Up in the Air Read online

  I pulled out of it—barely. I cut that song off cold. It took a toll, though. Because I seldom see doctors in their offices, but only in transit, accidentally, my sense of my afflictions is vague, haphazard. High blood pressure? No doubt. Cholesterol? I’m sure it’s in the pink zone, if not the red. Once, between Denver and Oklahoma City, I nodded off next to a pulmonary specialist who told me when I woke that I had apnea—a tendency to stop breathing while unconscious. The doctor recommended a machine that pushes air through the nostrils while one sleeps to raise the oxygen level in one’s blood. I didn’t follow up. My circulation is ebbing flight by flight—I can’t feel my toes if I don’t keep wiggling them, and that only works for my first hour on board—so I’d better make some changes. Soon.

  I’m talking too much. I’m dominating this. Are you interested, or just being polite? Another bourbon? I’ll have another milk. I know it’s been discredited as an ulcer aid, but I come from dairy country. I like the taste.

  Anyway, I should wrap this up—we’ll land soon. You’re meeting me in the middle of my farewell tour, with only six days and eight more cities to go. It’s a challenging but routine itinerary, mixing business and pleasure and family obligations. There are people I need to see, some I want to see, and a few I don’t know yet but may want to meet. I’ll need to stay flexible, disciplined, and alert, and while it won’t be easy, there’s a payoff. Every year I’ve flown further than the year before, and by the end of this week, conditions willing, I’ll cross a crucial horizon past which, I swear, I’ll stop, sit back, and reconsider everything.

  A million frequent flyer miles. One million.

  “That’s obsessive,” you say. Because you care for me, not because I’m annoying you, I hope. “It’s just a number. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Pi’s just a number,” I say.

  “It’s still obsessive.”

  The engines reverse thrust and here comes Denver.

  “It’s a boundary,” I say. “I need boundaries in my life.”

  They open the doors and seat belts start unsnapping. Maybe I’ll see you again, though it’s unlikely. Next Monday the boss gets back from chasing marlin and the first thing he’ll do after sifting through his in-box will be to cancel my corporate travel account, which he’s often accused me of abusing, anyway. I need my million before then, and on his dime.

  Deplaning now. As we stride down the jetway toward whatever’s next for us, two lottery balls tossed back into the barrel, a mini cassette tape falls out of my coat and you see it before I do, and bend down. It’s the last favor you’ll ever do for me and it occurs in slow motion, a tiny sacrament.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Have a good one.”

  “You too.”

  “I’ll try.”

  You’re gone, a fast walker, off to see the family. I hope you’re not mad that I kept you from your book. I didn’t want to spoil things by telling you, but I read it when it was in hardback. There’s no plot.

  two

  rushing, racing, delayed at the hotel by a wake-up call that never came, I hop from the parking lot shuttle to the curb with nothing to check, just a briefcase and a carry-on, cross the terminal, smile at the agent, flash my Compass Class card and driver’s license, say Yes, my bags have remained in my possession, say No, I haven’t let strangers handle them, then take my upgraded boarding pass and ticket, recross the terminal to security, empty my pockets—change, keys, mobile phone, foil blister-pack of sleeping tablets, mechanical pencil; the stuff just keeps on coming—flop my bags on the X-ray, straighten up, and step through the metal detector.

  The alarm sounds. I pat my pockets, find nothing, pass through again.

  Once more the alarm sounds.

  “Sir, step over here.”

  A female guard works me over with the wand. Sometimes I swear I can feel its waves pass through me—invasive pulses of radiation that light up my chromosomes, stir my spinal fluid. There’s bound to be a class-action suit someday and I plan to sit in full view of the bench, smack in the middle of the wheelchair section with my portable IV.

  “I’m clean,” I say. “Your equipment must be shot.” But then, around my knees, the wand starts squawking.

  “Your boots, sir?”

  “They’re new.”

  “They must have steel-lined arches.”

  I groan as she goes over me again, playing to some tourists in line behind me. I’ve lost momentum when I can least afford it, a Monday morning, when every slipup snowballs. The boots were a foolish purchase. Vanity. It’s all the shoe salesman’s fault, the man was sharp, mocking my credentials as a westerner after I mentioned I came from Minnesota. Instead of buying the boots I should have told him that there are no westerners, just displaced easterners, and that includes most of the Indian tribes—read history. The problem is that the boots will trip alarms at every checkpoint for the next five days, wasting minutes and chewing up my margin. Yes, I always budget for uncertainty and I can try to recapture the lost time—cancel a dinner appointment, skimp on sleep—but the smart move would be to buy new shoes.

  I ride the escalator to the tram that will carry me to Concourse B. The man one step up from me nods and jerks his head, jabbering into a hands-free mobile phone whose mouthpiece must be clipped to his lapel. The guy looks schizoid, raving at thin air, flinging his arms around and making fists. “How can I blame him? They made him a fat offer. Plus, he’s a load on our health plan. Prostate shit.” I’ve seen this creep before, en route to Boise, when he sat across the aisle from me berating the flight attendant about his food. He demanded a vegetarian entrée despite not having ordered one pre-flight, then fired off a string of asterisks and ampersands when she couldn’t find one in the galley. These jokers are everywhere lately, they’re multiplying, and the higher their fare class, the louder their abuse. Economy is a park compared to first.

  Through the moving windows of the tram I view this month’s art installation: foil propellers stuck to the walls of the tunnel, hundreds of them. They shiver and whirl as the cars gain speed and pass them. How much was the artist paid for this? Who paid him? Is this where the airport’s per-ticket surcharge goes? Last month’s masterpiece was a row of masks with progressively wider mouths and eyes that seemed to open as the viewer rode by, climaxing in a howl, a staring scream. Art. It always makes me feel diminished. There’s something smug about it. Cocky. Cold. Public works commissioners just love the stuff—it eases their bad consciences, I suspect, for hiring their nephews and steaming open sealed bids. Behind every sculpture garden, a great crime.

  The tram lets out and feeds its passengers onto another packed escalator, which lifts us into the middle of a food court fragrant with soft pretzels and cookie dough. There’s no time for my usual breakfast of frozen yogurt topped with sliced cling peaches, so I head down the moving walkway toward my gate, aggressively clearing lanes between the laggards. People who let the conveyor carry them when they can double their speed by moving their feet mystify me, but to each his own. Clearly, the whole purpose of the technology is to optimize the flow of traffic, not to let kids and slowpokes take a load off. The worst are two departing Mormon missionaries thronged by camera-toting friends and relatives. The boys look tired and pale and terrified; they’re bound for Asia, I’d guess, or South America, their heads full of tales about passport thieves and drug lords. It’s the word’s fastest-growing religion, I’ve been told, all thanks to this door-knocking army of western teens tramping the globe in J. C. Penney suits.

  I’m impressed, but I still don’t wish them luck. The church is a force in Denver. It’s oppressive. Half the battle of working for ISM, whose board includes a sitting Mormon apostle, is fending off advances from the saved. Every month I’m invited to yet another potluck, another dance for “inquiring unmarrieds.” Even if ISM bowed to my request to quit CTC and just do EEC, I’d probably be looking for a new firm.

  MythTech wants me. I hope so; I want them. They haven’t revealed their
interest in me openly, but I have my sources, and I can read the signs. Last month an anonymous caller to my assistant requested a manuscript of the book I’m finishing and gave him a FedEx number that I checked out through a national detective agency. The number belonged to a Lincoln, Nebraska, law firm whose surviving name partner is MythTech’s founder’s father.

  My dream is to land a position in brand analysis, a benevolent field that involves less travel and can be done from home, over the wires. Exhorting the unemployed to “surf the changes” and “massively network” their way to new positions while gazing across at their panicky, moist eyes from the head of an acrylic conference table spread with cheese sandwiches and canned fruit spritzers will still be someone’s job, and I can’t change that, but MythTech doesn’t work such feel-good shams. From what I gather, they’re forward thinkers. Optimists. Minimizing lawsuits from the outplaced is too rearguard for them. They’re not a large firm, just a small boutique, but they have grand plans, rumor has it, and they have spirit.

  Sadly, they can’t be courted, they can’t be pushed. They watch you. They rate you. If they make an offer, you sign on the spot, you don’t hold out for dental. They’re ex-Foreign Service agents, ex-LA cops, ex-ski bums, ex-seminarians, ex-junkies. They’re the establishment and its overthrow, too. They don’t use letterhead, just plain white bond with a faint embossed omega at the top. No logo, no web site—just a street address. In Omaha, of all places, blandest Omaha, whose location suits my schedule perfectly. On Thursday I have a conference in Las Vegas and on Saturday a wedding in Minnesota—my little sister’s third and biggest yet.

  I’ll see MythTech on Friday and ISM will pay for it. No appointment yet, but if I’m right that they’ve been sniffing around and checking references, a brief, get-acquainted, happened-to-be-in-town, hear-great-things-about-you, flying drop-in at 1860 Sioux Street might flip the switch. I’ll ask for old Lucius Spack, the number two, formerly of Andersen Consulting by way of the Chicago Board of Trade. Spack is the man, though the news outlets suppressed it and the government will never confirm it, who basically got NASA off its crutches, internally and public-image-wise, after the Challenger flameout. He’s a hero. I sat in on a five-person dinner with him once at an industry confab in Santa Cruz. I hear he has issues with prescription pain pills, but I have issues, too. And if he likes me? Maybe, just maybe, a peek into the office of Adam Sarrazin, age thirty-one, MIT dropout, no known hobbies, bald, reportedly either gay or celibate despite his marriage to a pet care heiress who’s bankrolled his projects since he was seventeen, and known in the world of leading-edge market research simply as “the Child.”

  Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. Even if nothing much comes of Omaha, something big will come of leaving Omaha for the Twin Cities late Friday afternoon. That’s the magic leg. I’ve worked it out. The math was complex, and it’s subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.

  The walkway drops me beneath a bank of monitors. 3204 to Reno via Elko is set to take off fifty minutes late, I see, which isn’t what I was told an hour ago when I phoned the airline from my room. Great West just can’t be trusted anymore, it lies to its most loyal customers, and if it didn’t monopolize DIA, I’d be shooting for my mark with Delta, although it wouldn’t mean as much at Delta. They fly overseas and Great West doesn’t yet—just a route or two in Canada—and Delta is old and Great West is new and Delta has scores of mileage millionaires and Great West, since the merger and the renaming, has exactly nine.

  I’ll be the tenth.

  There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought of Great West as a partner and an ally, but now I feel betrayed. The focus of my anger is Soren Morse, Great West’s rock-climbing, playboy CEO, a New Think smoothy from the soft-drink world brought in to charm the federal regulators and fend off Desert Air, a no-frills start-up whose ancient Boeings feel like prison vans but tend to land on time. One perk of breaking six zeros, traditionally, is a private luncheon with this sexpot, and I plan to give him an earful. I can’t wait. For years he’s been centimetering away my legroom, buffaloing me with tales of storm cells somewhere between Denver and the coast, and blowing cold air on my hot meals—all the while telling the nation through corporate image ads on the classier political talk shows that at Great West “We’re Taking America Higher!” The rumors in the first-class cabins are that he’s launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to be the next commissioner of baseball and that he has a new girlfriend—the young wife of the head of the Downtown Renaissance Committee. I’ll drop her name during dessert and watch his face.

  Right now what I need, though, is not revenge but coffee, hot, strong, and black, to cauterize my throat. I smoked last night for the first time since college, and once again, I blame the cowboy boots. I was in bed when I tugged them on again, wondering if I’d bought too snug a toe; the sudden boost in height transformed my mood and prompted me to turn off my cable money show, toss on a jacket and my cleanest khakis, and pop downstairs for a nightcap in the lounge. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well, anyway; my mind was on MythTech. They’re scary, they’re so good, and some of the deeper work I’ve heard they’re doing on consumer-nondurable price resistance spooks me. If you find yourself at the beauty counter next year buying your first-ever thirty-dollar bottle of shampoo-conditioner, and it’s just a six-ounce bottle and you’re a man, blame it on Omaha. Blame it on the Child.

  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.