Up in the Air (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s business?” Danny said.

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

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

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

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

“This one will. I’ve seen research.”

“Fill me in.”

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

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

“People actually study this sort of thing?”

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

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

“You have no idea.”

“I’m sure I don’t. It scares me.”

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

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

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

“I doubt that, Ryan.”

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

“And somebody had all this figured in advance?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are the contract talks?” I ventured.

“Stalled.”

“Drink?”

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

“No job actions planned, I hope.”

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

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

“What done?”

I told him. He didn’t seem impressed.

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

“What’s the holdup on Reno?” I say.

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

“Dale and Paul okay?”

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

“I thought that was a bust.”

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

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

“Come again?”

“I hope the diet works this time.”

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

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

“The house looks iffy.”

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

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

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

“Those two are getting along now?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of thing are you looking for?”

“Low maintenance.”

“Come over and eat with me.”

“Soon.”

“We miss you, Ryan.”

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

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