Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  The only object evoking work or purpose is a sheet metal cube painted army surplus green and the size of an industrial air conditioner. It’s featureless, with no rivets or vents or panels, but the sheen coming off it suggests it’s well maintained. It’s evidence of my investment in MythTech’s legend that despite a stint in a high-tech field that taught me what supercomputers really look like—nothing much; they’re no bigger than a dishwasher—I insist on seeing the cube as a huge cyber-brain capable of predicting how and when America’s recently rekindled romance with the traditional station wagon will end. It’s a drab-olive thinking monolith, that thing.

  “Hello down there. Can I help you?”

  “It’s Ryan Bingham!”

  The man at the rail of the mezzanine withdraws into the warren of glass offices and out pops a new face, young but very pale. The kid has on an orange Hawaiian shirt that’s probably an expensive tribute to the Hawaiian shirt of old, since this one is louder and busier and brighter than any I ever saw my father wear at his annual company picnic in the Lion’s Park. The kid’s wearing flip-flop sandals, too. Encouraging. This is the look of the new-class robber barons.

  “Can I help you?” Same question, but spoken with more authority, even a faint ring of profit participation. The kid considers this strange domain his own.

  “This is MythTech, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Sure is. I’m sorry, though—no more odd jobs. We finished the packing and loading two days ago. Are you from Manpower?”

  “I’m dressed like I’m from Manpower? Is Spack or Sarrazin here? It’s Ryan Bingham.”

  “They’re already up in Calgary,” he says. Why won’t he come down the stairs and make this civilized? “It’s just me and four temps and two security guys until we can hoist that thing there on a truck. Then we’re gone, too. Are you the one I sent the Town Car for?”

  “Someone did. That was you?”

  “I got a call from one of our old backers,” the kid shouts down. “Send a car to meet a plane, he said, and when I asked why and who for the guy got snippy and told me I’m too low to ask him questions. I had to remind the old snot we’re not top-down here. We’re horizontal.”

  “Sandy Pinter?”

  “One of those guys with all the wrong old concepts, the ones that put General Motors in the tank.”

  “Pinter’s a MythTech backer?”

  “From the old days. He got in early third quarter of ’98. You haven’t said how I can help you yet. Adam called you out here?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “Back-channel stuff?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s all back channel lately. Did they contact you via microwave or radar? Or AM radio?”

  This is not a high point in my life. I’m being teased by a mental inferior who thinks that America didn’t get off the ground until September 1999, or whenever he opened his first IRA. But I deserve his jeers. What do I tell him? That they summoned me on an airport loudspeaker using a mini-mart pay phone?

  “What’s in Calgary?”

  “Tax breaks. Lax accounting standards. Who knows? Strict banking privacy laws. Skilled immigrants. It’s not like we’re quarrying Nebraska sandstone—we can run this shop from Djakarta.” He snaps his fingers and the echo pings around the space. “Unless you can tell me how to be of service, though, I’ve got an office swamped with cords and cables that need some pretty serious untangling.”

  “The name Ryan Bingham means nothing to you?” I say.

  “Right now it means frustration. An hour ago I probably would’ve thought it was my senator. I mean it: I have big-time wire to spool, a jumbo commercial coffeemaker to clean. I also have two large guards on antipsychotics. Insanity defense? They’ve got it memorized.”

  “What’s your name? I’m going to write it down.”

  “I can give you my log-in. I go by that,” he says. “2BZ2CU.”

  I shift my center of gravity toward the door, but technically I hold my ground. I glance at the cube; it pulsed just now. It scanned me. I have sensitive mitochondria, rubbed raw by X-rays. I know when I’ve been scanned.

  “I came to see that,” I say, pointing. “Over there. My assistant took Sarrazin’s call. He screwed the dates up. I worked on its prototype in Colorado.”

  The young man cocks his body skeptically and folds his thin white arms. He’s bluff, all bluff, just another Starbucks M.B.A.; a fashion-forward brat in a VW who probably says he admires the Dalai Lama, but inside he’s all stock options, all wireless day trades. I’ve felt these kindergartners at my back for going on a decade, and they scare me. Time to confront that. Kid doesn’t know crap. Suspects he’s not going to Calgary, either, I bet. These outfits don’t go cross-border and non-dollar so they can haul along their slacker trash.

  This needn’t be pure humiliation, this errand. I can alpha this geek and exit in big black boots. So no one here was expecting me? That happens. I’m used to it by now. But I can at least view the cube and ride off tall into my million-mile sunset flight.

  “Professional courtesy call,” I say. “Get down here. Give me a tour or Pinter’s calling Spack and Spack’ll pay your severance in rubles.”

  2BZ shows Ryan his downy throat. He hits the stairs and flip-flops down in quick-time. The skylights dim as clouds slide over the sun but the cube holds its own in the gloom. It’s homeostatic. 2BZ sets us up at a distance from the thing and won’t fully face it; he just gives it his profile. He’s acting like he’s wishing for a lead apron.

  “Is it turned on?” I say.

  “Huh? It’s always ‘on.’ ”

  “On inside quotation marks?”

  “I’m really not the expert,” says 2BZ. “We work on a need-to-know basis in this firm. It’s horizontal, but layered-horizontal. I’m infrastructure. I’m shipping and receiving. I can tell you it’s insured and that it’s fragile and that it travels on a special flatbed that should have been here half an hour ago. I can tell you they already got in touch with Customs and that it wasn’t your shortest phone call ever. I think they made two calls, in fact.”

  “So what’s its nickname? Around the central office?”

  “This was the back office. People work at home. This place was mostly support and storage,” he says. “I’m not sure I have a job once it’s cleared out. Who do you work for?”

  “Myself. Like everyone. So basically you’re ancillary and clueless.”

  “They told me I was critical. You smoke? Mind if I do?”

  2BZ hand-rolls one from a pouch too fragrant to hold mere tobacco. Cloves or dope? These kids smoke all sorts of mixtures, and they should know better. I ask for one, too, but I won’t inhale, just steep myself. I’ve worn a few Hawaiian shirts myself.

  “I do have a few ideas about it,” he says. “It’s pretty skeletal here, there’s not much company, just FedEx and UPS, so I spin out sometimes. Whole place was wired for sound once. Sequenced amps. I pirated off the Net and blasted everything. Tried to see if I could break those skylights. Or get myself fired. You know how all the shrinks say that children now are crying out for firmness and discipline and clear-cut values? I think it’s true. I always got positive evaluations, but what I wanted was someone to storm in here and kill the music and kick a little butt.”

  “What ideas?” I’m inhaling some. You think you won’t, but in practice it’s hard not to. Just three hundred more miles to go, so I deserve it. Forty thousand feet above the wheat, and no one will even look up. As long as I know.

  “It’s the world-record random automated dialer. It skims off the fractional cents from savings accounts and forwards them to some bank in the Grand Caymans. It’s where erased voice mails end up.”

  “Don’t kid.”

  “I’m not.”

  “They have such devices. On decommissioned air bases. Don’t believe it when they say some base is decommissioned. More like ‘recommissioned.’ ”

  “That’s half this state. Drive through Nebraska sometime. It’s all old
Air Force. Half the Great Plains is military surplus.”

  We smoke and behold the cube. We think our thoughts. Is this where the miles are stored before they’re paid?

  A shuddering noise turns us both and we look on as a broad automated garage door rides its rails segment by segment and opens half one wall to views of the Missouri and western Iowa. We hear the beeps of a vehicle backing up and then we see the flatbed. It’s rigged with about a dozen orange triangles and a “Flammable” sticker from some other job, perhaps. Three workmen walk backwards behind it and guide the driver with hand signals aimed at his flared-out rearview mirrors, and all wear emerald jumpsuits with drawstring hoods and trouser cuffs that cinch around their boots. The bed of the semi bristles with tie-down eyelets. Hoops of braided cable hang from the truck and now it’s so close that we have to step aside. I can see by 2BZ’s squint and brittle posture that he’s witnessing his obsolescence here and I wish I knew someone to call on his behalf. My job recommendations pull no weight, unfortunately; the people know that I’m in CTC and am always trying to sell some exile as the Next Big Thing.

  The boom on the flatbed is swung over the cube and two new workmen pile out of the cab, one with a walkie-talkie against his cheek. There may well be a helicopter somewhere, but I don’t hear blades.

  I ask 2BZ for his card and give him mine, though I’m afraid they’re both outdated by now. His title is—was—“Associate.” I thank him.

  “The Calgary location is a campus. They’re calling it a campus. It’s vast, I hear. An old defunct seminary on the outskirts. No more home offices. They’re consolidating.”

  “If I’m not at one of those numbers on the card, try information, Polk Center, Minnesota. You want me to write that down for you?”

  “I’ll remember,” he says.

  “You tell yourself. I’m writing it on another one. Take this one.”

  “You know what I think it is? I think I guessed. It goes outside, on the campus. To welcome visitors.”

  The workmen swarm and two of them boost one of them onto the top, where he widens his stance and bends. Everyone wields some cable or some hook and radiates safety-conscious professionalism. This baby is reaching Canada intact.

  “I think it’s probably art,” says 2BZ. “It’s corporate art. A thing to put out front.”

  seventeen

  in Omaha, boarding,” I answer—accurately. They’ve worn me down. It’s best just to give these women what they want when they ask me where they’re reaching me.

  “Julie’s cut all her hair off,” Kara says. “She’ll be bald at the altar. I thought you set her straight.”

  “Waning powers.” It’s tough to keep my mind on this. My audience is assembling in first class and I intend to remember every face.

  “When the salmon never came,” says Kara, “Mom got some idea that she could smoke a turkey by putting a pan of wet wood chips in the oven, but underneath she wanted to burn the house down. No one’s helping me. It’s Shakespeare here. Luckily, the extinguisher had pressure left after four years of not once being checked.”

  “Did Tammy get in okay? The maid of honor?”

  “She’s Shakespeare too. She took a bump in Detroit for a free ticket and now we have to wait till almost midnight for her to show her hostile little face. A total play for attention. Infantile. Her best friend is on her third husband, just about, and she’s still single—not because she’s a chilly neatnik, naturally, who bolts every therapist we recommend the minute she finds a stray hair on their couch and the doctor won’t let her spray it down with that antibacterial crap she totes around, but because her parents wouldn’t buy her braces. She blames her teeth—like mine are any better. I got a man.”

  Someday, when I’m not paying for the call, I’ll ask her to tell me exactly how she worked that.

  “You there?”

  “If you’re planning to meet me, you’ll have to set out now. You’re already late.”

  “Your voice,” she says. “You’re loaded. I need you, Ryan. I’m dragging this whole celebration up a hill and I’m doing it alone. Don’t drink. It sours you. You get all quippy.”

  “Big day for me,” I say. I watch them file in and hand off wardrobe bags and tussle with the overheads and sit, but the attendance is sparser than I’d pictured and the group less representative, and older. I’d guess that just a third are flying for business and will fully appreciate the feat that’s coming and that most of the rest are aunts and uncles and granddads off to help video births and blow out candles, or else they just did those things and they’re slouching home.

  “Bigger day tomorrow,” Kara says. “If people can just look within for twenty seconds and get ahold of their spinning little gears. Hey, Mom needs to know if she should make a room up or if the hide-a-bed is all you’ll need?”

  “Room,” I say.

  “I figured that already. You forwarded your mail here,” Kara says.

  So that’s where it’s going. The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I’ll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth’s curvature allows. It’s a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere—if we could take it all in at once, why move?—and it may be the reason why one-ways cost the same as round-trips. They’re all round-trips, some are just diced up in smaller chunks.

  “Pick something up for Mom. Some souvenir. She senses the truth, I think; that this whole thing of yours is all about avoiding her. Some knickknack.”

  “A two-time loser is trying for her third tomorrow. Give your clarity a holiday. And whatever happened to ‘Just bring yourself’?”

  “The gift’s insurance. In case you don’t quite manage that.”

  “We’re set to taxi and you need to start driving.”

  “Got you, brother. We’re already in the Suburban and on our way. I’m holding the phone up. That snoring, all that wheezing? Your entire family sacked out, leaving Kara to do the driving, as usual. So don’t drink a drop. Don’t celebrate too soon.”

  “I’m drinking,” I say. “Odometer set to turn over soon.”

  “Oh, that.”

  She’s the master of small words, so I took the big ones.

  “Get in safe,” she says. “There’s weather here. There’s black sky to my south and tons of grass and crap is starting to blow, pretty fast, across the road.”

  I arrange my materials as we thrust and rise. On the empty seat to my left I set my HandStar, displaying our flight path as a broken line on its amber credit-card-size screen and programmed so I can advance a jet-shaped icon by toggling a key. Fort Dodge, Iowa, is the milestone, as it’s always been—I like the name—and though it’s all an estimate, of course, and I may already have swept across the line, I’ve always been comfortable with imprecision when it’s in the service of sharpened awareness. Factoring in leap years and cosmic wobble, our anniversaries aren’t our anniversaries, our birthdays are someone else’s, and the Three Kings would ride right past Bethlehem if they left today and they steered by the old stars.

  Next I unpocket the single-use camera I bought in a gift shop at McCarran this morning. It has no flash, and I wonder if it needs one, though how could any place have more light than here? I’ll let someone else snap the shot, I’m not sure who, though it will be one of the businessmen, naturally, so the photographer knows what he’s commemorating, its size and mass and scope, and will make sure to aim squarely and hold still and not let his thumb tip jut across the lens. I’ll want at least five shots from different angles and one from directly behind me, of my hair, which is how other flyers mostly see me and how I see them. If there’s too much glare I’ll lower my shade, though now, as the plane icon crosses a state border and in the real sky clouds accumulate, I see that I’ll have no problems from the sun, which is nothing but a corona around a thunderhead.

  And of course I set out the corny story I wrote after he died and before my sad sabbatical studying the true meaning of train songs. After the other students were done abusing it, I stashed it in the
pocket of my travel jacket, where it’s been graying and softening ever since. I honestly don’t remember how it goes, just that I wrote it the night I understood that rowing the uncomprehendingly unwanted across deep waters was not my heart’s desire and needed a limit placed on it, a stop sign. The night I hatched this whole plan, wherever that was, bubble-bathing in some Homestead Suites with a cold beer on the tub that fell and smashed when I reached for it with soapy hands. I had to get out and towel off and drain the tub and feel for silvers, because the glass was clear.

  “Excuse me. I was back in the wrong seat. This one with the stuff on it is mine, I think.”

  It’s a voice I’ve only heard in dreams, where it was usually half an octave lower and transparently that of my father at fifty, when he first ran for representative and adopted the hands-off approach to gas delivery that emboldened a ruthless competitor based way off in St. Paul but spreading west. The face, though, I know from pictures in his magazine. That sun-kissed golf-and-tennis ageless skin I liked to think had been softened in the dark room, but appeals even more in person, I now see. The worry lines around the eyes are new, though, and there’s an acrid top note in his breath—of failure and drift and working for one’s self.

  I gather my things and pouch them in my seatback and start to stand, though he motions me back down. “You’re it today. You’re on your throne. Don’t move. It’s Soren. I feel like we know each other, Ryan. Christine, a bottle of white. No stingy miniatures.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Cold, not lukewarm.”

  “Don’t carry that kind. Sorry.” A joke between them. Everyone knows the service has fallen off and no one, not even the chief, knows what to do. More money, and a shower in his office, but on the whole he’s in this with the rest of us.