by Walter Kirn
The Denver plane is a 727 with haggard upholstery and discolored wings, black streaks of corrosion trailing from every bolt. It clatters into the air and through the clouds and breaks out into a sunlit turquoise plain riddled with nasty whirlpools of clear-air turbulence. Julie reaches over and grips my wrist while fingering with her free hand a silver cross hanging against her breastbone inside her shirt. When did this strike? She’s been born-again again? All around me lately God is claiming people. Am I still on his list, or has he skipped me? We jolt again and Julie bows her head and doesn’t look up until the ride is smooth. The fear improves her color.
“I can’t go back. I’m going to, of course, but I can’t. I’m all confused,” she says.
There’s a pressure behind her face; she wants to talk now. This isn’t the place. There’s no room to move, to gesture. Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.
“Keith cares too much. It makes me feel . . . responsible. He won’t drink the last of the milk. He says it’s mine. When we wake up in bed I’m hogging the whole middle and he’s falling over the edge.”
“A relationship is a closed dynamic system.”
“Can I tell you a story? We’re shopping for a car. Keith says I need something safe, with lots of airbags, but I’m thinking I’d like a truck, for hauling kennels. I ask the salesman, who’s been showing us station wagons, to show us some pickups. I fall in love with one. I ask about the pickup’s safety rating compared to the wagons. ‘Not good,’ the salesman says. I turn to Keith and say ‘It’s your decision, hon,’ but he doesn’t respond, he just stands there. It gets embarrassing. It’s like he’s gone catatonic, had a stroke. Finally, I say ‘I’ll get the wagon, okay?’ Nothing. A blank. I literally had to shake him.”
She rambles on and I listen without listening. The clouds below have a complicated topography, dimpled and grooved and folded and corrugated, with broad estuarial fans along their edges. (Estuarial—there, I’ve finally used it.) It’s Wednesday down there, but what day is it up here? At times, in the afternoon, when flying east, I can see night bearing down across the continent, and the feeling is one of powerless omniscience. To know what’s coming and when it will arrive and see the places it’s already been is a counterfeit wisdom. It ought to help, but doesn’t.
Julie keeps talking. Though I barely hear her, I manage to be a brother to her merely by sitting nearby and shedding heat. She’ll go through with her wedding, I’m certain of it, but only once she’s drawn sufficient energy from me, her original hero, her first security. We talk about our father as though we loved him, but that was something we only discovered afterwards; while he was alive, he mostly worried us. He’d taken on so much—the house, the trucks, the loans, our mother—and we could see him sagging. His business was our protection, all we had, but nothing protected his business, and this scared us. We reserved our love for one another, brother and sisters, because everything else seemed borrowed against, at risk.
“Ryan?”
“Yes?”
“Weird question: are you rich? The way you bought my ticket, just like that, not even asking the price.”
“I’ve saved. I’m comfortable.”
“Do you date? Do you have a love life?”
“I like to think so. I’m meeting a woman in Vegas tomorrow night.”
“A stranger. Disease doesn’t worry you?”
“I’m in the soup. If you’re in the soup and get wet, then you get wet.”
“I don’t think you know how proud of you we are. Everything you’ve accomplished, this book you’ve written, these meetings you’re always flying to. It’s awesome. It’s like you’re out here covering the territory, putting it all together. Our ambassador. We read magazines and expect to see you in them, and even though you aren’t, we know you will be. We know you should be.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re done out here. Let’s go back to Minnesota,” she says.
“I’ll get you there tomorrow. I’ll be there Friday. I just have a few more stops to make. Appointments. It only seems hectic. Believe me, there’s a rhythm. You had to be here when it started to hear it, though.”
Julie sleeps.
There are no lights in the garage tonight except for the guttering candle that illuminates the latest quarterly statement from his accountants. According to their figures, the world is his. His products and processes dominate their markets. His name has become synonymous with quality and demand-based value-adding genius. He can quit now and step outside to vast acclaim, assured of permanent wealth and influence. The garage will have served its purpose as an incubator for dreams once widely dismissed and roundly ridiculed, and surely he must preserve it as a museum showcasing in perpetuity the transformational journey of one mind wholly at peace with its core competencies. But as M rises up from his stool to make his exit, something distracts him: a pad of clean white paper lying on the bench beside his instruments. The paper’s emptiness cries out for a mark, a sketch, a diagram, a thoughtless doodle. Through the door he can hear his massed admirers calling for him to show himself at last, but while he feels boundless affection for his team, without whose selfless input he’d be lost, he understands also, after a quick gut check, that his work remains incomplete. He lifts his pencil. . . .
The first thing I do in Denver is call Dwight’s mobile. He answers on the first ring. It’s disillusioning. I’d imagined him hunkered down with a sick author, but apparently he’s alone and doing nothing. Behind him I hear splashing, yelling. Pool sounds. His assistant portrayed the trip as an emergency, but it sounds like another golfing getaway.
“I’m on my way,” I say. “I’m with my sister. Hard to explain. We got canceled and rerouted, but we should be down there in time for dinner, easily.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’m not sure we are. I have to get her back to Minnesota and I need to be in Las Vegas tomorrow. GoalQuest. I might just shoot over there early.”
“The book is just brilliant.”
“You got it? You read it? Not just the summary? I don’t think it lends itself to being summarized. It’s more a gestalt. Is that the word. Gestalt?”
“I have a contract in front of me. An offer. We can work on the figures, the terms, but not a lot. It’s close to the best I can do. Just need your signature.”
“And I want you to have it.”
“Once we’ve talked. The manuscript has a ragged edge or two. I have a few trims, a few snips.”
“It’s not too short for that?”
“A lot of our books are read in digest form. You’ve heard of the journal Executive Outlines? They lop the fat off six or seven titles and sell them as a package to subscribers who don’t have time for a lot of monkey business.”
One of my eyelids twitches. My crownless molar zings and sizzles. I can taste it rotting.
“You’ll be here when, exactly?” Dwight says. “Technically, I’m checked out of my room, and my flight to Salt Lake City leaves at seven.”
“You’re flying to SLC? I don’t believe this. That’s where I’m coming from. I left an hour ago.”
“Too bad. We could have met there. I wish I’d known. Hold on for a minute. The waiter’s got my tea.”
The tram that I’ve been waiting for with Julie roars into the loading area, stops. Its doors open and a floodwall of pedestrians surges past us to the escalators.
“Bingham?”
“If I’m going to make it, I have to run,” I say. “My flight’s two terminals over. This is crazy. What’s this last-minute Utah business, anyway?”
“Tennis commitment. I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped. You say you’ll be back there tonight? Let’s think this through.”
“I don’t want to think. I want to see your face. There, my tram just left. Terrific. Great.” I roll my eyes at Julie, who whispers “What?” and tightens her grip on the bag of fuzzy pet
toys she bought for no reason at a stand upstairs. My sister feels ill at ease, I’m learning, if she goes for more than an hour without a purchase. I wish she’d put them away, though—I don’t like stuffed things.
“I have a solution,” says Dwight. “The Salt Lake Marriott. Tomorrow. For a very early lunch. We’ll buckle down and wrestle with this idea of yours and see if we can’t get an outline we’re both proud of.”
“It’s down to an outline now? That’s all you want?”
“The Marriott at ten. Frankly, I find this hugely preferable. They’re practically booting me out of this hotel. This works for both of us?”
It will have to work. Our flight to Phoenix is boarding; we’ll never make it. Julie, whose appetite Airworld has revived, bites off a chunk of caramel-coated soft pretzel and eyes me in a childish sugar daze. What’s next? I wish I could tell her.
“At ten. Agreed?”
“Fine. I’ll see you there. This doesn’t thrill me. If this is how your profession operates . . .”
“I don’t represent a profession; I’ve never claimed that. I’m a bookman, Bingham. Just a bookman. If you find our little fraternity too casual, too fallible, too dog-eared—”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Good. Because this idea of yours is strong.”
“As strong as Horizoneering? Morse’s book?”
“Odd you should ask.”
I listen. Nothing. “Why?”
“Just odd, is all. I’ll tell you a little story at lunch tomorrow. And bring an appetite. Their buffet’s first rate.”
“Where are you—really? La Jolla still? New York? Or do you just pretend to move around? What’s a tennis commitment? That’s a game.”
“Only for those who don’t play it well,” Dwight says.
“I want you to guarantee me you’ll be in Utah.”
“Guarantee you? Now how would I do that?”
eleven
fold certain itineraries in the middle and the halves are mirrors of each other. I’ve taken such trips, a yo-yo on a string, staying in the same places on my way back that I stayed in, the other day, on my way out. At the outermost point of such journeys, before the pivot, there’s a moment of stillness, of poised potential energy. To begin the rewinding all I have to do is pick up my change and wallet from the nightstand, tuck in a shirttail, sign a credit card slip. But what if I don’t? It’s always tempting. Rebellion. What if I step aside and let the string snap back without me? I’ll be free then, won’t I?
The next flight back to Salt Lake leaves in an hour, and there is another two hours after that. Julie wants my decision. She licks a yogurt cone speckled with crystals of red cinnamon candy and leans on the rail of the rising escalator, watching her brother sort through his bad options. I’ve begun to suspect she’s pregnant and not telling me. Her face has that dependent bottomless softness and her appetite for junk seems driven, hormonal. She’s filling out like a moon before my eyes.
“How would you like to see my office?”
“Sure. I thought you’d quit, though.”
“That’s still in process. We’ll rent a car. We’ll drive.”
I need to get out of the airport. All airports. Now.
My Maestro Diamond card cuts through the formalities and ten minutes later we’re buckled up and cruising, watching the Denver skyline climb the windshield and swaying in our seats to Christian rock. Julie has always been up for anything—the source of most of her problems. She rides along. Her beauty arises from her readiness, and Keith, if he’s really the lump she’s made him out to be, will never drink from its source. That’s fine with me. There are parts of her that I’d rather strangers not handle.
I’m a dead man at ISM but they don’t know that yet; the parking attendant thumbs-ups me, lifts the gate. We drive down into a catacomb of Cadillacs and take my empty spot, still stained with coolant from my poorly maintained Toyota. When we get out, a man that I know from the hallways and lobby and who I’ve always assumed is at my level—though how would I know?—stops dead and palely stares. He raises a hand in a lame half wave, then fusses with his tie and turns and goes. There’s the flash of a shoeshine, the echo of hasty steps. I lock the car doors remotely, with the smart key, and lead Julie into the elevator and up.
“You’re sure we should be here?” she says. “You’re not in trouble?”
“Why?”
“Your shoulders. Roll them back. Now exhale. Slowly.”
“Massage school,” I say.
“It stays with you. It trains your eye. Back there in the airport, the compression of people’s spines? It’s like they’re all six inches shorter than they should be.”
“You’d think they’d walk taller there.”
“They’re munchkins. Crabs.”
The point of this errand is still waiting to reveal itself. We walk out onto my floor and nothing’s changed except the art. Artemis Bond, the apostle on our board, donated to us a trove of wildlife oils said to be worth millions, though I’d be shocked if that were true. The bugling bull elk and treed pumas and flushing quail rotate through the building, floor by floor; I know it’s September now by all the waterfowl. The art is our only connection to natural cycles here. An energy-saving coating on the windows cuts out the heart of the spectrum from the light and turns people’s skin the color of old dull nickels. It makes paper explosive, too bright to look at, and assistants have actually left us over eyestrain. One even filed suit, and may have won. Such victories don’t pay. The CTC cases I’ve known who’ve wrangled judgments for wrongful termination are spacemen now, in orbit, in exile, unwelcome back on earth.
Julie trails me past a gang of cubicles glowing with junior executive ambition to a partitioned warren of larger offices that means we’re approaching the operational heart of things. The air swirls and eddies with all the old polarities—fear of the lion’s den just down the hall, the hope for an unmolested interlude at the copier or fax machine, the seductions of fresh-brewed decaf in the snack nook. My assistant looks up from his desktop—I’ve tripped some wire—and reformats his self-presentation appropriately, jerking taut the slack around his eyes.
“It’s you,” he says.
I point Julie to my office, which has a love seat. A foreshortened sofa, actually. It’s never been used for courtship, that I know of.
My assistant rolls back his chair two caster-turns. I’m a sight, it seems.
“Any messages?”
“Just one or two. Your hotel in Las Vegas is covered. The Mount Olympus. They’re crowded, so I had to take a suite. They said it has a jukebox and a pool table.”
“Nice.”
“You think so? It kind of gave me chills. Mr. Bingham alone in some hotel room, practicing his bank shots, playing records.”
“Who else. Did a woman named Alex call?”
“Don’t think so. Just that airline lady who sounds like Catwoman. She calls every couple of hours. She wants your mobile. I’ve been guarding your privacy.”
“Linda. What does she want?”
“Wouldn’t tell me. Is that voice an act?”
“I’ve never noticed it. Give her my number next time. Nothing about that meeting in Omaha?”
“No, but your briefcase came from Great West baggage. I stood it up next to your chair. Your tie is twisted.”
I own just one briefcase, and I’m carrying it. I walk into the office, hip-bang the door closed, and look down at a burgundy case with gold-tone hardware that might have been my style a few years back, but not since I started reading GQ magazine. The airline address tag looped around its handle is filled out in my hand, in faded blue ink.
“Is this you in this picture?” Julie is on the love seat, a magazine on her lap. The Corporate Counselor.
“That’s me. The one they’re hoisting on their shoulders.”
“Why are your shirts off? What are all those ropes?”
“We were rock climbing in Bryce Canyon. It’s a program. Wilderness Accountabili
ty. We ate wild grasses. We chiseled arrowheads.”
“One of those things where you let yourself fall backwards and everyone catches you?”
“Only they don’t catch you. On this one they let you fall. And then they step on you.”
I heft the case. It’s light, but it feels full. I shake it. Paper. The combination lock reads 4–6–7. I used to carry an expensive pocketknife—a gift from a Waco oil services firm in gratitude for the lawsuit-free excision of eleven second-tier managers, three of them less than a year from being vested in a pension plan that’s since gone under—but it was taken from me by airport guards who measured the blade length and said it broke the law. I could use something like it to jimmy the case. I open my top middle desk drawer and stir the junk around, a lot of giveaway convention bric-a-brac, looking for something slim and strong and pointed, but the best I can do is a silver-plated bookmark snagged from KPMG at the last GoalQuest. The thing is hardly metal, a flimsy wafer, and when I wedge it against a hinge, it cracks.
“Back from the vale of sorrows. Ryan B. His mournful dignity marred by coffee stains insufficiently blotted from wrinkled collar.”
This man is not worth elevating my vision for, a conclusion I came to long ago, but he might have a knife in his trousers, so I do. It’s the same old assault on the senses. Flared canine nostrils snuffling for blood trails near the watercooler. Marx Brothers eyebrows, permanently arched and flaked with dead skin that flies off him when he laughs, which he only does with both hands inside his pockets, as though there’s a switch near his scrotum he has to toggle. Craig Gregory, Human Issues Group Team Leader, who came to me years ago in the company weight room, reracked the barbell I was struggling with, gazed down into my clear young eyes, and said, “It’s a recession, it’s official. Axes are falling. Much stench. Much fear of plague. I know you’ll want back into Marketing Group someday but right now the king’s army needs some undertakers to sanitize the gore. You say you’d love to? Abracadabra: I grant you better insurance, complete with vision care coverage. Go with God.”