Up in the Air

She gives me a pouty, disappointed look that’s meant to look clownish but comes off as incensed. I’ve treated her poorly, worse than most of them. Two months ago she teased me into bed, then put on a showy, marathon performance that struck me as rehearsed, even researched. The encounter left me thirsty, gulping ice water, and reminded me of my early dates with Lori, the woman I ought to refer to as my ex-wife but can’t quite manage to—we weren’t that close. She was a tigress too, packed full of stunts. Now and then I’d catch her in the middle of a particularly far-fetched pose and see that it wasn’t appetite that drove her but some idea, some odd erotic theory. Maybe she’d come across it in a magazine, or maybe in a college psychology class. The pressure her notions put on our encounters was just too much, though, and even before we married we found ourselves fantasizing about a child, perhaps as a way to simplify our lovemaking. When Lori still wasn’t pregnant two years later (I doubt I’ll ever get over the desolation of all those negative drugstore test kits; the crisp instruction booklets, the faint pink minus signs), we hurled ourselves into skiing and mountain biking, playing the fresh-air couple on the go. We dropped weight, gained stamina, and emerged as strangers. A baby? We were virtually the same sex by then—two boyish hardbodies, rugged and untouchable.

That’s when I changed careers and started flying—two days a week at first, then three, then four, spreading the gospel of successful outplacement from Bakersfield to Bismarck. One night, after twenty consecutive days away, I drove home from the airport to our garden apartment and found on the doorstep a heap of rolled-up newspapers dating back to the morning of my departure.

“I’d better push on. I have calls to make,” I say. “You see any promising houses, take a peek for me.”

“What kind of thing are you looking for?”

“Low maintenance.”

“Come over and eat with me.”

“Soon.”

“We miss you, Ryan.”

The club is empty for a weekday morning. The stacks of newspapers stand straight and square, the armchair cushions are puffy and unwrinkled. Some lull in the business cycle, apparently. They happen, these little brownouts of activity. Maybe they’re biological events—a flu epidemic compounded by sunless weather spreads a deep fatigue across the land—but I do know all weeks aren’t equal. Things rise and fall.

The espresso machine whirrs and burbles at my touch, filling a cup exactly to the brim. The gizmo deserves to be thanked, it works so beautifully. People aren’t grateful enough to such devices. Mute valets supply our every need, but instead of pausing in acknowledgment, we jump to the next thing, issue another order. I wonder if some imbalance is building up here, a karmic gap between humans and their tools. Machines will be able to think not long from now, and as the descendants of slaves, they won’t be happy. I shared this idea once with an IT specialist flying out of Austin. He didn’t dismiss it. He told me about a field called Techno-Ethics that’s concerned with the question of whether computers have rights.

For me, the question is whether we’ll have any.

At a pay phone in one of the private business nooks between the rest rooms and the luggage lockers I rank the calls I need to make this morning. Using downtime efficiently is key—making the most of the minutes inside the minutes. I dial my credit card number (five miles right there; such silent accounting shadows my every thought), then enter a Seattle area code and the number for Advanta Publishing. I’m calling a man I’ve met just once before but who I believe can make a difference for me. We both believe in the future of The Garage, my “motivational fable” of an inventor who toils in his workshop, alone and undistracted, while out in the world his breakthrough innovations spawn a commercial empire he never sees. The theme is concentration, inner purity. The book isn’t long—a hundred pages or so—but that’s the trend now, wisdom in your pocket. There are men in my field who’ve made millions off such volumes, and if I can do half that well I’ll be fixed by forty and can spend the next decade working off my miles with weekend jaunts to Manhattan, if I’m still single, or with round-trips to Disney World if I have a family.