Up in the Air

“Nothing good.”

Morse is making this personal. He’ll pay.

“What do we do? Go back to Utah now?”

“That never works.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Going back.”

ten

i work quickly, rebooking us to Phoenix through Denver. The only available seats are in economy. The agent snickers delivering this news; I’ve dealt with him before, and he’s a pest. He’s sickly, always sniffling and coughing, and handing out infected boarding passes gives him a sadistic thrill, no doubt. If only Morse knew how poorly his employees, as grudging as nineteenth-century clerks, with no higher sense of process or brand goodwill, reflect on his credentials as a leader. Commissioner of baseball? Not a chance. Commissioner of youth league soccer, maybe.

The agent picks up his phone when I walk off—reporting to his masters? No way to know.

On our way to the gate we buy mochas and cinnamon rolls. Twelve dollars. Julie is outraged. She tastes her coffee and tells me it’s not even hot. Mine’s not hot either, but I had no expectations that it would be. That’s the secret to satisfaction nowadays. Julie asks me about my book and I say, “Later.” I was supposed to talk with her. I haven’t. A rowdy bunch of uniformed marines shoves past us on the moving walkway, running. A cart glides by with a blind man in the back, his cane sticking over the side and nearly swiping people.

The Denver plane is a 727 with haggard upholstery and discolored wings, black streaks of corrosion trailing from every bolt. It clatters into the air and through the clouds and breaks out into a sunlit turquoise plain riddled with nasty whirlpools of clear-air turbulence. Julie reaches over and grips my wrist while fingering with her free hand a silver cross hanging against her breastbone inside her shirt. When did this strike? She’s been born-again again? All around me lately God is claiming people. Am I still on his list, or has he skipped me? We jolt again and Julie bows her head and doesn’t look up until the ride is smooth. The fear improves her color.

“I can’t go back. I’m going to, of course, but I can’t. I’m all confused,” she says.

There’s a pressure behind her face; she wants to talk now. This isn’t the place. There’s no room to move, to gesture. Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.

“Keith cares too much. It makes me feel . . . responsible. He won’t drink the last of the milk. He says it’s mine. When we wake up in bed I’m hogging the whole middle and he’s falling over the edge.”

“A relationship is a closed dynamic system.”

“Can I tell you a story? We’re shopping for a car. Keith says I need something safe, with lots of airbags, but I’m thinking I’d like a truck, for hauling kennels. I ask the salesman, who’s been showing us station wagons, to show us some pickups. I fall in love with one. I ask about the pickup’s safety rating compared to the wagons. ‘Not good,’ the salesman says. I turn to Keith and say ‘It’s your decision, hon,’ but he doesn’t respond, he just stands there. It gets embarrassing. It’s like he’s gone catatonic, had a stroke. Finally, I say ‘I’ll get the wagon, okay?’ Nothing. A blank. I literally had to shake him.”

She rambles on and I listen without listening. The clouds below have a complicated topography, dimpled and grooved and folded and corrugated, with broad estuarial fans along their edges. (Estuarial—there, I’ve finally used it.) It’s Wednesday down there, but what day is it up here? At times, in the afternoon, when flying east, I can see night bearing down across the continent, and the feeling is one of powerless omniscience. To know what’s coming and when it will arrive and see the places it’s already been is a counterfeit wisdom. It ought to help, but doesn’t.

Julie keeps talking. Though I barely hear her, I manage to be a brother to her merely by sitting nearby and shedding heat. She’ll go through with her wedding, I’m certain of it, but only once she’s drawn sufficient energy from me, her original hero, her first security. We talk about our father as though we loved him, but that was something we only discovered afterwards; while he was alive, he mostly worried us. He’d taken on so much—the house, the trucks, the loans, our mother—and we could see him sagging. His business was our protection, all we had, but nothing protected his business, and this scared us. We reserved our love for one another, brother and sisters, because everything else seemed borrowed against, at risk.

“Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“Weird question: are you rich? The way you bought my ticket, just like that, not even asking the price.”

“I’ve saved. I’m comfortable.”

“Do you date? Do you have a love life?”

“I like to think so. I’m meeting a woman in Vegas tomorrow night.”

“A stranger. Disease doesn’t worry you?”

“I’m in the soup. If you’re in the soup and get wet, then you get wet.”