Up In The Air Part 21

I'm flummoxed. "You all know my face then? Nationwide? The tone of this little article was positive?"

"Try fawning." She points a finger down her throat.

"Really? No kidding."

"Orders from on high," she says. "Treat the man like a prince. That's not verbatim, but that's the thrust."

"Go on!"

"You haven't noticed the little smiles everywhere? The big thumbs-up from your teammates?"

I shake my head. "The newsletter said I'm your teammate? Do you still have it?"

"You really haven't noticed? You're our Most Wanted."

"I'm finding this very confusing. Morse said pamper me? The future head of pro baseball said pamper me? Not give me flak?"

"That baseball thing fell through. We hear he's shattered. He spoke at a prayer breakfast in Boulder yesterday and the word is he sobbed. He lost it for a minute. With the stock price stuck and Desert Air's big fare cuts and new 'Let's Fly Together' ad campaign, my union's saying he's gone within six weeks. Maybe-after that breakdown-even sooner."

"Reliable high-level gossip? Or car-pool stuff?"

"Union news. And believe me, we won't miss him. He's Mr. Bad Faith. Gives an inch, then takes it back, then gives it again later on like he's some Santa Claus or wonderful rich uncle. He'll make out fine. They'll slip him a million and he'll walk off laughing."

"He won't. That not how it feels," I say.

"Whatever."

"He's in for some dark nights, if this is true. Is there a way to contact him directly? How would I get his number? The one he answers?"

"Pray to G.o.d. Come on, you hate him, too. All the pa.s.sengers do. He killed this outfit."

"You're still working here."

"You're still buying tickets."

"Soften up on those more fortunate. It's all a continuum. You're in it, too."

"I'll give her the note. Vocabulary man."

I'm hoping Pinter unplugged the baccarat brainjack long enough to reach a phone and order some runway foam for me in Omaha. A driver at the gate holding a placard with my name only slightly misspelled in sloppy black capitals would add a certain something to my deplaning. It would help my arrival feel like an arrival and not just another departure in the making.

I call for my two percent and, yes, it's true-the flight attendant's smile seems to exceed the parabolic millimetric facial crack diagrammed in her Great West training manual. She's not a free being as you and I are free, and when her behavior varies, it's on purpose. Federal regulations rule her life, dictating shift lengths and rest periods and cycles of alcohol and prescription-drug consumption; her contract with the airline covers the rest. Even the bows in her shoelaces have been optimized. Two loops, just so. If she wore laced shoes, that is. It's forbidden; she might trip on them evacuating, helping some cla.s.s-ring salesman down the slide.

How I mistook my teammates' grins and backslaps for mockery and obstruction, I'm still not sure. It's as though I've confused a dinner in my honor for a penitentiary last meal. These two events might look much the same, perhaps-undue attention from people who've ignored one, telegrams, reporters, handkerchiefs. Maybe it's not all me.

Omaha looms in my window, but its looming stems from my expectations, not its grandeur. On past trips the city has struck me as forlorn, a project that's outlived its founding imperatives and hung on thanks to block grants and inertia and handouts from one or two civic-minded billionaires. This time it may as well be the risen Atlantis. The stubby, aging skyline snags on cloud. The spotty late-morning traffic seems darkly guided. Omaha, city of mystery. Home to MythTech, who guides our hands through supermarket freezers toward rising-crust pizzas and breadcrumbed mozzarella sticks that seem overpriced and skimpy, but what the h.e.l.l. It's our money. We'll spend it as we please.

I want to be in on that thing, whatever it is. To be safe from them one must be one of them. We dock with the Jetway and I join the line. It's not a job I'm seeking, it's citizenship, a seat inside the Dome. Key modules in the canopy hang from cranes and not every duct is f.l.a.n.g.ed and sealed, but unless I get in before the structure's dedicated, I'll be a spectator. A mark. If MythTech turns out to be seven twenty-five-year-olds shooting wastebasket hoops and munching protein bars, I'll still want in, if this is where it's going. Even the big stuff starts in the Garage.

Sam lets me call him Sam. I ride up front with him. He's not a veteran, like Driver, but he tries, and I suspect he bills clients electronically and doesn't grant show tickets on the honor system. He's in college, no doubt, and this is just a sideline; that Penguin Cla.s.sics Bleak House Bleak House is no breeze, and half the pages are tabbed and paper-clipped. Sam nods at the sights. A famous jewelry store favored by British royals and software t.i.tans who know their Color, Cut, and Clarity. Warren Buffet's first office-see that broken window? It's the one directly above it, with the pigeons. is no breeze, and half the pages are tabbed and paper-clipped. Sam nods at the sights. A famous jewelry store favored by British royals and software t.i.tans who know their Color, Cut, and Clarity. Warren Buffet's first office-see that broken window? It's the one directly above it, with the pigeons.

Someone must want me to feel at home in Omaha, and just in case Sam is reporting back to him, I show interest in salvaged toolworks and thoughtful greenways and redbrick loft districts zoned for art. I'm restless, though. We're leaving downtown along the sluggish Missouri. Paddle-wheel casinos, stacked raw lumber, the home of the nine-dollar T-bone, the eight, the seven. Big dreams and low rents can make beautiful music together, but as the steak dinners give way to dollar Buds, I start to wonder. Does MythTech have no pride?

"Where's world headquarters?"

"For what?" Sam says. "They gave me an address, not a press release."

Low pay, long hours. I don't take his snapping personally.

He looks from side to side, then at the sky, his chin out over the steering wheel. He's lost. Searching the sky while driving on the ground is like kicking the dropped fly ball that ended the game.

"Did they give you a time to get me there?" I say.

"In my glove compartment there's a phone."

Sam dials yet keeps driving; I lose faith in him. Once in the soup, persistence is no virtue. m.u.f.fler shops now. Unaffiliated churches. A Dairy Queen rival from the early seventies with a listing discolored cone that doesn't spin. MythTech hired this car, and by a firm's subcontractors you shall know its soul.

"We pa.s.sed it. I knew it!"

Sam's illegal U-turn ends at an old low warehouse that I'll admit has definite rock-and-roll capitalism potential but could use a few satellite dishes on the roof to close the deal. I open my door; I wish I'd kept my briefcase. Sam tells me he needs to deliver a late tuition payment but promises to be back within the hour.

The intercom panel beside the vault-like door is promisingly rich in lighted b.u.t.tons but none of them are labeled or even numbered. I hold them down four at a time and in response a buzzer sounds and a hidden latch clunks open. I s.n.a.t.c.h at the door handle, having never been told how long to expect such bolts to stay retracted. It's always a panic, this moment, for us nervous types.

The s.p.a.ce is well-lit thanks to banks of vintage skylights honeycombed with reinforcing wires and remarkably free of bird droppings and dust. There's an old-fashioned gallery or mezzanine of frosted-gla.s.s offices served by iron stairways that horseshoes around what must have been the floor of some grand factory from Omaha's golden age as a center of whatever industry-boilermaking?-that survives in the names of its high school football teams. But there's no one around and no visible reception center where one might inquire where they've gone. The rough plank floor is as empty as a rink and hasn't been lovingly sanded and refinished to the customary retro l.u.s.ter or painted with foul lines to afford young geniuses those crucial brainstorming games of lunch-break basketball without which there'd be no Internet, no HandStar.

The only object evoking work or purpose is a sheet metal cube painted army surplus green and the size of an industrial air conditioner. It's featureless, with no rivets or vents or panels, but the sheen coming off it suggests it's well maintained. It's evidence of my investment in MythTech's legend that despite a stint in a high-tech field that taught me what supercomputers really look like-nothing much; they're no bigger than a dishwasher-I insist on seeing the cube as a huge cyber-brain capable of predicting how and when America's recently rekindled romance with the traditional station wagon will end. It's a drab-olive thinking monolith, that thing.

"h.e.l.lo down there. Can I help you?"

"It's Ryan Bingham!"

The man at the rail of the mezzanine withdraws into the warren of gla.s.s offices and out pops a new face, young but very pale. The kid has on an orange Hawaiian shirt that's probably an expensive tribute to the Hawaiian shirt of old, since this one is louder and busier and brighter than any I ever saw my father wear at his annual company picnic in the Lion's Park. The kid's wearing flip-flop sandals, too. Encouraging. This is the look of the new-cla.s.s robber barons.

"Can I help you?" Same question, but spoken with more authority, even a faint ring of profit partic.i.p.ation. The kid considers this strange domain his own.

"This is MythTech, isn't it?" I say.

"Sure is. I'm sorry, though-no more odd jobs. We finished the packing and loading two days ago. Are you from Manpower?"

"I'm dressed like I'm from Manpower? Is s.p.a.ck or Sarrazin here? It's Ryan Bingham."

"They're already up in Calgary," he says. Why won't he come down the stairs and make this civilized? "It's just me and four temps and two security guys until we can hoist that thing there on a truck. Then we're gone, too. Are you the one I sent the Town Car for?"

"Someone did. That was you?"

"I got a call from one of our old backers," the kid shouts down. "Send a car to meet a plane, he said, and when I asked why and who for the guy got snippy and told me I'm too low to ask him questions. I had to remind the old snot we're not top-down here. We're horizontal."

"Sandy Pinter?"

"One of those guys with all the wrong old concepts, the ones that put General Motors in the tank."

"Pinter's a MythTech backer?"

"From the old days. He got in early third quarter of '98. You haven't said how I can help you yet. Adam called you out here?"

"Indirectly."

"Back-channel stuff?"

"Right."

"It's all back channel lately. Did they contact you via microwave or radar? Or AM radio?"

This is not a high point in my life. I'm being teased by a mental inferior who thinks that America didn't get off the ground until September 1999, or whenever he opened his first IRA. But I deserve his jeers. What do I tell him? That they summoned me on an airport loudspeaker using a mini-mart pay phone?

"What's in Calgary?"

"Tax breaks. Lax accounting standards. Who knows? Strict banking privacy laws. Skilled immigrants. It's not like we're quarrying Nebraska sandstone-we can run this shop from Djakarta." He snaps his fingers and the echo pings around the s.p.a.ce. "Unless you can tell me how to be of service, though, I've got an office swamped with cords and cables that need some pretty serious untangling."

"The name Ryan Bingham means nothing to you?" I say.

"Right now it means frustration. An hour ago I probably would've thought it was my senator. I mean it: I have big-time wire to spool, a jumbo commercial coffeemaker to clean. I also have two large guards on antipsychotics. Insanity defense? They've got it memorized."

"What's your name? I'm going to write it down."

"I can give you my log-in. I go by that," he says. "2BZ2CU."

I shift my center of gravity toward the door, but technically I hold my ground. I glance at the cube; it pulsed just now. It scanned me. I have sensitive mitochondria, rubbed raw by X-rays. I know when I've been scanned.

"I came to see that," I say, pointing. "Over there. My a.s.sistant took Sarrazin's call. He screwed the dates up. I worked on its prototype in Colorado."

The young man c.o.c.ks his body skeptically and folds his thin white arms. He's bluff, all bluff, just another Starbucks M.B.A.; a fashion-forward brat in a VW who probably says he admires the Dalai Lama, but inside he's all stock options, all wireless day trades. I've felt these kindergartners at my back for going on a decade, and they scare me. Time to confront that. Kid doesn't know c.r.a.p. Suspects he's not going to Calgary, either, I bet. These outfits don't go cross-border and non-dollar so they can haul along their slacker trash.

This needn't be pure humiliation, this errand. I can alpha this geek and exit in big black boots. So no one here was expecting me? That happens. I'm used to it by now. But I can at least view the cube and ride off tall into my million-mile sunset flight.

"Professional courtesy call," I say. "Get down here. Give me a tour or Pinter's calling s.p.a.ck and s.p.a.ck'll pay your severance in rubles."

2BZ shows Ryan his downy throat. He hits the stairs and flip-flops down in quick-time. The skylights dim as clouds slide over the sun but the cube holds its own in the gloom. It's homeostatic. 2BZ sets us up at a distance from the thing and won't fully face it; he just gives it his profile. He's acting like he's wishing for a lead ap.r.o.n.

"Is it turned on?" I say.

"Huh? It's always 'on.' "

"On inside quotation marks?"

"I'm really not the expert," says 2BZ. "We work on a need-to-know basis in this firm. It's horizontal, but layered-horizontal. I'm infrastructure. I'm shipping and receiving. I can tell you it's insured and that it's fragile and that it travels on a special flatbed that should have been here half an hour ago. I can tell you they already got in touch with Customs and that it wasn't your shortest phone call ever. I think they made two calls, in fact."

"So what's its nickname? Around the central office?"

"This was the back office. People work at home. This place was mostly support and storage," he says. "I'm not sure I have a job once it's cleared out. Who do you work for?"

"Myself. Like everyone. So basically you're ancillary and clueless."

"They told me I was critical. You smoke? Mind if I do?"

2BZ hand-rolls one from a pouch too fragrant to hold mere tobacco. Cloves or dope? These kids smoke all sorts of mixtures, and they should know better. I ask for one, too, but I won't inhale, just steep myself. I've worn a few Hawaiian shirts myself.

"I do have a few ideas about it," he says. "It's pretty skeletal here, there's not much company, just FedEx and UPS, so I spin out sometimes. Whole place was wired for sound once. Sequenced amps. I pirated off the Net and blasted everything. Tried to see if I could break those skylights. Or get myself fired. You know how all the shrinks say that children now are crying out for firmness and discipline and clear-cut values? I think it's true. I always got positive evaluations, but what I wanted was someone to storm in here and kill the music and kick a little b.u.t.t."

"What ideas?" I'm inhaling some. You think you won't, but in practice it's hard not to. Just three hundred more miles to go, so I deserve it. Forty thousand feet above the wheat, and no one will even look up. As long as I I know. know.

"It's the world-record random automated dialer. It skims off the fractional cents from savings accounts and forwards them to some bank in the Grand Caymans. It's where erased voice mails end up."

"Don't kid."

"I'm not."

"They have such devices. On decommissioned air bases. Don't believe it when they say some base is decommissioned. More like 'recommissioned.' "

"That's half this state. Drive through Nebraska sometime. It's all old Air Force. Half the Great Plains is military surplus."

We smoke and behold the cube. We think our thoughts. Is this where the miles are stored before they're paid?

A shuddering noise turns us both and we look on as a broad automated garage door rides its rails segment by segment and opens half one wall to views of the Missouri and western Iowa. We hear the beeps of a vehicle backing up and then we see the flatbed. It's rigged with about a dozen orange triangles and a "Flammable" sticker from some other job, perhaps. Three workmen walk backwards behind it and guide the driver with hand signals aimed at his flared-out rearview mirrors, and all wear emerald jumpsuits with drawstring hoods and trouser cuffs that cinch around their boots. The bed of the semi bristles with tie-down eyelets. Hoops of braided cable hang from the truck and now it's so close that we have to step aside. I can see by 2BZ's squint and brittle posture that he's witnessing his obsolescence here and I wish I knew someone to call on his behalf. My job recommendations pull no weight, unfortunately; the people know that I'm in CTC and am always trying to sell some exile as the Next Big Thing.

The boom on the flatbed is swung over the cube and two new workmen pile out of the cab, one with a walkie-talkie against his cheek. There may well be a helicopter somewhere, but I don't hear blades.

I ask 2BZ for his card and give him mine, though I'm afraid they're both outdated by now. His t.i.tle is-was-"a.s.sociate." I thank him.

"The Calgary location is a campus. They're calling it a campus. It's vast, I hear. An old defunct seminary on the outskirts. No more home offices. They're consolidating."

"If I'm not at one of those numbers on the card, try information, Polk Center, Minnesota. You want me to write that down for you?"

"I'll remember," he says.

"You tell tell yourself. I'm writing it on another one. Take this one." yourself. I'm writing it on another one. Take this one."

"You know what I think it is? I think I guessed. It goes outside, on the campus. To welcome visitors."

The workmen swarm and two of them boost one of them onto the top, where he widens his stance and bends. Everyone wields some cable or some hook and radiates safety-conscious professionalism. This baby is reaching Canada intact.

"I think it's probably art," says 2BZ. "It's corporate art. A thing to put out front."

seventeen.