Up in the Air

“I’m not kidding. Cancel everything.”

“I’ve been working up to it all week.”

“Ryan?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You’re loaded. It hurts to look at you. Can I get something off your forehead that’s been bugging me?”

She goes right ahead. I’ll never know what it was.

“I was going to say we should eat. You probably need to. This isn’t you, though. This is not my friend. I’m going to my room to study my materials for tomorrow’s seminar.”

“Don’t do it. Be kind, it’s that easy. Burn all workbooks. Erase all cassette tapes and dub them over with song.”

She kisses my cheek and it burns like the hot match heads my mother would use to make ticks release her children. “Goodbye, Ryan. I don’t think we’ll have more dates. This seminar has me thinking I’ll try nursing school, so I might not be at the club much longer, either. I think I always meant to be a nurse but veered a few degrees. Like you’ve said you did.”

“What did I tell you I set out to be?”

“A folk guitarist.”

I’m baffled. It’s so specific. “When was this, anyway?”

“June. Three months ago.”

“Wait here a minute, Linda. I’m coming down. Some ice water to dilute this and I’ll be me again. I want to reconstruct this folk guitar talk. Were we at your condo? Come back. Don’t wave. You know how we think we don’t have feelings for someone, but maybe it’s because they’re just too powerful? I love you. I have always loved you, Linda.”

Oh well, she had her chance. We’re all free agents now. Remember, it’s a lattice, a continuum, so it’s not like anything’s final. Nothing’s final. To the contrary. It’s win-win. It’s synergistic. Read Pinter on Quantum Granular Non-Hierarchies. Or hell, read between the lines of Winnie-the-Pooh, that cuddly avatar of Taoism. Milne knew it, he just couldn’t say it plainly then—the shadow of Victorianism or something. This is twenty-first-century Nevada, though. Scream it, feel free. Nothing’s final. It’s all a loop. We’ve been re-engineered. Like PepsiCo.

Back to Art and the tables. He’s behaving like I was, razzing a new dealer from Lima, Ohio, about the healed-over piercings in his eyebrows, discerning the face of the Virgin in his cards. He either lost everything while I was gone and bought back in with a mad five thousand bucks or he’s in the statistical slipstream, he’s supersonic. If you come in at the end of someone’s streak, the two conditions appear identical. If anything, it’s the big winners who look depressed, because grins are jinxes and it just can’t last, and the losers who smile, because they can go home soon.

I wander off into the crowd. GoalQuesters dominate. I get a fat wink from Dick Geertz at Andersen, who hit his United miles mark a year ago, but only because he commutes to Tokyo, so really there’s no comparison between us. I notice a drink in several colleagues’ hands of layered purples and violets and toothpicked melon chunks, so I flag down a waitress and order one by pointing. I ask what its name is and she says no one knows, that everybody else just pointed, too. When I tell her that someone had to start this thing, she flat doesn’t buy it. She’s a creationist. She’s also, I sense, much happier than I am.

“Hey, Bingham, I need you to meet someone. Get over here.”

It’s Craig Gregory calling. I hustle toward my punishment. The waitress will hunt me down. She’ll use her network.

“Bingham, this is Lisa Jeffries Kimmel. Lisa, Ryan.”

“Hi.”

“I’ve heard your name.”

“I’ve heard yours.” What satanic liars we are.

“Lisa is coming to ISM next month after an interesting stint in Omaha. I know you think they’re pursuing you, that bunch, so I’m guessing you’ll want to pick her pretty brain.”

Lisa looks down. She’s small and dark and beautiful and bizarrely shapely in the way of a bonsai tree compared to a full-size tree.

“Not that Omaha’s called him,” Craig Gregory tells her, “or written or faxed or anything like that. It’s just something he thinks. It gets him through the night.”

Someone squealed on me. My assistant, no doubt. Some agency sends them, you think they’re harmless drifters, be gone by winter, but really they’re your minders, briefed at a central location and later debriefed. It’s a business model, even if it’s not true.

“I’ll leave you two here. Full evening ahead of me at the convention center, followed by Streisand’s annual farewell gig at the MGM.”

I snag his elbow and step back from Lisa. “Someone sent me that bear you gave me, Craig. Mutilated. I’m pinning it on you. You’re who I gave him back to when he retired.”

Craig Gregory rubs his chin and opens a shaving cut that smears blood on his thumb tip, which he kisses dry. Tough little Lisa torches a cigarillo and hungers over the craps action all around us.

“That toy had two consecutive huge Christmases. I doubt you’re in possession of the original. By the way, your corporate AmEx? Confiscated. No more charging Hong Kong custom suits.”

“Computer crime. It wasn’t me,” I say. “If it goes in my file, I’ll sue.”

“Did you overhear that one, Lisa? Any thoughts?”