Up in the Air

i’m in the back row of the Reno airport chapel, sitting out a forty-minute delay with a fruit- topped frozen yogurt and this morning’s USA Today, when it happens again for the second time since August: I’m gripped by the feeling that I’ve just been paged. I missed the name, yet I’m certain it was mine. Someone wants me. Someone needs me. Now.

I fold the paper and put it in my briefcase and listen for the announcement to be repeated. Few people know that most airports have houses of worship: they tend to be white, high-ceilinged, scrubbed, and soundproof, imbued with a spirituality so general that even atheists can find refuge in them. They go unused, for the most part, except in times of emergency and terror—after a crash or when a war breaks out. They’re eerie little niches but also restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork. If someone arrives to pray or meditate while I’m using one, which seldom happens, I bow and pretend to be sunk in deep reflection as I fill out an expense report or rejigger my itinerary.

The voice was female, that’s all I’m sure of now. Tinny and official—robotic, almost. I examine the speaker recessed in the ceiling and think through the shortlist of the people who know my schedule. My assistant, a temp who claims to be a grad student taking time out from his thesis, but might be anyone, since I doubt ISM checked his background when it hired him. My boss, Ron Boosler, who’s fishing in Central America with the ex-CEO of General Mills and a Colorado federal judge he’s helping to position for the Supreme Court. And Alex, of course, who was gone when I woke up facedown in a soggy pillow on her bed.

It was MythTech. That’s what I thought in Billings, too, when the same thing happened three weeks ago. I was ordering oatmeal in the airport coffee shop, unslept and unshaven after an intensive two-day Career Transitions mini-session that saw the breakdown of one participant who wasn’t keen to re-enter the great job hunt and get on the phone to his entire Rolodex with chipper questions about openings while repeating to himself the affirmation: “I’m motivated, not desperate.” Stark panic often precedes enlightenment, and the former banker left our meeting room purple with hypertension and resentment, getting as far as his parked Buick LeSabre before falling into a catatonic trance that paralyzed his limbs but not his mouth, which belched forth intermittent rasping moans smelling of—they had an odor, these moans—stomach acid mixed with lighter fluid. It was dawn by the time I stabilized the fellow, and my eyes were so dry that when I blinked my lids stuck to my eyeballs with the adhesion factor of Post-it notes on a computer screen. In the cab to the airport I retched into a Baggie I use to store dirty underwear and socks. Then, at breakfast, directly above my head, I heard my name. My last name. I investigated, checking in with the airline and with security. Nothing. I called my voice mail and got a message, truncated and barely audible, leaving a number with a Nebraska area code. I dialed it, expecting Lucius Spack, whose interest in my career I’d been alerted to by a columnist for Modern Management who’d interviewed him for a story. Instead, I got an Omaha convenience store whose clerk insisted she’d just arrived at work and that I’d reached a pay phone. She couldn’t help me. I spent the flight back to Denver in a muddle, convinced that my ears had deceived me. Then again, Spack and MythTech are covert operators, famed for stealthy head-hunting campaigns. A call from an untraceable public phone wouldn’t be out of character for them, and tracking me down at an airport, away from colleagues, where no one could overhear us, would fit their tactics.

When the page doesn’t repeat, I leave the chapel, genuflecting by instinct in the aisle even though the room is so stripped bare that I’m not sure if it even contains an altar. At my gate a beeping electric cart cuts past and lets off a swollen old woman on metal crutches who hobbles onto the Jetway, the last to board. The agent rubber-bands her stack of boarding passes and levels a stare at me. “Let’s move along, sir.”

“I think I just heard someone call me on the PA.”

“The aircraft is leaving.”

I flash my Compass Club card. “Just try the office. The name is Ryan Bingham.”

The agent uses the phone behind the podium. “The last person paged was a Brian Raines,” she tells me. “You must have juxtaposed something.”

Juxtaposed. It’s so easy, but there’s a lag before it comes. I’m reaching capacity. No more Verbal Edge. Whatever I don’t know already, I’ll never learn.

I ask for an extra pillow and a blanket and shift my seat to its fully reclined position. The gentleman behind me groans. He could adjust his own seat for more space, but he prefers to play the martyr, apparently. I didn’t look at him closely when I boarded—still preoccupied with the phantom page—but, lying back, I recognize his cologne as one of those aggressive, woodsy scents worn by heavy perspirers. Salesmen, mostly.

I feel a bug coming on. My ears are hot. I twist shut the air nozzle blowing on my forehead and drain a second glass of grapefruit juice to soothe the pulsing rawness in my throat. The superviruses of modern air travel, steeled by exposure to diverse immune systems and virtually injected into the lungs by high-efficiency ventilation systems, can hang on for weeks, bringing on a multitude of symptoms that mimic those of more serious illnesses. Over time, I’ve grown resistant to most of them, but once in a while one sneaks past my glands. As soon as I land at Ontario today, I’ll find a drugstore and gorge on zinc and C. I need to be healthy for my meeting with Pinter.

My seatmate barely interests me for once. His glasses reflect the moonglow of his laptop as he touch-types what looks like a letter or an article. He’s chewing gum like a smoker in withdrawal and I’d guess by his mussed, longish hair and casual jacket that he’s a working journalist. I’m impressed. Anyone who can reach into the data swarm and pick out what’s newsworthy has my respect.

I can’t get comfortable in my little nest. My feet have swollen inside the cowboy boots, but I fear the odor if I kick them off. Such a small error, this purchase, yet so disruptive. Traveling, I live from my feet up. Shoes—one more item to shop for in Ontario.

But where’s Ontario? I really don’t know. A secondary airport outside Los Angeles, a clearing in the suburbs and subdivisions. They call such places faceless, but it’s not true. They’re bodiless, just signs and streets and lights. In fact, I’ve flown into Ontario before. I rode the shuttle bus to Homestead Suites, worked for an hour or two on The Garage, did some business downstairs in the grill, and returned to the terminal by cab. Memories? None. The smell of road tar, maybe. The trip was no more than a handshake through the ether.

I open one eye to read my seatmate’s screen—a breach of Airworld etiquette. Whatever he’s writing, he’s in the middle of it.

But for residents of this leafy college town, known until now for its world-class Children’s Hospital, the tragedy raises deeper, more troubling questions. Questions of media violence, parental neglect, and the aimlessness of the American adolescent. “A few of us worried about boys and guns,” says Janet Portis, 31, a part- time dental technician and mother of two, “but girls and guns? That just wasn’t on our screens.” Local officials echo her shocked confusion. “There was always a feeling of it can’t happen here,” muses Police Chief Brad McCann, one