Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “Compensation?”

  “You honestly stop caring. It seems terrific at first, but then the costs of just maintaining yourself so you can work—the therapy, the stationary bike, the weekend antiquing so you can clear your head, the soundproofing for your home office so no one hears you throwing your stapler or yodeling for the hell of it—”

  “Mounts. I needed to say that so I could breathe. I still have one question: What’s the product? The service?”

  “I was heading there. You’ve heard of that genome project? The human gene map? That’s what they’re after at MythTech, except with commerce. All the angles. All the combinations. And they know it won’t be a ‘eureka.’ It won’t just pop someday. It’s going to take piecework and steady crunching away on every front. It won’t take forever, but it won’t be quick. That’s why they don’t worry about profits. Let someone else chase money in the short term; long term it’s all MythTech’s, anyway. Because the second MythTech gets this map, the second they lock those files in the vault, everyone else is a plowboy on their farm. Fact is, the money we think we’re making now, the money we think IBM makes, Ford, Purina, KFC, Ben & Jerry’s, the LA Times, it’s actually just a loan from MythTech’s future paid backwards to us in the present so we can eat until they’ve got things nailed down and they eat us. We’re all Thanksgiving turkeys in their barnyard and tomorrow is November first.”

  “They still need operating funds. Who’d invest in this?”

  “Who wouldn’t, Ryan? Any investor who feels this thing might work knows he’ll have nothing unless he’s on its good side.”

  “I don’t see how you could leave a place like that.”

  “Look at me, listen to me. Feel my hands. Do I seem like I’ve left? Sure, you can go to work for someone else—hell, they want you to; they need you to—but who are you really working for? Get with it.”

  “And if you leak their secrets they don’t pursue it?”

  “You still don’t get what their product is, I’m seeing.”

  “The code. This perfect comprehensive map.”

  Lisa snaps off another filter and lights up. She leans back on her stool, cross-legged. Regards me. Sighs. “I’m selling it to you right now. You buying, boy? No, you already bought. It’s in your eyes.”

  “I was thinking we should get a room. We’re pretty far gone and it’s only six o’clock.”

  “It’s fear of the code. The fear there is a code and that someone else is going to crack it, so you’d better just cough up your energy right now, either to us or one of our subsidiaries. Or, if you’re rich, send a check. It’s all a racket. It’s extortion, Ryan. Sheer extortion. The code is a bluff. It’s all Beware of Dog. It’s Daddy’s deep, loud voice.”

  “Can I trust you with something?”

  “No. But go ahead.”

  “I’m flying there tomorrow.”

  “Why fly? You’re there.”

  “Craig was right. It’s a hunch. There’s no offer on the table. It’s hints. It’s signs. It’s smoke signals. I know that. I have to see, though. What’s my downside? None.”

  “After all I’ve just said you still want them to want you. You still want to shine in some interview,” she says. “Not sexy, Ryan. Very not sexy, Ryan.”

  “What you’ve said makes me think it’s the same whatever I do. If I go or don’t go.”

  “What’s the same?” she says. “Then I’m going back to my hotel.”

  “The result.”

  “That’s all you care about? Results? Man, have they ever got their claws in your brain.”

  She swings down off her stool and picks up her little bag and fishes out some lipstick and does a touch-up. She looks into my face like it’s her mirror and fills in a corner, puckers. There. She’s done. She puts away the lipstick, zips the bag, steadies herself in her tippy heels, and goes. Definitely the one, and there she goes. And yet I still have a date tonight, so screw her. Screw Linda, too. Ryan Bingham thinks ahead.

  fifteen

  alex says she wants to “do” Las Vegas. She’s been hitting the guidebooks, apparently. How dreary. Or maybe she’s thinking I’m so in-the-know, so seasoned and so locally plugged in, that while she’s at the vanity getting up her getup and I’m out here sinking trick shots on the pool table, I’m already scrolling through the top five menus and mentally ranking in order of their significance in the great junk-culture scheme of things the biggest ten magic acts, lion extravaganzas, artsy European circuses, and toned-down, export editions of three-year-old New York performance art one-woman shows.

  “Where were you all day?” I shout into the bathroom while sighting down my crooked, wavy cue. I’ll skip the white over the orange and hit the red and the red will cause a scale-model Big Bang of symmetrically diverging suns.

  “People-watching. The faces here. Amazing.”

  “You plan events for a living and huge festivities but you’ve never been to Las Vegas? Are you successful?”

  “What?”

  “That wasn’t to you. I’m mumbling.”

  “Can you just give me some time here? Five more minutes?”

  “What?”

  “Can you just—”

  “Kidding, Alex. Kidding. I wish you were in here to see what I just did.”

  She shoulders the door closed and I welcome this because I can stop looking through it at the floor where Mr. Hugs’ legs can be seen behind the trash basket. I hang up my stick and leave the rec room. That was my all-time high point, that last shot, a miracle on felt that won’t come twice. I lie on my back on the bed and I replay it on the expanded field of a beige ceiling so heavily textured and spackled and swirled and pebbled that I expect it to crumble or start dripping. Tomorrow’s the day, tonight is just survival, and knowing that should make everything a bonus. If I eat one good shrimp. If I snatch another Dexedrine. If I glimpse Lisa’s back in a crowd and flip her off or see Craig Gregory lose just one quarter. I can treat these next hours as one long jubilee and Alex as Bathsheba come back to life, and if I don’t I’m just stealing from myself. This is why a man must set clear goals, because in the final countdown to their fulfillment, especially if that fulfillment feels inevitable, he can be as playful as he wishes, because all but the riskiest risks are now risk-free.

  I’m ordering a limousine tonight. I’d like to see an impressionist. I shall. I’m raiding Alex’s pharmacy in broad daylight and if she catches me I’m going to grin the naughty disarming grin I just now practiced, before I’d even imagined a context for it. I want to find whoever’s dealing “blue bottle” and buy a six-pack, if that’s how it comes, and dose Alex’s drink without her knowledge and carry her back here giggling and fizzing and primed to act out the back pages of Hustler slathered in mentholated shaving cream.

  Still, I worry that she’s not successful. Because that will come out at some point and could be hard for someone as madcap and effervescent as the new me. She’s already mentioned that she did public relations once—she noticed on the jukebox a band she’d represented—but she didn’t explain how she got out of it, which means her departure was probably not voluntary. We’ll need to avoid that particular episode and any stretch of either of our lives that words such as episode can be applied to. That will be easy for me, since I’m a master, but could be tough for her as she gets drunker and starts to confuse my radiance with warmth.

  Judging by how long she’s been in wardrobe, she’s going to thrill me when next that door swings open, so there had better be some music playing. I logroll across the mattress and sit up and stare down into the jukebox’s bright innards. I’m looking for something light and old and tuneful with no strong associations for either of us. Just a song for two generic flatlanders who’ve known the sprawling opportunity cities but still remember cold drumsticks at the swimming hole and that jig Poppa danced when he drank too much schnapps, even if things didn’t happen just that way. Is there a song like that? Evocative but not stirring? That takes you back without taking you over?
If there is, it’s my theme. I’ll make it my new sleep machine.

  But it’s not here on this old Wurlitzer. I’m stumped. No Sinatra, no Broadway, no Motown, no bubblegum, just tons of glum college-radio alt rock and overproduced AM country and—it’s so wrong—much melancholy yet strident sixties protest crap. I may as well just punch stuff up at random; a dangerous thought, since that’s what I’m now doing, as though my ideas are now starting in my fingers and traveling upstream to my cerebrum. Out slides the arm and the record from its rack and up comes, at a volume I can’t lower because I see no knobs or dials anywhere, “If I Had a Hammer” by Peter, Paul and Mary. It’s just the tune I didn’t want to hear and of course it’s also Alex’s cue to open the door, spread her arms, and say “You like?”

  She takes the catwalk. She’s dipped herself in black lacquer that still looks wet and tied her straight hair back in a whiplash ponytail that she swings around in a slashing full rotation while bowing her head, and I’m really not sure why. Her shoes are the kind you don’t notice, you just see legs, and the whole effect is pure campy female cutout, like those busty silhouettes on truckers’ mud flaps.

  “Rate me,” she says. “Be vicious and be cold.”

  “Ten is inhuman and never sounds sincere, so I’ll say nine point seven. Nine point eight.”

  An abrupt Bond Girl pivot, hand on hip. Reverses it.

  “This music’s awful.”

  “Do something about it. There’s not much there.”

  “I don’t make decisions tonight. I’m full-on Barbie. Just pretend they never burned the bra and you’ve never heard the word ‘empowerment.’ That’s hard in your line of work, but just pretend.”

  “Last time you wanted to talk. Now this,” I say.

  Cocks a hip, trails her fingers up her sides. Ooh, that tickles. Oh, but it feels good. Pouts and half closes those lashes and strokes her cheeks. “Now this. One request only: a very long black car. Like something you’d see at a Playboy Mansion funeral.”

  “The phone book’s already open to that page.”

  We’re riding around and still talking destinations when it strikes me that what would ruin things forever would be for Ryan to get flashy with his credit card—the one that earns miles and the only one not hacked, because it already was and he replaced it—and prematurely hurtle over the goal line down here on Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman dressed as a Bahraini sex slave and him so zonked on prescription everything that he won’t remember his big finish. That’s never been the picture and mustn’t happen. The picture is specific and very dear to me. One, I’m alone or with a total stranger, which represents my customary mode. Two, there are fields below, even if I can’t see them. There’s more, a score of picky stipulations that have barnacled onto my skull over the years, but lately I’ve been rationing the previews so as not to pre-empt the real hit show.

  “Driver,” I say, and not because I like it but because the old guy insisted on being addressed this way, perhaps from some creepy role-playing addiction, “I need a bank. I need a cash machine. I’m only spending fresh green bills tonight.”

  “All the casinos have several ATMs, sir.”

  “I can’t explain why but I’d like it from a bank.”

  The gentleman already knows we’re freaks back here. The pills are out and a bunch rolled under the seat and it probably looks to him in his rearview mirror like we’ve been bobbing for apples these past few minutes. In the limo’s doors are insulated wells stocked with pop and beer and crescent-shaped ice cubes, and we’ve made a mess of these as well. We sip once from a can and decide it’s not our flavor and thrust it back into the ice pile and it spills and we crack another and fancy it even less and it tips and gushes, too, and we’re all sticky, so out come thick wads of multicolored napkins that we’re just too lazy to use singly, and plus we’re paying for them, so who cares?

  “You up for a good mimic, Alex?”

  “As always.”

  “So why did you quit PR?” I feared this subject, but as is my habit I’m rushing right in toward it because I don’t want it crawling up behind me.

  “I got let go.”

  “For cause? I’m sorry.”

  “Shrinkage. Not enough desk chairs to go around one day, but they tried to be sweet about it. You know. Help us.”

  “Why did you say ‘you know’ like that to me?”

  “Because you know.”

  I swing around to Driver like I’ve been kicked and do what he told me earlier I should do: ask him anything. What arises from this are two tickets and a firm price—we just have to give the box office a note that Driver’s now scribbling on a pad beside him while Alex watches the road because he isn’t and I can see she thinks this actually helps—for one Danny Jansen at some casino showroom. It’s ninety bucks per head. We find that bank. The machine is on an outside wall and hungry drifters lurk on every corner as I make the withdrawal, but vanish once I’ve made it.

  In line for the act I say, “I don’t know. Tell me.” Right straight at it again.

  She doesn’t answer me until we’re seated and Danny swaggers on as Schwarzkopf—topical—and there’s no way out. Just fire exits.

  “You honestly don’t remember me? Our sessions? It wasn’t a seminar, Ryan. You outplaced me. I was waiting for you to confess,” she says. “I thought you were playing with me by holding back. Then I realized you weren’t and didn’t know what to think. But you’ve really forgotten me, haven’t you? That hurts.”

  “This started in Reno?”

  “It started on the plane. I assumed you were playing chicken with this gal.”

  Danny proves to be one rare monster, stout as a hog but nimble as a lemur yet something else as an itty-bitty kitten flung down a basement staircase by its tail. Three minutes into his leaping, bucking, slithering, A-to-Z, pansexual imitation of everyone from Stalin to Shirley Temple—and he can do them simultaneously, too, sitting on a park bench licking sugar cones or with their heads stuck through adjacent guillotines—I’ve so horrifically received my money’s worth that I’m about to pee my pants with glee. And indeed I feel a tiny trickle, which I suck back up or at least prevent from soaking me. I ask Alex if she’ll excuse me for a moment. She won’t, though. She refuses to excuse me. She grabs my hand and crushes ligament as Danny dipsy-doodles through the Louvre as both the Mona Lisa and Picasso, and after about thirty seconds of tense resistance I decide that there’s another, better way: I’ll just go limp and take whatever’s coming and hope some skilled clinician can save me later.

  “Stop that,” she whispers. “Don’t squirm. It’s almost over.”

  I resolved to go limp, but I didn’t manage it. This time I will. I imagine soft old rope rotting on a Lake Superior dock.

  For the show’s last ten minutes I picture various deaths at Alex’s slender hands. Yet I don’t feel her anger. This troubles me even more. I was going to run into one of them, eventually, but I figured it would be a swift, short blow. I’m sick of waiting for it. I want it now.

  Driver is in position when we’re reborn from Danny’s seething necropolis and straggle out into the light of late-night Vegas. Move toward the light, it’s all a soul must know, even if it comes streaming from the red eyes of a mammoth re-created sphinx with two front paws the size of supertankers.

  “Well, I guess it’s all out in the open now,” says Alex, reclining against the molded leatherette of our American-made black mass on wheels. Driver is taking us somewhere he thinks we’ll like but he wants it to be a surprise. He’s being Driver.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I say. But just so-so. Why bother with guilt when she’s about to hang me? It’ll be her turn to feel guilty soon.

  “Slide over here and make it up to me. Kiss my legs or something. Right on up.”

  I obey her, both in letter and in spirit. The alcohol in her perfume stings my tongue. She must have bathed in it.

  “Came early, stayed late,” she says. “Worked weekends. Holidays. I had a sick kid br
other with no health plan, a mom who shared a dad with someone else and liked the nice girly things he couldn’t give her. Mostly, it was for me, though. I drove Miatas. One-year leases so I could try new colors. You know who I represented once? Barbara Bush. Pretty fabulous. I got some hand-me-downs. When she’d built up to five copies of one necklace that she couldn’t risk wearing the original of, guess who got the sixth, with a sweet card? That’s how they became the Texas Kennedys: cards for everyone, wrote them day and night.” She leans back further. “You’re doing good. Go, Fido.”

  “Ma’am?” The voice of Driver.

  “I’m still a miss. A junior miss.”

  “We’re there.”

  “Just circle, please.”

  I cast up my eyes at the giantess. She pats me. If this is the sum of my obligations to her, I’ll gladly go till dawn. Till dawn of spring. Or could it be that I payed my spiritual debt by watching Danny mutate for an hour and now I’m into the extra-credit zone.

  “I slept with the boss man. I didn’t feel exploited. I felt like he was offering me insurance. He wouldn’t just hump any of the young things, and the ones that he did hump had major blackmail power, all seventeen of us. God, I loved PR. The privilege of it. Showing the world that Texaco and Exxon only drilled and brokered and refined as a way to support their truer passions: saving the porpoise and promoting opera in the inner city, which they’ll rebuild someday and not even take the write-off—it’s a gift. Being entrusted with tall tales that vast just swoops you up onto your silver princess throne. More, give me more. Give me harder ones, you shout. Let me position private penitentiaries as walled Montessoris for late-blooming unfortunates. Your appetite for deception spreads and grows, and just when you think it can’t gape any wider, someone hands you a folder tabbed ‘Pesticide Spill: Monsanto.’ It’s like bliss. You don’t have to chew so hard, Ryan. Focus. Focus.”