Up in the Air

Someday, when I’m not paying for the call, I’ll ask her to tell me exactly how she worked that.

“You there?”

“If you’re planning to meet me, you’ll have to set out now. You’re already late.”

“Your voice,” she says. “You’re loaded. I need you, Ryan. I’m dragging this whole celebration up a hill and I’m doing it alone. Don’t drink. It sours you. You get all quippy.”

“Big day for me,” I say. I watch them file in and hand off wardrobe bags and tussle with the overheads and sit, but the attendance is sparser than I’d pictured and the group less representative, and older. I’d guess that just a third are flying for business and will fully appreciate the feat that’s coming and that most of the rest are aunts and uncles and granddads off to help video births and blow out candles, or else they just did those things and they’re slouching home.

“Bigger day tomorrow,” Kara says. “If people can just look within for twenty seconds and get ahold of their spinning little gears. Hey, Mom needs to know if she should make a room up or if the hide-a-bed is all you’ll need?”

“Room,” I say.

“I figured that already. You forwarded your mail here,” Kara says.

So that’s where it’s going. The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I’ll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth’s curvature allows. It’s a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere—if we could take it all in at once, why move?—and it may be the reason why one-ways cost the same as round-trips. They’re all round-trips, some are just diced up in smaller chunks.

“Pick something up for Mom. Some souvenir. She senses the truth, I think; that this whole thing of yours is all about avoiding her. Some knickknack.”

“A two-time loser is trying for her third tomorrow. Give your clarity a holiday. And whatever happened to ‘Just bring yourself’?”

“The gift’s insurance. In case you don’t quite manage that.”

“We’re set to taxi and you need to start driving.”

“Got you, brother. We’re already in the Suburban and on our way. I’m holding the phone up. That snoring, all that wheezing? Your entire family sacked out, leaving Kara to do the driving, as usual. So don’t drink a drop. Don’t celebrate too soon.”

“I’m drinking,” I say. “Odometer set to turn over soon.”

“Oh, that.”

She’s the master of small words, so I took the big ones.

“Get in safe,” she says. “There’s weather here. There’s black sky to my south and tons of grass and crap is starting to blow, pretty fast, across the road.”

I arrange my materials as we thrust and rise. On the empty seat to my left I set my HandStar, displaying our flight path as a broken line on its amber credit-card-size screen and programmed so I can advance a jet-shaped icon by toggling a key. Fort Dodge, Iowa, is the milestone, as it’s always been—I like the name—and though it’s all an estimate, of course, and I may already have swept across the line, I’ve always been comfortable with imprecision when it’s in the service of sharpened awareness. Factoring in leap years and cosmic wobble, our anniversaries aren’t our anniversaries, our birthdays are someone else’s, and the Three Kings would ride right past Bethlehem if they left today and they steered by the old stars.

Next I unpocket the single-use camera I bought in a gift shop at McCarran this morning. It has no flash, and I wonder if it needs one, though how could any place have more light than here? I’ll let someone else snap the shot, I’m not sure who, though it will be one of the businessmen, naturally, so the photographer knows what he’s commemorating, its size and mass and scope, and will make sure to aim squarely and hold still and not let his thumb tip jut across the lens. I’ll want at least five shots from different angles and one from directly behind me, of my hair, which is how other flyers mostly see me and how I see them. If there’s too much glare I’ll lower my shade, though now, as the plane icon crosses a state border and in the real sky clouds accumulate, I see that I’ll have no problems from the sun, which is nothing but a corona around a thunderhead.

And of course I set out the corny story I wrote after he died and before my sad sabbatical studying the true meaning of train songs. After the other students were done abusing it, I stashed it in the pocket of my travel jacket, where it’s been graying and softening ever since. I honestly don’t remember how it goes, just that I wrote it the night I understood that rowing the uncomprehendingly unwanted across deep waters was not my heart’s desire and needed a limit placed on it, a stop sign. The night I hatched this whole plan, wherever that was, bubble-bathing in some Homestead Suites with a cold beer on the tub that fell and smashed when I reached for it with soapy hands. I had to get out and towel off and drain the tub and feel for silvers, because the glass was clear.

“Excuse me. I was back in the wrong seat. This one with the stuff on it is mine, I think.”