Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  Career Transition Counseling is not just bad because it peddles false hope—most products and services do that, more or less, including a lot of the ones my fired subjects made big money providing, temporarily—it’s bad because it’s uniform. Steady state. People are going to prison and making fortunes and bailing out violent lovers and duping teenagers and CTC just sits there and sucks its thumb. In every kind of weather. All day, all year. It’s divided against itself and numb and circular and feels, to someone who does it for a living, like some ingenious suspended-animation scheme designed to inject you with embalming fluid while still allowing you to breathe and speak.

  Vigorade, the beverage, still exists. They added herbs, reconceptualized the packaging, and repositioned it as an endurance aid for aging jocks and outdoor enthusiasts. But I won’t drink it. It’s ever so slightly salty, just faintly sweet, and it tastes the way I imagine tears would taste if you could collect enough to fill a jug.

  “It drags,” Julie said as we put Gillette behind us and pressed on toward Billings and its many spokes. “Some twists at the end there, but otherwise it drags.”

  “Does it cohere, though?”

  “Not sure I know that word.”

  “Cohere? Coherent? They’re pretty basic, Julie.”

  It was early morning Thursday by then, and time that we dropped each other off. Time to get Maestro its car back, to buy our tickets, and for me to get back in the sky and her to marry.

  thirteen

  the first leg is Billings east to Bozeman on a Bombardier prop jet, a flying soda can that barely clears the weather as it cruises and sets down cockeyed and skipping on the runway, sounding like it’s lost at least one tire and prompting a cabin-wide exchange of looks that said I don’t know you, stranger, but I love you, so just hold on, we’re going to paradise. In the terminal I phone Alex from my mobile and get a machine that plays the theme from Brian’s Song but doesn’t include a voice, a message style I’ve always found conceited—it strikes me as a subtle power play, leaving callers wondering if they’ve found you. I give my Las Vegas hotel information and hang up half-hoping that Alex won’t show, which would leave only Pinter, Art Krusk, and Linda to deal with and allow me to rest my brain before my speech. If Alex does come, I’ll have to shake off Linda in some casino, though the nice thing about ditching women on the Strip is that the odds of them finding you again are worse than a single-number roulette wager. It’s the capital of lost dance partners, that town, and some never even make it home at all, like the former Desert Air flight attendant who won ninety grand on three quarters during a layover and rushed out and bought a condo and a Lexus and a picture-window-size tank of tropical fish, which were the only possessions she hadn’t pawned four months later. She gave them to a fish shelter. Such facilities actually exist, and it’s just this sort of oddball knowledge that makes Airworld not only fun but educational and sets one up for a lifetime of winning bar bets.

  BZN to SLC departs on time and locks in another five-hundred-mile increment that I trust will be safe from Morse and the identity thieves. I’ve met a couple of goldbugs in my travels, surprisingly young men with buried footlockers whose existence they felt compelled to share in the way of most people who cache things in the ground—serial killers, gun nuts, toxic waste disposers—and then can’t stop thinking about them day and night. I’m beginning to understand the mind-set, though. An icy electronic wind will blow someday, and no amount of backup or duplication will save the numbers we think of as our wealth. The dispossessed who’ve kept thorough written records will wander the land waving sweaty scraps of paper that may or may not win recognition from the precious-metals power elite. It’s not a wipeout I’m likely to survive or that I’d want to. My miles would be gone, and with them, I suspect, my drive, my spirit.

  To throw off my trackers I order tea with milk, a new drink for me. From now on I will act randomly while airborne, rendering myself useless as a research subject. My seatmate has on the classic sneakers and windbreaker that undercover men think make them invisible but stick out to anyone vaguely in the know like a British admiral’s uniform. He’s reading Dean Koontz with a squinting intensity that Koontz just doesn’t call for and must be fake.

  “Is Salt Lake City home?” he finally ventures, much too casually.

  I nod my lie. Though maybe it’s not a lie. Maybe it’s all my home, the entire route map.

  “I’m Allen.”

  “Dirk.”

  “That’s not a name you hear much anymore.”

  “You never did. It never had a following.”

  The agent closes his Koontz on his thumb, but not at the place he stopped reading. An amateur. I ask him his business and wait for a real lulu.

  “Memorabilia. Class rings,” he says.

  “Not for Heston’s?”

  “The only player left.” He’s authentic, it seems, he just dresses like a spook.

  “You’d know my old buddy Danny Sorenson, then.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Or maybe you haven’t heard yet. Danny passed.”

  There’s always a lag for me with such euphemisms, a few seconds before I realize they mean death.

  “I saw him last Sunday night,” I say. “My god.”

  “He was in Denver at some suite hotel and when he still hadn’t checked out at three P.M. a clerk went in and tried to shout him awake, then left when he couldn’t and didn’t follow up, just charged him for a new night and let him lie there. Our hospitality industry today.”

  “Is his wife okay? Do you have a number for her?”

  “Danny was gay.”

  “He talked about a wife.”

  “I’m sure he did. It’s a conservative company. How did you know him?”

  “Planes. Like I know you.”

  “So a passing acquaintance, basically.”

  “Not quite. I don’t know. Maybe so. Completely gay?”

  Allen looks put off and opens his paperback to the first page of underlined Koontz I’ve ever seen.

  “That came out wrong,” I say. “I’m just surprised by this. Usually I can tell. That sounds wrong, too. I’m all off balance now. I adored that man.”

  “On what basis?” says Allen. “Occasional proximity?”

  As if that’s tiny. As if there’s anything else. The impossible standards these non-flyers set! What were we supposed to do, make love in an exit row? Hand-feed each other peanuts?

  “I don’t think I have to justify my grief,” I say. There are open seats across the aisle.

  “Completely,” says Allen. “Unlike me. I’m semi. Fridays and Saturdays, major cities only. No anal. Strictly oral. Not Danny, though. He ordered off the whole menu. Completely.”

  I move.

  Every great corporation does one thing well, and in Marriott’s case it’s to help guests disappear. The indistinct architecture, the average service, the room-temperature everything. You’re gone, blended away by the stain-disguising carpet patterns, the art that soothes you even when your back’s turned. And you don’t even miss yourself, that’s Marriott’s great discovery. Invisibility, the ideal vacation. No more anxiety about your role, your place. Rest here, under our cloak. Don’t fidget, its just your face that we’re removing. You won’t be needing it until you leave, and here’s a claim check. Don’t worry if you lose it.

  Still, I’m surprised that Dwight is staying here. He seems like the type who cherishes his vividness. I arrive fifteen minutes early for our lunch, my bags stowed back at the Compass Club for my Vegas flight, and sit in an armchair facing the elevators browsing a gratis USA Today and trying not to imagine Danny’s night as a paying corpse at Homestead Suites, the charges still accruing to his dead soul the way they say dead people’s fingernails keep growing. Had he left his TV on? How many blankets covered him? The paper is written such that I can think these things yet still get the gist of the articles. It’s genius, almost on a par with Marriott’s. How many times did his phone ring? Rest in peace, sir. For all I know,
I’m the best friend you ever had.

  I consider my strategy for my lunch with Dwight. No more Cub Scout, no more bottom dog. Like we say in CTC, value yourself as you hope the market will and if the bids come in low, discount accordingly but think of it as a one-time-only sale, not a final re-evaluation. At ten I put down the paper and watch the elevators out of an old conviction that there’s an edge in seeing the man you’re negotiating with before he sees you. Business is folk wisdom, cave-born, dark, Masonic, and the best consultants are outright shamans who sprinkle on the science like so much fairy dust. Use a customer’s first name three times in your first five minutes together. Three, not four. They don’t have to notice your shoeshine to feel its presence.

  Each parting of the elevator doors discloses another person who’s of no use to me, and after ten minutes of predatory staring, I turn my head toward the registration desk, wondering if Dwight’s indeed a guest here, which of course is the moment when he slips in and taps my shoulder, the better sorcerer.

  “Here we finally are,” he says. He’s caught me sitting and I rise to my feet in humiliating freeze-frames and take a hand that’s all aura and no flesh and leaves not the slightest sensation when it’s withdrawn.

  “I thought we’d try the Carvery,” he says, “unless you’re stuck on waitresses and tablecoths.” His field, his ball. Resist now or be subsumed.

  “No, but I’d like to think our meeting warrants them.”

  “The Carvery’s better lit. World-class iced tea.”

  “Fine.”

  “Your call. There’s McNally’s Bistro, too. They mix their iced tea from a powder. A so-so burger, but that can be remedied at the fixings bar.”

  “The Carvery.” I’m a shame to my own name.

  Dwight leads the way. What at first looks like a limp reveals itself as a fundamental mismatch between the hemispheres of his egg-shaped body. Dwight’s mass and vitality all come from his left; his right side is just a hitchhiker, an add-on, as if he’s absorbed and digested his Siamese twin. His hair has a complicated, unnatural grain that’s suggestive of camouflaged transplant work, and yet the general effect is masculine, harking back to a time when men fell apart at thirty and could only fight back through tricks of dress and grooming. I thought he was my age once, but I’m unsure now. Too much reconstruction, too much work, to tell.

  The Carvery has a pub theme, Utah style. Much brass and wood and bric-a-brac, but beerless. Behind a long slanted shield of milky Plexiglas three fiftyish men whose career paths are enigmas—shouldn’t they at least be chefs by now, or have they been flash frozen by a benefits plan that fosters loyalty but kills ambition?—draw knives with scalloped blades through hams and roasts whose crusts show the charred cross-hatchings of butcher’s string. Dwight holds his plate out and gets three cuttings of well-done pork loin too thick to be called slices, too thin for slabs. Portion control is a Marriott obsession. Dwight nods at the carver to request a fourth piece and the fellow’s reaction shows he’s been well-schooled and qualifies as a professional after all; he delivers up a mere wafer on his broad knife blade, but with a flourish. To get his own back Dwight loads his plate with side dishes, just as Marriott expects him to. At pennies per pound for the cheesy potato medleys and oily pasta salads, the joke’s on him, though he struts away like he’s looted a royal tomb. There: a weakness to file for later on. The man doesn’t know when he’s being nickel-and-dimed.

  But where’s the contract? No bulges in his blazer.

  He chooses a two-setting table on a platform and takes the wall seat. From his perspective, I’ll blend with the lunch crowd behind me, but from mine he’s all there is, a looming individual. Fine, I’ll play jujitsu. I angle my chair so as to show him the slimmest, one-eyed profile. The look in my other eye he’ll have to guess at.

  What I want most now, besides a deal, is the story about Morse Dwight promised me, but I can’t predict the emotions it may stir so I’d better leave it for dessert.

  “Your book kept me awake last night,” Dwight says. “Can we bypass the small talk about our food, our meat?”

  “By all means.”

  “The Garage is . . . It’s a prism, isn’t it? It’s multidimensional, not just some flat tract.”

  A prism. This sounds to me like boilerplate.

  “Or a palimpsest, maybe that’s more accurate.”

  Tape two—I’ve come armed. My one eye shows comprehension and Dwight looks stunned.

  “The garret. The studio. Now the garage. It’s an all-American updating. And the book itself was conceived in a garage, because isn’t that where art comes from, so to speak?”

  “That’s true,” I say. “What part kept you awake?”

  “The whole. The sum. This sense that your concept pre-dates both of us. That it wasn’t so much authored as channeled. Eat.”

  “I like to get it all cut up in squares first.”

  “I’ve had this feeling before with certain manuscripts, that I’d seen them before, in some other life perhaps. Frankly, I smelled plagiarism.”

  I laugh from a place in myself that doesn’t often laugh. A place I associate more with rippling sobs.

  “That happens,” Dwight says. “Naked copying. Sheer fraud. It’s not always a crime, though; sometimes it’s an illness. The writer knows the book appeared before, but he feels the original author was the plagiarist and stole from him telepathically. But not in this case. This was daylight larceny. The writer—a midwesterner like you, from one of those states like Missouri, but not Missouri, the one just like it—”

  “Arkansas?” I say.

  “I think of that as the South. A former slave state.”

  “Missouri was too. Read Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Please. Do I look like a man who hasn’t? Please.”

  “People read and then forget. That’s all I meant.”

  “You’re speaking of yourself here?”

  “No, everyone.”

  “Anyway, I dug up the original, showed it to him side by side with his book, and even then he had a fancy story. Very different from your case.”

  “My book’s not stolen.”

  “You’ve yet to end it. How could it be?”

  “I’m close, though.”

  “Does he leave the Garage? I don’t see how he can. We think of garages as places men put behind them once they’re successful. Lincoln’s log cabin. But that’s your twist, of course—for you, the garage is holy and sufficient.”

  “Interesting. Until now my idea was that he’d leave eventually, but only once he realized that the whole world . . . Interesting.”

  “I’m looking at you. You’re sincere. You’re puzzling through this. I’m glad. This heartens me. You’re not a thief. What’s happened here is pure Huck Finn.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Reading and forgetting. And by the way, you were right, I’ve never touched Twain.”

  “Are you saying this isn’t my concept?”

  “Or title or character or theme or anything. It’s a first-class subconscious memory you have. Photographic. Yet lost to you. Amazing.”

  I lay down my fork. What’s eerie about Dwight’s hunch is just how close it might be to the truth given what I’ve been learning about my brain. If I didn’t know otherwise, I might share his doubts, but in fact I remember clearly how, when, and where the idea first arose. His name was Paul Ricks and I’d just helped fire him from Crownmark Greeting Cards in Minneapolis. When I showed him his master self-inventory, which rated high for artistic talent and enterprise, he tore the thing into strips and said “You’re kidding, right? You really believe I can leave two decades of copywriting, roll up my sleeves, hide out in my garage, and hatch a whole new existence?” To which I said: “If I didn’t, I couldn’t do this.” And Paul said: “Prove it.” And I said, “Tell me how.”

  “You’re innocent, but you’re guilty, too,” Dwight says. “I’m deeply sorry, Ryan.” He salts his pork.

  “Suspicion is not conviction. Y
ou’re way off base. My book seemed too good for a novice and so you dreamed this.”

  “I had a tip,” Dwight says. “You mentioned one of my authors yesterday. Soren Morse, the aviator.”

  “Aviator?”

  “I’m doing his sophomore book. We talk quite frequently.”

  I’m dumbfounded. There are layers to this thing . . .

  “So I mention your book to him, because I’m proud of it, and Morse said that’s like The Basement, isn’t it? I searched the Net and came up with a synopsis, the best I could do since the book is out of print. Coincidence after shocking coincidence. I called the publisher, hunted down the editor, and got a fuller description. One example: the protagonist of the basement is unnamed.”

  “Two characters without names is not the same name.”

  “Over my head, that. Try this: a phrase from your book that appears nineteen times and also occurs in the subtitle to The Basement. ‘Perpetual innovation.’ ”

  “No one owns ‘perpetual innovation.’ That’s like saying someone owns, I don’t know, ‘Get well.’ Morse put you onto this scavenger hunt?”

  “Someone would have.”

  “He’s my someone. Every single time.”

  “How exactly do you know each other?”

  “Distantly but intimately,” I say. “I’m tired of explaining how well I know people—no one respects my answers. I just know people. Hundreds. Thousands. From sea to shining sea. And no, I don’t think I coined that. See this napkin?”

  “In detail.”

  “I’m seeing the same napkin. You and me, both sane. The here and now.”

  “Let me finish,” Dwight says. “I hadn’t quite lost faith yet. There’s a collective mind, it’s very real. I can’t name one, but I’m aware of major inventions that appeared only days apart on different continents. This was like that, I hoped. I knew you traveled, so you’re exposed to the ether more than most of us, the cultural cyclotron, the particles. Bombarded by particles. Then I called the author. At nine. This morning.”