Up in the Air (12 page)

The voice was female, that’s all I’m sure of now. Tinny and official—robotic, almost. I examine the speaker recessed in the ceiling and think through the shortlist of the people who know my schedule. My assistant, a temp who claims to be a grad student taking time out from his thesis, but might be anyone, since I doubt ISM checked his background when it hired him. My boss, Ron Boosler, who’s fishing in Central America with the ex-CEO of General Mills and a Colorado federal judge he’s helping to position for the Supreme Court. And Alex, of course, who was gone when I woke up facedown in a soggy pillow on her bed.

It was MythTech. That’s what I thought in Billings, too, when the same thing happened three weeks ago. I was ordering oatmeal in the airport coffee shop, unslept and unshaven after an intensive two-day Career Transitions mini-session that saw the breakdown of one participant who wasn’t keen to re-enter the great job hunt and get on the phone to his entire Rolodex with chipper questions about openings while repeating to himself the affirmation: “I’m
motivated,
not desperate.” Stark panic often precedes enlightenment, and the former banker left our meeting room purple with hypertension and resentment, getting as far as his parked Buick LeSabre before falling into a catatonic trance that paralyzed his limbs but not his mouth, which belched forth intermittent rasping moans smelling of—they had an odor, these moans—stomach acid mixed with lighter fluid. It was dawn by the time I stabilized the fellow, and my eyes were so dry that when I blinked my lids stuck to my eyeballs with
the adhesion factor of Post-it notes on a computer screen. In the cab to the airport I retched into a Baggie I use to store dirty underwear and socks. Then, at breakfast, directly above my head, I heard my name. My last name. I investigated, checking in with the airline and with security. Nothing. I called my voice mail and got a message, truncated and barely audible, leaving a number with a Nebraska area code. I dialed it, expecting Lucius Spack, whose interest in my career I’d been alerted to by a columnist for
Modern Management
who’d interviewed him for a story. Instead, I got an Omaha convenience store whose clerk insisted she’d just arrived at work and that I’d reached a pay phone. She couldn’t help me. I spent the flight back to Denver in a muddle, convinced that my ears had deceived me. Then again, Spack and MythTech are covert operators, famed for stealthy head-hunting campaigns. A call from an untraceable public phone wouldn’t be out of character for them, and tracking
me down at an airport, away from colleagues, where no one could overhear us, would fit their tactics.

When the page doesn’t repeat, I leave the chapel, genuflecting by instinct in the aisle even though the room is so stripped bare that I’m not sure if it even contains an altar. At my gate a beeping electric cart cuts past and lets off a swollen old woman on metal crutches who hobbles onto the Jetway, the last to board. The agent rubber-bands her stack of boarding passes and levels a stare at me. “Let’s move along, sir.”

“I think I just heard someone call me on the PA.”

“The aircraft is leaving.”

I flash my Compass Club card. “Just try the office. The name is Ryan Bingham.”

The agent uses the phone behind the podium. “The last person paged was a Brian Raines,” she tells me. “You must have juxtaposed something.”

Juxtaposed. It’s so easy, but there’s a lag before it comes. I’m reaching capacity. No more Verbal Edge. Whatever I don’t know already, I’ll never learn.

I ask for an extra pillow and a blanket and shift my seat to its fully reclined position. The gentleman behind me groans. He could adjust his own seat for more space, but he prefers to play the martyr, apparently. I didn’t look at him closely when I boarded—still preoccupied with the phantom page—but, lying back, I recognize his cologne as one of those aggressive, woodsy scents worn by heavy perspirers. Salesmen, mostly.

I feel a bug coming on. My ears are hot. I twist shut the air nozzle blowing on my forehead and drain a second glass of grapefruit juice to soothe the pulsing rawness in my throat. The superviruses of modern air travel, steeled by exposure to diverse immune systems and virtually injected into the lungs by high-efficiency ventilation systems, can hang on for weeks, bringing on a multitude of symptoms that mimic those of more serious illnesses. Over time, I’ve grown resistant to most of them, but once in a while one sneaks past my glands. As soon as I land at Ontario today, I’ll find a drugstore and gorge on zinc and C. I need to be healthy for my meeting with Pinter.

My seatmate barely interests me for once. His glasses reflect the moonglow of his laptop as he touch-types what looks like a letter or an article. He’s chewing gum like a smoker in withdrawal and I’d guess by his mussed, longish hair and casual jacket that he’s a working journalist. I’m impressed. Anyone who can reach into the data swarm and pick out what’s newsworthy has my respect.

I can’t get comfortable in my little nest. My feet have swollen inside the cowboy boots, but I fear the odor if I kick them off. Such a small error, this purchase, yet so disruptive. Traveling, I live from my feet up. Shoes—one more item to shop for in Ontario.

But where’s Ontario? I really don’t know. A secondary airport outside Los Angeles, a clearing in the suburbs and subdivisions. They call such places faceless, but it’s not true. They’re bodiless, just signs and streets and lights. In fact, I’ve flown into Ontario before. I rode the shuttle bus to Homestead Suites, worked for an hour or two on
The Garage,
did some business downstairs in the grill, and returned to the terminal by cab. Memories? None. The smell of road tar, maybe. The trip was no more than a handshake through the ether.

I open one eye to read my seatmate’s screen—a breach of Airworld etiquette. Whatever he’s writing, he’s in the middle of it.

But for residents of this leafy college town, known until now for its world-class Children’s Hospital, the tragedy raises deeper, more troubling questions. Questions of media violence, parental neglect, and the aimlessness of the American adolescent. “A few of us worried about boys and guns,” says Janet Portis, 31, a part-time dental technician and mother of two, “but girls and guns? That just wasn’t on our screens.” Local officials echo her shocked confusion. “There was always a feeling of it can’t happen here,” muses Police Chief Brad McCann, one of the first to reach the gruesome scene. . . .

Something’s not right here; I’ve read this story before. I try to place the source. Was it last week in a club-room
U.S. News
or was it the week before, in flight, in
Time
? The shooting happened in Oregon, I recall, at a softball game, or was it a Wisconsin soccer match? I wait for the reporter to change screens and reveal his dateline but he’s stopped writing, hung up on completing this sentence: “Such innocence—”

I can finish it for him from memory: “dies hard.” His hands hang over the keyboard as he thinks. Here he goes now: “isn’t easily destroyed.” Same difference—I was right. I’ve read this story! Then I place it:
USA Today,
just half an hour ago.

What a make-work universe this is. Judging by the fellow’s bunched-up brow, rewriting a story known to all is just as hard as composing one from scratch.

“Got the time?” I ask, pretending to wake. I can’t let him know I’ve been spying.

“What’s our zone?”

“Pacific. This is a Tuesday, the third millennium, and breakfast is poppyseed muffins. That’s all I know.”

“I guess it must be seven then.” He clicks back his digital watch but goes too far, clicks it forward, overshoots again, then finally nails it.

“You write for a living?”

“Try.”

“For magazines?”

“A Chicago afternoon paper. I’m on deadline. Can you excuse me for a few more minutes? I need to file as soon as we touch down.”

He returns to his work, which isn’t really his, searching for transitions and adjectives that, when he finds them after much grave frowning, duplicate exactly the other writer’s, which probably came from a wire story anyway. I could just give him the paper from my briefcase, but the guy needs to feel important, like all of us.

I shed my boots at last and flex my feet. The odor is inoffensive—warm, damp leather—but the socks, I see, aren’t my brand. I only buy Gold Toes. A hotel laundry mix-up? It happens. Still.

I switch on my microrecorder: “Notes for book: hero floats outside of time in
The Garage
. The progress of his projects is all he knows. Self-management means nothing if not this—the task-centered governance of one’s very biorhythms. If not for the quarterly financial statements that come to him through the Communications Portal, which he shreds unread, then burns for heat, my hero would not even know what year it is. The man who makes history is a living calendar, his beating heart his only pendulum. When the voice in the Portal says to him “Go faster!” my hero replies with the Fourth Dictum: “Innovation spreads outward from its center, not forward from some arbitrary—”

“Sir?”

I look to the side.

“Your coffee.”

Turbulence. Before I can close my hand, the cup leaps sideways, spraying my chin and my collar. I’m wet, but not burned—the coffee was dishwater warm. We jolt again. My recorder hops off the seat onto the floor, and when I pick it up, it’s dripping, soaked. I press rewind and the capstans jerk then stop. I pop the tape out and blot it on my shirt. Thirty minutes of lost work not yet transcribed.

I check the window: clear skies, a plane-shaped shadow gliding over a salt flat. Things are calm again. The flight attendant returns, apologizes, then hands me a pen and a voucher from the airline granting me a thousand miles in consideration for my stained clothing. I tell her it’s not enough, that I want five, but she says that the best she can do is one. I sign. The miles don’t make us even, not even close, but at least I’m not falling any further behind.

The reporter saves his story, shuts his laptop, zips it into a padded black nylon case, and calls for a white rum and diet cola. We’re still waiting on our breakfast, but the flight attendant understands that there’s no accounting for body clocks.

I quiz the fellow about his job, then mention that I’ve been doing some writing myself, which seems to alarm him. Another sweaty amateur. I name my publisher to prove my bona fides, but he tells me he’s not familiar with the imprint and begins to fidget with his wedding band, sliding it up and down over his knuckle as if to make sure the thing will still come off. I backtrack to my real job and propose that he do a story on CTC men, the smiling undertakers for the still-living. The reporter hasn’t a clue about what I’m referring to, but nods nonetheless, then retrieves his cased computer. Inspiration has struck, apparently. Perhaps he’ll change “leafy college town” to “shady.”

I unlock the airphone from my seatback and steel myself for a call to ISM and the man I like least in the world, Craig Gregory, who came on the same month that I did, way back when. We underwent the same training, same orientation, and we simultaneously requisitioned the same ergonomic desk chairs and keyboard wrist-pads. After that, our paths diverged. Mine traveled flat and away, into the world, while Craig’s snaked back into the building and corkscrewed upward. He knew what I didn’t—that power in the company lay inside its walls, with his colleagues and superiors, not outside, with the clients. Craig Gregory became a virtuoso lurker in beverage nooks, stairwells, elevators, and men’s rooms, emerging from stalls to startle chatting VPs, plunking his tray down across from gossiping temps, getting the dope, remembering the dope, dishing out the dope. He never went home. No matter how early I reached the office, a coffeed-up Craig Gregory was there before me, sparking off with the latest
e-mail jokes and showing off curious finds from people’s wastebaskets. I suspected he kept a small mattress in an air duct, where he’d also squirreled away chocolate bars and water. And somehow, in time, he gained leverage over me, over all of us. We couldn’t shake him, the phantom of headquarters, a pestilent jack-in-the-box with icy Certs breath, and soon quite a few of us were reporting to him, ISM’s organizational charts be damned.

I tell him I’m on an airphone when he picks up—it’s a way to limit our conversation time. At three bucks a minute I’ll have to keep this short.

“How’s Krusk? You talk to him about his debts? You’re at least coming back with a severed ear, I hope. Hey, I got one of those desk toys—steel ball on strings. The soothing click and clack of basic physics. It fits right in with my teeter-totter monkeys.”

“Art’s a write-off. He’s gutted. There’s nothing there, Craig. I won’t be submitting my hours on that job.”

“Roll the bill over to those HMO guys—they deserve it. Denying cripples crutches. You on your way there?”

The subject of my call. Why even tell him, though; I owe him nothing.

“California today. A little meeting.”

“Profiting whom? Not more freelancing, let’s pray. Get this: I was in the skybox Sunday aft, grabbing some rented ass that we trucked in for what’s-his-face, the mobbed-up solid-waste king, and my guy in Internal Travel lights a Partagas and tells me ‘This Bingham of yours is on a spree; he’s taking us for a ride, hoss—shut him down.’ So I say . . . What do I say?”