Up in the Air

“October, maybe. You’re safe for another twenty days or so.”

“One more reason to get it done by Friday.”

“What done?”

I told him. He didn’t seem impressed.

Now, ten hours later, I’m paying dearly for my night of boozy, aimless chat. I touch a button mounted on a wall and the frosted-glass doors of the Compass Club swish open, revealing a sleek curved desk with a receptionist dressed in airline colors, red and yellow. I know this woman, a mother of teenage boys, both elusively troubled and on pills—the kind of kids who trade their Ritalin for game cartridges and six-packs of malt liquor. Linda was a Great West flight attendant until she was injured in an incident involving a sudden loss of tail control. She won a fat settlement from the company, then promptly lost half of it in a divorce from a no-good she’d put through chiropractic school. Her addled sons are her whole existence now, and occasionally I visit them at home to help with schoolwork or toss around a football. The older boy, Dale, a hulking fifteen-year-old drawn to horror comics and older girls, reminds me of myself at his age. It’s Linda’s belief that my work in corporate coaching qualifies me to help him, but she’s wrong.

“What’s the holdup on Reno?” I say.

She lowers her voice. “A fuel-line leak, I’m hearing. Another ninety minutes would be my estimate.”

“Dale and Paul okay?”

“We’re back to diet. Trying the ultra-high-protein thing again.”

“I thought that was a bust.”

“A semi-bust. Thinking back, I noticed a slight improvement.”

“Good luck recouping it.” A focus word. They always sound wrong, but maybe it’s how I use them.

“Come again?”

“I hope the diet works this time.”

“So tell me, did you get that house you looked at?”

I consider the best way to explain that, technically, I’m homeless at the moment. The house deal never reached the offer stage. Homeowning may not be in my makeup. My parents belonged to the lawn-and-garden cult—their marriage was a triangular affair involving themselves and a velvety front yard of drought-hardy Kentucky bluegrass—so I know how much labor good groundskeeping requires. I don’t have the time, and frankly I lack the passion. Green grass is a losing battle in the West, which wants to go back to sage and prickly pear, and so is securing an outpost in the sprawl. I look down on Denver, at its malls and parking lots, its chains of blue suburban swimming pools and rows of puck-like oil tanks, its freeways, and the notion of seeking shelter in the whole mess strikes me as a joke.

“The house looks iffy.”

Linda tents her hands beneath her chin. “I’m sorry to hear it. You would have been a neighbor. It would have been nice to have you in the zip code.”

A zip code is something I’d rather do without. Zip codes are how they find you, how they track you. They start with five numbers and finish with a profile, down to the movies you’re liable to go see and the pizza toppings you prefer. I’m not paranoid, but I am my father’s son, and much of my fascination with marketing stems from my fear of being the big boys’ patsy. Sure, today, we live in a democracy, and yes, for the most part, it leaves us to ourselves, but there are ambitious people who’d like to change this, and some who boast that they’ve already succeeded. I’m like the guy I met flying out of Memphis who told me that he’d joined the local police force because he’d lived next to a drug house for a time and seen how thoroughly the cops had watched the place. True privacy, he concluded, was only possible inside a squad car.

Linda fingers the collar of her uniform. “Free tomorrow? I’ll be home alone. Paul’s in Utah, at archaeology camp, and Dale’s in California, with his dad.”

“Those two are getting along now?”

“It’s court ordered. I could cook you a Thai meal. Something spicy.”

“Big trip ahead. Won’t be back till—I’m not sure.”