“Las Vegas is mostly suites. Underpromise and overdeliver. Like catalogue companies. They say it will come in five days, it’s there in two, and you feel like the Prince of Morocco. It’s a trick.”
“That was uncalled for.”
Julie is tiny now. Is that her thumb out? We’re past the speck point, into the unknown. This will go down as the time I cast her off in northern Colorado or southern Wyoming and will pass to Kara as part of her moral arsenal. In the story it will be over a hundred degrees out or well below freezing, with Julie wearing just socks, and as the years go by and I forget things Kara will remove the socks as well and I will fail to correct her and myths will petrify. She’ll bring out the story at Christmas, with all the others. A house full of women. My father suffered too.
“Ryan?”
“Still here. Just reflecting. I should go.”
“You’ll call me at Treasure Island? Let’s say five?”
“Why would the airline send you to Las Vegas?”
“Some seminar. Career enhancement stuff.”
“I’m going now. I’m really going now.”
I slide over behind the wheel and drive to catch her, two wheels on the shoulder to signal that others should pass. She’s walking normally now, no balance beam, and at a clip. I roll up next to her with the window down and tell her I’m sorry, I must have sounded bizarre there, but I’m recovering now, so please get in. We’ll be in Salt Lake City before dawn. We’ll drive the Mormon Trail, those hard old wagon tracks. We’ll commune with the grizzled ghosts of the frontier.
She starts to walk again. Heel to toe again.
“Think about your baby.”
But nothing works.
twelve
as long as you’re aimed at a city with an airport, you can get anywhere from anywhere and there’s no such thing as a wrong turn. That’s why I didn’t consider myself off course last night while driving north in accordance with Julie’s request to get her as close as I could to Minnesota before I flew back to Utah and then Nevada. It seemed to surprise her when I agreed to this, perhaps because she holds fundamentalist attitudes toward time and space and motion. I’m also convinced she believed that sheer inertia would carry me right on through to Minnesota, where, as she put it to me over crab legs in the Casper Red Lobster, “at least it’s safe.” (Her lips emphasized the word “safe”; my ears heard “least.”) She failed to take into account my mental map. In Billings, Montana, I’d find a portal to Airworld, and I could be back in Salt Lake by 9 A.M. then off to Vegas by noon.
This is how the country is structured now, in spokes, not lines. Just find a hub.
I worked on my speech to GoalQuest as we drove and tried not to think about whether there’s a heaven, what was inside the briefcase in the trunk, and what Soren Morse expected to accomplish by waging petty psychological warfare on his, statistically speaking, best customer. These were Airworld concerns and we were earthbound— doubly so because we were in Wyoming. When viewed from above, some state boundaries make sense—they follow rivers, declivities, chains of hills—but the straight lines defining Wyoming are purely notional and basically delimit a mammoth sandbox. Wyoming is just the land no other state wanted endowed with a capitol building to make it feel good. But such a pretty name. The prettiest.
Before my sister could critique my speech, I had to explain CTC to her in depth. This is never easy—with anyone. Most people assume we’re brought in to do the firing or that we find the fired new jobs. It’s neither. Our role is to make limbo tolerable, to ferry wounded souls across the river of dread and humiliation and self-doubt to the point at which hope’s bright shore is dimly visible, and then to stop the boat and make them swim while we row back to the palace of their banishment to present the nobles with our bills. We offer the swimmers no guarantees, no promises, just shouts of encouragement. “Keep it up! That’s great!” We reach our dock before they reach theirs and we don’t look back over our shoulders to check on them, though they look back at us repeatedly.
That’s the parable version of what we do. In practical terms, we give our “cases” “skills sets.” We coach them in how to make employment inquiries without sounding scarily hungry or submissive. We urge them to be patient, patient, patient. There’s a rule of thumb that for every ten thousand dollars of desired annual salary, a job seeker should expect to spend a month calling still-working friends and headhunters and Xeroxing hundreds of letters and resumes while waiting for them to call back. Since a lot of our cases have solid six-figure income histories, their searches can eat up years and far outstrip the duration of their severance benefits. Finding a job is itself a job, we teach, and not working is work, too, so don’t get blue. If you do get blue, forgive yourself. You’re only human. But also superhuman. Because you have untapped potential, and it’s infinite.
“So in other words you talk baloney,” Julie said, pushing us up through Wyoming. “I’m surprised at you. I’m surprised you’d do a job like that.”
“I’m telling you what I learned, not what I hoped. You’re getting the panoramic hindsight view.”
As first portrayed to me by ISM, CTC was nothing like I’ve described, but represented an ethical revolution in American business practices. Yes, it served the downsizing employer by minimizing potential legal blowback from the parties dismissed, and yes, one could view it as a half-assed penance that chiefly consoled the client corporation, but was it wrong? Did it hurt people? It helped some. It helped quite a few. And there were studies to prove it.
My first big assignment took me to Davenport, Iowa, the blighted Grain Belt home city of Osceola Corp., a manufacturer of heavy machinery. Their backhoes and tractors were piling up at dealers, deeply discounted yet still not moving. Their corporate bonds had been downgraded to scrap paper. Cuts were inevitable, and so they came.
I was given a small beige office in the rear of the company’s crumbling brick waterfront headquarters and tasked with the care of seven executives who were let go in sequence, one per day, and sent to me before their tears could dry. All were middle-aged men with families, and all but two of them asked me what they’d done wrong, to which I answered, “Nothing. Blame interest rates. Blame low commodity prices. This problem’s global.” One heavyset fellow, a face like a potpie, his suit full of strange custom seams to hide his girth, mistook me for a priest and made me kneel with him while he prayed from a card he carried inside his wallet. Another asked me if I would call his wife and repeat my interest rates remark.
