“What if I told you I’m taping you right now and sending a transcript to Equal Opportunity? You’re going to get ISM sued. You watch your mouth.”
“Me? Our first Diversity Training graduate? I’m covered, brother. I have a framed certificate. Sponsor me on my AIDS walk?”
I should quit now. Retrieve the letter from Boosler’s desk and read it aloud while standing on my chair. Gather the assistants. The cleaning staff. The letter has several flourishes I’m quite proud of and would benefit from an oral presentation. If I had my million miles, I’d do it, too. But it’s ISM’s dime that’s going to put me over, and I can’t afford to lose travel authorization. I recite the letter in my head.
“Until GoalQuest. Anon. Our desert tribal gathering.”
Craig Gregory is going. Walking now. Walking and wagging his ass now. He liked me once. He sent me bursting congratulatory food baskets heaped with blue-veined cheeses and vintage vinegars. Once, he even took a dive for me in a company tennis tournament, vaulting me into the finals. These tokens moved me. Maybe my father was not so loving, after all. Maybe there are holes I’m trying to fill.
“Was that your boss?” says Julie.
“That’s never been clear. We use the new, confusing titles here.”
It must be the briefcase I came for, because I have it now and I’m ready to leave and not come back. I stare at my desk and conduct a mental X-ray of its neglected contents. Family photos? I’m not the type who would bring those to the office—I’d prefer they not know the faces of my loved ones here. Voodoo potential. Somewhere, in some drawer, I stashed a small packet of marijuana once, which I used to use in tandem with my sleep machine during particularly hectic trips. It’s a fossil now, surely. No drug dog could even smell it. What else is in there? A stapler. Old Vicks inhalers. Some cream I bought once when I couldn’t feel my legs, supposed to promote circulation. It caused a rash. Other than that, though, just business cards and tape and microcassettes and ISM logo keychains and scads of paper clips that have mysteriously linked themselves together into the sort of puzzle bright children enjoy. Worth holding on to? Anything? Post-it notes?
They give you a lot of stuff when you’re first hired and you fully expect you’ll use it, but you just don’t.
If earning miles were the chief consideration, I would do better driving the rented Volvo at five hundred bonus points per calendar day back to Salt Lake City. In fact, this is the chief consideration, particularly as of 3 P.M. today, with every other seed I’ve planted lately gone dormant in the clay. Dwight is backpedaling on
Right now, for the first time in years—the first time ever?—I’d rather not get on a plane, though. You listening, Morse? Your calf has slipped the lariat. He’s driving. He’s utilizing the public byways. And still earning chits, still indebting you, through Maestro. Besides the miles I’ll give to charity in the hope some sick child will come vigorously of age and knife you in the street for pocket change, I think I’ll just hoard the rest. To keep you owing me.
Julie, too, would rather drive than fly now. She covered much the same route just yesterday, but in the dark, and she wonders what she missed. The trip should take us about eight hours, she estimates, and will be like old times in Dad’s Chevy, except we’ll eat.
Kara looms. Both bells at the New York Stock Exchange have rung, O’Hare has dispatched a dozen flights to Asia and FedEx Memphis has sorted a million legal briefs and tardy birthday presents, and still no status report for our big sister. I’m sure she finds this unpardonable. I find it racking. The longer we avoid her, the louder she speaks. I hear her voice when our tires stray onto the gravel.
The briefcase, still unopened, is in the trunk. Some truckstop along the way will have a screwdriver. My new theory is that the case is mine, that I left it on board a jet some years ago during one of the strobing, amnesiac flutters that follow intensive bouts of CTC work, and that the case has been sailing ever since in the parallel dimension of Great West baggage. I anticipate no epiphanies (Verbal Edge, tape nine, “The Language of Art and Literature”) when I crack it. I expect to find socks and boxers and a shirt and perhaps a collection of loose-leaf workbook pages from Sandy Pinter’s master-level seminar, the one where participants wore colored hats representing the Six Cognitive Styles and were asked by the trainer to cross a hotel ballroom without letting their feet contact the floor. It was a daunting task for the non-acrobats and the source of much frustration and puzzlement, until the trainer pointed out to us that our feet and the floor were separated by shoes, an obvious fact that all had overlooked and proof of Sandy Pinter’s principle that frantic problem-solving is usually evidence that no problem exists.
Either that or the case contains Morse’s tracking device and I can go crazy in earnest once I’ve jimmied and stripped the bug from the lining. To find a bug—how glorious that must be for those who’ve done it. To have one’s fears credentialed, physically. To hold the little gremlin in one’s hand and hear it tick or buzz or hum or whatever it does that tells one that it’s operating, then to bellow into the ears of living spies! I’d like to sit down with a man who’s had this chance. I think he would have a strong spirit as a result. I could offer to agent him as a corporate speaker.
I let Julie drive. I’m accustomed to being piloted. We head north toward Cheyenne, where we’ll meet I-80 west and push up over the hump to the Great Basin in the footsteps of the Mormon settlers. They say you can walk in the grooves cut by the wheels of their wagons and handcarts. We’ll pass the graves of children, the shady encampments where Brigham spread his bedroll. I’ve never driven this trail, but I’ve flown over it, and my sense of its contours and hazards is comprehensive. The West gave people so much trouble once, mostly because they couldn’t see over its ridges, but now we can, and it’s just another place.
This might be the nicest car Julie’s ever driven; she’s treating it with inordinate respect. Both hands on the wheel, a stiff, cadet-like posture, much attention to mirrors and turn signals. She’s scared. This is world-class imported equipment, and it’s intimidating, especially to those who don’t rent cars much and believe that the vehicles are theirs illicitly, as part of a scam or a very special favor. Me, I push these cars hard, without remorse, aware that they’ve been paid for ten times over and will be sold at a profit on top of that. It’s sweet, though, to see the meek, more natural attitude. May it never die out. It’s a cushion for the rest of us.
“What if, when we hit Wyoming,” Julie says, “we go right, not left? To Minnesota? It seems pretty easy
