Up in the Air

five

homestead Suites has three classes of rooms, their specifications the same from Maine to Texas. I like to stay in the mid-range L-shaped rooms. You could fill me with morphine and pluck out both my eyes and I’d still be able to dim the lights, place calls, and locate an outlet for my noise machine.

Not in Reno, though. This room is different. When I go to hang my jacket in the closet, feeling bloated and slow from too much beef and booze, I open the door on a shrunken, substandard bathroom lacking the usual double toilet-roll holder and equipped with a shower but no tub. Even worse, instead of a lamp beside the desk and twin swing-out sconces flanking the king bed, there’s a bare, fluorescent ceiling strip bright enough to interrogate a gang lord. And just one bar of soap: deodorant soap. Deodorant soap for the face! They’re kidding me.

I call downstairs from bed but no one answers. I’m not so much angry as out of sorts, confused. Even the mattress seems tilted and out of true, while the blanket is one of those foamy nylon jobs that offer a trace of warmth but no security. I consider stripping the curtains off their rods for added insulation, but I need them to block out Reno’s all-night glare. It’s a madhouse out there, and louder by the minute as America’s seniors seek out cheap prime rib and six-figure jackpots on the nickel slots. I turn on the air conditioner to “high fan” and tuck myself in like a bum under a newspaper.

At the end of the bed the TV screen pulses blue. Still hungry for punishment, I click around and manage to catch the last few minutes of Wall Street’s daily show. Though he must have taped it in Reno this afternoon, the set features a lit-up New York skyline. It’s the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We’ll look at clocks and we won’t believe the hands. They’ll forecast sun but we’ll pack our slickers anyway.

Feeling a need to halt the swirl, to stabilize, I dial Great West’s toll-free mileage hotline to check the running tally on my HandStar. I’m wading through the lengthy options menu when my mobile rings on the nightstand.

It’s my mother.

“Where am I reaching you, Ryan?”

She feels this matters. My mother has a developed sense of place; her mental map of the country is zoned and shaded according to her ideas about each region’s moral tenor and general demographics. If I’m in Arizona, she assumes that I’ve spent my day among pensioners and ranch hands and driven past the Grand Canyon at least once. If I’m in lowa, sensible, pleasant lowa, I’m eating well, thinking clearly, and making friends. Though my mother gets around in her RV and ought to be more sophisticated by now about our American psychedelic rainbow, her talent for turning new experiences into supporting evidence for her prejudices overrides all else. Once, while gassing up in Alabama, a state she considers brutal, poor, and racist, she got to talking with a black attorney driving a convertible Mercedes. The man paid for his gas with a hundred-dollar bill and was forced to accept, in change, a roll of quarters and stacks of ones and fives. Instead of noting the man’s prosperity, my mother seized on the pile of coins and bills—an act of humiliation, she decided, by the station’s white clerk.

“I’m in Portland,” I say. Nevada would worry her. “It’s awfully late. Is everything okay?”

If it’s not, she won’t tell me—not at first. The worse the news, the harder she’ll work to counter it with cheerful tidings from the Busy Bee Cafe.

“Did you hear about Burt’s medal?” The Lovely Man. “Our congressman finally cut through the red tape and it looks like the Navy sees things our way now. They might do a ceremony at Fort Snelling.”

“Great.” I cross to the mini-bar for a pick-me-up, set the down the receiver, grab a beer, twist off the cap, and get back on the line, confident that I haven’t missed a thing.

“It only took thirty years,” my mother is saying. “It all came down to the definition of ‘combat.’ ”

“How’s the wedding coming along? Excited?”

Throat clearing, nose blowing. I’ve hit on it.

“We spent all day stripping thorns off yellow roses. My hands are all scratched. I’ll need gloves for the reception. Julie’s gone missing. They’re cabbage roses—beautiful.”

It’s out, and she’d hang up now if she could. Now it’s my job to press her for details. So she can feel the pain all over again and I can fear I caused it.

“How long’s she been gone?”

“Ten, eleven hours.”

“Are she and Keith fighting?”

“No.”

“You have to talk, Mom. This isn’t a cross-examination. Talk.”

“Keith is here. Should I put Keith on?”

“Please.”

“What time are you getting here Friday? I need a flight number. There’s a special line that I can call to find out if you’re on time. I need that number, though. Our weather’s been crazy, hail and thunderstorms, so there might be delays.”

“I’ll find it. Give me Keith.”

My future brother-in-law’s Minnesota accent—the one so many comedians make fun of and which I don’t hear in myself, though others do—prevents me from judging his level of concern. “Ryan, I’ll get to the point here: she took off. No, we’re not arguing. It’s about her job. She lost two dogs this morning at the rescue farm. They jumped the fence and ate some gopher poison and pretty much died in her arms, from what we hear. It got ugly, I guess: they coughed up lots of blood. She split in her van and no one’s heard from her.”

“She hasn’t called Kara? She usually calls Kara.”

“We think someone saw her in Rochester. A cop.”

“Has Julie been eating?”

“Like a horse.”

“I doubt that.”

“It was the dogs, I swear. They’d been abused. Two Border collies with collars grown into their necks. Should I be worried? She’s done this in the past, right? Your mom says this is typical.”

She’s wrong. Yes, my sister runs when she’s unhappy, but there’s a novel element in play here: Julie’s attachment to the poisoned animals. This is a girl who assumes all bonds are temporary, who’s famously well-defended against loss. Her divorces were strangely painless; she skipped away from them, demanding no money, no car keys, nothing. The weekend after our father’s funeral, she sang in and won a karaoke contest at a supper club. She took the job at the rescue farm not out of pity or tenderheartedness, but because the vet in charge was a family friend who didn’t hold her history against her.

“You call me as soon as you hear from her,” I say.

“Kara’s flying up from Utah tonight. She thinks Julie’s probably crashed at some motel, crying things out.”

“This isn’t wedding jitters? That farm must lose animals every other day.”

“I know what you’re saying. Your sister’s changing, Ryan. Stuff affects her now. Pray for her, okay?”

“I never stop,” I say. “Put Mom back on.”

I finish my beer while I wait. It tastes like mucilage, that glue that’s used to paste photos into albums.

“Is it raining there?” my mother says.

“It never rains. It’s the desert. About this dog story: I don’t buy it, Mom.”

“Portland’s not the desert.”

“I’m in Nevada. This wedding is being rammed down Julie’s throat. Of course she’s AWOL. Can’t you people see that? This house Kara picked for her, the whole arrangement, it’s like you’re hanging Julie in some museum.”

“You fibbed to me,” she says. “Where are you, Ryan? You’re probably not in Nevada, either, are you? You’re probably in Des Moines, a hundred miles from here, and you just can’t be bothered to come help out.”

“You know that’s wrong, Mom. Whenever I’m that close to you, I’m there. The force field still works. Do we always have to fight?”

“Kara says you got fired.”

“Well, she knows better. You made that up.”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“I need people not to make things up this week.”

“You told me you were in Oregon.”

“Fight fire with fire. Can we go back to Julie?”

“It’s you that worries us. She knows what she’s running away from.”

“That’s so profound. Someone’s been reading a major woman novelist.”

“I don’t like having to wonder where I’m reaching you. It puts me at a disadvantage, Ryan. For all I know, you’re in Japan and it’s tomorrow. I’ll see you on Friday. We’re tying up the line.”

“I love you, okay? No matter what you think. Congratulate Burt and keep me posted on Julie.”

“How long are you coming for? Just the weekend? Longer?”

“I’m going in segments. I’ll get to that one soon. Are you crying?”

“I’m crying a little.”

“Me, too.”

“I know.”

I pour a glass of water to drink in bed but it tastes of chlorine, so I collect some change and step out into the hall to find a soda. Paper menus with early-morning breakfast orders hang from the doors, and I read a few of them. Coffee, juice, and muffins—they’re all the same. If the doors were to become transparent suddenly, the people behind them would all be the same, too: asleep with the news on, their bags beside their beds, their next day’s outfits hanging on the desk chairs. We travel alone, but together we’re an army.

The Coke machine isn’t where it ought to be, in a nook by the stairwell. I’m disappointed in Homestead—they’ve let things slide. The soul of their business is predictability, and if I were consulting for them I’d yank the name off any unit caught screwing with the blueprint.

I walk down a floor and resume my search. I normally avoid caffeine at night, but the news about Julie will keep me up. I’m half rooting for her to stay away, I realize. Wherever you are, my sister, just sit tight. Hug your pillow. Don’t answer the door. This Keith’s a good man, and Kara wants the best for you, but this is not their life. Just call me, will you? Do you have my number? Call me, Julie.

At last I find a glowing red Coke machine and drop in my quarters. The can thunks into the slot. I heard once that if you immerse a penny in a cola drink the coin will melt. I could use some good strong solvents now.

“You’re here,” a voice says.

It’s Alex, from the plane. My fingers start to button my open dress shirt.

“What a surprise,” she says. “Wow.” She’s in pajamas, a baggy pair of pink flannels that smells of dryer sheets. She’s smaller than I remember, slim and kittenish, her hair clipped into a haphazard ball. Primed by the strip club, my nerves swell up with lust, and I take a step back to disengage our auras.

I ask her about her cat.

“He’s at a vet. You were right, he shouldn’t have come. I overtranquilized. I’m thinking I’ll return him to the breeder. I don’t have any business owning pets.”

“I’m sorry. Hard lesson.”

“How’d your meeting go?”

“No casualties. Your thing?”

“They raised a hundred K. The bitch gave a speech about Medicare. Big thrill. I goofed on the food, though. There’s half a cow left over.”

The light of the Coke machine rouges Alex’s face. Down the hall, a door cracks open and a hand reaches out with a menu. We hush our voices. The building slips deeper and deeper into its dreams as my eyes slide down to Alex’s bare toes, curling and uncurling as we chat. She polished them once, but the color has chipped away except for a few red flecks around the cuticles. It’s a look I remember from high school and I like it.

It seems obvious, suddenly, what’s going to happen between us; the only question is how. To move from the hallway straight to one of our rooms would be to forget we’re grown-ups, not college kids. We have standards, guidelines, rules of thumb. If we want to maintain our self-respect as wary, wounded, thirtyish survivors, we’ll have to go somewhere else and then come back here.

We agree on a plan that only seems spontaneous; in fact, it’s as structured as a NASA countdown, designed to land us in bed by one o’clock so we can make our early-morning flights. We’ll dress, meet up in the lobby, and cross the street to the Gold Rush Casino. We pad off down the hallway to our rooms for a quick gargle and splash of soapy water. I can almost hear the guests’ sedatives kicking in as I pass their doors.

I wear my boots. For once, they’re on my side. The angle of the heels and soles aligns my spine and firms my chest and shoulders. The problem is my khakis. They’ve lost their shape. I’m a hasty packer and hard on clothes; I roll them into tubes instead of folding them.

Alex dresses mannishly and simply in jeans and a V-neck black T-shirt. And a watch. I know the maker—I outcounseled four men there—and I’m sorry she wasted her money. It’s ISM’s fault. To help the company move its wares upmarket, we urged it to license the prestigious name of a dead European industrial designer. The inferior guts of the timepieces, which are sold alongside Rolexes and Guccis in airport duty-free shops, didn’t change, but their prices quadrupled. Poor Alex fell for it.

We link arms. The street is still crowded with hopeful oldies toting buckets of change and plastic drink cups. The important thing is to stay casual, stay light. We’re repeating ourselves—we’ve played this scene with others, and always with the same melancholy outcome—but we don’t have to draw attention to the fact, nor do we have to deny it. We’ll come through this. We stop on the sidewalk in front of the casino and count out our stake: four hundred dollars in twenties, all of which we agree to put at risk.

The craps tables are packed. We try roulette. A band plays in a corner—a cover combo specializing in stodgy classic rock. I buy two hundred dollars worth of chips for each of us and note our different styles in stacking them. Alex divides hers into four piles, while I build a tower.

“Red?”

“Whatever you like. Just don’t bet a single number,” I say.

Ten minutes later she’s richer, though not by much, and I’m on my way to doubling my buy-in. Make no mistake: good luck is always significant and earning is no substitute for winning. We’ve made the right choice in coming out tonight; the wheel confirms it. I raise my average wager and hazard a high-odds corner bet, which hits.

A cocktail waitress arrives with our free drinks, two light beers, and I tip her with a chip. This always feels good, for some reason. Mr. Big.

“I have a confession,” Alex says.

“You’re married.”

“I know you. We’ve met before. I heard you speak.”

I look at her, keeping one eye on the wheel. To make the ball go where it needs to I have to coach it.

“Three years ago. At a seminar in Texas. You talked on career development, remember? I think the event was called Prepare for Power.”

It’s black—I’ve won again. “I’ve done a few of those. They keep me upbeat for my real job. Shafting people.”

“I went with a girlfriend. She dragged me. You were good. I was a mess at the time, completely drained. I’d just broken up with a famous businessman who’d done a real number on my self-esteem. I sat at the back of the room because I’m shy, but I felt like you were talking to me personally. The line I remember was ‘Change before they change you.’ Autonomy, right? It’s all about autonomy.”

I never give the same speech twice, so I don’t recall. I’m flattered, though. My fingertips warm as I restack my chips.

“You just dropped into a seminar one day? No reason? Just curious?”

“Total happenstance. We’re winning, aren’t we?”

“I’m going to double up.”

All my good luck has begun to flow together—I’ve met an admirer and won a bundle—which probably means it’s time that I cashed out. The odds are a funny thing. When they run with me, especially after they haven’t for a while, I can feel like I’m finally getting what I’m worth and that chance has nothing to do with it. It’s justice. The universe is paying up at last. Moralists like my mother and big sister would view this as a dangerous delusion, but I’m part pagan—I believe in breakthroughs, in bursts of astrological beneficence. Things rise and fall, but at times they rise and rise.

“After we got off the plane today,” says Alex, “I asked myself why I didn’t say I knew you. It’s a character weakness. I like to hide and watch. In Texas you came off as pretty cocky, so maybe I was hoping you’d screw up.”

“It sounds like you had it out for me.”

“Not really. It’s just hard to admit that this stranger who gave some talk that struck me as sort of corny at the time and intellectually below my level actually set me straight and helped me grow.”

“You’re laying it on pretty thick. Fort Worth, you said?”

“You didn’t gaze out on the audience and notice me?”

“I keep my face in my notes when I speak publicly. I’d rather not see the assassin’s muzzle flash.”

“Assassin?”

“I wasn’t frank with you today. My main occupation is Career Transitions. You’re smart, so you can interpret. Terminations.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was a field. How much have you won? Can we stop now?”

“One more spin.”

“You’re pretty into this, aren’t you?”

Should I not be? To prove I can walk away, I slide my chips—all of them—onto red. And red it is. Alex follows me to the cashier’s cage, where the casino turns plastic into paper so later it can be turned back into plastic. The clerk counts out ten one-hundred-dollar bills, still stiff from the mint. We’re rich. Where now? The bar.

The drinkers, instead of looking at one another, stare down at the video poker monitors whose screens form the resting place for their drinks and coasters. Their eyeglasses flicker as their cards are played. The band plays “Radar Love,” stroking its guitars with all the passion of jailbirds shoveling gravel while wearing leg-irons.

“That was incredible,” Alex says. “It practically seemed illegal, what you did there.”

She’s off balance now. That was the point of my big bet, which would have been just as effective had I lost. We’re not in control, my sweet. It’s all a hunch.

“So how precisely did I help you grow?”

“You convinced me to go into business for myself. Plus, you sort of set me on a path. I had a strange childhood, not traumatic, exactly, but hurtful, uncertain. My father had two families. We knew this. He drove a truck. It happens sometimes. When he was gone, my mother fooled around, spent time in the bars. The arrangement worked for both of them. The problem was me. They had four lives between them, and I was always switching back and forth. A few times my dad even took me to Missouri, where his other kids lived. Their mother was a secretary, so they had more money than I did, and they were Catholic. I had to learn to blend, to mold myself.”

“Sounds like it. What a mess.”

“I pulled it off, though. I split myself into quarters. I adapted. Then suddenly I’m eighteen and on my own and my special talent isn’t relevant. I’m expected to be consistent, and I’m just not.”

“Someone usurped my identity,” I say.

“Pardon?”

“Usurped. It means ‘steal.’ ”

“I went to college.”

“My question is: if they charge things to my credit card, who gets the miles? I’ll bet they go to waste.”

“I was telling you something. I hadn’t finished yet.”

“I made an association. Go ahead.”

Alex pushes away her beer. “I’m angry now.”

“I thought I was amplifying a point you’d made.”

“Listen, can we get going? Flight at six.”

I’m reluctant to leave the noise and bustle. The casino holds out so many possibilities—my sister might even walk by, you never know—but in Alex’s room the script has fewer endings. Because if it’s true that she admires me, she won’t once we’re through. Or is that her plan? To get me undressed and close our stature gap. I don’t see much profit in this rendezvous. This Alex is full of schemes, as she’s admitted, but I’m happy here, with my winnings in cash, for once.

I let her lead me. Her room is smaller than mine, one price point down, and though she’s only been in it a few hours, she’s turned it into an atmospheric grotto. She’s draped a violet scarf over the desk lamp and set a pair of candles on the bureau, which she lights with wooden matches. Twin flames jump up. A stuffed velour unicorn, worn bare with hugs, lies on the bed beside an open book, and on top of the blanket she’s spread a mohair throw. To do this to a hotel room would never occur to me—I take them as they come, the way God made them.

“There’s a tape in my little player on the sill. Turn it on if you want. I need to wash my hands.”

I do as I’m told and out spills a mystic trickle of formless music—piano, bells, and strings—that sounds like it was recorded underwater. The scene is set for a séance, a tarot reading, and as always when I’m expected to relax, my shoulders seize. I’m not so sure I’m up to this.

Alex emerges in a hotel bathrobe. Her face is different—ruddier, less porcelain. She’s a farm girl, just in from watering the stock. Has she put on makeup or removed some?

“You’ve really made this place your own,” I say.

“I always try to warm things up a little. I miss my own bedroom, my stuff. I think we all do.”

I don’t comment. I let her think I’m human too.

“Take off those silly boots,” she says. “Sit down.”

The question is always how far to strip, how quickly. There must be books on this, with clever tips. I go down to my T-shirt and boxers, then peel the shirt off. No complaints, no stares.

“Lie down on the bed, on your stomach. I’ll massage you. Your body’s one big knot.”

She kneels and straddles my hips and strokes my neck. She twists the point of one knuckle in a sore spot. “The muscles store memories,” she says. She’s right. I’m carrying five-year-old Julie on my shoulders so she can see the sights at the State Fair. I head for the tent where the Ice Man is displayed—a wonder my father assures me is a rip-off, an animal hide or a taxidermied monkey. I buy two tickets, mount a few low steps, stand behind a partition, and look down. The frosty block of ice obscures the details, but it’s a body, wrinkled, dark, and hairy, curled on its side like a newborn calf. Convincing. Julie’s hands squeeze my skull and I feel a drip. She’s weeping. I twist to leave, but she holds me. My neck is wet. “It’s a her,” she says. “It’s a girl. They killed a girl.”

“Tender here?” Alex says.

“It is.”

“You’re shaky. Maybe this isn’t our night tonight.”

“I’m fine. My little sister trained as a masseuse.”

“Don’t flinch. I’m on an important pressure point.”

“She worked at the Minneapolis Athletic Club. She lasted a week. A man tried to assault her—the CFO of a major retail shoe chain. The cops threw away her complaint.”

“Where’s all this coming from?”

“My sister gave massages, I’m getting one. Does everything have to come from somewhere?”

“No.” She rocks a thumb in the spaces between my vertebrae. No memories there, just pain. A thousand plane seats.

“I followed you, Ryan. You mentioned this hotel. I was about to call your room tonight. Psycho, huh?”

“I’ve done those things myself.”

“Mostly I hoped we’d talk,” she says. “Just talk. I feel like your speech in Texas started something—a conversation. You haven’t heard my half, though. I took what you said there to heart. I lived it, Ryan. I wanted to tell you what happened, what I learned. I didn’t realize how tired we’d be. Too bad.”

“Not our evening.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I understand. I gambled too long.”

“A little bit. It’s fine. You’re running. You’re tense. It’s natural.”

“It’s a problem. My ex said I had a problem.” I let her rub me. “Where will you be on Thursday?”

“Home. Salt Lake.”

Las Vegas—she could fly there in an hour. I’d have to cancel my date for Thursday dinner, but I’ve been thinking of canceling it anyway. Milla Searle is her name. She’s a talent manager; she handles a string of casino magic acts. We were stranded together in Spokane last spring during an all-night blizzard that closed the airport and forced us to sleep on the Compass Club’s bare floor beside the big TV. It was a wartime romance—the huddled refugees, the bottled water passed out by the airline, the flashing blue lights of the snowplows through the windows. When our paths crossed again in Phoenix a month later, we reminisced for an hour about the storm, then fell silent. Nothing else in common.

“I want you to meet me in Las Vegas Thursday. I’ll fly you in. We’ll see a show. No gambling. We’ll be rested, we’ll talk. I have the whole night free.”

Alex lets go of me. I want her back. I reach around and touch her through the robe. She guides my fingers across her hip, no further.

“I saw your itinerary on your HandStar. I already checked on fares,” she says. “That scares you.”

“You sit next to someone you like, you have to act. People move fast. They’ll get away from you.”

Alex squeezes my hand and returns it to my side, then bears down on the base of my neck with open palms. “When you terminate someone, does that depress you, Ryan?”

“What’s depressing is getting used to it.”

“Do you wonder about the people afterwards?”

“You learn to try not to. You learn to trick your mind.”

She digs in with her thumbs again. Hurts, but may be good for me.

“You learn to leapfrog. Mentally.”

“Relax.”

six

i’m in the back row of the Reno airport chapel, sitting out a forty-minute delay with a fruit-topped frozen yogurt and this morning’s USA Today, when it happens again for the second time since August: I’m gripped by the feeling that I’ve just been paged. I missed the name, yet I’m certain it was mine. Someone wants me. Someone needs me. Now.

I fold the paper and put it in my briefcase and listen for the announcement to be repeated. Few people know that most airports have houses of worship: they tend to be white, high-ceilinged, scrubbed, and soundproof, imbued with a spirituality so general that even atheists can find refuge in them. They go unused, for the most part, except in times of emergency and terror—after a crash or when a war breaks out. They’re eerie little niches but also restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork. If someone arrives to pray or meditate while I’m using one, which seldom happens, I bow and pretend to be sunk in deep reflection as I fill out an expense report or rejigger my itinerary.

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

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

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

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

“The aircraft is leaving.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s our zone?”

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

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

“You write for a living?”

“Try.”

“For magazines?”

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

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

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

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

“Sir?”

I look to the side.

“Your coffee.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“California today. A little meeting.”

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

“No idea, Craig. We’re nearing twenty bucks now, with connection charges.”

“Wherever our Bingham goes, the money follows. Let the man plant his seeds. They’ll grow to oaks.”

“I’m thinking of putting Texas off.”

“Unwise. They’re laying waste to their whole top floor, those boys. There’s gold in that there lake of steaming gore.”

“I’ll see.”

“I just set my shiny balls to swinging. Isaac Newton, I thank you. My man in Travel told me he thinks you’re gunning for big round numbers at his and my and the janitor’s expense, but I said ‘Lay off, he’s earned it.’ Hey, I crapped today. My first since the operation.”

“What operation?”

“A hush-hush female problem. My teenage steroid abuse grew me a uterus. None of your damn beeswax. Important thing: I crapped.”

“That’s me, applauding.”

“That’s me, passing blood.”

“This is costing us, Craig.”

“It’s costing all America. It’ll show up in next year’s productivity figures.”

“Are you threatening to cut my travel off?”

“We missed that boat. That boat left port five years ago. We’re going to let you sail and sail and sail. Send a postcard if you ever get there.”

“I’m hanging up on you.”

“Good. I love that sound.”

The reporter looks over; he’s been spying too, it seems. “Your office?”

“For another couple days.”

“You say your profession is dismissing people?”

“That’s how it ended up, not how it started. I also give talks on discovering inner riches. I met a fan last night. She bought my shit.”

“Maybe you’re right and there’s a story there. Sorry if I seemed rude before. I’m Pete. Tell me what you were going to tell me.”

“Later.”

“This is your chance,” says Pete. “We’re going to land.”

“Sorry. Moody. Don’t feel much like talking. Another big shooting? I peeked at your computer.”

“I can’t seem to find the words this morning. Stuck.”

I open my case and hand Pete the morning paper. He’ll get the same results but get them quicker, and he’ll be able to enjoy his cocktail. We all like to think we can add that special touch, and some of us can, perhaps, just not Pete and me. I order my own drink. The flight attendant hustles. For all she knows her morning is my night.

seven

not every profession is fortunate enough to have a founding father who’s still alive, let alone available to visit and do business with. In management analysis—the good side—that man is Sandor “Sandy” Pinter, a Hungarian who came over in the forties and called upon his training as a philosopher to grapple with the new realities of American business. His first full-length book, Ideals and Industry, argued that the modern corporation gains its moral legitimacy from its promise to forge and sustain a global middle class. The book was ignored except by intellectuals, but Pinter’s next book, addressed directly to businessmen, created the modern science of management almost by itself. Making Work Work earned Pinter fame and riches and formed the basis for the Pinter Institute, a Los Angeles school for mid-career executives where Pinter taught, in person and by satellite, until his retirement three years ago at the age of eighty. From his modest bungalow outside Ontario, he continues to write (an article a year or so, the latest being “Managing for Meaning”), but he rarely travels. You have to go to him.

And that’s what I’m doing. I have a small proposal. If Pinter accepts it, MythTech will take notice.

The concept is simple: allow a corporation to endow its physical environment, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with the philosopher’s inspiring presence. Muzak-like recordings of Pinter’s lectures will play in the hallways, lavatories, and lobbies. Ticker tapes composed of Pinter’s epigrams will run at the bottom of company computer screens. The product-package will be all-encompassing, including “Pinterized’” calendars, coffee mugs, ballpoint pens and other office supplies. Even its carpeting, should the company wish, can be woven with Pinter’s trademark “dynograms,” from the lightning-struck infinity symbol (Perpetual Discovery) to the star of five crossed swords (Team Solidarity).

Winning Pinter’s permission to license such a product should take one afternoon, if all goes well. I happen to know that he’s under some financial strain. His thoughtful books stopped selling years ago, bumped from the shelves by his students’ shoddy quickies, and his rash investments in fringe enthusiasms such as self-cooling beverage cans and sunless tanning preparations have murdered his net worth. That he’s agreed to spend time with me at all shows some desperation, I’m afraid, but I’m not here to take advantage of him. The opposite. I’m here to glorify him.

The problem, just now, is my health. My joints are stiff and I’m coughing up sweet phlegm after a morning of hassles and distractions attributable to the overall decline of American travel services. I was leaving the parking lot in my rental car when its orange oil light flashed on. I circled back to the Maestro garage and was given a choice by the on-duty mechanic of trading down from my Volvo to a Pontiac or changing the oil myself and billing the company. The mechanic recommended a ProntoLube just a block away from Homestead Suites, where he said I could also find a drugstore.

I got back on my way, but formless Ontario, with its poorly marked surface roads and surly pedestrians, swallowed me whole. My gas gauge fell and fell. Three times I passed identical burrito stands before realizing they were the same establishment. Twice I nearly ran over a stray Great Dane trailing a leash that had snagged a plastic tricycle. At unpatrolled traffic lights, sloping muscle cars and jacked-up pickups gunned past me blaring rap. I felt like I was driving in Paraguay. In my idea of Paraguay, at least.

I’m like my mother—I stereotype. It’s faster.

Airports are often plunked down in nowhere-lands, and I navigate them by calling on my sense of which sort of businesses go along with which. Find a Red Lobster, you’ve found the Holiday Inn. But Ontario’s layout didn’t follow the rules. Its Olive Gardens were next to bleak used-car lots. Its OfficeMaxes abutted adult bookstores. I punched in Homestead’s national 800 number and had the operator patch me through to the desk clerk at the local franchise, who talked me, block by block, to the front door. When I entered the lobby, I didn’t see him anywhere, though we’d only hung up on each other moments earlier. I pushed the buzzer, waited. Ten minutes passed.

A girl opened a door marked “Pool and Fitness” and asked if she could help me.

“Where’s the clerk?”

“I am.”

“I was just talking to him.”

“Me?”

“A male. The voice was male.”

“The pool guy maybe.”

I asked if my replacement credit card had arrived that morning as promised, and it had—the girl just couldn’t remember where she’d put it. I crossed the street to the drugstore while she searched. Through the locked door I could see the teenage staff conducting inventory. I knocked and knocked. A manager came to the door and waved me off, then pushed a stack of boxes against the glass.

Back at Homestead, the girl presented me with a fax. I asked about the card. “Still gone,” she said. The fax, marked “urgent,” was almost too light to read, and consisted of copies of copies of telephone messages taken down by my grad-student assistant. Two were from Morris Dwight at Advanta, one was from Linda at the Denver Compass Club, and the fourth read “Please call sister,” but didn’t say which one.

I went to my room to return the calls, but the phone had no dial tone. I used my mobile. First, I called Kara at home. Her husband answered. She’d already left for Minnesota, he said. Had she heard from Julie? He didn’t think so. Did he know that Julie was missing? No, he said, but then he’d only come home an hour ago from a two-day hospital stay. I asked Asif what he’d been in for—a mistake. My brother-in-law’s a slow talker, a real enunciator, and it’s part of his caring nature to assume that others care equally about him. We do care, but not at his level. He’s unique. “They studied my sleep,” he said. “I wore electrodes. They taped a little sensor to my thumb to measure the chemical makeup of my blood. It dipped below ninety percent, which isn’t good. I snore. I have apnea. It’s very common, and not just among the obese. You think you’re resting, but actually you’re expending as much energy as a marathon runner. Every night.”

“I was diagnosed with apnea too, once.”

“Which treatment plan did you choose?”

“I haven’t yet. Listen, someone’s knocking. Have to run.”

“We think we know how we’re sleeping, but we don’t. They filmed me. I was all over the mattress.”

“Here’s my number in case you hear from Julie.”

At Advanta I spoke to someone under Dwight who told me he must have called me from his cell, but refused to give out that number. I pointed out that the number on Dwight’s message was the number I was calling now. “I guess this line was supposed to forward then,” the underling said. “But it didn’t, did it? Shoot.” I suggested that he call Dwight on the road and pass on my number at Homestead. Silence. “Wait—I just found a note here. Are you ready? Can’t do Thursday SeaTac breakfast. Sorry. Will be in Phoenix on Wednesday. Can you come there? Wednesday is tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the tip. I already told him I can get to Phoenix. What’s the hotel name?”

“Had it, put it down, and . . . I can get it. It’s here. You’re the Garage guy?”

“Correct. You got the manuscript?”

“I read it. Your man in there, what exactly does he invent? I imagine he’s, like, a chemist.”

“It’s never stated.”

“Artistic. Cool. How big is his garage?”

“That’s up to you. It’s a metaphor. An image.”

“So it’s smallish, you’re saying?”

“Have you been listening? I’m saying its dimensions aren’t physical. What’s your boss’s opinion of the book?”

“He still hasn’t read it. He’s an editor. I take the first pass and then write up a summary. He decides from my summary whether he’ll read it, too.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“That’s the practice.”

“I’m stunned,” I say.

“Another question: The Second Dictum?”

“Yes?”

“It’s a lot like the Sixth. I don’t think you need the Sixth.”

“Tell Dwight I’ll be in Phoenix mid-day tomorrow and that I have some major concerns to share with him. Have you found that hotel name?”

“I had it, I put it down . . .”

“Does Advanta make a profit?”

“It’s publishing. Profits are secondary.”

“That’s what’s scaring me.”

I decide that my last call, to Linda, can wait awhile. What do you owe them once you’ve screwed them? Everything. You’ve been inside their skins. You’ve touched their wombs. The only question is whether they’ll make you pay, whether they’ll call in the note. Most don’t, thank goodness. But Linda, I’ve always feared, will want full value. This doesn’t mean I’ll have to pay, of course, just that I’ll have to live with having defaulted. And I can. I’ve done it with the others. It’s a matter of rolling over one personal debt into the pooled, collective, social debt that’s the business of governments and churches. Or I could refinance, amortize over centuries.

I lay down with my boots on for a nap. My sleep was not sleep but a paralytic trance. Asif was wrong: I know I get no rest. I dreamed abstractly, of multicolored grids unfurling to the horizon, a giant game board. The game pieces were familiar from Monopoly—the cannon, the shoe, the Scottie dog, the iron—but they floated over the board like space debris. Every few moments, a thin blue laser beam would arc from the board and turn a piece to ash.

Now I’m awake, in the bathroom, gargling Listerine. The membranes inside my cheeks feel ragged, scorched. I touch my forehead. Its neither chilled nor feverish; it’s the disturbing no-temperature of paper. I need vitamins. I need certain enzymes. The lack of them is visible on my skin. I tan with the slightest sun, but in the mirror now my face can barely muster a reflection.

The only good news: my credit card is back. They slipped it under the door while I was napping. The identity thief has been cut off, presumably. I’m whole again, with nothing hanging out. My first purchase will be a pair of shoes, and I have a whole hour to buy them—a rarity. According to Pinter’s autobiography, he sleeps in two four-hour shifts from 10 to 2, A.M. and P.M., and takes his meals at three. He writes in the book that all humans lived this way before the dawn of agriculture, but he gives no evidence. That’s typical. In management, it’s the stimulating assertion, not the tested hypothesis, that grabs folks.

I call Pinter’s house to confirm and get directions. Margaret answers, his so-called co-domestic. Pinter’s contempt for matrimony springs from his belief in male polygamy, which he refrains from practicing himself only because it’s currently illegal, but which he doesn’t rule out for the future. Maybe when he’s a hundred they’ll loosen standards.

“He’d like to come pick you up,” says Mrs. Pinter. “He bought a new car he’s eager to show off.”

“That’s fine. I can’t wait to see your lovely home.”

“It’s under renovation, I’m afraid. We’re down to two inhabitable rooms.”

“Maybe you’d like to eat out tonight.”

“Of course not. Sandy needs his food prepared just so. He doesn’t trust these restaurants. They overheat things and screw up the protein chains.”

“When should I expect him?”

“Five, ten minutes.”

“I thought he ate at three?”

“This year it’s two. Sandy corrected for daylight saving time.”

The genius act is beginning to annoy me, and I have a high tolerance for quirkiness, even when it’s a calculated put-on. One of the speakers I saw at last year’s GoalQuest, a world-renowned alpinist who died on Everest (just for seven minutes; they revived him, but only after he’d received a vision of abiding interest to the business world), wore shearling slippers with an Italian suit and insisted on chewing gum while speaking. His painful, frostbitten feet explained the slippers, but the bubbles he blew were the purest affectation, intended to show that he plays by his own Hoyles. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

I put away clothes to prepare for Pinter’s visit. How do hotel rooms fall apart so quickly, and even when I’ve hardly packed a thing? Their surfaces seem to cry out for abuse the way new haircuts cry out for a mussing. Perhaps it’s the urge to make the space your own by displacing the aura of the previous occupant. When someone vacates a plane seat or a room, they leave behind a molecular disturbance. This room, I’d guess, was last inhabited by a bickering family on vacation.

Pinter knocks just once. Efficiency. I greet him wearing khakis and a blue shirt and holding a legal pad with writing on it, trying to look like a man who’s always occupied.

“We finally meet. A privilege. Excuse the room,” I say.

“I need your toilet.”

“Of course. It’s right in there.”

Pinter doesn’t close the door completely, exposing me to sounds I’d rather not hear from one of his reputation, whose courses I’ve audited. The toilet-roll holder rattles as it unspools. Despite his famous abhorrence of waste and excess, Pinter has a lavish way with tissue. I wait for a flush, a running faucet. Nothing. When he reappears I shake his hand, whose absolute dryness confirms that it’s unwashed. I understand from studying his books that there isn’t a custom, tradition, or rule of hygiene that Pinter hasn’t dismissed or tinkered with.

He sits on the end of my bed, not facing me. He’s a small man, balding, but hairy in his crevices. His ears and nostrils are densely webbed, and there’s fur in the cleft of his jutting, pitted chin. His mouth is a long, lipless crescent, like a drawing.

“I don’t see an ashtray. Is this room non-smoking?”

“Don’t worry. The alarms aren’t sensitive.”

“There’s an alarm? It’s not worth it then.”

“I’ll join you.”

Pinter produces a Baggie of loose tobacco and rolls two lumpy cigarettes. “Why do they have to ruin everything? The California dream was freedom once. Now we’re ruled by nags and health fanatics. You’re familiar with my definition of health?”

“I am.”

“Mediocrity raised to an ideal. Health is why we get sick. Health-consciousness.”

But he won’t eat in restaurants because they warp the proteins.

Pinter is not a social smoker. He puffs like an Indian, reverent, eyes shut. His free hand opens and closes on his knee like a gasping fish. He flicks his ash on his corduroys and rubs it in with a newborn’s soft pink thumb.

“I’m celebrating this afternoon,” he says. “I signed a substantial contract yesterday.”

Discouraging news—I’d thought he was retired. I’d counted on his poor financial condition to help sell my proposal.

“It’s supposed to be confidential, but secrets bore me. An airline out of Phoenix hired me.”

“Not Desert Air?”

“You’ve heard of them?”

I nod. “They compete with the airline I fly.”

Pinter coughs. A volume of smoke rolls out and keeps on coming, as if his whole body is filled with it. “Good company?”

“You tell me.”

“They have a problem,” he says. “They built their business on price and price alone, which is effective but risky. I’ve written on this. A woman of easy virtue will soon grow popular, but she’ll fail when it comes to attracting a loyal mate. Long term, it’s better to be good than cheap. Wanton discounting is a downward spiral, so I’ve urged them to reinterpret their identity. Hauling warm bodies from point A to point B inspires no one. It’s a form of trucking. Promoting human togetherness, however, ignites the vital flame in all involved, the worker as well as the customer. Agreed?”

“A marketing angle.”

“Much deeper. A first principle. It starts with seating. Like should sit with like. Parents of small children with other parents. Young singles with young singles. No more jumbling. We learn who the passengers are through detailed surveys and task a computer with mixing them appropriately, the way a good hostess would seat a dinner party.”

“Manipulation like that can breed resentment.”

“People won’t know we’re doing it,” says Pinter. “All they’ll know is that they feel more comfortable. Friendlier, closer. We’ve run some live experiments.”

My toes curl in my boots. I feel invaded, as if I’ve just opened the curtains in my living room and discovered a neighbor with binoculars. Thank heaven I haven’t flown Desert Air this month, though if they’re doing this, Morse’s Great West will follow. I have to admit that, lately, I’ve felt watched.

“You’d be amazed how well it worked,” says Pinter. “We ran a satisfaction survey afterwards and couldn’t have been more pleased with the responses.”

“What else are you suggesting that they do?”

“Closed-circuit televisions in the gates connected to video cameras in the cabins. To shorten those anxious minutes when people deplane. You’re waiting for someone, perhaps you’re holding flowers, but it seems to take ages before you see his face. You worry he missed his flight. You don’t know what to think. This way you see him the moment he’s in range.”

He looks to me for a reaction, and I blink. His ideas are pure foolishness, born of arrogance. The man hardly flies, yet he’s dashing off prescriptions for a growing regional carrier. This is hubris. This is too much fame. I’m of a mind to pocket my proposal and tailor it for one of Pinter’s critics—for Arthur Cargill, maybe, of the Keane Group, the father of Duplicative Skills Reporting.

“Help me,” says Pinter. “You’re skeptical. Speak up.”

“With all due respect, sir—”

“Don’t kowtow. It’s beneath you. I made a few inquiries after your call and discovered you’re very well thought of. An up-and-comer. I agreed to share a meal with you because I expected a peer-to-peer exchange.”

I don’t dare ask him who spoke so highly of me. Someone at MythTech? I’ve heard he’s close to them. There’s a story that he attended the Child’s wedding, an exclusive affair in Sun Valley, Idaho, and presented the newlyweds with a silver cheese knife given to him by a Saudi prince in appreciation for his work untangling supply lines in the Gulf War.

“I come to this as a consumer,” I say. “A passenger. I appreciate your spirit, but frankly I feel like you’re toying with people’s lives here. An aircraft is not a glass beaker.”

“The world’s a beaker. This is axiomatic in our field.”

“Churches? Are churches beakers?”

Pinter glares. I’ve violated the code of our profession by invoking the sacred. I’m out of bounds.

“You’re religious?” he says.

“Not conventionally.”

“Of course not. No one’s conventionally anything anymore. But do you believe in the image of God in man?”

“I see where you’re going with this. I slipped. I’m sorry. I’ve been surrounded by Mormons for a decade.”

“It’s leaching in. You insulted me,” he says. “You implied I’m corrupt. A Faustian. Untrue. Helping this little airline find an edge in an increasingly cutthroat industry offends not a single commandment, that I’m aware of. In truth, it’s a moral act par excellence.”

“I repeat my apology.”

Pinter sighs, gets up. The difference in his stature sitting and standing is remarkably slight. He’s all torso and no legs, though his long baggy jacket conceals the fact. We face each other. He addresses my chest, as if we’re the same height, and in my weakness I play along—I crouch.

“Margaret and I have been cooking. A request: none of your God talk at supper. And no business.”

“You do understand why I’ve come, I hope. My concept?”

“Afterwards. At the table we stay ‘on topic.’ ”

“And what’s the topic?”

“That’s up to you. The guest.”

“I’ve taken your classes. I want to thank you for them. You were on satellite. You couldn’t see me.”

“That’s an assumption you have no basis for.”

“I know how satellites work.”

“The old ones, maybe.”

Because the street-side entrance to his house is blocked by landscapers and mounds of earth and because the front porch has been removed, leaving the doorway suspended in a wall, Pinter parks his new German sports coupe in an alley. It’s been a long ride. Ontario has traffic, uniformly frantic in all directions, like a stepped-on anthill, and Pinter has no business being out in it. His driving style combines inattention to others with a deep absorption in his own car. Even while cruising, he fussed with the controls, tilting the wheel and pumping up the lumbar and adjusting the louvered vents of the AC. He’ll die in that car, and I suspect he knows it, which is why he’s so eager to enjoy its gimmicks.

Margaret stands on a step by the back door holding an old-style cocktail with a cherry in it. She looks like a girl in her twenties who’s been aged by an amateur movie makeup artist using spirit gum for wrinkles and sprinkled baby powder to gray her hair. She greets me too kindly, kissing both my cheeks, yet barely acknowledges her co-domestic, who knifes past her into the kitchen and pours two drinks. The kitchen is one of the two inhabitable rooms, the other being a bedroom whose door is open, through which I can see a massive four-poster bed dressed with paisley sheets and furry blankets like the type you once saw on water beds. Access to the remainder of the house is blocked by thumbtacked sheets of dusty plastic. Behind them, a shadowy carpenter fires off bursts from a pneumatic nail gun. The noise is piercing.

“Sandy tells me you live in Colorado, out on the frontier.”

“I used to live there. I had an apartment, that is. I gave it up.”

“Where do you live now?”

“Just here and there.”

“Literally?”

“People do it. And not a few.”

“So this is a trend?”

“Not yet. You’ll see it soon, though.”

A drink is placed in my hand. It’s sweet and strong and tastes of 1940s Hollywood. Pinter lights another cigarette and resumes his peculiar smoking trance while peppery Margaret continues with the questions, timing her words to avoid the nail gun’s volleys. Over the royal bed I glimpse a picture: some mythical scene of a semi-naked virgin being chased through a dappled glade by randy goat-men.

The table is set, but I detect no cooking odors. Pinter wraps an apron around his waist and opens a curvy vintage refrigerator packed solid with convenience food. His cigarette smoke mingles with the frost cloud, a sight I find profoundly unappetizing.

“We’re dining alfresco this afternoon,” says Margaret. “The construction draws so much current our stove is useless. Did Sandy describe our project to you?”

“No. It looks like it’s fairly extensive.”

She motions me forward, then peels back the curtain of plastic. I peek through. The living room walls have been stripped back to the studs and a circular hole the size of a small swimming pool has been cut in the hardwood floor.

“Our arena,” says Margaret. “Sandy thought it up. See where the ceiling’s gone? That’s where the lights go. We’ll surround it with comfortable seating, pillows, throws. A stage for our debates, out little theatricals. We proportioned it after the Colosseum, actually.”

“Your guacamole’s skinned over,” Pinter says.

“Squeeze lemon juice on it.”

“I can’t find the chips.”

“You ate them in the night. Just use saltines.”

Margaret refastens the plastic in the doorway. I have questions, but don’t know where to start; the syrupy cocktail has turned my brain to sludge. The puzzle of the arena aside, what happened to Pinter’s dietary discipline? The spread he’s begun to assemble on the table—plastic tubs of pre-made onion dip, lunchmeat slices rolled and pinned with toothpicks, a dish of canned fried onions, a jar of olives—reminds me of sample day at a small-town supermarket or the grand opening of a Chevy dealer. I wonder if its wealth of additives holds the secret to Margaret’s pickled youthfulness.

Pinter refreshes our drinks and we sit down. The china and silver are real, the napkins linen. Pinter, since coming home, has gained in stature, and as we toast—“To the life force,” Margaret says—I see that both the table and the counters stand at wheelchair height. I tower beside them. I feel fatherly, monumental. Normal-sized Margaret’s the mother and Pinter’s our son.

“So,” she says, “did you select a topic?” She’s poised to start eating, but there are rules, apparently.

“An actual formal topic.”

They nod.

“I’m blank. Politics?”

“Anything,” Pinter snorts. He’s hungry. “Our last guest—”

“Don’t lead him,” says Margaret. “Let him associate.”

My gaze drifts to the bedroom painting. “Pursuit.”

They smile and dip their crackers. I’m a hit. I take a rolled slice of bologna as my prize.

“I think it’s important to start experientially. Now which of us at this table,” Pinter asks, “has actually been pursued?”

“I have,” Margaret says.

“Ryan?”

“Romantically? Professionally?”

“You chose the topic. What was on your mind?”

“Omaha.”

“Them,” he says. “No business talk.”

“You know them, though?”

“We’ve mingled. No business talk.”

Margaret dabs guacamole off her lips. “Sandy, you’ve heard this, so try not to jump in. It happened in London, England, in the sixties. Sandy was there as a guest of British Railways.”

“Rationalizing their timetables,” he says.

“I’d read about Carnaby Street in all the magazines and wanted to buy an outfit. I took a bus. I rode on the top deck, to see the sights. There were a couple of boys with Beatles haircuts—Sandy had one himself once—”

“Oh go to hell.”

“You did.”

I reach for a black olive. My drink is empty. Why is Pinter staring at my crotch?

“Anyway, two moptops. Drinking beer. Out of those extra large cans the English favor. And I, in what I’d guess you’d call my innocence—”

Pinter’s eyebrows arch. His nostrils flare.

“—approach these two lads to ask about their fashions. You know, their ‘scene.’ Can they point me to a shop, say—some place that’s out of the way and not for tourists? They tell me of course, if I’ll buy them a beer. A deal. So off we go into the streets, those crooked streets, and before I know it, well, they’re groping me. Against a wall. Beside a garbage can. And they take all my money.”

“The money that you paid them.”

“You’re out of rotation, Sandy. You’ll have your chance.”

“She was shopping for new experiences, not clothes. You weren’t around then, Ryan. The LSD years. My Margaret was something of a cosmic voyager. Dragged me out to meet Huxley, Leary, all of them. Hot tubs under the redwoods. Puppet shows. I thought it might break my writer’s block. Astrology. And maybe it helped. The visions. The new perspectives. Maybe it helped me turn DuPont around. But what did not help, I solemnly assure you, were Margaret’s suspiciously picturesque assaults in all the European capitals.”

“I slept with Henry Miller once,” says Margaret.

My phone rings in my jacket, a muffled trill. Pinter sneers at me, says “Pff . . .” I reach in and turn off the ringer and apologize, blushing even deeper than I have been.

“Thank you,” Pinter says. “I loathe those gadgets. The sins man commits in the name of keeping in touch.”

“I normally leave it behind on social occasions. I’m in a fog today.”

“The topic,” says Margaret.

“Are we ridiculous?” Pinter asks me. “Do we seem ridiculous to you? Our insistence on keeping the dinner hour holy? Our love of discussion? Our odd erotic pasts?”

“No,” I say, not audibly.

“If we do, it’s because we don’t buy it. We just don’t buy it. This wireless wired hive of ours. A sinkhole. No one can be everywhere at once, and why should they want to be? We’ll come close, of course. We’ll come within a hair, then half a hair, then half of a half. But we’ll never ring the bell. And that’s their plan, you see. Progress without perfection. The endless tease, slowly supplanting the pleasures of the sex act.”

“An hour ago you said the world’s a beaker.”

“Is this still pursuit?” Margaret asks. “Or have we switched?”

“A beaker is a charming antiquity compared to what they’ve got in store for us. Tiny antennas planted in our follicles. Digital readouts on our fingernails.”

“Attached without our permission?”

“We’ll give permission. They’ll promise us free FM radio. Free phone calls.”

“They? You don’t feel implicated here?”

“Of course I do. I’m in on the ground floor. I’d prefer it if there was another ‘they’ to join, but this is the ‘they’ that history offered me. Advice: If you hear there’s a ‘they,’ get in on it, if only to be pro-active and defensive.”

“In your seminars you teach accountability. This sounds like passivity.”

“It’s always a mix—the seminars overstate one element. The seminars are for psychic adolescents, not vigorous whole realized beings with perspective.”

“Remind me not to sign up for any more of them.”

“Sandy, you were pursued once. By that company.”

“That’s Omaha again. That’s business, Margaret.”

“Please,” I say. “I’m interested in this.”

“They asked me to write down my dreams for them. I did. After three months, they started faxing things back. Predictions. Guesses. What I’d dream of next. At their peak, they reached forty percent accuracy. It’s tedious.”

“How can you say that? Not at all. Dreams about what?”

“What I’d shop for the next day. Shaving cream dreams. Frozen meat dreams.”

“You’re joking with me.”

“They do some good work. They do some bad work, too. Mostly, they’re show-offs. It’s all just razzle-dazzle.”

“That’s not what he thought at the time,” says Margaret. “It staggered him. He fell ill for a whole year.”

“That was chronic fatigue. That wasn’t them. You brought up business, darling. Discussion over.”

Margaret deserts us. She carries her drink to the steps by the back door and sits down facing the alley, its peeling palm trees.

“I think MythTech’s after me, too.”

“You’ll know. Now drop it.”

“We need to discuss the Pinter Zone,” I say. “Don’t take this as pressure, but I’m relying on it.”

“I’m not sure I want my collected works on coffee mugs. Not that omnipresence isn’t appealing. Have to tinkle now. Try those onions there. And why not take off your jacket? You look hot.”

With the table as cover, I take out my phone and activate “last caller.” A Salt Lake area code. Asif again—he must have news of Julie. Now that he knows there’s a crisis, he’ll be tireless.

Margaret has turned and seen me from the stoop. “Just make your call. Don’t let him rattle you. Do it from outside, if that’s more comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

“My husband would like you to sleep over, but I can see you’re not ready. I’ll explain to him.”

I walk around behind Pinter’s car and dial. She answers on the first ring. My sister. Safe.

Her voice is not strong, though I doubt that mine is either. I can hear the road in her voice, the truckstop coffee, as she describes her all-night diagonal journey down through South Dakota and Wyoming in her Plymouth van. She punctured a tire passing Rapid City, repaired it with a can of Fix-A-Flat. She picked up an Indian hitchhiker near Sheridan who gave her a bear-claw pendant for good luck. Crossing the Utah border at Flaming Gorge, she stopped for an hour to examine with her flashlight a hillside bristling with fossil dinosaurs. And no, she insists, it’s not the wedding she’s fleeing, but the deaths of Miles and TJ, the poisoned dogs, who expired, as Keith reported, at her feet, of unstoppable internal bleeding. Their deaths were her fault. In fact, it’s all her fault.

“What else?” I ask.

“Everything.” Julie is not right.

“Have you eaten?” I say.

“I’m eating something now.”

“What?”

“A licorice rope.”

“Licorice isn’t food.”

She doesn’t ask me to come. I’m coming anyway. I can be there, Great West and the flight controllers willing, in under four hours. I’ll have to leave immediately.

“I’m pouring a glass of milk now.”

“Finish it. Milk is the ticket,” I say.

“I’ve finished it.”

Pinter comes out the back door onto the steps and stands with one arm around Margaret’s girlish waist. His face has lost its lecherous intensity, and he turns it away to grant me privacy. I tell Julie not to sit up for me, to sleep, and to pass the phone to Asif, which she does. The hum of expensive appliances tells me they’re in the kitchen, where they should be.

“Take her car keys.”

“I have them.”

“Bless you, Asif.” The gift of a rich, resourceful brother-in-law who wasn’t born in America. We owe him.

Pinter gives me a moment after I’m off the phone. Strange man, but intuitive when he wants to be. “Something’s come up, I can see,” he says. “You run now.” Margaret lowers her head against his shoulder.

“Family.”

“Don’t explain. We all have troubles. This business between us, perhaps we’ll work it out. I’ll be at GoalQuest. I need to travel more. You’re speaking there?”

“Short talk. To clear the air. Just between us, I’m leaving ISM. They’ve niched me and it’s not a niche I like. Plus, my lower extremities are numb. I’m sorry. It’s the same old whine.”

“Not really.”

“You couldn’t drive me back to my hotel so I can grab my luggage and my car?”

“I could, but we might not get there safely. Margaret?”

“Certainly. Just let me find my glasses.”

Pinter and I shake hands. His tiny thumb beats with a disconcertingly sharp pulse. I thank him for the meal, his understanding.

“Good topic,” he says. “We always enjoy ‘pursuit.’ ”

eight

i was a country boy once. I wore a cap. It promoted Polk Center Gouda, “World’s Finest Snack.” The girls in town were virgins but didn’t know it because they thought having their breasts touched was real sex. The girls were all blonds, except for the exchange students, who came from places like Italy and Egypt and stunned us with their fine manners and silky English. The boys were all blonds, too. Touring polka bands pulled in each summer and people paid two dollars to dance all night and drink keg beer that was mostly tasteless foam. The money went to the volunteer fire department. When we heard about murders in cities, we felt lucky. When we heard about Washington scandals, we felt justified. America was that country all around us, and we knew that we’d go there someday, but we could wait. We were proud of Polk Center. Its farmers fed the world. Our stop signs may have been riddled with bullet holes but our thoughtful drivers still respected them.

It wasn’t until the first time I flew, in a medevac helicopter to Minneapolis, that I realized how confined I’d been. I was sixteen. I’d had an accident. Every December, when the lakes froze over, kids piled into cars and hit the ice to race and spin three-sixties. I was driving. I had two passengers, other boys from town, whose fathers delivered propane for my father. I cranked on the wheel and we slammed against the doors. I cranked the wheel back and we hit the other doors. We laughed. We drank vodka. Our parents knew where we were. They’d pulled the same stunts when they were young. Tradition.

Then the hood of the car sloped up and we were sinking. Just like that—slipping backwards through the ice, the coins sliding out of our pockets across the seats. I watched the hood rise up and block the moon and I reached for the door and heaved but couldn’t budge it. The water against the windows was black and solid and some of it trickled through a heating vent and splashed me on the chin.

I woke up in the sky, on a stretcher, wearing a mask. The oxygen tasted bitter and dried my throat, and through a window I spotted the North Star. The uniformed man bending over me explained that both of my passengers had escaped the car but that I’d been in the lake for fifteen minutes, which normally would have been long enough to kill me. What had saved me, he said, was the freezing water, which sent my body into hibernation. He asked me if I felt lucky. I thought: Not yet.

They let me sit up as we hovered over the hospital. I could see all the Minneapolis skyscrapers, some of their floors lit up and others dark, as well as the antennas on their roofs that transmitted our radio stations and TV ball games. I could see the western horizon, where I’d come from, and a dogleg of snowy river crossed by bridges sparkling with late-night traffic. The landscape looked whole in a way it never had before; I could see how it fit together. My parents had lied. They’d taught me we lived in the best place in the world, but I could see now that the world was really one place and that comparing its parts did not make sense or gain our town any advantage over others.

Moments later, we landed. My stretcher jolted. As we waited for the helicopter’s blades to slow, the medic said I would be home in a few days, not understanding that this was not the comfort it would have been had I never left the ground. He wheeled me out onto the roof under the moon, which had risen some since I’d seen it from the car. I lifted the oxygen mask so I could speak and asked how long we’d been flying. Just thirty minutes. To reach a city I’d thought of as remote, halfway across the state, a foreign capital.

I told the man I was feeling lucky now.

Tonight, in Salt Lake, I’m feeling lucky again, and not just because I escaped the swinging Pinters. Three hours and thirty-five minutes, door-to-door, across the Great Basin to my sister’s mansion in the foothills along the Wasatch Front. I slept, I woke, I hailed a cab, I’m here. Don’t tell me this isn’t an age of miracles. Don’t tell me we can’t be everywhere at once.

Getting out of the cab and walking up the driveway, I set off a series of motion-detecting floodlights. The yard goes from dark to a Hollywood premiere. Wheels of mist surround the sprinkler heads buried in the fresh-mown lawn and their droplets splatter a trio of campaign signs for local Republicans. Otherwise, it’s quiet. My nephews’ mountain bikes lean against a wall of the three-bay, cedar-shake garage. This is Utah, the state of early bedtimes, and Jake and Edward are probably asleep now, dreaming of good grades and science fairs.

The peephole in the front door is faintly blue; someone, deep in the house, is watching TV. That would be Julie. Asif disdains pop culture. He came here from Pakistan to work and save, and the purity of his will is undiminished. Our family felt vaguely shamed by him at first, intimidated by his priestly poise and engineer’s exactitude of spirit, but that was our own unworthiness at work. He’s tough on himself, but he spoils his sons like princes, for which they’re none the worse, amazingly. If anything, they’re embarrassed by his lavishness and out to prove that they too can rise unaided, taking on extra science work at school and pitching in on chores like little sailors. I fully expect that by the time I’m old this branch of my family will be a minor dynasty, and I’m flattered that Asif has mixed his blood with ours. Except for my mother, we all are. She’s still cautious. She can’t believe this wealth is honest, somehow, and hoards savings bonds for her grandkids, just in case.

I open the door and set down my bag and case in the darkened hall. I smell a recent meal—encouraging. As a strict vegetarian in beefy Utah, Asif has had to learn to cook.

“Hello?”

“Down here,” Julie whispers. “Everyone’s sacked out.”

She’s dragged a couple of cushions off the couch and is sitting on them like a yogi, legs crossed, spine straight, watching an old Road Runner cartoon on a children’s cable channel. Beside her is a plate of cheese and bread and a tall glass of juice, but this looks staged. She hasn’t been eating. Her cheeks are two dirty ashtrays, gray concavities, and her hair, whose fluffiness tells me that it’s clean, doesn’t reflect the TV glow the way it ought to. The silk pajamas she’s wearing must be Kara’s. The top is bunched and wrinkled—it’s buttoned wrong—and the bottoms, they just look empty.

After I kiss her, I ask her, “Did you rest?”

“I tried,” she says. “I’m still buzzing from the drive. My van’s so big and shaky. Bad shocks or something. Nice jacket—out of a catalogue? It fits you. Must be nice to be shaped like people in catalogues. The wedding’s just going to be suits, no formal wear. Mom’s grumpy about it, but men look weird in tuxes—the kind you can rent in Minnesota, anyway. Those bands around the waist, they look like trusses, like something to hold in a hernia. Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a big plate of raisin cookies in the kitchen.”

“What were you going to say to me?”

“Stop staring. This is my ideal weight. Just hug me, Ryan.”

It’s the part I always forget, and women need it. Her body feels old and stony through her PJ top.

“I think your ideals are a problem,” I say.

“Yes.”

It’s always wise, in my experience, to turn off any nearby TVs or radios when trying to dissipate emotional tension; they have a way of blurting out bad thoughts, of lobbing idea grenades into the room. When I settle in on the sofa with the cookies, the Road Runner has changed places with Porky Pig. Is Julie just dying? A cleaver-wielding farmer is chasing Porky, over whose head looms a panicked thought balloon filled with hams and chops and bacon strips. Could it be any worse?

“I’m sorry about those dogs,” I say.

“It wasn’t them. It’s me. I ruin everything. Have you ever looked inside my car? It’s all old phone bills and spilled McDonald’s Cokes. I can’t catch up with myself. I’m underwater. I promise to do something simple, like walk those dogs, but then I remember another promise I made, and another one on top of that, so I make up a list with boxes and little checkmarks, but before I can finish it my pen runs dry, so I run off to find a pen, and then it’s quitting time. Pretty soon things have piled up so high I have to call in sick to clear my head, and when I come back they’re all angry at me, furious, so instead of buckling down, I run and hide. And it isn’t just work I’m talking about. It’s everything. It’s breathing. It’s sleeping. It’s feelings. Does this make sense?”

“It’s all about managing time.”

“It’s more than that.” She digs a raisin out of a cookie and eats it, the raisin, but leaves the rest untouched. “Anyway, I’m sorry I dragged you up here. You were on business and I screwed you up. Where are you supposed to be tomorrow?”

“Phoenix. I’m meeting my publisher. I hope.”

“Kara told me you were writing something. Wow. A mystery?”

“A business parable.”

“Is it long?” she says. “I like the long ones. So I can really snuggle in, get cozy.”

“Business readers don’t curl up with books.”

Julie rests her head on my knee. I stroke her hair. I’m ashamed to admit that her thinness has its charms, elongating and defining her throat and neck.

“That was the sweetest wedding present,” she says. “Keith opened it by mistake. You really splurged. Who told you we needed one? Mom?”

The gift’s not mine; my sister has it confused with someone else’s. I picked out the luggage set just yesterday and was waiting for my card to be reactivated before I placed the order. And there’s no way for her to know about the stock. Then again, this may be Kara’s work. Her standing assumption is that I’m irresponsible when it comes to my sentimental duties; she probably sent something practical in my name, a microwave or upright vacuum cleaner, and forgot to inform me. She covers for me this way, forging my signature on thoughtful gestures.

I probe. “You needed one?”

“Well, no one needs one. Our grandparents did without them, obviously.”

“What told you it was from me?”

She lifts her head and eyes me at a slant. “Are you okay?”

“A little frazzled. Why?”

“That was such an odd question. Who else would it have been from? Are you still on that medication?”

“That was years ago.”

“So no more seizures?”

“I’ve never had a seizure. That’s like calling every lump a tumor.”

“Fine, then. ‘Fits.’ ”

“That’s even worse,” I say.

Julie is misinformed, as usual. She’s referring to the beta-blockers prescribed for a funny heartbeat that turned up during an annual corporate physical a few months after our father’s funeral. I was tired at the time, surviving on diet cola while shuttling between Denver, LA, and Houston as part of an effort to smooth the troubled merger of two mid-size regional advertising agencies. Worn down by my grief and the gloom of the assignment, which consisted of identifying redundancies and recommending layoffs, I suffered a kind of segmented collapse marked by bouts of irresistible sleepiness during several key meetings and lunch appointments. Because of the politeness of my associates, who declined to mention my little naps after I came to, and because no single individual witnessed more than one of the attacks, weeks passed before I caught on to what was happening. I imagined I’d dozed off for a few seconds, when in fact I’d been falling asleep for a few minutes. I finally learned what was wrong at LAX, where I nodded off at a pay phone in the Compass Club and missed a flight. I was granted a paid leave. I grounded myself for seven weeks (a record), took a few classes to refresh my spirits, and made an adequate recovery. Other than the minor arrhythmia, there was just one lingering complication. It happened that during one of my brief blackouts—at a downtown Denver oyster bar—sneaky Craig Gregory had played a trick on me, slipping my wallet out of my back pocket and inserting a scribbled-on business card for one Melissa Hall at Great West Airlines. “Fantastic meeting you. Call!” the message read. There was also a row of X’s and a heart. I found the card while reorganizing my Rolodex, puzzled over it for a day or two, then thought what the hell and gave a ring. Assuming the woman was a flight attendant, I left a sweet, if tentative, voice mail, and received a call back from a mannerly Melissa—Soren Morse’s executive assistant and, I found out later, his sometime mistress. Here’s what was strange, though: after much embarrassment, and after we’d identified the trickster—Craig Gregory knew Melissa through a cousin—she told me that she’d seen my name while making up invitations to a Christmas party Morse was throwing for Great West’s heaviest flyers. We agreed to say hi to each other at the party, which was just a month away, but my invitation never arrived. I called to inquire, but Melissa wouldn’t speak to me, and I could only conclude that Morse himself had struck me from the guest list. Jealousy? I tried my theory on Craig Gregory, who laughed it off but no doubt wrote it down for the “This is your life” file he keeps on everyone.

All in all, a murky time for me. But I repeat: there were never any seizures. My sisters spend too much time on the phone together erroneously filling in the blanks of their brother’s life.

This matter of having sisters. I’ve done my best. When Kara was born after years and years of trying—in Minnesota you weren’t supposed to have to try; babies were supposed to come like crops—my parents already considered themselves old. My arrival surprised them. My father was as pleased as any man to have a son, but he was busy by then, with a growing gas route to attend to. In helping him I saw my opening. By five I was riding shotgun in the propane truck, learning a business that, if it had survived, I’d still be in today, with no regrets. The secret was providing added value with every refilled tank—carrying the news from farm to farm, adjusting and reigniting pilot lights, delivering packages for snowbound widows. My apprenticeship secured a spot for me in my father’s everyday routine and in the larger life of the community.

Everything changed when Julie came along, a month premature but radiant and perfect, with none of that simian newborn homeliness. If I’d been a surprise, she was a shock. Her beauty felt like a judgment on our averageness, and we fell into competition for her favor. My father, who’d grown comfortable by then, cut back on his hours to spend more time at home, while Kara and my mother scrimmaged constantly over who would change the baby’s diapers and push her in the new stroller through the aisles of the downtown J. C. Penney. I was odd man out again. Whenever I managed to get alone with Julie, I spoiled her with treats and toys and labored to impress her with my manliness. When I was fourteen and she was ten, I knocked down an older boy in front of her. I took her homework when she got home from school and returned it to her in the morning, finished. I was her first crush when she turned twelve, and when I went off to college I sent her letters playing up my successes and achievements and dismissing the girls who supposedly had eyes for me. Our romance crested during a summer vacation when I smuggled her into an R-rated movie and she rested her head on my shoulder during a love scene. A neighbor sitting a couple of rows behind us had a word with my mother. We were finished.

“The wedding present wasn’t from me,” I say. “Kara must have sent something in my name. What was it anyway?”

“A lawn mower. It follows these wires you bury in the ground and runs by remote control.”

My mouth goes dry. I can’t swallow my cookie.

“Where was it sent from?”

“Salt Lake City. Here. A store called Vann’s Electronics. You signed the card. You’re saying you don’t remember buying it?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m going to bed.”

I lie in the dark guest room beside a window that frames the spire of the Mormon Temple, as white as aspirin and topped with a gold angel. I’ve set my sleep machine on blowing leaves and swallowed a sedative. My left hand is tucked under the waistband of my boxers and in my other hand I hold my phone.

“Talk to her. Build her up inside,” says Kara. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it? Be tough, though. Don’t tell her she’ll be okay no matter what or that she’s some infinite bundle of creativity. Don’t bullshit her, Ryan. But try to make her feel good. This is a crisis of confidence we’re dealing with.”

The side of my face with the phone against it aches. I switch to the other ear. “I’m on a business trip.”

“Fine. So leave her to run away again. Maybe we’ll hear from her at Christmas. Shit.”

The air on my chest is heavy, hard to lift. I roll up on my side for easier breathing. “You’re saying to keep her with me?”

“In plain sight.”

“A question. When Wendy saw me in Salt Lake last week . . .”

“Yes?”

“She’s sure it was me?”

My sister sighs. “Out with it. Tell me. You lied to me before.”

“I think she was right. I was here. It slipped my mind, though. The cities don’t stick in my head the way they used to.”

“What?”

“There are credit card records. I made a purchase. Kara, I’m not at my best right now.”

A hush. Southerners have an oral tradition, they say. Minnesotans have a silence tradition. Not speaking is our preferred way of communicating.

“You haven’t been eating either,” she says. “Have you?”

“Poorly.”

“Come home. Right now. Come home right now. I know what you’re doing. I know what’s going on here. This is all about earning free tickets. You need your family.”

“My job ends Monday. I’m leaving before they fire me. I have appointments, interviews.”

“Come home.”

“It’s not my home anymore.”

“It’s where your mother is.”

“That’s why it’s not,” I say.

With the earpiece against my cheek I let her rant. One of my nephews opens his bedroom door and I hear him pad down the hallway to the bathroom and tinkle into the bowl. We start so small, and the space we take up as we grow is gone forever. Not everything is recycled. That space is gone.

“I need to sleep,” I tell her when she’s calmer. “I’ll try to talk sense to Julie. I’ll bring her with me. I have a meeting tomorrow, but she can come. I don’t want her vanishing in that van again.”

“ ‘Take’ her with me,” she says.

“I think it’s ‘bring.’ ”

“I’m coming back there. I’ll get her home myself.”

“I said I’ll do it. I’ll bring her down to Phoenix. In the morning I’ll put her on a plane back home.”

“Why do I have to do everything myself? Why am I always the glue?”

“I’m doing it.”

“You’re telling me you’re the glue? You’re not the glue! There’s a wedding on Saturday.”

“And you’re the glue.”

“Die, Ryan. Just get it over with. Goodbye.”

I stopped in Salt Lake last week. I wake, remembering. I remember that there was nothing to remember, except for telling a man who’d lost his job that careers nowadays aren’t ladders, they’re lattices, and then I explained to him what a lattice was and gave him a model résumé to study. I killed time in a store for an hour after the meeting and bought Keith and Julie their gift, which I had shipped. Then I flew off to Boise, I believe, where I gave the same speech to another man. The lattice speech.

There, I remember now. I wasn’t robbed. It turns out that we’ve been together this whole time, all of the Ryans. We just got separated.

This has happened before. I’ve never told a soul. I’ve met myself coming and going. It’s a secret. It’s only because you’ve been such a patient listener, there in your seat with your drink, your nuts, your napkin, prepared to crash with me, if it comes to that—because isn’t that, finally, the contract between us flyers?—that I’m breaking down and telling you.

nine

at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning Asif drives us to the airport in his Mercedes, a long black beauty that ought to have a flag flying from its antenna. The radio plays a conservative talk show whose amped-up host rattles papers into the mike and has mastered the art of speaking without swallowing. Our democracy died in 1960, he says, but he doesn’t provide specifics, unlike my father, whose doomsaying always included clear-cut timelines and definite turning points. The sun crawling up behind the Mormon Temple casts a peculiarly weak and filtered light, and a breeze stirs the surface of the Great Salt Lake, which appears to be filled with old bathwater this morning. Even the seagulls wind-skating its edges seem reluctant to land and wet their bellies.

“When should I pick you up tonight?” says Asif. I can tell he holds my plan in low regard. Not only is he convinced that Julie needs rest, but this notion of visiting a far-off city without spending the night there baffles him.

“We’ll get in late,” I say. “We’ll grab a cab.”

“How do I explain all this if Kara calls?”

“Her sister and brother needed some family time.”

At the ticket counter I pay full fare for both of us and make my pitch for a pair of first-class upgrades. Julie stands back as I wrangle with the agent, embarrassed by my assertiveness, no doubt. Minnesotans are taught to accept first offers gratefully, but in Airworld you’re nowhere if you don’t negotiate. Unfortunately, the agent is hanging tough. He grants me a seat because I have a coupon, but insists that I turn over ten thousand miles for Julie’s seat—ten thousand miles each way. I roll my eyes.

“Pull up my customer profile. This is crazy.”

Julie cringes and turns her head away. The agent runs his fingers over his keyboard, his mind a symphony of codes and acronyms. Though I’ve never seen him before, I know his story. He’s a lifetime employee who lives for strikes and sick-outs and spends his evenings figuring his pension on his home computer. He’s an officer in the union, undismissable, who sleeps through his annual performance reviews and savors the frustration of his customers, cheerfully forwarding their written complaints to his impotent superiors. He lives for some strange, consuming, pointless hobby—playing King Arthur in medieval fairs or collecting vintage outboard motors—and has come to believe that if not for certain health problems brought on by his stressful work environment, he might have been a man of influence.

“I have your data in front of me,” he says.

“Come on, let’s just go,” Julie whispers.

I wave her off. “How many miles do you see there?”

He lowers his glasses, which are attached to a cord, like an old woman’s. “Nine hundred ninety-five thousand two hundred and one.”

“Drop it,” Julie pleads. The agents smiles at her. He’s enjoying playing us off against each other.

“And what does that tell you about me? Huh?” I say.

“There’s a note in our system,” the agent says. He points a stubby finger at the screen. “Did you lose a bag last week, sir?”

“No.”

He types some more. “I’m showing we found a bag at SLC and sent it on to a Denver residence per the luggage tag: 1214 Gates Street, Apartment 16B. There was no one home to claim it. Is that your address?”

“It was. I moved out.” This isn’t making sense. Although it turns out that I did come to Salt Lake last week, I never check bags, so I couldn’t have lost it here.

“What’s your new address?” the agent says.

“There isn’t one. Listen, I didn’t lose a bag. I’d know.” I look behind me for Julie, but she’s gone. “Are you going to upgrade my companion’s ticket, or do we have to call your supervisor?”

The agent must feel that he’s toyed with me sufficiently; he prints out two boarding passes and hands them over as though all I’d needed to do was ask politely. My platinum customer status leaves him no choice. I ask him if he saw where Julie went and he nods at a newsstand across the terminal, then slips me a card with Great West’s lost luggage number.

Julie is browsing the home decor section of the newsstand’s magazine rack, mooning over photos of claw-foot tubs and built-in stainless steel refrigerators with ice and water dispensers in their doors. Such publications fascinate me, too, though not because I’m about to enter a marriage whose primary solace will be a line of credit at Ethan Allen, courtesy of Keith’s parents, who run an outlet. They intrigue me, these pictures, because the rooms they showcase strike me as buffed-up funeral parlors, basically, designed to display and preserve the upright dead. The flowers, the waxy furniture. It chills me. Lori, my ex, used to drag me to garage sales, convinced that she had a talent for discerning beauty and value beneath the dust and crud. What sorry wastelands. Console TV sets sheathed in chipped veneer. Dressers with sticky drawers and missing handles. The stuff had all been new once, clean and promising, and all I could see in it was depreciation. The depreciation of the owners, too.

I apologize for the confusion at the ticket counter, but Julie goes on reading and won’t acknowledge me. Our morning isn’t progressing as I’d hoped. My plan was to spend an hour at the airport broadening her horizons and introducing her to America’s pumping commerical heart. She’s been in Polk Center too long, it shrinks a person, but this is a place of options, of possibilities.

“Let’s go to the club. I have to make some calls.”

“The club?”

“I’ll show you. The magazines are free there.”

“Ryan, I need to go home.”

“Tomorrow. Thursday.”

“I’m letting a lot of people down,” says Julie.

“Don’t worry. They’ll still be there when you get back.”

“That’s not always true.”

“It’s true in Minnesota.”

The club attendant waves us in with all the graciousness of a royal doorman. I check Julie’s face; she’s flattered, I can see it. The buffet impresses her too—she pauses, stares. Midwesterners are beguiled by free food, even anorexics, apparently; it speaks to our unconscious, collective longing for a bounteous harvest. I pour myself a glass of orange juice from one of the glass carafes propped up in ice buckets (why do they always offer tomato and prune juice? Does anyone actually drink them anymore?) and watch as Julie reviews the pastry tray and uses a pair of scalloped metal tongs to select a caloric lemon Danish dusted with powdered sugar. And she’s not finished. She empties a single-serving box of bran flakes into a paper bowl, tops it with raisins and a glob of yogurt, then breaks off a greenish banana from a bunch of them, peels it, and slices it with a plastic knife.

“Get a table by the big TV there. You can watch your portfolio. CMB.”

“What’s that?”

“A little global bank you own a piece of. It’s up two points. You’re richer every minute.”

I duck into one of the carrels in the business center and dial my assistant in Denver. He’s there, for once. He has a memo on Texas he needs to fax me, but Texas is over, it’s obsolete. I punted. He gives me the address of Dwight’s hotel in Phoenix and passes on several other routine messages, including another from Linda at DIA. He confirms my Las Vegas hotel reservation, which I ask him to cancel because the Cinema Grand has labor issues, I read in last week’s Journal, and part of the new me is not being a scab. I ask for a suite at the Mount Apollo instead, the place with the five-story revolving Pegasus that spreads its great fiberglass wings on the half hour.

“One more little thing,” I say. “Contact Great West baggage at DIA and ask if they have a piece of luggage for me. If they do, have it sent to the office and open it.”

“You lost a bag?”

“That’s what they’re telling me.”

“I don’t know if I should mention this,” says Kyle, “but I saw a sort of strange memo on your desk. Craig Gregory’s assistant delivered it by mistake; he grabbed it back ten minutes after he brought it. The subject line read ‘Faithful Orange.’ ”

“Interesting.”

“Your initials were in the text. ‘RB in place,’ it said.”

“That’s all?”

“There was more, but I didn’t have time to read it. They snatched it out of my hand, like it was secret.”

“Sniff around and tell me what you find.”

“What’s Faithful Orange?”

“I have no idea.”

The air in the club smells of lint and vacuum bags and behind me I hear the cable financial guru predicting a major downturn in corporate bonds. He steered me right on Chase Manhattan, after all. I sit for a while in the tilting, castered chair and watch a light rain gust in out of the west, speckling the runways as it advances and sending the ground workers scrambling for orange slickers. It takes so many people to keep me airborne—night-shift janitors riding rotary waxers, crawl-space plumbers wielding clamps and wrenches, meteorologists, navigators, cooks—and this morning I feel like I’m failing them somehow. My skeleton feels like a ladder of lead pipes.

I recognize Faithful Orange as a project code, but I can only guess what it refers to. ISM’s founders came up through the military, a crew-cut cadre of logistics specialists who took what they’d learned supplying Vietnam with freeze-dried beef stew and tents and bayonets and applied it, in their first big contract, to the global distribution of auto parts. The corporate culture they spawned is leakproof, rigid. No shoptalk, no gossip. Dungeons inside of dungeons. For all I know MythTech is our subsidiary, and Great West itself is run by our alumni, with Morse as their strutting puppet. Faithful Orange. Orange is the airline’s official color, and considering that it’s at war with Desert Air, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re our client.

I’ve never trusted ISM. My position in the firm has never been clear to me, and the path to promotion is winding and obscure. Some people advance by leaving and returning, and the people who don’t advance . . . well, they just vanish. Two years later you hear they’ve opened a bed-and-breakfast or bought out a Kinko’s franchise in Keokuk. That’s what you hear, but it seems more like they’ve died.

RB in place. I’m part of something big.

Julie, God bless her, is back at the buffet, spooning more yogurt onto her granola. She looks better already, less sunk inside herself. The rain has picked up and it’s sheeting the tall windows, distorting the silhouette of the control tower. I check the departures monitor. Bad news. Our flight, 119, is twenty minutes delayed, and twenty minutes is almost always a lie. It means we’ll get back to you. It means buzz off.

“Is that our old friend Ryan Bingham? How’s he been?”

There’s a hand on my shoulder—I turn in its direction. The face is a jolt, collapsing time and space. Its white poreless nose hooks almost to its lips and the eyes have a blind and stony quality, like the eyes on Masonic temples and dollar bills. It’s the face of my ex-wife’s husband, my replacement, with whom she had two children, just like that, proving that I, not Lori, was the barren one. She took his last name after refusing mine, and from everything I know about their life together, the highest councils of heaven have sanctioned the match. I was merely a pit stop, a wrong turn, on the way to their preordained union.

“Mark,” I say. I take his extended hand and briefly squeeze it. His other hand grips the handle of a briefcase. Antiqued nickel hardware, natural, top-grain hide. One of Boulder’s top real estate salesmen, and still rising.

“How are the girls?”

“They’re fabulous. They’re dolls. Little Amy is quite the marksman, for her age. That’s our family obsession lately: shooting sports.”

“Lori, too? I thought she hated guns.”

“It must be the country air. We’re out of town now. Sixty acres up against the foothills. I subdivided the old Lazy W Ranch and took a nice slice for myself. You have to visit.”

“Lori firing a gun. I can’t imagine.”

“Still renting that one-bedroom?”

“I gave it up.”

“You own now?”

“No.”

“But you’re looking?”

“Not really. No.”

Mark’s face twists in on itself. He bites his lip. Homeownership is his church, and he feels sorry for me. He divides the world into two camps, those with equity and those without, and his calling is to unite them. A noble soul.

“There’s something I’d like to show you. An opportunity. Do you have a minute to sit and hear me out?”

I do, and he knows it; the airport’s at a standstill, pent up under an iron lid of clouds. The soft leather couch is like sitting on a body as we settle in diagonally, knee to knee, and Mark snaps open his case and reaches inside with a smooth and lotioned hand. This is the man who took up where I left off and carried my wife past a biological threshold that I lacked the strength for. His confidence is spellbinding. If I didn’t dislike him so, I’d hire him to stand up at hotel banquets and teach his system. I doubt he has one, though. Mark is all instinct and genetic mastery, shot from a cannon at birth. If he had antlers, they’d spread past his shoulders. He’s my natural superior.

He opens a folder and lays it flat between us. “These homes will go in the high four hundreds soon, but until the community’s finished—and be aware of this, it is a community, not just a development—we’re slipping people in in the mid-threes.” He gives me a moment to absorb the photos; crisp early-morning shots of pillared facades surrounded by spindly staked aspens and split-rail fences. The houses are set at odd angles to one another as though they grew up without a plan, organically, and each has a horse paddock with a lone brown steed that I’d swear is the same animal, duplicated. I detect a computer graphics program at work, but I’m charmed and drawn in despite myself. These happiness professionals know their jobs, and theirs is the sort of art I most admire, because it’s effective, because it gets things done.

“The concept is turnkey everything,” Mark says. “You buy a maintenance contract with the home. You’re traveling five days a week? It doesn’t matter. We’ll whack your weeds, we’ll even change your lightbulbs. Furniture? Buy your own or choose a package. High-speed Internet, too.”

“Garages?”

“Hidden. A seamless traditionalism, yet all the perks.”

I’m interested, though I’m not sure if it’s sincere. Part of me might like to signal Lori through Mark that not only do I qualify financially to own a burnished cube of paradise, but that I’m actually capable of filling it. She knew me just as I was starting to fly and developing my system for compact living, for keeping a portable and tidy camp. She accused me of smallness, of tightness. It wasn’t fair. If anything, my spirit was too far-flung. I lived out of a pack because I owned the plains.

“You’re concerned about interest rates,” Mark says. “Aren’t we all? You can’t think short term, though. This is an investment. How are your stocks doing?”

“Miserably.”

“I’m sorry. Do you have any tangible assets?”

“Not to speak of. A ’96 Camry in a long-term parking lot.”

I’m trying to sound pathetic on purpose now, to test the depths of Mark’s pity. He’s always liked me. He met my ex in a supermarket aisle a month before our divorce was finalized, but instead of asking her out immediately, he came to me for permission. Unprecedented.

“Here’s what you do if you’re interested,” he says. “Put down some earnest money, any amount, and I’ll hold a unit until you can come see it. I have one in mind. The viewscape’s just spectacular.”

“I may be relocating soon. To Omaha.”

“You hold this house six months, you’ll clear a profit. That’s guaranteed. If you don’t, I’ll buy it back. Ryan, we all need a place to call our own. This is America. This is what we’re promised.” He pushes the folder closer. “Are you all right?”

“Something strange is happening.”

Mark leans closer. His breath has the sweetness of a man who jogs, who squeezes his own juice and eats his vegetables. He may be too sane for what I’m going to tell him.

If you fly enough and chat with enough strangers, you hear some crazy things. They stretch your sense of what’s possible. Some examples. That a study was done about forty years ago of the chemical makeup of the soil in major American grain-producing regions which found that due to the overuse of fertilizers the soil was bereft of certain key particles and was therefore incapable of yielding even minimally nutritious food. That a science exists by the name of psychotronics which seeks to influence mass human behavior via the beaming of powerful radio waves from a network of secret transmitters located above the Arctic Circle and aimed at Russia during the cold war. That the American Medical Association, soon after issuing warnings about the effects of sodium consumption on high blood pressure, realized that there was no evidence for the warning but declined to retract it out of stubbornness. That contrary to popular belief, cocaine remained an ingredient in cola drinks well into the 1950s. That the odds of winning at blackjack in Las Vegas shift ever so slightly in favor of the player for an average of seven weeks per year and that there exists a high-priced newsletter which alerts well-heeled gamblers to these trends.

Now it’s my turn to float a far-fetched theory. Though not as far-fetched as Pinter’s dream reports.

“I think someone high up is toying with me.”

“Who?”

“It might be the airline. Or ISM. It might be an outfit in Omaha. Or all of them.”

Mark’s eyes go wide and tender. “Toying how?”

“You know how biologists will tag an elk so they can follow and analyze it’s movements? They do this with people, too. Not always openly. One of the Big Three auto companies hired my firm once to follow five new car buyers for their first three months of ownership. How fast did they drive? Did they change their oil on schedule? How many miles did they clock per week? You can do surveys to gather this kind of data, but you’ll never be able to guarantee their accuracy. No, what you want is behavior in the raw. That’s how you target your ads, create your profiles. Is this making any sense to you?”

Mark nods. “Why you, though? Why would they shadow Ryan Bingham?”

“Because I’m an interesting case to them just now. Uniquely interesting. By Friday night I’ll have a million frequent flyer miles, making me one of their most loyal customers. That’s the grail in this industry: loyalty. To keep you on board, buying tickets.”

“I understand that.”

“To them, I’m an optimal outcome,” I explain. “If they could create, say, a thousand more of me, just think of the earnings. The market share. I’m gold. There’s only one problem: Who am I?”

“I’m losing you.”

“How do they re-create me? They need a model. But how do they build this model? They can’t. Too complicated. Because what are the crucial variables? My age? My income? Some mysterious psychological quirk? No, the only way to make new mes, new Ryan Binghams, is to track and study, whole, in real time, in my ‘native environment,’ the actual Ryan Bingham. Right?”

“Okay.”

“You look confused. Your face.”

“I’m fine. Keep talking.”

“I’m everything they dream of in a customer, and that makes whatever I do worth studying, down to how many hours of sleep I get, what sort of rooms I stay in, what I eat. And also worth testing, if possible. They’re testing me. They’re throwing scenarios at me right and left and seeing how I react. A ticket agent rebuffs some special request—do I get angry or do I accept it? A flight attendant spills coffee on my jacket—do I switch to another airline, or threaten to? These are things they’d pay a lot to know.”

“So what are you going to do? If this is true, I mean.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“What can I do? I’m powerless.”

“Tell them to stop it.”

“Tell who? It’s not one person. And it’s not like they’re trying to control me. The elk, remember? They tag it with a beeper, and let it roam. The data I’m providing is only valuable insofar as I’m acting freely, naturally.”

“A beeper. I think that’s crazy, Ryan. I’m sorry.”

“In my case all they’d probably have to do is put a note in their computer system. It comes up whenever I check in for a flight and tells the agent to ask me this or that and call a certain number afterwards. A researcher answers, asks them certain questions, then forwards the answers to whoever’s running this.”

“And who do you think that is?”

“Management. Management and whoever’s advising management. Assuming that this is happening at all.”

“You’re admitting you might be dreaming this.”

“I might be.”

Mark cuts his eyes at the monitor. “My flight.”

I’ve made a mistake. I’ve chosen the wrong confessor.

“You run along. Forget this stuff,” I say. “I’ll think about the house. I really will.”

“I want you to call me, Ryan. Promise me? Make it a social call, forget the house. I’d like to sit down with you. Just two men. No business. There’s a book I read once that really changed my outlook, that pulled me out of a hole I’d stumbled into—maybe we could get together some night and read a few chapters?”

The Bible study come-on. Why won’t they ever just come right out and say it?

Mark shuts his briefcase, stands. “You’ll call? You promise?”

“Mmm.”

“You’re in our thoughts, you know.”

“Hers too?”

“Constantly. Listen, I’m sorry I’m rushing here. About the house, though—it might be what you need. A house can be a real anchor in this world. Take a good look at that literature.”

“Will do.”

Mark’s handshake leaves a moist spot on my palm that I blot on my trousers as I watch him go. In a couple of hours he’ll be home and in her arms, welcomed by jumping dogs and squealing kids, and his decency will forbid a full reporting of what I’ve told him this morning. Tonight they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, crowning their mountainside neighborhood with lights, and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over, blessing them.

Sealed in a tube again, but going nowhere. The rain strikes the windows like handfuls of dry rice as a flight attendant stows the wardrobe bags and another who might be her twin takes Julie’s drink order: club soda with a wedge of lime, no ice. The engines aren’t on yet, so no air conditioning. This is the trick they play that I least appreciate: pushing back from the gate to lock in a departure time, then parking while the cabin steams and swelters.

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

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

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

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

“We will.”

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

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

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

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

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

Julie says, “What does that mean?”

“Nothing good.”

Morse is making this personal. He’ll pay.

“What do we do? Go back to Utah now?”

“That never works.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Going back.”

ten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A relationship is a closed dynamic system.”

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

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

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

“Ryan?”

“Yes?”

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

“I’ve saved. I’m comfortable.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

Julie sleeps.

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

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

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

“Where are you staying?”

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

“The book is just brilliant.”

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

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

“And I want you to have it.”

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

“It’s not too short for that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bingham?”

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

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

“I don’t want to think. I want to see your face. There, my tram just left. Terrific. Great.” I roll my eyes at Julie, who whispers “What?” and tightens her grip on the bag of fuzzy pet toys she bought for no reason at a stand upstairs. My sister feels ill at ease, I’m learning, if she goes for more than an hour without a purchase. I wish she’d put them away, though—I don’t like stuffed things.

“I have a solution,” says Dwight. “The Salt Lake Marriott. Tomorrow. For a very early lunch. We’ll buckle down and wrestle with this idea of yours and see if we can’t get an outline we’re both proud of.”

“It’s down to an outline now? That’s all you want?”

“The Marriott at ten. Frankly, I find this hugely preferable. They’re practically booting me out of this hotel. This works for both of us?”

It will have to work. Our flight to Phoenix is boarding; we’ll never make it. Julie, whose appetite Airworld has revived, bites off a chunk of caramel-coated soft pretzel and eyes me in a childish sugar daze. What’s next? I wish I could tell her.

“At ten. Agreed?”

“Fine. I’ll see you there. This doesn’t thrill me. If this is how your profession operates . . .”

“I don’t represent a profession; I’ve never claimed that. I’m a bookman, Bingham. Just a bookman. If you find our little fraternity too casual, too fallible, too dog-eared—”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Good. Because this idea of yours is strong.”

“As strong as Horizoneering? Morse’s book?”

“Odd you should ask.”

I listen. Nothing. “Why?”

“Just odd, is all. I’ll tell you a little story at lunch tomorrow. And bring an appetite. Their buffet’s first rate.”

“Where are you—really? La Jolla still? New York? Or do you just pretend to move around? What’s a tennis commitment? That’s a game.”

“Only for those who don’t play it well,” Dwight says.

“I want you to guarantee me you’ll be in Utah.”

“Guarantee you? Now how would I do that?”