Up in the Air

suddenly. Just swerve. The rest might take care of itself. The wedding. Keith. He’s already burying wires for that lawn mower.”

“That monster you met in my office made you think. Red wagons and cornfields are sounding pretty good.”

“It isn’t like that now. We have espresso. Good espresso. Mom’s hooked on it. Burt, too.”

“The Lovely Man on uppers. What is that like? Just more, faster loveliness, or does he growl at people?”

“Burt’s family now. You should get to know him, Ryan. He’s full of great stories. He’s had a long, full life. He drove an armored truck in Mason City before he started his nursery, and someone, a fellow driver, drugged him once and tied him up with string and drove the truck way out into the woods and tried to rob it, except that he needed Burt’s key to open it, but when he reached down to take it, Burt bit his ear off. That wild old movie stuff really used to happen. Burt’s been around, you’d be shocked.”

“He’s good to Mom, that’s all I care about. I hear lots of stories. True ones, too.”

“Burt doesn’t lie. He wouldn’t make things up. He made a moral blood pact once, he told me. He opened a little vein along one knuckle and squeezed out a whole teaspoonful and drank it, then said the Ten Commandments with bloody lips while looking into a mirror.”

“That’s a fancy one.”

“It’s because he’d told a man a fib that accidentally killed him a day later. That’s how Burt made things right with God. He’s like that.”

“Deranged and ritualistic?”

“He just likes pacts. And he keeps them, it’s amazing. He swore off sweets—I was there for this, I witnessed it—and ever since I’ve never seen him eat one, not even sugar in coffee. It’s like sweets vanished. He doesn’t see them now. He’s trained his mind.”

“Enough black magic. How’s Mom?”

“You know, she’s Mom. She moms it up. You’ll see.”

“It’s good to be down here, isn’t it? Old sea level.”

“That’s not a big change for me. You know I’m pregnant?”

This catches me. “No.” I’d guessed it, but it still catches me.

“So what’s your job, exactly?”

“You said you’re pregnant. Let’s go back to that.”

“Let’s work around to it. I’m always amazed by what people do, you know? How many different businesses there are. That’s why that year in Chicago freaked me out. No one I met was doing the same thing. This one guy trades gold—in the future. This woman sues doctors—but only heart doctors. This other guy flies around the country telling zoos how to design the cages for different animals. Does anybody still do anything normal? Who’s sewing the shirts? Who’s collecting all the eggs?”

“I both do and don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“Kara and Mom and I, we talk about you, but really we’re just guessing, we’re making you up. We know you do something, you’ve maybe even told us, but it’s so complicated it doesn’t stick. Is that what’s going to happen to my baby?”

My mobile rings in my jacket, the silent-ring feature that tickles my rib cage just below my heart. I ignore it— ultimate issues are at stake here, at least for one of us.

“Is my baby just going to grow up into some . . . fragment? What happened to cowboys, to miners?”

“You’d better marry him. I think you at least have to try it.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“She left me,” I say. “She gave her ring back. I’ll show you. I carry it. It’s in my bag.”

“You talk about Burt. You’re worse.”

“How far along?”

“It’s like a plum now. Two weeks ago it was a peanut.”

My mobile again. To my father, all phone calls that weren’t cries for help ranked as impersonal noise, like the TV, and therefore had no claims on him. Things change.

“Hello?” An uncertain connection. Rolling static.

“It’s Linda. Finally. Where are you now?”

Women always ask this question. Men don’t. Men find it sufficient that you’re alive and that you’re somewhere. They know the rest is detail.

“I’m in a cab leaving SeaTac.”

Julie looks at me. Sticklers all. I don’t feel I’m lying, though. If this trip had gone the way I’d planned, that’s where I’d be now, driving downtown from SeaTac, and frankly I’d rather stick to that. The plan. The plan had beauty, and I wish to honor it. Perhaps, at some level, it’s clicking along without me, one of Sandy Pinter’s “Artifacts of Consciousness.” His example was the lost formulas of the alchemists, which he hints in one book he recovered in a dream.

“That’s weird. Someone saw you here,” says Linda. “At DIA.”

“I flew out of DIA.”