Up in the Air

one

to know me you have to fly with me. Sit down. I’m the aisle, you’re the window—trapped. You crack your paperback, last spring’s big legal thriller, convinced that what you want is solitude, though I know otherwise: you need to talk. The jaunty male flight attendant brings our drinks: a two percent milk with one ice cube for me, a Wild Turkey for you. It’s wet outside, the runways streaked and dark. Late afternoon. The first-class cabin fills with other businessmen who switch on their laptops and call up lengthy spreadsheets or use the last few moments before takeoff to punch in cell-phone calls to wives and clients. Their voices are bright but shallow, no diaphragms, their sentences kept short to save on tolls, and when they hang up they face the windows, sigh, and reset their watches from Central time to Mountain. For some of them this means a longer day, for others it means eating supper before they’re hungry. One fellow lowers his plastic window shade and wedges his head between two skimpy pillows, while another unlatches his briefcase, looks inside, then shuts his eyes and rubs his jaw, exhausted.

Your own work is done, though, temporarily. All week you’ve been out hustling, courting hot prospects in franchised seafood bars and steering a rented Intrepid along strange streets that didn’t match the markings in your atlas. You gave it your all, and for once your all was good enough to placate a boss who fears for his own job. You’ve stashed your tie in your briefcase, freed your collar, and slackened your belt a notch or two. To breathe. Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

“Is that the one about the tax-fraud murders? I’m hearing his plots aren’t what they used to be.”

You stall before answering, trying to discourage me. To you, I’m a type. A motormouth. A pest. You’re still getting over that last guy, LA to Portland, whose grandson was just admitted to Stanford Law. A brilliant kid, and a fine young athlete, too, he started his own business as a teen computerizing local diaper services—though what probably clinched his acceptance was his charity work; the kid has a soft spot for homeless immigrants, which pretty much describes all of us out west, though some are worse off than others. We’re the lucky ones.

“I’m on page eleven,” you say. “The plot’s still forming.”

“It hit number four on the Times list.”

“Don’t read that paper.”

“You live in Denver? Going home?”

“I’m trying.”

“Tell me about it. Nothing but delays.”

“Foul weather at one of the hubs.”

“Their classic line.”

“I guess they don’t take us for much these days.”

“Won’t touch that. Interesting news about the Broncos yesterday.”

“Pro football’s a farce.”

“I can’t say I disagree.”

“Millionaires and felons—these athletes sicken me. I do enjoy hockey, though. Hockey I don’t hate.”

“That’s the Canadian influence,” I say. “It ameliorates the materialism.”

“In English?”

“I talk big when I’m tired. Professor gasbag. Sorry. I like hockey, too.”

The atom was split by persistence; you relax. We go on chatting, impersonally at first, but then, once we’ve realized all we have in common—our moderate politics, our taste in rental cars, our feeling that the American service industry had better shape up soon or face a crisis—a warmth wells up, a cozy solidarity. You recommend a hotel in Tulsa; I tip you off to a rib joint in Fort Worth. The plane heads into a cloud, it bucks and shudders. Nothing like turbulence to cement a bond. Soon, you’re telling me about your family. Your daughter, the high school gymnast. Your lovely wife. She’s gone back to work and you’re not so sure you like this, though her job is only part time and may not last. Another thing you dislike is traveling. The pissy ticket agents. The luggage mix-ups. The soft hotel mattresses that twist your spine. You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby: restoring vintage speedboats. The water—that’s where you’re happiest. The lake.

Now it’s my turn. I make a full report. Single, but on the lookout—you never know, the woman in 3B might be my soul mate. Had a wife once, the prospect of a family, but I knew her mostly through phone calls across time zones. Grew up in Minnesota, in the country; father owned a fleet of propane trucks and served as a Democrat in two state legislatures, pressing a doomed agricultural agenda while letting his business slip. Parents split while I was in college, an eastern hippie school—picture a day care run by Ph.D.’s—and when I got home there was nothing to come back to, just lawyers and auctioneers and accusations, some of them true but few of them important. My first job was in computers. I sold memory, the perfect product, since no one has enough of it and everyone fears some competitor has more. Now I work as a management consultant, minoring in EET (Executive Effectiveness Training) and majoring—overwhelmingly, unfortunately—in CTC (Career Transition Counseling), which is a fancy term for coaching people to understand job loss as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. It’s a job I fell into because I wasn’t strong, and grew to tolerate because I had to, then suddenly couldn’t stand another hour of. My letter of resignation is on the desk of a man who will soon return from a long fishing trip. What I’ll do after he reads it, I don’t know. I’m intrigued by a firm called MythTech; they’ve put out feelers. I have other logs in the fire, but no flames yet. Until my superior flies back from Belize, I work out of Denver for ISM, Integrated Strategic Management. You’ve heard of Andersen? Deloitte & Touche? We’re something like them, though more diversified. “The Business of Business,” we say. Impressed me too, once.

As the hour passes and the meal comes (you try the Florentine chicken, I take the steak, and neither of us goes near the whipped dessert), the intimacy we develop is almost frightening. I’d like to feel it came naturally, mutually, and not because I pushed. I push sometimes. We exchange cards and slot them in our wallets, then order another round and go on talking, arriving at last at the topic I know best, the subject I could go on about all night.

You want to know who you’re sitting with? I’ll tell you.

Planes and airports are where I feel at home. Everything fellows like you dislike about them—the dry, recycled air alive with viruses; the salty food that seems drizzled with warm mineral oil; the aura-sapping artificial lighting—has grown dear to me over the years, familiar, sweet. I love the Compass Club lounges in the terminals, especially the flagship Denver club, with its digital juice dispenser and deep suede sofas and floor-to-ceiling views of taxiing aircraft. I love the restaurants and snack nooks near the gates, stacked to their heat lamps with whole wheat mini-pizzas and gourmet caramel rolls. I even enjoy the suite hotels built within sight of the runways on the ring roads, which are sometimes as close as I get to the cities that my job requires me to visit. I favor rooms with kitchenettes and conference tables, and once I cooked a Christmas feast in one, serving glazed ham and sweet potato pie to a dozen janitors and maids. They ate with me in rotation, on their breaks, one or two at a time, so I really got to know them, even though most spoke no English. I have a gift that way. If you and I hadn’t hit it off like this, if the only words we’d passed were “That’s my seat” or “Done with that Business Week?” or just “Excuse me,” I’d still regard us as close acquaintances and hope that if we met again up here we wouldn’t be starting from zero, as just two suits. Twice last October I sat in the same row, on different routes, as 1989’s Miss USA, the one who remade herself as a Washington hostess and supposedly works nonstop for voting rights. In person she’s tiny, barely over five feet. I put her carry-on in the overhead.

But you know some of this already. You fly, too. It just hasn’t hooked you; you just don’t study it.

Hey, you’re probably the normal one.

Fast friends aren’t my only friends, but they’re my best friends. Because they know the life—so much better than my own family does. We’re a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don’t meet face-to-face much, and when we do there’s a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present. Sad? Not really. We’re a busy bunch. And I’m not lonely. If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I’d opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.

I’m peaceful. I’m in my element up here. Flying isn’t an inconvenience for me, as it is for my colleagues at ISM, who hit the road to prove their loyalty to a company that’s hungry for such proof and, I’m told, rewards it now and then. But I’ve never aspired to an office at world headquarters, close to hearth and home and skybox, with a desk overlooking the Front Range of the Rockies and access to the ninth-floor fitness center. I suppose I’m a sort of mutation, a new species, and though I keep an apartment for storage purposes—actually, I left the place two weeks ago and transferred the few things I own into a locker I’ve yet to pay the rent on, and may not—I live somewhere else, in the margins of my itineraries.

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature—yours, too, I see—is the bestseller or the near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of common people in small towns. In Airworld, I’ve found, the passions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this is where the story breaks—on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn’t degrade them. They’re not taxed. They’re private property in its purest form.

It was during a layover in the Dallas Compass Club, my back sinking into a downy sofa cushion and coarse margarita salt drying on my lips, that I first told a friend about TMS, my Total Mileage System.

“It’s simple,” I said, as my hand crept up her leg (the woman was older than me and newly single; an LA ad exec who claimed her team had hatched the concept behind affinity credit cards). “I don’t spend a nickel, if I can help it, unless it somehow profits my account. I’m not just talking hotels and cars and long-distance carriers and Internet services, but mail-order steak firms and record clubs and teleflorists. I shop them according to the miles they pay, and I pit them against each other for the best deal. Even my broker gives miles as dividends.”

“So what’s your total?”

I smiled, but didn’t speak. I’m an open book in most ways, and I feel I deserve a few small secrets.

“What are you saving up for? Big vacation?”

“I’m not a vacation person. I’m just saving. I’d like to give a chunk to charity—to one of those groups that flies sick kids to hospitals.”

“I didn’t know you could do that. Sweet,” she said. She kissed me, lightly, quickly, but with feeling—a flick of her tongue tip that promised more to come should we meet again, which hasn’t happened yet. If it does, I may have to duck her, I’m afraid. She was too old for me even then, three years ago, and ad execs tend to age faster than the rest of us, once they’re on their way.

I don’t recall why I told that story. Not flattering. But I wasn’t in great shape back then. I’d just come off a seven-week vacation that ISM insisted I take for health reasons. I spent the time off taking classes at the U, hoping to enrich an inner life stretched thin by years of pep-talking the jobless. My bosses matched my tuition for the courses; a creative writing seminar that clawed apart a short nostalgic sketch about delivering propane with my father in a sixty-mile-per-hour blizzard, and a class called “Country-Western Music as Literature.” The music professor, a transplanted New Yorker in a black Stetson with a snakeskin band and a bolo tie clipped with a scorpion in amber, believed that great country lyrics share a theme: the migration from the village to the city, the disillusionment with urban wickedness, and the mournful desire to go home. The idea held up through dozens of examples and stayed with me when I returned to work, worsening the low mood and mental fuzziness that ISM had ordered me to correct. I saw my travels as a twangy ballad full of rhyming place names and neon streetscapes and vanishing taillights and hazy women’s faces. All those corny old verses, but new ones, too. The DIA control tower in fog. The drone of vacuum cleaners in a hallway, telling guests that they’ve slept past checkout time. The goose-pimply arms of a female senior manager hugging a stuffed bear I’ve handed her as we wait together for two security guards—it’s overkill; the one watches the other—to finish loading file cubes and desk drawers and the CPU from her computer onto a flat gray cart whose squeaky casters scream all the way to an elevator bank where a third guard holds down the “open” button.

I pulled out of it—barely. I cut that song off cold. It took a toll, though. Because I seldom see doctors in their offices, but only in transit, accidentally, my sense of my afflictions is vague, haphazard. High blood pressure? No doubt. Cholesterol? I’m sure it’s in the pink zone, if not the red. Once, between Denver and Oklahoma City, I nodded off next to a pulmonary specialist who told me when I woke that I had apnea—a tendency to stop breathing while unconscious. The doctor recommended a machine that pushes air through the nostrils while one sleeps to raise the oxygen level in one’s blood. I didn’t follow up. My circulation is ebbing flight by flight—I can’t feel my toes if I don’t keep wiggling them, and that only works for my first hour on board—so I’d better make some changes. Soon.

I’m talking too much. I’m dominating this. Are you interested, or just being polite? Another bourbon? I’ll have another milk. I know it’s been discredited as an ulcer aid, but I come from dairy country. I like the taste.

Anyway, I should wrap this up—we’ll land soon. You’re meeting me in the middle of my farewell tour, with only six days and eight more cities to go. It’s a challenging but routine itinerary, mixing business and pleasure and family obligations. There are people I need to see, some I want to see, and a few I don’t know yet but may want to meet. I’ll need to stay flexible, disciplined, and alert, and while it won’t be easy, there’s a payoff. Every year I’ve flown further than the year before, and by the end of this week, conditions willing, I’ll cross a crucial horizon past which, I swear, I’ll stop, sit back, and reconsider everything.

A million frequent flyer miles. One million.

“That’s obsessive,” you say. Because you care for me, not because I’m annoying you, I hope. “It’s just a number. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Pi’s just a number,” I say.

“It’s still obsessive.”

The engines reverse thrust and here comes Denver.

“It’s a boundary,” I say. “I need boundaries in my life.”

They open the doors and seat belts start unsnapping. Maybe I’ll see you again, though it’s unlikely. Next Monday the boss gets back from chasing marlin and the first thing he’ll do after sifting through his in-box will be to cancel my corporate travel account, which he’s often accused me of abusing, anyway. I need my million before then, and on his dime.

Deplaning now. As we stride down the jetway toward whatever’s next for us, two lottery balls tossed back into the barrel, a mini cassette tape falls out of my coat and you see it before I do, and bend down. It’s the last favor you’ll ever do for me and it occurs in slow motion, a tiny sacrament.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Have a good one.”

“You too.”

“I’ll try.”

You’re gone, a fast walker, off to see the family. I hope you’re not mad that I kept you from your book. I didn’t want to spoil things by telling you, but I read it when it was in hardback. There’s no plot.

two

rushing, racing, delayed at the hotel by a wake-up call that never came, I hop from the parking lot shuttle to the curb with nothing to check, just a briefcase and a carry-on, cross the terminal, smile at the agent, flash my Compass Class card and driver’s license, say Yes, my bags have remained in my possession, say No, I haven’t let strangers handle them, then take my upgraded boarding pass and ticket, recross the terminal to security, empty my pockets—change, keys, mobile phone, foil blister-pack of sleeping tablets, mechanical pencil; the stuff just keeps on coming—flop my bags on the X-ray, straighten up, and step through the metal detector.

The alarm sounds. I pat my pockets, find nothing, pass through again.

Once more the alarm sounds.

“Sir, step over here.”

A female guard works me over with the wand. Sometimes I swear I can feel its waves pass through me—invasive pulses of radiation that light up my chromosomes, stir my spinal fluid. There’s bound to be a class-action suit someday and I plan to sit in full view of the bench, smack in the middle of the wheelchair section with my portable IV.

“I’m clean,” I say. “Your equipment must be shot.” But then, around my knees, the wand starts squawking.

“Your boots, sir?”

“They’re new.”

“They must have steel-lined arches.”

I groan as she goes over me again, playing to some tourists in line behind me. I’ve lost momentum when I can least afford it, a Monday morning, when every slipup snowballs. The boots were a foolish purchase. Vanity. It’s all the shoe salesman’s fault, the man was sharp, mocking my credentials as a westerner after I mentioned I came from Minnesota. Instead of buying the boots I should have told him that there are no westerners, just displaced easterners, and that includes most of the Indian tribes—read history. The problem is that the boots will trip alarms at every checkpoint for the next five days, wasting minutes and chewing up my margin. Yes, I always budget for uncertainty and I can try to recapture the lost time—cancel a dinner appointment, skimp on sleep—but the smart move would be to buy new shoes.

I ride the escalator to the tram that will carry me to Concourse B. The man one step up from me nods and jerks his head, jabbering into a hands-free mobile phone whose mouthpiece must be clipped to his lapel. The guy looks schizoid, raving at thin air, flinging his arms around and making fists. “How can I blame him? They made him a fat offer. Plus, he’s a load on our health plan. Prostate shit.” I’ve seen this creep before, en route to Boise, when he sat across the aisle from me berating the flight attendant about his food. He demanded a vegetarian entrée despite not having ordered one pre-flight, then fired off a string of asterisks and ampersands when she couldn’t find one in the galley. These jokers are everywhere lately, they’re multiplying, and the higher their fare class, the louder their abuse. Economy is a park compared to first.

Through the moving windows of the tram I view this month’s art installation: foil propellers stuck to the walls of the tunnel, hundreds of them. They shiver and whirl as the cars gain speed and pass them. How much was the artist paid for this? Who paid him? Is this where the airport’s per-ticket surcharge goes? Last month’s masterpiece was a row of masks with progressively wider mouths and eyes that seemed to open as the viewer rode by, climaxing in a howl, a staring scream. Art. It always makes me feel diminished. There’s something smug about it. Cocky. Cold. Public works commissioners just love the stuff—it eases their bad consciences, I suspect, for hiring their nephews and steaming open sealed bids. Behind every sculpture garden, a great crime.

The tram lets out and feeds its passengers onto another packed escalator, which lifts us into the middle of a food court fragrant with soft pretzels and cookie dough. There’s no time for my usual breakfast of frozen yogurt topped with sliced cling peaches, so I head down the moving walkway toward my gate, aggressively clearing lanes between the laggards. People who let the conveyor carry them when they can double their speed by moving their feet mystify me, but to each his own. Clearly, the whole purpose of the technology is to optimize the flow of traffic, not to let kids and slowpokes take a load off. The worst are two departing Mormon missionaries thronged by camera-toting friends and relatives. The boys look tired and pale and terrified; they’re bound for Asia, I’d guess, or South America, their heads full of tales about passport thieves and drug lords. It’s the word’s fastest-growing religion, I’ve been told, all thanks to this door-knocking army of western teens tramping the globe in J. C. Penney suits.

I’m impressed, but I still don’t wish them luck. The church is a force in Denver. It’s oppressive. Half the battle of working for ISM, whose board includes a sitting Mormon apostle, is fending off advances from the saved. Every month I’m invited to yet another potluck, another dance for “inquiring unmarrieds.” Even if ISM bowed to my request to quit CTC and just do EEC, I’d probably be looking for a new firm.

MythTech wants me. I hope so; I want them. They haven’t revealed their interest in me openly, but I have my sources, and I can read the signs. Last month an anonymous caller to my assistant requested a manuscript of the book I’m finishing and gave him a FedEx number that I checked out through a national detective agency. The number belonged to a Lincoln, Nebraska, law firm whose surviving name partner is MythTech’s founder’s father.

My dream is to land a position in brand analysis, a benevolent field that involves less travel and can be done from home, over the wires. Exhorting the unemployed to “surf the changes” and “massively network” their way to new positions while gazing across at their panicky, moist eyes from the head of an acrylic conference table spread with cheese sandwiches and canned fruit spritzers will still be someone’s job, and I can’t change that, but MythTech doesn’t work such feel-good shams. From what I gather, they’re forward thinkers. Optimists. Minimizing lawsuits from the outplaced is too rearguard for them. They’re not a large firm, just a small boutique, but they have grand plans, rumor has it, and they have spirit.

Sadly, they can’t be courted, they can’t be pushed. They watch you. They rate you. If they make an offer, you sign on the spot, you don’t hold out for dental. They’re ex-Foreign Service agents, ex-LA cops, ex-ski bums, ex-seminarians, ex-junkies. They’re the establishment and its overthrow, too. They don’t use letterhead, just plain white bond with a faint embossed omega at the top. No logo, no web site—just a street address. In Omaha, of all places, blandest Omaha, whose location suits my schedule perfectly. On Thursday I have a conference in Las Vegas and on Saturday a wedding in Minnesota—my little sister’s third and biggest yet.

I’ll see MythTech on Friday and ISM will pay for it. No appointment yet, but if I’m right that they’ve been sniffing around and checking references, a brief, get-acquainted, happened-to-be-in-town, hear-great-things-about-you, flying drop-in at 1860 Sioux Street might flip the switch. I’ll ask for old Lucius Spack, the number two, formerly of Andersen Consulting by way of the Chicago Board of Trade. Spack is the man, though the news outlets suppressed it and the government will never confirm it, who basically got NASA off its crutches, internally and public-image-wise, after the Challenger flameout. He’s a hero. I sat in on a five-person dinner with him once at an industry confab in Santa Cruz. I hear he has issues with prescription pain pills, but I have issues, too. And if he likes me? Maybe, just maybe, a peek into the office of Adam Sarrazin, age thirty-one, MIT dropout, no known hobbies, bald, reportedly either gay or celibate despite his marriage to a pet care heiress who’s bankrolled his projects since he was seventeen, and known in the world of leading-edge market research simply as “the Child.”

Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. Even if nothing much comes of Omaha, something big will come of leaving Omaha for the Twin Cities late Friday afternoon. That’s the magic leg. I’ve worked it out. The math was complex, and it’s subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.

The walkway drops me beneath a bank of monitors. 3204 to Reno via Elko is set to take off fifty minutes late, I see, which isn’t what I was told an hour ago when I phoned the airline from my room. Great West just can’t be trusted anymore, it lies to its most loyal customers, and if it didn’t monopolize DIA, I’d be shooting for my mark with Delta, although it wouldn’t mean as much at Delta. They fly overseas and Great West doesn’t yet—just a route or two in Canada—and Delta is old and Great West is new and Delta has scores of mileage millionaires and Great West, since the merger and the renaming, has exactly nine.

I’ll be the tenth.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought of Great West as a partner and an ally, but now I feel betrayed. The focus of my anger is Soren Morse, Great West’s rock-climbing, playboy CEO, a New Think smoothy from the soft-drink world brought in to charm the federal regulators and fend off Desert Air, a no-frills start-up whose ancient Boeings feel like prison vans but tend to land on time. One perk of breaking six zeros, traditionally, is a private luncheon with this sexpot, and I plan to give him an earful. I can’t wait. For years he’s been centimetering away my legroom, buffaloing me with tales of storm cells somewhere between Denver and the coast, and blowing cold air on my hot meals—all the while telling the nation through corporate image ads on the classier political talk shows that at Great West “We’re Taking America Higher!” The rumors in the first-class cabins are that he’s launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to be the next commissioner of baseball and that he has a new girlfriend—the young wife of the head of the Downtown Renaissance Committee. I’ll drop her name during dessert and watch his face.

Right now what I need, though, is not revenge but coffee, hot, strong, and black, to cauterize my throat. I smoked last night for the first time since college, and once again, I blame the cowboy boots. I was in bed when I tugged them on again, wondering if I’d bought too snug a toe; the sudden boost in height transformed my mood and prompted me to turn off my cable money show, toss on a jacket and my cleanest khakis, and pop downstairs for a nightcap in the lounge. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well, anyway; my mind was on MythTech. They’re scary, they’re so good, and some of the deeper work I’ve heard they’re doing on consumer-nondurable price resistance spooks me. If you find yourself at the beauty counter next year buying your first-ever thirty-dollar bottle of shampoo-conditioner, and it’s just a six-ounce bottle and you’re a man, blame it on Omaha. Blame it on the Child.

At the bar I bumped into Danny Sorenson, a salesman for Heston’s, the class-ring company, who I’d last seen on an early-morning hop from Des Moines to Madison. Thirty years my senior, with bulging eyes, and still vibrating from his second heart attack, Danny spent the flight soliloquizing about the importance of legumes in the diet. When I spotted him again last night, he was gobbling mixed nuts and steaming about a Giants game showing on the TV above the bar. He announced when I sat down that he’d beefed up and didn’t intend to survive his next attack, then offered me a menthol, which I took. I don’t know what moved me, though it’s my job to know. Maybe MythTech had won the Kool account and flashed a prompt across the Giants’ scoreboard.

“This team gives me a gut ache,” Danny said. “Nice pitching, but no fielding to back it up.”

I nodded, tapped my ash. “It’s sad, all right.”

“I thought you backed the Rockies. You’re a Denver man.”

I shrugged and sucked down a load of minty smoke. The truth is that I root for ball teams depending on where I am at the time and who I happen to be sitting with. Three years ago, during the NBA post-season, I started the evening rooting for the Bulls in an O’Hare microbrewery and finished it whistling for the Timberwolves at the Minneapolis Marriott. I follow the crowd, I’ll admit it, and why not? It’s not their approval I’m after, it’s their energy.

“How’s business?” Danny said.

“Quiescent. Yours?” Quiescent was a featured “focus word” from one of my Verbal Edge cassette tapes. Years ago, a few months after my divorce and a week after I stopped peddling “storage solutions” to rural western hospitals, it was a touring self-improvement seminar—a Sandy Pinter production—that fished me out of the bottle I’d slithered into. I’ve tried to keep something perking ever since. The World’s One Hundred Greatest Ideas, Condensed. The P. Chester Prine Negotiating Course. My goal is to speak at least three new words a day. It can be a struggle when I first use them—they sound like they’re in brackets or quotation marks—but later on they come naturally, I find. The only problem: the world is going visual, so I’m forever clarifying myself. The assumption behind Verbal Edge is that fine speech provides an advantage in business, but I’m not sure.

“We’re working to open Japan. It’s going fine. Highly sentimental about their schools there. Nice contrast to what’s happening in the States.”

“Interesting,” I say. I’m always interested. I’m big on hearsay and inside information, and I pay the price in my portfolio—an assortment of esoteric, long-shot tips whispered to me over in-flight scotch and sodas. I forget my losers when I hit a winner, which I’m told is a sign of a gambling addiction. In truth, I just don’t care much about money. We always had enough when I grew up, and then one day, when my father went bust, we didn’t. Not a lot changed. The house and car were paid for, we never ate out, and we’d always shopped garage sales for everything but major appliances, which my father knew how to repair. We threw a few more garage sales, that was all. It’s like that in Minnesota, outside the cities. A town finds a certain level in its spending and almost everyone clusters around the mean so that no one has to feel bad if poor luck comes.

“It’s the freelance mentality,” Danny said. “Americans now like to think they don’t owe anyone. Everyone’s an original, self-made. Class rings depend on nostalgia, on gratitude. I tell myself it’ll swing around someday, but maybe it won’t. Not all things swing around.”

“This one will. I’ve seen research.”

“Fill me in.”

I popped a salted almond in my mouth, avoiding my left molars when I bit down. Last week, munching caramel corn at LAX, I’d lost a gold crown that I still hadn’t replaced. A steady relationship with a good dentist is tough to maintain in Airworld.

“You’ve heard of ‘linking’? Linking is part of identity formation. The drive to attach. To join with larger forces. The opposite is the urge to be yourself. The surveys show people are feeling out of balance here—people of higher income levels, that is. They’re getting tired of going it alone, and that’s predictive of certain behavior changes. Take Orthodox Catholic churches. They’re in a boom.”

“People actually study this sort of thing?”

“Make fun. Go ahead. It’s hocus-pocus.”

“No.” Danny pinched a wattle in his neck, one of those involuntary fat checks performed by men who know they’re falling apart. “We hear this same stuff in sales training. It’s real. It’s just that I can’t believe the level it’s reached.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’m sure I don’t. It scares me.”

I reached for another unwanted cigarette. An alien appetite had me in its grip, but it was too late at night to probe its source. “I think it’s too late to be scared. Can I be honest?”

“Two guys in a bar who will never talk again because one’s going to probably stroke or seize climbing the stairs to his room tonight. Be honest.”

“The decisions we make—I’m not sure they’re really ours. I think we’ve been figured out.”

“I doubt that, Ryan.”

“Example. There was a new, hit doll last Christmas. Baby Cruddles. Silly name, I know. Filthy, pinched little rat face. Filthy clothes. The kids liked it fine, but parents loved the thing. Why? Easy answer. They’re hypochondriacs, petrified of viruses, bacteria. They’re having children later, in their forties, and it makes them overprotective. Hypervigilant. This Cruddles doll helped discharge that inner tension.”

“And somebody had all this figured in advance?”

“Gloria Leo. I know her personally. She works for Ford & Farmer in San Francisco.”

“So why can’t someone do this for class rings?”

“Stay healthy and I bet you’ll see the day.”

“The reasons to live are just piling up tonight.”

The Giants lost. The bartender changed channels, then vanished into the back with the remote. We were left watching one of those roundtable shows that usually include a Princeton historian saying that while we’ve made progress on problem X, it’s no time to get complacent or lower our guards. Tonight the topic was bioengineering. One panelist said the male role in reproduction would soon be made redundant by technology, and Danny croaked back: “And not a day too soon.” I might as well have been sitting with my father. He took an apartment after the divorce and set up a cockpit around his television, stuffing himself with heat-and-eat lasagna and smoking White Owls down to the plastic tips. A progressive whose favorite president was Reagan, a liberal who underpaid the IRS, he died believing in a one-hundred-year plot to snuff out farmers and small businessmen. The scheme dated back to 1918, he said, and was looking like it would conclude ahead of schedule.

Danny abandoned his drink and lurched upstairs and left me alone with a fellow three barstools down who looked familiar from my CTC work. My sharpest fear when I travel is bumping into someone I’ve spoken to about “free agency” and “self-directed professional enhancement.” If such a person slapped me, I wouldn’t fight; I’d drop on all fours and bow my sinful head. Luckily, I was wrong about the man. He was a Great West pilot who’d shaken my hand once during a deplaning.

“How are the contract talks?” I ventured.

“Stalled.”

“Drink?”

“Just a Coke. I’m flying tomorrow,” he said. “Hell, let’s sneak a little rum in there.”

“No job actions planned, I hope.”

“October, maybe. You’re safe for another twenty days or so.”

“One more reason to get it done by Friday.”

“What done?”

I told him. He didn’t seem impressed.

Now, ten hours later, I’m paying dearly for my night of boozy, aimless chat. I touch a button mounted on a wall and the frosted-glass doors of the Compass Club swish open, revealing a sleek curved desk with a receptionist dressed in airline colors, red and yellow. I know this woman, a mother of teenage boys, both elusively troubled and on pills—the kind of kids who trade their Ritalin for game cartridges and six-packs of malt liquor. Linda was a Great West flight attendant until she was injured in an incident involving a sudden loss of tail control. She won a fat settlement from the company, then promptly lost half of it in a divorce from a no-good she’d put through chiropractic school. Her addled sons are her whole existence now, and occasionally I visit them at home to help with schoolwork or toss around a football. The older boy, Dale, a hulking fifteen-year-old drawn to horror comics and older girls, reminds me of myself at his age. It’s Linda’s belief that my work in corporate coaching qualifies me to help him, but she’s wrong.

“What’s the holdup on Reno?” I say.

She lowers her voice. “A fuel-line leak, I’m hearing. Another ninety minutes would be my estimate.”

“Dale and Paul okay?”

“We’re back to diet. Trying the ultra-high-protein thing again.”

“I thought that was a bust.”

“A semi-bust. Thinking back, I noticed a slight improvement.”

“Good luck recouping it.” A focus word. They always sound wrong, but maybe it’s how I use them.

“Come again?”

“I hope the diet works this time.”

“So tell me, did you get that house you looked at?”

I consider the best way to explain that, technically, I’m homeless at the moment. The house deal never reached the offer stage. Homeowning may not be in my makeup. My parents belonged to the lawn-and-garden cult—their marriage was a triangular affair involving themselves and a velvety front yard of drought-hardy Kentucky bluegrass—so I know how much labor good groundskeeping requires. I don’t have the time, and frankly I lack the passion. Green grass is a losing battle in the West, which wants to go back to sage and prickly pear, and so is securing an outpost in the sprawl. I look down on Denver, at its malls and parking lots, its chains of blue suburban swimming pools and rows of puck-like oil tanks, its freeways, and the notion of seeking shelter in the whole mess strikes me as a joke.

“The house looks iffy.”

Linda tents her hands beneath her chin. “I’m sorry to hear it. You would have been a neighbor. It would have been nice to have you in the zip code.”

A zip code is something I’d rather do without. Zip codes are how they find you, how they track you. They start with five numbers and finish with a profile, down to the movies you’re liable to go see and the pizza toppings you prefer. I’m not paranoid, but I am my father’s son, and much of my fascination with marketing stems from my fear of being the big boys’ patsy. Sure, today, we live in a democracy, and yes, for the most part, it leaves us to ourselves, but there are ambitious people who’d like to change this, and some who boast that they’ve already succeeded. I’m like the guy I met flying out of Memphis who told me that he’d joined the local police force because he’d lived next to a drug house for a time and seen how thoroughly the cops had watched the place. True privacy, he concluded, was only possible inside a squad car.

Linda fingers the collar of her uniform. “Free tomorrow? I’ll be home alone. Paul’s in Utah, at archaeology camp, and Dale’s in California, with his dad.”

“Those two are getting along now?”

“It’s court ordered. I could cook you a Thai meal. Something spicy.”

“Big trip ahead. Won’t be back till—I’m not sure.”

She gives me a pouty, disappointed look that’s meant to look clownish but comes off as incensed. I’ve treated her poorly, worse than most of them. Two months ago she teased me into bed, then put on a showy, marathon performance that struck me as rehearsed, even researched. The encounter left me thirsty, gulping ice water, and reminded me of my early dates with Lori, the woman I ought to refer to as my ex-wife but can’t quite manage to—we weren’t that close. She was a tigress too, packed full of stunts. Now and then I’d catch her in the middle of a particularly far-fetched pose and see that it wasn’t appetite that drove her but some idea, some odd erotic theory. Maybe she’d come across it in a magazine, or maybe in a college psychology class. The pressure her notions put on our encounters was just too much, though, and even before we married we found ourselves fantasizing about a child, perhaps as a way to simplify our lovemaking. When Lori still wasn’t pregnant two years later (I doubt I’ll ever get over the desolation of all those negative drugstore test kits; the crisp instruction booklets, the faint pink minus signs), we hurled ourselves into skiing and mountain biking, playing the fresh-air couple on the go. We dropped weight, gained stamina, and emerged as strangers. A baby? We were virtually the same sex by then—two boyish hardbodies, rugged and untouchable.

That’s when I changed careers and started flying—two days a week at first, then three, then four, spreading the gospel of successful outplacement from Bakersfield to Bismarck. One night, after twenty consecutive days away, I drove home from the airport to our garden apartment and found on the doorstep a heap of rolled-up newspapers dating back to the morning of my departure.

“I’d better push on. I have calls to make,” I say. “You see any promising houses, take a peek for me.”

“What kind of thing are you looking for?”

“Low maintenance.”

“Come over and eat with me.”

“Soon.”

“We miss you, Ryan.”

The club is empty for a weekday morning. The stacks of newspapers stand straight and square, the armchair cushions are puffy and unwrinkled. Some lull in the business cycle, apparently. They happen, these little brownouts of activity. Maybe they’re biological events—a flu epidemic compounded by sunless weather spreads a deep fatigue across the land—but I do know all weeks aren’t equal. Things rise and fall.

The espresso machine whirrs and burbles at my touch, filling a cup exactly to the brim. The gizmo deserves to be thanked, it works so beautifully. People aren’t grateful enough to such devices. Mute valets supply our every need, but instead of pausing in acknowledgment, we jump to the next thing, issue another order. I wonder if some imbalance is building up here, a karmic gap between humans and their tools. Machines will be able to think not long from now, and as the descendants of slaves, they won’t be happy. I shared this idea once with an IT specialist flying out of Austin. He didn’t dismiss it. He told me about a field called Techno-Ethics that’s concerned with the question of whether computers have rights.

For me, the question is whether we’ll have any.

At a pay phone in one of the private business nooks between the rest rooms and the luggage lockers I rank the calls I need to make this morning. Using downtime efficiently is key—making the most of the minutes inside the minutes. I dial my credit card number (five miles right there; such silent accounting shadows my every thought), then enter a Seattle area code and the number for Advanta Publishing. I’m calling a man I’ve met just once before but who I believe can make a difference for me. We both believe in the future of The Garage, my “motivational fable” of an inventor who toils in his workshop, alone and undistracted, while out in the world his breakthrough innovations spawn a commercial empire he never sees. The theme is concentration, inner purity. The book isn’t long—a hundred pages or so—but that’s the trend now, wisdom in your pocket. There are men in my field who’ve made millions off such volumes, and if I can do half that well I’ll be fixed by forty and can spend the next decade working off my miles with weekend jaunts to Manhattan, if I’m still single, or with round-trips to Disney World if I have a family.

“Morris Dwight, please,” I say to the receptionist. Dwight is my age but with an air of elegance, as though he grew up abroad, in grand hotels. He combs something into his hair that smells like wool and drops me notes in brown ink on heavy cream stock, tagging his signature with wispy doodles of seabirds and leaping fish, that kind of thing. I suspect he’s an alcoholic and a fraud and professionally unharmed by being either. His latest business title, You Lost, Get Over It!, has been on the Wall Street Journal list since spring, but it’s one of his clunkers that drew me to Advanta: Soren Morse’s own Horizoneering: The Story of a Mid-Air Turnaround. Outselling Morse, which shouldn’t be hard to do, would bring me a primitive, lasting satisfaction.

“Mr. Dwight’s in a meeting, sir. I’ll take your number.”

“Could I please have his voice mail?”

She disconnects me. I call again and get a busy signal that saws away at my morning optimism. I try one last time and he answers. “My friend,” he says.

I tell him I’d like to switch the drink we’ve scheduled to a more leisurely dinner, but Dwight is not the same chattering good sport I remember from the Portland club. He sounds stressed; I can hear him typing as we speak and rearranging papers on his desk. Wednesday is impossible, he tells me, due to “a sudden charitable commitment.” He suggests an early breakfast Thursday morning.

I do some speedy mental figuring with the help of my HandStar digital assistant, a wireless device I use for e-mail and to track my miles. My schedule this week leaves little room to improvise; it’s a three-dimensional chess game, meticulous. This afternoon and this evening I’ll be in Reno for a coaching session with an old client whose company is hobbling toward bankruptcy. Tomorrow, I go to Southern California to meet Sandor Pinter, consulting’s grand old man, to whom I’ll pitch an exciting freelance project that could make my name among my peers and backstop my income if MythTech and The Garage don’t come through. Wednesday A.M. I’m supposed to go to Dallas to plot a severance strategy at a consolidating HMO, but the flight’s not Great West, which makes it useless to me, so I’ve already left a message canceling and booked an earlier Seattle flight, which I now see won’t do me any good. On Thursday I head to Las Vegas for GoalQuest XX, an annual gathering of friends and colleagues at which I intend to speak on CTC and finally unburden my bad conscience by telling all about our nasty specialty. On Friday morning I’m off to Omaha, and later that day—in a mood of triumph, I hope, after a candid sit-down with the Child—I’ll board a plane to Minneapolis and ring up my million over Iowa. When my mother and sisters meet me at the gate, I intend to be drunk, and to stay drunk through the wedding. Drunk and free, with an open-ended ticket good for a round-trip to Saturn, if I so choose, and enough credit left in my account to send a few ailing children and their parents off to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic.

How dare Dwight alter such a battle plan. If I push back my arrival at GoalQuest XX, I can make breakfast, barely, if it’s brief, but I’ll miss Great West’s only morning flight to Vegas and have to slum it on Desert Air or Sun South, losing a thousand-mile connection bonus that I won’t be able to make up no matter which route I take to Omaha. The answer is to have breakfast very early and do it in the airport.

“You still there?”

I make my pitch to Dwight: 7 A.M. at SeaTac in the food court.

“The airport?”

“I’m squeezed. I’m sorry. I’m in a bind.”

“Can I phone you back about this? This evening, say? There’s a chance I’ll be in Arizona Wednesday and maybe into Thursday. Or beyond.”

“You just told me Wednesday’s your charitable thing.”

“My life is fluid. Can we meet at eight?”

“No later than seven. It has to be at SeaTac.”

The line goes quiet. Then: “It’s almost finished?”

“I two-day aired you three fourths of it last night. I’m down to filling in and rounding off.”

“Seven, then. Call on Tuesday to confirm, though.”

“I could shoot down to Arizona, too. My Wednesday is flexible. Phoenix, is it?”

“Phoenix—but maybe Utah that evening. Or somewhere else.”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Needy authors everywhere. Blocks. Nervous breakdowns. Major tax delinquencies. Much hand-holding to do. There’s also golf. I’m in La Jolla right now at a pro-am—my woman forwarded you.”

“I hear a keyboard.”

“It’s a course-simulation program on my laptop. I’m at a table outside the pro shop, strategizing.”

“I’ll confirm,” I say.

I expect the next call to be easier. Lower stakes. Kara, my oldest sister, who functions as our family’s social secretary, lives south of Salt Lake City in a suburb that might have been squeezed from a tube, with recreation centers for the kids and curving boulevards split by bike-path medians. She drives a Saab that’s cleaner than when she leased it and works full-time hours as a volunteer for literacy programs and battered-women shelters. Her husband makes it all possible, a software writer flush with some of the fastest money ever generated by our economy. He hangs pleasantly in the background of Kara’s life, demanding nothing, offering everything. They’re bountiful, gracious people, here to help, who seem to have sealed some deal with the Creator to spread his balm in return for perfect sanity. I pray that no real tragedy ever befalls them. It would be wrong, a sinful, cosmic breach.

Our business this morning relates to Saturday’s wedding, when Julie, my kid sister, will try again to camouflage her multiple addictions and general pathological dependency long enough to formalize a bond with a man who has no idea what he’s up against. Kara has worked for years to forge this match. She chose the groom, a fellow she dated in high school who sells New Holland tractors in our hometown by capitalizing on his youthful fame as a fearsome all-state running back. Kara’s goal is time travel, it seems: a marriage that will approximate our parents’ and secure our family’s future in its old county. Even the house Julie thinks that she picked out (in truth it was Kara who narrowed the field for her by passing secret instructions to the Realtor) could double for the home place. Same porch, same dormers, same maze of sagging handyman additions.

“Where are you?” Kara asks me when I call. It’s always her first question, and her silliest.

“Hung up at DIA. The Denver airport.”

“Someone saw you in Salt Lake on Friday. You’re sure you’re not here?”

It’s a funny question, actually. More than once I’ve landed in a city, spent a couple of hours there, flown off, and forgotten the visit just a few days later. Salt Lake I tend to remember, though. That temple. The byzantine liquor laws and spry old men.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“It was Wendy Jance who spotted you. Downtown. At that restaurant you like that serves the liver.”

“How is she these days?”

“Like you care. Don’t play that game. She’s the same as she was when you stopped calling her: bright, attractive, a little lost, and furious.”

I suppose that it’s time I explain about the women.

There are a lot of them. I credit my looks. This sounds awful, but I’m a handsome man, conventionally proportioned, but with flair. Old tailors love me. They tell me I remind them of men from forty years ago, slim but sturdy, on the small side but broad, with a long inseam. In most ways I have the same body as my father, who never consciously exercised or dieted and yet retained a thoughtless fitness even into his grim, suspicous old age. The farmwives on his gas route were all admirers, waylaying him with cookies and iced drinks while I waited, shy and watchful, in the truck, impressed even then by his patient rural gallantry. At his funeral, freed by the fact that he’d died single, the ladies wept abundantly and frankly, their tears erasing years from their old faces. My mother cried too, but mostly to keep up, I think. Public opinion had it that she’d wronged him. She’d remarried. He hadn’t. She’d prospered. He’d died in debt. Only physically had my father come out ahead. While she’d blurred away and lost all definition, becoming one of those women who need makeup not to highlight their features but to create them, he’d kept his hair and muscles and blue-green eyes right through the funeral director’s final touch-ups.

My genes only partly account for all the women, though. Sheer availability matters too. I’m out there among them, mixing, every day, eating a spinach salad one table over, changing my return date in the same ticket line. Take Wendy. I met her at the registration desk of the Fort Worth Homestead Suites. The hotel computer had eaten her reservation, an American Legion convention was in town, and she was facing a night without a room when I stepped up with my Premier-Ultra Guest Card. The clerk reversed herself; Wendy got her key. It was only fair that she join me for fillet at the in-house Conestoga Grill, where my mastery of the modest wine list wowed her. Soon, we were talking shop. Her shop: cosmetics. The animal-testing furor. The Asian market. “Organic” versus “natural.” I knew the business. That she lived two doors down from my sister never came up—not until afterwards, while watching pay-per-view, wrapped in a humid polyester sheet, our clothes and papers strewn across the room like wreckage from a trailer-park tornado. Our parting posture, unconsciously devised while watching Tom Cruise destroy a bio-terror ring, was that of two jaded orgiasts (focus word) putting one over on the Bible Belters.

A few days later Kara called my mobile and said that friend of hers had seen my picture in a family photo album and asked if I ever came to Utah. Subtle. Playing along, I flew to Utah twice that month, saw Wendy both times, then decided to back off when she thrust at me a sheaf of poems about her struggles with her Mormon faith.

She hadn’t said she was a member. It broke the deal. These people believe that in the life to come they’ll rule their own stars and planets as God rules ours. Lori, after she left me, became one, too, switching from short skirts to full-length dresses and marrying a real estate executive who had her pregnant within a couple of months.

My fling with Wendy wasn’t typical. Usually, there’s more romance, a slower buildup. I spot someone, or she spots me, across a buffet table or a conference room. Later, we find ourselves on the same flight and exchange a few words while dawdling in the aisle, mentioning to each other where we’ll be staying. At seven, as both of us step from scalding showers, snug inside freshly laundered terry robes, our hair still fragrant with giveaway shampoo, the telephone rings in one of our hotel rooms. A dinner follows where we compare our schedules and learn that we’ll both be in San Jose on Thursday—or that we can be, if we want to be. The next night, from different hotels, we speak again. For me, no sensation is more intoxicating than lying alone in bed, strange room, strange city, talking to someone I barely know who’s also disoriented and on her own. Her voice becomes my chief reality; lacking other landmarks, I cling to it. And she clings to my voice. Each other is all we have. By Thursday, as we park our rented Sables in front of a restaurant that neither of us has eaten at but that both of us have read good things about in Great West’s in-flight magazine, Horizons, a sense of destiny beckons. Until dessert.

Chance is an erratic matchmaker. Now and then it seats me next to women I wouldn’t dream of approaching on my own. On other occasions it dishes up a Wendy, superficially suitable but with a flaw. And a few times, I fear, it has offered me perfection.

“When will you be in Seattle?” Kara asks.

“I get in Wednesday.”

“Late?”

“Mid-afternoon. But I might have to go to Arizona instead.”

“Here are your instructions. Listening? Go straight to the Pike Street Market—it shuts at six—and order twelve pounds of king salmon, alder-smoked. Send it overnight to Mom’s, but make sure you inspect it first. Look for red, firm meat.”

“I can’t do this over the phone?”

“You have to see it. Make sure it’s good fish.”

“By the weekend it won’t be fresh, though.”

“It’s smoked. It’ll keep. Don’t flake out on me this time. Don’t pull another Santa Fe.”

She wounds me. Santa Fe was a fluke, and not my fault. Our mother had visited a gallery there during one of her winter Winnebago runs with her current husband, the Lovely Man. (So called because he’s small, he hardly speaks, and he has no discernible personality.) She fell in love with a Zuni bracelet there and described it to Julie, who mentioned it to Kara, who ordered me, on my next trip to New Mexico, to buy the thing as a gift from the whole family on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. I did my best, but due to a buildup of errors in the description, the piece my mother ultimately received was Hopi, ill-fitting, overpriced, and, as my mother told the Lovely Man (who then told Kara, proving he’s not so lovely), “positively god-awful.”

“Unfair,” I say.

“Well, this is your chance to redeem yourself.”

“Unfair.”

“There’s one other thing,” says Kara. “Tammy Jansen, Julie’s maid of honor. She’s in St. Louis now. Her car’s in the shop, so she’s going to have to fly up, except that she can’t afford the fare they quoted. Twelve hundred dollars round-trip! I hate these airlines.”

“Fine,” I say. “We’ll both chip in six hundred.”

“I already offered. When she tried to book, though, they told her they’d run out of seats.”

I know what’s coming. Take a hard line, I tell myself. Don’t budge. You have a policy, you’ve stated it often, and now you will have to repeat it for the record.

“Maybe you could cash in some miles,” says Kara.

I love my sister. Unfortunately, she’s ignorant. She doesn’t fly on any regular basis, so she doesn’t know what I’ve been up against out here. For years, Great West has been my boss, my sergeant, dictating where I went and if I went, deciding what I ate and if I ate. My mileage is my one chance to strike back, to snatch satisfaction from humiliation.

“We’ll need to find another way,” I say.

“This is ridiculous, Ryan. This is sad.”

“How’s Mom? Have you talked to her?”

“Call her this year, will you? She thinks you’ve turned into butter, disappeared.”

“Those two move around more than I do.”

“Be honest: Were you in Salt Lake last week?” she says. “Maybe you have a girl here. I’m concerned. What if you’re leading some shameful double life? What if you’re in trouble and need help? You’re awfully isolated, the way you live.”

“Isolated? I’m surrounded,” I say.

“We’re getting off track now.”

“You started this whole subject.”

“Let’s leave it that Kara’s worried. Now let’s rewind. Tammy needs to get here from Missouri.”

Solving the problem isn’t my sister’s goal. She rejects any number of reasonable proposals—an Amtrak ticket (“Tammy throws up on trains”); a rental car (“The long drive will exhaust her”)—and insists on testing my resistance to giving something away that cost me nothing—or so it seems to her. She calls my mileage rule “this stupid glitch of yours,” and though I’m screaming inside, I don’t explain myself. The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. Sally will not wear synthetics. That’s who she is. Billy won’t touch eggs. That’s Billy for you. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.

The conversation ends here: “My miles are mine.”

I put down the phone. I have a plane to catch.

three

i know of no pleasure more reliable than consuming a great American brand against the backdrop featured in its advertising. Driving a Ford pickup down brown dirt roads. Swigging a Coke on the beach in Malibu. Flying Great West over central Colorado. It’s a feeling of restfulness and order akin, I suspect, to how the ancient Egyptians felt watching the planets line up above the Pyramids. You’re in the right place, you’re running with the right forces, and if the wind should howl tomorrow, let it.

Below me, through the milky oval window, I can see a pair of alpine lakes glowing an unnatural chemical blue, the color of pools inside nuclear reactors. Mountains topped by radio towers rise to the south and west. That’s Aspen there, the runs cut like bowling alleys between the pines, the metal roofs of the lodges and second homes sending up Morse code glints of morning sunlight. It’s a good day in Airworld. I turn on my tape recorder and enjoy a few minutes of Verbal Edge through headphones.

We’re flying at half capacity, if that—Desert Air’s discounts have been poaching passengers. It’s more than a price war, it’s opera, this duel. Young Soren Morse, with his B-school line of blarney, against Major Buck Garrett, Korea flying ace. The marketer versus the aviator. Sad. Sad because Garrett, the rugged national treasure, doesn’t have a prayer. He does his own TV spots to save money and comes off as a crank. Worse, he refuses to institute a bonus program. Garrett believes that cheap tickets sell themselves, and so they do, for a certain kind of customer—retirees who fly once a year, if that.

Standing on her seat a few rows up, a toddler plays peekaboo with me. The secret involvements children have with strangers behind their parents’ backs. I wink, she ducks. “Recognizance: a bond or obligation entered into before a court of law.” I study the backs of other passengers’ heads. A Dairy Queen spiral of frosty, sprayed gray hair, pinned with a platinum snake. A polished bald spot dented in the center and freckled in the dent.

It’s the people I’ll never meet who most intrigue me.

“Seditious: given to promoting revolt.”

I smile to myself. It all connects up here. Across the aisle from me a famous businessman, a securities analyst with his own TV show and a foundation for troubled urban youth, has fallen asleep with a Sprite in his right hand and the beam from the overhead reading light shining into his slack and gaping mouth. The gold in there is amazing, a savage image that I feel strangely privileged to behold. The flight attendant peeks, too—we share a smirk. That mouth moves markets, and look at it: an ore field!

Celebrities always seem slightly lost on planes. Five years ago, I found myself surrounded by a rock band I’d worshiped as a kid. Two of them sat alone in their own rows and two had girls with them. Their trademark hairstyles—tortured, spiky crests of dull black thatch—looked overdone in such a neutral setting. The drummer, an alleged hotel-room smasher who’d supposedly had his blood replaced at an exclusive clinic in Geneva, thumbed a handheld video game. The singer, the star, sat still and stared ahead as though he’d lost power and was waiting for repairs. His fame seemed to call for a class beyond first, and I couldn’t help but think less of him, somehow, for sharing a cabin with the likes of me.

The professional athletes stick out most of all. The moment they were scouted in their teens everything stopped for them. Just stay well and eat. They’re served special meals, fat steaks with huge chef’s salads, and if they want more salt they hail a trainer, who tells a flight attendant, who hops to it. The players discuss their injuries, their cars, their investments in nightclubs and auto dealerships. It’s a sleepy existence, from what I can see, devoted to conserving energy. Parents push sheepish kids to shake their hands and the athletes oblige with a minimum of effort, sometimes without even turning their massive heads. Such inertia, such stillness. I envy it.

This is the place to see America, not down there, where the show is almost over. After college, I crossed the country with a girlfriend, loading a Subaru wagon with beer and sleeping bags and flipping coins to pick that day’s state highway. The girl was sheltered, the daughter of two professors who’d consulted with campus colleagues on her upbringing. No TV. A multilingual reading list. She hungered for mini-golf, for roadside farm stands, for wicked stares from old-timers in greasy spoons. She read On the Road as we drove, declaimed the thing. I knew I was being used—her native guide—and that she’d drop me once the trip looped back to her parents’ cottage on Nantucket, but I wanted to show her something she hadn’t seen.

I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims. They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards. The hitchhikers didn’t tell stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys. In Kansas, my girlfriend threw away the book at a truckstop Dunkin’ Donuts stand and called her father for a ticket home. She’s a Penn State sociologist now, raising her kids the same way she was raised, and I doubt that she’s thought twice in fifteen years about our hoboing. No reason to. The real America had left the ground and we’d spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.

The TV stock-picker wakes and blows his nose, then inspects the airline hand towel for lost gold. I take off my earphones and open the AirMall catalogue tucked in my seatback to browse for wedding presents. AirMall guarantees next-day delivery on items ordered in-flight, via airphone, and features offbeat products not found in stores: silver space pens whose ink flows upside down, alarm clocks that beam the time onto the ceiling, portable inversion boards for back pain. Sometimes I fall for these gimmicky wonder items, sending them ahead to my hotel so I’ll have something waiting with my name on it. I have a weakness for white-noise machines that simulate waterfalls and breaking surf. Lately, I can’t sleep without these gadgets. The one I own now is tuned to “summer cloudburst” and I can’t wait to turn it on tonight.

I narrow my choices to a robot lawn mower that tracks a grid of buried wires (dyslexic Julie will misread the instructions and send the thing careening across the street) and the safer selection, a six-piece luggage “system” fashioned from heavy nylon with Kevlar inserts. It’s not a set I’d ever buy for myself—a light packer, I prefer leather, for its warmth, and because the patterns of scuffs and scratches provide a fossil record of my travels—but for Julie and Keith of the annual jaunt to Florida and the Christmas coach tour of the Holy Land that my mother and the Lovely Man gave them in lieu of a secular honeymoon, these bags should be the ticket. Pockets galore for Julie’s personal pharmacy, stain-resistant if she vomits on them.

The girl is past delicate. She frightens me.

Though Kara won’t forgive me if I go through with it, I owe Keith a briefing this week, the whole case history, starting with the bogus model search when Julie was fifteen. Like the other local girls caught up in the fraud, she stopped eating. She ran. She gorged on laxatives. When the promoters vanished with her entry fee, she and a few of the other dupes kept dieting. They started shoplifting, formed a little crime club. The school called in social workers from St. Paul. There was a drug bust, a suicide attempt. Eventually, something turned the girls around, though. They filled out. They got educations. They learned some sense.

Except for my kid sister. So much grief. The teenage marriage. The teenage divorce. The year in massage school. The food fads and the pills. The racist second husband who went to Sandstone for forging savings bonds on a color copier. And only lately, in the last two years, a kind of peace for Julie, a new purpose, rehabilitating injured animals on a Humane Society rescue farm. She even has a degree now—Licensed Vet Tech—and though she’s still thin, her eyes go where she points them, which I feel is progress.

Now this wedding. This Keith. I give her two years before she’s in a hospital.

“Excuse me.”

The stock expert looks.

“One question, sir. I know who you are and I know I shouldn’t ask this—”

“Be my guest. I’m used to it by now.”

“If you were to buy a single issue tomorrow—a blue chip, as a gift, for the long term, for someone who can’t really handle her own affairs—what would it be?”

“The recipient’s a minor?”

“Basically. Actually, she’s thirty-one.”

“But flaky?”

“At a fairly high level. Yes.”

“Female, I’m guessing?”

“Extremely female.”

“Right.” The expert swabs his tongue across his gold mine. He’s thinking, he’s taking me seriously. Bless him. There’s grace in Airworld. I meet it all the time.

“I’d recommend General Electric, but I can’t. Their media holdings offend me morally. A long-term investment should elevate its owner. That puts me in the minority, but so be it. This isn’t well known, but I count among my clients the American Lutheran Church. That calls for standards.”

I’m inspired. I truly am. The man’s a giant. And to think that, just now, I have him to myself.

“I’ll tell you what I told the Lutheran bishops: load up on Chase Manhattan under sixty. Chase is your baby. A house upon a rock.”

The flight’s only stop is Elko, and knowing Elko, no one will get on or off when we set down. A curious city—Basque restaurants on every corner, a few small casinos, miles of trailer parks, and a Main Street boutique that sells candy panties to prostitutes. I once spent an evening there with a billionaire, 104th on the Forbes 400 list, whose family toy firm I’d been called in to downsize. The man was shopping for a hobby ranch and was eager to visit a brothel, but not alone. He had me hold his wallet in case of trouble and I found myself poking through it while he partied. I felt that a billionaire’s wallet might teach me something. Inside I found an expired driver’s license whose photo convinced me the man had had a face-lift. Also, a credit card. White. Not platinum, white. When I think of Elko I think of that pale card, of what it could buy. Whole states. The desert itself. After the billionaire finished with his girl, we returned to his jet, which had twin sleeping cabins. I heard him masturbating through the bulkhead, seducing himself in a made-up female voice that sounded like one of those singing-chipmunk records.

What you don’t want, I remember thinking that night, is to feature in such a man’s dreams. I’m scared of billionaires, though not for the same reasons my father was. If their goal was just world domination, we’d all be safer; the problems arise when they tamper with individuals.

I turn on my tape again, then click it off. Too many words in one day and I go fuzzy. The flight attendant leans close. I’m sure I know her.

“Sir?”

“You’re Denise. Chicago–Los Angeles.”

“Just reassigned last week.” She quiets her voice. “We’re having difficulties with a passenger. The man in the golf shirt”—she points—“beside the lady there?”

“Yes?”

“He’s intoxicated. He’s bothering her. I know you’re enjoying having your own row here . . .”

“Not at all. Bring her up. I’ll move my things.”

“She’s flying through to Reno.”

“Send her up.”

I form first impressions more quickly than other people. The woman’s sense of space is complicated; her every movement seems to be a choice between precisely two alternatives, one wholly right, the other completely wrong. She pauses, and in her pause she weighs decisions, rising halfway from her seat, then all the way, rotating her shoulders and then her neck, each action acute and separate, like an insect’s. It’s not unattractive, the way she stops and starts, but it speaks of a certain painful doubleness, as though she once suffered a paralyzing accident and had to retrain her muscles through therapy. I was in such an accident myself once, though the damage it caused is not for me to judge.

Instead of letting her past me to the window seat, I scoot over one space, my briefcase on my lap. After being trapped beside the drunk, the woman will want an open exit path.

“That jerk,” she says.

“They’re everywhere these days.”

“I’m afraid I attract them. I must send out some signal.”

“It’s the luck of the draw. We’re seated by computer.”

So here we are. It’s all decided now: in what tone of voice we’ll converse, how close we’ll sit, how far we’ll delve into each other’s stories. Such negotiations happen quickly—they’re over before you’re aware they’ve even begun, and everything that follows between two strangers just extends this instant contract. We’ve already faced a common foe, the drunk, and established our superior humanity, but that will be the sum of it, I’ll wager. Our vectors are fixed: ever onward, parallel, but fated not to touch or cross. Romance needs conflict, a collision course, but we’ve been doomed to agreement, to empathy.

She’s not the one. The list grows ever shorter. We’ll joke and kid, we’ll discover odd affinities, but it’s over between us, and I’m relieved.

“They shouldn’t have served him. He boarded stinking,” she says. “I thought the FAA had rules on that.”

“They’re only enforced in economy and coach. Welcome to the jungle.”

“I’m Alex.”

“Ryan.”

Alex, I’d guess, is an artist of some kind, though not the highbrow type that I dislike. She works on contract. She’s learned to sell herself. Her ugly glasses are the giveaway; their dark, chunky frames, which are just this side of dowdy, have an ironic, thrift-shop quality meant to convey independence and eclecticism. Before CTC, when I still did marketing, I worked with graphic designers from time to time; accessories meant everything to them. They’d wear a burlap sack for pants if they could find a cute belt to hold it up.

“Going to Reno for work or for the action?”

She frowns. “The action?”

“The gambling,” I say. I can see that Alex doesn’t bet, but I sense she regards herself as a free spirit. She’ll be flattered that I could mistake her for a player.

“No, but I’d love to learn. I like the craps tables. All the backchat, all the jabbering. I’m here on work—I coordinate events.”

“Weddings?”

“Also conventions and benefits. Instant ersatz ambience my specialty.”

I contemplate two responses to this comment, which, thanks to Verbal Edge, I understand. One: I’ll warn her against maligning her work. It seems adult and witty, yes, but go too far and the joke will be on you. Two: I’ll laugh. I’ll let her mock herself until she becomes depressed in earnest, and then I’ll weigh in with a pep talk and sage advice based on my work with redundant executives who minimized the value of their jobs until the day they lost them and broke down bawling or drove to the river and swallowed a hundred Advils. I’d guess her age as twenty-eight or so, the point when working women first taste success and realize they’ve been conned. A crucial moment—it’s when the ache sets in. Sometimes it leads to marriage and a family. Sometimes it spurs devotion to a cause. Men reach this point, too, of course, but it seldom results in major changes. That’s how it happened for me in my late twenties, when it dawned on me that CTC was not just a temporary assignment. I weighed my alternatives, convinced myself I had none, and here I am—subsisting on smoked almonds, chasing miles.

I laugh with her. Run yourself down, go on ahead.

“I’m doing a benefit for an interim senator. The wife of the guy who died water-skiing.”

“Nielsen.”

“Widowhood with a purpose, that’s my theme. Grays and golds for a color scheme. The food? Rare prime rib, I’m thinking. All that blood. Sacrifice and renewal. Martyrdom.”

“Complicated work.”

“It’s textbook, actually.”

This statement offends me; it’s subtly disrespectful. Alex doesn’t yet know my occupation, but I doubt that she takes me for a neurosurgeon or someone whose work is more challenging than hers. So if she’s just a hack, an uninspired grunt, then what does that make me—this man with a standard-issue side-part, wearing a lightweight navy travel suit and synthetic-blend odor-resistant stay-up socks.

“What’s textbook about it?”

“It’s just so middle-class.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask her.

She touches her glasses, pushing them higher on her bony nose. Her face is handsome, angular, distinguished, the product of generations of prudent mating by people who worked hard and skimped on frills only to give rise to a bohemian.

Her attitude reminds me of my college years. My father should never have sent me to DeWitt. It was the name that impressed him, the slick brochure, the aura of humanistic broad-mindedness. In fact, the place was a haven for bratty pricks—reggae-grooving, seaboard hippie kids in school to refine their contempt for people like me, who’d been raised in the wheaty void between the coasts by mothers who draped plastic on their sofas, which they called davenports. My roommate, a boy from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, smoked dope from a Native American hand-carved pipe, cashed monthly checks from his trust fund that made me gulp, and listened to “world music” on a high-end stereo worth more than one of my father’s propane tankers. He called himself a feminist, of all things, and enlisted me in “a self-criticism circle.” We met in our opium den of a dorm room, its windows blacked out with Indian batiks that forced me to use an alarm to wake for classes, and when it was my turn to confess my prejudices, I announced that I had none. My roommate kicked me out. I rigged up an “independent concentration” in Comparative Commercial Culture—as close as a kid could get to going square there—and bought a nice glowing Timex and started wearing it.

“I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” I say. “If your work’s beneath you, you should change professions.” Maybe we’re bound for conflict, after all.

Alex produces, from somewhere, a small inhaler, and mists her lungs with steroids. Her color changes. Not for the better, necessarily.

“I already have. Events are my act two. It’s not the job, it’s the clients who wear me out. This lady senator. A power bitch. She sent back my sketches of the floral arrangements with big black X’s through them and a note: ‘More funereal, please.’ Can you believe it? Her poor old husband’s beheaded by a speedboat and she sees a fund-raising gimmick.”

“A Democrat?”

“You’ve got it. I ought to switch parties.”

“They’re both corrupt.”

“Disempowerment machines,” she says.

She’s speaking my language now. Maybe she’s read Sandy Pinter, or read of him. Maybe there are layers to this Alex.

“So what do you do?” she says.

I leave out my work in CTC and play up my infrequent coaching jobs, using my Reno assignment to illustrate. It’s a canned presentation: the Art Krusk story. Retired army tank captain and cancer survivor opens modest Mexican buffet featuring mariachis and wife’s recipes. Expands his operation with borrowed money, staying one step ahead of swelling debt load by targeting growing market: young working families. Institutes generous compensation plan to retain top employees but overshoots, breeding widespread resentment when he scales back. Absenteeism follows. An act of sabotage: the suspected contamination of spiced ground meat with human feces. The resulting E. coli outbreak sickens dozens and tarnishes Krusk’s name. Among my recommendations: a company sports league to raise morale and, on the public relations front, sponsorship of medical “scholarships” for needy local children.

A snack is served: bagel sandwiches of ham or turkey dressed with mayonnaise and lettuce leaves. Alex asks questions, good ones, about Krusk’s case, probing the fine points of Brand Reconstruction—a term she actually uses. She’s with me, frowning and nodding, synthesizing. It orders her features, draws life into her eyes.

When I’m finished, Alex tells me about herself. She hails from a town in Wyoming, as small as mine, whose claim to fame is the time a local deputy stopped Robert Redford for speeding. I can top this. Back in Polk Center we had a doctor, a friend of my father’s through the Shriners lodge, who specialized in medically questionable oversize breast implants. He once performed surgery on a president’s mistress. We knew this because the local Western Union handled a White House get-well telegram. The clerk made a copy and tucked it in the files of the county history museum, where my father took me to view it as a teenager, explaining that it was important for young men to see through the saintly posturings of their leaders.

“Wise parent,” Alex says.

“I miss him badly.”

“When did he pass away?”

“Six years ago.”

I feel the syrup well up and stop myself. My memories of my happy youth confuse people—they can’t tell if I’m bragging, kidding, or crazy. It’s a problem for me, a curious burden: my golden Mark Twain boyhood of State Fair corn dogs and station wagon vacations to Yellowstone. So few shadows, so much, such varied, light. The autumn radiance of sunset boxcars bearing away the grain of Lewis County; the midsummer glare off the fenders of my Schwinn. And my father, the seeming source of all this light, dressed in Red Wing boots and Carhartt coveralls as he strode out at dawn to his truck, a yellow supercab, and woke the town to another day of work. His deliveries fueled the county’s furnaces and heated its morning showers. He warmed the world.

But who wants to hear this? No one. I used to try. I tried in the creative writing seminar. A girl half my age said “Show, don’t tell.” It’s pointless.

Alex peels the turkey from her bagel, folds the slice in half, in half again, wraps the whole package in lettuce, and bites down. I admire her willingness to take what’s given and improve on it. It’s a traveler’s trait, and I ask her how much she flies. Her numbers are medium: sixty thousand miles in twelve months, all domestic, on Delta and United. Her preferred lodgings are Courtyard Marriotts, although she agrees that Homestead Suites offers an equal value and better food. She opens her wallet and out falls an accordion of clear vinyl pockets holding her VIP cards.

“You’re satisifed with Avis?”

“I am,” she says.

“They’re stingy with the miles. I like Maestro.”

“Maestro keeps its vehicles too long. If a car’s over twenty-thousand, I get nervous.”

“That new outfit, Colonial, isn’t bad.”

“No instant checkout. I like to park and go. A question,” she says. “Have you ever flown with pets?”

“I don’t keep pets, but I wouldn’t fly with them. The climate controls in the holds are always wacky.”

Alex’s face sags. “My new cat’s along. I couldn’t bear to leave him. An Abyssinian.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine. Is he tranquilized?”

“One pill. It’s a human prescription. Are animal doses different?”

We descend into Elko through layered sheets of smoke. The Sierras are burning this summer, from Tahoe south, and the sun, which has just ticked over into the west, glows hot pink in my window. Bad news for Alex. Reno is even closer to the fires, though she tells me that smoke doesn’t bother her, just chemicals. She used to think her allergies were emotional, a product of childhood tension, she says, but now she blames them on solvents, glues, and dyes. She’d like to remain inside to get her breath back, so she asks if I’ll check on her kitten with the ground crew.

“Want anything from the terminal? Milky Way?”

“Have to trim down. Can’t risk it.”

“Understood.”

“I try to go light on the carbs when I’m out traveling.”

“It affects the digestion, no doubt about it. Smart. With me it’s fats and oils. My scalp breaks out.”

“Take chromium tablets.”

“I have. I’ve tried them all.”

A ground worker, sportily dressed in shorts and cap and looking content, for once, with his union contract, pushes a wheeled staircase against the exit. Stopping off in transit beats arriving. There’s the feeling of visiting an island, of stepping, briefly and sweetly, out of time into a scene you’ve had absolutely no hand in and have no designs on, no intentions toward. A truly neutral charge is tough to find in life, and that’s how Elko feels as I deplane: irrelevant and tranquil. A mirage.

On the tarmac I notice a pet crate being unloaded—to give its occupant water, I assume. I approach, but the baggage handler waves me off. Restricted zone. “The cat okay?” I yell. The handler doesn’t answer, too much engine noise, but something in his face concerns me as I watch him crouch, unlatch the crate, and reach one arm inside. He flags down a coworker driving a cart and together they peer through the grating at the kitten.

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.

four

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.

I turn up the station, reorient the mirrors, and drive to the guard’s booth, waving my rental papers. The old guy winks and raises the red-striped gate arm and I roll over the angled spikes, away.

On the way to Art’s house, where he insists on meeting, I dictate some lines for the preface to The Garage into the microrecorder at my chin.

For years it has been the same message: Grow or die. But is this necessarily the truth? Too often, growth for its own sake leads to chaos: unsustainable capital expansion, ill-timed acquisitions, a stressful workplace. In The Garage, I propose a bold new formula to replace the lurching pursuit of profit: “Sufficient Plenitude.” Enough really can be enough, that is. A heresy? Not to students of the human body, who know that optimum health is not achieved by ever-greater consumption and activity, but by functioning within certain dynamic parameters of diet and exercise, work and leisure. So too with the corporation, whose core objective should not be the amassing of good numbers, but the creation and management of abundance. Read on and you will discover in The Garage: the Four Plenteous Attitudes, the Six False Missions . . .

Where these words come from I have no idea. Like the rest of the book, which I wrote over ten months, dictating for two hours before bed in a succession of identical suites whose regulation layouts and amenities allowed me to work undistracted, without thinking, the preface feels like a gift, a transcribed dream. What this means for its value, I don’t know. I fear sometimes that the book is just the overflow of a brain so overstuffed with jargon that it’s spontaneously sloughing off the excess. I’ve allowed myself to reread it only once, and some of the ideas felt foreign to me, with no connection to how I actually operate. Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.

Art Krusk’s directions guide me through the foothills into the smoke, which smells like burning tires. I know Art moved to a golf course recently, but it’s hard to imagine green fairways on these brown mounds. Where does the water come from? It’s a sin. The golf culture, which I’ve had ample chances to join, draws its allure, I’m convinced, from wastefulness, from the lavish imbalance between its massive inputs—acreage, labor, fertilizer, machines—and its nonexistent output. Sad. The few times I’ve played the game, I’ve come away feeling like an ecological glutton.

I reach a gatehouse manned by an old woman so flayed by the sun that her skin is like a bat’s wing, all pigmentless gray tissue and thready veins. I state my name and she consults her clipboard.

“Art said go on up, the house is open. He had an errand.”

“When will he be back?”

“He tore out of here an hour ago. Don’t know. Try to drive slowly and watch out for the carts. A lot of our residents won’t hear you coming.”

The development is unfinished, with heaps of sand along its noodle-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. With so many tiny lanes and dead-end byways, the developer ran out of normal street names. I take a left on Lassie Drive and curve around right on Paul Newman Avenue. The houses (“Starting in the mid $200s,” according to a billboard) ape many styles, the most popular being a sort of Greco-ranch thing combining flat tile roofs with stocky columns. Art’s house is among the more elaborate models, with a fresh sod lawn whose seams still show and a faux-marble fountain of dancing cupids. For someone in his predicament, it’s offensive. His restaurants send half of Nevada to the ER and the man builds a palace in Mafia Moderne.

I’m tempted to leave a stinging note and return to the airport. Cutting Art adrift would let me build in crucial extra hours to my overloaded schedule. I could buy a thesaurus and touch up The Garage. I could get to a gym and tone my flabby lats. ISM would understand—Art’s a small client and a chronic late payer—but I have to consider MythTech’s feelings, too. If it’s true that they’re auditioning me from afar, I have to behave impeccably this week. Plus, I like Art. He’s crude, but he’s a searcher.

I dial the credit card people on my mobile and wander behind the house to the pool, a free-form blue pond with an artificial island and two stray golf balls lying on the bottom, looking like undissolved Alka-Seltzer tablets. My call is passed from computer to computer and then to a person who only sounds like one.

“Where are you presently located?” she asks.

“Nevada. Reno.”

“Did you make any large purchases last Friday?”

“That’s why I’m calling. You cut my credit off.”

“Who am I speaking to?”

I lose my temper. “I’m out here in the middle of a business trip, totally dependent on your card, adhering to our agreement in good faith—”

The woman adjusts her tone and talks me down. She explains that for the past few days someone has been moving from state to state, ringing up major charges on my account: fifteen hundred dollars in a Salt Lake City electronics store, two hundred to a national teleflorist. The purchases didn’t quite suit my customer profile, so the bank froze my card. The latest charge appeared last Saturday: four hundred dollars in a Texas western store.

That one was mine. The boots. I tell the woman.

“You’re certain you’re in Reno now?”

“I’m here.”

“And you didn’t send flowers last Thursday? By telephone?”

I stand at the edge of the pool, confused and spooked. Ordering flowers for my mother’s birthday has been on my to-do list for a week; I even picked out an arrangement from an ad in August’s Horizons. But did I send them? Nothing.

“Where, to what state, did the flowers go?” I ask.

“Our information isn’t that detailed.”

“That’s one sentimental thief.”

“We see it all, sir.”

I’ve read about this: identity theft, it’s called. They grab your data, your history, your files. They duplicate your economic self. They scan your signature and forge ID cards and head out into the world under your name to gorge on DVD players, fur coats. The damage can be extensive, requiring months for the victim to clear up and undo. He has to work backwards along the chain of fraud, reclaiming his reputation, his good name. But maybe I’m panicking. Maybe my case is simpler. Maybe some crook just found an old receipt in the trash can of an airport deli.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” the woman says. “You still have the card in your possession?”

“Yes.” My life on the defensive has begun. “But I wasn’t in Utah last week.”

“Where were you?”

I’m thinking. My fast-forward functions, but my reverse is stuck. I can’t even remember when I started forgetting things.

“Who else knows your schedule?”

“Assistant. Travel agent.”

“Is she trustworthy?”

“He. How would I know? Let’s bottom-line this: how soon can you send a replacement card?”

“Immediately. Where should it go?”

“Ontario, California. Send it to Homestead Suites.”

“That’s a hotel?”

“Where are you, anyway?”

“Grand Forks, North Dakota.”

“It’s a chain of executive lodging facilities.”

I’m still on the line with the woman when Art shows up, dressed for comfort in a black mesh tank top and a pair of clingy runner’s shorts that graphically mold his chunky, big man’s crotch. He looks like a wilted circus muscleman. His hair is longer than I remember—it must have been tied up when I last saw him. It falls to below his shoulders, a lush gray fan. I’ve seen such hair on female Christian rockers and always found it intriguing, but not on Art.

He signals me to take my time and busies himself with a telescopic pool tool, vacuuming bits of debris from the water and dragging the golf balls to the shallow end, where he wades in, bends over, and retrieves them, then tosses them over his fence back onto the course as if he were hurling grenades at the Nazis. He seems to be at odds with his new setup, seeing only its shortcomings and flaws. People in their fifties shouldn’t change homes. My parents never recovered from their dream house in a subdivision east of town, where they moved just before my father lost his gas trucks. The Jacuzzi embarrassed them, though they thought they’d like it. The surplus bedrooms made my father blush.

I pocket my phone and join Art at a table shaded by a Pepsi logo umbrella speckled with gray ash. He’s been pilfering from his restaurants—a bad sign. A black, volcanic-looking rock holds down a rain-warped fishing magazine and a stack of ads for Reno escort services—the sort of flyers old men hand out on street corners, that get carried a block before they’re crumpled and tossed.

“You’ll note the lack of a woman’s touch,” Art says. “Coquilla left Saturday morning. Want a drink?”

“I’m sorry. For good?”

“Well, you can’t have a drink. She took all the glasses and stuff. I hope for good.”

“Why would you hope that, Art? You love your wife.”

“She did it, Ryan. She left a note, confessing. That’s where I was just now: at my fancy lawyer’s, turning over the evidence. I’m sick. See this spot on my shirt? It’s ulcer puke. You believe this crap? I gave her everything. Fiesta Brava was hers. Her recipes. Does the rot always come from within, or what? Enlighten me. Is that like some great truth of history? Mixing up bacteria in hamburger and feeding it to kids in paper hats.”

“That’s a disturbing picture. You must be devastated.”

“The shit I took this morning was purple. Purple!”

“What was her motive?”

“You’re the expert. Guess.”

Art’s right: I already know why his dear wife, with her formal, immigrant’s English and shy good looks, torpedoed his dream. I know because I’ve watched Art, studied him. In the kitchen, training bumbling teens to deep-fry tortilla chips in bubbling lard. In the dining room, booming out ethnic folk songs for howling two-year-olds in booster seats. In the office, pep-talking his servers on the importance of honest tip reporting. Every business, at bottom, is a wish, and Art’s wish was for the world to rest secure inside his strong embrace. He didn’t boss or push people, he fathered them, but the hidden message of his largesse was that the world was a danger to itself, weak and self-defeating and in error. Even the way he pushed his patrons to eat, instructing his servers to refill diners’ plates without being asked, was unwittingly belittling. Art’s restaurants were fun and affordable but smothering, and though every dining room featured a full-length painting of Coquilla dressed in native regalia and offering steaming bowls of beans and rice, Fiesta Brava was really about him, his heart and potency. His wife’s rebellion was inevitable. A man who confuses his business with his family risks losing both, in my experience.

But Art doesn’t wait for me to answer his question.

“She did it because she couldn’t stand the smell,” he says. “The cooking odors. Can you say ‘change of life’? The question is: do I prosecute?”

“Of course not. Liquidate and move on. Enjoy your golf course. Sooner or later, you’ll get a new idea and then you can call me and we’ll hash it out. Don’t force things, though. And rule out hospitality.”

“Why’s that?”

“You give people more than they want. You cut their air off.”

Art drums his fingers on the tinny tabletop and little cinders skitter over the edge. I shift my weight to say I’m on my way. I didn’t count on a crisis intervention, and Art isn’t in the mood to face hard truths, nor should he have to just now. He never liked my ideas much, anyway; he retained me on the advice of his attorney, a celebrity litigator I met in Airworld and now hear has been disbarred for escrow monkeyshines.

“You hungry, Ryan?”

“I ate on the flight in. I’m truly sorry about Coquilla, Art. I’m guessing she has the children.”

“They’re hers to keep. She’s got them thoroughly brainwashed anyhow. They think that because I’m not Baha’i I’m worthless.”

“Coquilla is Baha’i? I never knew.”

“They’re tough to spot. They blend in with all the other groups.”

I stand and extend my hand.

“You going somewhere? I thought I owned your time tonight.”

“No charge. I’ll tell ISM to go light on you. You’re broke.”

Art folds his thick arms. “So this is how you operate. Guy loses everything, you’re out the door. Well, I need company, Ryan. Look at me. Either you’re hitting the town with me tonight and matching me drink for drink or I’m going to tell that guy who called last week that Bingham’s a dip, he doesn’t finish the job.”

“Who called you, Art?”

“He was checking references. Whoever it is you’re looking to go to work for.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That my wife just left me, but I’ll get back to you once I’ve blown my brains out. Does All-Star Steaks sound good? I booked a table. We can take your car or mine, it doesn’t matter.”

“Did this caller sound real or did you smell a prank? One of the guys I work with is a kidder.”

“What would you say are my chances of reopening under a new name? Not Mexican—something more sanitary. Middle Eastern?”

“That’s not as big a difference as you think. If you insist on staying in hospitality, people are having good luck with donuts now. There’s a group from down south that’s going national, but you have to co-advertise, and the buy-in’s steep.”

“No presence in Nevada yet?”

“I doubt it.”

“I tried donuts back in ’69. They petered out in the seventies. What changed?”

“These are the mysteries.”

“No one knows? Come on.”

“Maybe they know in Omaha. I’ll see.”

In science, an experiment is meaningless unless its outcome is repeatable. I feel the same way about restaurants and eating out. Unless a dish can be made to taste as good no matter where it’s prepared, LA or Little Rock, it doesn’t entice me. I like successful formulas. I like a meal that’s been tested and perfected, allowing me to order and relax, knowing the chef won’t use me as a guinea pig for his new fruit salsa or what have you. In fact, I prefer establishments that don’t need chefs because their training programs are so deft that anyone off the street can run the kitchen. That’s why I’m glad that Art chose All-Star Steaks. It’s one of the five or six chains that I depend on, whose systematic comforts always satisfy. Glass-cased sports memorabilia line the walls and the waitresses flounce around in shorts and jerseys as though they’ve just risen from bed with athlete boyfriends. They’ll have a lawsuit over that, eventually, but until that time, I’m theirs.

We choose a booth of orange textured vinyl stamped with various major league insignias. My challenge is to find a way to ditch Art without endangering my MythTech reference. Three hours from now there’s a flight to Ontario, whose local Homestead is granting double miles due to a construction inconvenience. Two nights there will help me recapture some lost momentum.

We order two of All-Star’s signature cocktails: jumbo martinis garnished with cherry tomatoes. To slip away, I’ll need to get Art tipsy without going sloppy myself. I’m good at this. One technique is to fill my cheek with alcohol, pretend to swallow, then spit into a napkin during a mock sneeze. Also, if the drinks are clear, I can secretly dump them in my water glass, then carelessly knock it over once it’s full. I’m slightly ashamed that I’m not man enough to declare my limits as a drinker, but since no one has ever caught me at my tricks, it’s a private shame, easy to deny, like the way I sometimes leave pairs of soiled boxer shorts in hotel room trash cans for the maid.

Art gnaws a breadstick. He’s breaking my heart today. Men venture everything when they start a business, not just money. Take my father’s case. Before he went into propane, he fixed machinery, making field calls for a John Deere dealer. Sometimes, during the harvest, he’d work all night, driving with his tools from farm to farm, rescuing fouled combines and frozen balers. He took caffeine pills to stay awake and lived on chocolate milk. Then one morning he told us he’d had enough and went to bed for a week. My mother sobbed. What finally brought him downstairs was a phone call informing him of a business loan approval. He put on a tie for the first time since his wedding and walked downtown to sign the documents. When he got back, in a new GMC diesel whose doors and tailgate were stenciled with his name, he was a different person, more distinct. The effect lasted years. He walked in his own spotlight.

The steaks are taking longer than they should, considering that we both ordered them rare. While we wait, Art dissects my credit card difficulties, displaying a knowledge of fraud I’m not surprised by. What I’m up against, he theorizes, is not a lone criminal but a far-flung gang.

“The way they work, they steal your info and only have a day or two to use it, so they set up a rolling purchase schedule. Simultaneous charges in different towns would raise red flags, so they space their buys apart, which makes the computers think you’re on a trip. People spend more money when they’re traveling, so when the charges start to pile up, the software that’s supposed to catch the pattern doesn’t kick in right away.”

“You know all this . . . ?”

Art eats his cherry tomato, blocking his mouth with a napkin to catch the juice spurt. “There’s things you never knew about my restaurants. They had a cash side that wasn’t on the books. The standard shenanigans. Everybody does them.”

“I guess I’m sorry to hear that. Cash corrupts, though.”

“I wanted to make it honestly. I tried. I read all those books, the ones by guys like you. Overcoming No. Get Real, Get Rich.”

“Don’t judge the good stuff by the trash,” I say.

“Visualization. Time analysis. Quality Cubes. I tried all kinds of crap. That thing where you get all your workers in one room and sit completely quiet for eight hours, then write down your thoughts and put them in a box that you never open. All those tricks. And still I was losing money. Losing people. Getting certified letters from state commissions saying so-and-so filed a complaint because you fired her for being queer, when the truth was she had her fingers in the till. And all the inspections. Day and night inspections. Your handicapped toilet needs moving—a thousand bucks. That table’s blocking an exit, pay this fine. Health cops, fire cops, tax cops. Total hell. Everyone poking you with his little pitchfork.”

“In management we call them ‘psychic costs.’ ” I glare at the waitress to hurry her along.

“Ryan, you don’t know. I’m sorry, you just don’t. Why is our food late, you’re wondering? I’ll tell you. Because the lowlife overseeing the kitchen ducked out an hour ago to score some dope and got knifed in the arm behind the Stockman’s Club, forcing the owner to call in some old wino he fired last week for coughing up green phlegm into the coleslaw. Human Resources? Try human refuse.”

To calm Art, I confess to being a bystander who’s never actually run a business himself. It’s too late, though, Art’s off, and even the arrival of a plate-filling T-bone smothered in onion nuggets and floating in au jus can’t stem his bitterness. If this mood hangs on, I don’t dare leave—he’ll be on the line to MythTech first thing tomorrow, slandering me to the skies. My only hope is that he’ll collapse in the next half hour or so. The water trick, due to Art’s keen gaze, is out, though, and I’ve already used the napkin trick. I’ll pay the bartender to pour a bomb and make mine a tonic water.

“Full bladder,” I say.

“Me too.”

I’m startled—joint toilet trips just don’t happen with men. Art is even lonelier than I thought.

The side-by-side urinals are filled with ice cubes, a touch I’ve never had properly explained to me. Holding himself with one hand, Art tips his head back and shakes out his Samson locks. I clench. Can’t pee.

“Let’s hit the Mustang. It’s a rip-off joint, but they fly in their girls from the leading beach resorts. My steak’s a joke. It’s like chewing a catcher’s glove.”

“Mine’s fine. Let’s stay for another drink or two.”

“Can’t now. I’ve got a picture in my head.”

Art covers the meal with two fifties from his money clip. There are money-clip men and there are wallet men. Money-clip men overtip for even poor service, carry only the freshest currency, and they don’t end an evening until they’ve spent their roll. I’m stuck in Reno. The only way to make Ontario would be to fly to LAX and drive, but I don’t feel up to freeway traffic.

The lights of the Strip rake our faces with bars of color. A cowboy in the doorway of a pawnshop flicks a lit cigar butt at our feet that skips into the street beneath a limo with vanity license plates: LTHL DOS. I step on a wet wad of chewing gum, remove it, then promptly step on another one that’s stickier. A casino barker costumed as a leprechaun but far too stout for the outfit’s emerald tights hands us coupons good for two free spins on something called the Wheel O’ Dreams. We pass.

“An hour. That’s all I have left in me this evening.”

“That’s fine,” Art says. “I’ll probably end up in the VIP room, tied to a water pipe with a sequined thong.”

I venture a focus word I’ve had on file. Use them or lose them. “You old sybarite.”

The club is set up as a lounge, no stage, no spotlights, just a maze of tables and leather sofas packed in so tight that the dancers and cocktail girls have to step sideways, brushing hips and nipples, when they pass each other on their rounds. Art tunnels ahead of me through the blue smoke to a spot in the back screened off by potted trees with leaves the shape and size of human hands. We sit, and I feel like a hunter in a blind, hidden but with a full view of the field. The women are a cut above, Art’s right; they look cool-to-the-touch, both healthy and intelligent. I can see Art growing anxious as one approaches. He thumbs a couple of breath mints off a roll and chews them hard to release the active ingredients.

Me, I’m not tempted. As a younger man I made the mistake of talking to a stripper, in depth and at length, about her finances. Her income shocked me. It was double mine. She claimed to be saving for college, but when I pressed her I learned that she didn’t even have a bank account and supported not one but two delinquent boyfriends. I didn’t feel sorry for her, I felt insulted. There I was, the sort of clean achiever this beautiful girl should consider marrying, but instead she was shaking me down for twenties to lavish on my Darwinian inferiors.

The girl settles onto Art’s lap and starts her act, gripping the back of his chair to brace herself and arching her lovely, articulated spine. On her shoulder a tattooed daisy spreads its petals. I look away, but Art wants to keep on talking.

“I have an idea if I get out of restaurants. It’s like a record or book club, but with power tools. April, you get a cordless drill. May, a reciprocal saw. If you don’t want it, you have to ship it back. You know how that works. People can’t be bothered. The stuff piles up. It’s automatic billing, so they’re screwed.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m leaving ISM, Art. I might not be available to help you.”

“Just give me hope. —Not so hard there, hon. I’ll rupture.”

I’m duty-bound to restore Art’s optimism, to point him toward new horizons. I have a thought. At GoalQuest on Thursday I’m meeting Tony Marlowe, one of the industry’s highest-earning motivators, who I knew through some friends before he got so huge. He’d come up through the speed-reading racket in California, where he played all the planned retirement communities, but left to build team skills in greater Silicon Valley. The man’s pure nitro, a self-made high school dropout whose private sessions turn CEOs to jelly. A few hours with Marlowe, on me—that’s what I’ll offer.

“I’m writing something on a card here, Art. Don’t lose it. This is a onetime-only deal.”

I wedge the card under an ashtray, and then I spot him: the TV financial advisor from the flight being worked over by a skinny redhead not twenty feet from my table. His hair is different, blow-dried into waves, but I recognize the noble forehead. I swallow and there’s a crackling in my ears as the girl wraps one leg around his crooked old back and bends him at the waist into her chest. His head flops like a corpse’s. His mouth drops open. There’s a flash of gray tongue, of fillings. I shut my eyes. When I open them, its worse. The girl’s fingers are buried in his wiry sideburns and she’s kissing his glossy bald spot, licking it. One of his hands hangs limp behind her ass, stuffed with enough cash to last the night.

I watch the old man being jostled and wrung dry. The sensation is gyroscopic, with spinning modules. There’s shock and disappointment, but that’s the least of it. It’s my confidence in Airworld that’s been undermined, my faith in the ethical bargain between passengers. If I hadn’t come to the Mustang Club tonight, my memory of our moment on the plane would have endured unchallenged and ever-golden. His mild, pious eyes. His pinstriped probity as he entertained my humble plea and sermonized on investing with a conscience. What a sham, and how demoralizing. The way I’ve lived, the way I’ve moved around, I’ve not had the luxury of double-checking what I see and hear. I have to trust. If a man who says he’s a doctor hears me cough and tells me I should go on antibiotics, I go on antibiotics. Of course I do. In Airworld honesty carries no penalty and deception has no upside. Or so I thought.

Chase Manhattan, solid as Gibraltar. Lutheran bishops. Evil NBC. This from a man who pays teenage runaways to do the watusi on his wizened johnson.

I turn to Art’s partner, who’s leaving with her money. “That old guy across the way—is he a regular?”

“I’ve seen him a couple of times. You want a show?”

I shake my head and she jiggles off into the crowd.

“You like that bird’s girl?” Art says. His nose is running. He’s fiddling with his trousers under the table. “She’s taken, it looks like.”

“That man she’s with,” I say. “Famous Wall Street bigwig, Mr. Dow. He gave me a stock idea on the plane today. I phoned it in when I landed. Six thousand bucks.”

Art watches him for a moment. “He’s hard core. His girl there’s a twisted sister. Toilet Terry. She uses guys as fire hydrants.”

“Stop.”

“She keeps an apartment over by the Hilton. She gets top dollar. Vinyl sheets, the works. If they leave through the side exit, he’s going home with her. I’ll bet he drinks it. I know a dancer here who’d tell you everything. Pay her enough and she’ll get you Polaroids.”

Art thinks I crave information about this fellow, but his secret life bores me. I’m not the bloodhound type. That’s why detective novels are lost on me. Somebody did it—that’s all I need to know. The who, the how, and the why are just details. To my mind, there’s nothing drearier than a labyrinth. It’s just a structure whose center takes time to find, but if you make an effort, you’ll find it. So? The only mysteries that interest me are, Will I land on time? Will the pilots strike? There’s enough uncertainty just moving through space.

I glance back at Wall Street, who’s sideways in his lounge chair, his head thrown back over one arm as the girl rides him. Soon, he’ll be looking right at me, upside down.

“What style of donuts?” Art asks me.

“I haven’t tasted them.”

“You up for the VIP room?”

“I have to sleep. Come to GoalQuest and meet this Marlowe. You’ll thank me, Art. And give me a nice reference if that guy calls.”

“I made that one up to get you to come out here. I was going to off myself tonight.”

“Sheer fabrication?”

“I’ve been drunk for days. I think it was.”

There—Wall Street sees me now. He seems to frown; it’s hard to read his features in reverse, with his lips where his eyebrows ought to be. Our eyes mix it up for a moment. Does he fear blackmail? I could bribe Art’s connection for all the dirt, but why? A mystery stated can be more powerful than a mystery solved, and no matter what she might tell me about this fake, he’ll never again be this vividly corrupt to me. And Art lied, too. At least he had a need.

I push back my chair and stand to leave, still watching Wall Street hang there like a possum. I used to think there was a code up there. Not true. Well, let them all feast on each other; I’ll be out soon. I’ll look up at their contrails and I won’t miss it. Ever. Though it might be nice if some of them missed me.