And nearly stumbles getting on the escalator. The corrugated step splits under the soles of his shoes, and he shuffles back and catches himself on the rubbery handrail. But when he glances back, the woman warrior is already watching someone else. Kevin sighs and descends into the cool, gray atrium of baggage claim, into a magnifying, mall-ish echo of voices, an oceanic murmuring. A diffuse crowd mills around the steely hippodrome of a baggage conveyer, and for a moment his heart lifts at the prospect of catching another glance of Joy Luck and her tattoos. But she was already carrying her luggage; she’s long gone by now. Kevin feels like a movie director riding the camera crane down into a crowd scene — he was a film major once, for half a semester — John Ford or William Wyler chewing the stem of his pipe, his feet dangling from his trouser cuffs and showing a pair of tartan socks and a little pale shin. This gives Kevin the momentary illusion of control, the feeling that he could bark at the crowd below and they’d all look up at him as one, waiting for direction. Hey, maybe he’s even some young director, a veteran of hip-hop videos making his first feature, a chunky white kid in a Raiders jersey and a vast pair of cargo shorts and a backward ball cap, watching his milling extras with a critical eye and calling out, “Where’s our star, yo? The fuck’s my leading lady? She in this shot, or what?” Ms. Joy Luck in the role of Lynda — Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. “She’s in her trailer, Mr. Quinn.” Mister Quinn — Kevin likes the sound of that. “Well, go ask her if she’d like to join us this morning, dog. We’re losing the fucking light.” But as the crane descends, the people below become less and less foreshortened, less and less under Kevin’s control, until with a gentle bump the escalator deposits Kevin sole to sole with his own dim reflection in the dully gleaming floor. Now he’s at eye level with everyone else, just another arriving passenger, just another guy in the crowd, just another extra in somebody else’s movie.
He passes through the sliding doors into his first real embrace by the Texas heat. It’s not so bad; the air presses warmly against his skin, that’s all. Plus he’s in the shade of an overpass, under a ceiling of massive rectangular beams held up by squat, square pillars of dirty white concrete. The Texas sunlight leaks in from the far ends, where the passenger pick-up lanes curve beneath the overpass. Vehicles coming out of the glare dim as they roll into the shade, a slow parade of SUVs and pickup trucks inching over speed bumps and braking impatiently for the crosswalks. Beyond a median, shuttle buses with broad foreheads line up nose to tail like baby elephants, and beyond that rises the cliff face of the parking garage, each pier embossed with a big, five-pointed Texas star, just in case the armadillo tiles in the men’s room and Asleep at the Wheel over the public address have left him in any doubt as to where he is.
Truth is, he feels like he’s not just in another state, but in another country. He knows no one in Texas; the folks waiting to see him this afternoon have never laid eyes on him. And no one in Ann Arbor even knows he’s here. He could hardly tell the folks at the Asia Center where he was going, so he took a personal day — annual checkup, he told Mira, the center’s administrative associate and his immediate superior — and to be on the safe side, he didn’t tell any of his friends, either. Even Stella doesn’t know he’s gone. Especially Stella. He plans to be back in Ann Arbor by eleven p.m. tonight, and Stella won’t be back from her sales conference in Chicago till late tomorrow. Unless the folks today offer him the job and he decides to take it, no one will ever know he was here. When he was a young backpacker, feeling invulnerable and immortal, he’d loved the thrill of knowing that he could step off a cliff in Donegal or fall down a sinkhole on the North York moors and no one would ever know what happened to him. But now his anonymity pierces him like a hook and hauls him up short. It’s not too late, he thinks, I could go back inside, change my ticket, and be back in Ann Arbor by midafternoon.
He realizes that he’s stopped walking. Other passengers step around him, the little wheels of their suitcases clacking over the joints in the pavement. He hears the mutter of the PA, first in English—“Due to heightened security, knives are not allowed on planes”—and then in Spanish—“Debido a la seguridad aumentada, cuchillos no se permiten en los planos.” The guttural grind of buses, the hiss and squeal of brakes, the slam of car doors reverberating off the concrete all around. A tepid breeze full of diesel exhaust brushes by him, and Kevin realizes he’s not even in Texas yet. The airport doesn’t count; it’s only an island in an archipelago nation of glassed-in atolls where everybody speaks a sort of English and lives off warm cinnamon buns and day-old turkey sandwiches.
He joins the pedestrians funneled into the crosswalks by concrete security barriers. (Just because you’re on the ground, says his lizard brain, doesn’t mean you’re safe.) Under his clothes the sweat prickles out of his skin. At the median he joins the queue at the taxi stand, behind a large woman in a broad-beamed pair of jeans and a voluminous shirt who is talking to herself in short, disjointed bursts and with much frantic gesturing. There is nothing in her hands. Time was, on the Diag in Ann Arbor where the homeless congregate, Kevin would circle around someone talking to herself in public, but now everyone does it. He feels aged by the fact that he’s still surprised to see people conducting phone conversations in public.
“I know that,” the woman says. “Don’t think I don’t know that.” From behind, Kevin watches her shake her helmet of hair. “Listen, I’ve been saying exactly the same thing.” She lowers herself into the next cab. “Doggone it, Pearl, that’s what I’ve been saying.” She’s shaking her head as the cab pulls away. “Doggone it, Pearl.”
Kevin approaches a green Chevy Lumina with JAY’S TAXI printed unceremoniously along the side; the cabbie’s already reached back to open the rear door.
“Luggage?” he says hoarsely, peering through the purple tint of his aviator glasses. A long, gaunt face. Scooped-out cheeks, pale, slack skin.
“No,” says Kevin. He lifts his knee to slide into the seat and the cabbie says, “Close that trunk for me, willya, bud?”
Kevin pushes back from the car and walks around to slam the trunk with both hands. Then he slides grumpily into the backseat of the Lumina — the meter’s already running, he notices — and the cab starts to roll even before he’s pulled the door shut. That’s when he sees Joy Luck in the crosswalk, swaying up to a shuttle bus with her duffle on her shoulder and the paperback dangling at her hip, her finger still holding her place.
“Whoa,” Kevin says involuntarily, and the cabbie hits the brake. Kevin rocks forward, and the door slips from his hand and bangs all the way open.