Up In The Air Part 19

"What you've said makes me think it's the same whatever I do. If I go or don't go."

"What's the same?" she says. "Then I'm going back to my hotel."

"The result."

"That's all you care about? Results? Man, have they ever got their claws in your brain."

She swings down off her stool and picks up her little bag and fishes out some lipstick and does a touch-up. She looks into my face like it's her mirror and fills in a corner, puckers. There. She's done. She puts away the lipstick, zips the bag, steadies herself in her tippy heels, and goes. Definitely the one, and there she goes. And yet I still have a date tonight, so screw her. Screw Linda, too. Ryan Bingham thinks ahead.

fifteen.

alex says she wants to "do" Las Vegas. She's been hitting the guidebooks, apparently. How dreary. Or maybe she's thinking I'm so in-the-know, so seasoned and so locally plugged in, that while she's at the vanity getting up her getup and I'm out here sinking trick shots on the pool table, I'm already scrolling through the top five menus and mentally ranking in order of their significance in the great junk-culture scheme of things the biggest ten magic acts, lion extravaganzas, artsy European circuses, and toned-down, export editions of three-year-old New York performance art one-woman shows.

"Where were you all day?" I shout into the bathroom while sighting down my crooked, wavy cue. I'll skip the white over the orange and hit the red and the red will cause a scale-model Big Bang of symmetrically diverging suns.

"People-watching. The faces here. Amazing."

"You plan events for a living and huge festivities but you've never been to Las Vegas? Are you successful?"

"What?"

"That wasn't to you. I'm mumbling."

"Can you just give me some time here? Five more minutes?"

"What?"

"Can you just-"

"Kidding, Alex. Kidding. I wish you were in here to see what I just did."

She shoulders the door closed and I welcome this because I can stop looking through it at the floor where Mr. Hugs' legs can be seen behind the trash basket. I hang up my stick and leave the rec room. That was my all-time high point, that last shot, a miracle on felt that won't come twice. I lie on my back on the bed and I replay it on the expanded field of a beige ceiling so heavily textured and s.p.a.ckled and swirled and pebbled that I expect it to crumble or start dripping. Tomorrow's the day, tonight is just survival, and knowing that should make everything a bonus. If I eat one good shrimp. If I s.n.a.t.c.h another Dexedrine. If I glimpse Lisa's back in a crowd and flip her off or see Craig Gregory lose just one quarter. I can treat these next hours as one long jubilee and Alex as Bathsheba come back to life, and if I don't I'm just stealing from myself. This is why a man must set clear goals, because in the final countdown to their fulfillment, especially if that fulfillment feels inevitable, he can be as playful as he wishes, because all but the riskiest risks are now risk-free.

I'm ordering a limousine tonight. I'd like to see an impressionist. I shall. I'm raiding Alex's pharmacy in broad daylight and if she catches me I'm going to grin the naughty disarming grin I just now practiced, before I'd even imagined a context for it. I want to find whoever's dealing "blue bottle" and buy a six-pack, if that's how it comes, and dose Alex's drink without her knowledge and carry her back here giggling and fizzing and primed to act out the back pages of Hustler Hustler slathered in mentholated shaving cream. slathered in mentholated shaving cream.

Still, I worry that she's not successful. Because that will come out at some point and could be hard for someone as madcap and effervescent as the new me. She's already mentioned that she did public relations once-she noticed on the jukebox a band she'd represented-but she didn't explain how she got out of it, which means her departure was probably not voluntary. We'll need to avoid that particular episode and any stretch of either of our lives that words such as episode can be applied to. That will be easy for me, since I'm a master, but could be tough for her as she gets drunker and starts to confuse my radiance with warmth.

Judging by how long she's been in wardrobe, she's going to thrill me when next that door swings open, so there had better be some music playing. I logroll across the mattress and sit up and stare down into the jukebox's bright innards. I'm looking for something light and old and tuneful with no strong a.s.sociations for either of us. Just a song for two generic flatlanders who've known the sprawling opportunity cities but still remember cold drumsticks at the swimming hole and that jig Poppa danced when he drank too much schnapps, even if things didn't happen just that way. Is there a song like that? Evocative but not stirring? That takes you back without taking you over? If there is, it's my theme. I'll make it my new sleep machine.

But it's not here on this old Wurlitzer. I'm stumped. No Sinatra, no Broadway, no Motown, no bubblegum, just tons of glum college-radio alt rock and overproduced AM country and-it's so wrong-much melancholy yet strident sixties protest c.r.a.p. I may as well just punch stuff up at random; a dangerous thought, since that's what I'm now doing, as though my ideas are now starting in my fingers and traveling upstream to my cerebrum. Out slides the arm and the record from its rack and up comes, at a volume I can't lower because I see no k.n.o.bs or dials anywhere, "If I Had a Hammer" by Peter, Paul and Mary. It's just the tune I didn't want to hear and of course it's also Alex's cue to open the door, spread her arms, and say "You like?"

She takes the catwalk. She's dipped herself in black lacquer that still looks wet and tied her straight hair back in a whiplash ponytail that she swings around in a slashing full rotation while bowing her head, and I'm really not sure why. Her shoes are the kind you don't notice, you just see legs, and the whole effect is pure campy female cutout, like those busty silhouettes on truckers' mud flaps.

"Rate me," she says. "Be vicious and be cold."

"Ten is inhuman and never sounds sincere, so I'll say nine point seven. Nine point eight."

An abrupt Bond Girl pivot, hand on hip. Reverses it.

"This music's awful."

"Do something about it. There's not much there."

"I don't make decisions tonight. I'm full-on Barbie. Just pretend they never burned the bra and you've never heard the word 'empowerment.' That's hard in your line of work, but just pretend."

"Last time you wanted to talk. Now this," I say.

c.o.c.ks a hip, trails her fingers up her sides. Ooh, that tickles. Oh, but it feels good. Pouts and half closes those lashes and strokes her cheeks. "Now this. One request only: a very long black car. Like something you'd see at a Playboy Mansion funeral."

"The phone book's already open to that page."

We're riding around and still talking destinations when it strikes me that what would ruin things forever would be for Ryan to get flashy with his credit card-the one that earns miles and the only one not hacked, because it already was and he replaced it-and prematurely hurtle over the goal line down here on Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman dressed as a Bahraini s.e.x slave and him so zonked on prescription everything that he won't remember his big finish. That's never been the picture and mustn't happen. The picture is specific and very dear to me. One, I'm alone or with a total stranger, which represents my customary mode. Two, there are fields below, even if I can't see them. There's more, a score of picky stipulations that have barnacled onto my skull over the years, but lately I've been rationing the previews so as not to pre-empt the real hit show.

"Driver," I say, and not because I like it but because the old guy insisted on being addressed this way, perhaps from some creepy role-playing addiction, "I need a bank. I need a cash machine. I'm only spending fresh green bills tonight."

"All the casinos have several ATMs, sir."

"I can't explain why but I'd like it from a bank."

The gentleman already knows we're freaks back here. The pills are out and a bunch rolled under the seat and it probably looks to him in his rearview mirror like we've been bobbing for apples these past few minutes. In the limo's doors are insulated wells stocked with pop and beer and crescent-shaped ice cubes, and we've made a mess of these as well. We sip once from a can and decide it's not our flavor and thrust it back into the ice pile and it spills and we crack another and fancy it even less and it tips and gushes, too, and we're all sticky, so out come thick wads of multicolored napkins that we're just too lazy to use singly, and plus we're paying for them, so who cares?

"You up for a good mimic, Alex?"

"As always."

"So why did you quit PR?" I feared this subject, but as is my habit I'm rushing right in toward it because I don't want it crawling up behind me.

"I got let go."

"For cause? I'm sorry."

"Shrinkage. Not enough desk chairs to go around one day, but they tried to be sweet about it. You know. Help us."

"Why did you say 'you know' like that to me?"

"Because you know."

I swing around to Driver like I've been kicked and do what he told me earlier I should do: ask him anything. What arises from this are two tickets and a firm price-we just have to give the box office a note that Driver's now scribbling on a pad beside him while Alex watches the road because he isn't and I can see she thinks this actually helps-for one Danny Jansen at some casino showroom. It's ninety bucks per head. We find that bank. The machine is on an outside wall and hungry drifters lurk on every corner as I make the withdrawal, but vanish once I've made it.

In line for the act I say, "I don't don't know. Tell me." Right straight at it again. know. Tell me." Right straight at it again.

She doesn't answer me until we're seated and Danny swaggers on as Schwarzkopf-topical-and there's no way out. Just fire exits.

"You honestly don't remember me? Our sessions? It wasn't a seminar, Ryan. You outplaced me. I was waiting for you to confess," she says. "I thought you were playing with me by holding back. Then I realized you weren't and didn't know what to think. But you've really forgotten me, haven't you? That hurts."

"This started in Reno?"

"It started on the plane. I a.s.sumed you were playing chicken with this gal."

Danny proves to be one rare monster, stout as a hog but nimble as a lemur yet something else as an itty-bitty kitten flung down a bas.e.m.e.nt staircase by its tail. Three minutes into his leaping, bucking, slithering, A-to-Z, pans.e.xual imitation of everyone from Stalin to Shirley Temple-and he can do them simultaneously, too, sitting on a park bench licking sugar cones or with their heads stuck through adjacent guillotines-I've so horrifically received my money's worth that I'm about to pee my pants with glee. And indeed I feel a tiny trickle, which I suck back up or at least prevent from soaking me. I ask Alex if she'll excuse me for a moment. She won't, though. She refuses to excuse me. She grabs my hand and crushes ligament as Danny dipsy-doodles through the Louvre as both the Mona Lisa and Pica.s.so, and after about thirty seconds of tense resistance I decide that there's another, better way: I'll just go limp and take whatever's coming and hope some skilled clinician can save me later.

"Stop that," she whispers. "Don't squirm. It's almost over."

I resolved to go limp, but I didn't manage it. This time I will. I imagine soft old rope rotting on a Lake Superior dock.

For the show's last ten minutes I picture various deaths at Alex's slender hands. Yet I don't feel her anger. This troubles me even more. I was going to run into one of them, eventually, but I figured it would be a swift, short blow. I'm sick of waiting for it. I want it now.

Driver is in position when we're reborn from Danny's seething necropolis and straggle out into the light of late-night Vegas. Move toward the light, it's all a soul must know, even if it comes streaming from the red eyes of a mammoth re-created sphinx with two front paws the size of supertankers.

"Well, I guess it's all out in the open now," says Alex, reclining against the molded leatherette of our American-made black ma.s.s on wheels. Driver is taking us somewhere he thinks we'll like but he wants it to be a surprise. He's being Driver.

"I'm so, so sorry," I say. But just so-so. Why bother with guilt when she's about to hang me? It'll be her turn to feel guilty soon.

"Slide over here and make it up to me. Kiss my legs or something. Right on up."

I obey her, both in letter and in spirit. The alcohol in her perfume stings my tongue. She must have bathed in it.

"Came early, stayed late," she says. "Worked weekends. Holidays. I had a sick kid brother with no health plan, a mom who shared a dad with someone else and liked the nice girly things he couldn't give her. Mostly, it was for me, though. I drove Miatas. One-year leases so I could try new colors. You know who I represented once? Barbara Bush. Pretty fabulous. I got some hand-me-downs. When she'd built up to five copies of one necklace that she couldn't risk wearing the original of, guess who got the sixth, with a sweet card? That's how they became the Texas Kennedys: cards for everyone, wrote them day and night." She leans back further. "You're doing good. Go, Fido."

"Ma'am?" The voice of Driver.

"I'm still a miss. A junior miss."

"We're there."

"Just circle, please."

I cast up my eyes at the giantess. She pats me. If this is the sum of my obligations to her, I'll gladly go till dawn. Till dawn of spring. Or could it be that I payed my spiritual debt by watching Danny mutate for an hour and now I'm into the extra-credit zone.

"I slept with the boss man. I didn't feel exploited. I felt like he was offering me insurance. He wouldn't just hump any of the young things, and the ones that he did hump had major blackmail power, all seventeen of us. G.o.d, I loved PR. The privilege of it. Showing the world that Texaco and Exxon only drilled and brokered and refined as a way to support their truer pa.s.sions: saving the porpoise and promoting opera in the inner city, which they'll rebuild someday and not even take the write-off-it's a gift. Being entrusted with tall tales that vast just swoops you up onto your silver princess throne. More, give me more. Give me harder ones, you shout. Let me position private penitentiaries as walled Montessoris for late-blooming unfortunates. Your appet.i.te for deception spreads and grows, and just when you think it can't gape any wider, someone hands you a folder tabbed 'Pesticide Spill: Monsanto.' It's like bliss. You don't have to chew so hard, Ryan. Focus. Focus."

"I apologize, miss, but my left rear tire feels flat. There's broken gla.s.s all over the road tonight. I'll need to stop up ahead and use the jack."

"Can you just lock us in?"

"Of course I can."

"Then it's not a problem."

"Yes, miss. Thank you."

I hear a door slam m.u.f.fled by so much skin.

"But then we lost some big clients," Alex says, "and one of our rainmakers died and . . . dominoes. I truly think they drew lots to choose who went. You still don't remember me? Those suits I wore? I'm up to our first meeting."

The harder she bangs on this lid, the tighter it seals. A moment ago I felt it opening-a vision of Dallas office-tower blue gla.s.s, an artsy reception area with seats resembling children's wood alphabet blocks, extreme-angle views of parking garages with painted helipad markings on the roofs-but now it's all black again, and shut; Chern.o.byl entombed in its smooth concrete sarcophagus. The barricades are up on memory lane.

My seat seems to tilt. Is this the jack at work?

"You don't remember the exercise?" she says. "That workshop hour where you were some big headhunter and I was supposed to sell you on my skills without using words like 'need' or 'want' or 'hope'? You cracked pistachios to show uninterest, which you said I'd have to be prepared for, and I unb.u.t.toned my cashmere cardigan, the top two b.u.t.tons, and you said, 'That looks desperate; you want a new job, not a sugar daddy.' Nothing?" She lifts my chin with two hands and makes me see her.

I apologize and apologize. The seats tilt. I'm afraid if I move I'll shift the limo's balance point and crush Driver under an axle.

"You cared," says Alex. She closes her legs with her dress tucked in the V. I'm off-duty now; I uncramp my neck. "You didn't want to be there, either, did you? We had that in common. We both wanted to scream. You fidgeted, your nails were bitten raw. I should be consoling him, him, I thought. I knew my job couldn't last. It wasn't meant to. Exxon. The Bushes. Festivals must end. But you thought I thought. I knew my job couldn't last. It wasn't meant to. Exxon. The Bushes. Festivals must end. But you thought you you were responsible. So earnest. I wanted to cook you a great big hot peach cobbler." were responsible. So earnest. I wanted to cook you a great big hot peach cobbler."

And then all is level and we're on the road again. The limo founders in a swarming crosswalk and long-haired rowdies slap the windows, holler. A can of something thunks the roof and skitters and Driver accelerates and through the floor I feel the wheels lump over a large soft object that I'll always remember as a body, even if it was a mail sack or a garbage bag. I want those Ambien. I find strange capsules, ones I haven't seen yet, shining in an upholstery crack. I gobble them. Alex is still reminiscing. "You cared," she says. It's the mantra in this monologue.

And then we're dancing somewhere. We're back indoors. Or is this the new outdoors? The purple drinks are back-they'd just gone dormant-except that now they're made of frozen slush that you can scoop up off the dance floor if you spill one and pack back into your cup like a wet s...o...b..ll and pierce with the long straw and keep on sucking. Other dancers keep shoving me. A cubist Alex, all planar overlap and s.e.xtuple foreheads, surrounds and eludes me simultaneously, omnidirectionally dancing with all of us. She grinds on my hip, she whispers in my ears-both ears at once. She loves me, loves me, loves me. Her ponytail slices a Z in the green fog, smoke, the Mark of Zorro. She's hanging on my neck.

I squirt through a crack in her cycloramic presence and make it to the bar and ask for milk. In a corner Art Krusk consults with Tony Marlowe, still plotting his comeback as an ethnic food king. Marlowe will cost Art. The newsletter. The videos. In CTC, all I wanted was a clean getaway, but Marlowe's game is different. He sticks around, angling to be your Pope, your spouse, and soon you're paying him to certify you as a trainer in his franchised cult. Goodbye, Art Krusk. The grating is off the storm drain. You're underground now, blowing through the mains. The two of them rise from their table with their snow cones and stroll away like president and premier talking peace on some Camp David bunny trail. Tomorrow Marlowe will give Art his new name.

"You little s.h.i.t. You ditched me," Alex says. Her heat-rashed throat is like an oriole's and her high birdy voice weaves through the DJ's drumtrack, which is all he's spinning tonight. Percussion.

"I needed cool dairy. Where are we? Where is this club?"

"Under Mount O." She index-fingers my temples. A current crackles between the diodes. "It's me."

If this could just conclude, please. I guzzle milk. It's not the taste, it's the texture. It's how it coats.

"You knew it would have to happen, didn't you? Someone was going to see under your black hood and realize the Grim Reaper was just a kid. This is our chance to heal each other, Ryan."

Where is all this eloquence coming from? She's mixed her pills better than I have. "You have a mustache." She licks the two percent off my upper lip and I lick off the wetness of her licking.

"Did you rehea.r.s.e these things you've said to me?"

"Day and night since Reno. Certain lines I wrote down. The Barbara Bush part."

"You're good," I say. "You're scary good, in fact."

"I want us to go upstairs," she says. "Just give me half an hour. To set the mood." She hands me her violet frosty to hold and kisses me and does the Bond Girl turn and activates her jetpack and whooshes off, right through the ceiling. Her contrails smell of propane.

But has anyone paid Driver? I fix on this in lieu of the big questions, such as how frightened to be of a young woman who aches to redeem her for-hire persecutor. I count my bills on the bar and recognize that I never coughed up for the Danny tickets, either. The harder I try to close out my accounts, the more people I owe. But I'll never find that limo. People who don't insist you pay them up front do you no favors. They're spiritual Shylocks.

I decide to consider my cash the house's money and find a quiet table and let it ride.

The winning streaks you're obliged to leave midway continue indefinitely in your dreams, until the sum you might have won if you'd only hung around dwarfs the stack you walked away with. I leave the blackjack pit after thirty minutes up around eight hundred bucks, but I cede my sunny Bahamian retirement and golden years of anonymous philanthropy to an old desert rat who's in my stool before its vinyl cushion can replump. It may be the greatest favor I've ever done anyone, but he can't acknowledge it and I can't take credit.

The elevator halts on every floor, it seems, but only twice do pa.s.sengers get off. We glare at one another as we rise, wondering who's the prankster or the moron. Most Las Vegas rides from the casino back to the rooms breed comity, compa.s.sion-everyone's been fleeced by the same con-but this crew stews and accuses. The four people I leave behind when I step out are poised for a b.l.o.o.d.y cage match.

I insert my card key. The light blinks red. I flip the card over. Still red. I'd knock or call, but I don't want to spoil Alex's set design by forcing her to leave her mark. She lives for stagecraft. It's really all I know about her. So what's in store? Gothic dungeon? Bridal chamber? LAPD interrogation cell?

I was right not to knock, I see; this isn't my room. The number beckoned because it's also the PIN for my Wells Fargo cash card. I look both ways. The rows of doors look phony, as if they conceal brick walls or dusty air shafts. I walk along but no digits jump out at me. Then I smell incense. I slot my card in. Green.