record store that summer and I used to get comp tickets, so I took her to see some pretty amazing stuff — U2, before they were really big, okay? But the thing is, these weren’t like dates, per se, it was more like, hey, I’ve got tickets to this thing, you want to go? And she always said yes. We used to go dancing all the time, too, sometimes at clubs, sometimes at parties at people’s houses we knew, and sometimes,” Kevin laughs, “sometimes we’d walk the streets near campus on a Friday or Saturday night until we found a big party, and just walk in. I mean, nobody cared, everybody was usually pretty drunk already, it was…” He’s lost in the memory for a moment.

“God, she was a great dancer!” He sighs. “This is going to sound really stupid, but she danced like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, back when Molly Ringwald was really something. Do you remember how she danced? She used to toss herself back and forth, like that.”

He almost demonstrates from his chair, but to his surprise, the thoracic surgeon nods.

“And one night we were at a party, dancing, drinking beer, and we went out on the porch of this house.” He pauses. “I don’t remember the address, but I could find it for you again, it’s still there, out on West Liberty, in the Old West Side. Won’t mean anything to you.” He waves his hand, clearing the air before him. “But that was the night I… That was the night we were… That was the night I decided to…” Pause. “Well, I didn’t decide anything, it just happened, because we were both really relaxed and happy, we’d both been drinking but we weren’t really drunk, we were just dancing without thinking about anything, brushing up against each other and touching and…”

Kevin can feel the mild midwestern heat of that summer, not like the stifling heat here in Austin. He can hear the crickets, the throb of the bass from the stereo inside the house, the cries of the dancers inside, the thump of their feet. He can see the Philosopher’s Daughter leaning against the porch railing in the dark, irresistibly silhouetted against the glow of a streetlight. He can see the red spark of her cigarette.

“We went out to take a break, to cool off, and she asked me, ‘Do you think I dance like a geek? Am I totally embarrassing myself?’ And I couldn’t help myself, so before I had a chance to think about it I said, ‘I love the way you dance. You’re adorable.’ God, I just…”

Twenty-five years after the fact, even in the Texas heat, Kevin’s blushing.

“Thing is, she had this way of watching you like she thought you were really funny, or really stupid, or stupid in a really funny way, and she’d laugh at you, but I didn’t care, because she had the loveliest laugh. I can’t explain it, but she was always watching you like she was right on the cusp of derision. But in a nice way, if that makes sense. And even in the dark on the porch, even when I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was watching me like that.”

Somehow in the heat, Kevin’s face feels cool again.

“So of course that’s when I told her I loved her. Just blurted it out.” Pause. “Dead silence.” The thump of the bass. The crickets. The Philosopher’s Daughter in exquisite silhouette, saying nothing. “They were playing the B-52s inside the house, ‘Rock Lobster,’ and everyone was chanting, ‘Down, down,’ and sinking slowly to the floor in a big tangle. Meantime, me, on the porch, having just handed my beating heart to this girl, I just stood there like an asshole, listening to dead silence from the girl I just said I loved.” Kevin stops.

“What happened?” says Claudia after a moment.

“Here’s the thing,” says Kevin hoarsely. “This is why I thought of this right now. This was my moment like the one with your father. This is why I brought this up. You know what she said to me?”

Claudia waits.

“She said to me, ‘Kevin,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t think I could love you.’ Bad enough, right? Under the circumstances.”

Claudia says nothing.

“Bear in mind, we’re in the dark, I can’t see her face, I can’t see her eyes. But she can see through me like a fucking x-ray. And if she laughs right now?” Kevin shakes his head. “But I’ll give her this much, she knew better than to laugh. Even she wasn’t that cruel.”

“What did she say?” Claudia says quietly.

“She asked me a question,” says Kevin. “She said, ‘Do you want to know why I don’t think I could love you?’ ”

Claudia gasps slightly.

“Exactly,” Kevin laughs. “Loaded question, right? I’m not as dumb as I look, so naturally I said, ‘No, not really. I’d actually rather you didn’t tell me that.’ ”

Claudia waits.

“And then she told me anyway.”

Claudia breathes out.

“She said, ‘I don’t think you’re capable of tenderness and passion.’ ”

Claudia winces.

“Yeah. Ouch, huh?”

“You just should have kissed her,” says Claudia.

“Thought of that,” says Kevin briskly. “Not right then, of course, not till it was too late. At the moment I was too busy bleeding to death. And anyway, if I was going to kiss her, it should have been before she told me that I had no soul, not after.”

“She shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“Maybe not,” says Kevin. “Unless it was true.”

“Was it?”

Kevin gasps, turns it into a weak laugh. I asked for that, he realizes, I left myself wide open. He feels a little spike of anger, but then he gave her the opportunity. And anyway, it’s just like him wanting to know what she did or didn’t do to that patient who died on her operating table.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“It’s a fair question,” says Kevin. “And it’s not like I haven’t asked it myself, every day of my life for the last, oh, quarter of a century.”

“Maybe you give her too much power.”

“I could say the same thing to you.”

Claudia gives him a sharp look. “That’s different. That was my father.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“You ever tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“How she made you feel.”

Kevin shrugs. “I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t even know where she is anymore. And by now, what’s the point? I’m going to call her up all these years later, and say, hey, remember stabbing me in the heart and twisting the knife that night back in the eighties?” Kevin laughs. “She must be, what, forty-five now? Whatever she did to me, whether she meant to hurt me or not, by now she’s no doubt had the same or worse done to her.” He smiles ruefully. “Bombardier, it’s your karma.”

“Pardon?”

“Firesign Theatre.” Kevin waves it away. “Forget it.”

They sit for a moment in silence, and Kevin feels the Texas heat closing in around him again, hears the traffic beyond the fence. “Rock Lobster” is replaced in his head by another rhythmic pop song in Spanish from the tinny loudspeaker.

“So what happened after that?” says Claudia.

“Oh,” says Kevin, “I started seeing this other girl that summer, someone I didn’t actually, you know, love. And who didn’t love me, either, but that was okay.”

Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. No way he’s telling Dr. Barrientos the second half of the story. He’s told her what the Philosopher’s Daughter said, how it set up a vibration in him that he still feels a quarter-century later, but no way he’s telling her about Lynda on the Philosopher’s Daughter’s front porch.

“No,” says Dr. Claudia. “I mean right then, at the party, on the porch. What happened next?”

“Oh.” In the flexing embrace of the flimsy plastic chair, Kevin runs his palm over his sweaty forehead and hair. “I really don’t remember. We probably went back inside and danced some more, I don’t know. It was kind of like the moment right after an explosion, my ears were ringing, I couldn’t really hear or see anything. I honestly don’t remember.”

He’s feeling calm now, calmer than he’s felt all day, actually. Calmer than he’s felt in weeks, even, since before he found Stella’s pregnancy test in the kitchen trash. You put a moment like that in the context of a lifetime, and it’s not such a big deal. Makes him wonder why he’s been so fretful about it. Makes him wonder why he’s in Texas at all.

“Why’d she tell me that, though,” he hears himself say, “when I asked her not to? That’s what I still don’t get. That’s what I still can’t get my mind around after all this time. Maybe she was just being cruel to be kind, telling me what she thought I needed to know so that I wouldn’t embarrass her again. A girl like that, I’m sure she had guys throwing themselves at her all the time. In fact, I know she did. Like I say, half the guys I knew…”

He thinks of her name, even as her face fades into the glare leaking through the leaves of the tree over the courtyard.

“I mean, she must have felt constantly besieged, and I’m sure she did her best to deflect all that uninvited interest as nicely as possible, because she wasn’t a bad person, or mean, or bitchy. It’s just that she must have gotten tired of all that… longing coming at her, all the time. So she learned to cut to the chase, say just the right thing that would stop the latest lovesick bastard in his tracks.”

Now he just feels tired. He wishes he could go somewhere and lie down. Even Lynda’s face is hard to recall now.

“But you know,” Kevin says, “that thing she said? What she told me about myself? It wasn’t exactly helpful. In fact, if you want to know the truth, it feels like a curse. I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s always there, at the back of my mind. Especially when I’m with a woman I love, or think I love. Or think I want to love. It’s like a leash, with the Philosopher’s Daughter at the other end. If I try too hard with a woman, if I make the effort, then I feel this little tug, like, not so fast, buster, who do you think you’re kidding?”

“Ah,” says Claudia.

“Because here’s the thing.” Kevin leans forward, rocking the table again. “Even it wasn’t true when she told me, it’s been true ever since because she told me.”

In the time they’ve been sitting there, a few more people have settled at tables in the courtyard. Some of them are already eating, so somewhere along the way the loudspeaker has announced more numbers, and Kevin just hasn’t heard them. A black bird is goose-stepping to and fro on a tabletop close to Kevin and Claudia’s, eyeing their half-finished tacos, first with one unblinking eye and then the other. In the heat under the tree Kevin and Claudia look at each other across the table as if they have each only just realized the other person is there. Their silence is no longer like a first date, but like the silence at the end of a break-up, when there’s nothing more left to say. Kevin doesn’t feel embarrassed or exposed or angry, just spent. Now what? he thinks. What’s next?

“Shall we go?” says Dr. Barrientos.

Out on Lamar again, in the hot cab of the truck, Claudia lowers the side windows a few inches, which lets out the heat and lets in a wedge of midday glare from either side.

“Just till the AC blows cold,” she says, though Kevin can already feel the difference from a vent as it plays over the rip in his trouser leg. His jacket folded again on his lap, Kevin gazes dully through the windshield at South Lamar finishing its slow, sinuous climb up from the river. As the glaring sky opens out above the street, Kevin sees a large church with a vast yellow lawn and a diner with a big neon coffee cup and more scruffy garages and bottom-rung car dealers, but he barely registers them. He feels numb and hollowed out by his exchange of intimacies with Dr. Barrientos, as if he’s just survived a loud explosion and is struggling to form a coherent thought in the reverberating silence. But all he can hear is tenderness and passion, tenderness and passion—oddly enough, though, not in the Philosopher’s Daughter’s own midwestern pixie’s intonation, but in the slightly nasal drawl of her lanky father, the professor himself, from whom Kevin took a class in ethics and who reminded Kevin of Jimmy Stewart. In fact, over the course of the semester, the professor managed to embody not one, but several avatars of Jimmy Stewart: narrating the death of Socrates as if it were the last reel of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; explaining utilitarianism as if he were the flinty, selfless technician of Strategic Air Command; and throughout the semester eyeing with barely repressed longing, as if he were the embittered sexual obsessive of Vertigo, a pair of ripe and stylish Southfield girls who always sat together in cashmere sweaters in the front row. So much did the professor remind Kevin of the actor, down to stammering and widening his eyes and waving his big-fingered hands when he was excited, that now, as the professor lectures Kevin about tenderness and passion — which he never did in real life — Kevin can’t really picture the Philosopher’s Daughter’s father at all, but sees instead the graying, middle-aged, parentally befuddled Stewart of the late-career comedies, flying off to Paris to rescue his teenaged daughter from some dreamy French boy, or his teenaged son from Brigitte Bardot, or even the professor’s own, real, vixenish daughter from some passionless son of Royal Oak.

“Duh, duh, define your terms, son,” stammers Professor Stewart. “Wha, wha, what do you mean by tenderness and passion?”

I have no idea! Kevin wants to shout. I can’t define them. To define them would be to pin them like butterflies to a corkboard. And anyway, professor, according to your own daughter, my problem isn’t that I can’t define them, it’s that I can’t express them. Besides, what do tenderness and/or passion get you? When Stella wakes up crying in the middle of the night, he holds her tightly until she stops shuddering. Neither of them says a word, they just clutch each other in the dark until she’s breathing evenly again. Then he loosens his grip but doesn’t let go of her completely. In the morning they never speak of it. What has his tenderness accomplished?

And passion, what of it? The Other Kevin, the Jihadist Kevin, the Freckled Suicide Bomber, he was passionate, wasn’t he? How many people died because of his passion? The Other Kevin’s blurry martyrdom video has been running nonstop on CNN and Fox all weekend, perhaps because it’s one of the rare examples performed in English. And even then they’ve been running it with subtitles, because Kevin/Abdul — posing in a green headband before a grainy blow-up of Osama bin Laden — speaks of jihad in an incomprehensibly thick Glaswegian monotone. Without the subtitles Kevin — Quinn, not MacDonald — would understand only every third or fourth word. Yeah, young Kevin was one confused, inarticulate young bastard, but at least he believed in something, didn’t he? At least he was willing to die for something. What would I be willing to die for, wonders Kevin — the decent Kevin, not the murderous Kevin — anything? Who would I be willing to die for? The Philosopher’s Daughter? That would have been a waste, she didn’t want me anyway. Lynda? Don’t be stupid, that wasn’t passion. Beth? Would he have died for her? Would he have died for her when she was pregnant with another man’s child? Say they were in a public place — the aisles of Gaia, say — and say Kevin saw some nervous-looking young guy suddenly open his overcoat to reveal a canvas vest bulging with plastic explosives, and say the guy started yelling Allahu akbar or whatever — would Kevin throw himself between Beth and her unborn child and the bomber? Probably, but that might just be good manners. In that last instant before everything went black, Kevin would feel like a chump. He’d be thinking, it’s not even my kid. And what if Stella’s life were in danger? Would he die for her if she was carrying his child? Would he sacrifice himself then more willingly, the way the Other Kevin did? That’s what passion does, thinks Michigan Kev (not Glasgow Kev) — passion makes you stupid, passion uses you and then throws you away.

He glances at Claudia, afraid he might have said some of this out loud, but if he has, she either didn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She’s driving distractedly again, one-handed, while with her other hand she pinches and unpinches a crease in her lower lip. Kevin’s not sure conversation is even possible now, as if the padded upholstery of the cab would soak up every sound. He’s not sure he would make any sense if he did speak, he’s not even sure if he would make sense to himself. For all he knows she’s feeling the same numbness, preoccupied with her father’s disappointment, her own uncertainty, the face of the woman she killed. Way to go, Dr. Barrientos, with the bedside manner! Just what he needs on the day of a job interview, the doctor passing her lacerating self-doubt along to him like Typhoid Mary. He’s still tongue-tied, but somebody better say something quick, because at last Lamar has widened and straightened out, lying as broad as the Champs-Élysées between strip malls and garages and down-market apartment complexes, and instead of the Arc de Triomphe at the far end, South Lamar’s vanishing point is obscured by a freeway overpass where the glittering roofs of cars and SUVs glide in the midday sun.

“How far are these stores?” Kevin says abruptly, at the same moment as Claudia says, “What sort of store are you looking for?”

They glance at each other.

“Sorry?” says Kevin.

“You first,” says Claudia.

Up ahead, freeway signs hang over the road like big green guillotine blades, blunt white arrows pointing the way to Johnson City, Llano, Bastrop. Kevin shifts in his seat, afraid that if they survive the steel blades and enter the tangle of overpasses, Claudia’s truck will get snagged and slotted in and shot like a pellet further south than Kevin wants to go, all the way to San Antonio, all the way to Mexico lindo.

“I don’t want to get too far from downtown,” he says. “I still have to find my way back to, ah…” He nearly says Barad-dûr, catches himself. He can’t remember the actual name of the building, which only makes him feel worse. Bad enough he bared his soul uselessly to this woman, dredging up an ancient hurt for no particular reason and with no particular result other than to embarrass her and make himself feel awful. Now on top of it, he’s having a senior moment, and all at once he thinks of the growing hair in his ears, his enlarging prostate, his receding gums, and how the location of his job interview has become yet another alarming pothole in his memory.

He’s still saying “Ah…” when Claudia cuts to the right and they glide across two lanes into a driveway with a grassy median and a brick sign that says LAMAR OAKS.

Kevin closes his mouth. Her briskness annoys him, makes him feel even frailer, just like Stella does when she brings in his mail and sorts it for him. Technically they have separate mailboxes, she’s still paying rent on the downstairs apartment, but if she’s home before he is, she empties both boxes and brings the mail up to his kitchen table and sorts it into piles, his and hers, junk and not-junk. She especially likes to fish out envelopes from the AARP, the first one of which appeared just before his fiftieth birthday as ominously as a crack in a levee, which has since widened into an irreparable breach, flooding his kitchen table with offers for life insurance, prescription drug delivery, low-interest credit cards, and Mediterranean cruises, not to mention anodyne and unconvincing reassurances that the best of life is yet to come. Stella loves to eat an apple and slice the envelope open and read the letter aloud while he pretends to be a good sport.

“They’ll help you choose a Medicare plan,” she says, chomping with her mouth open. “You’ll get discounts at Applebee’s.”

She thinks she’s coming across as pertly as Sarah Jessica teasing Mr. Big, but she’s being more bitchy Miranda than flirty Carrie. It’s all he can do to keep from telling her, you’re closer to this than you admit, baby, I’ve seen your driver’s license, but he hasn’t yet. And to be fair, she always ends her dramatic reading with a little slap and tickle. “Chicks dig a guy with a senior discount,” she likes to whisper in his hairy ear.

“There’s a Neiman Marcus,” Claudia is saying as she creeps the truck over speed bumps through a labyrinthine parking lot sectioned with bristling waist-high hedges and little trees with purple flowers.

“Whoa,” Kevin says. “Neiman Marcus? Didn’t you say something about Target?”

“It’s Neiman’s Last Call store.” She glances at him. “Everything’s marked way down.”

“Huh.”

“There’s a Wohl’s, too,” she says. “They’re less expensive.”

“Ah.” He relaxes a bit — Wohl’s he knows, there’s a Wohl’s out near Briarwood, on the far side of 94. It’s not much further up the retail evolutionary tree than Target or Sears, but it’s all he needs. Stella would drag him into Neiman Marcus, but then Stella’s not here, is she?

“Wohl’s is good,” he says as the truck rounds a corner into a wide-open, sun-hammered, nearly empty parking lot. A few cars are clustered at the far end where the bleached yellow façade of Wohl’s is taking the sun full in its face, and a few more are parked along the bland redbrick storefronts on the right: postal store, Christian books, big and tall menswear. The rest of the lot, with its faded chevrons of empty parking spaces and minimalist light poles staring down like surveillance devices, seems as desolate as a salt flat. All it needs are the bleached ribs and eyeless skulls of dead cattle. Even through the window tint and the icy blast of AC in his lap, Kevin can feel the blinding glare and the baking heat, and suddenly his stomach knots up so tight he nearly winces.

Don’t leave me here, he almost says aloud. This wasteland is indistinguishable from any strip mall parking lot in North America, but suddenly it seems like the most alien landscape Kevin’s ever seen. He’ll get out of the truck as Kevin Quinn, but by the time he stumbles across to Wohl’s, he’ll be Fred C. Dobbs for sure, all alone and thousands of miles from anybody who loves him — assuming anybody does — hollow-eyed, stubbled, footsore, and lip-blistered, muttering to the first person he sees, “Can ya stake a fellow American down on his luck?” His stomach only clenches tighter when Claudia’s truck rolls to a stop in the emptiest portion of the lot, equidistant from Wohl’s and the shops on the right.

“Last Call’s just around the corner,” she says, and he realizes she’s being polite, leaving the choice to him, but it feels as if she’s leaving him to die. He’s afraid he’s going to beg her not to abandon him, that she’s going to have to get out of the truck herself and drag him out into the heat as he clings to the headrest for dear life, leaving long, desperate fingernail scratches in the upholstery. He turns to her, his mouth dry again.

“He’s wrong,” he says, and when she looks at him quizzically, he adds, “Your father. I’ll bet you’re a fantastic surgeon.”

She blinks at him, momentarily speechless. He shrugs, but makes no effort to get out of the truck.

“Who needs another nurse?” he says. “World’s lousy with nurses.”

She gives a harsh bark of a laugh. “Not really, but thank you.”

“Thank you. For everything.” He hugs the jacket to his chest, gestures weakly at his knee. “I feel better already.”

“Good.”

As he watches her sidelong, desperately trying to think of something else to say, she shifts her focus rather meaningfully toward the department store. No doubt she’s wondering what he’s doing, why he’s postponing their parting, and he can’t decide if he wants her to misunderstand — wants her, in other words, to think it has something to do with her and what passed between them — or if he wants her to understand the truth, that he simply doesn’t want to be left to fend for himself in this empty parking lot under a semiforeign sun, semisunstroked and wearing semitattered clothes, not knowing a soul for miles in any direction, left alone to think only of all the frustrations and disappointments that have led him here, to this barren place. Either way, he realizes, he’s going to seem pathetic to a woman like Dr. Barrientos, and at last, like a dying prospector accepting his fate in that last euphoric moment before the sun kills him, he starts fumbling — for the seat belt release, for the door handle, for something to say that will leave a better impression than he has so far. He’s got the belt unlatched somehow and is disentangling his right arm, and then he cracks the door and lets in the heat, and as he nudges the panel with his injured knee, pushing the door wider, he hears her say, “Everybody.”

He’s got one foot on the running board, his jacket clutched to his chest. She’s not looking at him, but staring through the windshield, not at Wohl’s, but at something infinitely far away.

“Well, listen.” He edges down into the heat. As he plants both shoes on the gritty pavement and puts his hand on the door to swing it shut, she shifts her gaze to him slowly, eerily.

“Everybody is tender and passionate.” It’s almost as if she’s not talking to him, it’s more like she’s talking in her sleep, an utterance out of a dream.

“Everybody,” she says again, her gaze sharpening in his direction.

“I know,” says Kevin.

She gives him the barest of smiles, one lonely prospector passing another in a trackless waste.

“Good luck to you.” She puts her truck in gear.

“And to you,” he says, and bangs the door shut. With a throaty roar the truck glides away in a wide curve across the empty lot, and Kevin lifts his eyes to the freeway interchange, which is close now, ramps swooping over and under each other, lines of cars gliding as if pulled by strings, high above sunburned yellow grass. When he can’t hear the grumble of Claudia’s truck anymore, only the windy rush of traffic, he turns and limps through the heat toward the department store, pulling his sunglasses out of his pocket.

Stepping up on the curb in front of Wohl’s, he meets his reflection in the tinted glass of the doors, and it’s the first time he’s seen himself full-length since the men’s room at the airport — his shirt is half-untucked, the rip in his trouser leg bares the white square of his bandage and an alarming reach of pale shin. Around the bug eyes of his sunglasses, his head seems swollen. That’s just a flaw in the glass, he tells himself, my head’s not that big, but then his image trembles and he has the awful feeling he’s about to evaporate into the overheated air. The door opens as he reaches for it, startling him again, and out comes an elderly woman unflatteringly packed into white capri pants and a red striped top. Kevin holds the door as she teeters past on hot pink heels, her tight coiffure dyed an unconvincing blond, her bright mouth, the same shade of pink as her shoes, puckered under wraparound sunglasses. He nods, but she sails by as if she hasn’t seen him, stepping heavily down off the curb and mincing toward her car. And who am I to call her elderly? he wonders, as earnest as Jimmy Stewart. She gets the same mail from the AARP that I do. Twenty years ago, he might have thought of her as a sexy older woman. And twenty-five years from now, that could be Stella, dyeing her hair and risking her ankles and packing herself into pants two sizes too small. He folds his sunglasses into his jacket pocket and passes through the second set of doors into the mellow fluorescence and cool, dry, floral air of the store, thinking of the once and future Stella. In the three years they’ve been together, this is the first time he’s been shopping for clothes without her and he feels the same mildly illicit, slightly queasy thrill he felt last night when he sat in the big picture window of Blimpy’s and greedily ate a cheeseburger and onion rings. But this is even riskier, because by the time he sees her again — tomorrow night, when she gets back from Chicago — he will no longer smell of onions, but he will have a new pair of trousers, and Stella, who could star in her own production of CSI: Ann Arbor, will eventually come across them in his closet or in the laundry and she’ll say, oh my God, not Wohl’s! Because she’ll know. What on earth were you doing in Wohl’s?

None of your business, Kevin thinks, not any more, but as he limps up the wide entrance aisle, he knows it doesn’t matter what he thinks, because Stella’s going to kibitz whether he likes it or not, in spirit at least. There doesn’t seem to be anybody behind the glittering jewelry counter, but it’s a measure of his anxiety — at shopping without her, at sneaking away for a job interview without telling her, at thinking he could leave her and start over in Texas — that he feels a blinding, guilt-inducing beam from the engagement rings under glass, as if the ranked zirconia are focused in his direction like a navy searchlight. Though, to be fair, Stella would never shine that light on him here. Who would marry the oaf who bought a ring at Wohl’s? Puh-leeze.

He limps past the counter and up the wide aisle, his thick-soled shoes squeaking on the spotless white tile. The tiles and white suspended ceiling recede in mirror-image toward a vanishing point behind the pastel folded towels in the bath shop at the far end. Kevin still doesn’t see any employees, doesn’t even see another customer, just receding ranks of breastbone-high racks, pink and burgundy lingerie to his right, trousers to his left. He angles onto the silent gray carpeting of the labyrinth of slacks, and someone moves directly into his path, startling him, but it’s only himself in a mirrored column, still disheveled and pale. The store seems to be sailing on mysteriously unmanned like the Marie Celeste, with tantalizing indications of recent activity — the AC still humming, the Muzak still playing. Standing directly under a little round ceiling grille, Kevin can hear Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

Kevin sighs. The AC’s cold enough that he slips on his jacket over his wilted shirt, inventorying each pocket by touch. He finds his tie rolled in a side pocket and shakes it out to check it for creases, but it seems to have survived the heat and his fall on the bridge, so he rolls it up and puts it back. He moves the folded letter and spare bandage from his breast pocket into his jacket, fingers his boarding pass for the return flight. In the dry refrigeration of the store he can smell himself, and he lifts the lapels of his jacket to see sweat stains under his arms. Now he’ll have to buy a new shirt, too.

To the beat of the Tina Turner song, Kevin walks his fingers through one rack of trousers after another. He avoids the worsted dress pants — he’s not spending $75.00, no matter what Stella would say. But then Stella’s shade scares him away from the $45.00 trousers, because they’re microfiber. “That’s just itsy bitsy polyester,” she whispers in his ear. Kevin moves to the Dockers, which are only $29.99, and starts to dicker with Stella’s spirit. Didn’t I tell you, protests Stella, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man in pleated khakis? But they’re 100 percent cotton, replies Kevin, not a trace of microfiber. And they’re only thirty bucks. I’m not even sure I want this job, I’m not dropping another seventy-five bucks on a pair of trousers just to impress a bunch of strangers I’ll probably never see again. Reaching a compromise with his inner Stella, Kevin pulls out a dark blue pair of flat-front khakis in his size, 34/36.

Clutching the trousers, he winds through the slacks toward a display of shirts. Who is Stella to lecture him, anyway? Even during their worst moments, at least he and Beth got each other. He could carry on a conversation with her and not feel like he was speaking to a bratty younger cousin. She may not have liked Martin Amis’s books (she hated them, in fact) but at least she knew who he was and could tell you why she hated him (she called him a motormouthed misogynist). But Stella, on the other hand, Stella reads featherweight novels with pastel covers, when she reads at all. And the first thing she does is turn to the back of the book and read the last few pages, to see how it turns out. “I need to know,” she says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”

“What suspense?” Kevin said. “They all have the same ending: Reader, I married him.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “Which is why I look: if she doesn’t get the guy, then I know I don’t want to read the book.”

Beth used to drag him to operas and gamelan performances and concerts by Tuvan throat singers. They worked out a compromise about live music, by which she would consent to go see Richard Thompson at the Ark, and he would accompany her to hear some jazz performer he’d never heard of at the Firefly. One of their ancient arguments was over a Betty Carter album that Beth loved, called It’s Not About the Melody.

“Actually, it is about the melody,” protested Kevin, a second-generation Sinatra fan.

But with Stella, the roles were reversed. She agreed to go see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Power Center only after Kevin told her that Captain Picard from Star Trek was playing Antony — and then Stella’s chief reaction was awe at Patrick Stewart’s abs, which you could see from the second balcony.

“I’d jump him in a heartbeat,” she’d said on the walk home.

“He’s in his sixties,” Kevin had said.

“I like older men,” she’d said, linking arms with him. “You know that.”

Stella’s idea of high culture is one those gaudy, fascistic shows in which some formerly charming folk genre — Irish step-dancing or Japanese drummers or Chinese acrobats — is blown all out of proportion into the sort of spectacle that would have fit right in at the Nuremburg rallies. Or a show that takes something vaguely “street” or mildly avant-garde — hip-hop dancers banging trash-can lids, men painted blue whacking each other with plastic tubing — and turns it into Vegas spectacle. Don’t even get him started about Cirque de Soleil. She dragged him all the way to Chicago on his fiftieth birthday — and, to be fair, paid for the whole trip — to surprise him with a bewildering, assaultive show full of faux mysticism and pointless virtuosity. When she asked him if he didn’t just love it, he stifled his gut response: that this was what entertainment would have been like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, fantastically fit but facelessly interchangeable performers in revealing outfits doing spectacular but meaningless stunts for a mindlessly bedazzled audience. Even the show’s title wasn’t really a word, he was convinced — vaguely Italian- or French-sounding, but signifying nothing, in the manner of some expensively concocted corporate brand name.

“It was great” is what he actually said, after which she took him back to their room at the Drake—“Don’t worry,” she’d said, “I’m expensing it”—and engaged him in some elaborately silly sex involving feathers, restraints, and a pair of Cirque-style masks. All of which, he had to admit, put the show retrospectively in a much more favorable light, as a kind of public foreplay. She also insisted on playing a CD of Cirque music she’d bought at the show — a rhythmic hash of ethnic music, like the folk tunes of Benetton — and Kevin started to laugh halfway through. But Stella just took his laughter as pleasure — which it mostly was — and redoubled her efforts.

He’s startled again by the sight of himself in another mirrored column, and he wonders if Stella would be caught dead with a man in torn trousers and sweaty, wilted shirt and one blood-soaked sock. He zeroes in on a poly/cotton dress shirt — fuck it, it’s marked down to twenty bucks. He pulls the tie from his pocket and makes sure the shirt matches. Then he pivots on his injured leg and lurches toward the socks. The gray carpet has no give to it, it’s like walking on the green of a minigolf course. From a wall of socks he plucks off a pair for ten bucks — it’s a lot for socks, but they’re antimicrobial, so his sweaty feet won’t smell. Note that, Stella? You can’t go all Queer Eye on me when I buy antimicrobial socks. And even I know you don’t buy a woman an engagement ring at a department store. Who said anything about a ring, anyway? I know how to read a home pregnancy test, too, and I know when I’m off the hook. What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

He finds a cash register where the only apparent survivor of whatever plague cleared out the store, a pudgy, round-faced, lank-haired salesgirl, is flipping through a ring binder. She pushes it to one side as he lays his purchases on the counter.

“Find everything you need?” she says robotically, without making eye contact. “Do you have a Wohl’s charge card?” She flips the trousers to find the tag.

“No.” He should have tried the trousers on first, but fuck it.

“Are you interested in opening a Wohl’s account?” the girl says in her retail zombie monotone, scanning the tags.

“No thanks,” says Kevin. “Do you have a public restroom?”

For the first time, the girl’s bovine gaze flickers at Kevin, and her fingers hesitate over the register. What must he look like? He wonders if she can smell him.

“Up front, by the service desk.” She looks him up and down and says, “Sixty-six fifty-one.”

Kevin fishes for his wallet, plucks out his Visa, and the salesgirl swipes the card with two fingers as if it’s infectious, then holds it out to him at arm’s length, watching him warily. As she scoops his purchases toward a plastic bag, Kevin startles them both by pressing his hand next to hers on top of the clothes, not quite touching. He tugs the trousers out from under her palm. “Where’d you say the men’s room is?”

She lifts her chin over the labyrinth of racks toward the front. Kevin tucks his receipt inside his jacket and cradles his purchases in the crook of his arm. Her eyes slide down to his shoes and all the way up to his face again. “You okay?” she says.

“Never better,” he says, limping away.

Customer Service is off to one side of the store — CUSTOMER CONVENIENCE says the sign, CONVENIENCIA PARA EL CLIENTE — and it’s even more brightly lit than the sales floor. This desk, too, seems to be unstaffed, and as he passes the counter toward the restrooms Kevin feels vaguely guilty, as if he’s stealing the clothes. The men’s room is just as brightly lit as the rest of the store, and it’s aggressively clean, smelling of urinal cakes and floral air freshener. Just inside the door there’s even a framed print of orchids. There are four sinks on the wide counter, with boxes of tissue between them. The Muzak is louder in here, some contemporary pop hit he doesn’t recognize, a young woman with a sharpish voice telling him to “Breathe, just breathe.”

If you say so, thinks Kevin. Avoiding his image in the wide mirror, he casts about for someplace to put his purchases, wishing now he’d let the girl put them in a bag. The counter looks spotless, making him wonder again if anybody ever actually comes into this store, but instead he tilts the baby-changing table down from the wall, inspects it carefully, even sniffs it, and lays down his new clothes. He takes off his jacket, spreads his fingers under the collar, and brushes off any remaining dust. A little rumpled, he thinks, but presentable, and he hangs it on the hook behind the door of the handicapped stall. Then, at last, he confronts himself in the mirror.

In the pastel glitter of the reflected restroom, he sees an admirably slender but pale, round-faced, and baggy-eyed middle-aged man, his formerly crisp shirt wilted and stained under his arms, his forehead damp with sweat, his sandy hair matted along his sideburns and against the back of his neck. The shirt is half-untucked all around his waist, and his ruined trousers hang low like oversized jeans on some teenager. He resists the instinct to tuck in the shirt and tug up his pants, leaning over the sink instead and pushing the button on a faucet, waiting with his hands under the water for it to run hot. Nose to nose with the mirror he sees melancholy eyes and the unsubtle features of a peasant, son of an Irish father and a Polish mother — a Mick and a Polack, Uncle Stan used to say — good-looking enough, he supposes, to hang onto his younger girlfriend, at least for now. But he can already see where his cheeks are going to sag, and the bags under his eyes aren’t entirely the result of heat and fatigue; they are becoming a more or less permanent feature. Face to face with himself, he realizes he looks like somebody’s dad. Not like my dad, though, he thinks. He’s already four years older than his father was when he died.

The water stops running before it gets hot, so Kevin mashes the button again with the heel of his palm. He dips his head, cups lukewarm water in both hands, and splashes his face. He knows how to read a pregnancy test — he knows he’s nobody’s dad yet — but he still doesn’t know what the discarded test really means. He found the stick five weeks ago, and Stella hasn’t said a word about it. She must have missed a period, but did she take the test because she hoped she was pregnant or because she hoped she wasn’t? He’s seen her little clamshell birth-control dispenser in the medicine cabinet, but it’s not like he keeps track, it’s not like he counts the pills to make sure she’s taking one each day. Kevin wears a condom most of the time, too, but sometimes he doesn’t. He didn’t that night in Chicago, when Stella, her eyes shining behind that goofy mask, plucked the little foil square out of his fingers and flipped it across the room, murmuring wetly in his ear, “I want it to be just us, Kevin, skin to skin.”

Where does she get this stuff? he wondered at the time, but even now, his cock stirs at the memory. He’d thought the masks were silly, he’d hated the music, but he remembers that night vividly: the shudder of her thighs around his waist, the rabbit pulse of the vein in her neck, the tremble of her lower lip under the gaudy mask. He splashes his face again and presses the soap dispenser. The milky goo in his palm looks like semen and smells like coconut, and he starts to laugh as he lathers his face, pushing his fingers up into his hairline and along his sideburns and around the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs with his fingertips, and in the reddened blackness behind his eyelids he can see Stella’s wrists straining against the leather cuffs — well, vinyl really, she isn’t as snobbish about sex gear as she is with trousers — and he can hear the rhythmic chirp of her excitement. He opens his eyes to peer through soapy eyelashes at the lather dripping off his nose and eyebrows and into the collar of his shirt, then presses the faucet again and splashes double handfuls of lukewarm water against his face, spattering the mirror and the countertop. Blinking at his reflection, he yanks a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and scrubs himself dry, vigorously rubbing his hair.

Chicago was eight months ago, so the pregnancy test wasn’t the result of their own Cirque de Drake, but they’ve gone bareback since. More frequently since then, in fact, with Stella assuring him that it’s okay, she’s got it taken care of, or that she’s just had her period, or that she’s just about to have it. He unbuckles his belt, slides it out, and coils it on the changing table, and he unbuttons his shirt slowly, pausing only to glance up at the ceiling for a security camera. Fuck it, he’s a customer, he’s dropped nearly seventy bucks here today, and anyway, there can’t be a law against changing clothes in a public restroom, not even in Texas. There’s always the possibility, of course that Stella took the test because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t pregnant. And she wasn’t, this time, anyway, which was probably just as well, because Kevin had just read of some study in the New York Times that said older men were more likely to father autistic children or kids with birth defects. Just like men, spermatozoa don’t stay young forever — they age, they break down, they decay. He didn’t actually say anything to her about the article, but he left the newspaper on the kitchen table with the article prominently displayed, and it was gone when he came home from work.

He strips off the shirt and with a twinge of midwestern guilt — what a waste, all it needs is laundering — he wads it into a ball and stuffs it in the trash. Who is he kidding? Stella’s announcement in the car coming home from Gaia, her spinning of condoms across the room like little Frisbees, supposedly in the heat of the moment — there’s only one thing on Stella’s mind. No matter how geriatric his seed is, Stella wants a child. He takes off his pricey shoes and puts the left one on the counter. He sniffs the right one and runs a dry paper towel through it, which comes out a little damp, smelling of his foot, but showing no blood. It’s all soaked into his sticky sock, which he peels off with two fingers and flings into the trash. Then he peels off the other one and tosses it, too, and then, right there in the overlit, over-air-conditioned, Muzaked men’s room, miles from home, surrounded by strangers in all directions, Kevin feels the shock of the icy tile against his bare soles like the opening of an abyss at his feet. It’s like the time he was hiking the coast of Donegal — back when he was responsible for no one but himself and could do things like that — and the red-faced warden of the slovenly youth hostel told him not to go up on the cliffs, the fog had rolled in and it wasn’t safe, and Kevin went anyway, figuring as long as he couldn’t hear the surf booming against the rocks, he probably wasn’t close to the cliff edge, and he strode happily through the mist beading on his anorak like diamonds, until a sudden shift in the wind simultaneously carried the thunder of the surf to him and blew the mist away like a veil to reveal that he was inches, inches, from a sheer, thousand-foot drop into roiling black water. His whole body convulsed in shock, nearly tipping him over the edge, and he saved himself only by dropping to his ass and scuttling crabwise back away from the edge.

Just as he scuttles crabwise now back away from the very thought of fatherhood, because he knows fatherhood would upend his life. For starters, it would cost him lots and lots of money — not just the prenatal care and the birth, but food, clothing, shelter, medicine, fees, tuition, toys — twenty years of it at least, without the kid contributing one thin dime. Thousands of dollars right off the bat, because Stella would want nothing but the best baby paraphernalia, wireless baby monitors and Baby Einstein DVDs and handcrafted wooden toys and some Swedish-engineered stroller with more safety features than a Volvo. Not to mention Kevin’s house would have to be babyproofed top to bottom: every socket capped, every cabinet latched, every blade locked away, the chemicals under Kevin’s sinks sealed up like a Superfund site. And never mind the expense — what perks of his semibachelor life would he have to give up? He has friends with kids, he knows that for years he’d have to forego movies, concerts, going to clubs. No more eating out. No more spur of the moment weekend trips. No more reading Martin Amis for hours in the bath. No more performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. No more devoting an entire weekend to watching a whole season and all the extras of Galactica straight through on DVD. And no more HBO, if there’s a chance that little Kevin or Stella Jr. could wander into the room and glimpse a bloody murder or a pole dance, and he’d have to answer the question, “What’s that, Daddy?”

And, again, how old would he be when the kid’s graduating from high school? Kevin would never have a real retirement, he’d be working to pay for the kid’s college till he keeled over dead. He wouldn’t live long enough for the kid to take care of him. And what if he gets sick or dies when the kid’s still young? Could Stella raise a child on her own? High-strung, tense, impatient, capricious — not the most maternal qualities, if he does say so himself. Not to mention those scars on her arms and inside her thighs — old and pale, but unmistakable — and her nightmares and her periodic daylight sojourns in the Stella Continuum. What happens when little Kevin or Stella Jr. is sticking his or her finger into an electrical socket or choking on strained peas or squeezing through the railing of Kevin’s second-story deck, and Mommy’s just staring into space, gesturing and murmuring to herself? If I’m not around, the kid’s dead, and if I am around, I’m the alpha parent by default, picking up the slack while Stella freaks or zones out, with me telling the screaming kid, “Mommy needs a little time out, kiddo. Mommy loves you, but Mommy needs her space.”

He empties his trouser pockets onto the counter — wallet, keys, a handful of change — and panics for a moment when he can’t find his Swiss Army knife, until he remembers he left it on the dresser at home, knowing he couldn’t take it on the plane. He’s feeling a little naked without it — and in fact, now that he’s stripping off his ruined trousers and stuffing them in the trash, he is nearly naked in the mirror, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs that have gone saggy in the heat. The semi-erection that stirred when he was thinking about Stella in Chicago has gone saggy, too, drooping down one leg of his shorts. He sniffs his armpits and hits the faucet and pulls out another fistful of paper towels. He soaks them, squeezes them out, and runs the makeshift sponge over his bare chest and down his arms and into his armpits. The water is barely lukewarm, and the AC chills his wet skin. He arches his spine and reaches as far as he can behind his back. In the mirror he’s happy to see his ribs and not to see a gut, but while he’s got a flat belly — mostly — it’s no Patrick Stewart six-pack, never was and never will be. And he can already see where his pecs and his upper arms are going to slacken and droop in the not-distant future, no matter how many bench presses he does. I’m not going to have another shot at a younger woman, he thinks. Stella’s my last chance.

He lathers up more milky soap between his palms and rubs coconut scent across his chest and under his arms and down his back. So that’s the choice, he thinks as soapy water dampens the waistband of his saggy shorts. Lose Stella and find a woman his own age who’s already had her kids. Learn to love, or at least live with, wrinkles, wattles, a thickening waist, spreading hips. Or hang on to Stella and lose his life, basically. With a kid there’d be less sleep, less sex, less time to exercise. Fatherhood would mean he’d lose what muscle tone he still has. No more hour-long runs in Gallup Park, no more lifting free weights after work, no more brisk hikes around Silver Lake, because every waking moment would be devoted to, or at least planned around, the kid, the kid, the kid. What’s the kid doing, where’d she get to, is she okay, is she safe? I thought you were watching her. Where did she go? Did somebody take her? Because it’s not like when Kevin was a child, when he could disappear with his friends for hours — playing with matches, frying ants with a magnifying glass, setting off firecrackers — or take off on his own — wandering up alleys, breaking bottles in vacant lots, gliding on his Stingray through traffic — no, these days you can’t leave them alone for an instant, every moment has to be accounted for, every contingency foreseen, which is why they carry cell phones like tracking devices, why they have to be fingerprinted and microchipped like cats, why they have to be padded and helmeted like middle linebackers just to ride a bicycle. Because the world’s full of crazed, childless women who will murder you and steal your kid for their own; pedophiles lurking on the Internet pretending to be twelve-year-olds; angry working-class white guys taking whole schoolrooms of little girls hostage. And that’s not even taking into account the kid’s peers: the distracted teenaged girl behind the wheel of daddy’s SUV with a learner’s permit and a cell phone and your daughter in the passenger seat, not buckled in; the hulking guy dropping Rohypnol in her punch at a party; the sullen little Columbine wannabe striding up a school hallway with a Mac-10 under his long black overcoat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And terrorists — oh my God, they watch cable news, they’re not stupid, they know an opportunity when they see it. Forget Al Qaeda, there’s no central planning anymore, it’s all eager beaver freelancers now, or so Kevin understands from Frontline. It’s only a matter of time before some nasty, self-pitying little fuck takes a whole school hostage, decapitating children one by one, live on CNN. It could happen; it’s already happened elsewhere in the world. There was that massacre not so long ago in Russia, a whole cell of terrorists storming a school and killing kids; he’s forgotten the name but he remembers the video: desperate parents running under fire with limp, bloodied children in their arms. The guys who did that were Muslims, weren’t they? He’s not actually sure, but what does Kevin’s instinctive racial profiling mean anymore when some round-faced white guy like the Other Kevin could memorize a few verses of the Koran and carry out his own jerry-rigged jihad under the streets of Glasgow? It’s the worst of both worlds, adolescent rage meets religious fanaticism, Dylan Klebold meets Mohammed Atta. That’s what fatherhood gets you — your kid’s either a monster or a victim. A father is either guilty or grieving.

He rinses with another damp handful of towels, then wipes himself with some dry ones, chafing his skin. The trash bin is filling up with wadded paper; he can’t even see his discarded clothes anymore. He props his bare right foot on the rounded edge of the counter and scrubs the sticky blood away with soap and water. Coconut between his toes, behind his ears, in his armpits — he’s going to smell like a Piña Colada. With his knee bent and the stained bandage pulled tight, he feels the ache of his scrape, and he yanks the bandage painfully off and tosses it. Pinpricks of fresh blood ooze through the orange stain on his patella, so he puts his foot down on the cool floor, steps into the handicapped stall — only now does it occur to him that maybe he shouldn’t be walking around barefoot in a public restroom — and fishes the clean bandage out of his jacket pocket. He peels off the backing, props his foot back up on the counter, and pastes the new bandage against the scrape, smoothing down the edges.

Then Kevin tugs his new trousers out from under the shirt and socks on the changing table, tearing off the tag and picking out the threads with his teeth and fingernails, missing his Swiss Army knife again. He balances for a moment like a stork on one bare foot, the other foot poised over the empty waist of his new trousers, and surveys one more time his own pale, slackening, coconut-scented flesh. He hasn’t washed and changed his clothes in public since he used to go swimming at Silver Lake, and he hasn’t done that in years. Kevin doesn’t even like to take his shirt off in public anymore. He thinks of the Other Kevin, ritually bathing himself in the dank bathroom of some gloomy Glaswegian tower block, just before he strapped on his suicide vest and blew himself and a lot of other people to smithereens, and Kevin thinks, maybe if the Other Kevin’d had a girl, maybe if he’d gotten laid once in a while, he wouldn’t have felt that loathing for his own flesh, wouldn’t have felt the need to express his rage through plastic explosives.

Wobbling, Kevin thrusts one leg and then the other into the pants and zips them up. A little snug, but not too bad. He’s aware that he’s squaring his shoulders and sticking his chest out, even though he’s alone in the restroom with the Muzak. He’s been tuning it out until now, perhaps because it’s been playing songs he doesn’t know. But now it’s a song he recognizes, “Tempted” by Squeeze, more boomer comfort food, and now Kevin just feels tired. He doesn’t want to think about fatherhood anymore. He wishes the interview were over with, he wishes he were on his way to the airport, he wishes he were already on the plane. No, it’s more than that: he wishes he’d never come to Austin in the first place, wishes he’d never applied for the job, wishes he were back at his desk in Willoughby Hall, editing some deadly dull manuscript, reading his e-mail, mollifying some paranoid junior academic on the phone. He wishes he were on his deck drinking a Molson’s, waiting for Stella to come home from Chicago.

I said to my reflection, let’s get out of this play-ee-ace, goes the song, and he manages to unpin the new shirt without sticking himself and discovers that it’s short-sleeved, which ticks him off — at himself, mainly, for not checking in the first place — but he puts it on anyway, because if he wants to return it, he’d have to dig his old, soiled shirt out of the trash or go back into the store bare-chested. At least the new shirt buttons all the way to the top without choking him, so he just tucks it in and snakes his belt through the loops of his new trousers. He tugs on the new socks, hopping one-footed on the cold floor. Drops his shoes smack on the tile, steps into them, props each on the counter to tie the laces. Then he retrieves his jacket from the stall and watches himself in the mirror as he shrugs it on, shooting the cuffs. Did some bored security guard watch Kevin’s entire striptease on CCTV? Is he even now calling the Austin police, to report some pasty, Celtic suicide bomber in the men’s room, ritually preparing himself for an atrocity? Kevin wonders if he’ll be arrested before he even leaves the store.

“Relax,” Kevin says out loud, smiling insincerely at himself in the mirror. “I’m harmless.” He replaces his wallet and keys in the pockets of his new trousers, scoops the change off the damp counter into his palm. He steps to the urinal and empties his bladder of all the iced tea he’s been drinking, his stream spattering the little plastic filter that says JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS. Then he returns to the sinks and washes his hands, turning his newly scrubbed face this way and that in the mirror. He stands, squares his shoulders, plucks the tie out of his pocket, and ties it quickly in the mirror, cinching it until he’s happy, then loosening it a bit and undoing his top shirt button for the trip back downtown. He flips the changing table up against the wall — for the last time or the first? — and hits the door just as the singer gives a final, soulful grunt—Unhhh, tempted by the fruit of another, tempted but the truth is discovered…

… what’s been going on, thinks Kevin. At last there’s someone behind the Customer Service counter, a short, buxom, black-haired young woman in a fitted shirt, also flipping through a ring binder, and Kevin, cooled and cleaned and smelling of coconut and new clothes, steps up with a smile and puts both hands on the counter.

“Excuse me,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve left my cell phone at home. Could you call me a cab?”

Feeling refreshed and dapper, Kevin waits in the vestibule between the two banks of doors at the front of store. Gazing out the tinted doors at a yellow minivan coasting toward him through the dusty glare of the nearly empty parking lot, he’s thinking he should just tell the cabbie to take him straight to the airport, adding like some wiseguy in a snap-brim fedora, “And make it snappy, chief.” Might as well just go home, he thinks. He still can’t make up his mind about Stella, but what he’ll probably do is let things drift until she presents him with a positive pregnancy test, and by then it’ll be too late to abandon her. He will back into fatherhood the way he’s backed into everything else in his life. He’s already certain that he’s not going to take the job here, whatever it is, even if they offer it to him. Move to Texas? What the hell was he thinking?

The cab stops at the curb, and the cabbie’s silhouette peers toward the store. Kevin puts on his sunglasses and pushes out the door into the midday sun. Through the viscous air he hears the grumble of the cab’s engine and the waterfall rush of the nearby freeway. Only mad dogs and Englishmen, thinks Kevin, gripping the hot door handle and sliding open the minivan’s rear door. He climbs up onto the stiff seat, then heaves the door shut with a satisfying chunk. Enfolded in the cab’s pine-scented AC, he hauls the seat belt across and clicks it. The cabbie, a skeletally lean young black man, tilts his close-cropped head slightly, so that Kevin can only see his sharp, ebony cheekbone.

“Downtown,” Kevin says, tugging his jacket straight, shooting his cuffs like some high roller. Without a word, the cabbie puts the minivan in gear. Wohl’s glides backwards in Kevin’s window.

Well, why not? He’s spent all this money to come all this way, he might as well go through with the interview, even if he doesn’t really want the job. Five hundred for the plane ticket — though they’re going to reimburse him — another forty bucks on two cab rides, wait, make that sixty for three cab rides, because it’ll cost him another twenty to get back to the airport from downtown. Not to mention seventy bucks on new clothes. Cruising down the parking lot, the cabbie taps on the brake for an attractive thirtysomething in khaki shorts and a tight sleeveless blouse who is carrying a bag from Neiman Marcus. The cab passes behind her as she approaches a parked SUV, and Kevin turns to watch her open the hatchback, her heels lifted from her flip-flops, her calves taut, her firm arm extended, her blouse lifting to bare the small of her back. No tattoo like Kelly had, alas, but an admirably round ass, and dirty blond hair brushing her freckled shoulders. Kevin faces front again, simultaneously reminded of Stella’s toned upper arms and of the freckled shoulders of long-lost Lynda, and he smiles to realize that that’s why he just dropped seventy dollars on new clothes — the money isn’t an index of his professional ambition, it’s the price of his foolish middle-aged longing, his geriatric priapism. If he’d kept his mind on the interview to begin with, he’d still be downtown in Starbucks. It wasn’t ambition, but lust and nostalgia that wilted his shirt and tore his trousers and bloodied his socks, and it wasn’t even really lust for Kelly, fine as she was, it was lust for a woman he hasn’t even seen in twenty-five years. Lynda would be forty-five now, at least. Probably thicker around the middle, broader in the hips, her slinky walk buried under the sediment of middle age, her sleekness blunted, her pale skin a little less springy than it was. And what happens to freckled girls as they age? What do freckles look like on a forty-five-year-old? Do they fade away or do they become age spots? Do women at midlife pay cosmetic surgeons to save their freckles or erase them? Is it cruel to think this way? Having lived in Ann Arbor for thirty years, he regularly runs into old lovers or college classmates — the way he ran into Beth at Gaia Market — but he’s watched them age in small increments. What takes him by surprise is running into some old high school crush when he’s visiting his mom in Royal Oak, someone he hasn’t seen since the seventies. Usually she recognizes him before he recognizes her, and he has to fake it for a moment, pretending at first that he knows who she is, and then pretending he isn’t taken aback at how she’s changed since her days of hip-hugging bell bottoms and halter tops and ironed hair. He doesn’t always succeed, and no matter how enthusiastically he says, “You look great!” or “Of course I knew it was you!” he can see her gauge his response. It’s the same when he’s channel-surfing and he comes across some formerly dewy sitcom actress he fantasized about in his teens and twenties, and the sight of her playing a gruff lesbian mom on Lifetime or a gorgon of a defense attorney on Law and Order depresses him like nothing else. But Lynda, Lynda, whatever happened to Lynda? From that steamy summer until now, as often as he’s retrospectively fantasized about that one night on the porch, it has rarely occurred to him to wonder where she is now. Would he even recognize her if he passed her on the street?

The cab negotiates the maze of hedges, and the little bushes with purple flowers bristle at Kevin from beyond his window. Without his intending it to happen, the faces of the women he’s known are stuttering now before him like a mis-sprocketed film. Beth, Stella, the Philosopher’s Daughter, Lynda — there are others, but those are the four who are popping up most often in his sexual highlight reel. The minivan rocks over a speed bump, and Kevin feels a tingling in his balls. He and Beth sometimes made love as if they were struggling for mastery, grappling like a pair of sweaty high school wrestlers, each trying for a more lethal grip, muscles taut as guy lines as they grunted and strained against each other, racing to see who could make the other finish first. In this battle of wills, making the other climax wasn’t tenderness but one-upmanship: it was getting the other to cry uncle, it was earning a victory by which the other was stripped bare. He grinned fiercely in her face as he pinned her by the wrists and pounded her, grunting, “Give it up, give it up.” And sometimes she’d pinned him, straddling him like a playground bully and grinding against him, pressing him down by the wrists and baring her teeth and laughing like a frat-boy date rapist: “You know you want it.” In these ruthless contests, if he came first he sobbed aloud as if he were ashamed and turned his face away. And if she came first, she groaned as if in pain and then fended him off with a forearm and rolled out from under him, curled on the edge of the bed with her chest heaving as if she’d just pulled herself out of dark, cold water. It wasn’t like this all the time or even most of the time — they had sentimental sex and sleepy sex and conversational sex and make-up sex like any other long-term couple — but what he remembers now are those desperate grapplings.

There’s passion for you, Kevin thinks, his cock semihard in his boxer briefs. He wonders if he could adjust himself without the cabbie noticing, but just as he glances at the glossy back of the cabbie’s head — trapezius muscles like a weightlifter’s, a shiny scalp under stubbled hair — the driver looks right as he changes lanes. The radio is muttering now, the cabbie’s turned it up. More talk radio; Kevin can hear the shrillness of the announcer, though he can’t make out what he’s saying. Don’t the cabbies here ever listen to music? Isn’t Austin supposed to be the live music capital of the world? Kevin grips his knees and shifts his legs, which relieves the pressure on his hard-on. He’s surprised to see that they’ve left the shopping center and are already cruising north up Lamar, back the way he came with Claudia Barrientos, the street wide and flat and laced over with wires, under a whitish sky. Kevin sees things he hadn’t noticed coming the other way: a Wendy’s in a grove of gnarled trees; a scruffy used-car lot flying both American and Mexican flags; a low, ancient, ramshackle wooden dance hall with an unlit neon sign reading THE BROKEN SPOKE. Another place I’ll never go, thinks Kevin, coasting downhill back toward downtown, then back to the airport, back to Ann Arbor, back to Stella.

Whom he doesn’t love, or so he keeps telling himself. Yet their lovemaking can be surprisingly tender. Part of that’s the difference in their ages: no matter how many bench presses he does or how far he runs, he’s still fifty, so no more three vigorous copulations a night — it’s two if he’s lucky, once or twice a week, and the second time is an uphill climb. Like a general fighting the previous war, a couple of times early on he tried to grapple with Stella the way he’d grappled with Beth, pinning her wrists to the sheets, but she stiffened as if in pain and gasped, “Please don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, instantly releasing her. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Stella may like her faux-leather handcuffs from time to time, but that’s about performance and make-believe and a kind of adolescent role-playing that Kevin has learned to go along with and even enjoy. Instead, what he can offer Stella in bed is midlife courtliness. What he feels toward her, in fact, is a kind of protectiveness, and on those rare occasions when he tries to plumb the mystery of Stella — who made the scars on her inner thighs and why, who she’s talking to in the Stella Continuum and what they’re talking about, why she wakes up sweating and shuddering in the middle of the night, what she’s looking at when she doesn’t seem to be looking at anything — he wonders what could have happened to her before he met her that makes her respond so gratefully to simple kindness. Mutual gratitude may even be the foundation of their relationship, because he knows that at his age he’s lucky to be having any sex at all with a fit and energetic younger woman.

“… in St. Paul, Minnesota,” says the minivan’s radio, suddenly even louder. “Reports are still sketchy at this time…”

Kevin watches the cabbie’s long arm, all muscle and bone, withdrawing from the radio dial. Their gazes meet in the rearview. The cabbie has wide, deep-set, mournful eyes, and the instant he sees Kevin looking back, he reaches for the radio again and turns down the volume.

“We goin’ where downtown, exactly?” the cabbie says to Kevin in the mirror. He has a musical accent, which Kevin guesses is African.

Up ahead, framed by telephone poles and power lines, broad Lamar descends into a gentle curve lined with trees and billboards and low buildings. Against the bleached sky rises a new condo tower like something made of Legos, and the narrow dome of the Texas capitol. Kevin can’t see the pronged tower, and he still can’t remember its name, nearly calling it Barad-dûr out loud.

“Sixth and Congress,” he says, shifting in his seat, picturing the view from Starbucks: the homeless guy in the lamé dress and Laura Petrie wig; the flat-bellied, sweat-free guys in khakis; the swaying, bare-midriffed nymphets; Kelly, with her duffel over her shoulder, swinging her hips like a sailor on shore leave. Kelly, who led him astray and wilted his suit and tore his trousers and lacerated his knee, who lured him off the map to his fall. Only it wasn’t really Kelly who’s to blame, it was Lynda, and it wasn’t even really Lynda, but his nostalgia for the only truly uncomplicated and regret-free fucking he’s ever done in his life. Not even in retrospect does he feel any tenderness for Lynda, which is probably why he hardly ever wonders what happened to her. Even when they were lovers, she provoked no other emotion in him but desire, and for that reason, probably, twenty-five years later she looms larger in his fantasy life than all the other women he’s known put together. Even more than the Philosopher’s Daughter — about whom, it sometimes amazes him to realize, he has never fantasized sexually.

Whoa, thinks Kevin, nearly saying it out loud. Riding semi-aroused in an air-conditioned minivan in sweltering Austin, the glare outside cut by the window tint and his own amber sunglasses, Kevin is breathless suddenly, his heart racing. The tapestry of trees and bungalows on either side scrolls past the windows, while up ahead the sun-hazed backdrop of the capitol dome and condo towers and skeletal construction cranes slides from side to side with each curve of Lamar. At last Barad-dûr is visible, and it seems to glide back and forth like it’s being trundled about by unseen stagehands. Not once over the years has he ever daydreamed about the Philosopher’s Daughter, who at the time he thought he would love until he died, and yet his three month’s worth of couplings with Lynda, whose last name he doesn’t even remember, are his go-to memories—à la plage, on the dance floor, on the railing — whenever he needs to arouse himself. She is his default fantasy, his shortcut to a quick ecstasy.

And now, in a little bubble of freezing air drifting down a wide commercial street in Austin, Texas, he realizes once again that the primacy of Lynda in his imagination is because of the Philosopher’s Daughter. He’s not proud of it, and it’s not something that he likes to contemplate, but it’s true. The reason he has never sullied his memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter with self-abuse is because of that night at her parent’s house, the night of one of her impromptu parties, when their mutual friend Wayne carted his whole stereo out to the house because her parents’ ancient hi-fi wasn’t up to the job. Wayne set up the system in her parents’ living room and blasted his painstakingly composed party tapes into the warm summer night while everyone danced on the creaking floorboards of the Philosopher’s farmhouse. Kevin had been out dancing with Lynda already on a number of occasions — he loved to watch her wave her arms in the air, like Anna’s arms on the roof of Taco Rapido, raised to the sky (as Kevin now passes) in invocation of… what? Perhaps she overheard Kevin’s story on the packed dirt patio below and like some local, tutelary deity, the Tex-Mex goddess of desire, she has lifted her hands to bless his nostalgic erection, or at least to bless his memory of that one particular night, because that’s the night he best remembers Lynda on the dance floor, with the Philosopher’s surprisingly shabby Persian rug rolled up and the sofa pushed back, the coffee table jammed against the wall and littered with flakes of weed and grains of cocaine. On the sofa sprawled Wayne, a plump Asian guy, smoking cigarette after cigarette and nodding behind the screen of his long black hair to the music, watching the dancers and only occasionally dancing himself. The Philosopher’s Daughter herself danced to every song, often bolting from the dance floor midsong, laughing, to abandon one partner and pull another onto the floor, working her way with a teasing evenhandedness through her entire roster of suitors. But this wasn’t like the TV party, when she had been a queen bee surrounded only by wistful wannabees — no, tonight there were actually other girls at this party, lots of them. This was only a month or two after the Philosopher’s Daughter had rejected him, and Kevin made a point of introducing Lynda to the Daughter during the ringing silence between dance tapes, while Wayne squatted at the tape deck picking the next one with exquisite judgment and the sweaty dancers wandered out to the back porch for beer and a breeze.

“This is Lynda,” Kevin had said, his arm curled around her narrow waist, his hand cupped over her hip. The room was lit only by a couple of red bulbs plugged into a floor lamp in the corner. The sash windows were open to the whirring crickets outside, but even so the room was fifteen degrees hotter than the summer night, humid with sweat and spilled beer and the sweet reek of reefer. Even in the resinous gloom, Kevin could see that the Philosopher’s Daughter was flushed and excited, her hair pasted with sweat to her forehead.

“Oh, hi!” she shouted, rocking back on her heels and laughing, piercing Kevin’s heart even as he stood with his arm around another warm girl. “Hi!” she chirped again, as high-pitched as a chipmunk, but Lynda gave her just a slow, sleepy smile, stroking Kevin’s back as she let her heavy-lidded gaze stray around the room. The Daughter, her pupils dilated, just blinked at Kevin and laughed again, and Kevin, to fill the silence, was about to say “Great party” when the music erupted once more and Wayne jumped up and started one of his infrequent boogies, throwing his bulk around and flinging his black hair about like a go-go dancer’s. Without a word Lynda tugged Kevin away by the hand as the Philosopher’s Daughter blinked dopily after them in the dim cathouse light. He turned away from her and instead watched Lynda kick her flip-flops to the wall, then start snapping her fingers over her head, slouching and swaying and closing her eyes behind the screen of her disheveled hair.

Kevin’s dimly aware of the metallic insinuation of the radio—“Early indications,” in the measured tones of an NPR announcer, “significant casualties”—and above the trees along a stretch of Lamar Kevin doesn’t remember, all he sees is the faded bedsheet of Texas sky. His hand on the radio, the cabbie is watching Kevin in the rearview, but Kevin’s trying to remember that first song he danced to at the party with Lynda, and he can’t. Despite his record store job, he was just enough older than the other dancers that the music wasn’t instantly familiar to him, a throbbing, quasidisco beat he identified as something from Manchester, England, though he couldn’t name the band. In fact, he remembers only the one song from that night, but he still remembers the way Lynda danced mostly on her toes in that steamy living room, pivoting and twirling so that her hair lashed across her face, the old farmhouse floor bouncing under their feet. At first Kevin simply chugged in place, closing his eyes as if he were really caught up in the music, which he wasn’t, not to begin with, still experiencing the thunderous, pounding bass as an assault, still self-consciously sober among all these swaying, drunken dancers, hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was watching him, hoping she was wondering who this new girl was. But he kept his eyes on Lynda, who danced with her eyes closed, swaying her hips and her long, freckled arms in a complex, sinuous, but precise relationship to the beat. She wore a loose sundress that swung with every movement of her hips and flared to reveal her calves. The dress had no back to speak of, so that when she spun Kevin saw, under her flying hair, a single, smooth curve of skin, stained red by the lamplight. As the cab glides down the long slope of Lamar toward the river, the busy skyline out of sight behind the heatstruck trees, Kevin remembers hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was noticing what a good dancer Lynda was, how effortless and sensual and unself-conscious, with not a hint of the Daughter’s spastic Molly Ringwaldisms. In the breaks between tapes he and Lynda visited the keg out back, and soon he was drunk enough so that it wasn’t even an effort not to glance around the dance floor, soon he was drunk enough to dance like Lynda, swaying his own hips and snapping his fingers over his head. During another break he stood breathless to one side as Lynda did a line off the coffee table, lifting her hair back with one hand, baring her slender neck, and he felt an electric surge from his medulla down his spine to the tip of his cock as if he’d done the line himself. He feels it now, in fact.

“Somethin’ bad happen,” says the cabbie. He’s fiddling with the radio, which hisses and spits from station to station.

“I’m sorry?” Kevin shifts on the backseat. A moment after she did the line, he and Lynda were dancing again, and now she was watching him with half-lidded eyes through her wild screen of hair, now she spun closer and ran the tips of her fingers down his arms. He grinned stupidly back at her, woozy and aroused, almost touching her but not quite, close enough to feel the lash of her hair across his cheek, close enough to smell her sweat.

“On the radio,” says the cabbie, searching the dial without pausing. “Somethin’ bad in Minnesota.”

The cab is already crawling across the Lamar Avenue Bridge, though Kevin can’t remember descending that last mile, curve after curve, to the river. He’s disoriented by the view out his window, where he sees a line of boxcars crawling across the rust-red trestle, the inverted reflections of the railcars crawling through the glassy green water of the river below. On the pedestrian bridge where he fell an hour or two ago, sweaty joggers trudge past a cluster of busy young men in polo shirts and khakis, some sort of film crew, it seems, working within a rough rampart of metal boxes, setting up a couple of tripods and aiming them at Austin’s dynamic skyline. Kevin feels as if his own film is being rewound, as if his lust has reeled him out to the end of the line, and is now reeling him back in, all the way down Lamar back to the center of town where he started. His disarticulation and reconstruction as a Texan as he traveled south down Lamar has been reversed, and now he’s being returned to his former state, the original Kevin, Michigan Kev.

The cabbie’s watching him in the rearview, his gaze more mournful than before, but Kevin can’t remember what the guy just said. He cranes around the headrest in front of him and sees traffic kinking and unkinking up the hill toward Gaia Market. Perhaps there’s been another accident; it can’t be the same one. Kevin, restless and rattled, notes the glowing red numbers of the fare; this is going to be another expensive cab ride.

“I got a brother up there.” The cabbie has given up on the radio; he’s feeling for something on the front seat. “He drive a cab, too, in the Twin Cities. I gettin’ worried.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin says. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

The cabbie’s cradling a glossy red cell phone in his broad palm and thumbing the tiny keypad, shifting his gaze back and forth between the traffic ahead and the cell’s display as the cab glides and stops, glides and stops.

“What’s this about Minnesota?” Kevin leans forward against his seat belt, but the cabbie raises his finger for silence as he cups the tiny phone to his ear. The man’s other hand grips the wheel tightly, even though they’re crawling at only fifteen miles per hour off the end of the bridge and under the railway underpass.

“Fine,” mutters Kevin, settling back against the seat. Over the rush of the AC vents Kevin hears the tiny ring of the cabbie’s phone and then the ringing silence on the dance floor when the tape cuts off in midsong and everybody sags in place and groans in the heat and humidity. “Waaayyyne!” sings out the Philosopher’s Daughter, laughing, mocking. Wayne vaults from the couch, the old floor shuddering under his weight, and pushes his way through the breathless dancers to the stereo. Kevin and Lynda sink back on their heels, and Lynda pushes her hair away from her face with both hands and fixes Kevin with her cocaine eyes. All around them people are shouting over the music that isn’t playing, and Wayne and the Philosopher’s Daughter are loudly haggling over which tape to play next. Lynda sways against Kevin and catches his T-shirt with one hand and tugs him toward the door. They pinball off other dancers who don’t seem to notice and stumble out onto the empty farmhouse porch, the screen door slapping shut behind them. The red light within tints the windows but casts no glow on the porch, and Kevin isn’t sure if the shrilling all around him is the absence of amplified music ringing in his ears or the crickets under the shadowy trees on the farmhouse lawn. Lynda backs up to a porch upright and pulls Kevin up against her, and she drapes her arms over his shoulder and kisses him. She tastes salty from sweat. Kevin slips his hands inside the loose armholes of her dress and slides his palms up her warm, slippery rib cage, stiffens her nipples under his thumbs, feels her blood pulsing through the tips of his fingers. She kisses him deeper in the ringing, buzzing silence, her fingers through the sweaty hair at the back of his head. Kevin’s cock was already stirring on the dance floor, and now he’s hard. He frees a hand and slides it up under her skirt. “That’s the one!” he hears their hostess cry over the chatter inside the house, and now he’s aware of the Philosopher’s Daughter somewhere behind him like a source of heat, and he sends a thought in her direction, watch this, his thumb sliding up the inside of Lynda’s slick thigh, I’ll show you passion. Lynda flinches, catching her breath.

(The cabbie is speaking rapid-fire into his phone in a foreign language. He’s repeating the same word — a name? — over and over again. Nobody seems to be answering him.)

Then the stereo erupts again to shouts and cheers, a ragged electric guitar in a sharp, insinuating figure that Kevin recognizes instantly. In the clinch, Kevin and Lynda gaze through the dark at each other as the drums kick in, Charlie Watts playing a slow, sensual, urgent beat. On the sloping old porch they can feel the trembling of the farmhouse floor under the dancer’s feet, and Kevin starts to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” murmurs Lynda.

“Nothing,” he breathes as the bass comes in, Bill Wyman playing a balling rhythm. He kisses Lynda and slides his sweaty palm farther up under her skirt, and she grips his wrist and holds him back. They part slightly, their mutual humidity rising between them, and he tries to catch her gaze, why not? But she’s looking past him, blinking through her scrim of hair as if listening carefully for something. Then Jagger starts singing, Yeah, you got… satin shoes, and she eases from under him and sways her hips to Watts and Wyman down the porch, away from the windows. She doesn’t look back, but he follows her past one dim red window and then the other, brushing the porch swing and making it twist slowly, end by end. Dim red figures bob and sway in the farmhouse windows, and Kevin can’t make out anyone in particular, but he knows the Philosopher’s Daughter is there, he can feel her radiating through the wall of the house.

(Cupping the cell, the cabbie makes the turn by Gaia Market one-handed, accelerating east down Fifth into the canyon of construction sites. He presses Dial again and lifts the phone to his ear.)

At the end of the porch Lynda lifts her chin and pushes her hair back again with both hands, saying nothing. Jagger growls through the window screens, Y’all got… cocaine eyes, and she grips Kevin by the forearms and wheels him around and settles him on the wooden railing, never taking her half-lidded eyes off his. His feet flat on the floorboards, the bass pounds through the soles of his sneakers. Lynda glances back at the windows, tosses her hair, then squats barefoot before him, pushing Kevin’s knees apart. “Oh,” he breathes, so quietly that no one could possibly hear him over the music, not even himself. In the windows crimsoned bodies churn while at his feet Lynda tugs the zipper of his jeans and pries his cock free with the tips of her fingers. He lays his trembling hand on the crown of her head as she takes the tip of it in her mouth and strokes him three times, up and down, like she’s nodding at something he said. One long-fingered hand rests on his thigh, the other curled under her skirt, between her legs. His cock aches it’s so hard, but Lynda lifts her mouth away and pushes herself to her feet with her hands on his knees. Even in the humid summer air her saliva chills his hard-on. “Don’t stop,” he says, still not loud enough to be heard over the music, but Lynda lifts her skirt to thumb her panties down into a knot on the porch. Her face is in shadow, her eyes hooded. She slips the straps of her dress off her shoulders, baring her breasts, and leans into him and kisses him, her hair falling across their faces. He slides his hands up under her dress and digs his fingers into her slippery ass. She pushes down on his shoulders, he lifts, and somehow she’s straddling his lap with her knees on the railing, her thighs taut, her moist cunt sliding exquisitely onto his cock.

(The cab dashes from light to light toward Austin’s downtown as the cabbie mutters into the phone, then presses Quit and tosses it in frustration on the seat beside him.)

The porch railing creaks under their weight, and even drunk and excited Kevin wonders about the farmhouse’s craftsmanship and hopes the Philosopher’s Daughter’s father is as good a handyman as he is a philosopher. He worries about toppling backward into the bushes, he worries about splinters, but the beer and the anxiety are making him last longer, otherwise he might have come the instant he was inside her. Then Lynda murmurs “Wait” right in his ear, and as he clutches her waist under her dress she unbends first one leg and then the other over the railing, settling tightly against him, taking him in even deeper. She tightens her calves against the railing and squeezes with her thighs, and he groans, because he’s deeper inside this girl than he’s ever been inside any girl before, and he presses his open mouth against the long, salty curve of her neck. He’s inhaling her humidity, she’s panting like an animal just above the top of his head. They can’t move much — if she thrusts too hard against him she’ll topple them into the bushes — but the song has finished with words and now it’s just a driving sax, and they rock together to the beat, her sweat dripping into the dress bunched at her waist, her hands kneading his back, his face pressed between her salty breasts, her heart thumping against his lips. He can’t move much, he can hardly breathe, but he can’t stop now, and he hooks his chin over her shoulder, her hair scratching his nose and filling his mouth, and through it he can see the red window where the music’s pouring out, he can see pumping limbs and torsos in the red light, hair swinging, heads shaking. There’s someone in the window, he can’t make out who in the darkness, just a silhouette against the red glow, catching a breeze through the screen, breathing in something other than sweat and beer and marijuana. Kevin wants it to be her, and he thinks, look at me, but he can’t be sure, it’s just a shape in the window, it might not be her, it might be someone else. Now the music is circling and building, just the rhythm section and an insinuating solo guitar, and as Lynda rocks against him, he surges with each bar of the solo, almost cresting but not quite, and he thinks, I want you to see me. He hopes this lasts forever, he hopes that it doesn’t and that he comes like a waterfall, but either way he wants her to know, he wants her to see him. His heart hammers, his breath rasps through Lynda’s hair. Turn around, he wills the silhouette in the window, this could have been us.

(The cab idles impatiently at the corner of Fifth and Congress. The cabbie breathes heavily through his nose; he has the phone in hand again, and he’s staring at the little screen, as if willing it to ring.)

Now the guitar and the saxophone are trading off, leading each other on, and Lynda starts thrusting harder against him, faster than the beat, gasping like a runner. Kevin tries to grip her tighter, but she’s so slippery under her dress and she’s moving so urgently it’s all he can do to keep them both on the railing. His thighs ache and his back hurts, and under his hands he can feel every muscle in her body pulling tighter. All he can do is hold on tight and flex his buttocks. Now her gasps are high-pitched and squeaky and he hopes they finish before the song does because he doesn’t want her to come out loud in the gap between the songs when everybody could hear them. Only her, he thinks, hanging on to Lynda for dear life, I only want her to know. Lynda digs her nails into the back of his neck, and he sinks his teeth into the taut curve of her throat to keep from groaning aloud. Her sweat pours over his fingers, and now she’s whimpering rhythmically, chirping like a bird, and through the window the guitar and the saxophone are winding tightly round and round each other, and Kevin thinks, Turn around, just about to come himself, look this way.

(As the cab turns onto Congress, the cell phone sings, and the cabbie exclaims aloud, inclining his head toward the red phone like a tiny heart in his palm. There’s a torrent of speech, both ends of the conversation talking excitedly over each other. The cabbie sounds like he’s about to cry.)

Lynda sucks in her breath and her cunt seizes tightly around Kevin’s cock and Kevin feels it all the way up his spine and down to his toes, blood pounding in his temples, his heart squeezing tighter than a fist, as if it will never relax again. He clenches his arms around her back, digging his fingers into her; he groans wordlessly into the salty flesh of her shoulder. He can feel his balls pumping into her. Then Lynda goes slack, her head drooping over his shoulder, her ass sagging back against his knees. His own limbs turn rubbery and he can barely hold her up, her sweat pooling under his palms. Through her tangled hair he sees bodies thumping in the living room, limned in red light. Nobody’s in the window anymore. It’s another song now, they fucked right past the end of the last one. Lynda’s pulse is still pounding, she’s panting against his cheek. His own heart is beating again, slow and hard, and he feels postcoital lassitude spreading through him like a barbiturate. Lynda sighs and rocks back, counting on him to keep her from sliding off his lap to the porch. Her breasts gleam in dark, and she lifts her elbows one more time and brushes back her sweat-stringy strands of hair and gives him the slowest, dirtiest smile he’s ever seen, before or since, the same smile she’ll give him a month or so later, when he finds her in bed with another guy.

“Hey, mister.” The cabbie is looking right at Kevin through the gap between the minivan’s bucket seats.

So what if I didn’t love her — she didn’t love me, no big deal. That night on the porch wasn’t even the best sex he ever had, but it’s the moment he always comes back to, and after fingering this memory threadbare for all these years, he knows it’s only because of where it happened and who might have been watching. Did he really love the Philosopher’s Daughter? Has he ever really loved any of the women he’s known? Has any of them ever really loved him? He’s pretty sure he loved Beth, but they fought all the time. The worst he can say about Stella is that she irritates him, frustrates him, bores him, but Beth, holy shit, Beth used to send him into a rage. There were shouting matches and tears and slammed doors and a couple of times the flinging of substantial objects, capable of inflicting injury. She threw a plate at him once, and he just laughed and said, “A plate? Really? You couldn’t find the rolling pin?” and then she threw another one at him. And once he threw a book at her, a hardcover copy of Rabbit Is Rich, which is a pretty big book, bruising her backside and making him feel guilty for weeks afterward. But that’s what proves he loved her — at least that’s what he tells himself — the fact that they stayed together for so long despite driving each other crazy. It was the longest relationship he’s ever had, it went on for years, but in all that time together he never shook the feeling that she was still making up her mind about him, and in the end, when she did make up her mind, she left. When Beth decided at long last to have a child, she found somebody else to have it with. She didn’t want it to be his, not any more. Stella, on the other hand, tells him all the time she loves him, but always in passing — in the aisle at Gaia, or squeezing him from behind at the kitchen counter, or at the end of a phone call, saying “Love you” in the same singsong way she’d say “Keep in touch” or “Take care.” Never face to face, never in some tender moment, never in bed. She never even meets his eye when she says it. Maybe she thinks she’s wearing him down, like drops of water on a stone. But who’s he to complain? He’s never told her at all he loves her, not once, not even just to be polite, the way he has upon occasion with other women. Yet Stella, thinks Kevin, whom I don’t love, and who may not really love me — maybe she’s just being polite — Stella not only wants to have a child, she wants to have a child with me. She wants us to have a child. She wants to have my child.

“Mister, you’re here.” The cabbie’s glaring at him, tears welling out of the corner of his eyes. “You gotta get out now.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin says, shifting in his seat, detumescent at last. He glances out the window, where he’s surprised to see the ice-blue doors of One Longhorn Place, Barad-dûr. He’s even more surprised to see the cabbie sniffling in the driver’s seat. “Are you okay?” Kevin says.

The cabbie shakes the cell phone like a rattle or a talisman, knuckling tears away with his other hand. “Sixth and Congress, mister, you gotta get out now. I gotta go.”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” Kevin fumbles for the seat belt release. “What do I owe you?” He looks at the meter and yanks out his wallet, hoping he still has enough after the last cab ride and lunch with Dr. Barrientos.

“Just go, man. No charge.”

“Sorry?” Kevin freezes with his fingers in his wallet.

The cabbie’s facing forward again, scraping the heel of his hand over his sharp cheekbones, wiping away tears.

“Just be gettin’ out of my cab, okay?” He draws a sharp breath and lets it out. “My brother’s alive and I gotta go, so it’s free, okay?”

“Okay,” Kevin says warily, wondering if the guy’s trying to pull some sort of scam. “You’re sure?”

“Man, will you go?” cries the cabbie, nearly sobbing, and Kevin flinches and stuffs his wallet away and fumbles for the door. “Listen, thanks,” he says, untangling the seat belt, yanking on the door. “I appreciate it, I hope everything’s okay with your, with your…”

The cabbie’s hammering the steering wheel with his wrist, already checking his mirrors so he can pull away as soon as this stammering idiot is out of his cab. “Gonna be a bad day for everybody today.” He glances back at Kevin one last time. “You need to pay attention, man.”

Kevin’s out in the heat again, patting his pockets, making sure he hasn’t left anything behind. The cab starts to pull away before he’s even shut the door, and he yells, “Wait! Lemme get the door!” But without stopping the cabbie reaches back with his long arm and hauls it shut, then guns the cab through the intersection as the light turns yellow, leaving Kevin curbside by the rush of downtown traffic, with the unforgiving sun beating straight down on the top of his head.

Kevin’s a little disoriented, and he looks up and down the street to situate himself — south down the canyon of Congress toward the two squashed ziggurats by the river, then up at the capitol squatting under the steep sun of midafternoon. The sidewalk is crowded with lunchtime pedestrians, businessmen and women traveling in packs, or alone and chatting on cell phones, all of them sifting through the scruffy homeless orbiting a bus stop. The clock on the corner of Sixth and Congress tells him his interview is still forty-five minutes away, but it’s time to quit screwing around, so he cuts across the stream of pedestrians to the tower, hauls at the glass door—pongggg—and steps into the arctic AC. Time to get this over with so he can go back to the airport, get on the plane, and go home.

As he squeaks across the lobby floor toward the elevator alcoves, he buttons the top button of his shirt and tightens the knot of his tie. He’s a little queasy with adolescent test anxiety — instead of wandering and woolgathering he should have been thinking all this time about the interview, he should have brought with him the Web pages he printed off from the Hemphill Associates site and reviewed them on the plane — but he quashes the feeling, reminds himself he doesn’t even want the job. He loosens the tie again. The tower’s lobby reverberates with indistinct voices, like a museum. The black woman in the blazer is standing behind the rampart of the security desk, and she’s been joined by another blazered colleague, a tall, rangy white guy with a bushy Josef Stalin moustache, and together they’re watching the big, silent flatscreen on the lobby wall. In fact, a loose group of people has gathered under the screen just beyond the security desk, faces all tilted up at the unnaturally vivid image. Kevin notes only the aggressive red, white, and blue of Fox as he turns to the touch screen in the prow of the desk, where the Texas flag waves on its endless loop. He thumbs the cool glass, the video keyboard flickers up, and he touches H for Hemphill Associates.

“Can you turn it up?” says a man standing under the flatscreen.

“Ain’t supposed to,” says the black security guard.

“I tell you what,” murmurs the white guard, in a deep, confidential drawl, “I’d like to hear it, too.”

“At least put on the captions,” says another one of the flatscreeners.

Kevin notes the floor of Hemphill Associates—52—and looks up at the two guards.

“Excuse me,” he says, but the black woman is fussing through the clutter on her desktop. Without taking his eyes off the screen, the white guard says, “Can’t you find it?”

“No.” She’s sliding stuff around.

“Well, how’d you turn it on this morning?” His eyes still on the cable news.

“I didn’t,” she says, peeved at him, at the missing remote, at herself. “We don’t never turn it off.”

“Excuse me,” Kevin says again, and the white guard slowly lowers his gaze.

“Sir.”

“Which elevator goes to Hemphill Associates?” Kevin jerks his thumb toward the alcoves.

The black woman looks up wide-eyed at Kevin; he’s not sure if she recognizes him from a few hours before. “What floor they on?” she says.

Kevin consults the screen. “Fifty-two?” he says.

The white guard sighs and looks back at the television. The black woman widens her eyes a fraction. She points over Kevin’s head. “Can you read?”

Kevin turns and sees big black numbers over the entrance to each elevator alcove, 11–26 over one, 26–52 over the other. He feels his face get hot. Suddenly the black woman stands up straight, clutching the remote. “Found it!” she cries.

“Fine.” Kevin lifts both his palms; now he’s peeved, too. “That’s all I wanted to know.” He swivels away from the desk, and his gaze glides away from the distracted guards, over the knot of people straining like sunflowers toward the television, and past the cluttered graphics of the flatscreen itself — the speeding crawl, the bright red tab reading BREAKING NEWS, the helmet-haired anchor centered against the out-of-focus newsroom. As he enters the alcove for floors 26 through 52, he performs an involuntary little stutter step — did he just see the caption ATTACK IN ST. PAUL in bold white sans serif against a livid red? — but under the momentum of his own impatience Kevin presses the elevator button. Immediately one of the elevators pings, the doors slide open, Kevin enters. As he presses the button for 52, an amplified voice swells out of the museum reverb of the lobby, saying, “We’re getting reports of what seems to be another missile attack, in another American city,” and Kevin involuntarily glances through the closing doors. But he can’t see the TV, can’t even see the security desk.

“A building appears to be burning in downtown Baltimore,” says the flatscreen as the doors slide shut and the elevator accelerates at an absurd speed, nearly buckling Kevin’s knees. His stomach drops, his balls tighten, and in the burnished door of the car Kevin glimpses his own blurred incredulity. Did I just hear, he wonders, what I thought I heard? It’s like the time in high school when a girl a couple grades ahead of him cut school to go to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, and she came back with a copy of the April 1 edition of the Michigan student paper, with the giant headline NIXON DECLARES MARTIAL LAW. In the cafeteria at lunchtime she sat with the headline ostentatiously displayed, and Kevin fell for it, leaping from his seat and stalking across the dining room and yanking the paper from her hands, all the while saying loudly, over and over again, “I don’t fucking believe it, I do not fucking believe it,” until she pointed out the date on the paper. “April Fool’s,” she said, laughing. As the entire cafeteria rose as one to applaud Kevin’s righteous if unnecessary outrage, he blushed and carefully refolded the paper and handed it back to the girl — he still remembers that she had pretty green eyes — and he said to her, “Really. I didn’t believe it.” Then walked the long mile back to his own table where his buddies gagged with laughter on their sloppy joes.

But this is different, because it’s not April 1, because the whole world is jumpier than it was in 1974, and because he’s thirty-five years older and resigned to the fact that sometimes the worst thing that you can imagine happening, actually does. Of course, arguably he understood that earlier in life than most people, with the death of his father. He sighs and tightens the knot of his tie again. He lifts his chin and runs his finger under his collar. The car wobbles ever so slightly in its breathless ascent, and the glowing red floor indicator, which has remained on 1 ever since he left the ground, suddenly starts to beep through the floors—26, 27, 28—and he realizes that, these days, hearing of simultaneous attacks in Minnesota and Maryland is not much more shocking than hearing “Your father is dead” or “Your mother drinks too much” or “Your sister’s a lesbian.” Or “Stella used to cut herself.” Or “Stella’s pregnant.”

Now his heart is racing, but he’s not sure why. Is it because of what he just heard on the television, or is it because Stella’s trying to trap him into fatherhood, or is it because he has a sudden case of nerves over this interview for a job that he doesn’t even want any longer? Or is it just the g-forces of his rapid ascent up the gullet of Barad-dûr? The red numbers are flicking as fast as his pulse—47, 48, 49—but even as the elevator slows, relieving the pressure on Kevin’s knees, his heart keeps racing. Kevin leans against the back wall of the car, bracing his feet. Compared to its jackrabbit start, the car crawls the last couple of floors — fiiiiiffty, fiiiiiifffty-onnnnne — and Kevin feels a pressure in his ears that he’s surprised to realize is because of the altitude. He’s yawning to make them pop when the elevator comes to a stop so slow, so gentle, that Kevin’s surprised again when the doors slide open.

He steps tentatively into the elevator alcove of the fifty-second floor, which flows uninterrupted into a severe black and gray reception area. Beyond the glass wall of an empty conference room the chairs are all awry around the table as if everyone just left in a hurry, and beyond the table a floor-to-ceiling glass wall gives a jaw-dropping vista of Austin. Even as Kevin stops dead, he knows he looks like a rubbernecking rube, but under the bleached sky beyond the window he can see the flat green river between leafy parkland, tiny glittering cars streaming both ways over a freeway bridge in the distance, and beyond that, the rampart of hills, their dull green foliage studded with red tile roofs. He’s viewing it all through the tint of two windows, which lends it the slightly dark, digitally graded grandeur of a glossy film: Austin, Texas, directed by Ridley Scott. The condo towers under construction look even grander somehow when seen from slightly above — heroic, even. The tall, T square crane above the nearest one rises almost as high as the floor where Kevin is standing, and he can see a little man in an orange vest and hardhat climbing slowly up a ladder up the center of the crane’s framework near the top, just under the cab. Kevin nearly gasps at the idea of simultaneously being that high up and that exposed.

“May I help you?”

Kevin starts and, embarrassed, turns to a very pretty dark-haired young woman seated behind a low reception desk, an artful sweep of dark wood with a black marble top. She’s lean and sharp-featured, and she wears a tight black knit top over form-fitting gray slacks; her top is sleeveless, showing off her impeccably toned arms. She sits with perfect posture in her chair, watching him with professional brightness, and maybe even a little bemusement at his reaction to the view out the window.

“Hi!” says Kevin, a little too chipper.

“Hi,” she says back, squaring her office chair with both hands on the desktop below the marble counter. Her response is slightly firmer this time, as if she’s bracing herself to deal with an idiot.

“Is this, uh, Hemphill Associates?” He cringes inside, realizing he ought to be projecting confidence, not asking dumb questions that he should already know the answer to.

“Yes, it is,” she says, lifting her fastidiously maintained eyebrows like a kindergarten teacher with a dull student who unexpectedly gave the right answer.

God, she’s pretty, Kevin’s thinking, and stepping up to the counter he draws a breath and gathers his threadbare professionalism about him. The thing to do now, he’s telling himself, is to empty his mind of all the sturm and drang of the last few hours — his seminostalgic, semihorndog stalking of Joy Luck; his fateful fall on the bridge; his emotionally tumultuous lunch with Dr. Barrientos; his epiphanic sponge bath in the men’s room in Wohl’s; his erotic reverie in the cab; his apocalyptic aural fantasy in the elevator just now — and just calm the fuck down. But as he lays his hands lightly on the frosty countertop, he finds himself wondering how this girl in her thin sleeveless blouse stays warm in the icy AC. It’s all he can do not to say, “Aren’t you freezing?” and offer her his jacket.

“I’m Kevin Quinn,” he manages to say instead. “I’m here for an interview.”

The girl’s face brightens, almost as if she’s genuinely happy to see him, and Kevin’s heart brightens, too, even though he knows her smile is purely professional. How many more smiles like that, he wonders, smiling back, can a man my age expect to see in his lifetime? So what if it’s not personal. He’ll take what he can get.

“You’re early!” She widens her eyes at a computer screen under the counter. Then she rises, and Kevin’s even more thrilled to see that she’s nearly as tall as he is. Kevin’s always been an easy touch for tall women. “But I’ll go let Patsy know you’re here.” She steps away from the desk, her perfect shoulders squared, the hollow of her back perfectly erect, and disappears up a hallway that runs parallel to the dazzling view.

Stop it! thinks Kevin, resisting the temptation to edge around the end of the reception desk to watch her walk away. Enough already! Haven’t you already made enough of a fool of yourself for one day? He pinches his lips together to keep from laughing out loud. He’s not normally like this, at least he doesn’t think he is. Certainly he has no problem admiring a good-looking young woman, he’s a standard-issue middle-aged man, but he normally doesn’t walk around like a cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, his tongue unscrolling to the floor. He doesn’t usually erupt into a full-blown reverie within the first seconds of meeting someone, or at least he doesn’t go from zero to ninety quite so quickly. What’s going on with me today, he wonders — is it the change of scene, or the slightly exotic, subtropical women he’s met here, or is it just the heat? Or, now that he’s fifty-two stories up, is it the altitude? Or is it because he’s actually contemplating going back to Ann Arbor as if this whole episode in Austin never happened? Is it because he’s thinking he might actually go back and be a father to Stella’s child? Is this the death of the old Kevin or the birth pangs of the new, and how can he tell the difference?

In spite of himself, he’s stepped far enough into the lobby to peer down the hall where the receptionist went. But it’s empty, a long row of glass-walled offices that he can’t see into. He walks to the wall of the empty conference room and looks through it at the view again. Over the leaden river he can see the two bridges at Lamar Avenue, the old traffic bridge and the pedestrian bridge where he fell down. Even now, in the ungodly midday heat, there are joggers crossing the pedestrian bridge, simultaneously vivid and featureless at this distance, like Sims. In fact, the whole scene below has the aspect of a fantastically detailed computer animation, from the bustling film crew of clean-cut young men with their three tripods — WOW, how many cameras do they need? — down to the tiny white sliver of a rowing scull dragging a miniature V across the green surface of the river, its tiny oars dimpling the water on either side. It’s Austin by Pixar Studios, with their characteristic eye for busy detail.

“Mr. Quinn?”

Kevin’s startled again by the dazzling receptionist, who’s giving him a spokesmodel smile from only a couple of feet away.

“Quite a view, isn’t it,” she says in a way that implies that Kevin’s not really entitled to it. She swivels her gaze out the window and then fixes on Kevin again, lowering her voice a register. “Patsy’s just finishing up a phone call, but she’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Kevin gives her a halfhearted smile, but he’s distracted by a bright flash from the pedestrian bridge. Wow, thinks Kevin, what’s that? Even a movie light wouldn’t be that bright in this sunlight, but instead of zeroing in on the bustling little group on the bridge, his gaze instinctively follows an equally dazzling streak trailing a tight spiral of smoke in a long smooth curve that stops abruptly at one of the new, finished condo towers. Kevin’s gaze automatically keeps tracking beyond the tower, so that he has to correct himself and jerk his head back to see a black flower of smoke threaded with flame bursting from an upper floor.

“Sir?” The receptionist is tilting her head. “Perhaps you’d like to have a seat.”

Kevin turns to the girl, but he’s speechless and his mouth is suddenly dry and his pulse is racing. He hears a sharp, hollow boom, and he jerks his gaze out the window again, where he sees not one, but two dazzling streaks rising from the bridge, brightening as they come, gushing smoke as they rise in a fatal arc, straight for him. The beautiful young receptionist has flinched slightly at the sound of the boom, but instead of following his gaze out the window at the furious missiles miraculously threading the construction cranes and ziggurats and condominiums — now only an inch away, now half an inch, now a quarter-inch — she has placed one hand near Kevin’s elbow without quite touching him, gesturing spokesmodelishly with her other hand to a pair of square, black leather chairs angled toward each other at the center of the severe lobby.

“Please sit down,” she says.