Up in the Air

The Carvery has a pub theme, Utah style. Much brass and wood and bric-a-brac, but beerless. Behind a long slanted shield of milky Plexiglas three fiftyish men whose career paths are enigmas—shouldn’t they at least be chefs by now, or have they been flash frozen by a benefits plan that fosters loyalty but kills ambition?—draw knives with scalloped blades through hams and roasts whose crusts show the charred cross-hatchings of butcher’s string. Dwight holds his plate out and gets three cuttings of well-done pork loin too thick to be called slices, too thin for slabs. Portion control is a Marriott obsession. Dwight nods at the carver to request a fourth piece and the fellow’s reaction shows he’s been well-schooled and qualifies as a professional after all; he delivers up a mere wafer on his broad knife blade, but with a flourish. To get his own back Dwight loads his plate with side dishes, just as Marriott expects him to. At pennies per pound for the cheesy potato medleys and oily pasta salads, the joke’s on him, though he struts away like he’s looted a royal tomb. There: a weakness to file for later on. The man doesn’t know when he’s being nickel-and-dimed.

But where’s the contract? No bulges in his blazer.

He chooses a two-setting table on a platform and takes the wall seat. From his perspective, I’ll blend with the lunch crowd behind me, but from mine he’s all there is, a looming individual. Fine, I’ll play jujitsu. I angle my chair so as to show him the slimmest, one-eyed profile. The look in my other eye he’ll have to guess at.

What I want most now, besides a deal, is the story about Morse Dwight promised me, but I can’t predict the emotions it may stir so I’d better leave it for dessert.

“Your book kept me awake last night,” Dwight says. “Can we bypass the small talk about our food, our meat?”

“By all means.”

“The Garage is . . . It’s a prism, isn’t it? It’s multidimensional, not just some flat tract.”

A prism. This sounds to me like boilerplate.

“Or a palimpsest, maybe that’s more accurate.”

Tape two—I’ve come armed. My one eye shows comprehension and Dwight looks stunned.

“The garret. The studio. Now the garage. It’s an all-American updating. And the book itself was conceived in a garage, because isn’t that where art comes from, so to speak?”

“That’s true,” I say. “What part kept you awake?”

“The whole. The sum. This sense that your concept pre-dates both of us. That it wasn’t so much authored as channeled. Eat.”

“I like to get it all cut up in squares first.”

“I’ve had this feeling before with certain manuscripts, that I’d seen them before, in some other life perhaps. Frankly, I smelled plagiarism.”

I laugh from a place in myself that doesn’t often laugh. A place I associate more with rippling sobs.

“That happens,” Dwight says. “Naked copying. Sheer fraud. It’s not always a crime, though; sometimes it’s an illness. The writer knows the book appeared before, but he feels the original author was the plagiarist and stole from him telepathically. But not in this case. This was daylight larceny. The writer—a midwesterner like you, from one of those states like Missouri, but not Missouri, the one just like it—”

“Arkansas?” I say.

“I think of that as the South. A former slave state.”

“Missouri was too. Read Huckleberry Finn.”

“Please. Do I look like a man who hasn’t? Please.”

“People read and then forget. That’s all I meant.”

“You’re speaking of yourself here?”

“No, everyone.”

“Anyway, I dug up the original, showed it to him side by side with his book, and even then he had a fancy story. Very different from your case.”

“My book’s not stolen.”

“You’ve yet to end it. How could it be?”

“I’m close, though.”

“Does he leave the Garage? I don’t see how he can. We think of garages as places men put behind them once they’re successful. Lincoln’s log cabin. But that’s your twist, of course—for you, the garage is holy and sufficient.”

“Interesting. Until now my idea was that he’d leave eventually, but only once he realized that the whole world . . . Interesting.”

“I’m looking at you. You’re sincere. You’re puzzling through this. I’m glad. This heartens me. You’re not a thief. What’s happened here is pure Huck Finn.”

“Excuse me?”

“Reading and forgetting. And by the way, you were right, I’ve never touched Twain.”

“Are you saying this isn’t my concept?”

“Or title or character or theme or anything. It’s a first-class subconscious memory you have. Photographic. Yet lost to you. Amazing.”