Up in the Air (13 page)

“No idea, Craig. We’re nearing twenty bucks now, with connection charges.”

“Wherever our Bingham goes, the money follows. Let the man plant his seeds. They’ll grow to oaks.”

“I’m thinking of putting Texas off.”

“Unwise. They’re laying waste to their whole top floor, those boys. There’s gold in that there lake of steaming gore.”

“I’ll see.”

“I just set my shiny balls to swinging. Isaac Newton, I thank you. My man in Travel told me he thinks you’re gunning for big round numbers at his and my and the janitor’s expense, but I said ‘Lay off, he’s earned it.’ Hey, I crapped today. My first since the operation.”

“What operation?”

“A hush-hush female problem. My teenage steroid abuse grew me a uterus. None of your damn beeswax. Important thing: I crapped.”

“That’s me, applauding.”

“That’s me, passing blood.”

“This is costing us, Craig.”

“It’s costing all America. It’ll show up in next year’s productivity figures.”

“Are you threatening to cut my travel off?”

“We missed that boat. That boat left port five years ago. We’re going to let you sail and sail and sail. Send a postcard if you ever get there.”

“I’m hanging up on you.”

“Good. I love that sound.”

The reporter looks over; he’s been spying too, it seems. “Your office?”

“For another couple days.”

“You say your profession is dismissing people?”

“That’s how it ended up, not how it started. I also give talks on discovering inner riches. I met a fan last night. She bought my shit.”

“Maybe you’re right and there’s a story there. Sorry if I seemed rude before. I’m Pete. Tell me what you were going to tell me.”

“Later.”

“This is your chance,” says Pete. “We’re going to land.”

“Sorry. Moody. Don’t feel much like talking. Another big shooting? I peeked at your computer.”

“I can’t seem to find the words this morning. Stuck.”

I open my case and hand Pete the morning paper. He’ll get the same results but get them quicker, and he’ll be able to enjoy his cocktail. We all like to think we can add that special touch, and some of us can, perhaps, just not Pete and me. I order my own drink. The flight attendant hustles. For all she knows her morning is my night.

n
ot every profession is fortunate enough to have a founding father who’s still alive, let alone available to visit and do business with. In management analysis—the good side—that man is Sandor “Sandy” Pinter, a Hungarian who came over in the forties and called upon his training as a philosopher to grapple with the new realities of American business. His first full-length book,
Ideals and Industry,
argued that the modern corporation gains its moral legitimacy from its promise to forge and sustain a global middle class. The book was ignored except by intellectuals, but Pinter’s next book, addressed directly to businessmen, created the modern science of management almost by itself.
Making Work Work
earned Pinter fame and riches and formed the basis for the Pinter Institute, a Los Angeles school for mid-career executives where Pinter taught, in person and by satellite, until his retirement three years ago at the age of eighty. From his modest bungalow outside Ontario, he continues
to write (an article a year or so, the latest being “Managing for Meaning”), but he rarely travels. You have to go to him.

And that’s what I’m doing. I have a small proposal. If Pinter accepts it, MythTech will take notice.

The concept is simple: allow a corporation to endow its physical environment, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with the philosopher’s inspiring presence. Muzak-like recordings of Pinter’s lectures will play in the hallways, lavatories, and lobbies. Ticker tapes composed of Pinter’s epigrams will run at the bottom of company computer screens. The product-package will be all-encompassing, including “Pinterized’” calendars, coffee mugs, ballpoint pens and other office supplies. Even its carpeting, should the company wish, can be woven with Pinter’s trademark “dynograms,” from the lightning-struck infinity symbol (Perpetual Discovery) to the star of five crossed swords (Team Solidarity).

Winning Pinter’s permission to license such a product should take one afternoon, if all goes well. I happen to know that he’s under some financial strain. His thoughtful books stopped selling years ago, bumped from the shelves by his students’ shoddy quickies, and his rash investments in fringe enthusiasms such as self-cooling beverage cans and sunless tanning preparations have murdered his net worth. That he’s agreed to spend time with me at all shows some desperation, I’m afraid, but I’m not here to take advantage of him. The opposite. I’m here to glorify him.

The problem, just now, is my health. My joints are stiff and I’m coughing up sweet phlegm after a morning of hassles and distractions attributable to the overall decline of American travel services. I was leaving the parking lot in my rental car when its orange oil light flashed on. I circled back to the Maestro garage and was given a choice by the on-duty mechanic of trading down from my Volvo to a Pontiac or changing the oil myself and billing the company. The mechanic recommended a ProntoLube just a block away from Homestead Suites, where he said I could also find a drugstore.

I got back on my way, but formless Ontario, with its poorly marked surface roads and surly pedestrians, swallowed me whole. My gas gauge fell and fell. Three times I passed identical burrito stands before realizing they were the same establishment. Twice I nearly ran over a stray Great Dane trailing a leash that had snagged a plastic tricycle. At unpatrolled traffic lights, sloping muscle cars and jacked-up pickups gunned past me blaring rap. I felt like I was driving in Paraguay. In my idea of Paraguay, at least.

I’m like my mother—I stereotype. It’s faster.

Airports are often plunked down in nowhere-lands, and I navigate them by calling on my sense of which sort of businesses go along with which. Find a Red Lobster, you’ve found the Holiday Inn. But Ontario’s layout didn’t follow the rules. Its Olive Gardens were next to bleak used-car lots. Its OfficeMaxes abutted adult bookstores. I punched in Homestead’s national 800 number and had the operator patch me through to the desk clerk at the local franchise, who talked me, block by block, to the front door. When I entered the lobby, I didn’t see him anywhere, though we’d only hung up on each other moments earlier. I pushed the buzzer, waited. Ten minutes passed.

A girl opened a door marked “Pool and Fitness” and asked if she could help me.

“Where’s the clerk?”

“I am.”

“I was just talking to him.”

“Me?”

“A male. The voice was male.”

“The pool guy maybe.”

I asked if my replacement credit card had arrived that morning as promised, and it had—the girl just couldn’t remember where she’d put it. I crossed the street to the drugstore while she searched. Through the locked door I could see the teenage staff conducting inventory. I knocked and knocked. A manager came to the door and waved me off, then pushed a stack of boxes against the glass.

Back at Homestead, the girl presented me with a fax. I asked about the card. “Still gone,” she said. The fax, marked “urgent,” was almost too light to read, and consisted of copies of copies of telephone messages taken down by my grad-student assistant. Two were from Morris Dwight at Advanta, one was from Linda at the Denver Compass Club, and the fourth read “Please call sister,” but didn’t say which one.

I went to my room to return the calls, but the phone had no dial tone. I used my mobile. First, I called Kara at home. Her husband answered. She’d already left for Minnesota, he said. Had she heard from Julie? He didn’t think so. Did he know that Julie was missing? No, he said, but then he’d only come home an hour ago from a two-day hospital stay. I asked Asif what he’d been in for—a mistake. My brother-in-law’s a slow talker, a real enunciator, and it’s part of his caring nature to assume that others care equally about him. We do care, but not at his level. He’s unique. “They studied my sleep,” he said. “I wore electrodes. They taped a little sensor to my thumb to measure the chemical makeup of my blood. It dipped below ninety percent, which isn’t good. I snore. I have apnea. It’s very common, and not just among the obese. You think you’re resting, but actually you’re expending as much energy as a marathon runner. Every night.”

“I was diagnosed with apnea too, once.”

“Which treatment plan did you choose?”

“I haven’t yet. Listen, someone’s knocking. Have to run.”

“We think we know how we’re sleeping, but we don’t. They filmed me. I was all over the mattress.”

“Here’s my number in case you hear from Julie.”

At Advanta I spoke to someone under Dwight who told me he must have called me from his cell, but refused to give out that number. I pointed out that the number on Dwight’s message was the number I was calling now. “I guess this line was supposed to forward then,” the underling said. “But it didn’t, did it? Shoot.” I suggested that he call Dwight on the road and pass on my number at Homestead. Silence. “Wait—I just found a note here. Are you ready? Can’t do Thursday SeaTac breakfast. Sorry. Will be in Phoenix on Wednesday. Can you come there? Wednesday is tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the tip. I already told him I can get to Phoenix. What’s the hotel name?”

“Had it, put it down, and . . . I can get it. It’s here. You’re the
Garage
guy?”

“Correct. You got the manuscript?”

“I read it. Your man in there, what exactly does he invent? I imagine he’s, like, a chemist.”

“It’s never stated.”

“Artistic. Cool. How big is his garage?”

“That’s up to you. It’s a metaphor. An image.”

“So it’s smallish, you’re saying?”

“Have you been listening? I’m saying its dimensions aren’t physical. What’s your boss’s opinion of the book?”

“He still hasn’t read it. He’s an editor. I take the first pass and then write up a summary. He decides from my summary whether he’ll read it, too.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“That’s the practice.”

“I’m stunned,” I say.

“Another question: The Second Dictum?”

“Yes?”

“It’s a lot like the Sixth. I don’t think you need the Sixth.”

“Tell Dwight I’ll be in Phoenix mid-day tomorrow and that I have some major concerns to share with him. Have you found that hotel name?”

“I had it, I put it down . . .”

“Does Advanta make a profit?”

“It’s publishing. Profits are secondary.”

“That’s what’s scaring me.”

I decide that my last call, to Linda, can wait awhile. What do you owe them once you’ve screwed them? Everything. You’ve been inside their skins. You’ve touched their wombs. The only question is whether they’ll make you pay, whether they’ll call in the note. Most don’t, thank goodness. But Linda, I’ve always feared, will want full value. This doesn’t mean I’ll have to pay, of course, just that I’ll have to live with having defaulted. And I can. I’ve done it with the others. It’s a matter of rolling over one personal debt into the pooled, collective, social debt that’s the business of governments and churches. Or I could refinance, amortize over centuries.

I lay down with my boots on for a nap. My sleep was not sleep but a paralytic trance. Asif was wrong: I
know
I get no rest. I dreamed abstractly, of multicolored grids unfurling to the horizon, a giant game board. The game pieces were familiar from Monopoly—the cannon, the shoe, the Scottie dog, the iron—but they floated over the board like space debris. Every few moments, a thin blue laser beam would arc from the board and turn a piece to ash.

Now I’m awake, in the bathroom, gargling Listerine. The membranes inside my cheeks feel ragged, scorched. I touch my forehead. Its neither chilled nor feverish; it’s the disturbing no-temperature of paper. I need vitamins. I need certain enzymes. The lack of them is visible on my skin. I tan with the slightest sun, but in the mirror now my face can barely muster a reflection.

The only good news: my credit card is back. They slipped it under the door while I was napping. The identity thief has been cut off, presumably. I’m whole again, with nothing hanging out. My first purchase will be a pair of shoes, and I have a whole hour to buy them—a rarity. According to Pinter’s autobiography, he sleeps in two four-hour shifts from 10 to 2,
A.M.
and
P.M.
, and takes his meals at three. He writes in the book that all humans lived this way before the dawn of agriculture, but he gives no evidence. That’s typical. In management, it’s the stimulating assertion, not the tested hypothesis, that grabs folks.

I call Pinter’s house to confirm and get directions. Margaret answers, his so-called co-domestic. Pinter’s contempt for matrimony springs from his belief in male polygamy, which he refrains from practicing himself only because it’s currently illegal, but which he doesn’t rule out for the future. Maybe when he’s a hundred they’ll loosen standards.

“He’d like to come pick you up,” says Mrs. Pinter. “He bought a new car he’s eager to show off.”

“That’s fine. I can’t wait to see your lovely home.”