Up in the Air

“Interesting,” I say. I’m always interested. I’m big on hearsay and inside information, and I pay the price in my portfolio—an assortment of esoteric, long-shot tips whispered to me over in-flight scotch and sodas. I forget my losers when I hit a winner, which I’m told is a sign of a gambling addiction. In truth, I just don’t care much about money. We always had enough when I grew up, and then one day, when my father went bust, we didn’t. Not a lot changed. The house and car were paid for, we never ate out, and we’d always shopped garage sales for everything but major appliances, which my father knew how to repair. We threw a few more garage sales, that was all. It’s like that in Minnesota, outside the cities. A town finds a certain level in its spending and almost everyone clusters around the mean so that no one has to feel bad if poor luck comes.

“It’s the freelance mentality,” Danny said. “Americans now like to think they don’t owe anyone. Everyone’s an original, self-made. Class rings depend on nostalgia, on gratitude. I tell myself it’ll swing around someday, but maybe it won’t. Not all things swing around.”

“This one will. I’ve seen research.”

“Fill me in.”

I popped a salted almond in my mouth, avoiding my left molars when I bit down. Last week, munching caramel corn at LAX, I’d lost a gold crown that I still hadn’t replaced. A steady relationship with a good dentist is tough to maintain in Airworld.

“You’ve heard of ‘linking’? Linking is part of identity formation. The drive to attach. To join with larger forces. The opposite is the urge to be yourself. The surveys show people are feeling out of balance here—people of higher income levels, that is. They’re getting tired of going it alone, and that’s predictive of certain behavior changes. Take Orthodox Catholic churches. They’re in a boom.”

“People actually study this sort of thing?”

“Make fun. Go ahead. It’s hocus-pocus.”

“No.” Danny pinched a wattle in his neck, one of those involuntary fat checks performed by men who know they’re falling apart. “We hear this same stuff in sales training. It’s real. It’s just that I can’t believe the level it’s reached.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’m sure I don’t. It scares me.”

I reached for another unwanted cigarette. An alien appetite had me in its grip, but it was too late at night to probe its source. “I think it’s too late to be scared. Can I be honest?”

“Two guys in a bar who will never talk again because one’s going to probably stroke or seize climbing the stairs to his room tonight. Be honest.”

“The decisions we make—I’m not sure they’re really ours. I think we’ve been figured out.”

“I doubt that, Ryan.”

“Example. There was a new, hit doll last Christmas. Baby Cruddles. Silly name, I know. Filthy, pinched little rat face. Filthy clothes. The kids liked it fine, but parents loved the thing. Why? Easy answer. They’re hypochondriacs, petrified of viruses, bacteria. They’re having children later, in their forties, and it makes them overprotective. Hypervigilant. This Cruddles doll helped discharge that inner tension.”

“And somebody had all this figured in advance?”

“Gloria Leo. I know her personally. She works for Ford & Farmer in San Francisco.”

“So why can’t someone do this for class rings?”

“Stay healthy and I bet you’ll see the day.”

“The reasons to live are just piling up tonight.”

The Giants lost. The bartender changed channels, then vanished into the back with the remote. We were left watching one of those roundtable shows that usually include a Princeton historian saying that while we’ve made progress on problem X, it’s no time to get complacent or lower our guards. Tonight the topic was bioengineering. One panelist said the male role in reproduction would soon be made redundant by technology, and Danny croaked back: “And not a day too soon.” I might as well have been sitting with my father. He took an apartment after the divorce and set up a cockpit around his television, stuffing himself with heat-and-eat lasagna and smoking White Owls down to the plastic tips. A progressive whose favorite president was Reagan, a liberal who underpaid the IRS, he died believing in a one-hundred-year plot to snuff out farmers and small businessmen. The scheme dated back to 1918, he said, and was looking like it would conclude ahead of schedule.

Danny abandoned his drink and lurched upstairs and left me alone with a fellow three barstools down who looked familiar from my CTC work. My sharpest fear when I travel is bumping into someone I’ve spoken to about “free agency” and “self-directed professional enhancement.” If such a person slapped me, I wouldn’t fight; I’d drop on all fours and bow my sinful head. Luckily, I was wrong about the man. He was a Great West pilot who’d shaken my hand once during a deplaning.

“How are the contract talks?” I ventured.

“Stalled.”

“Drink?”

“Just a Coke. I’m flying tomorrow,” he said. “Hell, let’s sneak a little rum in there.”

“No job actions planned, I hope.”