Up in the Air Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The topic,” says Margaret.

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

  “No,” I say, not audibly.

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

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

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

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

  “Attached without our permission?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re joking with me.”

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

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

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

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

  “I think MythTech’s after me, too.”

  “You’ll know. Now drop it.”

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

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

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

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

  “Thank you.”

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

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

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

  “What else?” I ask.

  “Everything.” Julie is not right.

  “Have you eaten?” I say.

  “I’m eating something now.”

  “What?”

  “A licorice rope.”

  “Licorice isn’t food.”

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

  “I’m pouring a glass of milk now.”

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

  “I’ve finished it.”

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

  “Take her car keys.”

  “I have them.”

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

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

  “Family.”

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

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

  “Not really.”

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

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

  “Certainly. Just let me find my glasses.”

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

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

  eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I told the man I was feeling lucky now.

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

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

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

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

  “Hello?”

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

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

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

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

  “Yes?”

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

  “What were you going to say to me?”

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

  “I’m sorry about those dogs,” I say.

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

>   “It’s all about managing time.”

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

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

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

  “A business parable.”

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

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

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

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

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

  I probe. “You needed one?”

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

  “What told you it was from me?”

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

  “A little frazzled. Why?”

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

  “That was years ago.”

  “So no more seizures?”

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

  “Fine, then. ‘Fits.’ ”

  “That’s even worse,” I say.