“I’m on page eleven,” you say. “The plot’s still forming.”
“It hit number four on the
“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 classic 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 pissy 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 competitor 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 fishing 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 passes 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 Compass Club lounges in the terminals, especially the flagship 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 passed were “That’s my seat” or “Done with that
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
