Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “You’ve heard of ‘linking’? Linking is part of identity formation. The drive to attach. To join with larger forces. The opposite is the urge to be yourself. The surveys show people are feeling out of balance here—people of higher income levels, that is. They’re getting tired of going it alone, and that’s predictive of certain behavior changes. Take Orthodox Catholic churches. They’re in a boom.”

  “People actually study this sort of thing?”

  “Make fun. Go ahead. It’s hocus-pocus.”

  “No.” Danny pinched a wattle in his neck, one of those involuntary fat checks performed by men who know they’re falling apart. “We hear this same stuff in sales training. It’s real. It’s just that I can’t believe the level it’s reached.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I’m sure I don’t. It scares me.”

  I reached for another unwanted cigarette. An alien appetite had me in its grip, but it was too late at night to probe its source. “I think it’s too late to be scared. Can I be honest?”

  “Two guys in a bar who will never talk again because one’s going to probably stroke or seize climbing the stairs to his room tonight. Be honest.”

  “The decisions we make—I’m not sure they’re really ours. I think we’ve been figured out.”

  “I doubt that, Ryan.”

  “Example. There was a new, hit doll last Christmas. Baby Cruddles. Silly name, I know. Filthy, pinched little rat face. Filthy clothes. The kids liked it fine, but parents loved the thing. Why? Easy answer. They’re hypochondriacs, petrified of viruses, bacteria. They’re having children later, in their forties, and it makes them overprotective. Hypervigilant. This Cruddles doll helped discharge that inner tension.”

  “And somebody had all this figured in advance?”

  “Gloria Leo. I know her personally. She works for Ford & Farmer in San Francisco.”

  “So why can’t someone do this for class rings?”

  “Stay healthy and I bet you’ll see the day.”

  “The reasons to live are just piling up tonight.”

  The Giants lost. The bartender changed channels, then vanished into the back with the remote. We were left watching one of those roundtable shows that usually include a Princeton historian saying that while we’ve made progress on problem X, it’s no time to get complacent or lower our guards. Tonight the topic was bioengineering. One panelist said the male role in reproduction would soon be made redundant by technology, and Danny croaked back: “And not a day too soon.” I might as well have been sitting with my father. He took an apartment after the divorce and set up a cockpit around his television, stuffing himself with heat-and-eat lasagna and smoking White Owls down to the plastic tips. A progressive whose favorite president was Reagan, a liberal who underpaid the IRS, he died believing in a one-hundred-year plot to snuff out farmers and small businessmen. The scheme dated back to 1918, he said, and was looking like it would conclude ahead of schedule.

  Danny abandoned his drink and lurched upstairs and left me alone with a fellow three barstools down who looked familiar from my CTC work. My sharpest fear when I travel is bumping into someone I’ve spoken to about “free agency” and “self-directed professional enhancement.” If such a person slapped me, I wouldn’t fight; I’d drop on all fours and bow my sinful head. Luckily, I was wrong about the man. He was a Great West pilot who’d shaken my hand once during a deplaning.

  “How are the contract talks?” I ventured.

  “Stalled.”

  “Drink?”

  “Just a Coke. I’m flying tomorrow,” he said. “Hell, let’s sneak a little rum in there.”

  “No job actions planned, I hope.”

  “October, maybe. You’re safe for another twenty days or so.”

  “One more reason to get it done by Friday.”

  “What done?”

  I told him. He didn’t seem impressed.

  Now, ten hours later, I’m paying dearly for my night of boozy, aimless chat. I touch a button mounted on a wall and the frosted-glass doors of the Compass Club swish open, revealing a sleek curved desk with a receptionist dressed in airline colors, red and yellow. I know this woman, a mother of teenage boys, both elusively troubled and on pills—the kind of kids who trade their Ritalin for game cartridges and six-packs of malt liquor. Linda was a Great West flight attendant until she was injured in an incident involving a sudden loss of tail control. She won a fat settlement from the company, then promptly lost half of it in a divorce from a no-good she’d put through chiropractic school. Her addled sons are her whole existence now, and occasionally I visit them at home to help with schoolwork or toss around a football. The older boy, Dale, a hulking fifteen-year-old drawn to horror comics and older girls, reminds me of myself at his age. It’s Linda’s belief that my work in corporate coaching qualifies me to help him, but she’s wrong.

  “What’s the holdup on Reno?” I say.

  She lowers her voice. “A fuel-line leak, I’m hearing. Another ninety minutes would be my estimate.”

  “Dale and Paul okay?”

  “We’re back to diet. Trying the ultra-high-protein thing again.”

  “I thought that was a bust.”

  “A semi-bust. Thinking back, I noticed a slight improvement.”

  “Good luck recouping it.” A focus word. They always sound wrong, but maybe it’s how I use them.

  “Come again?”

  “I hope the diet works this time.”

  “So tell me, did you get that house you looked at?”

  I consider the best way to explain that, technically, I’m homeless at the moment. The house deal never reached the offer stage. Homeowning may not be in my makeup. My parents belonged to the lawn-and-garden cult—their marriage was a triangular affair involving themselves and a velvety front yard of drought-hardy Kentucky bluegrass—so I know how much labor good groundskeeping requires. I don’t have the time, and frankly I lack the passion. Green grass is a losing battle in the West, which wants to go back to sage and prickly pear, and so is securing an outpost in the sprawl. I look down on Denver, at its malls and parking lots, its chains of blue suburban swimming pools and rows of puck-like oil tanks, its freeways, and the notion of seeking shelter in the whole mess strikes me as a joke.

  “The house looks iffy.”

  Linda tents her hands beneath her chin. “I’m sorry to hear it. You would have been a neighbor. It would have been nice to have you in the zip code.”

  A zip code is something I’d rather do without. Zip codes are how they find you, how they track you. They start with five numbers and finish with a profile, down to the movies you’re liable to go see and the pizza toppings you prefer. I’m not paranoid, but I am my father’s son, and much of my fascination with marketing stems from my fear of being the big boys’ patsy. Sure, today, we live in a democracy, and yes, for the most part, it leaves us to ourselves, but there are ambitious people who’d like to change this, and some who boast that they’ve already succeeded. I’m like the guy I met flying out of Memphis who told me that he’d joined the local police force because he’d lived next to a drug house for a time and seen how thoroughly the cops had watched the place. True privacy, he concluded, was only possible inside a squad car.

  Linda fingers the collar of her uniform. “Free tomorrow? I’ll be home alone. Paul’s in Utah, at archaeology camp, and Dale’s in California, with his dad.”

  “Those two are getting along now?”

  “It’s court ordered. I could cook you a Thai meal. Something spicy.”

  “Big trip ahead. Won’t be back till—I’m not sure.”

  She gives me a pouty, disappointed look that’s meant to look clownish but comes off as incensed. I’ve treated her poorly, worse than most of them. Two months ago she teased me into bed, then put on a showy, marathon performance that struck me as rehearsed, even researched. The encounter left me thirsty, gulping ice water, and reminded me of my early dates with Lori, the woman I ought to refer to as my ex-wife
but can’t quite manage to—we weren’t that close. She was a tigress too, packed full of stunts. Now and then I’d catch her in the middle of a particularly far-fetched pose and see that it wasn’t appetite that drove her but some idea, some odd erotic theory. Maybe she’d come across it in a magazine, or maybe in a college psychology class. The pressure her notions put on our encounters was just too much, though, and even before we married we found ourselves fantasizing about a child, perhaps as a way to simplify our lovemaking. When Lori still wasn’t pregnant two years later (I doubt I’ll ever get over the desolation of all those negative drugstore test kits; the crisp instruction booklets, the faint pink minus signs), we hurled ourselves into skiing and mountain biking, playing the fresh-air couple on the go. We dropped weight, gained stamina, and emerged as strangers. A baby? We were virtually the same sex by then—two boyish hardbodies, rugged and untouchable.

  That’s when I changed careers and started flying—two days a week at first, then three, then four, spreading the gospel of successful outplacement from Bakersfield to Bismarck. One night, after twenty consecutive days away, I drove home from the airport to our garden apartment and found on the doorstep a heap of rolled-up newspapers dating back to the morning of my departure.

  “I’d better push on. I have calls to make,” I say. “You see any promising houses, take a peek for me.”

  “What kind of thing are you looking for?”

  “Low maintenance.”

  “Come over and eat with me.”

  “Soon.”

  “We miss you, Ryan.”

  The club is empty for a weekday morning. The stacks of newspapers stand straight and square, the armchair cushions are puffy and unwrinkled. Some lull in the business cycle, apparently. They happen, these little brownouts of activity. Maybe they’re biological events—a flu epidemic compounded by sunless weather spreads a deep fatigue across the land—but I do know all weeks aren’t equal. Things rise and fall.

  The espresso machine whirrs and burbles at my touch, filling a cup exactly to the brim. The gizmo deserves to be thanked, it works so beautifully. People aren’t grateful enough to such devices. Mute valets supply our every need, but instead of pausing in acknowledgment, we jump to the next thing, issue another order. I wonder if some imbalance is building up here, a karmic gap between humans and their tools. Machines will be able to think not long from now, and as the descendants of slaves, they won’t be happy. I shared this idea once with an IT specialist flying out of Austin. He didn’t dismiss it. He told me about a field called Techno-Ethics that’s concerned with the question of whether computers have rights.

  For me, the question is whether we’ll have any.

  At a pay phone in one of the private business nooks between the rest rooms and the luggage lockers I rank the calls I need to make this morning. Using downtime efficiently is key—making the most of the minutes inside the minutes. I dial my credit card number (five miles right there; such silent accounting shadows my every thought), then enter a Seattle area code and the number for Advanta Publishing. I’m calling a man I’ve met just once before but who I believe can make a difference for me. We both believe in the future of The Garage, my “motivational fable” of an inventor who toils in his workshop, alone and undistracted, while out in the world his breakthrough innovations spawn a commercial empire he never sees. The theme is concentration, inner purity. The book isn’t long—a hundred pages or so—but that’s the trend now, wisdom in your pocket. There are men in my field who’ve made millions off such volumes, and if I can do half that well I’ll be fixed by forty and can spend the next decade working off my miles with weekend jaunts to Manhattan, if I’m still single, or with round-trips to Disney World if I have a family.

  “Morris Dwight, please,” I say to the receptionist. Dwight is my age but with an air of elegance, as though he grew up abroad, in grand hotels. He combs something into his hair that smells like wool and drops me notes in brown ink on heavy cream stock, tagging his signature with wispy doodles of seabirds and leaping fish, that kind of thing. I suspect he’s an alcoholic and a fraud and professionally unharmed by being either. His latest business title, You Lost, Get Over It!, has been on the Wall Street Journal list since spring, but it’s one of his clunkers that drew me to Advanta: Soren Morse’s own Horizoneering: The Story of a Mid-Air Turnaround. Outselling Morse, which shouldn’t be hard to do, would bring me a primitive, lasting satisfaction.

  “Mr. Dwight’s in a meeting, sir. I’ll take your number.”

  “Could I please have his voice mail?”

  She disconnects me. I call again and get a busy signal that saws away at my morning optimism. I try one last time and he answers. “My friend,” he says.

  I tell him I’d like to switch the drink we’ve scheduled to a more leisurely dinner, but Dwight is not the same chattering good sport I remember from the Portland club. He sounds stressed; I can hear him typing as we speak and rearranging papers on his desk. Wednesday is impossible, he tells me, due to “a sudden charitable commitment.” He suggests an early breakfast Thursday morning.

  I do some speedy mental figuring with the help of my HandStar digital assistant, a wireless device I use for e-mail and to track my miles. My schedule this week leaves little room to improvise; it’s a three-dimensional chess game, meticulous. This afternoon and this evening I’ll be in Reno for a coaching session with an old client whose company is hobbling toward bankruptcy. Tomorrow, I go to Southern California to meet Sandor Pinter, consulting’s grand old man, to whom I’ll pitch an exciting freelance project that could make my name among my peers and backstop my income if MythTech and The Garage don’t come through. Wednesday A.M. I’m supposed to go to Dallas to plot a severance strategy at a consolidating HMO, but the flight’s not Great West, which makes it useless to me, so I’ve already left a message canceling and booked an earlier Seattle flight, which I now see won’t do me any good. On Thursday I head to Las Vegas for GoalQuest XX, an annual gathering of friends and colleagues at which I intend to speak on CTC and finally unburden my bad conscience by telling all about our nasty specialty. On Friday morning I’m off to Omaha, and later that day—in a mood of triumph, I hope, after a candid sit-down with the Child—I’ll board a plane to Minneapolis and ring up my million over Iowa. When my mother and sisters meet me at the gate, I intend to be drunk, and to stay drunk through the wedding. Drunk and free, with an open-ended ticket good for a round-trip to Saturn, if I so choose, and enough credit left in my account to send a few ailing children and their parents off to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic.

  How dare Dwight alter such a battle plan. If I push back my arrival at GoalQuest XX, I can make breakfast, barely, if it’s brief, but I’ll miss Great West’s only morning flight to Vegas and have to slum it on Desert Air or Sun South, losing a thousand-mile connection bonus that I won’t be able to make up no matter which route I take to Omaha. The answer is to have breakfast very early and do it in the airport.

  “You still there?”

  I make my pitch to Dwight: 7 A.M. at SeaTac in the food court.

  “The airport?”

  “I’m squeezed. I’m sorry. I’m in a bind.”

  “Can I phone you back about this? This evening, say? There’s a chance I’ll be in Arizona Wednesday and maybe into Thursday. Or beyond.”

  “You just told me Wednesday’s your charitable thing.”

  “My life is fluid. Can we meet at eight?”

  “No later than seven. It has to be at SeaTac.”

  The line goes quiet. Then: “It’s almost finished?”

  “I two-day aired you three fourths of it last night. I’m down to filling in and rounding off.”

  “Seven, then. Call on Tuesday to confirm, though.”

  “I could shoot down to Arizona, too. My Wednesday is flexible. Phoenix, is it?”

  “Phoenix—but maybe Utah that evening. Or somewhere else.”

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “Needy authors everywhere.
Blocks. Nervous breakdowns. Major tax delinquencies. Much hand-holding to do. There’s also golf. I’m in La Jolla right now at a pro-am—my woman forwarded you.”

  “I hear a keyboard.”

  “It’s a course-simulation program on my laptop. I’m at a table outside the pro shop, strategizing.”

  “I’ll confirm,” I say.

  I expect the next call to be easier. Lower stakes. Kara, my oldest sister, who functions as our family’s social secretary, lives south of Salt Lake City in a suburb that might have been squeezed from a tube, with recreation centers for the kids and curving boulevards split by bike-path medians. She drives a Saab that’s cleaner than when she leased it and works full-time hours as a volunteer for literacy programs and battered-women shelters. Her husband makes it all possible, a software writer flush with some of the fastest money ever generated by our economy. He hangs pleasantly in the background of Kara’s life, demanding nothing, offering everything. They’re bountiful, gracious people, here to help, who seem to have sealed some deal with the Creator to spread his balm in return for perfect sanity. I pray that no real tragedy ever befalls them. It would be wrong, a sinful, cosmic breach.

  Our business this morning relates to Saturday’s wedding, when Julie, my kid sister, will try again to camouflage her multiple addictions and general pathological dependency long enough to formalize a bond with a man who has no idea what he’s up against. Kara has worked for years to forge this match. She chose the groom, a fellow she dated in high school who sells New Holland tractors in our hometown by capitalizing on his youthful fame as a fearsome all-state running back. Kara’s goal is time travel, it seems: a marriage that will approximate our parents’ and secure our family’s future in its old county. Even the house Julie thinks that she picked out (in truth it was Kara who narrowed the field for her by passing secret instructions to the Realtor) could double for the home place. Same porch, same dormers, same maze of sagging handyman additions.

  “Where are you?” Kara asks me when I call. It’s always her first question, and her silliest.