Up in the Air

“Don’t kid.”

“I’m not.”

“They have such devices. On decommissioned air bases. Don’t believe it when they say some base is decommissioned. More like ‘recommissioned.’ ”

“That’s half this state. Drive through Nebraska sometime. It’s all old Air Force. Half the Great Plains is military surplus.”

We smoke and behold the cube. We think our thoughts. Is this where the miles are stored before they’re paid?

A shuddering noise turns us both and we look on as a broad automated garage door rides its rails segment by segment and opens half one wall to views of the Missouri and western Iowa. We hear the beeps of a vehicle backing up and then we see the flatbed. It’s rigged with about a dozen orange triangles and a “Flammable” sticker from some other job, perhaps. Three workmen walk backwards behind it and guide the driver with hand signals aimed at his flared-out rearview mirrors, and all wear emerald jumpsuits with drawstring hoods and trouser cuffs that cinch around their boots. The bed of the semi bristles with tie-down eyelets. Hoops of braided cable hang from the truck and now it’s so close that we have to step aside. I can see by 2BZ’s squint and brittle posture that he’s witnessing his obsolescence here and I wish I knew someone to call on his behalf. My job recommendations pull no weight, unfortunately; the people know that I’m in CTC and am always trying to sell some exile as the Next Big Thing.

The boom on the flatbed is swung over the cube and two new workmen pile out of the cab, one with a walkie- talkie against his cheek. There may well be a helicopter somewhere, but I don’t hear blades.

I ask 2BZ for his card and give him mine, though I’m afraid they’re both outdated by now. His title is—was —“Associate.” I thank him.

“The Calgary location is a campus. They’re calling it a campus. It’s vast, I hear. An old defunct seminary on the outskirts. No more home offices. They’re consolidating.”

“If I’m not at one of those numbers on the card, try information, Polk Center, Minnesota. You want me to write that down for you?”

“I’ll remember,” he says.

“You tell yourself. I’m writing it on another one. Take this one.”

“You know what I think it is? I think I guessed. It goes outside, on the campus. To welcome visitors.”

The workmen swarm and two of them boost one of them onto the top, where he widens his stance and bends. Everyone wields some cable or some hook and radiates safety-conscious professionalism. This baby is reaching Canada intact.

“I think it’s probably art,” says 2BZ. “It’s corporate art. A thing to put out front.”

seventeen

in Omaha, boarding,” I answer—accurately. They’ve worn me down. It’s best just to give these women what they want when they ask me where they’re reaching me.

“Julie’s cut all her hair off,” Kara says. “She’ll be bald at the altar. I thought you set her straight.”

“Waning powers.” It’s tough to keep my mind on this. My audience is assembling in first class and I intend to remember every face.

“When the salmon never came,” says Kara, “Mom got some idea that she could smoke a turkey by putting a pan of wet wood chips in the oven, but underneath she wanted to burn the house down. No one’s helping me. It’s Shakespeare here. Luckily, the extinguisher had pressure left after four years of not once being checked.”

“Did Tammy get in okay? The maid of honor?”

“She’s Shakespeare too. She took a bump in Detroit for a free ticket and now we have to wait till almost midnight for her to show her hostile little face. A total play for attention. Infantile. Her best friend is on her third husband, just about, and she’s still single—not because she’s a chilly neatnik, naturally, who bolts every therapist we recommend the minute she finds a stray hair on their couch and the doctor won’t let her spray it down with that antibacterial crap she totes around, but because her parents wouldn’t buy her braces. She blames her teeth—like mine are any better. I got a man.”

Someday, when I’m not paying for the call, I’ll ask her to tell me exactly how she worked that.

“You there?”

“If you’re planning to meet me, you’ll have to set out now. You’re already late.”

“Your voice,” she says. “You’re loaded. I need you, Ryan. I’m dragging this whole celebration up a hill and I’m doing it alone. Don’t drink. It sours you. You get all quippy.”

“Big day for me,” I say. I watch them file in and hand off wardrobe bags and tussle with the overheads and sit, but the attendance is sparser than I’d pictured and the group less representative, and older. I’d guess that just a third are flying for business and will fully appreciate the feat that’s coming and that most of the rest are aunts and uncles and granddads off to help video births and blow out candles, or else they just did those things and they’re slouching home.

“Bigger day tomorrow,” Kara says. “If people can just look within for twenty seconds and get ahold of their spinning little gears. Hey, Mom needs to know if she should make a room up or if the hide-a-bed is all you’ll need?”

“Room,” I say.

“I figured that already. You forwarded your mail here,” Kara says.

So that’s where it’s going. The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I’ll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth’s curvature allows. It’s a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere—if we could take it all in at once, why move?—and it may be the reason why one-ways cost the same as round-trips. They’re all round-trips, some