Up in the Air

then enter a Seattle area code and the number for Advanta Publishing. I’m calling a man I’ve met just once before but who I believe can make a difference for me. We both believe in the future of The Garage, my “motivational fable” of an inventor who toils in his workshop, alone and undistracted, while out in the world his breakthrough innovations spawn a commercial empire he never sees. The theme is concentration, inner purity. The book isn’t long—a hundred pages or so—but that’s the trend now, wisdom in your pocket. There are men in my field who’ve made millions off such volumes, and if I can do half that well I’ll be fixed by forty and can spend the next decade working off my miles with weekend jaunts to Manhattan, if I’m still single, or with round-trips to Disney World if I have a family.

“Morris Dwight, please,” I say to the receptionist. Dwight is my age but with an air of elegance, as though he grew up abroad, in grand hotels. He combs something into his hair that smells like wool and drops me notes in brown ink on heavy cream stock, tagging his signature with wispy doodles of seabirds and leaping fish, that kind of thing. I suspect he’s an alcoholic and a fraud and professionally unharmed by being either. His latest business title, You Lost, Get Over It!, has been on the Wall Street Journal list since spring, but it’s one of his clunkers that drew me to Advanta: Soren Morse’s own Horizoneering: The Story of a Mid-Air Turnaround. Outselling Morse, which shouldn’t be hard to do, would bring me a primitive, lasting satisfaction.

“Mr. Dwight’s in a meeting, sir. I’ll take your number.”

“Could I please have his voice mail?”

She disconnects me. I call again and get a busy signal that saws away at my morning optimism. I try one last time and he answers. “My friend,” he says.

I tell him I’d like to switch the drink we’ve scheduled to a more leisurely dinner, but Dwight is not the same chattering good sport I remember from the Portland club. He sounds stressed; I can hear him typing as we speak and rearranging papers on his desk. Wednesday is impossible, he tells me, due to “a sudden charitable commitment.” He suggests an early breakfast Thursday morning.

I do some speedy mental figuring with the help of my HandStar digital assistant, a wireless device I use for e- mail and to track my miles. My schedule this week leaves little room to improvise; it’s a three-dimensional chess game, meticulous. This afternoon and this evening I’ll be in Reno for a coaching session with an old client whose company is hobbling toward bankruptcy. Tomorrow, I go to Southern California to meet Sandor Pinter, consulting’s grand old man, to whom I’ll pitch an exciting freelance project that could make my name among my peers and backstop my income if MythTech and The Garage don’t come through. Wednesday A.M. I’m supposed to go to Dallas to plot a severance strategy at a consolidating HMO, but the flight’s not Great West, which makes it useless to me, so I’ve already left a message canceling and booked an earlier Seattle flight, which I now see won’t do me any good. On Thursday I head to Las Vegas for GoalQuest XX, an annual gathering of friends and colleagues at which I intend to speak on CTC and finally unburden my bad conscience by telling all about our nasty specialty. On Friday morning I’m off to Omaha, and later that day—in a mood of triumph, I hope, after a candid sit-down with the Child—I’ll board a plane to Minneapolis and ring up my million over Iowa. When my mother and sisters meet me at the gate, I intend to be drunk, and to stay drunk through the wedding. Drunk and free, with an open-ended ticket good for a round-trip to Saturn, if I so choose, and enough credit left in my account to send a few ailing children and their parents off to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic.

How dare Dwight alter such a battle plan. If I push back my arrival at GoalQuest XX, I can make breakfast, barely, if it’s brief, but I’ll miss Great West’s only morning flight to Vegas and have to slum it on Desert Air or Sun South, losing a thousand-mile connection bonus that I won’t be able to make up no matter which route I take to Omaha. The answer is to have breakfast very early and do it in the airport.

“You still there?”

I make my pitch to Dwight: 7 A.M. at SeaTac in the food court.

“The airport?”

“I’m squeezed. I’m sorry. I’m in a bind.”

“Can I phone you back about this? This evening, say? There’s a chance I’ll be in Arizona Wednesday and maybe into Thursday. Or beyond.”

“You just told me Wednesday’s your charitable thing.”

“My life is fluid. Can we meet at eight?”

“No later than seven. It has to be at SeaTac.”

The line goes quiet. Then: “It’s almost finished?”

“I two-day aired you three fourths of it last night. I’m down to filling in and rounding off.”

“Seven, then. Call on Tuesday to confirm, though.”

“I could shoot down to Arizona, too. My Wednesday is flexible. Phoenix, is it?”

“Phoenix—but maybe Utah that evening. Or somewhere else.”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Needy authors everywhere. Blocks. Nervous breakdowns. Major tax delinquencies. Much hand-holding to do. There’s also golf. I’m in La Jolla right now at a pro-am—my woman forwarded you.”

“I hear a keyboard.”

“It’s a course-simulation program on my laptop. I’m at a table outside the pro shop, strategizing.”

“I’ll confirm,” I say.

I expect the next call to be easier. Lower stakes. Kara, my oldest sister, who functions as our family’s social secretary, lives south of Salt Lake City in a suburb that might have been squeezed from a tube, with recreation centers for the kids and curving boulevards split by bike-path medians. She drives a Saab that’s cleaner than when she leased it and works full-time hours as a volunteer for literacy programs and battered-women shelters. Her husband makes it all possible, a software writer flush with some of the fastest money ever generated by our economy. He hangs pleasantly in the background of Kara’s life, demanding nothing, offering everything. They’re bountiful, gracious people, here to help, who seem to have sealed some deal with the Creator to spread his balm in return for perfect sanity. I pray that no real tragedy ever befalls them. It would be wrong, a sinful, cosmic breach.