by Walter Kirn
It’s black—I’ve won again. “I’ve done a few of those. They keep me upbeat for my real job. Shafting people.”
“I went with a girlfriend. She dragged me. You were good. I was a mess at the time, completely drained. I’d just broken up with a famous businessman who’d done a real number on my self-esteem. I sat at the back of the room because I’m shy, but I felt like you were talking to me personally. The line I remember was ‘Change before they change you.’ Autonomy, right? It’s all about autonomy.”
I never give the same speech twice, so I don’t recall. I’m flattered, though. My fingertips warm as I restack my chips.
“You just dropped into a seminar one day? No reason? Just curious?”
“Total happenstance. We’re winning, aren’t we?”
“I’m going to double up.”
All my good luck has begun to flow together—I’ve met an admirer and won a bundle—which probably means it’s time that I cashed out. The odds are a funny thing. When they run with me, especially after they haven’t for a while, I can feel like I’m finally getting what I’m worth and that chance has nothing to do with it. It’s justice. The universe is paying up at last. Moralists like my mother and big sister would view this as a dangerous delusion, but I’m part pagan—I believe in breakthroughs, in bursts of astrological beneficence. Things rise and fall, but at times they rise and rise.
“After we got off the plane today,” says Alex, “I asked myself why I didn’t say I knew you. It’s a character weakness. I like to hide and watch. In Texas you came off as pretty cocky, so maybe I was hoping you’d screw up.”
“It sounds like you had it out for me.”
“Not really. It’s just hard to admit that this stranger who gave some talk that struck me as sort of corny at the time and intellectually below my level actually set me straight and helped me grow.”
“You’re laying it on pretty thick. Fort Worth, you said?”
“You didn’t gaze out on the audience and notice me?”
“I keep my face in my notes when I speak publicly. I’d rather not see the assassin’s muzzle flash.”
“Assassin?”
“I wasn’t frank with you today. My main occupation is Career Transitions. You’re smart, so you can interpret. Terminations.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was a field. How much have you won? Can we stop now?”
“One more spin.”
“You’re pretty into this, aren’t you?”
Should I not be? To prove I can walk away, I slide my chips—all of them—onto red. And red it is. Alex follows me to the cashier’s cage, where the casino turns plastic into paper so later it can be turned back into plastic. The clerk counts out ten one-hundred-dollar bills, still stiff from the mint. We’re rich. Where now? The bar.
The drinkers, instead of looking at one another, stare down at the video poker monitors whose screens form the resting place for their drinks and coasters. Their eyeglasses flicker as their cards are played. The band plays “Radar Love,” stroking its guitars with all the passion of jailbirds shoveling gravel while wearing leg-irons.
“That was incredible,” Alex says. “It practically seemed illegal, what you did there.”
She’s off balance now. That was the point of my big bet, which would have been just as effective had I lost. We’re not in control, my sweet. It’s all a hunch.
“So how precisely did I help you grow?”
“You convinced me to go into business for myself. Plus, you sort of set me on a path. I had a strange childhood, not traumatic, exactly, but hurtful, uncertain. My father had two families. We knew this. He drove a truck. It happens sometimes. When he was gone, my mother fooled around, spent time in the bars. The arrangement worked for both of them. The problem was me. They had four lives between them, and I was always switching back and forth. A few times my dad even took me to Missouri, where his other kids lived. Their mother was a secretary, so they had more money than I did, and they were Catholic. I had to learn to blend, to mold myself.”
“Sounds like it. What a mess.”
“I pulled it off, though. I split myself into quarters. I adapted. Then suddenly I’m eighteen and on my own and my special talent isn’t relevant. I’m expected to be consistent, and I’m just not.”
“Someone usurped my identity,” I say.
“Pardon?”
“Usurped. It means ‘steal.’ ”
“I went to college.”
“My question is: if they charge things to my credit card, who gets the miles? I’ll bet they go to waste.”
“I was telling you something. I hadn’t finished yet.”
“I made an association. Go ahead.”
Alex pushes away her beer. “I’m angry now.”
“I thought I was amplifying a point you’d made.”
“Listen, can we get going? Flight at six.”
I’m reluctant to leave the noise and bustle. The casino holds out so many possibilities—my sister might even walk by, you never know—but in Alex’s room the script has fewer endings. Because if it’s true that she admires me, she won’t once we’re through. Or is that her plan? To get me undressed and close our stature gap. I don’t see much profit in this rendezvous. This Alex is full of schemes, as she’s admitted, but I’m happy here, with my winnings in cash, for once.
I let her lead me. Her room is smaller than mine, one price point down, and though she’s only been in it a few hours, she’s turned it into an atmospheric grotto. She’s draped a violet scarf over the desk lamp and set a pair of candles on the bureau, which she lights with wooden matches. Twin flames jump up. A stuffed velour unicorn, worn bare with hugs, lies on the bed beside an open book, and on top of the blanket she’s spread a mohair throw. To do this to a hotel room would never occur to me—I take them as they come, the way God made them.
“There’s a tape in my little player on the sill. Turn it on if you want. I need to wash my hands.”
I do as I’m told and out spills a mystic trickle of formless music—piano, bells, and strings—that sounds like it was recorded underwater. The scene is set for a séance, a tarot reading, and as always when I’m expected to relax, my shoulders seize. I’m not so sure I’m up to this.
Alex emerges in a hotel bathrobe. Her face is different—ruddier, less porcelain. She’s a farm girl, just in from watering the stock. Has she put on makeup or removed some?
“You’ve really made this place your own,” I say.
“I always try to warm things up a little. I miss my own bedroom, my stuff. I think we all do.”
I don’t comment. I let her think I’m human too.
“Take off those silly boots,” she says. “Sit down.”
The question is always how far to strip, how quickly. There must be books on this, with clever tips. I go down to my T-shirt and boxers, then peel the shirt off. No complaints, no stares.
“Lie down on the bed, on your stomach. I’ll massage you. Your body’s one big knot.”
She kneels and straddles my hips and strokes my neck. She twists the point of one knuckle in a sore spot. “The muscles store memories,” she says. She’s right. I’m carrying five-year-old Julie on my shoulders so she can see the sights at the State Fair. I head for the tent where the Ice Man is displayed—a wonder my father assures me is a rip-off, an animal hide or a taxidermied monkey. I buy two tickets, mount a few low steps, stand behind a partition, and look down. The frosty block of ice obscures the details, but it’s a body, wrinkled, dark, and hairy, curled on its side like a newborn calf. Convincing. Julie’s hands squeeze my skull and I feel a drip. She’s weeping. I twist to leave, but she holds me. My neck is wet. “It’s a her,” she says. “It’s a girl. They killed a girl.”
“Tender here?” Alex says.
“It is.”
“You’re shaky. Maybe this isn’t our night tonight.”
“I’m fine. My little sister trained as a masseuse.”
“Don’t flinch. I’m on an i
mportant pressure point.”
“She worked at the Minneapolis Athletic Club. She lasted a week. A man tried to assault her—the CFO of a major retail shoe chain. The cops threw away her complaint.”
“Where’s all this coming from?”
“My sister gave massages, I’m getting one. Does everything have to come from somewhere?”
“No.” She rocks a thumb in the spaces between my vertebrae. No memories there, just pain. A thousand plane seats.
“I followed you, Ryan. You mentioned this hotel. I was about to call your room tonight. Psycho, huh?”
“I’ve done those things myself.”
“Mostly I hoped we’d talk,” she says. “Just talk. I feel like your speech in Texas started something—a conversation. You haven’t heard my half, though. I took what you said there to heart. I lived it, Ryan. I wanted to tell you what happened, what I learned. I didn’t realize how tired we’d be. Too bad.”
“Not our evening.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I understand. I gambled too long.”
“A little bit. It’s fine. You’re running. You’re tense. It’s natural.”
“It’s a problem. My ex said I had a problem.” I let her rub me. “Where will you be on Thursday?”
“Home. Salt Lake.”
Las Vegas—she could fly there in an hour. I’d have to cancel my date for Thursday dinner, but I’ve been thinking of canceling it anyway. Milla Searle is her name. She’s a talent manager; she handles a string of casino magic acts. We were stranded together in Spokane last spring during an all-night blizzard that closed the airport and forced us to sleep on the Compass Club’s bare floor beside the big TV. It was a wartime romance—the huddled refugees, the bottled water passed out by the airline, the flashing blue lights of the snowplows through the windows. When our paths crossed again in Phoenix a month later, we reminisced for an hour about the storm, then fell silent. Nothing else in common.
“I want you to meet me in Las Vegas Thursday. I’ll fly you in. We’ll see a show. No gambling. We’ll be rested, we’ll talk. I have the whole night free.”
Alex lets go of me. I want her back. I reach around and touch her through the robe. She guides my fingers across her hip, no further.
“I saw your itinerary on your HandStar. I already checked on fares,” she says. “That scares you.”
“You sit next to someone you like, you have to act. People move fast. They’ll get away from you.”
Alex squeezes my hand and returns it to my side, then bears down on the base of my neck with open palms. “When you terminate someone, does that depress you, Ryan?”
“What’s depressing is getting used to it.”
“Do you wonder about the people afterwards?”
“You learn to try not to. You learn to trick your mind.”
She digs in with her thumbs again. Hurts, but may be good for me.
“You learn to leapfrog. Mentally.”
“Relax.”
six
i’m in the back row of the Reno airport chapel, sitting out a forty-minute delay with a fruit-topped frozen yogurt and this morning’s USA Today, when it happens again for the second time since August: I’m gripped by the feeling that I’ve just been paged. I missed the name, yet I’m certain it was mine. Someone wants me. Someone needs me. Now.
I fold the paper and put it in my briefcase and listen for the announcement to be repeated. Few people know that most airports have houses of worship: they tend to be white, high-ceilinged, scrubbed, and soundproof, imbued with a spirituality so general that even atheists can find refuge in them. They go unused, for the most part, except in times of emergency and terror—after a crash or when a war breaks out. They’re eerie little niches but also restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork. If someone arrives to pray or meditate while I’m using one, which seldom happens, I bow and pretend to be sunk in deep reflection as I fill out an expense report or rejigger my itinerary.
The voice was female, that’s all I’m sure of now. Tinny and official—robotic, almost. I examine the speaker recessed in the ceiling and think through the shortlist of the people who know my schedule. My assistant, a temp who claims to be a grad student taking time out from his thesis, but might be anyone, since I doubt ISM checked his background when it hired him. My boss, Ron Boosler, who’s fishing in Central America with the ex-CEO of General Mills and a Colorado federal judge he’s helping to position for the Supreme Court. And Alex, of course, who was gone when I woke up facedown in a soggy pillow on her bed.
It was MythTech. That’s what I thought in Billings, too, when the same thing happened three weeks ago. I was ordering oatmeal in the airport coffee shop, unslept and unshaven after an intensive two-day Career Transitions mini-session that saw the breakdown of one participant who wasn’t keen to re-enter the great job hunt and get on the phone to his entire Rolodex with chipper questions about openings while repeating to himself the affirmation: “I’m motivated, not desperate.” Stark panic often precedes enlightenment, and the former banker left our meeting room purple with hypertension and resentment, getting as far as his parked Buick LeSabre before falling into a catatonic trance that paralyzed his limbs but not his mouth, which belched forth intermittent rasping moans smelling of—they had an odor, these moans—stomach acid mixed with lighter fluid. It was dawn by the time I stabilized the fellow, and my eyes were so dry that when I blinked my lids stuck to my eyeballs with the adhesion factor of Post-it notes on a computer screen. In the cab to the airport I retched into a Baggie I use to store dirty underwear and socks. Then, at breakfast, directly above my head, I heard my name. My last name. I investigated, checking in with the airline and with security. Nothing. I called my voice mail and got a message, truncated and barely audible, leaving a number with a Nebraska area code. I dialed it, expecting Lucius Spack, whose interest in my career I’d been alerted to by a columnist for Modern Management who’d interviewed him for a story. Instead, I got an Omaha convenience store whose clerk insisted she’d just arrived at work and that I’d reached a pay phone. She couldn’t help me. I spent the flight back to Denver in a muddle, convinced that my ears had deceived me. Then again, Spack and MythTech are covert operators, famed for stealthy head-hunting campaigns. A call from an untraceable public phone wouldn’t be out of character for them, and tracking me down at an airport, away from colleagues, where no one could overhear us, would fit their tactics.
When the page doesn’t repeat, I leave the chapel, genuflecting by instinct in the aisle even though the room is so stripped bare that I’m not sure if it even contains an altar. At my gate a beeping electric cart cuts past and lets off a swollen old woman on metal crutches who hobbles onto the Jetway, the last to board. The agent rubber-bands her stack of boarding passes and levels a stare at me. “Let’s move along, sir.”
“I think I just heard someone call me on the PA.”
“The aircraft is leaving.”
I flash my Compass Club card. “Just try the office. The name is Ryan Bingham.”
The agent uses the phone behind the podium. “The last person paged was a Brian Raines,” she tells me. “You must have juxtaposed something.”
Juxtaposed. It’s so easy, but there’s a lag before it comes. I’m reaching capacity. No more Verbal Edge. Whatever I don’t know already, I’ll never learn.
I ask for an extra pillow and a blanket and shift my seat to its fully reclined position. The gentleman behind me groans. He could adjust his own seat for more space, but he prefers to play the martyr, apparently. I didn’t look at him closely when I boarded—still preoccupied with the phantom page—but, lying back, I recognize his cologne as one of those aggressive, woodsy scents worn by heavy perspirers. Salesmen, mostly.
I feel a bug coming on. My ears are hot. I twist shut the air nozzle blowing on my forehead and drain a second glass of grapefruit juice to soothe the pulsing rawness in my throat. The superviruses of modern air travel, steeled by exposure to diverse immune sy
stems and virtually injected into the lungs by high-efficiency ventilation systems, can hang on for weeks, bringing on a multitude of symptoms that mimic those of more serious illnesses. Over time, I’ve grown resistant to most of them, but once in a while one sneaks past my glands. As soon as I land at Ontario today, I’ll find a drugstore and gorge on zinc and C. I need to be healthy for my meeting with Pinter.
My seatmate barely interests me for once. His glasses reflect the moonglow of his laptop as he touch-types what looks like a letter or an article. He’s chewing gum like a smoker in withdrawal and I’d guess by his mussed, longish hair and casual jacket that he’s a working journalist. I’m impressed. Anyone who can reach into the data swarm and pick out what’s newsworthy has my respect.
I can’t get comfortable in my little nest. My feet have swollen inside the cowboy boots, but I fear the odor if I kick them off. Such a small error, this purchase, yet so disruptive. Traveling, I live from my feet up. Shoes—one more item to shop for in Ontario.
But where’s Ontario? I really don’t know. A secondary airport outside Los Angeles, a clearing in the suburbs and subdivisions. They call such places faceless, but it’s not true. They’re bodiless, just signs and streets and lights. In fact, I’ve flown into Ontario before. I rode the shuttle bus to Homestead Suites, worked for an hour or two on The Garage, did some business downstairs in the grill, and returned to the terminal by cab. Memories? None. The smell of road tar, maybe. The trip was no more than a handshake through the ether.
I open one eye to read my seatmate’s screen—a breach of Airworld etiquette. Whatever he’s writing, he’s in the middle of it.
But for residents of this leafy college town, known until now for its world-class Children’s Hospital, the tragedy raises deeper, more troubling questions. Questions of media violence, parental neglect, and the aimlessness of the American adolescent. “A few of us worried about boys and guns,” says Janet Portis, 31, a part-time dental technician and mother of two, “but girls and guns? That just wasn’t on our screens.” Local officials echo her shocked confusion. “There was always a feeling of it can’t happen here,” muses Police Chief Brad McCann, one of the first to reach the gruesome scene. . . .