Up in the Air

I ask her why she takes so many pills, my concern for her seeming genuine, even to me, and she says she doesn’t—the pills are a collection, a way of adapting to the flying life and self-employment, which she’s never grown used to. Consulting with a doctor in each new city is like redesigning the lighting in her hotel rooms; it helps her to feel connected and at ease; and she only asks the physicians for prescriptions because she’s from Wyoming and grew up poor and believes in value for her money. She broke them out tonight because she saw I’d stolen a fair number and she concluded that drugs were my passion or maybe just my pastime and she wanted to swing along, not be a spoilsport. I tell her I buy all this, although few others would, because I know what she’s up against out here, having to set up anew each time she lands—I do it, too, by rooting for local teams, and I tell her the story about the Bulls and Timberwolves. “So: Poseidon’s Grotto in fifteen minutes? Come as whoever,” I say. And then I add: “I finally remembered you,” because it’s true. A minute ago, when I realized there’d be no penalty, I flashed on the morning I played headhunter to Alex’s kittenish job seeker in cashmere, though the nuts were peanuts, not pistachios.

“We had chemistry, didn’t we?” she says.

“I wouldn’t go that far. I enjoyed the outfits. I wasn’t capable then of having chemistry.”

“You think our limo’s still out front?”

“I’m certain.”

“We could drive to that secret air base in the desert where they supposedly autopsy the aliens and sit on a rock with a carton of cold milk and watch the skies for experimental craft.”

Now, that’s my idea of doing Las Vegas. “Yes.”

“Why weren’t you like this before?”

Can’t answer that.

“Or maybe,” she says, “we should wait a week or two and see if we’re still interested?”

“Oh.”

“That would be wiser, I think.”

In bed, alone, I recall that tonight was about survival only, so I’ve succeeded. The rest was all a bonus. And I may just have met my soul mate tonight, though I’m still not sure which one she was.

sixteen

this business of hassled travelers waking up not knowing where they are has always seemed false to me, a form of bragging, as when someone tells me at a business lunch that it’s been years since he really tasted his food. The more I’ve traveled, the better I’ve become at orienting myself with a few clues, and the harder it’s gotten to lose myself. I’m perpetually mapping and triangulating, alert to accents, hairstyles, cloud formations, the chemical bouquets of drinking water. Nomadism means vigilance, and to wake up bewildered and drifting and unmoored is a privilege of the settled, it seems to me—of the farmer who’s spent his whole life in one white house, rising to the same roosters.

The light in my room is Las Vegas morning light, there’s none other like it in all America—a stun gun to the soul. It picks out the pistils and stamens in the lilies and the ashes of the spent incense cones. My mobile is halfway through its second ring, and because I’m now down to unwelcome callers only, I hesitate before answering. I’d give anything for a moment of dislocation, a blessed buffer zone.

“I’m downstairs with a car on the way,” Craig Gregory says. “I thought you might like a ride to the convention center. You’ll want to check the acoustics, the power spots. You going to use a lectern and sermonize or do the walkabout talk-show act? We’re curious.”

“I haven’t showered.”

“Use it for effect. Too conscience-stricken to bathe. I’ll wait out front, next to the big pink granite Dionysus.”

I do my best with razor, soap, and toothbrush, but it’s like polishing a wormy apple. Motivation is low. Virtue’s bugle call is silent. I rehearse a few brave phrases from my talk but the face in the steamy mirror seems unmoved. The point of the speech was to hear myself deliver it, but I already have, a hundred times, and clearly my best performance is behind me. The true act of courage this morning would be to cancel and live with the knowledge of Craig Gregory’s office-wide “I told you so’s.” It’s the sole penance left to me, and I must snatch it.

I pack up my carry-on but it won’t zip. I leave it on the bed. My briefcase, too. Luggage, for me, was an affectation anyway, a way to reassure strangers and hotel clerks that I hadn’t just been released from prison and that I’d make good on my bills. I ditch the white-noise generator as well. The thing enfeebled me. If a person can’t lose consciousness on his own, if thinking his thoughts is that important to him, then let him lie on his bed of nails. He’ll cope.