Up in the Air

I smile to myself. It all connects up here. Across the aisle from me a famous businessman, a securities analyst with his own TV show and a foundation for troubled urban youth, has fallen asleep with a Sprite in his right hand and the beam from the overhead reading light shining into his slack and gaping mouth. The gold in there is amazing, a savage image that I feel strangely privileged to behold. The flight attendant peeks, too—we share a smirk. That mouth moves markets, and look at it: an ore field!

Celebrities always seem slightly lost on planes. Five years ago, I found myself surrounded by a rock band I’d worshiped as a kid. Two of them sat alone in their own rows and two had girls with them. Their trademark hairstyles—tortured, spiky crests of dull black thatch—looked overdone in such a neutral setting. The drummer, an alleged hotel-room smasher who’d supposedly had his blood replaced at an exclusive clinic in Geneva, thumbed a handheld video game. The singer, the star, sat still and stared ahead as though he’d lost power and was waiting for repairs. His fame seemed to call for a class beyond first, and I couldn’t help but think less of him, somehow, for sharing a cabin with the likes of me.

The professional athletes stick out most of all. The moment they were scouted in their teens everything stopped for them. Just stay well and eat. They’re served special meals, fat steaks with huge chef’s salads, and if they want more salt they hail a trainer, who tells a flight attendant, who hops to it. The players discuss their injuries, their cars, their investments in nightclubs and auto dealerships. It’s a sleepy existence, from what I can see, devoted to conserving energy. Parents push sheepish kids to shake their hands and the athletes oblige with a minimum of effort, sometimes without even turning their massive heads. Such inertia, such stillness. I envy it.

This is the place to see America, not down there, where the show is almost over. After college, I crossed the country with a girlfriend, loading a Subaru wagon with beer and sleeping bags and flipping coins to pick that day’s state highway. The girl was sheltered, the daughter of two professors who’d consulted with campus colleagues on her upbringing. No TV. A multilingual reading list. She hungered for mini-golf, for roadside farm stands, for wicked stares from old-timers in greasy spoons. She read On the Road as we drove, declaimed the thing. I knew I was being used—her native guide—and that she’d drop me once the trip looped back to her parents’ cottage on Nantucket, but I wanted to show her something she hadn’t seen.

I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims. They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards. The hitchhikers didn’t tell stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys. In Kansas, my girlfriend threw away the book at a truckstop Dunkin’ Donuts stand and called her father for a ticket home. She’s a Penn State sociologist now, raising her kids the same way she was raised, and I doubt that she’s thought twice in fifteen years about our hoboing. No reason to. The real America had left the ground and we’d spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.

The TV stock-picker wakes and blows his nose, then inspects the airline hand towel for lost gold. I take off my earphones and open the AirMall catalogue tucked in my seatback to browse for wedding presents. AirMall guarantees next-day delivery on items ordered in-flight, via airphone, and features offbeat products not found in stores: silver space pens whose ink flows upside down, alarm clocks that beam the time onto the ceiling, portable inversion boards for back pain. Sometimes I fall for these gimmicky wonder items, sending them ahead to my hotel so I’ll have something waiting with my name on it. I have a weakness for white-noise machines that simulate waterfalls and breaking surf. Lately, I can’t sleep without these gadgets. The one I own now is tuned to “summer cloudburst” and I can’t wait to turn it on tonight.