Up in the Air (19 page)

Julie doesn’t seem bothered. She’s in heaven, claiming every inch that she’s entitled to by gripping both armrests and kicking out her legs and tipping her head back like a sunbather. This trip is already doing wonders for her. She’s loosened her shoes, which hang from her bare toes, and spread her knees in acceptance of what’s coming: G-forces, liftoff, the future. Poor Keith is screwed. His fiancée has discovered her inner princess.

Me, I’m panicking. I shouldn’t be here. This is one flight too many. My hands are gloved in sweat. Until today my momentum was my own, but I’m at the top of the arc now, pitching over, and my seat belt feels thin and flimsy across my middle. I could use a quick blast from the oxygen mask. A beer.

“Unclench your jaw,” says Julie. “You’ll get a migraine.”

“I’m nervous. I’m meeting my publisher today. Assuming we ever take off.”

“We will.”

“We won’t. I’ve developed an instinct—they’re going to cancel us. We’ll sit here, they’ll string us along, and then they’ll cancel. Meanwhile, this man I’m seeing is like the wind. I’ll never catch him again. Eternal tag.”

Julie refuses to let me bring her down. Her eyes glide around the cabin the way they used to during long driving vacations when we were kids, passing the hours by playing games with license plates. My father was a rigid driver, maddeningly steady on the pedal and unwilling to stop, except for fuel. He’d announce a time of arrival when we set out and do whatever it took to hit his mark—starve us, dehydrate us, torture our bowels and bladders. Everything but speed up. Speed scared my father; delivering flammable liquids had made him timid. There was a bumper sticker on his propane truck: “Don’t drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.”

I turn on my HandStar and dial up Great West’s customer information site, according to which our flight is still on time. How do they keep their lies straight in this business? They must use deception software, some suite of programs that synchronizes their falsehoods system-wide. No wonder I’ve grown suspicious of them lately—they haven’t spoken the truth to me in years. How many times have I gazed up at blue skies and been told that my flight’s being held because of weather?

Julie opens
Horizons
to the page where Soren Morse, or whoever does his writing for him, expounds each month on his visionary quest to make Great West “your total travel solution.” His photo up top is quasi-presidential, with a soft-focus background of globes and flags and bookshelves. Welcome to my kingdom. I own you here. His face is soap opera handsome. Full lips. Sleek forehead. A scar on his chin to remind you he’s a male. His management style, from everything I’ve heard, is smooth but abusive. Interviewed by
Fortune,
he called himself “process-centered to the core” and a “humanist reengineer,” but I’ve heard tales of tantrums and vendettas, of intimidation campaigns against VPs that left their targets medicated wrecks.

The pilot has an announcement. I was right. Our plane will be returning to the gate. “Please inquire inside for further information.”

Julie says, “What does that mean?”

“Nothing good.”

Morse is making this personal. He’ll pay.

“What do we do? Go back to Utah now?”

“That never works.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Going back.”

i
work quickly, rebooking us to Phoenix through Denver. The only available seats are in economy. The agent snickers delivering this news; I’ve dealt with him before, and he’s a pest. He’s sickly, always sniffling and coughing, and handing out infected boarding passes gives him a sadistic thrill, no doubt. If only Morse knew how poorly his employees, as grudging as nineteenth-century clerks, with no higher sense of process or brand goodwill, reflect on his credentials as a leader. Commissioner of baseball? Not a chance. Commissioner of youth league soccer, maybe.

The agent picks up his phone when I walk off—reporting to his masters? No way to know.

On our way to the gate we buy mochas and cinnamon rolls. Twelve dollars. Julie is outraged. She tastes her coffee and tells me it’s not even hot. Mine’s not hot either, but I had no expectations that it would be. That’s the secret to satisfaction nowadays. Julie asks me about my book and I say, “Later.” I was supposed to talk with her. I haven’t. A rowdy bunch of uniformed marines shoves past us on the moving walkway, running. A cart glides by with a blind man in the back, his cane sticking over the side and nearly swiping people.

The Denver plane is a 727 with haggard upholstery and discolored wings, black streaks of corrosion trailing from every bolt. It clatters into the air and through the clouds and breaks out into a sunlit turquoise plain riddled with nasty whirlpools of clear-air turbulence. Julie reaches over and grips my wrist while fingering with her free hand a silver cross hanging against her breastbone inside her shirt. When did this strike? She’s been born-again again? All around me lately God is claiming people. Am I still on his list, or has he skipped me? We jolt again and Julie bows her head and doesn’t look up until the ride is smooth. The fear improves her color.

“I can’t go back. I’m going to, of course, but I can’t. I’m all confused,” she says.

There’s a pressure behind her face; she wants to talk now. This isn’t the place. There’s no room to move, to gesture. Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.

“Keith cares too much. It makes me feel . . . responsible. He won’t drink the last of the milk. He says it’s mine. When we wake up in bed I’m hogging the whole middle and he’s falling over the edge.”

“A relationship is a closed dynamic system.”

“Can I tell you a story? We’re shopping for a car. Keith says I need something safe, with lots of airbags, but I’m thinking I’d like a truck, for hauling kennels. I ask the salesman, who’s been showing us station wagons, to show us some pickups. I fall in love with one. I ask about the pickup’s safety rating compared to the wagons. ‘Not good,’ the salesman says. I turn to Keith and say ‘It’s your decision, hon,’ but he doesn’t respond, he just stands there. It gets embarrassing. It’s like he’s gone catatonic, had a stroke. Finally, I say ‘I’ll get the wagon, okay?’ Nothing. A blank. I literally had to shake him.”

She rambles on and I listen without listening. The clouds below have a complicated topography, dimpled and grooved and folded and corrugated, with broad estuarial fans along their edges. (Estuarial—there, I’ve finally used it.) It’s Wednesday down there, but what day is it up here? At times, in the afternoon, when flying east, I can see night bearing down across the continent, and the feeling is one of powerless omniscience. To know what’s coming and when it will arrive and see the places it’s already been is a counterfeit wisdom. It ought to help, but doesn’t.

Julie keeps talking. Though I barely hear her, I manage to be a brother to her merely by sitting nearby and shedding heat. She’ll go through with her wedding, I’m certain of it, but only once she’s drawn sufficient energy from me, her original hero, her first security. We talk about our father as though we loved him, but that was something we only discovered afterwards; while he was alive, he mostly worried us. He’d taken on so much—the house, the trucks, the loans, our mother—and we could see him sagging. His business was our protection, all we had, but nothing protected his business, and this scared us. We reserved our love for one another, brother and sisters, because everything else seemed borrowed against, at risk.

“Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“Weird question: are you rich? The way you bought my ticket, just like that, not even asking the price.”

“I’ve saved. I’m comfortable.”

“Do you date? Do you have a love life?”

“I like to think so. I’m meeting a woman in Vegas tomorrow night.”

“A stranger. Disease doesn’t worry you?”

“I’m in the soup. If you’re in the soup and get wet, then you get wet.”

“I don’t think you know how proud of you we are. Everything you’ve accomplished, this book you’ve written, these meetings you’re always flying to. It’s awesome. It’s like you’re out here covering the territory, putting it all together. Our ambassador. We read magazines and expect to see you in them, and even though you aren’t, we know you will be. We know you should be.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re done out here. Let’s go back to Minnesota,” she says.

“I’ll get you there tomorrow. I’ll be there Friday. I just have a few more stops to make. Appointments. It only seems hectic. Believe me, there’s a rhythm. You had to be here when it started to hear it, though.”

Julie sleeps.

There are no lights in the garage tonight except for the guttering candle that illuminates the latest quarterly statement from his accountants. According to their figures, the world is his. His products and processes dominate their markets. His name has become synonymous with quality and demand-based value-adding genius. He can quit now and step outside to vast acclaim, assured of permanent wealth and influence. The garage will have served its purpose as an incubator for dreams once widely dismissed and roundly ridiculed, and surely he must preserve it as a museum showcasing in perpetuity the transformational journey of one mind wholly at peace with its core competencies. But as M rises up from his stool to make his exit, something distracts him: a pad of clean white paper lying on the bench beside his instruments. The paper’s emptiness cries out for a mark, a sketch, a diagram, a thoughtless doodle. Through the door he can hear his massed admirers calling for him to show himself at last, but while he feels
boundless affection for his team, without whose selfless input he’d be lost, he understands also, after a quick gut check, that his work remains incomplete. He lifts his pencil. . . .

The first thing I do in Denver is call Dwight’s mobile. He answers on the first ring. It’s disillusioning. I’d imagined him hunkered down with a sick author, but apparently he’s alone and doing nothing. Behind him I hear splashing, yelling. Pool sounds. His assistant portrayed the trip as an emergency, but it sounds like another golfing getaway.

“I’m on my way,” I say. “I’m with my sister. Hard to explain. We got canceled and rerouted, but we should be down there in time for dinner, easily.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m not sure we are. I have to get her back to Minnesota and I need to be in Las Vegas tomorrow. GoalQuest. I might just shoot over there early.”

“The book is just brilliant.”

“You got it? You read it? Not just the summary? I don’t think it lends itself to being summarized. It’s more a gestalt. Is that the word. Gestalt?”

“I have a contract in front of me. An offer. We can work on the figures, the terms, but not a lot. It’s close to the best I can do. Just need your signature.”

“And I want you to have it.”

“Once we’ve talked. The manuscript has a ragged edge or two. I have a few trims, a few snips.”

“It’s not too short for that?”

“A lot of our books are read in digest form. You’ve heard of the journal
Executive Outlines
? They lop the fat off six or seven titles and sell them as a package to subscribers who don’t have time for a lot of monkey business.”

One of my eyelids twitches. My crownless molar zings and sizzles. I can taste it rotting.

“You’ll be here when, exactly?” Dwight says. “Technically, I’m checked out of my room, and my flight to Salt Lake City leaves at seven.”

“You’re flying to SLC? I don’t believe this. That’s where I’m coming from. I left an hour ago.”

“Too bad. We could have met there. I wish I’d known. Hold on for a minute. The waiter’s got my tea.”

The tram that I’ve been waiting for with Julie roars into the loading area, stops. Its doors open and a floodwall of pedestrians surges past us to the escalators.

“Bingham?”

“If I’m going to make it, I have to run,” I say. “My flight’s two terminals over. This is crazy. What’s this last-minute Utah business, anyway?”

“Tennis commitment. I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped. You say you’ll be back there tonight? Let’s think this through.”