Up in the Air Read online

  “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 de
flated 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.