Up in the Air

“Blameless. It’s happened twice this year to me.”

Craig Gregory folds his hands. He bows, comes back to me. “I’ll be there for your breakfast sermon tomorrow. The title has people concerned. I’m not one of them. I know how you pussy out. I’ll sit up front. Lisa, this is a man on his last legs, so give him much succor. We hear you give great succor.”

“Die in hell, you gonorrheal prick.”

“Hear that, Bingham? What this bitch just said? That’s how healthy people respond to me. Take note. You’re not too old to get it right.”

The purple drink is still out there looking for me when I sit at the bar with Lisa and order another by pointing at one just like it two spots down. The bartender, leaves in his hair, a loose white robe, asks Lisa if she’d like one, too—a mere formality—and she says no. It’s a startling negation, and it’s infectious. I cancel my order as though I never meant it. The craze will be extinct within ten minutes.

I want this Lisa. I excuse myself, swivel on my stool, sneak two more pills, and phone my room on the mobile. I have a plan. If she’s there, I’ll hang up. If she’s not, I’ll dare to hope that she’s joined Art’s girl out there in the cyclone. No answer. Will it be safe to go back up, though? What I should do is book another room and abandon my personal effects, which, by design, are not that personal but standard items available anywhere. I’ll miss my sleep machine, whose “prairie wind” track is unique as far as I can tell, but nothing else. The tapes of The Garage are best mislaid. That way there’s at least a possibility that in ten years or twenty, at a rummage sale, an intern at Business Week will pay a nickel for them, listen to them on a whim, and call his boss. The authorship of the scrolls will be disputed—Tarkenton? Salinger? Billy Graham the Younger?—and a stream of pretenders will come forward waving bogus polygraph results. Me, I’ll hang back in my Idaho retreat, content with my dogs, my Mormon faith, my wives.

Or, if this works with Lisa, my one true love.

“What’s MythTech like?” There’s no other way to start. “I thought no one quit there. I heard that if you’re fired they buy you out for life, or pretty close.”

She pinches the filter off a Marlboro. She’s out of little cigars and needs particulates.

“Of course people leave. They just don’t blab about it.”

“Scared?”

“I’d say cautious. Maybe still perplexed. It’s not like a regular consultancy. Take what I did: Market Ecology. The study of non-obvious interactions among diverse commercial entities.”

“Beautiful. And no CTC department, am I right?”

“No departments at all. The model’s plasma. Nuclear plasma fields. Pretentious.”

“Gorgeous. At play in the fields of the Lord. Just think, just float. And no travel, I hear, and just a bare-bones headquarters. You can work from home. From anywhere. It’s all electronic, humanistic, fractal.”

“What are you on? I want some. I’m fading here.”

Somehow I produce three pills for each of us. It’s like the loaves and fishes, my right front pocket. Or did I lie to myself about how many I stole?

“Anyway, Lisa. Me. The market ecologist. A project comes down one day from Spack and Sarrazin. It isn’t true that they’re lovers, by the way. Sarrazin is crazy for his wife and Spack is a neuter. Born that way. He’ll tell you.”

“Haven’t heard one breath of any of this. A friend of mine who said he had a wife died this week and I hear now he was gay, so basically I’ve written off these topics. The people themselves don’t understand their leanings—that’s my conclusion. I’m growing wise by leaps.”

“The problem was tripartite,” Lisa says. “Fiber optics, red meat, and propane gas.”

I clutch her gesturing hand in mid-air. “My dad sold propane.”

“I started with the easy ones. Gas plus red meat equals grills and patios and heart problems and the insurance that covers them and all those ramifications. But fiber optics? Maybe a gas grill that’s somehow data-linked to a repair center whose low-wage workers only lunch at Wendy’s or McDonald’s not just because it’s a grunt job and they’re broke but because they’re on call to diagnose malfunctions and can’t leave their screens for more than fifteen minutes?”

“You’re asking a question?”

“Or maybe it’s like automated cattle ranches fed with real-time commodities reports that lead to higher profits per animal and thus increased contributions to co-op ad campaigns promoting beef versus chicken? I couldn’t think!”

“Who was the client? A supermarket chain?”

“I’m not even sure there was a client, Ray.”

“Ryan. That’s okay. It’s dark in here.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” Lisa says. “I know what you mean, though. I’m high myself, from earlier. What’s ‘blue bottle’? That’s what the kid kept calling it.”

“I’m not down on the street a lot. Don’t know.”