Up In The Air Part 22

in Omaha, boarding," I answer-accurately. They've worn me down. It's best just to give these women what they want when they ask me where they're reaching me.

"Julie's cut all her hair off," Kara says. "She'll be bald at the altar. I thought you set her straight."

"Waning powers." It's tough to keep my mind on this. My audience is a.s.sembling in first cla.s.s and I intend to remember every face.

"When the salmon never came," says Kara, "Mom got some idea that she could smoke a turkey by putting a pan of wet wood chips in the oven, but underneath she wanted to burn the house down. No one's helping me. It's Shakespeare here. Luckily, the extinguisher had pressure left after four years of not once being checked."

"Did Tammy get in okay? The maid of honor?"

"She's Shakespeare too. She took a b.u.mp in Detroit for a free ticket and now we have to wait till almost midnight for her to show her hostile little face. A total play for attention. Infantile. Her best friend is on her third husband, just about, and she's still single-not because she's a chilly neatnik, naturally, who bolts every therapist we recommend the minute she finds a stray hair on their couch and the doctor won't let her spray it down with that antibacterial c.r.a.p she totes around, but because her parents wouldn't buy her braces. She blames her teeth-like mine are any better. I I got a man." got a man."

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 spa.r.s.er 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 gra.s.s and c.r.a.p 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 ma.s.s 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 acc.u.mulate, 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 gla.s.s was clear.

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

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 compet.i.tor 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 gla.s.ses 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, gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.ses 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 winegla.s.s 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.

Morse unbuckles to show us all the way, back in the lead and comfortable again, because during normal his orders must be obeyed and his moods are the collective rudder. The episode is over, his face declares, and already he's revising its severity and telling a little story to himself of uninterrupted control. His airline not only lies to customers, it deceives itself. We're steady on now and we always have been.

"Christine, two new gla.s.ses. These ones spilled," he says. "Take them away, please."

Already concealing evidence. The continuum would include him, but he won't let it, though soon he'll have to work harder to stand alone, when he's cooling his heels in an office in D.C. as just another aviation lobbyist or whenever a baseball game comes on TV while he's at home with his new and plainer mistress after another long day at the trucking line or the regional frozen foods distributor. Not me, though. I know when I've come through a rough patch and voiced silent prayers that promised deep reforms-the same reforms everyone else was pledging, too, with the full knowledge that we'll dishonor them the moment we're down and safe.

I can see to the ground now between white disks of cloud that meet in the pattern four dinner plates would make if pushed in against one another on a table. The pattern repeats and repeats, and through the breaks shaped like perfect diamonds with curved-in sides I notice that we're no longer above the west. I recognize the tic-tac-toe green fields and the corner placements of windbreak maples. There's a definite American longitude dividing the cottonwoods and sc.r.a.ppy desert trees from the wet shady maples, and we've pa.s.sed it.

I check my watch to confirm, but I don't have to. The plane icon is well beyond Fort Dodge and in a few minutes I'll be on top of Kara, casting a shadow on her eastbound car. Which means that I missed it, as I was bound to miss it. But I still crossed. I hand Morse the cheapie camera and instruct him to shoot me front and back and from the sides, though of course he can't stand on the wing and shoot from that side. How kind of my family to come pick me up. Will they be able to see it on my face? Morse looks silly snapping that little b.u.t.ton. It was worth it to watch this. "From below," I say. I'll tramp along the Jetway, in my boots, and see them all there at the gate, where they've been waiting, though I wonder why. Will we last a whole week together? We just might. Everyone's exhausted. Exhaustion soothes. It's a fable now, anyway. We've used up our real substance. In a fable, you find new resources, new powers. Pick an animal, then take its shape.

Morse runs out of film and begs my pardon: he needs to check in on the c.o.c.kpit and exercise what's left of his authority. Two more weeks and the pilots will shut this airline down. He's getting out just in time, and so am I.

"My miles go to children's hospitals," I say.

"That's great. What a gesture. We should get this out. I'll contact press relations when we land. You're serious?"

"Don't use my name. No name. It's not a gesture. It's barely charity. I'm sick myself; I can't use them anyway. Plus, I've been everywhere you people fly."

Of course I've had seizures. Why skirt it any longer? One after another, some mild, some not, but nothing one talks about if one wants a job-and didn't I land in the perfect one. Too perfect. My family knows, but we've learned not to discuss it. It started when my car went in the lake. We tried medications, and some worked better than others, but what worked best was lowering my standards for what was not a seizure. And forgetting. I'm not there when I have them, so really, what's to say? How can I tell you a secret I don't know? The s.p.a.ces between them are getting shorter, though. The signs all agree. The mental gaps are widening. I made my appointments at Mayo before the trip and Mayo has wonderful instruments, so we'll see. I'll drive down alone, in case it's not good news.

There's one last item and this will feel complete. I slide my credit card through the airphone slot. I sense the account's being drained on several continents, but it brings up a dial tone, which is all I need. I punch in my own number and get my voice mail, then press more b.u.t.tons to reach the little message I recorded . . . when? Three weeks ago? Or was it four? It was after I saw the specialist in Houston, the one I haven't mentioned, since no one's asked.

"You're there," the message says, then tapes my answer.

"We're here," I say. Just that. No more. "We're here."

* No Premium Import vehicles available at time of booking. You're waitlisted. -M. No Premium Import vehicles available at time of booking. You're waitlisted. -M.

* New departmental travel policy,per Craig Gregory:single rooms only for non-overnight stays New departmental travel policy,per Craig Gregory:single rooms only for non-overnight stays

Non-Great West route.Sorry. -M. Non-Great West route.Sorry. -M.

* Automatic courtesy upgrade for reaching 100-night mark in single calendar year. Congrats! -M. Automatic courtesy upgrade for reaching 100-night mark in single calendar year. Congrats! -M.

* As I understand it, you're staying with family in MN and don't need a car either. Also, sorry for compact in LV, but nothing bigger's available (they say). And be aware of new policy at Homestead: you must provide Preferred Frontiersman # as well as Compa.s.s AirPoints # and proof of qualifying flight at check-in to guarantee Great West mileage credit. Ha.s.sle, I know. Have a great one! -Mel Truex, Internal Travel Services As I understand it, you're staying with family in MN and don't need a car either. Also, sorry for compact in LV, but nothing bigger's available (they say). And be aware of new policy at Homestead: you must provide Preferred Frontiersman # as well as Compa.s.s AirPoints # and proof of qualifying flight at check-in to guarantee Great West mileage credit. Ha.s.sle, I know. Have a great one! -Mel Truex, Internal Travel Services

about the author.

walter kirn is currently the fiction editor for is currently the fiction editor for GQ GQ magazine and a contributing editor to magazine and a contributing editor to Time Time magazine. His work has appeared in the magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Magazine, the the New York Times Book Review, GQ, Vogue, New York, New York Times Book Review, GQ, Vogue, New York, and and Esquire Esquire. He is the author of three previous works of fiction, My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, and and Thumbsucker Thumbsucker. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

also by walter kirn

Thumbsucker

My Hard Bargain

She Needed Me