Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “Refused again,” the woman says. She hands back the card as though it’s covered in microbes.

  I pay with cash, forsaking thirty-three miles. Worse, I left my cell phone on the plane, so I can’t call the credit card’s customer service line until the young guy at the pay phone by the pop machine wraps up his already-endless conversation about a lost mountain bike.

  I make a pleading face.

  “What?” the man whispers.

  “Emergency.”

  “Me too.”

  Elko is not my town. I’ve never done well here.

  Alex looks distressed when I return, her lips clamped down so hard on the inhaler that the tendons in her jaw stand up. I motion for her to stay seated and edge in front of her, eyeing my phone, which I won’t have time to use, since the credit card company’s voice-mail labyrinth will keep me on hold for fifteen minutes, minimum.

  “How’s my boy? They taking good care of him?”

  “Yes, but he’s sluggish.”

  “You saw him?”

  I fib. “I did.”

  Alex looks unreassured. She tucks the inhaler in her seatback pocket and cinches tight her lap belt. I see now that this is a woman who’s made her way in life by playing the spread between modern assertiveness and Victorian fragility.

  We take off into the smoke. I’m jumpy too now. Aside from a slim civilian corridor that roughly follows I-80 toward California, the central Nevada skies are Air Force territory, a vast mock battleground for the latest jets, some so highly classified and agile that witnesses take them for otherworldly craft. I thought I glimpsed one once: a silver arrowhead corkscrewing straight up into the sun. Radar dishes stud the scrubby mountaintops, tracking war games and bombing runs and dogfights. America’s airspace has its own geography, and this is its no-man’s-land, ringed by virtual razor wire. If our plane went down here, they might not tell our relatives.

  Alex leafs through an issue of Cosmopolitan, which seems beneath her, though I do the same thing: read below my level while in flight. Maybe she’s trying not to think about the cat, which I suspect she knows she overdosed. I imagine the creature comatose in the hold, surrounded by Styrofoam coolers of frozen trout, boxes of catalogue sweaters, tennis rackets. A plane is a van whose cargo includes people, but there’s nothing special about us, we’re just tonnage, less profitable, pound for pound, than first-class mail.

  I take out my pencil and paper and try to work, refining my plan for Art Krusk’s commercial comeback. I can’t say I’m optimistic about his prospects. Healing the wound to Reno’s public memory caused by the poison tacos should prove simple, but rehabilitating Art the manager won’t be easy. The man’s a bitter wreck. Word has it that he’s connected to Reno’s underworld and that he’s placed a bounty on the head of the unknown saboteur. I hope not. Breaking some busboy’s arm won’t bring his patrons back.

  Art may not make it, but he’s my only coaching client, my sole relief from the dolors of CTC. Maybe the best I can do is help him fail. There are two kinds of consultants, basically: the accountants and operations specialists who minister to the body of the patient, and those who treat its mind and spirit, approaching the company as a vital being animated by conflicts and desires. Enterprises feel and think and dream, and often when they die, as Art’s may die, and as my father’s propane business died, they die of loneliness. Businesses may thrive on competition, Sandor Pinter wrote in one of his books, but they need love and understanding, too.

  Alex goes off to use the bathroom, leaving me with decisions to make. Every flight is a three-act play—takeoff, cruising, descent; past, present, future—which means that it’s time to prepare for how we’ll part, on what terms, and with what expectation. She already knows I’m staying at Homestead Suites and I know that she’ll be at Harrah’s on the Strip, overseeing her benefit, which starts at eight. Maybe she has a local flame, and maybe she thinks I do. She’d be right. Anita deals Pai Gow poker at Circus Circus, a twenty-nine-year-old Sarah Lawrence grad who came west with the Park Service as a stream biologist but fell in with the local color crowd. We got together, chastely, a month ago and took in a traditional Irish dance troupe at the Silver Legacy, but I don’t plan to look her up again. Anita had ugly opinions about the Asians who patronize her table, and though I humored her bigotry at first, I hated myself for it afterwards. She’s one of those women who take up right-wing views as a substitute for a pistol or can of Mace—in self-defense, as a warning to creeps and stalkers. It’s tiresome armor. Time-consuming, too. The Kennedy family this, the World Bank that.

  In truth, I don’t have much time for Alex, either, assuming that we have prospects, which I doubt. No, the challenge for us will be to separate without so much as a gesture toward this evening. We’ll have to use the descent to drift apart and retract any curiosity we’ve shown. To confirm to ourselves that we worked best as strangers.

  It’s time to bore each other, if possible.

  “California tomorrow,” I say when she returns, rosy-cheeked and smelling of moist towelettes. “You know how, in magazine food surveys you read, it rivals New York now? I think that’s wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “I just think it’s wrong. Where you headed after Reno?”

  “Back to Salt Lake City. I just moved there.”

  “Are you a Mormon?”

  “No. They’re trying, though. I like having people coming to the door.”

  “They wear undergarments they claim are bulletproof. I swear it. They’ll tell you stories of stopping bullets.”

  “I haven’t heard that one yet.”

  “Just date a Mormon.”

  “I thought they didn’t date.”

  “They date like mad. And they’re ready with the engagement ring, first night.”

  I stop. This is getting too interesting, too personal.

  “You’re sure it was my cat you saw, not someone else’s? They lose them, I’ve heard. People’s pets wind up in Greece.”

  “What’s that movie called, Amazing Journey? The one where the family relocates to a new town and their dog walks a thousand miles or something to find them? I think it fights a bear along the way.”

  “There are more than one of those movies. It’s a genre.”

  “I know that word, but I’ve never quite spit it out. Pronunciation anxiety.”

  “I know. I’m like that with ‘cigarillo.’ Hard l?”

  “For me.”

  “I don’t think that’s right, though.”

  “I’ll check sometime.”

  It’s working: we’re barely looking at each other and there’s the Reno skyline. Ten more minutes. The only threat is our pride; mine smarts a little. Our agreement—the one I drew up for both of us—called for a tender, reluctant edging away, not total detachment. Can’t we reassess this? After all, this is Reno we’re visiting, a city whose whole economy is founded on errors in judgment and doomed trysts. Can’t we at least acknowledge the bitter tang of having grown so prudent with our bodies?

  No, because now the drunk is acting up again, heckling the flight attendant for cutting him off. He flicks an ice cube at her, cackles, snorts, his face a chaotic red clown’s mask. Alex flinches. Given how much she flies, she should be used to this—these outbursts of entitled rage—but she cowers like a baby rabbit. My chance to put a fatherly arm around her? I’m considering it when the copilot strides up, cinematically handsome in his uniform and cutting such a capable male figure that any protective move on my part would only come off as puny and derivative. He threatens the drunk with arrest when we touch down. He raises one arm. The drunk sputters, then falls silent. The copilot orders the man to fetch the ice cube and stands there, hands on his hips, while he bends down.

  The miniature drama has sealed us in our own skins. Alex retrieves her inhaler. She looks spent. She’s ready to pick up her kitten, hail a cab, and curl up in bed to the sound of Headline News. She’ll eat a room service salad with the curtains drawn, then sneak a Snickers fr
om the mini-bar. She’ll jam in earplugs, don a blackout mask, and lay down with her clothes on for a dreamless nap.

  In no time we’re at the gate and on our feet, shuffling out of the plane like day care toddlers holding one of those ropes with all the loops. I walk a step behind her. It’s goodbye.

  “Good luck with that witch of a senator.”

  “I’ll need it.”

  “That Colonial checkout procedure? They’ve streamlined it. You might want to give them another shot.”

  “I will.”

  Where do they go when they leave me? The last I see of her, she’s standing by the baggage carousel, fluffing her hair and waiting for the pet crate. I’d be surprised if the kitten arrived alive, and I realize that I’ve been suppressing real anger at Alex for risking its health just to ease her loneliness. That was my job, her seatmate’s, but she let me go. And I let her go. We forgot that in Airworld each other is all we have.

  four

  i used to try to be interesting. That passed. Now I try to be pleasant and on time.

  That will be impossible today. Behind the rental car counter a dull trainee labors to slip a key onto a ring and fold my contract to fit inside its envelope. He should be in college, judging by his age, but instead he’s already failing at his first job. After he runs my credit card—still frozen; I have to use my AmEx from ISM, which generates no miles—he manages to drop it and step on it, scratching and ruining the magnetic strip. The kid’s pathetic excuse is greasy hands; he just finished eating a box of chicken strips. I tell him he’d better evaluate his goals and he acts as though I’ve complimented him, thanking me and handing me a map.

  “Excuse me, what’s your job?” I say.

  “My job? Filling out rental agreements.”

  “No it’s not. Your job is providing a service that meets a need.”

  He stares at me.

  “Tell me the need,” I say.

  “A four-door Nissan.”

  “Actually, what I want, my basic desire, is to get to a business meeting across town punctually, comfortably, and safely. The Nissan’s a means to an end. It’s just a detail. Try to think less about isolated tasks and more about the overarching process. It will serve you, believe me.”

  “So you’re some millionaire?”

  “No. Do I have to be rich to give advice?”

  “For me to listen to it, you do,” he says.

  The car, a new model I’ve never driven before, smells of a fruity industrial deodorant that’s worse than any odor it might be masking. The mirrors point off in random directions as though the last driver was a schizophrenic. The radio is tuned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it’s as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they’re devoted. After the cops led away her second husband, Julie spent a summer as a born-again and worked in a St. Paul religous gift shop whose manager played in a band called Precious Blood. We took in one of their concerts, a spectacle of fog and laser lights and colored scrims. The band released white doves during the encore, and afterwards Julie and others rushed the stage and dropped to their knees before a neon cross next to the drum kit. It shook me to see such need in her, such thirst.

  I turn up the station, reorient the mirrors, and drive to the guard’s booth, waving my rental papers. The old guy winks and raises the red-striped gate arm and I roll over the angled spikes, away.

  On the way to Art’s house, where he insists on meeting, I dictate some lines for the preface to The Garage into the microrecorder at my chin.

  For years it has been the same message: Grow or die. But is this necessarily the truth? Too often, growth for its own sake leads to chaos: unsustainable capital expansion, ill-timed acquisitions, a stressful workplace. In The Garage, I propose a bold new formula to replace the lurching pursuit of profit: “Sufficient Plenitude.” Enough really can be enough, that is. A heresy? Not to students of the human body, who know that optimum health is not achieved by ever-greater consumption and activity, but by functioning within certain dynamic parameters of diet and exercise, work and leisure. So too with the corporation, whose core objective should not be the amassing of good numbers, but the creation and management of abundance. Read on and you will discover in The Garage: the Four Plenteous Attitudes, the Six False Missions . . .

  Where these words come from I have no idea. Like the rest of the book, which I wrote over ten months, dictating for two hours before bed in a succession of identical suites whose regulation layouts and amenities allowed me to work undistracted, without thinking, the preface feels like a gift, a transcribed dream. What this means for its value, I don’t know. I fear sometimes that the book is just the overflow of a brain so overstuffed with jargon that it’s spontaneously sloughing off the excess. I’ve allowed myself to reread it only once, and some of the ideas felt foreign to me, with no connection to how I actually operate. Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.

  Art Krusk’s directions guide me through the foothills into the smoke, which smells like burning tires. I know Art moved to a golf course recently, but it’s hard to imagine green fairways on these brown mounds. Where does the water come from? It’s a sin. The golf culture, which I’ve had ample chances to join, draws its allure, I’m convinced, from wastefulness, from the lavish imbalance between its massive inputs—acreage, labor, fertilizer, machines—and its nonexistent output. Sad. The few times I’ve played the game, I’ve come away feeling like an ecological glutton.

  I reach a gatehouse manned by an old woman so flayed by the sun that her skin is like a bat’s wing, all pigmentless gray tissue and thready veins. I state my name and she consults her clipboard.

  “Art said go on up, the house is open. He had an errand.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “He tore out of here an hour ago. Don’t know. Try to drive slowly and watch out for the carts. A lot of our residents won’t hear you coming.”

  The development is unfinished, with heaps of sand along its noodle-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. With so many tiny lanes and dead-end byways, the developer ran out of normal street names. I take a left on Lassie Drive and curve around right on Paul Newman Avenue. The houses (“Starting in the mid $200s,” according to a billboard) ape many styles, the most popular being a sort of Greco-ranch thing combining flat tile roofs with stocky columns. Art’s house is among the more elaborate models, with a fresh sod lawn whose seams still show and a faux-marble fountain of dancing cupids. For someone in his predicament, it’s offensive. His restaurants send half of Nevada to the ER and the man builds a palace in Mafia Moderne.

  I’m tempted to leave a stinging note and return to the airport. Cutting Art adrift would let me build in crucial extra hours to my overloaded schedule. I could buy a thesaurus and touch up The Garage. I could get to a gym and tone my flabby lats. ISM would understand—Art’s a small client and a chronic late payer—but I have to consider MythTech’s feelings, too. If it’s true that they’re auditioning me from afar, I have to behave impeccably this week. Plus, I like Art. He’s crude, but he’s a searcher.

  I dial the credit card people on my mobile and wander behind the house to the pool, a free-form blue pond with an artificial island and two stray golf balls lying on the bottom, looking like undissolved Alka-Seltzer tablets. My call is passed from computer to computer and then to a person who only sounds like one.

  “Where are you presently located?” she asks.

  “Nevada. Reno.”

  “Did you make any large purchases last Friday?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. You cut my credit off.”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  I lose my temper. “I’m out here in the middle of a business trip, totally dependent on your card, adhering to our agreement in good faith—”

  The woman adjusts her tone and talks me down. She explains that for the past few days someone has been moving from state to st
ate, ringing up major charges on my account: fifteen hundred dollars in a Salt Lake City electronics store, two hundred to a national teleflorist. The purchases didn’t quite suit my customer profile, so the bank froze my card. The latest charge appeared last Saturday: four hundred dollars in a Texas western store.

  That one was mine. The boots. I tell the woman.

  “You’re certain you’re in Reno now?”

  “I’m here.”

  “And you didn’t send flowers last Thursday? By telephone?”

  I stand at the edge of the pool, confused and spooked. Ordering flowers for my mother’s birthday has been on my to-do list for a week; I even picked out an arrangement from an ad in August’s Horizons. But did I send them? Nothing.

  “Where, to what state, did the flowers go?” I ask.

  “Our information isn’t that detailed.”

  “That’s one sentimental thief.”

  “We see it all, sir.”

  I’ve read about this: identity theft, it’s called. They grab your data, your history, your files. They duplicate your economic self. They scan your signature and forge ID cards and head out into the world under your name to gorge on DVD players, fur coats. The damage can be extensive, requiring months for the victim to clear up and undo. He has to work backwards along the chain of fraud, reclaiming his reputation, his good name. But maybe I’m panicking. Maybe my case is simpler. Maybe some crook just found an old receipt in the trash can of an airport deli.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” the woman says. “You still have the card in your possession?”

  “Yes.” My life on the defensive has begun. “But I wasn’t in Utah last week.”

  “Where were you?”

  I’m thinking. My fast-forward functions, but my reverse is stuck. I can’t even remember when I started forgetting things.

  “Who else knows your schedule?”

  “Assistant. Travel agent.”

  “Is she trustworthy?”

  “He. How would I know? Let’s bottom-line this: how soon can you send a replacement card?”