Up in the Air

eleven

fold certain itineraries in the middle and the halves are mirrors of each other. I’ve taken such trips, a yo-yo on a string, staying in the same places on my way back that I stayed in, the other day, on my way out. At the outermost point of such journeys, before the pivot, there’s a moment of stillness, of poised potential energy. To begin the rewinding all I have to do is pick up my change and wallet from the nightstand, tuck in a shirttail, sign a credit card slip. But what if I don’t? It’s always tempting. Rebellion. What if I step aside and let the string snap back without me? I’ll be free then, won’t I?

The next flight back to Salt Lake leaves in an hour, and there is another two hours after that. Julie wants my decision. She licks a yogurt cone speckled with crystals of red cinnamon candy and leans on the rail of the rising escalator, watching her brother sort through his bad options. I’ve begun to suspect she’s pregnant and not telling me. Her face has that dependent bottomless softness and her appetite for junk seems driven, hormonal. She’s filling out like a moon before my eyes.

“How would you like to see my office?”

“Sure. I thought you’d quit, though.”

“That’s still in process. We’ll rent a car. We’ll drive.”

I need to get out of the airport. All airports. Now.

My Maestro Diamond card cuts through the formalities and ten minutes later we’re buckled up and cruising, watching the Denver skyline climb the windshield and swaying in our seats to Christian rock. Julie has always been up for anything—the source of most of her problems. She rides along. Her beauty arises from her readiness, and Keith, if he’s really the lump she’s made him out to be, will never drink from its source. That’s fine with me. There are parts of her that I’d rather strangers not handle.

I’m a dead man at ISM but they don’t know that yet; the parking attendant thumbs-ups me, lifts the gate. We drive down into a catacomb of Cadillacs and take my empty spot, still stained with coolant from my poorly maintained Toyota. When we get out, a man that I know from the hallways and lobby and who I’ve always assumed is at my level—though how would I know?—stops dead and palely stares. He raises a hand in a lame half wave, then fusses with his tie and turns and goes. There’s the flash of a shoeshine, the echo of hasty steps. I lock the car doors remotely, with the smart key, and lead Julie into the elevator and up.

“You’re sure we should be here?” she says. “You’re not in trouble?”

“Why?”

“Your shoulders. Roll them back. Now exhale. Slowly.”

“Massage school,” I say.

“It stays with you. It trains your eye. Back there in the airport, the compression of people’s spines? It’s like they’re all six inches shorter than they should be.”

“You’d think they’d walk taller there.”

“They’re munchkins. Crabs.”

The point of this errand is still waiting to reveal itself. We walk out onto my floor and nothing’s changed except the art. Artemis Bond, the apostle on our board, donated to us a trove of wildlife oils said to be worth millions, though I’d be shocked if that were true. The bugling bull elk and treed pumas and flushing quail rotate through the building, floor by floor; I know it’s September now by all the waterfowl. The art is our only connection to natural cycles here. An energy-saving coating on the windows cuts out the heart of the spectrum from the light and turns people’s skin the color of old dull nickels. It makes paper explosive, too bright to look at, and assistants have actually left us over eyestrain. One even filed suit, and may have won. Such victories don’t pay. The CTC cases I’ve known who’ve wrangled judgments for wrongful termination are spacemen now, in orbit, in exile, unwelcome back on earth.

Julie trails me past a gang of cubicles glowing with junior executive ambition to a partitioned warren of larger offices that means we’re approaching the operational heart of things. The air swirls and eddies with all the old polarities—fear of the lion’s den just down the hall, the hope for an unmolested interlude at the copier or fax machine, the seductions of fresh-brewed decaf in the snack nook. My assistant looks up from his desktop—I’ve tripped some wire—and reformats his self-presentation appropriately, jerking taut the slack around his eyes.

“It’s you,” he says.

I point Julie to my office, which has a love seat. A foreshortened sofa, actually. It’s never been used for courtship, that I know of.

My assistant rolls back his chair two caster-turns. I’m a sight, it seems.

“Any messages?”

“Just one or two. Your hotel in Las Vegas is covered. The Mount Olympus. They’re crowded, so I had to take a suite. They said it has a jukebox and a pool table.”

“Nice.”

“You think so? It kind of gave me chills. Mr. Bingham alone in some hotel room, practicing his bank shots, playing records.”

“Who else. Did a woman named Alex call?”

“Don’t think so. Just that airline lady who sounds like Catwoman. She calls every couple of hours. She wants your mobile. I’ve been guarding your privacy.”

“Linda. What does she want?”

“Wouldn’t tell me. Is that voice an act?”

“I’ve never noticed it. Give her my number next time. Nothing about that meeting in Omaha?”

“No, but your briefcase came from Great West baggage. I stood it up next to your chair. Your tie is twisted.”

I own just one briefcase, and I’m carrying it. I walk into the office, hip-bang the door closed, and look down at a burgundy case with gold-tone hardware that might have been my style a few years back, but not since I started reading GQ magazine. The airline address tag looped around its handle is filled out in my hand, in faded blue ink.

“Is this you in this picture?” Julie is on the love seat, a magazine on her lap. The Corporate Counselor.

“That’s me. The one they’re hoisting on their shoulders.”

“Why are your shirts off? What are all those ropes?”

“We were rock climbing in Bryce Canyon. It’s a program. Wilderness Accountability. We ate wild grasses. We chiseled arrowheads.”

“One of those things where you let yourself fall backwards and everyone catches you?”

“Only they don’t catch you. On this one they let you fall. And then they step on you.”

I heft the case. It’s light, but it feels full. I shake it. Paper. The combination lock reads 4–6–7. I used to carry an expensive pocketknife—a gift from a Waco oil services firm in gratitude for the lawsuit-free excision of eleven second-tier managers, three of them less than a year from being vested in a pension plan that’s since gone under—but it was taken from me by airport guards who measured the blade length and said it broke the law. I could use something like it to jimmy the case. I open my top middle desk drawer and stir the junk around, a lot of giveaway convention bric-a-brac, looking for something slim and strong and pointed, but the best I can do is a silver-plated bookmark snagged from KPMG at the last GoalQuest. The thing is hardly metal, a flimsy wafer, and when I wedge it against a hinge, it cracks.

“Back from the vale of sorrows. Ryan B. His mournful dignity marred by coffee stains insufficiently blotted from wrinkled collar.”

This man is not worth elevating my vision for, a conclusion I came to long ago, but he might have a knife in his trousers, so I do. It’s the same old assault on the senses. Flared canine nostrils snuffling for blood trails near the watercooler. Marx Brothers eyebrows, permanently arched and flaked with dead skin that flies off him when he laughs, which he only does with both hands inside his pockets, as though there’s a switch near his scrotum he has to toggle. Craig Gregory, Human Issues Group Team Leader, who came to me years ago in the company weight room, reracked the barbell I was struggling with, gazed down into my clear young eyes, and said, “It’s a recession, it’s official. Axes are falling. Much stench. Much fear of plague. I know you’ll want back into Marketing Group someday but right now the king’s army needs some undertakers to sanitize the gore. You say you’d love to? Abracadabra: I grant you better insurance, complete with vision care coverage. Go with God.”

Craig smiles at me now, just one hand pocketed. The other will join it the moment I ask for something.

“You stood up our Texas client. And that’s okay. Life moves so slowly down in the Lone Star State, beneath those humbling skyscapes, that red sun, that I’ll bet you could amble on in a year from now and those lazy cowpokes would still be at their grub. Also, they’ve written some wobbly checks of late, so I say screw ’em. I say hang ’em high.”

I slice a look at Julie, who need not witness this. She stands. The old family telepathy still functions.

“The ladies’ room? Do I need a key or something?”

Both pockets now. Craig Gregory locks and loads. It’s like him to ignore a stranger’s presence until he can actively nullify it. “A password: ‘Open sesame, really gotta pee.’ ”

“Ask my assistant,” I tell her. “My sister Julie, Craig. Proof I was born of woman, not spore, like you.”

The two of them brush hands and Julie flees. She’ll make it a long one, I trust.

“I’m serious, Ryan, you called it right on Texas. Those boys aren’t downsizing, they’re capsizing. We don’t take Monopoly money at ISM. The full faith and credit of Parker Brothers State Bank just ain’t gonna butter our bagel. Old policy. No pro bono until Jesus tells us otherwise.”

“Is Boosler still back from his trip 9/21?”

“Affirmative. Caught many tuna. Dallied with many maidens. Sucked much synergistic bigwig dick. The question is: when will you be back?”

“I’m here.”

“Fractionally. I sense brief layover. I’m going to stroll to your love seat over there and sacrifice my commanding height advantage in return for some teammate-to-teammate pillow talk. Walking now. Sitting now. Relating now. What the fuck’s up with you, asswipe? They phoned, you know.”

“Excuse me if I don’t join you in repose. Fresher air up here. Who phoned?”

“Them. The Brain Trust. Operation Gamma Ray. The Seven. Whatever it is they’re calling themselves these days to mask the absurdity of their worthless methods. The Omaha Illuminati.”

“MythTech?”

“They swiped our big milky nipple this week, CoronaCom. There goes the lap pool we’re building up on nine. There goes the Broncos skybox with the wet bar and honor-system humidor.”

“Good for them.”

“Good for you, if you join them. ‘This Bingham?’ they ask me. Bold as that, like we’re swapping fucking baseball cards. ‘What can he do for us? Is he a comer? Rate on a ten scale: Emotional lability. Bilateral orgasmic dexterity. And by the way, since we’re speaking frankly now, how does he do taking orders from female Negroes?’ ”

“Who made this call? This isn’t their procedure.”

“I am strength and silence. I am Khan.”

“Lucius Spack?”

“Is that the quiz-kid pederast? The queer little pink guy with the propeller beanie?”

“You don’t have a pocketknife, do you, by any chance?”

Craig Gregory licks his lips. They dry out quickly. “No one called.”

I set the briefcase down.

“I’m fishing, Ryan. I’m covering my flanks. They raided Deloitte. They’re raiding everyone. I’m going up and down the halls today in search of potential deserters. Don’t think you’re special. We’re an old-line firm, and we take pride in that, but we realize that novelty sings its siren song.”

“You’re lying. I say they did call.”

Again, both pockets. Craig Gregory laughs. “This is fun. It’s fun, my job. The Art of the Mind Fuck. You’ll be at GoalQuest, surely?”

“I’m speaking there,” I remind him. “Please come listen.”

“Before or after Tony Robbins? During? Sorry, can’t make it. Must touch my guru’s robes. Must wash big Tony’s feet in thanks and praise for turning wormy me into king cobra.”

I cross my arms. “What’s Faithful Orange? Tell me.”

Craig Gregory cups his knees and slowly rises in lobster-like, hinged stages from my sofa. “Behind you,” he says. “Your sister. Waiting sheepishly. Intimidated by Gregory’s musky pheromones.”

I turn. We all look so gray in here. Turn back.

“Faithful Orange. A soda pop, I think.”

“Is the Marketing Team consulting for Great West Air?”

“I’d like to think we have corporate Denver covered. I certainly hope we are. Listen, you look like hell. Nice boots, but from there on up you’re Guatemalan. If I was a fag I’d reach over and fix your hair. And your ‘I’m too busy to floss’ thing just isn’t working. That may go over fine among the Navajo, but this is white America. Colgate country.”

“What if I told you I’m taping you right now and sending a transcript to Equal Opportunity? You’re going to get ISM sued. You watch your mouth.”

“Me? Our first Diversity Training graduate? I’m covered, brother. I have a framed certificate. Sponsor me on my AIDS walk?”

I should quit now. Retrieve the letter from Boosler’s desk and read it aloud while standing on my chair. Gather the assistants. The cleaning staff. The letter has several flourishes I’m quite proud of and would benefit from an oral presentation. If I had my million miles, I’d do it, too. But it’s ISM’s dime that’s going to put me over, and I can’t afford to lose travel authorization. I recite the letter in my head.

“Until GoalQuest. Anon. Our desert tribal gathering.”

Craig Gregory is going. Walking now. Walking and wagging his ass now. He liked me once. He sent me bursting congratulatory food baskets heaped with blue-veined cheeses and vintage vinegars. Once, he even took a dive for me in a company tennis tournament, vaulting me into the finals. These tokens moved me. Maybe my father was not so loving, after all. Maybe there are holes I’m trying to fill.

“Was that your boss?” says Julie.

“That’s never been clear. We use the new, confusing titles here.”

It must be the briefcase I came for, because I have it now and I’m ready to leave and not come back. I stare at my desk and conduct a mental X-ray of its neglected contents. Family photos? I’m not the type who would bring those to the office—I’d prefer they not know the faces of my loved ones here. Voodoo potential. Somewhere, in some drawer, I stashed a small packet of marijuana once, which I used to use in tandem with my sleep machine during particularly hectic trips. It’s a fossil now, surely. No drug dog could even smell it. What else is in there? A stapler. Old Vicks inhalers. Some cream I bought once when I couldn’t feel my legs, supposed to promote circulation. It caused a rash. Other than that, though, just business cards and tape and microcassettes and ISM logo keychains and scads of paper clips that have mysteriously linked themselves together into the sort of puzzle bright children enjoy. Worth holding on to? Anything? Post-it notes?

They give you a lot of stuff when you’re first hired and you fully expect you’ll use it, but you just don’t.

If earning miles were the chief consideration, I would do better driving the rented Volvo at five hundred bonus points per calendar day back to Salt Lake City. In fact, this is the chief consideration, particularly as of 3 P.M. today, with every other seed I’ve planted lately gone dormant in the clay. Dwight is backpedaling on The Garage; the Pinter Zone concept, while still alive, feels vaporous; MythTech hovers obscurely behind a cloud bank; and Alex still hasn’t called about our Vegas tryst, which I’ve begun to regret arranging anyhow. If my chilled, sluggish legs are any indication, I doubt I’ll be able to muster the blood flow necessary to cap off our evening in my rec-room suite. My assistant was right; it is a lonely scene, even with a woman in the frame. The jukebox plays Sinatra. The balls go smack. You say to your date, ‘Nice shot.’ The hot tub bubbles. And meanwhile, in all four directions, above your head, people you’ve met or may as well have met but at this point will never meet fan out on late-night business that you’re not part of and may never be again. Because you had qualms, and you voiced them, and you’re tired. Tired, with cold numb toes.

Right now, for the first time in years—the first time ever?—I’d rather not get on a plane, though. You listening, Morse? Your calf has slipped the lariat. He’s driving. He’s utilizing the public byways. And still earning chits, still indebting you, through Maestro. Besides the miles I’ll give to charity in the hope some sick child will come vigorously of age and knife you in the street for pocket change, I think I’ll just hoard the rest. To keep you owing me.

Julie, too, would rather drive than fly now. She covered much the same route just yesterday, but in the dark, and she wonders what she missed. The trip should take us about eight hours, she estimates, and will be like old times in Dad’s Chevy, except we’ll eat.

Kara looms. Both bells at the New York Stock Exchange have rung, O’Hare has dispatched a dozen flights to Asia and FedEx Memphis has sorted a million legal briefs and tardy birthday presents, and still no status report for our big sister. I’m sure she finds this unpardonable. I find it racking. The longer we avoid her, the louder she speaks. I hear her voice when our tires stray onto the gravel.

The briefcase, still unopened, is in the trunk. Some truckstop along the way will have a screwdriver. My new theory is that the case is mine, that I left it on board a jet some years ago during one of the strobing, amnesiac flutters that follow intensive bouts of CTC work, and that the case has been sailing ever since in the parallel dimension of Great West baggage. I anticipate no epiphanies (Verbal Edge, tape nine, “The Language of Art and Literature”) when I crack it. I expect to find socks and boxers and a shirt and perhaps a collection of loose-leaf workbook pages from Sandy Pinter’s master-level seminar, the one where participants wore colored hats representing the Six Cognitive Styles and were asked by the trainer to cross a hotel ballroom without letting their feet contact the floor. It was a daunting task for the non-acrobats and the source of much frustration and puzzlement, until the trainer pointed out to us that our feet and the floor were separated by shoes, an obvious fact that all had overlooked and proof of Sandy Pinter’s principle that frantic problem-solving is usually evidence that no problem exists.

Either that or the case contains Morse’s tracking device and I can go crazy in earnest once I’ve jimmied and stripped the bug from the lining. To find a bug—how glorious that must be for those who’ve done it. To have one’s fears credentialed, physically. To hold the little gremlin in one’s hand and hear it tick or buzz or hum or whatever it does that tells one that it’s operating, then to bellow into the ears of living spies! I’d like to sit down with a man who’s had this chance. I think he would have a strong spirit as a result. I could offer to agent him as a corporate speaker.

I let Julie drive. I’m accustomed to being piloted. We head north toward Cheyenne, where we’ll meet I-80 west and push up over the hump to the Great Basin in the footsteps of the Mormon settlers. They say you can walk in the grooves cut by the wheels of their wagons and handcarts. We’ll pass the graves of children, the shady encampments where Brigham spread his bedroll. I’ve never driven this trail, but I’ve flown over it, and my sense of its contours and hazards is comprehensive. The West gave people so much trouble once, mostly because they couldn’t see over its ridges, but now we can, and it’s just another place.

This might be the nicest car Julie’s ever driven; she’s treating it with inordinate respect. Both hands on the wheel, a stiff, cadet-like posture, much attention to mirrors and turn signals. She’s scared. This is world-class imported equipment, and it’s intimidating, especially to those who don’t rent cars much and believe that the vehicles are theirs illicitly, as part of a scam or a very special favor. Me, I push these cars hard, without remorse, aware that they’ve been paid for ten times over and will be sold at a profit on top of that. It’s sweet, though, to see the meek, more natural attitude. May it never die out. It’s a cushion for the rest of us.

“What if, when we hit Wyoming,” Julie says, “we go right, not left? To Minnesota? It seems pretty easy suddenly. Just swerve. The rest might take care of itself. The wedding. Keith. He’s already burying wires for that lawn mower.”

“That monster you met in my office made you think. Red wagons and cornfields are sounding pretty good.”

“It isn’t like that now. We have espresso. Good espresso. Mom’s hooked on it. Burt, too.”

“The Lovely Man on uppers. What is that like? Just more, faster loveliness, or does he growl at people?”

“Burt’s family now. You should get to know him, Ryan. He’s full of great stories. He’s had a long, full life. He drove an armored truck in Mason City before he started his nursery, and someone, a fellow driver, drugged him once and tied him up with string and drove the truck way out into the woods and tried to rob it, except that he needed Burt’s key to open it, but when he reached down to take it, Burt bit his ear off. That wild old movie stuff really used to happen. Burt’s been around, you’d be shocked.”

“He’s good to Mom, that’s all I care about. I hear lots of stories. True ones, too.”

“Burt doesn’t lie. He wouldn’t make things up. He made a moral blood pact once, he told me. He opened a little vein along one knuckle and squeezed out a whole teaspoonful and drank it, then said the Ten Commandments with bloody lips while looking into a mirror.”

“That’s a fancy one.”

“It’s because he’d told a man a fib that accidentally killed him a day later. That’s how Burt made things right with God. He’s like that.”

“Deranged and ritualistic?”

“He just likes pacts. And he keeps them, it’s amazing. He swore off sweets—I was there for this, I witnessed it—and ever since I’ve never seen him eat one, not even sugar in coffee. It’s like sweets vanished. He doesn’t see them now. He’s trained his mind.”

“Enough black magic. How’s Mom?”

“You know, she’s Mom. She moms it up. You’ll see.”

“It’s good to be down here, isn’t it? Old sea level.”

“That’s not a big change for me. You know I’m pregnant?”

This catches me. “No.” I’d guessed it, but it still catches me.

“So what’s your job, exactly?”

“You said you’re pregnant. Let’s go back to that.”

“Let’s work around to it. I’m always amazed by what people do, you know? How many different businesses there are. That’s why that year in Chicago freaked me out. No one I met was doing the same thing. This one guy trades gold—in the future. This woman sues doctors—but only heart doctors. This other guy flies around the country telling zoos how to design the cages for different animals. Does anybody still do anything normal? Who’s sewing the shirts? Who’s collecting all the eggs?”

“I both do and don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“Kara and Mom and I, we talk about you, but really we’re just guessing, we’re making you up. We know you do something, you’ve maybe even told us, but it’s so complicated it doesn’t stick. Is that what’s going to happen to my baby?”

My mobile rings in my jacket, the silent-ring feature that tickles my rib cage just below my heart. I ignore it—ultimate issues are at stake here, at least for one of us.

“Is my baby just going to grow up into some . . . fragment? What happened to cowboys, to miners?”

“You’d better marry him. I think you at least have to try it.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“She left me,” I say. “She gave her ring back. I’ll show you. I carry it. It’s in my bag.”

“You talk about Burt. You’re worse.”

“How far along?”

“It’s like a plum now. Two weeks ago it was a peanut.”

My mobile again. To my father, all phone calls that weren’t cries for help ranked as impersonal noise, like the TV, and therefore had no claims on him. Things change.

“Hello?” An uncertain connection. Rolling static.

“It’s Linda. Finally. Where are you now?”

Women always ask this question. Men don’t. Men find it sufficient that you’re alive and that you’re somewhere. They know the rest is detail.

“I’m in a cab leaving SeaTac.”

Julie looks at me. Sticklers all. I don’t feel I’m lying, though. If this trip had gone the way I’d planned, that’s where I’d be now, driving downtown from SeaTac, and frankly I’d rather stick to that. The plan. The plan had beauty, and I wish to honor it. Perhaps, at some level, it’s clicking along without me, one of Sandy Pinter’s “Artifacts of Consciousness.” His example was the lost formulas of the alchemists, which he hints in one book he recovered in a dream.

“That’s weird. Someone saw you here,” says Linda. “At DIA.”

“I flew out of DIA.”

“And didn’t visit?”

“I’m cutting things close this week. What’s going on?”

Linda says something to someone. She’s at work, which means her news must be important. She takes work seriously. She considers guarding the Compass Club big stuff.

“It’s me again. Don’t be angry, just listen, okay? I’ve been in the computer trying to find you, so I know that you’re not in Seattle. Don’t explain. Before I tell you why I checked your flights, though, you should know about something I saw in your account.”

“Wait,” I say. I ask Julie to pull over. I don’t want to drive out of range of the connection. And I want to be still when I hear this. “Talk. I’m here.”

“You know how you’ve been gunning for a million? You talk about it pretty much nonstop, so I know how important it is. It’s like a symbol.”

I’m disappointed to hear her put it this way. It’s insensitive and inaccurate. She demeans me. The Nike “swoosh” is a symbol. This isn’t that. This is life, this thing, and this is me, and this woman who claims to care for me should understand.

“I knew this. They’re screwing around with me,” I say. I’ve found my bug. I’m angry, exalted, justified. “Linda, hang on. Stay there.” I turn to Julie, who’s facing out her window, still holding the wheel despite having turned the key off. She’s wherever it is that she goes inside herself when some man is calling the shots and not consulting her, or even bothering to make much sense. I suspect it’s her soul I’m seeing.

“Julie? Jules? Something’s happening. Turn the car around. We need to go back to the airport.”

She shakes her head.

“Today’s been exhausting, I know. Just turn the car around.”

“No.”

I give up for now. Back to Linda. To the bug. “What are they doing to me? Lay it out.”

“Redemptions. It could just be clerical, some mix-up, but someone’s been redeeming miles for tickets. I know how you are, so I knew it wasn’t you.”

“Hell no, it’s not me.”

“Hawaii. Alaska. Orlando. All first class. Three in three days, all last week.”

“For future dates? I hope you’re not saying someone used these tickets. You’re saying they’re gone? The points are gone?”

“Relax.”

“I find this sick. I find this worse than sick. This is diseased, what they’re doing. This is dogshit.”

Julie opens her door a crack. For air?

“They haven’t been used. You can cancel them. Calm down. You’ll just have to change your ID numbers or something. Maybe someone hacked them. Those hacker people.”

“This comes from the top. This is dogshit from the top. Make no mistake, Linda. These are sad, sick people. These people are losing a proud, established, major American transportation company to their own short-term lusts and half-baked theories, and in consequence they are sick and sad and desperate. You work there. I know. You can’t afford to hear this. I pity your dilemma. But this is truth. Rock-hard cold impregnable truth.”

“There, I’m in the system now. I’m canceling.”

“You’re canceling the mischievous effects, not the intentions behind them. Those persist.”

“What was strange were the dates. The trips were for a year—a year to the day, almost—from the reservations. Someone expected to go to all those places on three consecutive days? It just looked wacky. Or maybe they were keeping their options open.”

“Don’t second-guess the pathological mind. That’s a trap. It’s bottomless. Don’t start.”

The driver’s-side door slams and Julie is out and walking, straight on up the highway, heel to toe, treating the shoulder stripe like a balance beam. Trucks blast past and lift her pretty hair.

“Should I tell you why I was poking through your bookings?”

“Does Morse ever do that walk-among-the-peasants bit, strolling through the airport, shaking hands, patting workers’ backs? Is that a thing of his? The Pope-in-disguise-among-his-children stunt?”

“You mean have I met Soren Morse? I’ve met him. Why?”

“The touchy-touchy type, or more reserved? This is called casing the joint for unlocked windows. Does he ever eat lunch in the food court? The humble act? My guess is he’d go for that California pizza place, the one where they don’t use red sauce, just so-called pesto. That’s more his trip. The pine nuts. The thin, charred crust. Not pizza as you and I know it. Power pizza. Or does he just hang loose at Burger King?”

“You sound bad, Ryan. Are you on stay-awake pills? I used to take those when I worked the red-eyes. They made me like you’re being now.”

My sister is dwindling. It’s flat and vast here and it takes time to dwindle, but she’s managing to and soon I’ll have to catch her. There are rules for when women desert your car and walk. The man should allow them to dwindle, as is their right, but not beyond the point where if they turn the car is just a speck to them. That angers them.

“Listen, I’m at my desk here,” Linda says. “Guests are flashing passes and I’m not seeing them. They might be expired. What I wanted to tell you was that you mentioned Las Vegas the other day and it happens the airline is sending me there tomorrow. I wanted to check if we’d cross. Looks like we will. Which place are you staying? I’m at Treasure Island. I guess it’s a suite.”

“Las Vegas is mostly suites. Underpromise and overdeliver. Like catalogue companies. They say it will come in five days, it’s there in two, and you feel like the Prince of Morocco. It’s a trick.”

“That was uncalled for.”

Julie is tiny now. Is that her thumb out? We’re past the speck point, into the unknown. This will go down as the time I cast her off in northern Colorado or southern Wyoming and will pass to Kara as part of her moral arsenal. In the story it will be over a hundred degrees out or well below freezing, with Julie wearing just socks, and as the years go by and I forget things Kara will remove the socks as well and I will fail to correct her and myths will petrify. She’ll bring out the story at Christmas, with all the others. A house full of women. My father suffered too.

“Ryan?”

“Still here. Just reflecting. I should go.”

“You’ll call me at Treasure Island? Let’s say five?”

“Why would the airline send you to Las Vegas?”

“Some seminar. Career enhancement stuff.”

“I’m going now. I’m really going now.”

I slide over behind the wheel and drive to catch her, two wheels on the shoulder to signal that others should pass. She’s walking normally now, no balance beam, and at a clip. I roll up next to her with the window down and tell her I’m sorry, I must have sounded bizarre there, but I’m recovering now, so please get in. We’ll be in Salt Lake City before dawn. We’ll drive the Mormon Trail, those hard old wagon tracks. We’ll commune with the grizzled ghosts of the frontier.

She starts to walk again. Heel to toe again.

“Think about your baby.”

But nothing works.

twelve

as long as you’re aimed at a city with an airport, you can get anywhere from anywhere and there’s no such thing as a wrong turn. That’s why I didn’t consider myself off course last night while driving north in accordance with Julie’s request to get her as close as I could to Minnesota before I flew back to Utah and then Nevada. It seemed to surprise her when I agreed to this, perhaps because she holds fundamentalist attitudes toward time and space and motion. I’m also convinced she believed that sheer inertia would carry me right on through to Minnesota, where, as she put it to me over crab legs in the Casper Red Lobster, “at least it’s safe.” (Her lips emphasized the word “safe”; my ears heard “least.”) She failed to take into account my mental map. In Billings, Montana, I’d find a portal to Airworld, and I could be back in Salt Lake by 9 A.M. then off to Vegas by noon.

This is how the country is structured now, in spokes, not lines. Just find a hub.

I worked on my speech to GoalQuest as we drove and tried not to think about whether there’s a heaven, what was inside the briefcase in the trunk, and what Soren Morse expected to accomplish by waging petty psychological warfare on his, statistically speaking, best customer. These were Airworld concerns and we were earthbound—doubly so because we were in Wyoming. When viewed from above, some state boundaries make sense—they follow rivers, declivities, chains of hills—but the straight lines defining Wyoming are purely notional and basically delimit a mammoth sandbox. Wyoming is just the land no other state wanted endowed with a capitol building to make it feel good. But such a pretty name. The prettiest.

Before my sister could critique my speech, I had to explain CTC to her in depth. This is never easy—with anyone. Most people assume we’re brought in to do the firing or that we find the fired new jobs. It’s neither. Our role is to make limbo tolerable, to ferry wounded souls across the river of dread and humiliation and self-doubt to the point at which hope’s bright shore is dimly visible, and then to stop the boat and make them swim while we row back to the palace of their banishment to present the nobles with our bills. We offer the swimmers no guarantees, no promises, just shouts of encouragement. “Keep it up! That’s great!” We reach our dock before they reach theirs and we don’t look back over our shoulders to check on them, though they look back at us repeatedly.

That’s the parable version of what we do. In practical terms, we give our “cases” “skills sets.” We coach them in how to make employment inquiries without sounding scarily hungry or submissive. We urge them to be patient, patient, patient. There’s a rule of thumb that for every ten thousand dollars of desired annual salary, a job seeker should expect to spend a month calling still-working friends and headhunters and Xeroxing hundreds of letters and résumés while waiting for them to call back. Since a lot of our cases have solid six-figure income histories, their searches can eat up years and far outstrip the duration of their severance benefits. Finding a job is itself a job, we teach, and not working is work, too, so don’t get blue. If you do get blue, forgive yourself. You’re only human. But also superhuman. Because you have untapped potential, and it’s infinite.

“So in other words you talk baloney,” Julie said, pushing us up through Wyoming. “I’m surprised at you. I’m surprised you’d do a job like that.”

“I’m telling you what I learned, not what I hoped. You’re getting the panoramic hindsight view.”

As first portrayed to me by ISM, CTC was nothing like I’ve described, but represented an ethical revolution in American business practices. Yes, it served the downsizing employer by minimizing potential legal blowback from the parties dismissed, and yes, one could view it as a half-assed penance that chiefly consoled the client corporation, but was it wrong? Did it hurt people? It helped some. It helped quite a few. And there were studies to prove it.

My first big assignment took me to Davenport, Iowa, the blighted Grain Belt home city of Osceola Corp., a manufacturer of heavy machinery. Their backhoes and tractors were piling up at dealers, deeply discounted yet still not moving. Their corporate bonds had been downgraded to scrap paper. Cuts were inevitable, and so they came.

I was given a small beige office in the rear of the company’s crumbling brick waterfront headquarters and tasked with the care of seven executives who were let go in sequence, one per day, and sent to me before their tears could dry. All were middle-aged men with families, and all but two of them asked me what they’d done wrong, to which I answered, “Nothing. Blame interest rates. Blame low commodity prices. This problem’s global.” One heavyset fellow, a face like a potpie, his suit full of strange custom seams to hide his girth, mistook me for a priest and made me kneel with him while he prayed from a card he carried inside his wallet. Another asked me if I would call his wife and repeat my interest rates remark.

I counseled these men for two weeks. The company gave them offices next to mine where they could make phone calls and draft their pleas for help and fill out the numerous tests and work sheets that sought to identify their strengths and weaknesses, goals and longings, habits of thought and feeling. I scored these surveys, interpreted their results, and provided each man with a “master self-inventory” of five double-spaced typed pages, his to keep. One man set his aflame before my eyes, but most of them clung to and studied these documents with the devotion of Egyptologists poring over tomb writings.

For three of the men it seemed to work. They passed through guilt to anger to despair to something approaching acceptance, if not hope. My bright-eyed graduates. My little soldiers. A fourth man dropped out at anger and, months later, was arrested by Secret Service agents for driving an Osceola diesel tractor into a crowd at a presidential campaign stop. The other three men were unreadable. They clammed up. Oddly, these three were the first to find new jobs, while two of the success stories still hadn’t when I stopped tracking them one year later.

In time, I learned not to track my former subjects, just as the elders in our field advise. Unfortunately, it was not by force of will that I accomplished this necessary forgetting but through reflexive, progressive memory loss. I learned to live from the present forward only, and I don’t regret it. One must these days if one is to stay in business, and it’s all business now. Try selling stock to last year’s buyers. Impossible. Try marketing tractors to your customers’ ancestors.

All in all, by the time my plane left Davenport (my first trip in a spacious seat up front) I was fairly sure I’d done some good and certainly no real harm. A solid beginning, and one that set my course for years to come. There were bleak spots, naturally, but ISM threw me enough upbeat executive coaching jobs—Art Krusk, some others—that I muddled through them. The mounting memory problems weren’t really an issue because there was nothing particularly worth remembering in my life just then and also because I’d developed regular habits. Pack one bag well, with the necessities, launch yourself into Airworld, with all its services, and the higher mental functions become irrelevant. That’s the merciful nature of the place, and the part I’ll miss.

“This is your speech?” said Julie. We’d reached Gillette by then, a natural gas boomtown where flames burn on tall stacks and deer cross the freeway in lines of six and seven.

“It’s just the setup. The lead.”

“It’s awfully long. Just give them the finger and be done with it.”

“These are hardened professionals I’m speaking to. I have to crack their armor plate by plate.”

I intend to crack it by talking about Vigorade. A few of my listeners will have similar stories from their own practices, but this is mine, and I hope to tell it well, without too many Verbal Edge curlicues and a minimum of M.B.A. abstractions. I don’t require that they cry, though. Let them laugh. I’m the one resigning. I don’t need followers. I just need to bleed a little, publicly. Preferably all over Craig Gregory’s shirt.

Vigorade was based in San Diego and sold a line of secret-formula sports drinks that acquired, over time, a curious reputation on college campuses and other youth spots for mild, euphoric, narcotic-like effects when drunk in large quantities or mixed with alcohol. The company was small, its products specialized, but the fanaticism of its young customers yielded crazy margins. For a period. Disaster struck when an anti-drunk-driving parents group obtained a memo from corporate marketing outlining strategies for targeting teens with the myth of the Vigorade-vodka cocktail. Petitions went out. Class-action suits were filed. Sales spiked at first due to the furor, but soon they stalled, then slid. Executives who’d been living extremely well by veiling a humdrum beverage in urban legend were summoned upstairs and told to empty their desks even as guards, directed to search for documents that might play into the hands of legal foes, were emptying them for them.

I counseled three senior people in sales and marketing. One woman, two men. All were furious. They wailed. This time, though, I didn’t sympathize. Vigorade’s troubles were purely of its own making, and these were the folks who’d hatched the basic plot. With court battles already raging and tempers raw, my job was to neutralize the threat from three insiders who might well retaliate, and possibly scuttle the whole enterprise. There was no sentimental fuzziness around the true identity of my client. I was working for management. Private Bingham.

And they armed me well. Along with my usual inspirational literature, Craig Gregory fed me a package of psychological tests formulated somewhere in the depths of ISM Research. The tests were unfamiliar to me. Strange. And some of the questions seemed out of line, and haunted me. “You’re an astronaut on a three-man mission to Mars and you discover, privately, in flight, that only enough air remains for two of you. Would you: (A) inform your crewmates and participate in a negotiated solution? (B) conspire with a second crewmate to murder the third? (C) say nothing and leave your survival up to fate? (D) spare your team by committing suicide?”

As instructed, I administered the tests, scored them using the relevant keys, and consulted several manuals to ascertain the meaning of the results. The findings shocked me. All three subjects, it seemed, suffered from deep personality disorders predictive of poor—the poorest—career performance. These people were freaks. Deficients. Messed-up specimens. Had I made some mistake? Were the manuals at fault? I sent the documents to ISM, who double-checked them and vouched for my conclusions, which they ordered me to keep a secret so as not to arouse or embitter the ex-executives. Frankly, I was relieved. I went on counseling them, focusing on the bright side of unemployment, then packed up my kit and flew off to my next job. Just one thing nagged me. If the subjects truly were as disturbed as the tests suggested, wasn’t someone obliged to offer them expert help?

Like I’ve said, I’d stopped checking on former cases by then, but these three intrigued me. They were special. Unique. I inquired about them at three months, six months, one year. By three months, one was dead. The woman. Suicide by blocked tailpipe in sealed garage. Her note singled out her abusive husband for blame and it emerged in a search of old police files that he’d been battering her steadily for years, had been arrested over and over, but was always released when she declined to press charges and took him back.

At six months, one of the men was facing trial for possession of a Class Three substance—heroin and stolen Percodan—with intent to distribute. I followed his trial and it came out in court that the man had been using heavily since college and selling the stuff to his son and his son’s friends. They convicted him.

At a year, the third subject, who’d struck me as the dull one, was America’s latest paper billionaire, having taken public a tech firm whose leading product none of the business journals could clearly describe, noting only that it involved microscopic lasers and the man-made element seaborgium.

What to make of all this? I’m not smart enough to know. And that’s what still floors me: how little I knew these folks and how far they must have already progressed toward their ultimate, outrageous fates by the time I started seeing them. Would the expert help I sensed we owed them have done any good? For the suicide perhaps. Not the billionaire. And junkies are junkies. And how revealing, really, were those test results? Could any of what happened been foretold? Not by me and not by ISM. And anyway, the counseling is the same whether the subjects are upstanding citizens or masochists, drug fiends, and scientific geniuses.

Career Transition Counseling is not just bad because it peddles false hope—most products and services do that, more or less, including a lot of the ones my fired subjects made big money providing, temporarily—it’s bad because it’s uniform. Steady state. People are going to prison and making fortunes and bailing out violent lovers and duping teenagers and CTC just sits there and sucks its thumb. In every kind of weather. All day, all year. It’s divided against itself and numb and circular and feels, to someone who does it for a living, like some ingenious suspended-animation scheme designed to inject you with embalming fluid while still allowing you to breathe and speak.

Vigorade, the beverage, still exists. They added herbs, reconceptualized the packaging, and repositioned it as an endurance aid for aging jocks and outdoor enthusiasts. But I won’t drink it. It’s ever so slightly salty, just faintly sweet, and it tastes the way I imagine tears would taste if you could collect enough to fill a jug.

“It drags,” Julie said as we put Gillette behind us and pressed on toward Billings and its many spokes. “Some twists at the end there, but otherwise it drags.”

“Does it cohere, though?”

“Not sure I know that word.”

“Cohere? Coherent? They’re pretty basic, Julie.”

It was early morning Thursday by then, and time that we dropped each other off. Time to get Maestro its car back, to buy our tickets, and for me to get back in the sky and her to marry.

thirteen

the first leg is Billings east to Bozeman on a Bombardier prop jet, a flying soda can that barely clears the weather as it cruises and sets down cockeyed and skipping on the runway, sounding like it’s lost at least one tire and prompting a cabin-wide exchange of looks that said I don’t know you, stranger, but I love you, so just hold on, we’re going to paradise. In the terminal I phone Alex from my mobile and get a machine that plays the theme from Brian’s Song but doesn’t include a voice, a message style I’ve always found conceited—it strikes me as a subtle power play, leaving callers wondering if they’ve found you. I give my Las Vegas hotel information and hang up half-hoping that Alex won’t show, which would leave only Pinter, Art Krusk, and Linda to deal with and allow me to rest my brain before my speech. If Alex does come, I’ll have to shake off Linda in some casino, though the nice thing about ditching women on the Strip is that the odds of them finding you again are worse than a single-number roulette wager. It’s the capital of lost dance partners, that town, and some never even make it home at all, like the former Desert Air flight attendant who won ninety grand on three quarters during a layover and rushed out and bought a condo and a Lexus and a picture-window-size tank of tropical fish, which were the only possessions she hadn’t pawned four months later. She gave them to a fish shelter. Such facilities actually exist, and it’s just this sort of oddball knowledge that makes Airworld not only fun but educational and sets one up for a lifetime of winning bar bets.

BZN to SLC departs on time and locks in another five-hundred-mile increment that I trust will be safe from Morse and the identity thieves. I’ve met a couple of goldbugs in my travels, surprisingly young men with buried footlockers whose existence they felt compelled to share in the way of most people who cache things in the ground—serial killers, gun nuts, toxic waste disposers—and then can’t stop thinking about them day and night. I’m beginning to understand the mind-set, though. An icy electronic wind will blow someday, and no amount of backup or duplication will save the numbers we think of as our wealth. The dispossessed who’ve kept thorough written records will wander the land waving sweaty scraps of paper that may or may not win recognition from the precious-metals power elite. It’s not a wipeout I’m likely to survive or that I’d want to. My miles would be gone, and with them, I suspect, my drive, my spirit.

To throw off my trackers I order tea with milk, a new drink for me. From now on I will act randomly while airborne, rendering myself useless as a research subject. My seatmate has on the classic sneakers and windbreaker that undercover men think make them invisible but stick out to anyone vaguely in the know like a British admiral’s uniform. He’s reading Dean Koontz with a squinting intensity that Koontz just doesn’t call for and must be fake.

“Is Salt Lake City home?” he finally ventures, much too casually.

I nod my lie. Though maybe it’s not a lie. Maybe it’s all my home, the entire route map.

“I’m Allen.”

“Dirk.”

“That’s not a name you hear much anymore.”

“You never did. It never had a following.”

The agent closes his Koontz on his thumb, but not at the place he stopped reading. An amateur. I ask him his business and wait for a real lulu.

“Memorabilia. Class rings,” he says.

“Not for Heston’s?”

“The only player left.” He’s authentic, it seems, he just dresses like a spook.

“You’d know my old buddy Danny Sorenson, then.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Or maybe you haven’t heard yet. Danny passed.”

There’s always a lag for me with such euphemisms, a few seconds before I realize they mean death.

“I saw him last Sunday night,” I say. “My god.”

“He was in Denver at some suite hotel and when he still hadn’t checked out at three P.M. a clerk went in and tried to shout him awake, then left when he couldn’t and didn’t follow up, just charged him for a new night and let him lie there. Our hospitality industry today.”

“Is his wife okay? Do you have a number for her?”

“Danny was gay.”

“He talked about a wife.”

“I’m sure he did. It’s a conservative company. How did you know him?”

“Planes. Like I know you.”

“So a passing acquaintance, basically.”

“Not quite. I don’t know. Maybe so. Completely gay?”

Allen looks put off and opens his paperback to the first page of underlined Koontz I’ve ever seen.

“That came out wrong,” I say. “I’m just surprised by this. Usually I can tell. That sounds wrong, too. I’m all off balance now. I adored that man.”

“On what basis?” says Allen. “Occasional proximity?”

As if that’s tiny. As if there’s anything else. The impossible standards these non-flyers set! What were we supposed to do, make love in an exit row? Hand-feed each other peanuts?

“I don’t think I have to justify my grief,” I say. There are open seats across the aisle.

“Completely,” says Allen. “Unlike me. I’m semi. Fridays and Saturdays, major cities only. No anal. Strictly oral. Not Danny, though. He ordered off the whole menu. Completely.”

I move.

Every great corporation does one thing well, and in Marriott’s case it’s to help guests disappear. The indistinct architecture, the average service, the room-temperature everything. You’re gone, blended away by the stain-disguising carpet patterns, the art that soothes you even when your back’s turned. And you don’t even miss yourself, that’s Marriott’s great discovery. Invisibility, the ideal vacation. No more anxiety about your role, your place. Rest here, under our cloak. Don’t fidget, its just your face that we’re removing. You won’t be needing it until you leave, and here’s a claim check. Don’t worry if you lose it.

Still, I’m surprised that Dwight is staying here. He seems like the type who cherishes his vividness. I arrive fifteen minutes early for our lunch, my bags stowed back at the Compass Club for my Vegas flight, and sit in an armchair facing the elevators browsing a gratis USA Today and trying not to imagine Danny’s night as a paying corpse at Homestead Suites, the charges still accruing to his dead soul the way they say dead people’s fingernails keep growing. Had he left his TV on? How many blankets covered him? The paper is written such that I can think these things yet still get the gist of the articles. It’s genius, almost on a par with Marriott’s. How many times did his phone ring? Rest in peace, sir. For all I know, I’m the best friend you ever had.

I consider my strategy for my lunch with Dwight. No more Cub Scout, no more bottom dog. Like we say in CTC, value yourself as you hope the market will and if the bids come in low, discount accordingly but think of it as a one-time-only sale, not a final re-evaluation. At ten I put down the paper and watch the elevators out of an old conviction that there’s an edge in seeing the man you’re negotiating with before he sees you. Business is folk wisdom, cave-born, dark, Masonic, and the best consultants are outright shamans who sprinkle on the science like so much fairy dust. Use a customer’s first name three times in your first five minutes together. Three, not four. They don’t have to notice your shoeshine to feel its presence.

Each parting of the elevator doors discloses another person who’s of no use to me, and after ten minutes of predatory staring, I turn my head toward the registration desk, wondering if Dwight’s indeed a guest here, which of course is the moment when he slips in and taps my shoulder, the better sorcerer.

“Here we finally are,” he says. He’s caught me sitting and I rise to my feet in humiliating freeze-frames and take a hand that’s all aura and no flesh and leaves not the slightest sensation when it’s withdrawn.

“I thought we’d try the Carvery,” he says, “unless you’re stuck on waitresses and tablecoths.” His field, his ball. Resist now or be subsumed.

“No, but I’d like to think our meeting warrants them.”

“The Carvery’s better lit. World-class iced tea.”

“Fine.”

“Your call. There’s McNally’s Bistro, too. They mix their iced tea from a powder. A so-so burger, but that can be remedied at the fixings bar.”

“The Carvery.” I’m a shame to my own name.

Dwight leads the way. What at first looks like a limp reveals itself as a fundamental mismatch between the hemispheres of his egg-shaped body. Dwight’s mass and vitality all come from his left; his right side is just a hitchhiker, an add-on, as if he’s absorbed and digested his Siamese twin. His hair has a complicated, unnatural grain that’s suggestive of camouflaged transplant work, and yet the general effect is masculine, harking back to a time when men fell apart at thirty and could only fight back through tricks of dress and grooming. I thought he was my age once, but I’m unsure now. Too much reconstruction, too much work, to tell.

The Carvery has a pub theme, Utah style. Much brass and wood and bric-a-brac, but beerless. Behind a long slanted shield of milky Plexiglas three fiftyish men whose career paths are enigmas—shouldn’t they at least be chefs by now, or have they been flash frozen by a benefits plan that fosters loyalty but kills ambition?—draw knives with scalloped blades through hams and roasts whose crusts show the charred cross-hatchings of butcher’s string. Dwight holds his plate out and gets three cuttings of well-done pork loin too thick to be called slices, too thin for slabs. Portion control is a Marriott obsession. Dwight nods at the carver to request a fourth piece and the fellow’s reaction shows he’s been well-schooled and qualifies as a professional after all; he delivers up a mere wafer on his broad knife blade, but with a flourish. To get his own back Dwight loads his plate with side dishes, just as Marriott expects him to. At pennies per pound for the cheesy potato medleys and oily pasta salads, the joke’s on him, though he struts away like he’s looted a royal tomb. There: a weakness to file for later on. The man doesn’t know when he’s being nickel-and-dimed.

But where’s the contract? No bulges in his blazer.

He chooses a two-setting table on a platform and takes the wall seat. From his perspective, I’ll blend with the lunch crowd behind me, but from mine he’s all there is, a looming individual. Fine, I’ll play jujitsu. I angle my chair so as to show him the slimmest, one-eyed profile. The look in my other eye he’ll have to guess at.

What I want most now, besides a deal, is the story about Morse Dwight promised me, but I can’t predict the emotions it may stir so I’d better leave it for dessert.

“Your book kept me awake last night,” Dwight says. “Can we bypass the small talk about our food, our meat?”

“By all means.”

“The Garage is . . . It’s a prism, isn’t it? It’s multidimensional, not just some flat tract.”

A prism. This sounds to me like boilerplate.

“Or a palimpsest, maybe that’s more accurate.”

Tape two—I’ve come armed. My one eye shows comprehension and Dwight looks stunned.

“The garret. The studio. Now the garage. It’s an all-American updating. And the book itself was conceived in a garage, because isn’t that where art comes from, so to speak?”

“That’s true,” I say. “What part kept you awake?”

“The whole. The sum. This sense that your concept pre-dates both of us. That it wasn’t so much authored as channeled. Eat.”

“I like to get it all cut up in squares first.”

“I’ve had this feeling before with certain manuscripts, that I’d seen them before, in some other life perhaps. Frankly, I smelled plagiarism.”

I laugh from a place in myself that doesn’t often laugh. A place I associate more with rippling sobs.

“That happens,” Dwight says. “Naked copying. Sheer fraud. It’s not always a crime, though; sometimes it’s an illness. The writer knows the book appeared before, but he feels the original author was the plagiarist and stole from him telepathically. But not in this case. This was daylight larceny. The writer—a midwesterner like you, from one of those states like Missouri, but not Missouri, the one just like it—”

“Arkansas?” I say.

“I think of that as the South. A former slave state.”

“Missouri was too. Read Huckleberry Finn.”

“Please. Do I look like a man who hasn’t? Please.”

“People read and then forget. That’s all I meant.”

“You’re speaking of yourself here?”

“No, everyone.”

“Anyway, I dug up the original, showed it to him side by side with his book, and even then he had a fancy story. Very different from your case.”

“My book’s not stolen.”

“You’ve yet to end it. How could it be?”

“I’m close, though.”

“Does he leave the Garage? I don’t see how he can. We think of garages as places men put behind them once they’re successful. Lincoln’s log cabin. But that’s your twist, of course—for you, the garage is holy and sufficient.”

“Interesting. Until now my idea was that he’d leave eventually, but only once he realized that the whole world . . . Interesting.”

“I’m looking at you. You’re sincere. You’re puzzling through this. I’m glad. This heartens me. You’re not a thief. What’s happened here is pure Huck Finn.”

“Excuse me?”

“Reading and forgetting. And by the way, you were right, I’ve never touched Twain.”

“Are you saying this isn’t my concept?”

“Or title or character or theme or anything. It’s a first-class subconscious memory you have. Photographic. Yet lost to you. Amazing.”

I lay down my fork. What’s eerie about Dwight’s hunch is just how close it might be to the truth given what I’ve been learning about my brain. If I didn’t know otherwise, I might share his doubts, but in fact I remember clearly how, when, and where the idea first arose. His name was Paul Ricks and I’d just helped fire him from Crownmark Greeting Cards in Minneapolis. When I showed him his master self-inventory, which rated high for artistic talent and enterprise, he tore the thing into strips and said “You’re kidding, right? You really believe I can leave two decades of copywriting, roll up my sleeves, hide out in my garage, and hatch a whole new existence?” To which I said: “If I didn’t, I couldn’t do this.” And Paul said: “Prove it.” And I said, “Tell me how.”

“You’re innocent, but you’re guilty, too,” Dwight says. “I’m deeply sorry, Ryan.” He salts his pork.

“Suspicion is not conviction. You’re way off base. My book seemed too good for a novice and so you dreamed this.”

“I had a tip,” Dwight says. “You mentioned one of my authors yesterday. Soren Morse, the aviator.”

“Aviator?”

“I’m doing his sophomore book. We talk quite frequently.”

I’m dumbfounded. There are layers to this thing . . .

“So I mention your book to him, because I’m proud of it, and Morse said that’s like The Basement, isn’t it? I searched the Net and came up with a synopsis, the best I could do since the book is out of print. Coincidence after shocking coincidence. I called the publisher, hunted down the editor, and got a fuller description. One example: the protagonist of the basement is unnamed.”

“Two characters without names is not the same name.”

“Over my head, that. Try this: a phrase from your book that appears nineteen times and also occurs in the subtitle to The Basement. ‘Perpetual innovation.’ ”

“No one owns ‘perpetual innovation.’ That’s like saying someone owns, I don’t know, ‘Get well.’ Morse put you onto this scavenger hunt?”

“Someone would have.”

“He’s my someone. Every single time.”

“How exactly do you know each other?”

“Distantly but intimately,” I say. “I’m tired of explaining how well I know people—no one respects my answers. I just know people. Hundreds. Thousands. From sea to shining sea. And no, I don’t think I coined that. See this napkin?”

“In detail.”

“I’m seeing the same napkin. You and me, both sane. The here and now.”

“Let me finish,” Dwight says. “I hadn’t quite lost faith yet. There’s a collective mind, it’s very real. I can’t name one, but I’m aware of major inventions that appeared only days apart on different continents. This was like that, I hoped. I knew you traveled, so you’re exposed to the ether more than most of us, the cultural cyclotron, the particles. Bombarded by particles. Then I called the author. At nine. This morning.”

“Pause, pause, pause. Cheap drama. Spit it out.”

“He knows you. You had a run-in once, he claims. He also distinctly recalls the conversation in which he announced his intention to write The Basement. Name of Ricks? A Minnesotan? You’re all midwesterners.”

I push back my plate and look over at a wall of injection-molded coats of arms. Made-up legacies, random heraldry. My father bought one once off the TV, the genuine Bingham family crest, authenticated. Stags and lions and eagles and battle-axes; we were dragon slayers from way, way back, and my father bought it all, poor man. He was living alone by then, stalked by private Rockefellers, but the crest put a bounce in his step, aligned his spine. He stowed his TV tray and started eating downtown. He detailed his Monte Carlo. All the crest. Two weeks of nobility that I’m glad he had, but then he went for a haircut with old Ike Schmidt and there it was, over the comb jar of blue Barbicide. A gentle being—he let Schmidt go on dreaming of Round Table banquets, ale from hollow horns. He kept his peace and let himself be shaved.

I’m not up to his level. I have to fuss and struggle. “The concept was both of ours. It was simultaneous.”

“Weak. Two objects can’t occupy one space.”

“Ideas aren’t objects. He went out and really wrote it? He left the strong impression that was my job.”

“What are they, then?”

“Ideas? Do we have to play these games right now? I just spent a year investing in my future, dictating notes from here to Amarillo and all points in between, and now you tell me this Ricks, this jobless loser, who scored in the lousy twentieth percentile for follow-through and reliability—facts I concealed from him because I’m decent—strolled back to his sad little house and scooped me blind. When was this rip-off published, anyway?”

“Four years ago.”

“He worked fast. Did this thing sell?”

“Hardly at all, but it wasn’t pushed correctly. Scattershot marketing. Hangdog author’s photo. A golf publisher that went out on a cute limb.”

“That’s good news, at least.”

“I’ll do much better. This is Advanta’s sweet spot. We’ll swat this ball.”

“Incredible. You’re one nervy little fatso. Is that a weave or plugs? Dyed beaver? Orlon?”

“Ricks says you had him fired.”

“Ricks distorts.”

“You fire people for a living. Now that’s a book. You’d have to strike the somber, reflective pose—the old recovery gambit—but that’s a memoir. Advanta has crack ghostwriters, real mind readers. You’ll think every comma is yours. Your natural hair.”

“Such thick skin on you reptiles. I’m gone. Cover this check. That iced tea was powdered, too.”

On my way out of the Carvery I sweep the crests off the wall, a dozen of them, and no one stops me because they know I’m serious, Bingham the dragon slayer. We go way back.

fourteen

a VIP commotion at the gate complicates and prolongs the boarding process. A convoy of electric carts sweeps in loaded with uniformed security and a couple of bison-shouldered civilian toughs talking like princesses on cute red radios. The pedestrian flow through the concourse snags and eddies and at the heart of the turbulence I spot him: the retired Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, General Norman Schwarzkopf, signing autographs for full-grown men who are lying if they say they want them for their kids. I’ve seen these mementos, and I know where they go: under plate glass on desktops, front and center, for a quick-hit morale boost during high-stakes conference calls. They’d pluck the last hairs from the general’s rhino head, but he’s probably already selling them through an untraceable chain of sub-sub-agents, encased in clear acrylic, as paperweights. The relics that come off these supermen—astonishing. I’ve seen every stick of gum Mantle ever chewed in some corner office or another, every last Zippo Patton ever lit.

Schwarzkopf is a motivational mainstay, right up there with Tarkenton, Robbins, Ditka, the pre-trial O. J. Simpson, and Famous Amos, so it’s no surprise to see him here, mobilizing for GoalQuest with us ants. I’ve heard him four times in six years, and he delivers. B vitamins straight to the heart muscle itself. You stand up afterwards ready to thump someone, just name the cause, and though this wears off and leaves a startling thirst that not even gallons of Vigorade could quench, a virtuous residue has been deposited that kicks back into the veins when you grow weak and jolts you straight when you nod off at the wheel. The magic works, almost all of it, to some degree, and that’s what the skeptics find so intolerable. Just peek at the gurus’ pay stubs. The market knows.

Because I’m off to Omaha at eleven, I’ll miss the Supreme Commander, and I could use him. He finally boards behind his human wedge but the spot where he stood remains vacant for a minute; step on it, you’ll break your mother’s back. Even people just now dismounting from the walkway who don’t know he was here avoid the patch. Well, let me be the first, with both boots. Shazam! I feel it.

No joke. It’s real. Forty grand for forty minutes and no one ever wants his money back. I wrote a book that someone else wrote first and I feel like Tom Swift on his tin-can rocket ship beating Neil Armstrong to the moon.

El Supremo sits to my front and to my right and the distraction he causes among the crew lifts my sense of being scrutinized. My voice mail yields Julie, safe in Minnesota, and Kara double-checking on that salmon I was instructed to feel and taste and eyeball. Another reason to fear reincarnation, which, if it’s all about unfinished business as my Hindu seatmates keep telling me, will consist for me of rounding up and stamping many hundred unmailed birthday cards and overnighting endless coastal delicacies to the eastern edge of the Great Plains. If God or Shiva or whoever’s on duty that day is a Minnesotan, as I was taught, CTC will be deemed the most pardonable of my sins—the boy did what they told him, he had to eat—compared to the un-FedExed coolers of tiger prawns my mother died in her driveway waiting for.

I leaf through the GoalQuest program. “Break Down, Break Through, Break Out: Third-Generation Dot-com Retailing. Guided Informal Group Discussion. Snack.” “Is There Life After Gold? A Journey Through Depression with former Team USA hockey coach Brett Maynard, cofounder of Camp Quality for Kids.” “Prayerful Pragmatism by Charles ‘Chuck’ Colson.” “The Buck Starts There: Making Customers Your Boss.” “Pinter on Pinter.” Elegant, that one. And this, of course, head to head at 9 A.M. with “You Plus Me Equals ??? by major CEO to be announced”: “One New Beginning Fits All by Ryan M. Bingham. Light Continental Breakfast.”

Aren’t they all light? Isn’t that what “Continental” means?

There’s a flutter of emotional cabin pressure as El Supremo slinks into the aisle and meekly heads to the bathroom. We understand, sir; we’re all God’s children here. Still, as his visit lengthens, I feel a shift as all of us stop thinking about ourselves and wonder why that closed door is staying so closed. A hand-washer? Normal travelers’ diarrhea? It’s painful to picture the Big Guy so confined. The cold steel john. The little tampon slot. Like most frequent flyers I’ve talked to, I sometimes thrill myself with hyper-detailed crash scenarios, and in my favorite I’m right where he is now when the death plunge comes. I balance myself in my new sideways world and squeak out a note with a soap bar on the mirror: “I loved you, every one. I’m sorry, Mom.” It’s a variable fantasy; my testaments change. Once I just drew a heart. How sweet of me. Lately, it’s been six zeros and a one. What would El Supremo write? “See you in hell, Saddam”? Or “Grrr”? I like that. In an actual crash, of course, the Christians among us would likely just draw a cross. Saves time, it’s manageable from every angle, and it well might open a few doors.

Mount Olympus reminds me how poorly I know my gods. The young redhead at check-in wears a light suede toga cut to resemble a deer or antelope hide and over one shoulder hangs a bow and arrows. As she hunts for my reservation on her screen a bellhop in a winged helmet scurries over and offers to carry my briefcases, the one still locked, and my strangely deflated carry-on. (Have my clothes shrunk?) I give him all of it and request a screwdriver, which he doesn’t find odd, apparently. Wings on his shoes as well. Mercury? Who’s Mercury? Evil? Good? Or were those old gods both?

“It looks like your companion checked in already. Alex Brophy. Keep this on her MasterCard?”

“Are you still in that cross-promotion with Great West?”

Nods.

“On mine,” I say. “Who are you, anyway? Your character?”

“The huntress.”

“Your name. Your powers.”

“Laurie. I water-ski. You have two messages.”

“Read them.”

“Art Krusk: ‘I’m at the Hard Rock. Nab some dinner? This Marlowe’s a pisser. Glad you hooked us up.’ A Mr. Pinter next: ‘Quite busy tonight but will see you at your talk.’ He’s staying here.”

“No Linda?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s good. It simplifies. Is my companion in the room already? You wouldn’t know, I guess. You’re Circe maybe?”

“It’s just a theme. It’s not a college course. Go ask at Excalibur which of you is Lancelot? This really isn’t the city for history.”

“That’s why it grows and grows and grows and grows.”

Pinter’s interest in my little speech renders me weightless in the elevator and puts a pair of wings on my feet, too. And Krusk likes Marlowe. I’ve brokered a great match. The idea of Alex, a jukebox, and a pool table suddenly blossoms with sexy possibilities. Good riddance, The Garage. It’s a world of flesh, not inky paper, and from this moment forward I only take huge bites.

A suite, as I understand it, is two or more rooms, but as part of the erosion of all fixed standards and the upgrading of the subpar, a single room with an alcove or an angle or any hint of partitioning at all now qualifies for the title. Here, the suite feature is a modest nook showcasing a scaled-down pool table but still too small, at first glance, to wield a cue in. The jukebox is the real thing, though: a vintage Wurlitzer featuring curved glass tubes of backlit jellies that generate long, sluggish bubbles as they’re warmed. The buttons are within reach of the king bed on top of whose satiny spread stand two black shoes next to a crossed pair of blowsy red roses.

I find other tableaux as I pace around the room, still waiting for my baggage and the screwdriver. Alex has been fussing like an elf. There are clusters of white votives on the nightstands and on the desk two slim black tapers standing aslant in hotel water glasses. The silk scarf lamp trick. Cones of incense on a plate. I sniff them. Jasmine? What does jasmine smell like? So much lost sensual knowledge with men like me.

Incense to me means drugs, a mask for pot smoke. Will we get high tonight? Might be nice. Or horrible. My last few drug experiences hurt. A line of coke with the cackling Vice President of Human Resources at Pine Ridge Gas sniffed in a Houston TGI Friday’s. My heart beat lumpily for hours. I cried. And just last month a pellet of red hash shared with a deadheading flight attendant in Portland. We partook while sitting up to our bare chests in a volcanic Homestead Suites hot tub, and when the stuff hit the chlorine fumes from the water whooshed up my nostrils and filled my vision with glowworms that fattened and brightened and wriggled when I blinked. I fled to the locker room for a cold compress, and when I tottered back out to the tub how many minutes later I couldn’t tell, my date and a bare-assed, crew-cut college kid were pressing their privates against the bubbling jets and toasting each other with pink wine.

I go to wash my face and on the sink board is a muslin bag of potpourri and a zipped-up leather toilet kit. I dare not look, but I do, and I find: pills. Ten or twelve brown bottles, most of them with that telltale orange warning sticker familiar from my high school days as a burglar of medicine cabinets. The sticker meant narcotics, pills worth stealing, so what do we have here? Xanax. Darvocet. Vicodin. Wellbutrin. All from different doctors in different cities. At one time or another I’ve taken all of them, but separately. Ambien. Dexedrine. Lorazepam. Names that are all connotation and assonance, Z’s and X’s for ups and M’s for downs. Is that where the poets have gone? To Merck and Pfizer?

The bellhop interrupts my inventory. He puts the bags in the closet, then produces one of those multi-function pocket tools that will rebuild our civilization if the bomb drops.

“My supervisor needs this back,” he says. “I’ll wait here while you use it, if that’s okay.”

“Did you help the woman who’s staying in this room?”

“Sure.”

“How was she? Her demeanor. Her vibe.”

The bellhop’s face cools and stiffens. He doesn’t rat. She made illicit requests of him, I know it.

“She was fine,” he says.

“Didn’t ask for special services?”

Standoff. Two male primates, taking stock. I take out my wallet, engorged with business cards I never look at and should probably paste in an album eventually.

“I don’t want to spoil anything,” he says. “Any surprises.”

“I don’t like surprises. I get enough of them just walking around.”

He takes my twenty and vanishes it, a petty-cash Houdini. “It’s not your birthday, is it?”

“I’ve lost track.”

“Well, lots more candles, for starters, and lots more flowers. And other sentimental stuff. Just cute stuff. The names of some stores. I think she’s planning a party. Nothing bad, though. And a shoulder rub.”

“You do that for your guests? Not a topless shoulder rub, I hope.”

He smirks.

“She’s not my wife. It’s fine to tell me.”

“I need that tool back. It’s like my boss’s right hand.”

I shut myself in the bathroom with the locked case, lay it on the sink, and start to pry, first at the lock and then, for better leverage, along the hinges. Something splinters, pops. I put the case on the floor and wedge a boot toe into the crack and grip the lid, both hands. I yank. It gives.

I leave the case lying open, its contents exposed, dismiss the bellhop, shut my eyes to think, then raid the mini-bar for three wee bottles of Johnny Walker Black that I empty into a cling-film-covered glass back at the sink. Gingerly, with my toe again, I prod the thing out of the case onto the floor and flip it over, fuzzy tummy up. It’s Mr. Hugs.

I threw the bear away years ago. He’s back. His forehead is punctured and over one soft ear white cotton puffs out where the bullet must have exited. Assassinated.

In CTC work they’re known as grieving aids, but the slang term is better: “squashables.” As in “The poor lady was hysterical, ripping out drawers from her filing cabinet, screaming, so I gave her a squashable and she calmed down.” They aren’t always teddy bears, or even soft. Brock Stoddard at Intersource who out-counsels high-finance types uses a baseball-size chunk of chalky rock that he challenges emotional ex-brokers to squeeze and squeeze and crumble into dust. Becky Gursak at K. K. Carrera offers modeling clay. Some counselors don’t use squashables at all, but those that do tend to favor stuffed animals—a plump brown puppy that sits there on the sofa, just part of the office scenery until one morning when some menopausal former manager who gave up on kids so she could pledge her all to International Hexbolt’s holy war for the South American market share suddenly—and I’ve seen it happen myself, it’s like a slasher movie—begins to spout red gore from her left nostril before the brave smile has even left her face. Stress is the killer, they say, and I believe it. I’ve seen the eruptions. I’ve Kleenexed up the fluids. It progresses nine tenths of the way in stealth and silence, until the tenth tenth, when it wails. It roars.

I remember the day the bear entered my life and I remember the client: Deschamps Cosmetics, which was almost entirely female—aging female. I was off to the airport in a company Lincoln when Craig Gregory leaned through the window and said, “For this job, Ryan, you’ll want to take along a squashable. Meet Mr. Hugs and his darling button nose.”

I demurred—too gimmicky, I thought—but Craig Gregory pushed, and he was right to. The Deschamps ladies crushed the toy shapeless. They mangled it. Mr. Hugs became a fixture in my practice. He burst now and then, but I always stitched him up. The more use he showed, the more willingly they embraced him, and the less likely they were to hurl him back at me. Then I couldn’t look at him anymore. Two years of rough handling had given him a soul, an expressive face and figure all his own. “Sad” doesn’t capture it. Help me, Verbal Edge. Martyred. Forlorn. Unconsolable. Woebegone. Baby Jesus left out in the rain.

I’d rather not touch him now. I withdraw my boot. I pick up the shattered briefcase and look around for somewhere to dispose of it. I stuff it between the jukebox and the wall, then realize I should search it for a note, drag it back out, and find nothing. I examine the tag again. My writing? The block capitals could be anyone’s. Likely suspects? Practically nothing but.

The scotch isn’t cutting it. I eye the toilet bag. How would one medicate this particular fright? I line up the pill bottles and play mad scientist. Xanax and Vicodin for drifty pain relief countered by the peppy Wellbutrin? Too nuanced. I need a blunter instrument. Some Ambien, that quick-absorption knockout drop favored by intercontinental flyers? The heavyweight gut punch of Lorazepam? I don’t want to put my feelings in a coma, I want to vanquish them. Blast the vampire with sunlight.

Dexedrine. I took it for a few months after my narcolepsy diagnosis; it’s as potent as street speed but without the lockjaw and much easier to calibrate. In low doses it gave me confidence, pizzazz. At higher doses I was fairly sure that the King James Bible could be improved upon and that I was just the fellow to do it. Then my tolerance grew and I felt nothing. If I damp the high notes with Xanax and Johnny Walker, I’ll be in the flow, the center of the chute, not suppressing my horror at Mr. Hugs: The Sequel but sledding its leading edge. The feelings exist, as we say in CTC, and you can either ride them or let them flatten you. I believe it’s only fitting, little bear, that I take my own advice today.

The bottle overflows with orange tablets and a drawdown of twenty percent shouldn’t be noticeable. If Alex is such a junkie that she counts them, I won’t respect her opinion of me anyway. I gulp three tabs, stash seven in my pocket, and lay in a gorilla dose of Ambien for a sound night’s sleep before my talk. Two Vicodin in case I fall and break something and have to haul myself to the ER.

I douse Mr. Hugs in sterilizing scotch—why am I suddenly certain he has fleas?—and kick him behind the waste can under the sink, then pick up the phone that’s mounted beside the toilet. You never see this placement in private homes but it’s become de rigueur in nice hotels. I associate it with invalids’ cries for help, but I know that’s not why they do it. It’s a puzzle right up there with ice cubes in the urinal.

“Art Krusk’s room, please.” I need time with a man’s man. Someone who’s been slapped around a little.

“Bingham?”

“I’m going downstairs to play some cards.”

“I just went to bed from yesterday,” Art says.

“I’ve got stuff to fix that. I’m at Mount O.”

“That Marlowe kicked my everlasting butt. You didn’t tell me there’d be role playing. Thanks, though. I feel sharp. I’ve got my fangs back. He gave me this first one as a favor to you, but what’s it going to cost when he starts charging me?”

“All depends on how deep you want to go.”

“It’s exciting the way you say that. Things in store for me.”

“You’ve entered the dragon, Art. Blackjack pit in ten. Wear your medallions. Pour on the Vitalis.”

“You have a girl for tonight?”

“A teddy bear.”

“Right. Me, too. That dancer we saw in Reno doing the old guy. I flew her down, but I think she’s gone out freelancing. I guess she’s just part of the general hoo-ha now. She carries a beeper, but I can’t get through. Marlowe says let it go. I’m like his zombie now.”

Art’s a moron, pathetic, but we click. I should slip him a ticket to Schwarzkopf. He’d be wowed and the favor might win me some leeway in my next life. Don’t you think so, Mr. Hugs? He does. Whatever you feel, your squashable feels too.

There is so much they want from us here besides our money. Art disagrees. He thinks their greed is pure. I direct his attention to our dealer’s eyes, her flat black tiddlywink pupils, the scaly lids, then ask Art if he’s ever visited Disneyland, because if he has, then he knows we have before us an animatronic biomorphic puppet whose battery cells—they’re sewn into her scalp, and if we shaved her head we’d find round ridges—have been charging themselves off our body heat for an hour now, robbing us of the strength to leave a game in which we’re losing four of every five hands and try our luck at the flashing-dollar slots arranged in a horseshoe around that red Dodge Viper, which is actually an elaborate chocolate cake formed around earth’s most perfect natural emerald.

“Sorry, can’t keep up with you,” Art says. “Pills haven’t hit yet.”

“Just swing.”

“I need a six, Shawn.”

Art reads all their name tags, not realizing that they’re aliases, although the hometowns engraved on them are accurate. Whoever she is, this latex-sheathed destroyer, she was really built in Troy, New York, where they also make rototillers and small gas engines that I’m told are the best on the market. One hears this everywhere.

“You keep looking around,” Art says, “like you’re expecting someone.”

It must be Alex. I left her a note that was legible but cramped—there was so much information to squeeze in. My allergies, both proven and suspected. My turn-ons and turn-offs. My feelings about war. Oh, that first rush of Dexedrine on an empty stomach.

“Over there, Art. Check it out,” I say. “Hillary Clinton, trying for the Viper. It’s nothing but gods and legends in this place.”

“You know who actually is in town,” Art says. “Thatcher.”

“Former leader of the British Tories? She lives here, Art. This is her home now.”

“For a speech. I met a busboy smoking behind the Hard Rock who says he can get me in for fifty bucks. Might be worth it. I’m kicking it around.”

“You know what I want, Art? My family in one place. A place even farther away than they are now but where they won’t miss me, because they’ll have the ocean. Tomorrow night I’ll have a million miles, and though I’ve assumed I’d want most of them myself, they’re all, as of now, one-way tickets to coastal Ireland for anyone who can prove that they’re my kin.”

“You shouldn’t kid around about blood relatives.”

“For those twenty seconds, just those, I wasn’t kidding. I was daring myself to be a better man. Three hundred thousand, that’s all I’m going to keep.”

“You’re not a bad man. You’re just run ragged.”

“Alex!”

She turns. From the back she was Alex—from the front she’s what’s her face from TV. Who sleeps with senators. She says she wants loads of children, but it won’t happen. My ex talked that way too but didn’t get pregnant until she shut up and started screwing Mormons with no expectations whatsoever. None. Except that the men would worship her perfect toes.

“I’m feeling them now,” Art says. “You really sat with him?”

My Schwarzkopf fib; I knew he’d call me on it. “We discussed my future. Man’s an empath. Total empath. St. Francis with a side arm.”

“Ryan!”

It’s her. Not Alex—Linda. Morse’s operative. She has on an airline-issued orange turtleneck that she seems to believe can double as swank casino wear if it’s accessorized with a rhinestone pin.

Anyway, we kiss. So now that’s over with.

On to the next thing, whatever she suggests.

“Hi, I’m Art Krusk,” Art Krusk says. Know thyself. He offers Linda his broad right hand that’s as tanned on the palm as it is across the back.

“Nice to meet you,” Linda says.

“Same here.”

Boy, are these two on their game tonight.

“I’m so glad I found you, Ryan. This city’s a zoo. Guess who I’m pretty sure I saw at Bally’s stepping out of a roped-off elevator?”

One, two, three, four, five. A, B, C, D. She’ll crack eventually, and I can wait.

“Brando. He’s giving a speech, I guess.”

“They all are.”

“Could we maybe talk for a minute? Over there. Excuse us, Art.”

“Excuse us, Art,” I say. It’s a technique: Neurolinguistic Mirroring, they call it. Do as the greats do and you can be great, too. Copy their walk, their inflections, everything. Big in the seventies, came back in the nineties, faded some, but will surely rise again.

We move “over there,” which feels like the same place and wasn’t, to my mind, worth the whole upheaval, emotional and physical, of getting to. Linda seems happier, though, and I’m happy for her. I count the pills in my pocket between two fingers and am disappointed with the tally.

“I was right about those hackers, Ryan. We’re not supposed to tell customers, so don’t spread this, but someone in Spain got into our computers—just some young kid, the FBI is saying—and scooped up account information, credit card numbers—”

“Anonymous Spanish teenager. Strangely plausible.”

“He e-mailed the data to friends who e-mailed their friends and now it’s all over the world and it’s still going. We’re getting calls from China. I’m serious.”

“Our global globe.”

“I’m not kidding. Cancel everything.”

“I’ve been working up to it all week.”

“Ryan?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You’re loaded. It hurts to look at you. Can I get something off your forehead that’s been bugging me?”

She goes right ahead. I’ll never know what it was.

“I was going to say we should eat. You probably need to. This isn’t you, though. This is not my friend. I’m going to my room to study my materials for tomorrow’s seminar.”

“Don’t do it. Be kind, it’s that easy. Burn all workbooks. Erase all cassette tapes and dub them over with song.”

She kisses my cheek and it burns like the hot match heads my mother would use to make ticks release her children. “Goodbye, Ryan. I don’t think we’ll have more dates. This seminar has me thinking I’ll try nursing school, so I might not be at the club much longer, either. I think I always meant to be a nurse but veered a few degrees. Like you’ve said you did.”

“What did I tell you I set out to be?”

“A folk guitarist.”

I’m baffled. It’s so specific. “When was this, anyway?”

“June. Three months ago.”

“Wait here a minute, Linda. I’m coming down. Some ice water to dilute this and I’ll be me again. I want to reconstruct this folk guitar talk. Were we at your condo? Come back. Don’t wave. You know how we think we don’t have feelings for someone, but maybe it’s because they’re just too powerful? I love you. I have always loved you, Linda.”

Oh well, she had her chance. We’re all free agents now. Remember, it’s a lattice, a continuum, so it’s not like anything’s final. Nothing’s final. To the contrary. It’s win-win. It’s synergistic. Read Pinter on Quantum Granular Non-Hierarchies. Or hell, read between the lines of Winnie-the-Pooh, that cuddly avatar of Taoism. Milne knew it, he just couldn’t say it plainly then—the shadow of Victorianism or something. This is twenty-first-century Nevada, though. Scream it, feel free. Nothing’s final. It’s all a loop. We’ve been re-engineered. Like PepsiCo.

Back to Art and the tables. He’s behaving like I was, razzing a new dealer from Lima, Ohio, about the healed-over piercings in his eyebrows, discerning the face of the Virgin in his cards. He either lost everything while I was gone and bought back in with a mad five thousand bucks or he’s in the statistical slipstream, he’s supersonic. If you come in at the end of someone’s streak, the two conditions appear identical. If anything, it’s the big winners who look depressed, because grins are jinxes and it just can’t last, and the losers who smile, because they can go home soon.

I wander off into the crowd. GoalQuesters dominate. I get a fat wink from Dick Geertz at Andersen, who hit his United miles mark a year ago, but only because he commutes to Tokyo, so really there’s no comparison between us. I notice a drink in several colleagues’ hands of layered purples and violets and toothpicked melon chunks, so I flag down a waitress and order one by pointing. I ask what its name is and she says no one knows, that everybody else just pointed, too. When I tell her that someone had to start this thing, she flat doesn’t buy it. She’s a creationist. She’s also, I sense, much happier than I am.

“Hey, Bingham, I need you to meet someone. Get over here.”

It’s Craig Gregory calling. I hustle toward my punishment. The waitress will hunt me down. She’ll use her network.

“Bingham, this is Lisa Jeffries Kimmel. Lisa, Ryan.”

“Hi.”

“I’ve heard your name.”

“I’ve heard yours.” What satanic liars we are.

“Lisa is coming to ISM next month after an interesting stint in Omaha. I know you think they’re pursuing you, that bunch, so I’m guessing you’ll want to pick her pretty brain.”

Lisa looks down. She’s small and dark and beautiful and bizarrely shapely in the way of a bonsai tree compared to a full-size tree.

“Not that Omaha’s called him,” Craig Gregory tells her, “or written or faxed or anything like that. It’s just something he thinks. It gets him through the night.”

Someone squealed on me. My assistant, no doubt. Some agency sends them, you think they’re harmless drifters, be gone by winter, but really they’re your minders, briefed at a central location and later debriefed. It’s a business model, even if it’s not true.

“I’ll leave you two here. Full evening ahead of me at the convention center, followed by Streisand’s annual farewell gig at the MGM.”

I snag his elbow and step back from Lisa. “Someone sent me that bear you gave me, Craig. Mutilated. I’m pinning it on you. You’re who I gave him back to when he retired.”

Craig Gregory rubs his chin and opens a shaving cut that smears blood on his thumb tip, which he kisses dry. Tough little Lisa torches a cigarillo and hungers over the craps action all around us.

“That toy had two consecutive huge Christmases. I doubt you’re in possession of the original. By the way, your corporate AmEx? Confiscated. No more charging Hong Kong custom suits.”

“Computer crime. It wasn’t me,” I say. “If it goes in my file, I’ll sue.”

“Did you overhear that one, Lisa? Any thoughts?”

“Blameless. It’s happened twice this year to me.”

Craig Gregory folds his hands. He bows, comes back to me. “I’ll be there for your breakfast sermon tomorrow. The title has people concerned. I’m not one of them. I know how you pussy out. I’ll sit up front. Lisa, this is a man on his last legs, so give him much succor. We hear you give great succor.”

“Die in hell, you gonorrheal prick.”

“Hear that, Bingham? What this bitch just said? That’s how healthy people respond to me. Take note. You’re not too old to get it right.”

The purple drink is still out there looking for me when I sit at the bar with Lisa and order another by pointing at one just like it two spots down. The bartender, leaves in his hair, a loose white robe, asks Lisa if she’d like one, too—a mere formality—and she says no. It’s a startling negation, and it’s infectious. I cancel my order as though I never meant it. The craze will be extinct within ten minutes.

I want this Lisa. I excuse myself, swivel on my stool, sneak two more pills, and phone my room on the mobile. I have a plan. If she’s there, I’ll hang up. If she’s not, I’ll dare to hope that she’s joined Art’s girl out there in the cyclone. No answer. Will it be safe to go back up, though? What I should do is book another room and abandon my personal effects, which, by design, are not that personal but standard items available anywhere. I’ll miss my sleep machine, whose “prairie wind” track is unique as far as I can tell, but nothing else. The tapes of The Garage are best mislaid. That way there’s at least a possibility that in ten years or twenty, at a rummage sale, an intern at Business Week will pay a nickel for them, listen to them on a whim, and call his boss. The authorship of the scrolls will be disputed—Tarkenton? Salinger? Billy Graham the Younger?—and a stream of pretenders will come forward waving bogus polygraph results. Me, I’ll hang back in my Idaho retreat, content with my dogs, my Mormon faith, my wives.

Or, if this works with Lisa, my one true love.

“What’s MythTech like?” There’s no other way to start. “I thought no one quit there. I heard that if you’re fired they buy you out for life, or pretty close.”

She pinches the filter off a Marlboro. She’s out of little cigars and needs particulates.

“Of course people leave. They just don’t blab about it.”

“Scared?”

“I’d say cautious. Maybe still perplexed. It’s not like a regular consultancy. Take what I did: Market Ecology. The study of non-obvious interactions among diverse commercial entities.”

“Beautiful. And no CTC department, am I right?”

“No departments at all. The model’s plasma. Nuclear plasma fields. Pretentious.”

“Gorgeous. At play in the fields of the Lord. Just think, just float. And no travel, I hear, and just a bare-bones headquarters. You can work from home. From anywhere. It’s all electronic, humanistic, fractal.”

“What are you on? I want some. I’m fading here.”

Somehow I produce three pills for each of us. It’s like the loaves and fishes, my right front pocket. Or did I lie to myself about how many I stole?

“Anyway, Lisa. Me. The market ecologist. A project comes down one day from Spack and Sarrazin. It isn’t true that they’re lovers, by the way. Sarrazin is crazy for his wife and Spack is a neuter. Born that way. He’ll tell you.”

“Haven’t heard one breath of any of this. A friend of mine who said he had a wife died this week and I hear now he was gay, so basically I’ve written off these topics. The people themselves don’t understand their leanings—that’s my conclusion. I’m growing wise by leaps.”

“The problem was tripartite,” Lisa says. “Fiber optics, red meat, and propane gas.”

I clutch her gesturing hand in mid-air. “My dad sold propane.”

“I started with the easy ones. Gas plus red meat equals grills and patios and heart problems and the insurance that covers them and all those ramifications. But fiber optics? Maybe a gas grill that’s somehow data-linked to a repair center whose low-wage workers only lunch at Wendy’s or McDonald’s not just because it’s a grunt job and they’re broke but because they’re on call to diagnose malfunctions and can’t leave their screens for more than fifteen minutes?”

“You’re asking a question?”

“Or maybe it’s like automated cattle ranches fed with real-time commodities reports that lead to higher profits per animal and thus increased contributions to co-op ad campaigns promoting beef versus chicken? I couldn’t think!”

“Who was the client? A supermarket chain?”

“I’m not even sure there was a client, Ray.”

“Ryan. That’s okay. It’s dark in here.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” Lisa says. “I know what you mean, though. I’m high myself, from earlier. What’s ‘blue bottle’? That’s what the kid kept calling it.”

“I’m not down on the street a lot. Don’t know.”

“It felt like pure R&D to me,” she says. “No timelines, no meetings, just live with this strange problem and send us your thoughts as you think them until they’ve stopped or you feel satisfied. Casual directives, and yet you feel this incredibly formidable potential wrath just waiting to sweep down and smash your life the moment you slack off or add some numbers wrong or make some other mistake you’re bound to miss because no one’s told you how to measure progress, they’ve only said something like ‘Give it your best shot’ or ‘We know you have this in you, Lisa. Just try it.’ ”

“Compensation?”

“You honestly stop caring. It seems terrific at first, but then the costs of just maintaining yourself so you can work—the therapy, the stationary bike, the weekend antiquing so you can clear your head, the soundproofing for your home office so no one hears you throwing your stapler or yodeling for the hell of it—”

“Mounts. I needed to say that so I could breathe. I still have one question: What’s the product? The service?”

“I was heading there. You’ve heard of that genome project? The human gene map? That’s what they’re after at MythTech, except with commerce. All the angles. All the combinations. And they know it won’t be a ‘eureka.’ It won’t just pop someday. It’s going to take piecework and steady crunching away on every front. It won’t take forever, but it won’t be quick. That’s why they don’t worry about profits. Let someone else chase money in the short term; long term it’s all MythTech’s, anyway. Because the second MythTech gets this map, the second they lock those files in the vault, everyone else is a plowboy on their farm. Fact is, the money we think we’re making now, the money we think IBM makes, Ford, Purina, KFC, Ben & Jerry’s, the LA Times, it’s actually just a loan from MythTech’s future paid backwards to us in the present so we can eat until they’ve got things nailed down and they eat us. We’re all Thanksgiving turkeys in their barnyard and tomorrow is November first.”

“They still need operating funds. Who’d invest in this?”

“Who wouldn’t, Ryan? Any investor who feels this thing might work knows he’ll have nothing unless he’s on its good side.”

“I don’t see how you could leave a place like that.”

“Look at me, listen to me. Feel my hands. Do I seem like I’ve left? Sure, you can go to work for someone else—hell, they want you to; they need you to—but who are you really working for? Get with it.”

“And if you leak their secrets they don’t pursue it?”

“You still don’t get what their product is, I’m seeing.”

“The code. This perfect comprehensive map.”

Lisa snaps off another filter and lights up. She leans back on her stool, cross-legged. Regards me. Sighs. “I’m selling it to you right now. You buying, boy? No, you already bought. It’s in your eyes.”

“I was thinking we should get a room. We’re pretty far gone and it’s only six o’clock.”

“It’s fear of the code. The fear there is a code and that someone else is going to crack it, so you’d better just cough up your energy right now, either to us or one of our subsidiaries. Or, if you’re rich, send a check. It’s all a racket. It’s extortion, Ryan. Sheer extortion. The code is a bluff. It’s all Beware of Dog. It’s Daddy’s deep, loud voice.”

“Can I trust you with something?”

“No. But go ahead.”

“I’m flying there tomorrow.”

“Why fly? You’re there.”

“Craig was right. It’s a hunch. There’s no offer on the table. It’s hints. It’s signs. It’s smoke signals. I know that. I have to see, though. What’s my downside? None.”

“After all I’ve just said you still want them to want you. You still want to shine in some interview,” she says. “Not sexy, Ryan. Very not sexy, Ryan.”

“What you’ve said makes me think it’s the same whatever I do. If I go or don’t go.”

“What’s the same?” she says. “Then I’m going back to my hotel.”

“The result.”

“That’s all you care about? Results? Man, have they ever got their claws in your brain.”

She swings down off her stool and picks up her little bag and fishes out some lipstick and does a touch-up. She looks into my face like it’s her mirror and fills in a corner, puckers. There. She’s done. She puts away the lipstick, zips the bag, steadies herself in her tippy heels, and goes. Definitely the one, and there she goes. And yet I still have a date tonight, so screw her. Screw Linda, too. Ryan Bingham thinks ahead.

fifteen

alex says she wants to “do” Las Vegas. She’s been hitting the guidebooks, apparently. How dreary. Or maybe she’s thinking I’m so in-the-know, so seasoned and so locally plugged in, that while she’s at the vanity getting up her getup and I’m out here sinking trick shots on the pool table, I’m already scrolling through the top five menus and mentally ranking in order of their significance in the great junk-culture scheme of things the biggest ten magic acts, lion extravaganzas, artsy European circuses, and toned-down, export editions of three-year-old New York performance art one-woman shows.

“Where were you all day?” I shout into the bathroom while sighting down my crooked, wavy cue. I’ll skip the white over the orange and hit the red and the red will cause a scale-model Big Bang of symmetrically diverging suns.

“People-watching. The faces here. Amazing.”

“You plan events for a living and huge festivities but you’ve never been to Las Vegas? Are you successful?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t to you. I’m mumbling.”

“Can you just give me some time here? Five more minutes?”

“What?”

“Can you just—”

“Kidding, Alex. Kidding. I wish you were in here to see what I just did.”

She shoulders the door closed and I welcome this because I can stop looking through it at the floor where Mr. Hugs’ legs can be seen behind the trash basket. I hang up my stick and leave the rec room. That was my all-time high point, that last shot, a miracle on felt that won’t come twice. I lie on my back on the bed and I replay it on the expanded field of a beige ceiling so heavily textured and spackled and swirled and pebbled that I expect it to crumble or start dripping. Tomorrow’s the day, tonight is just survival, and knowing that should make everything a bonus. If I eat one good shrimp. If I snatch another Dexedrine. If I glimpse Lisa’s back in a crowd and flip her off or see Craig Gregory lose just one quarter. I can treat these next hours as one long jubilee and Alex as Bathsheba come back to life, and if I don’t I’m just stealing from myself. This is why a man must set clear goals, because in the final countdown to their fulfillment, especially if that fulfillment feels inevitable, he can be as playful as he wishes, because all but the riskiest risks are now risk-free.

I’m ordering a limousine tonight. I’d like to see an impressionist. I shall. I’m raiding Alex’s pharmacy in broad daylight and if she catches me I’m going to grin the naughty disarming grin I just now practiced, before I’d even imagined a context for it. I want to find whoever’s dealing “blue bottle” and buy a six-pack, if that’s how it comes, and dose Alex’s drink without her knowledge and carry her back here giggling and fizzing and primed to act out the back pages of Hustler slathered in mentholated shaving cream.

Still, I worry that she’s not successful. Because that will come out at some point and could be hard for someone as madcap and effervescent as the new me. She’s already mentioned that she did public relations once—she noticed on the jukebox a band she’d represented—but she didn’t explain how she got out of it, which means her departure was probably not voluntary. We’ll need to avoid that particular episode and any stretch of either of our lives that words such as episode can be applied to. That will be easy for me, since I’m a master, but could be tough for her as she gets drunker and starts to confuse my radiance with warmth.

Judging by how long she’s been in wardrobe, she’s going to thrill me when next that door swings open, so there had better be some music playing. I logroll across the mattress and sit up and stare down into the jukebox’s bright innards. I’m looking for something light and old and tuneful with no strong associations for either of us. Just a song for two generic flatlanders who’ve known the sprawling opportunity cities but still remember cold drumsticks at the swimming hole and that jig Poppa danced when he drank too much schnapps, even if things didn’t happen just that way. Is there a song like that? Evocative but not stirring? That takes you back without taking you over? If there is, it’s my theme. I’ll make it my new sleep machine.

But it’s not here on this old Wurlitzer. I’m stumped. No Sinatra, no Broadway, no Motown, no bubblegum, just tons of glum college-radio alt rock and overproduced AM country and—it’s so wrong—much melancholy yet strident sixties protest crap. I may as well just punch stuff up at random; a dangerous thought, since that’s what I’m now doing, as though my ideas are now starting in my fingers and traveling upstream to my cerebrum. Out slides the arm and the record from its rack and up comes, at a volume I can’t lower because I see no knobs or dials anywhere, “If I Had a Hammer” by Peter, Paul and Mary. It’s just the tune I didn’t want to hear and of course it’s also Alex’s cue to open the door, spread her arms, and say “You like?”

She takes the catwalk. She’s dipped herself in black lacquer that still looks wet and tied her straight hair back in a whiplash ponytail that she swings around in a slashing full rotation while bowing her head, and I’m really not sure why. Her shoes are the kind you don’t notice, you just see legs, and the whole effect is pure campy female cutout, like those busty silhouettes on truckers’ mud flaps.

“Rate me,” she says. “Be vicious and be cold.”

“Ten is inhuman and never sounds sincere, so I’ll say nine point seven. Nine point eight.”

An abrupt Bond Girl pivot, hand on hip. Reverses it.

“This music’s awful.”

“Do something about it. There’s not much there.”

“I don’t make decisions tonight. I’m full-on Barbie. Just pretend they never burned the bra and you’ve never heard the word ‘empowerment.’ That’s hard in your line of work, but just pretend.”

“Last time you wanted to talk. Now this,” I say.

Cocks a hip, trails her fingers up her sides. Ooh, that tickles. Oh, but it feels good. Pouts and half closes those lashes and strokes her cheeks. “Now this. One request only: a very long black car. Like something you’d see at a Playboy Mansion funeral.”

“The phone book’s already open to that page.”

We’re riding around and still talking destinations when it strikes me that what would ruin things forever would be for Ryan to get flashy with his credit card—the one that earns miles and the only one not hacked, because it already was and he replaced it—and prematurely hurtle over the goal line down here on Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman dressed as a Bahraini sex slave and him so zonked on prescription everything that he won’t remember his big finish. That’s never been the picture and mustn’t happen. The picture is specific and very dear to me. One, I’m alone or with a total stranger, which represents my customary mode. Two, there are fields below, even if I can’t see them. There’s more, a score of picky stipulations that have barnacled onto my skull over the years, but lately I’ve been rationing the previews so as not to pre-empt the real hit show.

“Driver,” I say, and not because I like it but because the old guy insisted on being addressed this way, perhaps from some creepy role-playing addiction, “I need a bank. I need a cash machine. I’m only spending fresh green bills tonight.”

“All the casinos have several ATMs, sir.”

“I can’t explain why but I’d like it from a bank.”

The gentleman already knows we’re freaks back here. The pills are out and a bunch rolled under the seat and it probably looks to him in his rearview mirror like we’ve been bobbing for apples these past few minutes. In the limo’s doors are insulated wells stocked with pop and beer and crescent-shaped ice cubes, and we’ve made a mess of these as well. We sip once from a can and decide it’s not our flavor and thrust it back into the ice pile and it spills and we crack another and fancy it even less and it tips and gushes, too, and we’re all sticky, so out come thick wads of multicolored napkins that we’re just too lazy to use singly, and plus we’re paying for them, so who cares?

“You up for a good mimic, Alex?”

“As always.”

“So why did you quit PR?” I feared this subject, but as is my habit I’m rushing right in toward it because I don’t want it crawling up behind me.

“I got let go.”

“For cause? I’m sorry.”

“Shrinkage. Not enough desk chairs to go around one day, but they tried to be sweet about it. You know. Help us.”

“Why did you say ‘you know’ like that to me?”

“Because you know.”

I swing around to Driver like I’ve been kicked and do what he told me earlier I should do: ask him anything. What arises from this are two tickets and a firm price—we just have to give the box office a note that Driver’s now scribbling on a pad beside him while Alex watches the road because he isn’t and I can see she thinks this actually helps—for one Danny Jansen at some casino showroom. It’s ninety bucks per head. We find that bank. The machine is on an outside wall and hungry drifters lurk on every corner as I make the withdrawal, but vanish once I’ve made it.

In line for the act I say, “I don’t know. Tell me.” Right straight at it again.

She doesn’t answer me until we’re seated and Danny swaggers on as Schwarzkopf—topical—and there’s no way out. Just fire exits.

“You honestly don’t remember me? Our sessions? It wasn’t a seminar, Ryan. You outplaced me. I was waiting for you to confess,” she says. “I thought you were playing with me by holding back. Then I realized you weren’t and didn’t know what to think. But you’ve really forgotten me, haven’t you? That hurts.”

“This started in Reno?”

“It started on the plane. I assumed you were playing chicken with this gal.”

Danny proves to be one rare monster, stout as a hog but nimble as a lemur yet something else as an itty-bitty kitten flung down a basement staircase by its tail. Three minutes into his leaping, bucking, slithering, A-to-Z, pansexual imitation of everyone from Stalin to Shirley Temple—and he can do them simultaneously, too, sitting on a park bench licking sugar cones or with their heads stuck through adjacent guillotines—I’ve so horrifically received my money’s worth that I’m about to pee my pants with glee. And indeed I feel a tiny trickle, which I suck back up or at least prevent from soaking me. I ask Alex if she’ll excuse me for a moment. She won’t, though. She refuses to excuse me. She grabs my hand and crushes ligament as Danny dipsy-doodles through the Louvre as both the Mona Lisa and Picasso, and after about thirty seconds of tense resistance I decide that there’s another, better way: I’ll just go limp and take whatever’s coming and hope some skilled clinician can save me later.

“Stop that,” she whispers. “Don’t squirm. It’s almost over.”

I resolved to go limp, but I didn’t manage it. This time I will. I imagine soft old rope rotting on a Lake Superior dock.

For the show’s last ten minutes I picture various deaths at Alex’s slender hands. Yet I don’t feel her anger. This troubles me even more. I was going to run into one of them, eventually, but I figured it would be a swift, short blow. I’m sick of waiting for it. I want it now.

Driver is in position when we’re reborn from Danny’s seething necropolis and straggle out into the light of late-night Vegas. Move toward the light, it’s all a soul must know, even if it comes streaming from the red eyes of a mammoth re-created sphinx with two front paws the size of supertankers.

“Well, I guess it’s all out in the open now,” says Alex, reclining against the molded leatherette of our American-made black mass on wheels. Driver is taking us somewhere he thinks we’ll like but he wants it to be a surprise. He’s being Driver.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I say. But just so-so. Why bother with guilt when she’s about to hang me? It’ll be her turn to feel guilty soon.

“Slide over here and make it up to me. Kiss my legs or something. Right on up.”

I obey her, both in letter and in spirit. The alcohol in her perfume stings my tongue. She must have bathed in it.

“Came early, stayed late,” she says. “Worked weekends. Holidays. I had a sick kid brother with no health plan, a mom who shared a dad with someone else and liked the nice girly things he couldn’t give her. Mostly, it was for me, though. I drove Miatas. One-year leases so I could try new colors. You know who I represented once? Barbara Bush. Pretty fabulous. I got some hand-me-downs. When she’d built up to five copies of one necklace that she couldn’t risk wearing the original of, guess who got the sixth, with a sweet card? That’s how they became the Texas Kennedys: cards for everyone, wrote them day and night.” She leans back further. “You’re doing good. Go, Fido.”

“Ma’am?” The voice of Driver.

“I’m still a miss. A junior miss.”

“We’re there.”

“Just circle, please.”

I cast up my eyes at the giantess. She pats me. If this is the sum of my obligations to her, I’ll gladly go till dawn. Till dawn of spring. Or could it be that I payed my spiritual debt by watching Danny mutate for an hour and now I’m into the extra-credit zone.

“I slept with the boss man. I didn’t feel exploited. I felt like he was offering me insurance. He wouldn’t just hump any of the young things, and the ones that he did hump had major blackmail power, all seventeen of us. God, I loved PR. The privilege of it. Showing the world that Texaco and Exxon only drilled and brokered and refined as a way to support their truer passions: saving the porpoise and promoting opera in the inner city, which they’ll rebuild someday and not even take the write-off—it’s a gift. Being entrusted with tall tales that vast just swoops you up onto your silver princess throne. More, give me more. Give me harder ones, you shout. Let me position private penitentiaries as walled Montessoris for late-blooming unfortunates. Your appetite for deception spreads and grows, and just when you think it can’t gape any wider, someone hands you a folder tabbed ‘Pesticide Spill: Monsanto.’ It’s like bliss. You don’t have to chew so hard, Ryan. Focus. Focus.”

“I apologize, miss, but my left rear tire feels flat. There’s broken glass all over the road tonight. I’ll need to stop up ahead and use the jack.”

“Can you just lock us in?”

“Of course I can.”

“Then it’s not a problem.”

“Yes, miss. Thank you.”

I hear a door slam muffled by so much skin.

“But then we lost some big clients,” Alex says, “and one of our rainmakers died and . . . dominoes. I truly think they drew lots to choose who went. You still don’t remember me? Those suits I wore? I’m up to our first meeting.”

The harder she bangs on this lid, the tighter it seals. A moment ago I felt it opening—a vision of Dallas office-tower blue glass, an artsy reception area with seats resembling children’s wood alphabet blocks, extreme-angle views of parking garages with painted helipad markings on the roofs—but now it’s all black again, and shut; Chernobyl entombed in its smooth concrete sarcophagus. The barricades are up on memory lane.

My seat seems to tilt. Is this the jack at work?

“You don’t remember the exercise?” she says. “That workshop hour where you were some big headhunter and I was supposed to sell you on my skills without using words like ‘need’ or ‘want’ or ‘hope’? You cracked pistachios to show uninterest, which you said I’d have to be prepared for, and I unbuttoned my cashmere cardigan, the top two buttons, and you said, ‘That looks desperate; you want a new job, not a sugar daddy.’ Nothing?” She lifts my chin with two hands and makes me see her.

I apologize and apologize. The seats tilt. I’m afraid if I move I’ll shift the limo’s balance point and crush Driver under an axle.

“You cared,” says Alex. She closes her legs with her dress tucked in the V. I’m off-duty now; I uncramp my neck. “You didn’t want to be there, either, did you? We had that in common. We both wanted to scream. You fidgeted, your nails were bitten raw. I should be consoling him, I thought. I knew my job couldn’t last. It wasn’t meant to. Exxon. The Bushes. Festivals must end. But you thought you were responsible. So earnest. I wanted to cook you a great big hot peach cobbler.”

And then all is level and we’re on the road again. The limo founders in a swarming crosswalk and long-haired rowdies slap the windows, holler. A can of something thunks the roof and skitters and Driver accelerates and through the floor I feel the wheels lump over a large soft object that I’ll always remember as a body, even if it was a mail sack or a garbage bag. I want those Ambien. I find strange capsules, ones I haven’t seen yet, shining in an upholstery crack. I gobble them. Alex is still reminiscing. “You cared,” she says. It’s the mantra in this monologue.

And then we’re dancing somewhere. We’re back indoors. Or is this the new outdoors? The purple drinks are back—they’d just gone dormant—except that now they’re made of frozen slush that you can scoop up off the dance floor if you spill one and pack back into your cup like a wet snowball and pierce with the long straw and keep on sucking. Other dancers keep shoving me. A cubist Alex, all planar overlap and sextuple foreheads, surrounds and eludes me simultaneously, omnidirectionally dancing with all of us. She grinds on my hip, she whispers in my ears—both ears at once. She loves me, loves me, loves me. Her ponytail slices a Z in the green fog, smoke, the Mark of Zorro. She’s hanging on my neck.

I squirt through a crack in her cycloramic presence and make it to the bar and ask for milk. In a corner Art Krusk consults with Tony Marlowe, still plotting his comeback as an ethnic food king. Marlowe will cost Art. The newsletter. The videos. In CTC, all I wanted was a clean getaway, but Marlowe’s game is different. He sticks around, angling to be your Pope, your spouse, and soon you’re paying him to certify you as a trainer in his franchised cult. Goodbye, Art Krusk. The grating is off the storm drain. You’re underground now, blowing through the mains. The two of them rise from their table with their snow cones and stroll away like president and premier talking peace on some Camp David bunny trail. Tomorrow Marlowe will give Art his new name.

“You little shit. You ditched me,” Alex says. Her heat-rashed throat is like an oriole’s and her high birdy voice weaves through the DJ’s drumtrack, which is all he’s spinning tonight. Percussion.

“I needed cool dairy. Where are we? Where is this club?”

“Under Mount O.” She index-fingers my temples. A current crackles between the diodes. “It’s me.”

If this could just conclude, please. I guzzle milk. It’s not the taste, it’s the texture. It’s how it coats.

“You knew it would have to happen, didn’t you? Someone was going to see under your black hood and realize the Grim Reaper was just a kid. This is our chance to heal each other, Ryan.”

Where is all this eloquence coming from? She’s mixed her pills better than I have. “You have a mustache.” She licks the two percent off my upper lip and I lick off the wetness of her licking.

“Did you rehearse these things you’ve said to me?”

“Day and night since Reno. Certain lines I wrote down. The Barbara Bush part.”

“You’re good,” I say. “You’re scary good, in fact.”

“I want us to go upstairs,” she says. “Just give me half an hour. To set the mood.” She hands me her violet frosty to hold and kisses me and does the Bond Girl turn and activates her jetpack and whooshes off, right through the ceiling. Her contrails smell of propane.

But has anyone paid Driver? I fix on this in lieu of the big questions, such as how frightened to be of a young woman who aches to redeem her for-hire persecutor. I count my bills on the bar and recognize that I never coughed up for the Danny tickets, either. The harder I try to close out my accounts, the more people I owe. But I’ll never find that limo. People who don’t insist you pay them up front do you no favors. They’re spiritual Shylocks.

I decide to consider my cash the house’s money and find a quiet table and let it ride.

The winning streaks you’re obliged to leave midway continue indefinitely in your dreams, until the sum you might have won if you’d only hung around dwarfs the stack you walked away with. I leave the blackjack pit after thirty minutes up around eight hundred bucks, but I cede my sunny Bahamian retirement and golden years of anonymous philanthropy to an old desert rat who’s in my stool before its vinyl cushion can replump. It may be the greatest favor I’ve ever done anyone, but he can’t acknowledge it and I can’t take credit.

The elevator halts on every floor, it seems, but only twice do passengers get off. We glare at one another as we rise, wondering who’s the prankster or the moron. Most Las Vegas rides from the casino back to the rooms breed comity, compassion—everyone’s been fleeced by the same con—but this crew stews and accuses. The four people I leave behind when I step out are poised for a bloody cage match.

I insert my card key. The light blinks red. I flip the card over. Still red. I’d knock or call, but I don’t want to spoil Alex’s set design by forcing her to leave her mark. She lives for stagecraft. It’s really all I know about her. So what’s in store? Gothic dungeon? Bridal chamber? LAPD interrogation cell?

I was right not to knock, I see; this isn’t my room. The number beckoned because it’s also the PIN for my Wells Fargo cash card. I look both ways. The rows of doors look phony, as if they conceal brick walls or dusty air shafts. I walk along but no digits jump out at me. Then I smell incense. I slot my card in. Green.

Inside, a moment of night-blind blackout yields to imprinted ghostlights from the dance club and then to a Russian Orthodox cathedralscape of shadows and candleglow. The room’s mock-suite shape, its notional entryway, blocks a full-Broadway beholding of the king bed and whatever pose my date has chosen there—champagne flapper, minky Marilyn, Cleopatra with serpents. I see the flowers, though. Carnivorous white lilies on the pool table and more of them on the dresser-credenza thing. No music, though. No beatnik minstrelsy. That Wurlitzer let us both down. Three steps, a turn.

Home to fulfill the obsession I deserved.

It’s like a fairy tale. The bed stripped down to its sheets. The banks of roses. The powdered skin and many, many lit tapers. All gauzy and medieval and surely calculated to address the ancient child in me even as it rebukes the infant grown-up. That seems to have been her intention, at least. To enchant and correct at the same time. But her thrashings and half-conscious gropings have mangled things. She’s on her side in a kind of frozen crouch, fouled in the linens. The roses are a mess. Only the chess-set lineup of pill bottles on the nightstand beside my sonic sleep machine—tuned to the “rain forest” track; I hear the dripping now—memorializes my girl’s perfectionism.

I receive it all as a kindness. She could have hung herself.

To grab the phone I have to reach through flames, and I suffer a burn I won’t feel till hours later. The receiver is off the hook—evidence of second thoughts? I’m shaking her with one hand, but I’m also listening for a dial tone. Then I see the cord yanked from the wall jack. I frisk myself for my mobile. 911? Or patch through to the desk for the in-house team of medics that any hotel this size must have on standby? The decision hangs. I shouldn’t have to make one. I’ve outsmarted myself by imagining the medics.

The emergency operator wants my room number, which I never noted; I followed the jasmine. The lady drawls. Her westernness offends me. I run to the hall, read the number off the door, then hustle back to list the names of the poisons, the medications. I arrive at the wrong side of the broad mattress and instead of circling around I climb across. I brush her skin, traversing. It might be colder. Still time to pump her stomach, to give the shots. The small print on the bottles’ labels is faded, low contrast. I squint and report. I’m asked to speak more clearly.

Instructions next. Check the airway for obstructions; the victim may have aspirated vomit. I don’t understand. “With your fingers,” drawls the operator. I’m surprised she didn’t call me “hon.” I ask her for specifics, mechanical drawings. Which fingers? How many? In the throat? Somehow I fumble the handset in my scramble and lose it in all the roses and knotted laundry. It rings seconds later, an automated callback, but I perform the more critical mission first. I roll her on her back—I’m sure I’m wrong here; the victim belongs on its side, so it can drool; so its gullet can eject the foreign material—and I spread her wet chin and jaw and make my probe, index and middle, it’s coming back to me.

Jaws dully close and gum me—wakefulness. Then her head makes a ripping, canine shake. She bites.

“The fucking hell . . . ?” Huge eyes she has. Like Lazarus.

“Alex, oh fucking god.”

“You choked me. Shit!” She jerks back her knees and goes fetal against the headboard. Cornered, curled, as if I had a knife. Extremely wakeful, though. My phone still ringing.

“You never came,” she says. “I fell asleep. Where were you?”

“Are you okay? You said to wait.”

“Not two hours,” she says. The phone is by her hand, I see. She slaps it and it goes quiet.

“I,” I say. “I,” I continue. “I,” I offer. I pause.

“Playing cards? Just one more hand?” she says. She gathers the sheets and covers all her good parts. Again the phone rings. She answers it and listens and says, “I’m fine,” and repeats it until even I’m convinced, her face showing comprehension of my mistake, of everyone’s mistakes, and then disgust.

“Thank you. I know, but it wasn’t that,” she says. “He’s self-important, so he thought it was. He knew I used sedatives, but apparently . . . I know, I know.” They’re hitting it off, these gals. “He got himself all hung up in the casino and tiptoed in here with a guilty conscience and saw what he wanted to or hoped or something. His poor, poor Juliet. If you want to send someone over to confirm, be my guest . . . Right. Okay. She wants to talk to you.”

I explain that there’s no emergency after all and turn the mobile off and face my date. If she lit all these candles when she first came in and they were new then and now they’re this burned down I’m surprised it was only two hours I wasted down there.

“You got the bear, I noticed,” she says. “From Paula. My friend. Who you don’t remember, either. Tall. Wore flannel slacks. She worked that mannish thing.”

“A Paula. Statuesque,” I say. “A Paula.”

“When I told her I saw you on the Reno flight, she said ‘Oh goody,’ and asked me for your info. You ticked her off. She’s touchy, but she’s a gas. She said she was going to do something, but not what, though it must have been her because she gave those bears for Christmas once, the year we were fired, when those bears were big. She’s back in PR, in Miami. Fashion stuff.”

“I should probably get my own room tonight, you feel.”

“Get me one. This one’s trashed. I want fresh blankets. I spent a lot of money on all this gear.”

“Or maybe we can both get a new room.”

“You must think I’m a pretty lonely lady. Pretty twisted, too. Just say it.”

“No.”

“That was your moment of grandeur, wasn’t it? Your slain despondent virgin,” Alex says. “I know your big atonement’s set for nine, but I’d just call and cancel if I were you. You haven’t really earned the cross, you know? You flatter yourself and it’s sort of getting old. Try to book me another suite. Or anything. It doesn’t even have to be Mount O.”

I take down the cue when I’m alone again and venture a few four-bumper extravaganzas, but I’m out of my groove and not much sinks. Pool balls not sinking, just knocking around, are sad. Some entertainment? I should love this Wurlitzer. These are my people. Haggard. Baez. Hank. Country-Western Music as Literature. I’m told I had ambitions as a folk singer, and I don’t doubt it, but it’s too late to learn an instrument. I click my sleep machine to “prairie wind” and gobble a pill I found under the sink and an Ambien from my pocket, to hedge my bets.

I call Alex in her new room three floors above me to see if she’s comfortable and to make sure she won’t be down to murder me in my sleep. She answers from the bathroom, from the john, whose whirlpooling I can hear when she picks up. I’m calling from the same spot—we’ve found a wavelength?—though I’ve already flushed. I flush again, a kind of mating call, and Alex says she’s preparing to go out again and I say, competitively, that I am, too. “As what?” she says. It’s the question I should have asked her; she’s the one who’s always going out as things. “As Danny,” I say, and at last I get a laugh from her. Why didn’t we begin things in this fashion, toilet to toilet, at a modest remove, the way the balanced Mormons do their courting?

I ask her why she takes so many pills, my concern for her seeming genuine, even to me, and she says she doesn’t—the pills are a collection, a way of adapting to the flying life and self-employment, which she’s never grown used to. Consulting with a doctor in each new city is like redesigning the lighting in her hotel rooms; it helps her to feel connected and at ease; and she only asks the physicians for prescriptions because she’s from Wyoming and grew up poor and believes in value for her money. She broke them out tonight because she saw I’d stolen a fair number and she concluded that drugs were my passion or maybe just my pastime and she wanted to swing along, not be a spoilsport. I tell her I buy all this, although few others would, because I know what she’s up against out here, having to set up anew each time she lands—I do it, too, by rooting for local teams, and I tell her the story about the Bulls and Timberwolves. “So: Poseidon’s Grotto in fifteen minutes? Come as whoever,” I say. And then I add: “I finally remembered you,” because it’s true. A minute ago, when I realized there’d be no penalty, I flashed on the morning I played headhunter to Alex’s kittenish job seeker in cashmere, though the nuts were peanuts, not pistachios.

“We had chemistry, didn’t we?” she says.

“I wouldn’t go that far. I enjoyed the outfits. I wasn’t capable then of having chemistry.”

“You think our limo’s still out front?”

“I’m certain.”

“We could drive to that secret air base in the desert where they supposedly autopsy the aliens and sit on a rock with a carton of cold milk and watch the skies for experimental craft.”

Now, that’s my idea of doing Las Vegas. “Yes.”

“Why weren’t you like this before?”

Can’t answer that.

“Or maybe,” she says, “we should wait a week or two and see if we’re still interested?”

“Oh.”

“That would be wiser, I think.”

In bed, alone, I recall that tonight was about survival only, so I’ve succeeded. The rest was all a bonus. And I may just have met my soul mate tonight, though I’m still not sure which one she was.

sixteen

this business of hassled travelers waking up not knowing where they are has always seemed false to me, a form of bragging, as when someone tells me at a business lunch that it’s been years since he really tasted his food. The more I’ve traveled, the better I’ve become at orienting myself with a few clues, and the harder it’s gotten to lose myself. I’m perpetually mapping and triangulating, alert to accents, hairstyles, cloud formations, the chemical bouquets of drinking water. Nomadism means vigilance, and to wake up bewildered and drifting and unmoored is a privilege of the settled, it seems to me—of the farmer who’s spent his whole life in one white house, rising to the same roosters.

The light in my room is Las Vegas morning light, there’s none other like it in all America—a stun gun to the soul. It picks out the pistils and stamens in the lilies and the ashes of the spent incense cones. My mobile is halfway through its second ring, and because I’m now down to unwelcome callers only, I hesitate before answering. I’d give anything for a moment of dislocation, a blessed buffer zone.

“I’m downstairs with a car on the way,” Craig Gregory says. “I thought you might like a ride to the convention center. You’ll want to check the acoustics, the power spots. You going to use a lectern and sermonize or do the walkabout talk-show act? We’re curious.”

“I haven’t showered.”

“Use it for effect. Too conscience-stricken to bathe. I’ll wait out front, next to the big pink granite Dionysus.”

I do my best with razor, soap, and toothbrush, but it’s like polishing a wormy apple. Motivation is low. Virtue’s bugle call is silent. I rehearse a few brave phrases from my talk but the face in the steamy mirror seems unmoved. The point of the speech was to hear myself deliver it, but I already have, a hundred times, and clearly my best performance is behind me. The true act of courage this morning would be to cancel and live with the knowledge of Craig Gregory’s office-wide “I told you so’s.” It’s the sole penance left to me, and I must snatch it.

I pack up my carry-on but it won’t zip. I leave it on the bed. My briefcase, too. Luggage, for me, was an affectation anyway, a way to reassure strangers and hotel clerks that I hadn’t just been released from prison and that I’d make good on my bills. I ditch the white-noise generator as well. The thing enfeebled me. If a person can’t lose consciousness on his own, if thinking his thoughts is that important to him, then let him lie on his bed of nails. He’ll cope.

Only the HandStar is indispensable, if only for nine more hours or so. Its flight schedules, mileage charts, and activity logs will tell me when I’ve passed over my meridian. After that, the trash. My credit cards, too. The fewer numerical portals into my affairs, the fewer intruders. I may keep one Visa so I can pump my gas without having to face a human clerk, but I’ll toss the rest on the unloved-numbers dump. 787 59643 85732, you may no longer act as my agent. Permission denied. My phone I’ll retain in case I witness a car wreck and can be of aid. The boots stay, too. To help me walk the surface of the earth and look silly doing it, which is how I’ll feel. Not forever, I hope, but certainly at first.

I check out by remote, via the TV, and ride the elevator to the casino, where I notice a few of the players from last night still humped up over the tables and machines, though not the fellow who copped my lucky blackjack stool, who’s probably out yacht-shopping by now, nagged by a faint sense of illegitimacy he’s drinking hard to mask.

I’m almost out the door and MythTech-bound, heading for a rear exit to miss Craig Gregory, when I fix on a familiar profile alone at a corner mini-baccarat table. They got him. I’m devastated. They waylaid Pinter. There he is, stubbly, strung out on the odds, a monk who ventured from his cell just once and plunged straightaway down Lucifer’s rabbit hole. It’s my duty to try to haul him out.

It takes him a moment to see me once I’ve sat down. This game of no skill and one binary decision—Player or Banker; an embryo could do it—has fossilized his nerves. The whites of his eyes are the color of old teeth, and so are his old teeth.

“I was just getting up to come hear you speak,” he says. Optimistically.

“I was up against CEO-to-be-announced. I bowed out. How’s it going over here?”

“Better and better. I’m almost back to even.” He wets his gray lips and commits two chips to Banker, then has an epiphany and shifts to Player. If he wins this, he’ll think he has the touch. If he loses he’ll think he had the touch, but doubted himself. He’ll resolve not to doubt himself and keep on playing.

“Have you thought any more about the Pinter Zone?”

He smashes out a hand-rolled cigarette. “I’ve decided to license those rights to Tony Marlowe. I’m sorry. I planned to tell you at your talk.”

“May I ask why?” As if I don’t know, and as though I care now. Marlowe’s a smiler. He grooms. He follows up. The perennial philosophy.

“You may, but my answer would only make you feel bad.”

Fair enough. But he stabs me anyhow. “You’re a graduate of my seminars,” he says. “Marlowe’s not. His brain’s not full of goop. He sees me for what I am, another businessman, not an avatar. It takes the pressure off. You, I would have disillusioned.”

Wrong. Watching him kill himself to get “back to even” (where but in Las Vegas is reaching zero considered an accomplishment?) has already done that job.

“You seeing the general this afternoon?” he says. “This man won a massive set-piece desert battle. Imagine the confidence that must instill.”

“I’ve heard him. I’ve gotten all he has to give. I’m off to Omaha. Spack and Sarrazin.”

“Say hello to them for me.”

He chooses Banker. Loses. The El Dorado of evenness recedes before a new grail: bankruptcy with dignity. I buy a few chips. I’ll join him in his ruin.

“I’m not even sure I still want to work for them. I might live on my savings for a year. Read the classics.”

“The classics will just depress you. I fled a country nurtured on the classics and everyone there was drunk or suicidal. Keep occupied. Work. Earn money. Help others earn money. Ignorance of the classics is your best asset. If MythTech shows interest, accept. Don’t ponder Dante.”

I’ve won two hands, that fast, and I can see the swinging pocket watch of last night’s trance. I collect my chips and scoot my stool back, rise.

“Stay. You’re the charm,” says Pinter. “Five more hands. I’m back within striking distance of where I stood when I felt I was starting to catch up.”

Too sad, that remark. And I owe the old man, too, even if he’s dancing with Marlowe now. He did something for me once. He did a lot. The sophisticates may sniff, but it’s all true: in the course of certain American lives, way out in the flyover gloom between the coasts, it’s possible to arrive—through loss of love, through the long, formless shock of watching parents age, through inadequacies of moral training, through money problems—at a stage or a juncture or a passage—dismiss the buzzwords at your peril—when we find ourselves alone in a strange city where no one lives any longer than he must and all of our neighbors come from somewhere else, and damn it, things just aren’t working out for us, and we’ve tried everything, diets, gyms, jobs, churches, but so far not this thing, which we read about on a glossy flyer tucked under our windshields: a breakthrough new course in Dynamic Self-Management developed over decades of experience training America’s Top Business Leaders and GUARANTEED TO GET YOU WHERE YOU’RE GOING!

And we go. And feel better. Because there’s wisdom there, more than we gained at our lousy college, at least, and more importantly there’s an old man’s face—beamed in from California by satellite—which appears to be looking at us alone, the ninety-eight-pound weaklings, and not laughing! A miracle. Not even smirking! Beholding us!

“I win again. Are you watching this?” says Pinter. “Don’t move an inch. I’m tripling my wagers.”

Only for him would I do this: stand around impersonating good luck when I have a flight to catch.

“I’m there! I’m even!”

“You might want to stop now,” I say.

Pinter nods. “Unless you can postpone Omaha.”

“I can’t.”

He pockets the chips he sat down with like golden loot dredged from a wreck. He steps back from the table. Look: no handcuffs.

“I’m sorry about Marlowe. I can’t unsign. I can, however, run up to my room and call Mr. Sarrazin and vouch for you and suggest that he send a car when you get in. When’s your arrival?”

I tell him.

“You brought me back!” He shakes my hand and won’t stop, and though one dreams of someday being thanked by one’s old mentor, one doesn’t want him to cling this way. It’s painful. My favor was so small. I did so little.

Though I guess that depends on how much he was down.

There’s always a change in Denver. It’s unavoidable. A trip to the bathroom out west means changing in Denver. If you’ve done it, you’ve seen the city at its best. Not because the rest of Denver is dull (I’ve been told my old city possesses a “thriving arts scene,” whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks) but because the airport is a wonder. Along with Hartsfield and O’Hare, DIA is one of Airworld’s three great capitals. It’s the best home that someone between homes could ever want.

But today is goodbye. I’ll change in Denver again someday—I’ll still fly, I suppose, though less often, and mostly for pleasure—but this won’t be the same DIA, where I know everybody and most folks at least act like they know me. The ten-minute chair-massage girl who just had twins. The shoeshine guys, Baron and Gideon and Phil. The health-walking retired G-man who shows up every weekday at 6 A.M. to clock his nine miles, shielded from the weather by those soaring conical canopies said to invoke a native teepee village, though to me they’ve always looked like sails.

And Linda, of course, whom I had to go and sleep with, perverting the pristine relationship of kind and competent receptionist and busy man who loved being received.

I stare at them as I walk between my gates. If I catch someone’s eye I make a finger pistol and shoot them a big “Howdy” or “Keep on truckin’.” A few shoot back, but only one person speaks—Sharon, the quickie massage girl. “Flamingo neck, get over here! You need me!”

I mount her odd-looking chair and rest my head, facing down and forward, between two pads. I watch the floor go by. Nothing stays in place; it all goes by. Floors just do it more slowly than other things.

“Hear that Rice Krispies sound? That’s your fascia crackling.” She always brings up my fascia. She pities them. She believes that if people, particularly people in power, “would only listen to their bodies,” war would cease and pollution would abate—and for as long as I’m in her oily hands, I believe it, too. Imagine the red faces if the answer turns out to be that simple. It just may.

I’d tell her “So long,” but I don’t want to confuse her. Of course I’m going away; I’m in an airport.

I walk to the Compass Club desk and ask the woman filling in for Linda to pass a note to her I wrote on the flight in. Not much of a note: “Keep smiling, okay? I’m sorry about last night. I’ll be away. Tell the boys to expect big parcels on their birthdays and yes, you’d make a terrific nurse. Pursue that.”

“Are you Ryan?” the sub asks. “The one she always talks about? You fit the description perfectly. You must be.”

“Describe the description.”

“Medium short hair. A big vocabulary. Flat but pleasing voice.”

“With that, you pegged me?”

“Great West ran your picture in the employee newsletter. They’ve been updating us on your progress. You’ll be our tenth.”

I’m flummoxed. “You all know my face then? Nationwide? The tone of this little article was positive?”

“Try fawning.” She points a finger down her throat.

“Really? No kidding.”

“Orders from on high,” she says. “Treat the man like a prince. That’s not verbatim, but that’s the thrust.”

“Go on!”

“You haven’t noticed the little smiles everywhere? The big thumbs-up from your teammates?”

I shake my head. “The newsletter said I’m your teammate? Do you still have it?”

“You really haven’t noticed? You’re our Most Wanted.”

“I’m finding this very confusing. Morse said pamper me? The future head of pro baseball said pamper me? Not give me flak?”

“That baseball thing fell through. We hear he’s shattered. He spoke at a prayer breakfast in Boulder yesterday and the word is he sobbed. He lost it for a minute. With the stock price stuck and Desert Air’s big fare cuts and new ‘Let’s Fly Together’ ad campaign, my union’s saying he’s gone within six weeks. Maybe—after that breakdown—even sooner.”

“Reliable high-level gossip? Or car-pool stuff?”

“Union news. And believe me, we won’t miss him. He’s Mr. Bad Faith. Gives an inch, then takes it back, then gives it again later on like he’s some Santa Claus or wonderful rich uncle. He’ll make out fine. They’ll slip him a million and he’ll walk off laughing.”

“He won’t. That not how it feels,” I say.

“Whatever.”

“He’s in for some dark nights, if this is true. Is there a way to contact him directly? How would I get his number? The one he answers?”

“Pray to God. Come on, you hate him, too. All the passengers do. He killed this outfit.”

“You’re still working here.”

“You’re still buying tickets.”

“Soften up on those more fortunate. It’s all a continuum. You’re in it, too.”

“I’ll give her the note. Vocabulary man.”

I’m hoping Pinter unplugged the baccarat brainjack long enough to reach a phone and order some runway foam for me in Omaha. A driver at the gate holding a placard with my name only slightly misspelled in sloppy black capitals would add a certain something to my deplaning. It would help my arrival feel like an arrival and not just another departure in the making.

I call for my two percent and, yes, it’s true—the flight attendant’s smile seems to exceed the parabolic millimetric facial crack diagrammed in her Great West training manual. She’s not a free being as you and I are free, and when her behavior varies, it’s on purpose. Federal regulations rule her life, dictating shift lengths and rest periods and cycles of alcohol and prescription-drug consumption; her contract with the airline covers the rest. Even the bows in her shoelaces have been optimized. Two loops, just so. If she wore laced shoes, that is. It’s forbidden; she might trip on them evacuating, helping some class-ring salesman down the slide.

How I mistook my teammates’ grins and backslaps for mockery and obstruction, I’m still not sure. It’s as though I’ve confused a dinner in my honor for a penitentiary last meal. These two events might look much the same, perhaps—undue attention from people who’ve ignored one, telegrams, reporters, handkerchiefs. Maybe it’s not all me.

Omaha looms in my window, but its looming stems from my expectations, not its grandeur. On past trips the city has struck me as forlorn, a project that’s outlived its founding imperatives and hung on thanks to block grants and inertia and handouts from one or two civic-minded billionaires. This time it may as well be the risen Atlantis. The stubby, aging skyline snags on cloud. The spotty late-morning traffic seems darkly guided. Omaha, city of mystery. Home to MythTech, who guides our hands through supermarket freezers toward rising-crust pizzas and breadcrumbed mozzarella sticks that seem overpriced and skimpy, but what the hell. It’s our money. We’ll spend it as we please.

I want to be in on that thing, whatever it is. To be safe from them one must be one of them. We dock with the Jetway and I join the line. It’s not a job I’m seeking, it’s citizenship, a seat inside the Dome. Key modules in the canopy hang from cranes and not every duct is flanged and sealed, but unless I get in before the structure’s dedicated, I’ll be a spectator. A mark. If MythTech turns out to be seven twenty-five-year-olds shooting wastebasket hoops and munching protein bars, I’ll still want in, if this is where it’s going. Even the big stuff starts in the Garage.

Sam lets me call him Sam. I ride up front with him. He’s not a veteran, like Driver, but he tries, and I suspect he bills clients electronically and doesn’t grant show tickets on the honor system. He’s in college, no doubt, and this is just a sideline; that Penguin Classics Bleak House is no breeze, and half the pages are tabbed and paper-clipped. Sam nods at the sights. A famous jewelry store favored by British royals and software titans who know their Color, Cut, and Clarity. Warren Buffet’s first office—see that broken window? It’s the one directly above it, with the pigeons.

Someone must want me to feel at home in Omaha, and just in case Sam is reporting back to him, I show interest in salvaged toolworks and thoughtful greenways and redbrick loft districts zoned for art. I’m restless, though. We’re leaving downtown along the sluggish Missouri. Paddle-wheel casinos, stacked raw lumber, the home of the nine-dollar T-bone, the eight, the seven. Big dreams and low rents can make beautiful music together, but as the steak dinners give way to dollar Buds, I start to wonder. Does MythTech have no pride?

“Where’s world headquarters?”

“For what?” Sam says. “They gave me an address, not a press release.”

Low pay, long hours. I don’t take his snapping personally.

He looks from side to side, then at the sky, his chin out over the steering wheel. He’s lost. Searching the sky while driving on the ground is like kicking the dropped fly ball that ended the game.

“Did they give you a time to get me there?” I say.

“In my glove compartment there’s a phone.”

Sam dials yet keeps driving; I lose faith in him. Once in the soup, persistence is no virtue. Muffler shops now. Unaffiliated churches. A Dairy Queen rival from the early seventies with a listing discolored cone that doesn’t spin. MythTech hired this car, and by a firm’s subcontractors you shall know its soul.

“We passed it. I knew it!”

Sam’s illegal U-turn ends at an old low warehouse that I’ll admit has definite rock-and-roll capitalism potential but could use a few satellite dishes on the roof to close the deal. I open my door; I wish I’d kept my briefcase. Sam tells me he needs to deliver a late tuition payment but promises to be back within the hour.

The intercom panel beside the vault-like door is promisingly rich in lighted buttons but none of them are labeled or even numbered. I hold them down four at a time and in response a buzzer sounds and a hidden latch clunks open. I snatch at the door handle, having never been told how long to expect such bolts to stay retracted. It’s always a panic, this moment, for us nervous types.

The space is well-lit thanks to banks of vintage skylights honeycombed with reinforcing wires and remarkably free of bird droppings and dust. There’s an old-fashioned gallery or mezzanine of frosted-glass offices served by iron stairways that horseshoes around what must have been the floor of some grand factory from Omaha’s golden age as a center of whatever industry—boilermaking?—that survives in the names of its high school football teams. But there’s no one around and no visible reception center where one might inquire where they’ve gone. The rough plank floor is as empty as a rink and hasn’t been lovingly sanded and refinished to the customary retro luster or painted with foul lines to afford young geniuses those crucial brainstorming games of lunch-break basketball without which there’d be no Internet, no HandStar.

The only object evoking work or purpose is a sheet metal cube painted army surplus green and the size of an industrial air conditioner. It’s featureless, with no rivets or vents or panels, but the sheen coming off it suggests it’s well maintained. It’s evidence of my investment in MythTech’s legend that despite a stint in a high-tech field that taught me what supercomputers really look like—nothing much; they’re no bigger than a dishwasher—I insist on seeing the cube as a huge cyber-brain capable of predicting how and when America’s recently rekindled romance with the traditional station wagon will end. It’s a drab-olive thinking monolith, that thing.

“Hello down there. Can I help you?”

“It’s Ryan Bingham!”

The man at the rail of the mezzanine withdraws into the warren of glass offices and out pops a new face, young but very pale. The kid has on an orange Hawaiian shirt that’s probably an expensive tribute to the Hawaiian shirt of old, since this one is louder and busier and brighter than any I ever saw my father wear at his annual company picnic in the Lion’s Park. The kid’s wearing flip-flop sandals, too. Encouraging. This is the look of the new-class robber barons.

“Can I help you?” Same question, but spoken with more authority, even a faint ring of profit participation. The kid considers this strange domain his own.

“This is MythTech, isn’t it?” I say.

“Sure is. I’m sorry, though—no more odd jobs. We finished the packing and loading two days ago. Are you from Manpower?”

“I’m dressed like I’m from Manpower? Is Spack or Sarrazin here? It’s Ryan Bingham.”

“They’re already up in Calgary,” he says. Why won’t he come down the stairs and make this civilized? “It’s just me and four temps and two security guys until we can hoist that thing there on a truck. Then we’re gone, too. Are you the one I sent the Town Car for?”

“Someone did. That was you?”

“I got a call from one of our old backers,” the kid shouts down. “Send a car to meet a plane, he said, and when I asked why and who for the guy got snippy and told me I’m too low to ask him questions. I had to remind the old snot we’re not top-down here. We’re horizontal.”

“Sandy Pinter?”

“One of those guys with all the wrong old concepts, the ones that put General Motors in the tank.”

“Pinter’s a MythTech backer?”

“From the old days. He got in early third quarter of ’98. You haven’t said how I can help you yet. Adam called you out here?”

“Indirectly.”

“Back-channel stuff?”

“Right.”

“It’s all back channel lately. Did they contact you via microwave or radar? Or AM radio?”

This is not a high point in my life. I’m being teased by a mental inferior who thinks that America didn’t get off the ground until September 1999, or whenever he opened his first IRA. But I deserve his jeers. What do I tell him? That they summoned me on an airport loudspeaker using a mini-mart pay phone?

“What’s in Calgary?”

“Tax breaks. Lax accounting standards. Who knows? Strict banking privacy laws. Skilled immigrants. It’s not like we’re quarrying Nebraska sandstone—we can run this shop from Djakarta.” He snaps his fingers and the echo pings around the space. “Unless you can tell me how to be of service, though, I’ve got an office swamped with cords and cables that need some pretty serious untangling.”

“The name Ryan Bingham means nothing to you?” I say.

“Right now it means frustration. An hour ago I probably would’ve thought it was my senator. I mean it: I have big-time wire to spool, a jumbo commercial coffeemaker to clean. I also have two large guards on antipsychotics. Insanity defense? They’ve got it memorized.”

“What’s your name? I’m going to write it down.”

“I can give you my log-in. I go by that,” he says. “2BZ2CU.”

I shift my center of gravity toward the door, but technically I hold my ground. I glance at the cube; it pulsed just now. It scanned me. I have sensitive mitochondria, rubbed raw by X-rays. I know when I’ve been scanned.

“I came to see that,” I say, pointing. “Over there. My assistant took Sarrazin’s call. He screwed the dates up. I worked on its prototype in Colorado.”

The young man cocks his body skeptically and folds his thin white arms. He’s bluff, all bluff, just another Starbucks M.B.A.; a fashion-forward brat in a VW who probably says he admires the Dalai Lama, but inside he’s all stock options, all wireless day trades. I’ve felt these kindergartners at my back for going on a decade, and they scare me. Time to confront that. Kid doesn’t know crap. Suspects he’s not going to Calgary, either, I bet. These outfits don’t go cross-border and non-dollar so they can haul along their slacker trash.

This needn’t be pure humiliation, this errand. I can alpha this geek and exit in big black boots. So no one here was expecting me? That happens. I’m used to it by now. But I can at least view the cube and ride off tall into my million-mile sunset flight.

“Professional courtesy call,” I say. “Get down here. Give me a tour or Pinter’s calling Spack and Spack’ll pay your severance in rubles.”

2BZ shows Ryan his downy throat. He hits the stairs and flip-flops down in quick-time. The skylights dim as clouds slide over the sun but the cube holds its own in the gloom. It’s homeostatic. 2BZ sets us up at a distance from the thing and won’t fully face it; he just gives it his profile. He’s acting like he’s wishing for a lead apron.

“Is it turned on?” I say.

“Huh? It’s always ‘on.’ ”

“On inside quotation marks?”

“I’m really not the expert,” says 2BZ. “We work on a need-to-know basis in this firm. It’s horizontal, but layered-horizontal. I’m infrastructure. I’m shipping and receiving. I can tell you it’s insured and that it’s fragile and that it travels on a special flatbed that should have been here half an hour ago. I can tell you they already got in touch with Customs and that it wasn’t your shortest phone call ever. I think they made two calls, in fact.”

“So what’s its nickname? Around the central office?”

“This was the back office. People work at home. This place was mostly support and storage,” he says. “I’m not sure I have a job once it’s cleared out. Who do you work for?”

“Myself. Like everyone. So basically you’re ancillary and clueless.”

“They told me I was critical. You smoke? Mind if I do?”

2BZ hand-rolls one from a pouch too fragrant to hold mere tobacco. Cloves or dope? These kids smoke all sorts of mixtures, and they should know better. I ask for one, too, but I won’t inhale, just steep myself. I’ve worn a few Hawaiian shirts myself.

“I do have a few ideas about it,” he says. “It’s pretty skeletal here, there’s not much company, just FedEx and UPS, so I spin out sometimes. Whole place was wired for sound once. Sequenced amps. I pirated off the Net and blasted everything. Tried to see if I could break those skylights. Or get myself fired. You know how all the shrinks say that children now are crying out for firmness and discipline and clear-cut values? I think it’s true. I always got positive evaluations, but what I wanted was someone to storm in here and kill the music and kick a little butt.”

“What ideas?” I’m inhaling some. You think you won’t, but in practice it’s hard not to. Just three hundred more miles to go, so I deserve it. Forty thousand feet above the wheat, and no one will even look up. As long as I know.

“It’s the world-record random automated dialer. It skims off the fractional cents from savings accounts and forwards them to some bank in the Grand Caymans. It’s where erased voice mails end up.”

“Don’t kid.”

“I’m not.”

“They have such devices. On decommissioned air bases. Don’t believe it when they say some base is decommissioned. More like ‘recommissioned.’ ”

“That’s half this state. Drive through Nebraska sometime. It’s all old Air Force. Half the Great Plains is military surplus.”

We smoke and behold the cube. We think our thoughts. Is this where the miles are stored before they’re paid?

A shuddering noise turns us both and we look on as a broad automated garage door rides its rails segment by segment and opens half one wall to views of the Missouri and western Iowa. We hear the beeps of a vehicle backing up and then we see the flatbed. It’s rigged with about a dozen orange triangles and a “Flammable” sticker from some other job, perhaps. Three workmen walk backwards behind it and guide the driver with hand signals aimed at his flared-out rearview mirrors, and all wear emerald jumpsuits with drawstring hoods and trouser cuffs that cinch around their boots. The bed of the semi bristles with tie-down eyelets. Hoops of braided cable hang from the truck and now it’s so close that we have to step aside. I can see by 2BZ’s squint and brittle posture that he’s witnessing his obsolescence here and I wish I knew someone to call on his behalf. My job recommendations pull no weight, unfortunately; the people know that I’m in CTC and am always trying to sell some exile as the Next Big Thing.

The boom on the flatbed is swung over the cube and two new workmen pile out of the cab, one with a walkie-talkie against his cheek. There may well be a helicopter somewhere, but I don’t hear blades.

I ask 2BZ for his card and give him mine, though I’m afraid they’re both outdated by now. His title is—was—“Associate.” I thank him.

“The Calgary location is a campus. They’re calling it a campus. It’s vast, I hear. An old defunct seminary on the outskirts. No more home offices. They’re consolidating.”

“If I’m not at one of those numbers on the card, try information, Polk Center, Minnesota. You want me to write that down for you?”

“I’ll remember,” he says.

“You tell yourself. I’m writing it on another one. Take this one.”

“You know what I think it is? I think I guessed. It goes outside, on the campus. To welcome visitors.”

The workmen swarm and two of them boost one of them onto the top, where he widens his stance and bends. Everyone wields some cable or some hook and radiates safety-conscious professionalism. This baby is reaching Canada intact.

“I think it’s probably art,” says 2BZ. “It’s corporate art. A thing to put out front.”

seventeen

in Omaha, boarding,” I answer—accurately. They’ve worn me down. It’s best just to give these women what they want when they ask me where they’re reaching me.

“Julie’s cut all her hair off,” Kara says. “She’ll be bald at the altar. I thought you set her straight.”

“Waning powers.” It’s tough to keep my mind on this. My audience is assembling in first class and I intend to remember every face.

“When the salmon never came,” says Kara, “Mom got some idea that she could smoke a turkey by putting a pan of wet wood chips in the oven, but underneath she wanted to burn the house down. No one’s helping me. It’s Shakespeare here. Luckily, the extinguisher had pressure left after four years of not once being checked.”

“Did Tammy get in okay? The maid of honor?”

“She’s Shakespeare too. She took a bump in Detroit for a free ticket and now we have to wait till almost midnight for her to show her hostile little face. A total play for attention. Infantile. Her best friend is on her third husband, just about, and she’s still single—not because she’s a chilly neatnik, naturally, who bolts every therapist we recommend the minute she finds a stray hair on their couch and the doctor won’t let her spray it down with that antibacterial crap she totes around, but because her parents wouldn’t buy her braces. She blames her teeth—like mine are any better. I got a man.”

Someday, when I’m not paying for the call, I’ll ask her to tell me exactly how she worked that.

“You there?”

“If you’re planning to meet me, you’ll have to set out now. You’re already late.”

“Your voice,” she says. “You’re loaded. I need you, Ryan. I’m dragging this whole celebration up a hill and I’m doing it alone. Don’t drink. It sours you. You get all quippy.”

“Big day for me,” I say. I watch them file in and hand off wardrobe bags and tussle with the overheads and sit, but the attendance is sparser than I’d pictured and the group less representative, and older. I’d guess that just a third are flying for business and will fully appreciate the feat that’s coming and that most of the rest are aunts and uncles and granddads off to help video births and blow out candles, or else they just did those things and they’re slouching home.

“Bigger day tomorrow,” Kara says. “If people can just look within for twenty seconds and get ahold of their spinning little gears. Hey, Mom needs to know if she should make a room up or if the hide-a-bed is all you’ll need?”

“Room,” I say.

“I figured that already. You forwarded your mail here,” Kara says.

So that’s where it’s going. The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I’ll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth’s curvature allows. It’s a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere—if we could take it all in at once, why move?—and it may be the reason why one-ways cost the same as round-trips. They’re all round-trips, some are just diced up in smaller chunks.

“Pick something up for Mom. Some souvenir. She senses the truth, I think; that this whole thing of yours is all about avoiding her. Some knickknack.”

“A two-time loser is trying for her third tomorrow. Give your clarity a holiday. And whatever happened to ‘Just bring yourself’?”

“The gift’s insurance. In case you don’t quite manage that.”

“We’re set to taxi and you need to start driving.”

“Got you, brother. We’re already in the Suburban and on our way. I’m holding the phone up. That snoring, all that wheezing? Your entire family sacked out, leaving Kara to do the driving, as usual. So don’t drink a drop. Don’t celebrate too soon.”

“I’m drinking,” I say. “Odometer set to turn over soon.”

“Oh, that.”

She’s the master of small words, so I took the big ones.

“Get in safe,” she says. “There’s weather here. There’s black sky to my south and tons of grass and crap is starting to blow, pretty fast, across the road.”

I arrange my materials as we thrust and rise. On the empty seat to my left I set my HandStar, displaying our flight path as a broken line on its amber credit-card-size screen and programmed so I can advance a jet-shaped icon by toggling a key. Fort Dodge, Iowa, is the milestone, as it’s always been—I like the name—and though it’s all an estimate, of course, and I may already have swept across the line, I’ve always been comfortable with imprecision when it’s in the service of sharpened awareness. Factoring in leap years and cosmic wobble, our anniversaries aren’t our anniversaries, our birthdays are someone else’s, and the Three Kings would ride right past Bethlehem if they left today and they steered by the old stars.

Next I unpocket the single-use camera I bought in a gift shop at McCarran this morning. It has no flash, and I wonder if it needs one, though how could any place have more light than here? I’ll let someone else snap the shot, I’m not sure who, though it will be one of the businessmen, naturally, so the photographer knows what he’s commemorating, its size and mass and scope, and will make sure to aim squarely and hold still and not let his thumb tip jut across the lens. I’ll want at least five shots from different angles and one from directly behind me, of my hair, which is how other flyers mostly see me and how I see them. If there’s too much glare I’ll lower my shade, though now, as the plane icon crosses a state border and in the real sky clouds accumulate, I see that I’ll have no problems from the sun, which is nothing but a corona around a thunderhead.

And of course I set out the corny story I wrote after he died and before my sad sabbatical studying the true meaning of train songs. After the other students were done abusing it, I stashed it in the pocket of my travel jacket, where it’s been graying and softening ever since. I honestly don’t remember how it goes, just that I wrote it the night I understood that rowing the uncomprehendingly unwanted across deep waters was not my heart’s desire and needed a limit placed on it, a stop sign. The night I hatched this whole plan, wherever that was, bubble-bathing in some Homestead Suites with a cold beer on the tub that fell and smashed when I reached for it with soapy hands. I had to get out and towel off and drain the tub and feel for silvers, because the glass was clear.

“Excuse me. I was back in the wrong seat. This one with the stuff on it is mine, I think.”

It’s a voice I’ve only heard in dreams, where it was usually half an octave lower and transparently that of my father at fifty, when he first ran for representative and adopted the hands-off approach to gas delivery that emboldened a ruthless competitor based way off in St. Paul but spreading west. The face, though, I know from pictures in his magazine. That sun-kissed golf-and-tennis ageless skin I liked to think had been softened in the dark room, but appeals even more in person, I now see. The worry lines around the eyes are new, though, and there’s an acrid top note in his breath—of failure and drift and working for one’s self.

I gather my things and pouch them in my seatback and start to stand, though he motions me back down. “You’re it today. You’re on your throne. Don’t move. It’s Soren. I feel like we know each other, Ryan. Christine, a bottle of white. No stingy miniatures.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cold, not lukewarm.”

“Don’t carry that kind. Sorry.” A joke between them. Everyone knows the service has fallen off and no one, not even the chief, knows what to do. More money, and a shower in his office, but on the whole he’s in this with the rest of us.

Morse nestles in beside me and we shake hands and then we stretch out a little and touch elbows. He pulls his arm away first and lets mine rest. The plane skims over what feels like washboard gravel and rumbles some, and glasses chatter on trays.

“The way our best math minds have tallied it,” he says, “as of today, you’re our tenth. Congratulations. You expected a private lunch, I realize, but this’ll have to be our date, right here. My board and I came to terms a week ago and I’m moving on effective six October. It’s more meaningful this way. Share the living moment.”

“Yes. It is.” I’m back the way I started; single syllables. They get the point across.

“Funny story. We counted wrong before—” Christine arrives with a bottle, glasses, napkins, and as we unlatch our trays more rumbles come and then a tricky atmospheric pothole that lasts just a second but jostles pretty Christine and forces her to stiff-arm Morse’s seat corner. The glasses ring together in her hand and down floats a napkin, onto Morse’s knee.

“We thought the big trip was Billings-Denver,” he says. “We had a party set up in the crew lounge. We paged, but I guess the speakers weren’t so clear. We’d estimated wrong, so it was fine.”

The man’s unemployed now. His next step won’t be up. It’s over the instant they tell you, not the moment you go.

“You did it again in Reno this week,” I say. Christine is decanting, but shouldn’t be on her feet—not with the seat belt sign lit. It just came on.

“I’m not aware—”

It’s a big one and it’s lateral, like a shark shaking meat in its jaws. Our topped-up goblets slide over my way, but we snatch them somehow. Warm Chablis sloshes over on my sleeve and Morse and Christine exchange looks that don’t reflect a master-and-servant imbalance but meet head on. Somehow this sight alarms me more than anything. Christine goes forward bracing hands on chairbacks—not to her fold-down jump seat, but to the cockpit, closing the door in time for a new lateral, though this one has a pitch and stronger swim. My oval window streams diagonally, then milks up and fogs; as crosswinds drive the droplets straight at the plastic. Off and down and forward there’s white-green lightning, not bolts, but blurs. Morse buckles himself in and I do, too. The sight of a man of his stature, or former stature, strapped in across the thighs and struggling to feed more belt through for a snugger hold, disorients more than the turbulence.

Our captain speaks and, as usual, minimizes, and I can see mottling on Morse’s wrists and a coiled desire to shout at someone and demand results this very minute, but the huffy, flushed look seems childish under the circumstances, and Morse knows this, it seems, and won’t look me in the eye but mentally shuts himself inside his office, refusing to take calls. We bronco again and then bang down an escalator that must floor out somewhere but keeps not doing so, and then we’re on a whole new ride, even steeper, and my wineglass ejects a column of solid liquid that hangs for a time directly before my eyes and actually shows inner particles and bends light.

Our keel evens but it’s a trick and no one’s buying and yet it remains even, just to torture us, though level is level, I see after a while, and normal is the most usual condition, so why question normal? Normal’s what got us here. There’s also more light now, both under and ahead, and light somehow speaks more reliably than flatness about the prospects of its own continuing.

Morse unbuckles to show us all the way, back in the lead and comfortable again, because during normal his orders must be obeyed and his moods are the collective rudder. The episode is over, his face declares, and already he’s revising its severity and telling a little story to himself of uninterrupted control. His airline not only lies to customers, it deceives itself. We’re steady on now and we always have been.

“Christine, two new glasses. These ones spilled,” he says. “Take them away, please.”

Already concealing evidence. The continuum would include him, but he won’t let it, though soon he’ll have to work harder to stand alone, when he’s cooling his heels in an office in D.C. as just another aviation lobbyist or whenever a baseball game comes on TV while he’s at home with his new and plainer mistress after another long day at the trucking line or the regional frozen foods distributor. Not me, though. I know when I’ve come through a rough patch and voiced silent prayers that promised deep reforms—the same reforms everyone else was pledging, too, with the full knowledge that we’ll dishonor them the moment we’re down and safe.

I can see to the ground now between white disks of cloud that meet in the pattern four dinner plates would make if pushed in against one another on a table. The pattern repeats and repeats, and through the breaks shaped like perfect diamonds with curved-in sides I notice that we’re no longer above the west. I recognize the tic-tac-toe green fields and the corner placements of windbreak maples. There’s a definite American longitude dividing the cottonwoods and scrappy desert trees from the wet shady maples, and we’ve passed it.

I check my watch to confirm, but I don’t have to. The plane icon is well beyond Fort Dodge and in a few minutes I’ll be on top of Kara, casting a shadow on her eastbound car. Which means that I missed it, as I was bound to miss it. But I still crossed. I hand Morse the cheapie camera and instruct him to shoot me front and back and from the sides, though of course he can’t stand on the wing and shoot from that side. How kind of my family to come pick me up. Will they be able to see it on my face? Morse looks silly snapping that little button. It was worth it to watch this. “From below,” I say. I’ll tramp along the Jetway, in my boots, and see them all there at the gate, where they’ve been waiting, though I wonder why. Will we last a whole week together? We just might. Everyone’s exhausted. Exhaustion soothes. It’s a fable now, anyway. We’ve used up our real substance. In a fable, you find new resources, new powers. Pick an animal, then take its shape.

Morse runs out of film and begs my pardon: he needs to check in on the cockpit and exercise what’s left of his authority. Two more weeks and the pilots will shut this airline down. He’s getting out just in time, and so am I.

“My miles go to children’s hospitals,” I say.

“That’s great. What a gesture. We should get this out. I’ll contact press relations when we land. You’re serious?”

“Don’t use my name. No name. It’s not a gesture. It’s barely charity. I’m sick myself; I can’t use them anyway. Plus, I’ve been everywhere you people fly.”

Of course I’ve had seizures. Why skirt it any longer? One after another, some mild, some not, but nothing one talks about if one wants a job—and didn’t I land in the perfect one. Too perfect. My family knows, but we’ve learned not to discuss it. It started when my car went in the lake. We tried medications, and some worked better than others, but what worked best was lowering my standards for what was not a seizure. And forgetting. I’m not there when I have them, so really, what’s to say? How can I tell you a secret I don’t know? The spaces between them are getting shorter, though. The signs all agree. The mental gaps are widening. I made my appointments at Mayo before the trip and Mayo has wonderful instruments, so we’ll see. I’ll drive down alone, in case it’s not good news.

There’s one last item and this will feel complete. I slide my credit card through the airphone slot. I sense the account’s being drained on several continents, but it brings up a dial tone, which is all I need. I punch in my own number and get my voice mail, then press more buttons to reach the little message I recorded . . . when? Three weeks ago? Or was it four? It was after I saw the specialist in Houston, the one I haven’t mentioned, since no one’s asked.

“You’re there,” the message says, then tapes my answer.

“We’re here,” I say. Just that. No more. “We’re here.”