Up in the Air Read online

  “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 d
eep 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.