Up in the Air (7 page)

The second man stands and comes over to me. “Yours?”

“A friend’s. Is it okay?”

“Has it been tranquilized?”

“Just one pill.”

“It’s acting awfully sluggish. Make sure it gets more water first thing in Reno.”

I pass through the cinder-block terminal, acknowledging one or two Great West employees whose faces I remember from other trips. By rotating its personnel, who pop up again and again in different cities, the airline creates a sense in flyers like me of running in place. I find this reassuring.

I head for the gift shop. According to my HandStar, Art Krusk has two young daughters, five and nine. I scan the shelves for souvenirs and pick out two figurines of rearing mustangs. Don’t all girls love horses? Sure they do. My sisters were horse-obsessed well into their teens, when my mother cut back on their riding as a way to stimulate interest in boys. They hated her for it. My mother was a scientific parent; she’d taught third grade before she married my father. She believed in stages of development. Under her system, keyed to crucial birthdays, teddy bears disappeared when kids turned eight, replaced by clarinets or swimming lessons. She had us baptized at ten, confirmed at twelve, and bought us subscriptions to
Newsweek
at fourteen. How she settled on
Newsweek
I don’t know.

The gift shop lady, a buzzardy old gal with nicotine fingers and casino eyes, slides my credit card through her machine. I can tell she’d rather I pay in cash so she can skim a few bucks to play the slots.

“Refused,” she says.

“That’s impossible.”

She shrugs. “Want to try another one?”

I don’t. The card is the only one that pays me miles and enters me in a contest for a new Audi. “Try it over. It’ll work this time.”

Since my payments are current, there has to be a glitch. But maybe my payments aren’t current. I think back. The last load of mail delivered to my old address showed signs of mishandling. Two torn envelopes. Was there a credit card bill? I don’t remember. I put through a forwarding order ten days ago listing my office at ISM—I think—but as of last Friday nothing had arrived.

“Refused again,” the woman says. She hands back the card as though it’s covered in microbes.

I pay with cash, forsaking thirty-three miles. Worse, I left my cell phone on the plane, so I can’t call the credit card’s customer service line until the young guy at the pay phone by the pop machine wraps up his already-endless conversation about a lost mountain bike.

I make a pleading face.

“What?” the man whispers.

“Emergency.”

“Me too.”

Elko is not my town. I’ve never done well here.

Alex looks distressed when I return, her lips clamped down so hard on the inhaler that the tendons in her jaw stand up. I motion for her to stay seated and edge in front of her, eyeing my phone, which I won’t have time to use, since the credit card company’s voice-mail labyrinth will keep me on hold for fifteen minutes, minimum.

“How’s my boy? They taking good care of him?”

“Yes, but he’s sluggish.”

“You saw him?”

I fib. “I did.”

Alex looks unreassured. She tucks the inhaler in her seatback pocket and cinches tight her lap belt. I see now that this is a woman who’s made her way in life by playing the spread between modern assertiveness and Victorian fragility.

We take off into the smoke. I’m jumpy too now. Aside from a slim civilian corridor that roughly follows I-80 toward California, the central Nevada skies are Air Force territory, a vast mock battleground for the latest jets, some so highly classified and agile that witnesses take them for otherworldly craft. I thought I glimpsed one once: a silver arrowhead corkscrewing straight up into the sun. Radar dishes stud the scrubby mountaintops, tracking war games and bombing runs and dogfights. America’s airspace has its own geography, and this is its no-man’s-land, ringed by virtual razor wire. If our plane went down here, they might not tell our relatives.

Alex leafs through an issue of
Cosmopolitan,
which seems beneath her, though I do the same thing: read below my level while in flight. Maybe she’s trying not to think about the cat, which I suspect she knows she overdosed. I imagine the creature comatose in the hold, surrounded by Styrofoam coolers of frozen trout, boxes of catalogue sweaters, tennis rackets. A plane is a van whose cargo includes people, but there’s nothing special about us, we’re just tonnage, less profitable, pound for pound, than first-class mail.

I take out my pencil and paper and try to work, refining my plan for Art Krusk’s commercial comeback. I can’t say I’m optimistic about his prospects. Healing the wound to Reno’s public memory caused by the poison tacos should prove simple, but rehabilitating Art the manager won’t be easy. The man’s a bitter wreck. Word has it that he’s connected to Reno’s underworld and that he’s placed a bounty on the head of the unknown saboteur. I hope not. Breaking some busboy’s arm won’t bring his patrons back.

Art may not make it, but he’s my only coaching client, my sole relief from the dolors of CTC. Maybe the best I can do is help him fail. There are two kinds of consultants, basically: the accountants and operations specialists who minister to the body of the patient, and those who treat its mind and spirit, approaching the company as a vital being animated by conflicts and desires. Enterprises feel and think and dream, and often when they die, as Art’s may die, and as my father’s propane business died, they die of loneliness. Businesses may thrive on competition, Sandor Pinter wrote in one of his books, but they need love and understanding, too.

Alex goes off to use the bathroom, leaving me with decisions to make. Every flight is a three-act play—takeoff, cruising, descent; past, present, future—which means that it’s time to prepare for how we’ll part, on what terms, and with what expectation. She already knows I’m staying at Homestead Suites and I know that she’ll be at Harrah’s on the Strip, overseeing her benefit, which starts at eight. Maybe she has a local flame, and maybe she thinks I do. She’d be right. Anita deals Pai Gow poker at Circus Circus, a twenty-nine-year-old Sarah Lawrence grad who came west with the Park Service as a stream biologist but fell in with the local color crowd. We got together, chastely, a month ago and took in a traditional Irish dance troupe at the Silver Legacy, but I don’t plan to look her up again. Anita had ugly opinions about the Asians who patronize her table, and though I humored her bigotry at first, I hated myself for it afterwards. She’s one of those
women who take up right-wing views as a substitute for a pistol or can of Mace—in self-defense, as a warning to creeps and stalkers. It’s tiresome armor. Time-consuming, too. The Kennedy family this, the World Bank that.

In truth, I don’t have much time for Alex, either, assuming that we have prospects, which I doubt. No, the challenge for us will be to separate without so much as a gesture toward this evening. We’ll have to use the descent to drift apart and retract any curiosity we’ve shown. To confirm to ourselves that we worked best as strangers.

It’s time to bore each other, if possible.

“California tomorrow,” I say when she returns, rosy-cheeked and smelling of moist towelettes. “You know how, in magazine food surveys you read, it rivals New York now? I think that’s wrong.”

“How so?”

“I just think it’s wrong. Where you headed after Reno?”

“Back to Salt Lake City. I just moved there.”

“Are you a Mormon?”

“No. They’re trying, though. I like having people coming to the door.”

“They wear undergarments they claim are bulletproof. I swear it. They’ll tell you stories of stopping bullets.”

“I haven’t heard that one yet.”

“Just date a Mormon.”

“I thought they didn’t date.”

“They date like mad. And they’re ready with the engagement ring, first night.”

I stop. This is getting too interesting, too personal.

“You’re sure it was
my
cat you saw, not someone else’s? They lose them, I’ve heard. People’s pets wind up in Greece.”

“What’s that movie called,
Amazing Journey
? The one where the family relocates to a new town and their dog walks a thousand miles or something to find them? I think it fights a bear along the way.”

“There are more than one of those movies. It’s a genre.”

“I know that word, but I’ve never quite spit it out. Pronunciation anxiety.”

“I know. I’m like that with ‘cigarillo.’ Hard
l
?”

“For me.”

“I don’t think that’s right, though.”

“I’ll check sometime.”

It’s working: we’re barely looking at each other and there’s the Reno skyline. Ten more minutes. The only threat is our pride; mine smarts a little. Our agreement—the one I drew up for both of us—called for a tender, reluctant edging away, not total detachment. Can’t we reassess this? After all, this is Reno we’re visiting, a city whose whole economy is founded on errors in judgment and doomed trysts. Can’t we at least acknowledge the bitter tang of having grown so prudent with our bodies?

No, because now the drunk is acting up again, heckling the flight attendant for cutting him off. He flicks an ice cube at her, cackles, snorts, his face a chaotic red clown’s mask. Alex flinches. Given how much she flies, she should be used to this—these outbursts of entitled rage—but she cowers like a baby rabbit. My chance to put a fatherly arm around her? I’m considering it when the copilot strides up, cinematically handsome in his uniform and cutting such a capable male figure that any protective move on my part would only come off as puny and derivative. He threatens the drunk with arrest when we touch down. He raises one arm. The drunk sputters, then falls silent. The copilot orders the man to fetch the ice cube and stands there, hands on his hips, while he bends down.

The miniature drama has sealed us in our own skins. Alex retrieves her inhaler. She looks spent. She’s ready to pick up her kitten, hail a cab, and curl up in bed to the sound of
Headline News
. She’ll eat a room service salad with the curtains drawn, then sneak a Snickers from the mini-bar. She’ll jam in earplugs, don a blackout mask, and lay down with her clothes on for a dreamless nap.

In no time we’re at the gate and on our feet, shuffling out of the plane like day care toddlers holding one of those ropes with all the loops. I walk a step behind her. It’s goodbye.

“Good luck with that witch of a senator.”

“I’ll need it.”

“That Colonial checkout procedure? They’ve streamlined it. You might want to give them another shot.”

“I will.”

Where do they go when they leave me? The last I see of her, she’s standing by the baggage carousel, fluffing her hair and waiting for the pet crate. I’d be surprised if the kitten arrived alive, and I realize that I’ve been suppressing real anger at Alex for risking its health just to ease her loneliness. That was my job, her seatmate’s, but she let me go. And I let her go. We forgot that in Airworld each other is all we have.

i
used to try to be interesting. That passed. Now I try to be pleasant and on time.

That will be impossible today. Behind the rental car counter a dull trainee labors to slip a key onto a ring and fold my contract to fit inside its envelope. He should be in college, judging by his age, but instead he’s already failing at his first job. After he runs my credit card—still frozen; I have to use my AmEx from ISM, which generates no miles—he manages to drop it and step on it, scratching and ruining the magnetic strip. The kid’s pathetic excuse is greasy hands; he just finished eating a box of chicken strips. I tell him he’d better evaluate his goals and he acts as though I’ve complimented him, thanking me and handing me a map.

“Excuse me, what’s your job?” I say.

“My job? Filling out rental agreements.”

“No it’s not. Your job is providing a service that meets a need.”

He stares at me.

“Tell me the need,” I say.

“A four-door Nissan.”

“Actually, what I want, my basic desire, is to get to a business meeting across town punctually, comfortably, and safely. The Nissan’s a means to an end. It’s just a detail. Try to think less about isolated tasks and more about the overarching process. It will serve you, believe me.”

“So you’re some millionaire?”

“No. Do I have to be rich to give advice?”

“For me to listen to it, you do,” he says.

The car, a new model I’ve never driven before, smells of a fruity industrial deodorant that’s worse than any odor it might be masking. The mirrors point off in random directions as though the last driver was a schizophrenic. The radio is tuned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it’s as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they’re devoted. After the cops led away her second husband, Julie spent a summer as a born-again and worked in a St. Paul religous gift shop whose manager played in a band called Precious Blood. We took in one of their concerts, a spectacle of fog and laser lights and colored scrims. The band released white doves during the encore, and afterwards Julie and others rushed the stage and dropped to their knees before a neon cross next to the drum kit. It shook me to see such need in her, such thirst.