Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “I apologize, miss, but my left rear tire feels flat. There’s broken glass all over the road tonight. I’ll need to stop up ahead and use the jack.”

  “Can you just lock us in?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Then it’s not a problem.”

  “Yes, miss. Thank you.”

  I hear a door slam muffled by so much skin.

  “But then we lost some big clients,” Alex says, “and one of our rainmakers died and . . . dominoes. I truly think they drew lots to choose who went. You still don’t remember me? Those suits I wore? I’m up to our first meeting.”

  The harder she bangs on this lid, the tighter it seals. A moment ago I felt it opening—a vision of Dallas office-tower blue glass, an artsy reception area with seats resembling children’s wood alphabet blocks, extreme-angle views of parking garages with painted helipad markings on the roofs—but now it’s all black again, and shut; Chernobyl entombed in its smooth concrete sarcophagus. The barricades are up on memory lane.

  My seat seems to tilt. Is this the jack at work?

  “You don’t remember the exercise?” she says. “That workshop hour where you were some big headhunter and I was supposed to sell you on my skills without using words like ‘need’ or ‘want’ or ‘hope’? You cracked pistachios to show uninterest, which you said I’d have to be prepared for, and I unbuttoned my cashmere cardigan, the top two buttons, and you said, ‘That looks desperate; you want a new job, not a sugar daddy.’ Nothing?” She lifts my chin with two hands and makes me see her.

  I apologize and apologize. The seats tilt. I’m afraid if I move I’ll shift the limo’s balance point and crush Driver under an axle.

  “You cared,” says Alex. She closes her legs with her dress tucked in the V. I’m off-duty now; I uncramp my neck. “You didn’t want to be there, either, did you? We had that in common. We both wanted to scream. You fidgeted, your nails were bitten raw. I should be consoling him, I thought. I knew my job couldn’t last. It wasn’t meant to. Exxon. The Bushes. Festivals must end. But you thought you were responsible. So earnest. I wanted to cook you a great big hot peach cobbler.”

  And then all is level and we’re on the road again. The limo founders in a swarming crosswalk and long-haired rowdies slap the windows, holler. A can of something thunks the roof and skitters and Driver accelerates and through the floor I feel the wheels lump over a large soft object that I’ll always remember as a body, even if it was a mail sack or a garbage bag. I want those Ambien. I find strange capsules, ones I haven’t seen yet, shining in an upholstery crack. I gobble them. Alex is still reminiscing. “You cared,” she says. It’s the mantra in this monologue.

  And then we’re dancing somewhere. We’re back indoors. Or is this the new outdoors? The purple drinks are back—they’d just gone dormant—except that now they’re made of frozen slush that you can scoop up off the dance floor if you spill one and pack back into your cup like a wet snowball and pierce with the long straw and keep on sucking. Other dancers keep shoving me. A cubist Alex, all planar overlap and sextuple foreheads, surrounds and eludes me simultaneously, omnidirectionally dancing with all of us. She grinds on my hip, she whispers in my ears—both ears at once. She loves me, loves me, loves me. Her ponytail slices a Z in the green fog, smoke, the Mark of Zorro. She’s hanging on my neck.

  I squirt through a crack in her cycloramic presence and make it to the bar and ask for milk. In a corner Art Krusk consults with Tony Marlowe, still plotting his comeback as an ethnic food king. Marlowe will cost Art. The newsletter. The videos. In CTC, all I wanted was a clean getaway, but Marlowe’s game is different. He sticks around, angling to be your Pope, your spouse, and soon you’re paying him to certify you as a trainer in his franchised cult. Goodbye, Art Krusk. The grating is off the storm drain. You’re underground now, blowing through the mains. The two of them rise from their table with their snow cones and stroll away like president and premier talking peace on some Camp David bunny trail. Tomorrow Marlowe will give Art his new name.

  “You little shit. You ditched me,” Alex says. Her heat-rashed throat is like an oriole’s and her high birdy voice weaves through the DJ’s drumtrack, which is all he’s spinning tonight. Percussion.

  “I needed cool dairy. Where are we? Where is this club?”

  “Under Mount O.” She index-fingers my temples. A current crackles between the diodes. “It’s me.”

  If this could just conclude, please. I guzzle milk. It’s not the taste, it’s the texture. It’s how it coats.

  “You knew it would have to happen, didn’t you? Someone was going to see under your black hood and realize the Grim Reaper was just a kid. This is our chance to heal each other, Ryan.”

  Where is all this eloquence coming from? She’s mixed her pills better than I have. “You have a mustache.” She licks the two percent off my upper lip and I lick off the wetness of her licking.

  “Did you rehearse these things you’ve said to me?”

  “Day and night since Reno. Certain lines I wrote down. The Barbara Bush part.”

  “You’re good,” I say. “You’re scary good, in fact.”

  “I want us to go upstairs,” she says. “Just give me half an hour. To set the mood.” She hands me her violet frosty to hold and kisses me and does the Bond Girl turn and activates her jetpack and whooshes off, right through the ceiling. Her contrails smell of propane.

  But has anyone paid Driver? I fix on this in lieu of the big questions, such as how frightened to be of a young woman who aches to redeem her for-hire persecutor. I count my bills on the bar and recognize that I never coughed up for the Danny tickets, either. The harder I try to close out my accounts, the more people I owe. But I’ll never find that limo. People who don’t insist you pay them up front do you no favors. They’re spiritual Shylocks.

  I decide to consider my cash the house’s money and find a quiet table and let it ride.

  The winning streaks you’re obliged to leave midway continue indefinitely in your dreams, until the sum you might have won if you’d only hung around dwarfs the stack you walked away with. I leave the blackjack pit after thirty minutes up around eight hundred bucks, but I cede my sunny Bahamian retirement and golden years of anonymous philanthropy to an old desert rat who’s in my stool before its vinyl cushion can replump. It may be the greatest favor I’ve ever done anyone, but he can’t acknowledge it and I can’t take credit.

  The elevator halts on every floor, it seems, but only twice do passengers get off. We glare at one another as we rise, wondering who’s the prankster or the moron. Most Las Vegas rides from the casino back to the rooms breed comity, compassion—everyone’s been fleeced by the same con—but this crew stews and accuses. The four people I leave behind when I step out are poised for a bloody cage match.

  I insert my card key. The light blinks red. I flip the card over. Still red. I’d knock or call, but I don’t want to spoil Alex’s set design by forcing her to leave her mark. She lives for stagecraft. It’s really all I know about her. So what’s in store? Gothic dungeon? Bridal chamber? LAPD interrogation cell?

  I was right not to knock, I see; this isn’t my room. The number beckoned because it’s also the PIN for my Wells Fargo cash card. I look both ways. The rows of doors look phony, as if they conceal brick walls or dusty air shafts. I walk along but no digits jump out at me. Then I smell incense. I slot my card in. Green.

  Inside, a moment of night-blind blackout yields to imprinted ghostlights from the dance club and then to a Russian Orthodox cathedralscape of shadows and candleglow. The room’s mock-suite shape, its notional entryway, blocks a full-Broadway beholding of the king bed and whatever pose my date has chosen there—champagne flapper, minky Marilyn, Cleopatra with serpents. I see the flowers, though. Carnivorous white lilies on the pool table and more of them on the dresser-credenza thing. No music, though. No beatnik minstrelsy. That Wurlitzer let us both down. Three steps, a turn.

  Home to fulfill the obsession I deserved.<
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  It’s like a fairy tale. The bed stripped down to its sheets. The banks of roses. The powdered skin and many, many lit tapers. All gauzy and medieval and surely calculated to address the ancient child in me even as it rebukes the infant grown-up. That seems to have been her intention, at least. To enchant and correct at the same time. But her thrashings and half-conscious gropings have mangled things. She’s on her side in a kind of frozen crouch, fouled in the linens. The roses are a mess. Only the chess-set lineup of pill bottles on the nightstand beside my sonic sleep machine—tuned to the “rain forest” track; I hear the dripping now—memorializes my girl’s perfectionism.

  I receive it all as a kindness. She could have hung herself.

  To grab the phone I have to reach through flames, and I suffer a burn I won’t feel till hours later. The receiver is off the hook—evidence of second thoughts? I’m shaking her with one hand, but I’m also listening for a dial tone. Then I see the cord yanked from the wall jack. I frisk myself for my mobile. 911? Or patch through to the desk for the in-house team of medics that any hotel this size must have on standby? The decision hangs. I shouldn’t have to make one. I’ve outsmarted myself by imagining the medics.

  The emergency operator wants my room number, which I never noted; I followed the jasmine. The lady drawls. Her westernness offends me. I run to the hall, read the number off the door, then hustle back to list the names of the poisons, the medications. I arrive at the wrong side of the broad mattress and instead of circling around I climb across. I brush her skin, traversing. It might be colder. Still time to pump her stomach, to give the shots. The small print on the bottles’ labels is faded, low contrast. I squint and report. I’m asked to speak more clearly.

  Instructions next. Check the airway for obstructions; the victim may have aspirated vomit. I don’t understand. “With your fingers,” drawls the operator. I’m surprised she didn’t call me “hon.” I ask her for specifics, mechanical drawings. Which fingers? How many? In the throat? Somehow I fumble the handset in my scramble and lose it in all the roses and knotted laundry. It rings seconds later, an automated callback, but I perform the more critical mission first. I roll her on her back—I’m sure I’m wrong here; the victim belongs on its side, so it can drool; so its gullet can eject the foreign material—and I spread her wet chin and jaw and make my probe, index and middle, it’s coming back to me.

  Jaws dully close and gum me—wakefulness. Then her head makes a ripping, canine shake. She bites.

  “The fucking hell . . . ?” Huge eyes she has. Like Lazarus.

  “Alex, oh fucking god.”

  “You choked me. Shit!” She jerks back her knees and goes fetal against the headboard. Cornered, curled, as if I had a knife. Extremely wakeful, though. My phone still ringing.

  “You never came,” she says. “I fell asleep. Where were you?”

  “Are you okay? You said to wait.”

  “Not two hours,” she says. The phone is by her hand, I see. She slaps it and it goes quiet.

  “I,” I say. “I,” I continue. “I,” I offer. I pause.

  “Playing cards? Just one more hand?” she says. She gathers the sheets and covers all her good parts. Again the phone rings. She answers it and listens and says, “I’m fine,” and repeats it until even I’m convinced, her face showing comprehension of my mistake, of everyone’s mistakes, and then disgust.

  “Thank you. I know, but it wasn’t that,” she says. “He’s self-important, so he thought it was. He knew I used sedatives, but apparently . . . I know, I know.” They’re hitting it off, these gals. “He got himself all hung up in the casino and tiptoed in here with a guilty conscience and saw what he wanted to or hoped or something. His poor, poor Juliet. If you want to send someone over to confirm, be my guest . . . Right. Okay. She wants to talk to you.”

  I explain that there’s no emergency after all and turn the mobile off and face my date. If she lit all these candles when she first came in and they were new then and now they’re this burned down I’m surprised it was only two hours I wasted down there.

  “You got the bear, I noticed,” she says. “From Paula. My friend. Who you don’t remember, either. Tall. Wore flannel slacks. She worked that mannish thing.”

  “A Paula. Statuesque,” I say. “A Paula.”

  “When I told her I saw you on the Reno flight, she said ‘Oh goody,’ and asked me for your info. You ticked her off. She’s touchy, but she’s a gas. She said she was going to do something, but not what, though it must have been her because she gave those bears for Christmas once, the year we were fired, when those bears were big. She’s back in PR, in Miami. Fashion stuff.”

  “I should probably get my own room tonight, you feel.”

  “Get me one. This one’s trashed. I want fresh blankets. I spent a lot of money on all this gear.”

  “Or maybe we can both get a new room.”

  “You must think I’m a pretty lonely lady. Pretty twisted, too. Just say it.”

  “No.”

  “That was your moment of grandeur, wasn’t it? Your slain despondent virgin,” Alex says. “I know your big atonement’s set for nine, but I’d just call and cancel if I were you. You haven’t really earned the cross, you know? You flatter yourself and it’s sort of getting old. Try to book me another suite. Or anything. It doesn’t even have to be Mount O.”

  I take down the cue when I’m alone again and venture a few four-bumper extravaganzas, but I’m out of my groove and not much sinks. Pool balls not sinking, just knocking around, are sad. Some entertainment? I should love this Wurlitzer. These are my people. Haggard. Baez. Hank. Country-Western Music as Literature. I’m told I had ambitions as a folk singer, and I don’t doubt it, but it’s too late to learn an instrument. I click my sleep machine to “prairie wind” and gobble a pill I found under the sink and an Ambien from my pocket, to hedge my bets.

  I call Alex in her new room three floors above me to see if she’s comfortable and to make sure she won’t be down to murder me in my sleep. She answers from the bathroom, from the john, whose whirlpooling I can hear when she picks up. I’m calling from the same spot—we’ve found a wavelength?—though I’ve already flushed. I flush again, a kind of mating call, and Alex says she’s preparing to go out again and I say, competitively, that I am, too. “As what?” she says. It’s the question I should have asked her; she’s the one who’s always going out as things. “As Danny,” I say, and at last I get a laugh from her. Why didn’t we begin things in this fashion, toilet to toilet, at a modest remove, the way the balanced Mormons do their courting?

  I ask her why she takes so many pills, my concern for her seeming genuine, even to me, and she says she doesn’t—the pills are a collection, a way of adapting to the flying life and self-employment, which she’s never grown used to. Consulting with a doctor in each new city is like redesigning the lighting in her hotel rooms; it helps her to feel connected and at ease; and she only asks the physicians for prescriptions because she’s from Wyoming and grew up poor and believes in value for her money. She broke them out tonight because she saw I’d stolen a fair number and she concluded that drugs were my passion or maybe just my pastime and she wanted to swing along, not be a spoilsport. I tell her I buy all this, although few others would, because I know what she’s up against out here, having to set up anew each time she lands—I do it, too, by rooting for local teams, and I tell her the story about the Bulls and Timberwolves. “So: Poseidon’s Grotto in fifteen minutes? Come as whoever,” I say. And then I add: “I finally remembered you,” because it’s true. A minute ago, when I realized there’d be no penalty, I flashed on the morning I played headhunter to Alex’s kittenish job seeker in cashmere, though the nuts were peanuts, not pistachios.

  “We had chemistry, didn’t we?” she says.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I enjoyed the outfits. I wasn’t capable then of having chemistry.”

  “You think our limo’s still out front?”

  “I’m certain.”
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  “We could drive to that secret air base in the desert where they supposedly autopsy the aliens and sit on a rock with a carton of cold milk and watch the skies for experimental craft.”

  Now, that’s my idea of doing Las Vegas. “Yes.”

  “Why weren’t you like this before?”

  Can’t answer that.

  “Or maybe,” she says, “we should wait a week or two and see if we’re still interested?”

  “Oh.”

  “That would be wiser, I think.”

  In bed, alone, I recall that tonight was about survival only, so I’ve succeeded. The rest was all a bonus. And I may just have met my soul mate tonight, though I’m still not sure which one she was.

  sixteen

  this business of hassled travelers waking up not knowing where they are has always seemed false to me, a form of bragging, as when someone tells me at a business lunch that it’s been years since he really tasted his food. The more I’ve traveled, the better I’ve become at orienting myself with a few clues, and the harder it’s gotten to lose myself. I’m perpetually mapping and triangulating, alert to accents, hairstyles, cloud formations, the chemical bouquets of drinking water. Nomadism means vigilance, and to wake up bewildered and drifting and unmoored is a privilege of the settled, it seems to me—of the farmer who’s spent his whole life in one white house, rising to the same roosters.

  The light in my room is Las Vegas morning light, there’s none other like it in all America—a stun gun to the soul. It picks out the pistils and stamens in the lilies and the ashes of the spent incense cones. My mobile is halfway through its second ring, and because I’m now down to unwelcome callers only, I hesitate before answering. I’d give anything for a moment of dislocation, a blessed buffer zone.

  “I’m downstairs with a car on the way,” Craig Gregory says. “I thought you might like a ride to the convention center. You’ll want to check the acoustics, the power spots. You going to use a lectern and sermonize or do the walkabout talk-show act? We’re curious.”