Up in the Air

The club attendant waves us in with all the graciousness of a royal doorman. I check Julie’s face; she’s flattered, I can see it. The buffet impresses her too—she pauses, stares. Midwesterners are beguiled by free food, even anorexics, apparently; it speaks to our unconscious, collective longing for a bounteous harvest. I pour myself a glass of orange juice from one of the glass carafes propped up in ice buckets (why do they always offer tomato and prune juice? Does anyone actually drink them anymore?) and watch as Julie reviews the pastry tray and uses a pair of scalloped metal tongs to select a caloric lemon Danish dusted with powdered sugar. And she’s not finished. She empties a single-serving box of bran flakes into a paper bowl, tops it with raisins and a glob of yogurt, then breaks off a greenish banana from a bunch of them, peels it, and slices it with a plastic knife.

“Get a table by the big TV there. You can watch your portfolio. CMB.”

“What’s that?”

“A little global bank you own a piece of. It’s up two points. You’re richer every minute.”

I duck into one of the carrels in the business center and dial my assistant in Denver. He’s there, for once. He has a memo on Texas he needs to fax me, but Texas is over, it’s obsolete. I punted. He gives me the address of Dwight’s hotel in Phoenix and passes on several other routine messages, including another from Linda at DIA. He confirms my Las Vegas hotel reservation, which I ask him to cancel because the Cinema Grand has labor issues, I read in last week’s Journal, and part of the new me is not being a scab. I ask for a suite at the Mount Apollo instead, the place with the five-story revolving Pegasus that spreads its great fiberglass wings on the half hour.

“One more little thing,” I say. “Contact Great West baggage at DIA and ask if they have a piece of luggage for me. If they do, have it sent to the office and open it.”

“You lost a bag?”

“That’s what they’re telling me.”

“I don’t know if I should mention this,” says Kyle, “but I saw a sort of strange memo on your desk. Craig Gregory’s assistant delivered it by mistake; he grabbed it back ten minutes after he brought it. The subject line read ‘Faithful Orange.’ ”

“Interesting.”

“Your initials were in the text. ‘RB in place,’ it said.”

“That’s all?”

“There was more, but I didn’t have time to read it. They snatched it out of my hand, like it was secret.”

“Sniff around and tell me what you find.”

“What’s Faithful Orange?”

“I have no idea.”

The air in the club smells of lint and vacuum bags and behind me I hear the cable financial guru predicting a major downturn in corporate bonds. He steered me right on Chase Manhattan, after all. I sit for a while in the tilting, castered chair and watch a light rain gust in out of the west, speckling the runways as it advances and sending the ground workers scrambling for orange slickers. It takes so many people to keep me airborne—night-shift janitors riding rotary waxers, crawl-space plumbers wielding clamps and wrenches, meteorologists, navigators, cooks—and this morning I feel like I’m failing them somehow. My skeleton feels like a ladder of lead pipes.

I recognize Faithful Orange as a project code, but I can only guess what it refers to. ISM’s founders came up through the military, a crew-cut cadre of logistics specialists who took what they’d learned supplying Vietnam with freeze-dried beef stew and tents and bayonets and applied it, in their first big contract, to the global distribution of auto parts. The corporate culture they spawned is leakproof, rigid. No shoptalk, no gossip. Dungeons inside of dungeons. For all I know MythTech is our subsidiary, and Great West itself is run by our alumni, with Morse as their strutting puppet. Faithful Orange. Orange is the airline’s official color, and considering that it’s at war with Desert Air, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re our client.

I’ve never trusted ISM. My position in the firm has never been clear to me, and the path to promotion is winding and obscure. Some people advance by leaving and returning, and the people who don’t advance . . . well, they just vanish. Two years later you hear they’ve opened a bed-and-breakfast or bought out a Kinko’s franchise in Keokuk. That’s what you hear, but it seems more like they’ve died.

RB in place. I’m part of something big.

Julie, God bless her, is back at the buffet, spooning more yogurt onto her granola. She looks better already, less sunk inside herself. The rain has picked up and it’s sheeting the tall windows, distorting the silhouette of the control tower. I check the departures monitor. Bad news. Our flight, 119, is twenty minutes delayed, and twenty minutes is almost always a lie. It means we’ll get back to you. It means buzz off.

“Is that our old friend Ryan Bingham? How’s he been?”