Up in the Air

then. But I’ve never aspired to an office at world headquarters, close to hearth and home and skybox, with a desk overlooking the Front Range of the Rockies and access to the ninth-floor fitness center. I suppose I’m a sort of mutation, a new species, and though I keep an apartment for storage purposes—actually, I left the place two weeks ago and transferred the few things I own into a locker I’ve yet to pay the rent on, and may not—I live somewhere else, in the margins of my itineraries.

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature—yours, too, I see—is the bestseller or the near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of common people in small towns. In Airworld, I’ve found, the passions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this is where the story breaks—on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn’t degrade them. They’re not taxed. They’re private property in its purest form.

It was during a layover in the Dallas Compass Club, my back sinking into a downy sofa cushion and coarse margarita salt drying on my lips, that I first told a friend about TMS, my Total Mileage System.

“It’s simple,” I said, as my hand crept up her leg (the woman was older than me and newly single; an LA ad exec who claimed her team had hatched the concept behind affinity credit cards). “I don’t spend a nickel, if I can help it, unless it somehow profits my account. I’m not just talking hotels and cars and long-distance carriers and Internet services, but mail-order steak firms and record clubs and teleflorists. I shop them according to the miles they pay, and I pit them against each other for the best deal. Even my broker gives miles as dividends.”

“So what’s your total?”

I smiled, but didn’t speak. I’m an open book in most ways, and I feel I deserve a few small secrets.

“What are you saving up for? Big vacation?”

“I’m not a vacation person. I’m just saving. I’d like to give a chunk to charity—to one of those groups that flies sick kids to hospitals.”

“I didn’t know you could do that. Sweet,” she said. She kissed me, lightly, quickly, but with feeling—a flick of her tongue tip that promised more to come should we meet again, which hasn’t happened yet. If it does, I may have to duck her, I’m afraid. She was too old for me even then, three years ago, and ad execs tend to age faster than the rest of us, once they’re on their way.

I don’t recall why I told that story. Not flattering. But I wasn’t in great shape back then. I’d just come off a seven-week vacation that ISM insisted I take for health reasons. I spent the time off taking classes at the U, hoping to enrich an inner life stretched thin by years of pep-talking the jobless. My bosses matched my tuition for the courses; a creative writing seminar that clawed apart a short nostalgic sketch about delivering propane with my father in a sixty-mile-per-hour blizzard, and a class called “Country-Western Music as Literature.” The music professor, a transplanted New Yorker in a black Stetson with a snakeskin band and a bolo tie clipped with a scorpion in amber, believed that great country lyrics share a theme: the migration from the village to the city, the disillusionment with urban wickedness, and the mournful desire to go home. The idea held up through dozens of examples and stayed with me when I returned to work, worsening the low mood and mental fuzziness that ISM had ordered me to correct. I saw my travels as a twangy ballad full of rhyming place names and neon streetscapes and vanishing taillights and hazy women’s faces. All those corny old verses, but new ones, too. The DIA control tower in fog. The drone of vacuum cleaners in a hallway, telling guests that they’ve slept past checkout time. The goose-pimply arms of a female senior manager hugging a stuffed bear I’ve handed her as we wait together for two security guards—it’s overkill; the one watches the other—to finish loading file cubes and desk drawers and the CPU from her computer onto a flat gray cart whose squeaky casters scream all the way to an elevator bank where a third guard holds down the “open” button.

I pulled out of it—barely. I cut that song off cold. It took a toll, though. Because I seldom see doctors in their offices, but only in transit, accidentally, my sense of my afflictions is vague, haphazard. High blood pressure? No doubt. Cholesterol? I’m sure it’s in the pink zone, if not the red. Once, between Denver and Oklahoma City, I nodded off next to a pulmonary specialist who told me when I woke that I had apnea—a tendency to stop breathing while unconscious. The doctor recommended a machine that pushes air through the nostrils while one sleeps to raise the oxygen level in one’s blood. I didn’t follow up. My circulation is ebbing flight by flight—I can’t feel my toes if I don’t keep wiggling them, and that only works for my first hour on board—so I’d better make some changes. Soon.

I’m talking too much. I’m dominating this. Are you interested, or just being polite? Another bourbon? I’ll have another milk. I know it’s been discredited as an ulcer aid, but I come from dairy country. I like the taste.

Anyway, I should wrap this up—we’ll land soon. You’re meeting me in the middle of my farewell tour, with only six days and eight more cities to go. It’s a challenging but routine itinerary, mixing business and pleasure and family obligations. There are people I need to see, some I want to see, and a few I don’t know yet but may want to meet. I’ll need to stay flexible, disciplined, and alert, and while it won’t be easy, there’s a payoff. Every year I’ve flown further than the year before, and by the end of this week, conditions willing, I’ll cross a crucial horizon past which, I swear, I’ll stop, sit back, and reconsider everything.

A million frequent flyer miles. One million.

“That’s obsessive,” you say. Because you care for me, not because I’m annoying you, I hope. “It’s just a number. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Pi’s just a number,” I say.

“It’s still obsessive.”

The engines reverse thrust and here comes Denver.

“It’s a boundary,” I say. “I need boundaries in my life.”

They open the doors and seat belts start unsnapping. Maybe I’ll see you again, though it’s unlikely. Next Monday the boss gets back from chasing marlin and the first thing he’ll do after sifting through his in-box will be to cancel my corporate travel account, which he’s often accused me of abusing, anyway. I need my million before then, and on his dime.

Deplaning now. As we stride down the jetway toward whatever’s next for us, two lottery balls tossed back into the barrel, a mini cassette tape falls out of my coat and you see it before I do, and bend down. It’s the last favor you’ll ever do for me and it occurs in slow motion, a tiny sacrament.