Up In The Air Part 4

"For me."

"I don't think that's right, though."

"I'll check sometime."

It's working: we're barely looking at each other and there's the Reno skyline. Ten more minutes. The only threat is our pride; mine smarts a little. Our agreement-the one I drew up for both of us-called for a tender, reluctant edging away, not total detachment. Can't we rea.s.sess this? After all, this is Reno we're visiting, a city whose whole economy is founded on errors in judgment and doomed trysts. Can't we at least acknowledge the bitter tang of having grown so prudent with our bodies?

No, because now the drunk is acting up again, heckling the flight attendant for cutting him off. He flicks an ice cube at her, cackles, snorts, his face a chaotic red clown's mask. Alex flinches. Given how much she flies, she should be used to this-these outbursts of ent.i.tled rage-but she cowers like a baby rabbit. My chance to put a fatherly arm around her? I'm considering it when the copilot strides up, cinematically handsome in his uniform and cutting such a capable male figure that any protective move on my part would only come off as puny and derivative. He threatens the drunk with arrest when we touch down. He raises one arm. The drunk sputters, then falls silent. The copilot orders the man to fetch the ice cube and stands there, hands on his hips, while he bends down.

The miniature drama has sealed us in our own skins. Alex retrieves her inhaler. She looks spent. She's ready to pick up her kitten, hail a cab, and curl up in bed to the sound of Headline News Headline News. She'll eat a room service salad with the curtains drawn, then sneak a Snickers from the mini-bar. She'll jam in earplugs, don a blackout mask, and lay down with her clothes on for a dreamless nap.

In no time we're at the gate and on our feet, shuffling out of the plane like day care toddlers holding one of those ropes with all the loops. I walk a step behind her. It's goodbye.

"Good luck with that witch of a senator."

"I'll need it."

"That Colonial checkout procedure? They've streamlined it. You might want to give them another shot."

"I will."

Where do they go when they leave me? The last I see of her, she's standing by the baggage carousel, fluffing her hair and waiting for the pet crate. I'd be surprised if the kitten arrived alive, and I realize that I've been suppressing real anger at Alex for risking its health just to ease her loneliness. That was my job, her seatmate's, but she let me go. And I let her go. We forgot that in Airworld each other is all we have.

four.

i used to try to be interesting. That pa.s.sed. Now I try to be pleasant and on time. used to try to be interesting. That pa.s.sed. Now I try to be pleasant and on time.

That will be impossible today. Behind the rental car counter a dull trainee labors to slip a key onto a ring and fold my contract to fit inside its envelope. He should be in college, judging by his age, but instead he's already failing at his first job. After he runs my credit card-still frozen; I have to use my AmEx from ISM, which generates no miles-he manages to drop it and step on it, scratching and ruining the magnetic strip. The kid's pathetic excuse is greasy hands; he just finished eating a box of chicken strips. I tell him he'd better evaluate his goals and he acts as though I've complimented him, thanking me and handing me a map.

"Excuse me, what's your job?" I say.

"My job? Filling out rental agreements."

"No it's not. Your job is providing a service that meets a need."

He stares at me.

"Tell me the need," I say.

"A four-door Nissan."

"Actually, what I want, my basic desire, is to get to a business meeting across town punctually, comfortably, and safely. The Nissan's a means to an end. It's just a detail. Try to think less about isolated tasks and more about the overarching process. It will serve you, believe me."

"So you're some millionaire?"

"No. Do I have to be rich to give advice?"

"For me to listen to it, you do," he says.

The car, a new model I've never driven before, smells of a fruity industrial deodorant that's worse than any odor it might be masking. The mirrors point off in random directions as though the last driver was a schizophrenic. The radio is tuned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it's as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they're devoted. After the cops led away her second husband, Julie spent a summer as a born-again and worked in a St. Paul religous gift shop whose manager played in a band called Precious Blood. We took in one of their concerts, a spectacle of fog and laser lights and colored scrims. The band released white doves during the encore, and afterwards Julie and others rushed the stage and dropped to their knees before a neon cross next to the drum kit. It shook me to see such need in her, such thirst.

I turn up the station, reorient the mirrors, and drive to the guard's booth, waving my rental papers. The old guy winks and raises the red-striped gate arm and I roll over the angled spikes, away.

On the way to Art's house, where he insists on meeting, I dictate some lines for the preface to The Garage The Garage into the microrecorder at my chin. into the microrecorder at my chin.

For years it has been the same message: Grow or die. But is this necessarily the truth? Too often, growth for its own sake leads to chaos: unsustainable capital expansion, ill-timed acquisitions, a stressful workplace. In The Garage, The Garage, I propose a bold new formula to replace the lurching pursuit of profit: "Sufficient Plenitude." Enough really can be enough, that is. A heresy? Not to students of the human body, who know that optimum health is not achieved by ever-greater consumption and activity, but by functioning within certain dynamic parameters of diet and exercise, work and leisure. So too with the corporation, whose core objective should not be the ama.s.sing of good numbers, but the creation and management of abundance. Read on and you will discover in I propose a bold new formula to replace the lurching pursuit of profit: "Sufficient Plenitude." Enough really can be enough, that is. A heresy? Not to students of the human body, who know that optimum health is not achieved by ever-greater consumption and activity, but by functioning within certain dynamic parameters of diet and exercise, work and leisure. So too with the corporation, whose core objective should not be the ama.s.sing of good numbers, but the creation and management of abundance. Read on and you will discover in The Garage: The Garage: the Four Plenteous Att.i.tudes, the Six False Missions . . . the Four Plenteous Att.i.tudes, the Six False Missions . . .

Where these words come from I have no idea. Like the rest of the book, which I wrote over ten months, dictating for two hours before bed in a succession of identical suites whose regulation layouts and amenities allowed me to work undistracted, without thinking, the preface feels like a gift, a transcribed dream. What this means for its value, I don't know. I fear sometimes that the book is just the overflow of a brain so overstuffed with jargon that it's spontaneously sloughing off the excess. I've allowed myself to reread it only once, and some of the ideas felt foreign to me, with no connection to how I actually operate. Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I'm hoping so.

Art Krusk's directions guide me through the foothills into the smoke, which smells like burning tires. I know Art moved to a golf course recently, but it's hard to imagine green fairways on these brown mounds. Where does the water come from? It's a sin. The golf culture, which I've had ample chances to join, draws its allure, I'm convinced, from wastefulness, from the lavish imbalance between its ma.s.sive inputs-acreage, labor, fertilizer, machines-and its nonexistent output. Sad. The few times I've played the game, I've come away feeling like an ecological glutton.

I reach a gatehouse manned by an old woman so flayed by the sun that her skin is like a bat's wing, all pigmentless gray tissue and thready veins. I state my name and she consults her clipboard.

"Art said go on up, the house is open. He had an errand."

"When will he be back?"

"He tore out of here an hour ago. Don't know. Try to drive slowly and watch out for the carts. A lot of our residents won't hear you coming."

The development is unfinished, with heaps of sand along its noodle-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. With so many tiny lanes and dead-end byways, the developer ran out of normal street names. I take a left on La.s.sie Drive and curve around right on Paul Newman Avenue. The houses ("Starting in the mid $200s," according to a billboard) ape many styles, the most popular being a sort of Greco-ranch thing combining flat tile roofs with stocky columns. Art's house is among the more elaborate models, with a fresh sod lawn whose seams still show and a faux-marble fountain of dancing cupids. For someone in his predicament, it's offensive. His restaurants send half of Nevada to the ER and the man builds a palace in Mafia Moderne.

I'm tempted to leave a stinging note and return to the airport. Cutting Art adrift would let me build in crucial extra hours to my overloaded schedule. I could buy a thesaurus and touch up The Garage The Garage. I could get to a gym and tone my flabby lats. ISM would understand-Art's a small client and a chronic late payer-but I have to consider MythTech's feelings, too. If it's true that they're auditioning me from afar, I have to behave impeccably this week. Plus, I like Art. He's crude, but he's a searcher.

I dial the credit card people on my mobile and wander behind the house to the pool, a free-form blue pond with an artificial island and two stray golf b.a.l.l.s lying on the bottom, looking like undissolved Alka-Seltzer tablets. My call is pa.s.sed from computer to computer and then to a person who only sounds like one.

"Where are you presently located?" she asks.

"Nevada. Reno."

"Did you make any large purchases last Friday?"

"That's why I'm calling. You cut my credit off."

"Who am I speaking to?"

I lose my temper. "I'm out here in the middle of a business trip, totally dependent on your card, adhering to our agreement in good faith-"

The woman adjusts her tone and talks me down. She explains that for the past few days someone has been moving from state to state, ringing up major charges on my account: fifteen hundred dollars in a Salt Lake City electronics store, two hundred to a national teleflorist. The purchases didn't quite suit my customer profile, so the bank froze my card. The latest charge appeared last Sat.u.r.day: four hundred dollars in a Texas western store.

That one was mine. The boots. I tell the woman.

"You're certain you're in Reno now?"

"I'm here."

"And you didn't send flowers last Thursday? By telephone?"

I stand at the edge of the pool, confused and spooked. Ordering flowers for my mother's birthday has been on my to-do list for a week; I even picked out an arrangement from an ad in August's Horizons Horizons. But did I send them? Nothing.

"Where, to what state, did the flowers go?" I ask.

"Our information isn't that detailed."

"That's one sentimental thief."

"We see it all, sir."

I've read about this: ident.i.ty theft, it's called. They grab your data, your history, your files. They duplicate your economic self. They scan your signature and forge ID cards and head out into the world under your name to gorge on DVD players, fur coats. The damage can be extensive, requiring months for the victim to clear up and undo. He has to work backwards along the chain of fraud, reclaiming his reputation, his good name. But maybe I'm panicking. Maybe my case is simpler. Maybe some crook just found an old receipt in the trash can of an airport deli.

"There's something I don't understand," the woman says. "You still have the card in your possession?"

"Yes." My life on the defensive has begun. "But I wasn't in Utah last week."

"Where were you?"

I'm thinking. My fast-forward functions, but my reverse is stuck. I can't even remember when I started forgetting things.

"Who else knows your schedule?"

"a.s.sistant. Travel agent."

"Is she trustworthy?"

"He. How would I know? Let's bottom-line this: how soon can you send a replacement card?"

"Immediately. Where should it go?"

"Ontario, California. Send it to Homestead Suites."

"That's a hotel?"

"Where are you, anyway?"

"Grand Forks, North Dakota."

"It's a chain of executive lodging facilities."

I'm still on the line with the woman when Art shows up, dressed for comfort in a black mesh tank top and a pair of clingy runner's shorts that graphically mold his chunky, big man's crotch. He looks like a wilted circus muscleman. His hair is longer than I remember-it must have been tied up when I last saw him. It falls to below his shoulders, a lush gray fan. I've seen such hair on female Christian rockers and always found it intriguing, but not on Art.

He signals me to take my time and busies himself with a telescopic pool tool, vacuuming bits of debris from the water and dragging the golf b.a.l.l.s to the shallow end, where he wades in, bends over, and retrieves them, then tosses them over his fence back onto the course as if he were hurling grenades at the n.a.z.is. He seems to be at odds with his new setup, seeing only its shortcomings and flaws. People in their fifties shouldn't change homes. My parents never recovered from their dream house in a subdivision east of town, where they moved just before my father lost his gas trucks. The Jacuzzi embarra.s.sed them, though they thought they'd like it. The surplus bedrooms made my father blush.

I pocket my phone and join Art at a table shaded by a Pepsi logo umbrella speckled with gray ash. He's been pilfering from his restaurants-a bad sign. A black, volcanic-looking rock holds down a rain-warped fis.h.i.+ng magazine and a stack of ads for Reno escort services-the sort of flyers old men hand out on street corners, that get carried a block before they're crumpled and tossed.

"You'll note the lack of a woman's touch," Art says. "Coquilla left Sat.u.r.day morning. Want a drink?"

"I'm sorry. For good?"

"Well, you can't have a drink. She took all the gla.s.ses and stuff. I hope for good."

"Why would you hope that, Art? You love your wife."

"She did it, Ryan. She left a note, confessing. That's where I was just now: at my fancy lawyer's, turning over the evidence. I'm sick. See this spot on my s.h.i.+rt? It's ulcer puke. You believe this c.r.a.p? I gave her everything. Fiesta Brava was hers. Her hers. Her recipes. Does the rot always come from within, or what? Enlighten me. Is that like some great truth of history? Mixing up bacteria in hamburger and feeding it to kids in paper hats." recipes. Does the rot always come from within, or what? Enlighten me. Is that like some great truth of history? Mixing up bacteria in hamburger and feeding it to kids in paper hats."

"That's a disturbing picture. You must be devastated."

"The s.h.i.+t I took this morning was purple. Purple!"

"What was her motive?"

"You're the expert. Guess."

Art's right: I already know why his dear wife, with her formal, immigrant's English and shy good looks, torpedoed his dream. I know because I've watched Art, studied him. In the kitchen, training b.u.mbling teens to deep-fry tortilla chips in bubbling lard. In the dining room, booming out ethnic folk songs for howling two-year-olds in booster seats. In the office, pep-talking his servers on the importance of honest tip reporting. Every business, at bottom, is a wish, and Art's wish was for the world to rest secure inside his strong embrace. He didn't boss or push people, he fathered them, but the hidden message of his largesse was that the world was a danger to itself, weak and self-defeating and in error. Even the way he pushed his patrons to eat, instructing his servers to refill diners' plates without being asked, was unwittingly belittling. Art's restaurants were fun and affordable but smothering, and though every dining room featured a full-length painting of Coquilla dressed in native regalia and offering steaming bowls of beans and rice, Fiesta Brava was really about him, his heart and potency. His wife's rebellion was inevitable. A man who confuses his business with his family risks losing both, in my experience.

But Art doesn't wait for me to answer his question.

"She did it because she couldn't stand the smell," he says. "The cooking odors. Can you say 'change of life'? The question is: do I prosecute?"

"Of course not. Liquidate and move on. Enjoy your golf course. Sooner or later, you'll get a new idea and then you can call me and we'll hash it out. Don't force things, though. And rule out hospitality."

"Why's that?"

"You give people more than they want. You cut their air off."

Art drums his fingers on the tinny tabletop and little cinders skitter over the edge. I s.h.i.+ft my weight to say I'm on my way. I didn't count on a crisis intervention, and Art isn't in the mood to face hard truths, nor should he have to just now. He never liked my ideas much, anyway; he retained me on the advice of his attorney, a celebrity litigator I met in Airworld and now hear has been disbarred for escrow monkeys.h.i.+nes.

"You hungry, Ryan?"

"I ate on the flight in. I'm truly sorry about Coquilla, Art. I'm guessing she has the children."

"They're hers to keep. She's got them thoroughly brainwashed anyhow. They think that because I'm not Baha'i I'm worthless."

"Coquilla is Baha'i? I never knew."

"They're tough to spot. They blend in with all the other groups."

I stand and extend my hand.

"You going somewhere? I thought I owned your time tonight."

"No charge. I'll tell ISM to go light on you. You're broke."

Art folds his thick arms. "So this is how you operate. Guy loses everything, you're out the door. Well, I need company, Ryan. Look at me. Either you're hitting the town with me tonight and matching me drink for drink or I'm going to tell that guy who called last week that Bingham's a dip, he doesn't finish the job."