Up In The Air Part 1

Up in the air : a novel.

by Walter Kirn.

one.

to know me you have to fly with me. Sit down. I'm the aisle, you're the window-trapped. You crack your paperback, last spring's big legal thriller, convinced that what you want is solitude, though I know otherwise: you need to talk. The jaunty male flight attendant brings our drinks: a two percent milk with one ice cube for me, a Wild Turkey for you. It's wet outside, the runways streaked and dark. Late afternoon. The first-cla.s.s cabin fills with other businessmen who switch on their laptops and call up lengthy spreadsheets or use the last few moments before takeoff to punch in cell-phone calls to wives and clients. Their voices are bright but shallow, no diaphragms, their sentences kept short to save on tolls, and when they hang up they face the windows, sigh, and reset their watches from Central time to Mountain. For some of them this means a longer day, for others it means eating supper before they're hungry. One fellow lowers his plastic window shade and wedges his head between two skimpy pillows, while another unlatches his briefcase, looks inside, then shuts his eyes and rubs his jaw, exhausted.

Your own work is done, though, temporarily. All week you've been out hustling, courting hot prospects in franchised seafood bars and steering a rented Intrepid along strange streets that didn't match the markings in your atlas. You gave it your all, and for once your all was good enough to placate a boss who fears for his own job. You've stashed your tie in your briefcase, freed your collar, and slackened your belt a notch or two. To breathe. Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

"Is that the one about the tax-fraud murders? I'm hearing his plots aren't what they used to be."

You stall before answering, trying to discourage me. To you, I'm a type. A motormouth. A pest. You're still getting over that last guy, LA to Portland, whose grandson was just admitted to Stanford Law. A brilliant kid, and a fine young athlete, too, he started his own business as a teen computerizing local diaper services-though what probably clinched his acceptance was his charity work; the kid has a soft spot for homeless immigrants, which pretty much describes all of us out west, though some are worse off than others. We're the lucky ones.

"I'm on page eleven," you say. "The plot's still forming."

"It hit number four on the Times Times list." list."

"Don't read that paper."

"You live in Denver? Going home?"

"I'm trying."

"Tell me about it. Nothing but delays."

"Foul weather at one of the hubs."

"Their cla.s.sic line."

"I guess they don't take us for much these days."

"Won't touch that. Interesting news about the Broncos yesterday."

"Pro football's a farce."

"I can't say I disagree."

"Millionaires and felons-these athletes sicken me. I do enjoy hockey, though. Hockey I don't hate."

"That's the Canadian influence," I say. "It ameliorates the materialism."

"In English?"

"I talk big when I'm tired. Professor gasbag. Sorry. I like hockey, too."

The atom was split by persistence; you relax. We go on chatting, impersonally at first, but then, once we've realized all we have in common-our moderate politics, our taste in rental cars, our feeling that the American service industry had better shape up soon or face a crisis-a warmth wells up, a cozy solidarity. You recommend a hotel in Tulsa; I tip you off to a rib joint in Fort Worth. The plane heads into a cloud, it bucks and shudders. Nothing like turbulence to cement a bond. Soon, you're telling me about your family. Your daughter, the high school gymnast. Your lovely wife. She's gone back to work and you're not so sure you like this, though her job is only part time and may not last. Another thing you dislike is traveling. The p.i.s.sy ticket agents. The luggage mix-ups. The soft hotel mattresses that twist your spine. You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby: restoring vintage speedboats. The water-that's where you're happiest. The lake.

Now it's my turn. I make a full report. Single, but on the lookout-you never know, the woman in 3B might be my soul mate. Had a wife once, the prospect of a family, but I knew her mostly through phone calls across time zones. Grew up in Minnesota, in the country; father owned a fleet of propane trucks and served as a Democrat in two state legislatures, pressing a doomed agricultural agenda while letting his business slip. Parents split while I was in college, an eastern hippie school-picture a day care run by Ph.D.'s-and when I got home there was nothing to come back to, just lawyers and auctioneers and accusations, some of them true but few of them important. My first job was in computers. I sold memory, the perfect product, since no one has enough of it and everyone fears some compet.i.tor has more. Now I work as a management consultant, minoring in EET (Executive Effectiveness Training) and majoring-overwhelmingly, unfortunately-in CTC (Career Transition Counseling), which is a fancy term for coaching people to understand job loss as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. It's a job I fell into because I wasn't strong, and grew to tolerate because I had to, then suddenly couldn't stand another hour of. My letter of resignation is on the desk of a man who will soon return from a long fis.h.i.+ng trip. What I'll do after he reads it, I don't know. I'm intrigued by a firm called MythTech; they've put out feelers. I have other logs in the fire, but no flames yet. Until my superior flies back from Belize, I work out of Denver for ISM, Integrated Strategic Management. You've heard of Andersen? Deloitte & Touche? We're something like them, though more diversified. "The Business of Business," we say. Impressed me too, once.

As the hour pa.s.ses and the meal comes (you try the Florentine chicken, I take the steak, and neither of us goes near the whipped dessert), the intimacy we develop is almost frightening. I'd like to feel it came naturally, mutually, and not because I pushed. I push sometimes. We exchange cards and slot them in our wallets, then order another round and go on talking, arriving at last at the topic I know best, the subject I could go on about all night.

You want to know who you're sitting with? I'll tell you.

Planes and airports are where I feel at home. Everything fellows like you dislike about them-the dry, recycled air alive with viruses; the salty food that seems drizzled with warm mineral oil; the aura-sapping artificial lighting-has grown dear to me over the years, familiar, sweet. I love the Compa.s.s Club lounges in the terminals, especially the flags.h.i.+p Denver club, with its digital juice dispenser and deep suede sofas and floor-to-ceiling views of taxiing aircraft. I love the restaurants and snack nooks near the gates, stacked to their heat lamps with whole wheat mini-pizzas and gourmet caramel rolls. I even enjoy the suite hotels built within sight of the runways on the ring roads, which are sometimes as close as I get to the cities that my job requires me to visit. I favor rooms with kitchenettes and conference tables, and once I cooked a Christmas feast in one, serving glazed ham and sweet potato pie to a dozen janitors and maids. They ate with me in rotation, on their breaks, one or two at a time, so I really got to know them, even though most spoke no English. I have a gift that way. If you and I hadn't hit it off like this, if the only words we'd pa.s.sed were "That's my seat" or "Done with that Business Week Business Week?" or just "Excuse me," I'd still regard us as close acquaintances and hope that if we met again up here we wouldn't be starting from zero, as just two suits. Twice last October I sat in the same row, on different routes, as 1989's Miss USA, the one who remade herself as a Was.h.i.+ngton hostess and supposedly works nonstop for voting rights. In person she's tiny, barely over five feet. I put her carry-on in the overhead.

But you know some of this already. You fly, too. It just hasn't hooked you; you just don't study it.

Hey, you're probably the normal one.

Fast friends aren't my only friends, but they're my best friends. Because they know the life-so much better than my own family does. We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present. Sad? Not really. We're a busy bunch. And I'm not lonely. If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.

I'm peaceful. I'm in my element up here. Flying isn't an inconvenience for me, as it is for my colleagues at ISM, who hit the road to prove their loyalty to a company that's hungry for such proof and, I'm told, rewards it now and then. But I've never aspired to an office at world headquarters, close to hearth and home and skybox, with a desk overlooking the Front Range of the Rockies and access to the ninth-floor fitness center. I suppose I'm a sort of mutation, a new species, and though I keep an apartment for storage purposes-actually, I left the place two weeks ago and transferred the few things I own into a locker I've yet to pay the rent on, and may not-I live somewhere else, in the margins of my itineraries.

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today USA Today and the and the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature-yours, too, I see-is the bestseller or the near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of common people in small towns. In Airworld, I've found, the pa.s.sions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this is where the story breaks-on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency-the token economy of airline bonus miles that I've come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn't degrade them. They're not taxed. They're private property in its purest form.

It was during a layover in the Dallas Compa.s.s Club, my back sinking into a downy sofa cus.h.i.+on and coa.r.s.e margarita salt drying on my lips, that I first told a friend about TMS, my Total Mileage System.

"It's simple," I said, as my hand crept up her leg (the woman was older than me and newly single; an LA ad exec who claimed her team had hatched the concept behind affinity credit cards). "I don't spend a nickel, if I can help it, unless it somehow profits my account. I'm not just talking hotels and cars and long-distance carriers and Internet services, but mail-order steak firms and record clubs and teleflorists. I shop them according to the miles they pay, and I pit them against each other for the best deal. Even my broker gives miles as dividends."

"So what's your total?"

I smiled, but didn't speak. I'm an open book in most ways, and I feel I deserve a few small secrets.

"What are you saving up for? Big vacation?"

"I'm not a vacation person. I'm just saving. I'd like to give a chunk to charity-to one of those groups that flies sick kids to hospitals."

"I didn't know you could do that. Sweet," she said. She kissed me, lightly, quickly, but with feeling-a flick of her tongue tip that promised more to come should we meet again, which hasn't happened yet. If it does, I may have to duck her, I'm afraid. She was too old for me even then, three years ago, and ad execs tend to age faster than the rest of us, once they're on their way.

I don't recall why I told that story. Not flattering. But I wasn't in great shape back then. I'd just come off a seven-week vacation that ISM insisted I take for health reasons. I spent the time off taking cla.s.ses at the U, hoping to enrich an inner life stretched thin by years of pep-talking the jobless. My bosses matched my tuition for the courses; a creative writing seminar that clawed apart a short nostalgic sketch about delivering propane with my father in a sixty-mile-per-hour blizzard, and a cla.s.s called "Country-Western Music as Literature." The music professor, a transplanted New Yorker in a black Stetson with a snakeskin band and a bolo tie clipped with a scorpion in amber, believed that great country lyrics share a theme: the migration from the village to the city, the disillusionment with urban wickedness, and the mournful desire to go home. The idea held up through dozens of examples and stayed with me when I returned to work, worsening the low mood and mental fuzziness that ISM had ordered me to correct. I saw my travels as a tw.a.n.gy ballad full of rhyming place names and neon streetscapes and vanis.h.i.+ng taillights and hazy women's faces. All those corny old verses, but new ones, too. The DIA control tower in fog. The drone of vacuum cleaners in a hallway, telling guests that they've slept past checkout time. The goose-pimply arms of a female senior manager hugging a stuffed bear I've handed her as we wait together for two security guards-it's overkill; the one watches the other-to finish loading file cubes and desk drawers and the CPU from her computer onto a flat gray cart whose squeaky casters scream all the way to an elevator bank where a third guard holds down the "open" b.u.t.ton.

I pulled out of it-barely. I cut that song off cold. It took a toll, though. Because I seldom see doctors in their offices, but only in transit, accidentally, my sense of my afflictions is vague, haphazard. High blood pressure? No doubt. Cholesterol? I'm sure it's in the pink zone, if not the red. Once, between Denver and Oklahoma City, I nodded off next to a pulmonary specialist who told me when I woke that I had apnea-a tendency to stop breathing while unconscious. The doctor recommended a machine that pushes air through the nostrils while one sleeps to raise the oxygen level in one's blood. I didn't follow up. My circulation is ebbing flight by flight-I can't feel my toes if I don't keep wiggling them, and that only works for my first hour on board-so I'd better make some changes. Soon.

I'm talking too much. I'm dominating this. Are you interested, or just being polite? Another bourbon? I'll have another milk. I know it's been discredited as an ulcer aid, but I come from dairy country. I like the taste.

Anyway, I should wrap this up-we'll land soon. You're meeting me in the middle of my farewell tour, with only six days and eight more cities to go. It's a challenging but routine itinerary, mixing business and pleasure and family obligations. There are people I need to see, some I want to see, and a few I don't know yet but may want to meet. I'll need to stay flexible, disciplined, and alert, and while it won't be easy, there's a payoff. Every year I've flown further than the year before, and by the end of this week, conditions willing, I'll cross a crucial horizon past which, I swear, I'll stop, sit back, and reconsider everything.

A million frequent flyer miles. One million.

"That's obsessive," you say. Because you care for me, not because I'm annoying you, I hope. "It's just a number. It doesn't mean a thing."

"Pi's just a number," I say.

"It's still obsessive."

The engines reverse thrust and here comes Denver.

"It's a boundary," I say. "I need boundaries in my life."

They open the doors and seat belts start unsnapping. Maybe I'll see you again, though it's unlikely. Next Monday the boss gets back from chasing marlin and the first thing he'll do after sifting through his in-box will be to cancel my corporate travel account, which he's often accused me of abusing, anyway. I need my million before then, and on his dime.

Deplaning now. As we stride down the jetway toward whatever's next for us, two lottery b.a.l.l.s tossed back into the barrel, a mini ca.s.sette tape falls out of my coat and you see it before I do, and bend down. It's the last favor you'll ever do for me and it occurs in slow motion, a tiny sacrament.

"Thanks," I say.

"Have a good one."

"You too."

"I'll try."

You're gone, a fast walker, off to see the family. I hope you're not mad that I kept you from your book. I didn't want to spoil things by telling you, but I read it when it was in hardback. There's no plot.

two.

rus.h.i.+ng, racing, delayed at the hotel by a wake-up call that never came, I hop from the parking lot shuttle to the curb with nothing to check, just a briefcase and a carry-on, cross the terminal, smile at the agent, flash my Compa.s.s Cla.s.s card and driver's license, say Yes, my bags have remained in my possession, say No, I haven't let strangers handle them, then take my upgraded boarding pa.s.s and ticket, recross the terminal to security, empty my pockets-change, keys, mobile phone, foil blister-pack of sleeping tablets, mechanical pencil; the stuff just keeps on coming-flop my bags on the X-ray, straighten up, and step through the metal detector.

The alarm sounds. I pat my pockets, find nothing, pa.s.s through again.

Once more the alarm sounds.

"Sir, step over here."

A female guard works me over with the wand. Sometimes I swear I can feel its waves pa.s.s through me-invasive pulses of radiation that light up my chromosomes, stir my spinal fluid. There's bound to be a cla.s.s-action suit someday and I plan to sit in full view of the bench, smack in the middle of the wheelchair section with my portable IV.

"I'm clean," I say. "Your equipment must be shot." But then, around my knees, the wand starts squawking.

"Your boots, sir?"

"They're new."

"They must have steel-lined arches."

I groan as she goes over me again, playing to some tourists in line behind me. I've lost momentum when I can least afford it, a Monday morning, when every slipup s...o...b..a.l.l.s. The boots were a foolish purchase. Vanity. It's all the shoe salesman's fault, the man was sharp, mocking my credentials as a westerner after I mentioned I came from Minnesota. Instead of buying the boots I should have told him that there are are no westerners, just displaced easterners, and that includes most of the Indian tribes-read history. The problem is that the boots will trip alarms at every checkpoint for the next five days, wasting minutes and chewing up my margin. Yes, I always budget for uncertainty and I can try to recapture the lost time-cancel a dinner appointment, skimp on sleep-but the smart move would be to buy new shoes. no westerners, just displaced easterners, and that includes most of the Indian tribes-read history. The problem is that the boots will trip alarms at every checkpoint for the next five days, wasting minutes and chewing up my margin. Yes, I always budget for uncertainty and I can try to recapture the lost time-cancel a dinner appointment, skimp on sleep-but the smart move would be to buy new shoes.

I ride the escalator to the tram that will carry me to Concourse B. The man one step up from me nods and jerks his head, jabbering into a hands-free mobile phone whose mouthpiece must be clipped to his lapel. The guy looks schizoid, raving at thin air, flinging his arms around and making fists. "How can I blame him? They made him a fat offer. Plus, he's a load on our health plan. Prostate s.h.i.+t." I've seen this creep before, en route to Boise, when he sat across the aisle from me berating the flight attendant about his food. He demanded a vegetarian entree despite not having ordered one pre-flight, then fired off a string of asterisks and ampersands when she couldn't find one in the galley. These jokers are everywhere lately, they're multiplying, and the higher their fare cla.s.s, the louder their abuse. Economy is a park compared to first.

Through the moving windows of the tram I view this month's art installation: foil propellers stuck to the walls of the tunnel, hundreds of them. They s.h.i.+ver and whirl as the cars gain speed and pa.s.s them. How much was the artist paid for this? Who paid him? Is this where the airport's per-ticket surcharge goes? Last month's masterpiece was a row of masks with progressively wider mouths and eyes that seemed to open as the viewer rode by, climaxing in a howl, a staring scream. Art. It always makes me feel diminished. There's something smug about it. c.o.c.ky. Cold. Public works commissioners just love the stuff-it eases their bad consciences, I suspect, for hiring their nephews and steaming open sealed bids. Behind every sculpture garden, a great crime.

The tram lets out and feeds its pa.s.sengers onto another packed escalator, which lifts us into the middle of a food court fragrant with soft pretzels and cookie dough. There's no time for my usual breakfast of frozen yogurt topped with sliced cling peaches, so I head down the moving walkway toward my gate, aggressively clearing lanes between the laggards. People who let the conveyor carry them when they can double their speed by moving their feet mystify me, but to each his own. Clearly, the whole purpose of the technology is to optimize the flow of traffic, not to let kids and slowpokes take a load off. The worst are two departing Mormon missionaries thronged by camera-toting friends and relatives. The boys look tired and pale and terrified; they're bound for Asia, I'd guess, or South America, their heads full of tales about pa.s.sport thieves and drug lords. It's the word's fastest-growing religion, I've been told, all thanks to this door-knocking army of western teens tramping the globe in J. C. Penney suits.

I'm impressed, but I still don't wish them luck. The church is a force in Denver. It's oppressive. Half the battle of working for ISM, whose board includes a sitting Mormon apostle, is fending off advances from the saved. Every month I'm invited to yet another potluck, another dance for "inquiring unmarrieds." Even if ISM bowed to my request to quit CTC and just do EEC, I'd probably be looking for a new firm.

MythTech wants me. I hope so; I want them. They haven't revealed their interest in me openly, but I have my sources, and I can read the signs. Last month an anonymous caller to my a.s.sistant requested a ma.n.u.script of the book I'm finis.h.i.+ng and gave him a FedEx number that I checked out through a national detective agency. The number belonged to a Lincoln, Nebraska, law firm whose surviving name partner is MythTech's founder's father.

My dream is to land a position in brand a.n.a.lysis, a benevolent field that involves less travel and can be done from home, over the wires. Exhorting the unemployed to "surf the changes" and "ma.s.sively network" their way to new positions while gazing across at their panicky, moist eyes from the head of an acrylic conference table spread with cheese sandwiches and canned fruit spritzers will still be someone's job, and I can't change that, but MythTech doesn't work such feel-good shams. From what I gather, they're forward thinkers. Optimists. Minimizing lawsuits from the outplaced is too rearguard for them. They're not a large firm, just a small boutique, but they have grand plans, rumor has it, and they have spirit.

Sadly, they can't be courted, they can't be pushed. They watch you. They rate you. If they make an offer, you sign on the spot, you don't hold out for dental. They're ex-Foreign Service agents, ex-LA cops, ex-ski b.u.ms, ex-seminarians, ex-junkies. They're the establishment and its overthrow, too. They don't use letterhead, just plain white bond with a faint embossed omega at the top. No logo, no web site-just a street address. In Omaha, of all places, blandest Omaha, whose location suits my schedule perfectly. On Thursday I have a conference in Las Vegas and on Sat.u.r.day a wedding in Minnesota-my little sister's third and biggest yet.

I'll see MythTech on Friday and ISM will pay for it. No appointment yet, but if I'm right that they've been sniffing around and checking references, a brief, get-acquainted, happened-to-be-in-town, hear-great-things-about-you, flying drop-in at 1860 Sioux Street might flip the switch. I'll ask for old Lucius s.p.a.ck, the number two, formerly of Andersen Consulting by way of the Chicago Board of Trade. s.p.a.ck is the man, though the news outlets suppressed it and the government will never confirm it, who basically got NASA off its crutches, internally and public-image-wise, after the Challenger Challenger flameout. He's a hero. I sat in on a five-person dinner with him once at an industry confab in Santa Cruz. I hear he has issues with prescription pain pills, but I have issues, too. And if he likes me? Maybe, just maybe, a peek into the office of Adam Sarrazin, age thirty-one, MIT dropout, no known hobbies, bald, reportedly either gay or celibate despite his marriage to a pet care heiress who's bankrolled his projects since he was seventeen, and known in the world of leading-edge market research simply as "the Child." flameout. He's a hero. I sat in on a five-person dinner with him once at an industry confab in Santa Cruz. I hear he has issues with prescription pain pills, but I have issues, too. And if he likes me? Maybe, just maybe, a peek into the office of Adam Sarrazin, age thirty-one, MIT dropout, no known hobbies, bald, reportedly either gay or celibate despite his marriage to a pet care heiress who's bankrolled his projects since he was seventeen, and known in the world of leading-edge market research simply as "the Child."

Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. Even if nothing much comes of Omaha, something big will come of leaving Omaha for the Twin Cities late Friday afternoon. That's the magic leg. I've worked it out. The math was complex, and it's subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.

The walkway drops me beneath a bank of monitors. 3204 to Reno via Elko is set to take off fifty minutes late, I see, which isn't what I was told an hour ago when I phoned the airline from my room. Great West just can't be trusted anymore, it lies to its most loyal customers, and if it didn't monopolize DIA, I'd be shooting for my mark with Delta, although it wouldn't mean as much at Delta. They fly overseas and Great West doesn't yet-just a route or two in Canada-and Delta is old and Great West is new and Delta has scores of mileage millionaires and Great West, since the merger and the renaming, has exactly nine.

I'll be the tenth.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought of Great West as a partner and an ally, but now I feel betrayed. The focus of my anger is Soren Morse, Great West's rock-climbing, playboy CEO, a New Think smoothy from the soft-drink world brought in to charm the federal regulators and fend off Desert Air, a no-frills start-up whose ancient Boeings feel like prison vans but tend to land on time. One perk of breaking six zeros, traditionally, is a private luncheon with this s.e.xpot, and I plan to give him an earful. I can't wait. For years he's been centimetering away my legroom, buffaloing me with tales of storm cells somewhere between Denver and the coast, and blowing cold air on my hot meals-all the while telling the nation through corporate image ads on the cla.s.sier political talk shows that at Great West "We're Taking America Higher!" The rumors in the first-cla.s.s cabins are that he's launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to be the next commissioner of baseball and that he has a new girlfriend-the young wife of the head of the Downtown Renaissance Committee. I'll drop her name during dessert and watch his face.

Right now what I need, though, is not revenge but coffee, hot, strong, and black, to cauterize my throat. I smoked last night for the first time since college, and once again, I blame the cowboy boots. I was in bed when I tugged them on again, wondering if I'd bought too snug a toe; the sudden boost in height transformed my mood and prompted me to turn off my cable money show, toss on a jacket and my cleanest khakis, and pop downstairs for a nightcap in the lounge. I knew I wasn't going to sleep well, anyway; my mind was on MythTech. They're scary, they're so good, and some of the deeper work I've heard they're doing on consumer-nondurable price resistance spooks me. If you find yourself at the beauty counter next year buying your first-ever thirty-dollar bottle of shampoo-conditioner, and it's just a six-ounce bottle and you're a man, man, blame it on Omaha. Blame it on the Child. blame it on Omaha. Blame it on the Child.

At the bar I b.u.mped into Danny Sorenson, a salesman for Heston's, the cla.s.s-ring company, who I'd last seen on an early-morning hop from Des Moines to Madison. Thirty years my senior, with bulging eyes, and still vibrating from his second heart attack, Danny spent the flight soliloquizing about the importance of legumes in the diet. When I spotted him again last night, he was gobbling mixed nuts and steaming about a Giants game showing on the TV above the bar. He announced when I sat down that he'd beefed up and didn't intend to survive his next attack, then offered me a menthol, which I took. I don't know what moved me, though it's my job to know. Maybe MythTech had won the Kool account and flashed a prompt across the Giants' scoreboard.

"This team gives me a gut ache," Danny said. "Nice pitching, but no fielding to back it up."

I nodded, tapped my ash. "It's sad, all right."

"I thought you backed the Rockies. You're a Denver man."

I shrugged and sucked down a load of minty smoke. The truth is that I root for ball teams depending on where I am at the time and who I happen to be sitting with. Three years ago, during the NBA post-season, I started the evening rooting for the Bulls in an O'Hare microbrewery and finished it whistling for the Timberwolves at the Minneapolis Marriott. I follow the crowd, I'll admit it, and why not? It's not their approval I'm after, it's their energy.

"How's business?" Danny said.

"Quiescent. Yours?" Quiescent Quiescent was a featured "focus word" from one of my Verbal Edge ca.s.sette tapes. Years ago, a few months after my divorce and a week after I stopped peddling "storage solutions" to rural western hospitals, it was a touring self-improvement seminar-a Sandy Pinter production-that fished me out of the bottle I'd slithered into. I've tried to keep something perking ever since. The World's One Hundred Greatest Ideas, Condensed. The P. Chester Prine Negotiating Course. My goal is to speak at least three new words a day. It can be a struggle when I first use them-they sound like they're in brackets or quotation marks-but later on they come naturally, I find. The only problem: the world is going visual, so I'm forever clarifying myself. The a.s.sumption behind Verbal Edge is that fine speech provides an advantage in business, but I'm not sure. was a featured "focus word" from one of my Verbal Edge ca.s.sette tapes. Years ago, a few months after my divorce and a week after I stopped peddling "storage solutions" to rural western hospitals, it was a touring self-improvement seminar-a Sandy Pinter production-that fished me out of the bottle I'd slithered into. I've tried to keep something perking ever since. The World's One Hundred Greatest Ideas, Condensed. The P. Chester Prine Negotiating Course. My goal is to speak at least three new words a day. It can be a struggle when I first use them-they sound like they're in brackets or quotation marks-but later on they come naturally, I find. The only problem: the world is going visual, so I'm forever clarifying myself. The a.s.sumption behind Verbal Edge is that fine speech provides an advantage in business, but I'm not sure.

"We're working to open j.a.pan. It's going fine. Highly sentimental about their schools there. Nice contrast to what's happening in the States."

"Interesting," I say. I'm always interested. I'm big on hearsay and inside information, and I pay the price in my portfolio-an a.s.sortment 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 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 cl.u.s.ters around the mean so that no one has to feel bad if poor luck comes. 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 cl.u.s.ters 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. Cla.s.s rings depend on nostalgia, on grat.i.tude. 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 relations.h.i.+p with a good dentist is tough to maintain in Airworld.