Up in the Air

Oh well, she had her chance. We’re all free agents now. Remember, it’s a lattice, a continuum, so it’s not like anything’s final. Nothing’s final. To the contrary. It’s win-win. It’s synergistic. Read Pinter on Quantum Granular Non-Hierarchies. Or hell, read between the lines of Winnie-the-Pooh, that cuddly avatar of Taoism. Milne knew it, he just couldn’t say it plainly then—the shadow of Victorianism or something. This is twenty-first-century Nevada, though. Scream it, feel free. Nothing’s final. It’s all a loop. We’ve been re-engineered. Like PepsiCo.

Back to Art and the tables. He’s behaving like I was, razzing a new dealer from Lima, Ohio, about the healed- over piercings in his eyebrows, discerning the face of the Virgin in his cards. He either lost everything while I was gone and bought back in with a mad five thousand bucks or he’s in the statistical slipstream, he’s supersonic. If you come in at the end of someone’s streak, the two conditions appear identical. If anything, it’s the big winners who look depressed, because grins are jinxes and it just can’t last, and the losers who smile, because they can go home soon.

I wander off into the crowd. GoalQuesters dominate. I get a fat wink from Dick Geertz at Andersen, who hit his United miles mark a year ago, but only because he commutes to Tokyo, so really there’s no comparison between us. I notice a drink in several colleagues’ hands of layered purples and violets and toothpicked melon chunks, so I flag down a waitress and order one by pointing. I ask what its name is and she says no one knows, that everybody else just pointed, too. When I tell her that someone had to start this thing, she flat doesn’t buy it. She’s a creationist. She’s also, I sense, much happier than I am.

“Hey, Bingham, I need you to meet someone. Get over here.”

It’s Craig Gregory calling. I hustle toward my punishment. The waitress will hunt me down. She’ll use her network.

“Bingham, this is Lisa Jeffries Kimmel. Lisa, Ryan.”

“Hi.”

“I’ve heard your name.”

“I’ve heard yours.” What satanic liars we are.

“Lisa is coming to ISM next month after an interesting stint in Omaha. I know you think they’re pursuing you, that bunch, so I’m guessing you’ll want to pick her pretty brain.”

Lisa looks down. She’s small and dark and beautiful and bizarrely shapely in the way of a bonsai tree compared to a full-size tree.

“Not that Omaha’s called him,” Craig Gregory tells her, “or written or faxed or anything like that. It’s just something he thinks. It gets him through the night.”

Someone squealed on me. My assistant, no doubt. Some agency sends them, you think they’re harmless drifters, be gone by winter, but really they’re your minders, briefed at a central location and later debriefed. It’s a business model, even if it’s not true.

“I’ll leave you two here. Full evening ahead of me at the convention center, followed by Streisand’s annual farewell gig at the MGM.”

I snag his elbow and step back from Lisa. “Someone sent me that bear you gave me, Craig. Mutilated. I’m pinning it on you. You’re who I gave him back to when he retired.”

Craig Gregory rubs his chin and opens a shaving cut that smears blood on his thumb tip, which he kisses dry. Tough little Lisa torches a cigarillo and hungers over the craps action all around us.

“That toy had two consecutive huge Christmases. I doubt you’re in possession of the original. By the way, your corporate AmEx? Confiscated. No more charging Hong Kong custom suits.”

“Computer crime. It wasn’t me,” I say. “If it goes in my file, I’ll sue.”

“Did you overhear that one, Lisa? Any thoughts?”

“Blameless. It’s happened twice this year to me.”

Craig Gregory folds his hands. He bows, comes back to me. “I’ll be there for your breakfast sermon tomorrow. The title has people concerned. I’m not one of them. I know how you pussy out. I’ll sit up front. Lisa, this is a man on his last legs, so give him much succor. We hear you give great succor.”

“Die in hell, you gonorrheal prick.”

“Hear that, Bingham? What this bitch just said? That’s how healthy people respond to me. Take note. You’re not too old to get it right.”

The purple drink is still out there looking for me when I sit at the bar with Lisa and order another by pointing at one just like it two spots down. The bartender, leaves in his hair, a loose white robe, asks Lisa if she’d like one, too—a mere formality—and she says no. It’s a startling negation, and it’s infectious. I cancel my order as though I never meant it. The craze will be extinct within ten minutes.

I want this Lisa. I excuse myself, swivel on my stool, sneak two more pills, and phone my room on the mobile. I have a plan. If she’s there, I’ll hang up. If she’s not, I’ll dare to hope that she’s joined Art’s girl out there in the cyclone. No answer. Will it be safe to go back up, though? What I should do is book another room and abandon my personal effects, which, by design, are not that personal but standard items available anywhere. I’ll miss my sleep machine, whose “prairie wind” track is unique as far as I can tell, but nothing else. The tapes of The Garage are best mislaid. That way there’s at least a possibility that in ten years or twenty, at a rummage sale, an intern at Business Week will pay a nickel for them, listen to them on a whim, and call his boss. The authorship of the scrolls will be disputed—Tarkenton? Salinger? Billy Graham the Younger?—and a stream of pretenders will come forward waving bogus polygraph results. Me, I’ll hang back in my Idaho retreat, content with my dogs, my Mormon faith, my wives.

Or, if this works with Lisa, my one true love.

“What’s MythTech like?” There’s no other way to start. “I thought no one quit there. I heard that if you’re fired they buy you out for life, or pretty close.”

She pinches the filter off a Marlboro. She’s out of little cigars and needs particulates.