Up in the Air

of the first to reach the gruesome scene. . . .

Something’s not right here; I’ve read this story before. I try to place the source. Was it last week in a club- room U.S. News or was it the week before, in flight, in Time? The shooting happened in Oregon, I recall, at a softball game, or was it a Wisconsin soccer match? I wait for the reporter to change screens and reveal his dateline but he’s stopped writing, hung up on completing this sentence: “Such innocence—”

I can finish it for him from memory: “dies hard.” His hands hang over the keyboard as he thinks. Here he goes now: “isn’t easily destroyed.” Same difference—I was right. I’ve read this story! Then I place it: USA Today, just half an hour ago.

What a make-work universe this is. Judging by the fellow’s bunched-up brow, rewriting a story known to all is just as hard as composing one from scratch.

“Got the time?” I ask, pretending to wake. I can’t let him know I’ve been spying.

“What’s our zone?”

“Pacific. This is a Tuesday, the third millennium, and breakfast is poppyseed muffins. That’s all I know.”

“I guess it must be seven then.” He clicks back his digital watch but goes too far, clicks it forward, overshoots again, then finally nails it.

“You write for a living?”

“Try.”

“For magazines?”

“A Chicago afternoon paper. I’m on deadline. Can you excuse me for a few more minutes? I need to file as soon as we touch down.”

He returns to his work, which isn’t really his, searching for transitions and adjectives that, when he finds them after much grave frowning, duplicate exactly the other writer’s, which probably came from a wire story anyway. I could just give him the paper from my briefcase, but the guy needs to feel important, like all of us.

I shed my boots at last and flex my feet. The odor is inoffensive—warm, damp leather—but the socks, I see, aren’t my brand. I only buy Gold Toes. A hotel laundry mix-up? It happens. Still.

I switch on my microrecorder: “Notes for book: hero floats outside of time in The Garage. The progress of his projects is all he knows. Self-management means nothing if not this—the task-centered governance of one’s very biorhythms. If not for the quarterly financial statements that come to him through the Communications Portal, which he shreds unread, then burns for heat, my hero would not even know what year it is. The man who makes history is a living calendar, his beating heart his only pendulum. When the voice in the Portal says to him “Go faster!” my hero replies with the Fourth Dictum: “Innovation spreads outward from its center, not forward from some arbitrary—”

“Sir?”

I look to the side.

“Your coffee.”

Turbulence. Before I can close my hand, the cup leaps sideways, spraying my chin and my collar. I’m wet, but not burned—the coffee was dishwater warm. We jolt again. My recorder hops off the seat onto the floor, and when I pick it up, it’s dripping, soaked. I press rewind and the capstans jerk then stop. I pop the tape out and blot it on my shirt. Thirty minutes of lost work not yet transcribed.

I check the window: clear skies, a plane-shaped shadow gliding over a salt flat. Things are calm again. The flight attendant returns, apologizes, then hands me a pen and a voucher from the airline granting me a thousand miles in consideration for my stained clothing. I tell her it’s not enough, that I want five, but she says that the best she can do is one. I sign. The miles don’t make us even, not even close, but at least I’m not falling any further behind.

The reporter saves his story, shuts his laptop, zips it into a padded black nylon case, and calls for a white rum and diet cola. We’re still waiting on our breakfast, but the flight attendant understands that there’s no accounting for body clocks.

I quiz the fellow about his job, then mention that I’ve been doing some writing myself, which seems to alarm him. Another sweaty amateur. I name my publisher to prove my bona fides, but he tells me he’s not familiar with the imprint and begins to fidget with his wedding band, sliding it up and down over his knuckle as if to make sure the thing will still come off. I backtrack to my real job and propose that he do a story on CTC men, the smiling undertakers for the still-living. The reporter hasn’t a clue about what I’m referring to, but nods nonetheless, then retrieves his cased computer. Inspiration has struck, apparently. Perhaps he’ll change “leafy college town” to “shady.”

I unlock the airphone from my seatback and steel myself for a call to ISM and the man I like least in the world, Craig Gregory, who came on the same month that I did, way back when. We underwent the same training, same orientation, and we simultaneously requisitioned the same ergonomic desk chairs and keyboard wrist-pads. After that, our paths diverged. Mine traveled flat and away, into the world, while Craig’s snaked back into the building and corkscrewed upward. He knew what I didn’t—that power in the company lay inside its walls, with his colleagues and superiors, not outside, with the clients. Craig Gregory became a virtuoso lurker in beverage nooks, stairwells, elevators, and men’s rooms, emerging from stalls to startle chatting VPs, plunking his tray down across from gossiping temps, getting the dope, remembering the dope, dishing out the dope. He never went home. No matter how early I reached the office, a coffeed-up Craig Gregory was there before me, sparking off with the latest e-mail jokes and showing off curious finds from people’s wastebaskets. I suspected he kept a small mattress in an air duct, where he’d also squirreled away chocolate bars and water. And somehow, in time, he gained leverage over me, over all of us. We couldn’t shake him, the phantom of headquarters, a pestilent jack-in-the-box with icy Certs breath, and soon quite a few of us were reporting to him, ISM’s organizational charts be damned.

I tell him I’m on an airphone when he picks up—it’s a way to limit our conversation time. At three bucks a minute I’ll have to keep this short.

“How’s Krusk? You talk to him about his debts? You’re at least coming back with a severed ear, I hope. Hey, I got one of those desk toys—steel ball on strings. The soothing click and clack of basic physics. It fits right in with my teeter-totter monkeys.”

“Art’s a write-off. He’s gutted. There’s nothing there, Craig. I won’t be submitting my hours on that job.”