Up in the Air

against itself and numb and circular and feels, to someone who does it for a living, like some ingenious suspended- animation scheme designed to inject you with embalming fluid while still allowing you to breathe and speak.

Vigorade, the beverage, still exists. They added herbs, reconceptualized the packaging, and repositioned it as an endurance aid for aging jocks and outdoor enthusiasts. But I won’t drink it. It’s ever so slightly salty, just faintly sweet, and it tastes the way I imagine tears would taste if you could collect enough to fill a jug.

“It drags,” Julie said as we put Gillette behind us and pressed on toward Billings and its many spokes. “Some twists at the end there, but otherwise it drags.”

“Does it cohere, though?”

“Not sure I know that word.”

“Cohere? Coherent? They’re pretty basic, Julie.”

It was early morning Thursday by then, and time that we dropped each other off. Time to get Maestro its car back, to buy our tickets, and for me to get back in the sky and her to marry.

thirteen

the first leg is Billings east to Bozeman on a Bombardier prop jet, a flying soda can that barely clears the weather as it cruises and sets down cockeyed and skipping on the runway, sounding like it’s lost at least one tire and prompting a cabin-wide exchange of looks that said I don’t know you, stranger, but I love you, so just hold on, we’re going to paradise. In the terminal I phone Alex from my mobile and get a machine that plays the theme from Brian’s Song but doesn’t include a voice, a message style I’ve always found conceited—it strikes me as a subtle power play, leaving callers wondering if they’ve found you. I give my Las Vegas hotel information and hang up half-hoping that Alex won’t show, which would leave only Pinter, Art Krusk, and Linda to deal with and allow me to rest my brain before my speech. If Alex does come, I’ll have to shake off Linda in some casino, though the nice thing about ditching women on the Strip is that the odds of them finding you again are worse than a single-number roulette wager. It’s the capital of lost dance partners, that town, and some never even make it home at all, like the former Desert Air flight attendant who won ninety grand on three quarters during a layover and rushed out and bought a condo and a Lexus and a picture-window-size tank of tropical fish, which were the only possessions she hadn’t pawned four months later. She gave them to a fish shelter. Such facilities actually exist, and it’s just this sort of oddball knowledge that makes Airworld not only fun but educational and sets one up for a lifetime of winning bar bets.

BZN to SLC departs on time and locks in another five-hundred-mile increment that I trust will be safe from Morse and the identity thieves. I’ve met a couple of goldbugs in my travels, surprisingly young men with buried footlockers whose existence they felt compelled to share in the way of most people who cache things in the ground—serial killers, gun nuts, toxic waste disposers—and then can’t stop thinking about them day and night. I’m beginning to understand the mind-set, though. An icy electronic wind will blow someday, and no amount of backup or duplication will save the numbers we think of as our wealth. The dispossessed who’ve kept thorough written records will wander the land waving sweaty scraps of paper that may or may not win recognition from the precious-metals power elite. It’s not a wipeout I’m likely to survive or that I’d want to. My miles would be gone, and with them, I suspect, my drive, my spirit.

To throw off my trackers I order tea with milk, a new drink for me. From now on I will act randomly while airborne, rendering myself useless as a research subject. My seatmate has on the classic sneakers and windbreaker that undercover men think make them invisible but stick out to anyone vaguely in the know like a British admiral’s uniform. He’s reading Dean Koontz with a squinting intensity that Koontz just doesn’t call for and must be fake.

“Is Salt Lake City home?” he finally ventures, much too casually.

I nod my lie. Though maybe it’s not a lie. Maybe it’s all my home, the entire route map.

“I’m Allen.”

“Dirk.”

“That’s not a name you hear much anymore.”

“You never did. It never had a following.”

The agent closes his Koontz on his thumb, but not at the place he stopped reading. An amateur. I ask him his business and wait for a real lulu.

“Memorabilia. Class rings,” he says.

“Not for Heston’s?”

“The only player left.” He’s authentic, it seems, he just dresses like a spook.

“You’d know my old buddy Danny Sorenson, then.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Or maybe you haven’t heard yet. Danny passed.”

There’s always a lag for me with such euphemisms, a few seconds before I realize they mean death.

“I saw him last Sunday night,” I say. “My god.”

“He was in Denver at some suite hotel and when he still hadn’t checked out at three P.M. a clerk went in and tried to shout him awake, then left when he couldn’t and didn’t follow up, just charged him for a new night and let him lie there. Our hospitality industry today.”

“Is his wife okay? Do you have a number for her?”

“Danny was gay.”

“He talked about a wife.”

“I’m sure he did. It’s a conservative company. How did you know him?”

“Planes. Like I know you.”

“So a passing acquaintance, basically.”