Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “I haven’t showered.”

  “Use it for effect. Too conscience-stricken to bathe. I’ll wait out front, next to the big pink granite Dionysus.”

  I do my best with razor, soap, and toothbrush, but it’s like polishing a wormy apple. Motivation is low. Virtue’s bugle call is silent. I rehearse a few brave phrases from my talk but the face in the steamy mirror seems unmoved. The point of the speech was to hear myself deliver it, but I already have, a hundred times, and clearly my best performance is behind me. The true act of courage this morning would be to cancel and live with the knowledge of Craig Gregory’s office-wide “I told you so’s.” It’s the sole penance left to me, and I must snatch it.

  I pack up my carry-on but it won’t zip. I leave it on the bed. My briefcase, too. Luggage, for me, was an affectation anyway, a way to reassure strangers and hotel clerks that I hadn’t just been released from prison and that I’d make good on my bills. I ditch the white-noise generator as well. The thing enfeebled me. If a person can’t lose consciousness on his own, if thinking his thoughts is that important to him, then let him lie on his bed of nails. He’ll cope.

  Only the HandStar is indispensable, if only for nine more hours or so. Its flight schedules, mileage charts, and activity logs will tell me when I’ve passed over my meridian. After that, the trash. My credit cards, too. The fewer numerical portals into my affairs, the fewer intruders. I may keep one Visa so I can pump my gas without having to face a human clerk, but I’ll toss the rest on the unloved-numbers dump. 787 59643 85732, you may no longer act as my agent. Permission denied. My phone I’ll retain in case I witness a car wreck and can be of aid. The boots stay, too. To help me walk the surface of the earth and look silly doing it, which is how I’ll feel. Not forever, I hope, but certainly at first.

  I check out by remote, via the TV, and ride the elevator to the casino, where I notice a few of the players from last night still humped up over the tables and machines, though not the fellow who copped my lucky blackjack stool, who’s probably out yacht-shopping by now, nagged by a faint sense of illegitimacy he’s drinking hard to mask.

  I’m almost out the door and MythTech-bound, heading for a rear exit to miss Craig Gregory, when I fix on a familiar profile alone at a corner mini-baccarat table. They got him. I’m devastated. They waylaid Pinter. There he is, stubbly, strung out on the odds, a monk who ventured from his cell just once and plunged straightaway down Lucifer’s rabbit hole. It’s my duty to try to haul him out.

  It takes him a moment to see me once I’ve sat down. This game of no skill and one binary decision—Player or Banker; an embryo could do it—has fossilized his nerves. The whites of his eyes are the color of old teeth, and so are his old teeth.

  “I was just getting up to come hear you speak,” he says. Optimistically.

  “I was up against CEO-to-be-announced. I bowed out. How’s it going over here?”

  “Better and better. I’m almost back to even.” He wets his gray lips and commits two chips to Banker, then has an epiphany and shifts to Player. If he wins this, he’ll think he has the touch. If he loses he’ll think he had the touch, but doubted himself. He’ll resolve not to doubt himself and keep on playing.

  “Have you thought any more about the Pinter Zone?”

  He smashes out a hand-rolled cigarette. “I’ve decided to license those rights to Tony Marlowe. I’m sorry. I planned to tell you at your talk.”

  “May I ask why?” As if I don’t know, and as though I care now. Marlowe’s a smiler. He grooms. He follows up. The perennial philosophy.

  “You may, but my answer would only make you feel bad.”

  Fair enough. But he stabs me anyhow. “You’re a graduate of my seminars,” he says. “Marlowe’s not. His brain’s not full of goop. He sees me for what I am, another businessman, not an avatar. It takes the pressure off. You, I would have disillusioned.”

  Wrong. Watching him kill himself to get “back to even” (where but in Las Vegas is reaching zero considered an accomplishment?) has already done that job.

  “You seeing the general this afternoon?” he says. “This man won a massive set-piece desert battle. Imagine the confidence that must instill.”

  “I’ve heard him. I’ve gotten all he has to give. I’m off to Omaha. Spack and Sarrazin.”

  “Say hello to them for me.”

  He chooses Banker. Loses. The El Dorado of evenness recedes before a new grail: bankruptcy with dignity. I buy a few chips. I’ll join him in his ruin.

  “I’m not even sure I still want to work for them. I might live on my savings for a year. Read the classics.”

  “The classics will just depress you. I fled a country nurtured on the classics and everyone there was drunk or suicidal. Keep occupied. Work. Earn money. Help others earn money. Ignorance of the classics is your best asset. If MythTech shows interest, accept. Don’t ponder Dante.”

  I’ve won two hands, that fast, and I can see the swinging pocket watch of last night’s trance. I collect my chips and scoot my stool back, rise.

  “Stay. You’re the charm,” says Pinter. “Five more hands. I’m back within striking distance of where I stood when I felt I was starting to catch up.”

  Too sad, that remark. And I owe the old man, too, even if he’s dancing with Marlowe now. He did something for me once. He did a lot. The sophisticates may sniff, but it’s all true: in the course of certain American lives, way out in the flyover gloom between the coasts, it’s possible to arrive—through loss of love, through the long, formless shock of watching parents age, through inadequacies of moral training, through money problems—at a stage or a juncture or a passage—dismiss the buzzwords at your peril—when we find ourselves alone in a strange city where no one lives any longer than he must and all of our neighbors come from somewhere else, and damn it, things just aren’t working out for us, and we’ve tried everything, diets, gyms, jobs, churches, but so far not this thing, which we read about on a glossy flyer tucked under our windshields: a breakthrough new course in Dynamic Self-Management developed over decades of experience training America’s Top Business Leaders and GUARANTEED TO GET YOU WHERE YOU’RE GOING!

  And we go. And feel better. Because there’s wisdom there, more than we gained at our lousy college, at least, and more importantly there’s an old man’s face—beamed in from California by satellite—which appears to be looking at us alone, the ninety-eight-pound weaklings, and not laughing! A miracle. Not even smirking! Beholding us!

  “I win again. Are you watching this?” says Pinter. “Don’t move an inch. I’m tripling my wagers.”

  Only for him would I do this: stand around impersonating good luck when I have a flight to catch.

  “I’m there! I’m even!”

  “You might want to stop now,” I say.

  Pinter nods. “Unless you can postpone Omaha.”

  “I can’t.”

  He pockets the chips he sat down with like golden loot dredged from a wreck. He steps back from the table. Look: no handcuffs.

  “I’m sorry about Marlowe. I can’t unsign. I can, however, run up to my room and call Mr. Sarrazin and vouch for you and suggest that he send a car when you get in. When’s your arrival?”

  I tell him.

  “You brought me back!” He shakes my hand and won’t stop, and though one dreams of someday being thanked by one’s old mentor, one doesn’t want him to cling this way. It’s painful. My favor was so small. I did so little.

  Though I guess that depends on how much he was down.

  There’s always a change in Denver. It’s unavoidable. A trip to the bathroom out west means changing in Denver. If you’ve done it, you’ve seen the city at its best. Not because the rest of Denver is dull (I’ve been told my old city possesses a “thriving arts scene,” whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks) but because the airport is a wonder. Along with Hartsfield and O’Hare, DIA is one of Airworld’s three great capitals.
It’s the best home that someone between homes could ever want.

  But today is goodbye. I’ll change in Denver again someday—I’ll still fly, I suppose, though less often, and mostly for pleasure—but this won’t be the same DIA, where I know everybody and most folks at least act like they know me. The ten-minute chair-massage girl who just had twins. The shoeshine guys, Baron and Gideon and Phil. The health-walking retired G-man who shows up every weekday at 6 A.M. to clock his nine miles, shielded from the weather by those soaring conical canopies said to invoke a native teepee village, though to me they’ve always looked like sails.

  And Linda, of course, whom I had to go and sleep with, perverting the pristine relationship of kind and competent receptionist and busy man who loved being received.

  I stare at them as I walk between my gates. If I catch someone’s eye I make a finger pistol and shoot them a big “Howdy” or “Keep on truckin’.” A few shoot back, but only one person speaks—Sharon, the quickie massage girl. “Flamingo neck, get over here! You need me!”

  I mount her odd-looking chair and rest my head, facing down and forward, between two pads. I watch the floor go by. Nothing stays in place; it all goes by. Floors just do it more slowly than other things.

  “Hear that Rice Krispies sound? That’s your fascia crackling.” She always brings up my fascia. She pities them. She believes that if people, particularly people in power, “would only listen to their bodies,” war would cease and pollution would abate—and for as long as I’m in her oily hands, I believe it, too. Imagine the red faces if the answer turns out to be that simple. It just may.

  I’d tell her “So long,” but I don’t want to confuse her. Of course I’m going away; I’m in an airport.

  I walk to the Compass Club desk and ask the woman filling in for Linda to pass a note to her I wrote on the flight in. Not much of a note: “Keep smiling, okay? I’m sorry about last night. I’ll be away. Tell the boys to expect big parcels on their birthdays and yes, you’d make a terrific nurse. Pursue that.”

  “Are you Ryan?” the sub asks. “The one she always talks about? You fit the description perfectly. You must be.”

  “Describe the description.”

  “Medium short hair. A big vocabulary. Flat but pleasing voice.”

  “With that, you pegged me?”

  “Great West ran your picture in the employee newsletter. They’ve been updating us on your progress. You’ll be our tenth.”

  I’m flummoxed. “You all know my face then? Nationwide? The tone of this little article was positive?”

  “Try fawning.” She points a finger down her throat.

  “Really? No kidding.”

  “Orders from on high,” she says. “Treat the man like a prince. That’s not verbatim, but that’s the thrust.”

  “Go on!”

  “You haven’t noticed the little smiles everywhere? The big thumbs-up from your teammates?”

  I shake my head. “The newsletter said I’m your teammate? Do you still have it?”

  “You really haven’t noticed? You’re our Most Wanted.”

  “I’m finding this very confusing. Morse said pamper me? The future head of pro baseball said pamper me? Not give me flak?”

  “That baseball thing fell through. We hear he’s shattered. He spoke at a prayer breakfast in Boulder yesterday and the word is he sobbed. He lost it for a minute. With the stock price stuck and Desert Air’s big fare cuts and new ‘Let’s Fly Together’ ad campaign, my union’s saying he’s gone within six weeks. Maybe—after that breakdown—even sooner.”

  “Reliable high-level gossip? Or car-pool stuff?”

  “Union news. And believe me, we won’t miss him. He’s Mr. Bad Faith. Gives an inch, then takes it back, then gives it again later on like he’s some Santa Claus or wonderful rich uncle. He’ll make out fine. They’ll slip him a million and he’ll walk off laughing.”

  “He won’t. That not how it feels,” I say.

  “Whatever.”

  “He’s in for some dark nights, if this is true. Is there a way to contact him directly? How would I get his number? The one he answers?”

  “Pray to God. Come on, you hate him, too. All the passengers do. He killed this outfit.”

  “You’re still working here.”

  “You’re still buying tickets.”

  “Soften up on those more fortunate. It’s all a continuum. You’re in it, too.”

  “I’ll give her the note. Vocabulary man.”

  I’m hoping Pinter unplugged the baccarat brainjack long enough to reach a phone and order some runway foam for me in Omaha. A driver at the gate holding a placard with my name only slightly misspelled in sloppy black capitals would add a certain something to my deplaning. It would help my arrival feel like an arrival and not just another departure in the making.

  I call for my two percent and, yes, it’s true—the flight attendant’s smile seems to exceed the parabolic millimetric facial crack diagrammed in her Great West training manual. She’s not a free being as you and I are free, and when her behavior varies, it’s on purpose. Federal regulations rule her life, dictating shift lengths and rest periods and cycles of alcohol and prescription-drug consumption; her contract with the airline covers the rest. Even the bows in her shoelaces have been optimized. Two loops, just so. If she wore laced shoes, that is. It’s forbidden; she might trip on them evacuating, helping some class-ring salesman down the slide.

  How I mistook my teammates’ grins and backslaps for mockery and obstruction, I’m still not sure. It’s as though I’ve confused a dinner in my honor for a penitentiary last meal. These two events might look much the same, perhaps—undue attention from people who’ve ignored one, telegrams, reporters, handkerchiefs. Maybe it’s not all me.

  Omaha looms in my window, but its looming stems from my expectations, not its grandeur. On past trips the city has struck me as forlorn, a project that’s outlived its founding imperatives and hung on thanks to block grants and inertia and handouts from one or two civic-minded billionaires. This time it may as well be the risen Atlantis. The stubby, aging skyline snags on cloud. The spotty late-morning traffic seems darkly guided. Omaha, city of mystery. Home to MythTech, who guides our hands through supermarket freezers toward rising-crust pizzas and breadcrumbed mozzarella sticks that seem overpriced and skimpy, but what the hell. It’s our money. We’ll spend it as we please.

  I want to be in on that thing, whatever it is. To be safe from them one must be one of them. We dock with the Jetway and I join the line. It’s not a job I’m seeking, it’s citizenship, a seat inside the Dome. Key modules in the canopy hang from cranes and not every duct is flanged and sealed, but unless I get in before the structure’s dedicated, I’ll be a spectator. A mark. If MythTech turns out to be seven twenty-five-year-olds shooting wastebasket hoops and munching protein bars, I’ll still want in, if this is where it’s going. Even the big stuff starts in the Garage.

  Sam lets me call him Sam. I ride up front with him. He’s not a veteran, like Driver, but he tries, and I suspect he bills clients electronically and doesn’t grant show tickets on the honor system. He’s in college, no doubt, and this is just a sideline; that Penguin Classics Bleak House is no breeze, and half the pages are tabbed and paper-clipped. Sam nods at the sights. A famous jewelry store favored by British royals and software titans who know their Color, Cut, and Clarity. Warren Buffet’s first office—see that broken window? It’s the one directly above it, with the pigeons.

  Someone must want me to feel at home in Omaha, and just in case Sam is reporting back to him, I show interest in salvaged toolworks and thoughtful greenways and redbrick loft districts zoned for art. I’m restless, though. We’re leaving downtown along the sluggish Missouri. Paddle-wheel casinos, stacked raw lumber, the home of the nine-dollar T-bone, the eight, the seven. Big dreams and low rents can make beautiful music together, but as the steak dinners give way to dollar Buds, I start to wonder. Does MythTech have no pride?

  “Where�
��s world headquarters?”

  “For what?” Sam says. “They gave me an address, not a press release.”

  Low pay, long hours. I don’t take his snapping personally.

  He looks from side to side, then at the sky, his chin out over the steering wheel. He’s lost. Searching the sky while driving on the ground is like kicking the dropped fly ball that ended the game.

  “Did they give you a time to get me there?” I say.

  “In my glove compartment there’s a phone.”

  Sam dials yet keeps driving; I lose faith in him. Once in the soup, persistence is no virtue. Muffler shops now. Unaffiliated churches. A Dairy Queen rival from the early seventies with a listing discolored cone that doesn’t spin. MythTech hired this car, and by a firm’s subcontractors you shall know its soul.

  “We passed it. I knew it!”

  Sam’s illegal U-turn ends at an old low warehouse that I’ll admit has definite rock-and-roll capitalism potential but could use a few satellite dishes on the roof to close the deal. I open my door; I wish I’d kept my briefcase. Sam tells me he needs to deliver a late tuition payment but promises to be back within the hour.

  The intercom panel beside the vault-like door is promisingly rich in lighted buttons but none of them are labeled or even numbered. I hold them down four at a time and in response a buzzer sounds and a hidden latch clunks open. I snatch at the door handle, having never been told how long to expect such bolts to stay retracted. It’s always a panic, this moment, for us nervous types.

  The space is well-lit thanks to banks of vintage skylights honeycombed with reinforcing wires and remarkably free of bird droppings and dust. There’s an old-fashioned gallery or mezzanine of frosted-glass offices served by iron stairways that horseshoes around what must have been the floor of some grand factory from Omaha’s golden age as a center of whatever industry—boilermaking?—that survives in the names of its high school football teams. But there’s no one around and no visible reception center where one might inquire where they’ve gone. The rough plank floor is as empty as a rink and hasn’t been lovingly sanded and refinished to the customary retro luster or painted with foul lines to afford young geniuses those crucial brainstorming games of lunch-break basketball without which there’d be no Internet, no HandStar.