Up in the Air

It’s a voice I’ve only heard in dreams, where it was usually half an octave lower and transparently that of my father at fifty, when he first ran for representative and adopted the hands-off approach to gas delivery that emboldened a ruthless competitor based way off in St. Paul but spreading west. The face, though, I know from pictures in his magazine. That sun-kissed golf-and-tennis ageless skin I liked to think had been softened in the dark room, but appeals even more in person, I now see. The worry lines around the eyes are new, though, and there’s an acrid top note in his breath—of failure and drift and working for one’s self.

I gather my things and pouch them in my seatback and start to stand, though he motions me back down. “You’re it today. You’re on your throne. Don’t move. It’s Soren. I feel like we know each other, Ryan. Christine, a bottle of white. No stingy miniatures.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cold, not lukewarm.”

“Don’t carry that kind. Sorry.” A joke between them. Everyone knows the service has fallen off and no one, not even the chief, knows what to do. More money, and a shower in his office, but on the whole he’s in this with the rest of us.

Morse nestles in beside me and we shake hands and then we stretch out a little and touch elbows. He pulls his arm away first and lets mine rest. The plane skims over what feels like washboard gravel and rumbles some, and glasses chatter on trays.

“The way our best math minds have tallied it,” he says, “as of today, you’re our tenth. Congratulations. You expected a private lunch, I realize, but this’ll have to be our date, right here. My board and I came to terms a week ago and I’m moving on effective six October. It’s more meaningful this way. Share the living moment.”

“Yes. It is.” I’m back the way I started; single syllables. They get the point across.

“Funny story. We counted wrong before—” Christine arrives with a bottle, glasses, napkins, and as we unlatch our trays more rumbles come and then a tricky atmospheric pothole that lasts just a second but jostles pretty Christine and forces her to stiff-arm Morse’s seat corner. The glasses ring together in her hand and down floats a napkin, onto Morse’s knee.

“We thought the big trip was Billings-Denver,” he says. “We had a party set up in the crew lounge. We paged, but I guess the speakers weren’t so clear. We’d estimated wrong, so it was fine.”

The man’s unemployed now. His next step won’t be up. It’s over the instant they tell you, not the moment you go.

“You did it again in Reno this week,” I say. Christine is decanting, but shouldn’t be on her feet—not with the seat belt sign lit. It just came on.

“I’m not aware—”

It’s a big one and it’s lateral, like a shark shaking meat in its jaws. Our topped-up goblets slide over my way, but we snatch them somehow. Warm Chablis sloshes over on my sleeve and Morse and Christine exchange looks that don’t reflect a master-and-servant imbalance but meet head on. Somehow this sight alarms me more than anything. Christine goes forward bracing hands on chairbacks—not to her fold-down jump seat, but to the cockpit, closing the door in time for a new lateral, though this one has a pitch and stronger swim. My oval window streams diagonally, then milks up and fogs; as crosswinds drive the droplets straight at the plastic. Off and down and forward there’s white-green lightning, not bolts, but blurs. Morse buckles himself in and I do, too. The sight of a man of his stature, or former stature, strapped in across the thighs and struggling to feed more belt through for a snugger hold, disorients more than the turbulence.

Our captain speaks and, as usual, minimizes, and I can see mottling on Morse’s wrists and a coiled desire to shout at someone and demand results this very minute, but the huffy, flushed look seems childish under the circumstances, and Morse knows this, it seems, and won’t look me in the eye but mentally shuts himself inside his office, refusing to take calls. We bronco again and then bang down an escalator that must floor out somewhere but keeps not doing so, and then we’re on a whole new ride, even steeper, and my wineglass ejects a column of solid liquid that hangs for a time directly before my eyes and actually shows inner particles and bends light.

Our keel evens but it’s a trick and no one’s buying and yet it remains even, just to torture us, though level is level, I see after a while, and normal is the most usual condition, so why question normal? Normal’s what got us here. There’s also more light now, both under and ahead, and light somehow speaks more reliably than flatness about the prospects of its own continuing.