she married my father. She believed in stages of development. Under her system, keyed to crucial birthdays, teddy bears disappeared when kids turned eight, replaced by clarinets or swimming lessons. She had us baptized at ten, confirmed at twelve, and bought us subscriptions to
The gift shop lady, a buzzardy old gal with nicotine fingers and casino eyes, slides my credit card through her machine. I can tell she’d rather I pay in cash so she can skim a few bucks to play the slots.
“Refused,” she says.
“That’s impossible.”
She shrugs. “Want to try another one?”
I don’t. The card is the only one that pays me miles and enters me in a contest for a new Audi. “Try it over. It’ll work this time.”
Since my payments are current, there has to be a glitch. But maybe my payments aren’t current. I think back. The last load of mail delivered to my old address showed signs of mishandling. Two torn envelopes. Was there a credit card bill? I don’t remember. I put through a forwarding order ten days ago listing my office at ISM—I think— but as of last Friday nothing had arrived.
“Refused again,” the woman says. She hands back the card as though it’s covered in microbes.
I pay with cash, forsaking thirty-three miles. Worse, I left my cell phone on the plane, so I can’t call the credit card’s customer service line until the young guy at the pay phone by the pop machine wraps up his already-endless conversation about a lost mountain bike.
I make a pleading face.
“What?” the man whispers.
“Emergency.”
“Me too.”
Elko is not my town. I’ve never done well here.
Alex looks distressed when I return, her lips clamped down so hard on the inhaler that the tendons in her jaw stand up. I motion for her to stay seated and edge in front of her, eyeing my phone, which I won’t have time to use, since the credit card company’s voice-mail labyrinth will keep me on hold for fifteen minutes, minimum.
“How’s my boy? They taking good care of him?”
“Yes, but he’s sluggish.”
“You saw him?”
I fib. “I did.”
Alex looks unreassured. She tucks the inhaler in her seatback pocket and cinches tight her lap belt. I see now that this is a woman who’s made her way in life by playing the spread between modern assertiveness and Victorian fragility.
We take off into the smoke. I’m jumpy too now. Aside from a slim civilian corridor that roughly follows I-80 toward California, the central Nevada skies are Air Force territory, a vast mock battleground for the latest jets, some so highly classified and agile that witnesses take them for otherworldly craft. I thought I glimpsed one once: a silver arrowhead corkscrewing straight up into the sun. Radar dishes stud the scrubby mountaintops, tracking war games and bombing runs and dogfights. America’s airspace has its own geography, and this is its no-man’s-land, ringed by virtual razor wire. If our plane went down here, they might not tell our relatives.
Alex leafs through an issue of
I take out my pencil and paper and try to work, refining my plan for Art Krusk’s commercial comeback. I can’t say I’m optimistic about his prospects. Healing the wound to Reno’s public memory caused by the poison tacos should prove simple, but rehabilitating Art the manager won’t be easy. The man’s a bitter wreck. Word has it that he’s connected to Reno’s underworld and that he’s placed a bounty on the head of the unknown saboteur. I hope not. Breaking some busboy’s arm won’t bring his patrons back.
Art may not make it, but he’s my only coaching client, my sole relief from the dolors of CTC. Maybe the best I can do is help him fail. There are two kinds of consultants, basically: the accountants and operations specialists who minister to the body of the patient, and those who treat its mind and spirit, approaching the company as a vital being animated by conflicts and desires. Enterprises feel and think and dream, and often when they die, as Art’s may die, and as my father’s propane business died, they die of loneliness. Businesses may thrive on competition, Sandor Pinter wrote in one of his books, but they need love and understanding, too.
Alex goes off to use the bathroom, leaving me with decisions to make. Every flight is a three-act play—takeoff, cruising, descent; past, present, future—which means that it’s time to prepare for how we’ll part, on what terms, and with what expectation. She already knows I’m staying at Homestead Suites and I know that she’ll be at Harrah’s on the Strip, overseeing her benefit, which starts at eight. Maybe she has a local flame, and maybe she thinks I do. She’d be right. Anita deals Pai Gow poker at Circus Circus, a twenty-nine-year-old Sarah Lawrence grad who came west with the Park Service as a stream biologist but fell in with the local color crowd. We got together, chastely, a month ago and took in a traditional Irish dance troupe at the Silver Legacy, but I don’t plan to look her up again. Anita had ugly opinions about the Asians who patronize her table, and though I humored her bigotry at first, I hated myself for it afterwards. She’s one of those women who take up right-wing views as a substitute for a pistol or can of Mace—in self-defense, as a warning to creeps and stalkers. It’s tiresome armor. Time-consuming, too. The Kennedy family this, the World Bank that.
In truth, I don’t have much time for Alex, either, assuming that we have prospects, which I doubt. No, the challenge for us will be to separate without so much as a gesture toward this evening. We’ll have to use the descent to drift apart and retract any curiosity we’ve shown. To confirm to ourselves that we worked best as strangers.
It’s time to bore each other, if possible.
