Up in the Air (27 page)

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.

a
lex 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?”