Up in the Air (24 page)

Each parting of the elevator doors discloses another person who’s of no use to me, and after ten minutes of predatory staring, I turn my head toward the registration desk, wondering if Dwight’s indeed a guest here, which of course is the moment when he slips in and taps my shoulder, the better sorcerer.

“Here we finally are,” he says. He’s caught me sitting and I rise to my feet in humiliating freeze-frames and take a hand that’s all aura and no flesh and leaves not the slightest sensation when it’s withdrawn.

“I thought we’d try the Carvery,” he says, “unless you’re stuck on waitresses and tablecoths.” His field, his ball. Resist now or be subsumed.

“No, but I’d like to think our meeting warrants them.”

“The Carvery’s better lit. World-class iced tea.”

“Fine.”

“Your call. There’s McNally’s Bistro, too. They mix their iced tea from a powder. A so-so burger, but that can be remedied at the fixings bar.”

“The Carvery.” I’m a shame to my own name.

Dwight leads the way. What at first looks like a limp reveals itself as a fundamental mismatch between the hemispheres of his egg-shaped body. Dwight’s mass and vitality all come from his left; his right side is just a hitchhiker, an add-on, as if he’s absorbed and digested his Siamese twin. His hair has a complicated, unnatural grain that’s suggestive of camouflaged transplant work, and yet the general effect is masculine, harking back to a time when men fell apart at thirty and could only fight back through tricks of dress and grooming. I thought he was my age once, but I’m unsure now. Too much reconstruction, too much work, to tell.

The Carvery has a pub theme, Utah style. Much brass and wood and bric-a-brac, but beerless. Behind a long slanted shield of milky Plexiglas three fiftyish men whose career paths are enigmas—shouldn’t they at least be chefs by now, or have they been flash frozen by a benefits plan that fosters loyalty but kills ambition?—draw knives with scalloped blades through hams and roasts whose crusts show the charred cross-hatchings of butcher’s string. Dwight holds his plate out and gets three cuttings of well-done pork loin too thick to be called slices, too thin for slabs. Portion control is a Marriott obsession. Dwight nods at the carver to request a fourth piece and the fellow’s reaction shows he’s been well-schooled and qualifies as a professional after all; he delivers up a mere wafer on his broad knife blade, but with a flourish. To get his own back Dwight loads his plate with side dishes, just as Marriott expects him to. At pennies per pound for the cheesy potato medleys and oily
pasta salads, the joke’s on him, though he struts away like he’s looted a royal tomb. There: a weakness to file for later on. The man doesn’t know when he’s being nickel-and-dimed.

But where’s the contract? No bulges in his blazer.

He chooses a two-setting table on a platform and takes the wall seat. From his perspective, I’ll blend with the lunch crowd behind me, but from mine he’s all there is, a looming individual. Fine, I’ll play jujitsu. I angle my chair so as to show him the slimmest, one-eyed profile. The look in my other eye he’ll have to guess at.

What I want most now, besides a deal, is the story about Morse Dwight promised me, but I can’t predict the emotions it may stir so I’d better leave it for dessert.

“Your book kept me awake last night,” Dwight says. “Can we bypass the small talk about our food, our meat?”

“By all means.”

“The Garage is . . . It’s a prism, isn’t it? It’s multidimensional, not just some flat tract.”

A prism. This sounds to me like boilerplate.

“Or a palimpsest, maybe that’s more accurate.”

Tape two—I’ve come armed. My one eye shows comprehension and Dwight looks stunned.

“The garret. The studio. Now the garage. It’s an all-American updating. And the book itself was conceived in a garage, because isn’t that where art comes from, so to speak?”

“That’s true,” I say. “What part kept you awake?”

“The whole. The sum. This sense that your concept pre-dates both of us. That it wasn’t so much authored as channeled. Eat.”

“I like to get it all cut up in squares first.”

“I’ve had this feeling before with certain manuscripts, that I’d seen them before, in some other life perhaps. Frankly, I smelled plagiarism.”

I laugh from a place in myself that doesn’t often laugh. A place I associate more with rippling sobs.

“That happens,” Dwight says. “Naked copying. Sheer fraud. It’s not always a crime, though; sometimes it’s an illness. The writer knows the book appeared before, but he feels the original author was the plagiarist and stole from him telepathically. But not in this case. This was daylight larceny. The writer—a midwesterner like you, from one of those states like Missouri, but not Missouri, the one just like it—”

“Arkansas?” I say.

“I think of that as the South. A former slave state.”

“Missouri was too. Read
Huckleberry Finn
.”

“Please. Do I look like a man who hasn’t? Please.”

“People read and then forget. That’s all I meant.”

“You’re speaking of yourself here?”

“No, everyone.”

“Anyway, I dug up the original, showed it to him side by side with his book, and even then he had a fancy story. Very different from your case.”

“My book’s not stolen.”

“You’ve yet to end it. How could it be?”

“I’m close, though.”

“Does he leave the Garage? I don’t see how he can. We think of garages as places men put behind them once they’re successful. Lincoln’s log cabin. But that’s your twist, of course—for you, the garage is holy and sufficient.”

“Interesting. Until now my idea was that he’d leave eventually, but only once he realized that the whole world . . . Interesting.”

“I’m looking at you. You’re sincere. You’re puzzling through this. I’m glad. This heartens me. You’re not a thief. What’s happened here is pure Huck Finn.”

“Excuse me?”

“Reading and forgetting. And by the way, you were right, I’ve never touched Twain.”

“Are you saying this isn’t my concept?”

“Or title or character or theme or anything. It’s a first-class subconscious memory you have. Photographic. Yet lost to you. Amazing.”

I lay down my fork. What’s eerie about Dwight’s hunch is just how close it might be to the truth given what I’ve been learning about my brain. If I didn’t know otherwise, I might share his doubts, but in fact I remember clearly how, when, and where the idea first arose. His name was Paul Ricks and I’d just helped fire him from Crownmark Greeting Cards in Minneapolis. When I showed him his master self-inventory, which rated high for artistic talent and enterprise, he tore the thing into strips and said “You’re kidding, right? You really believe I can leave two decades of copywriting, roll up my sleeves, hide out in my garage, and hatch a whole new existence?” To which I said: “If I didn’t, I couldn’t do this.” And Paul said: “Prove it.” And I said, “Tell me how.”

“You’re innocent, but you’re guilty, too,” Dwight says. “I’m deeply sorry, Ryan.” He salts his pork.

“Suspicion is not conviction. You’re way off base. My book seemed too good for a novice and so you dreamed this.”

“I had a tip,” Dwight says. “You mentioned one of my authors yesterday. Soren Morse, the aviator.”

“Aviator?”

“I’m doing his sophomore book. We talk quite frequently.”

I’m dumbfounded. There are layers to this thing . . .

“So I mention your book to him, because I’m proud of it, and Morse said that’s like
The Basement,
isn’t it? I searched the Net and came up with a synopsis, the best I could do since the book is out of print. Coincidence after shocking coincidence. I called the publisher, hunted down the editor, and got a fuller description. One example: the protagonist of the basement is unnamed.”

“Two characters without names is not the same name.”

“Over my head, that. Try this: a phrase from your book that appears nineteen times and also occurs in the subtitle to
The Basement
. ‘Perpetual innovation.’ ”

“No one owns ‘perpetual innovation.’ That’s like saying someone owns, I don’t know, ‘Get well.’ Morse put you onto this scavenger hunt?”

“Someone would have.”

“He’s my someone. Every single time.”

“How exactly do you know each other?”

“Distantly but intimately,” I say. “I’m tired of explaining how well I know people—no one respects my answers. I just know people. Hundreds. Thousands. From sea to shining sea. And no, I don’t think I coined that. See this napkin?”

“In detail.”

“I’m seeing the same napkin. You and me, both sane. The here and now.”

“Let me finish,” Dwight says. “I hadn’t quite lost faith yet. There’s a collective mind, it’s very real. I can’t name one, but I’m aware of major inventions that appeared only days apart on different continents. This was like that, I hoped. I knew you traveled, so you’re exposed to the ether more than most of us, the cultural cyclotron, the particles. Bombarded by particles. Then I called the author. At nine. This morning.”

“Pause, pause, pause. Cheap drama. Spit it out.”

“He knows you. You had a run-in once, he claims. He also distinctly recalls the conversation in which he announced his intention to write
The Basement
. Name of Ricks? A Minnesotan? You’re all midwesterners.”

I push back my plate and look over at a wall of injection-molded coats of arms. Made-up legacies, random heraldry. My father bought one once off the TV, the genuine Bingham family crest, authenticated. Stags and lions and eagles and battle-axes; we were dragon slayers from way, way back, and my father bought it all, poor man. He was living alone by then, stalked by private Rockefellers, but the crest put a bounce in his step, aligned his spine. He stowed his TV tray and started eating downtown. He detailed his Monte Carlo. All the crest. Two weeks of nobility that I’m glad he had, but then he went for a haircut with old Ike Schmidt and there it was, over the comb jar of blue Barbicide. A gentle being—he let Schmidt go on dreaming of Round Table banquets, ale from hollow horns. He kept his peace and let himself be shaved.

I’m not up to his level. I have to fuss and struggle. “The concept was both of ours. It was simultaneous.”

“Weak. Two objects can’t occupy one space.”

“Ideas aren’t objects. He went out and really wrote it? He left the strong impression that was my job.”

“What are they, then?”

“Ideas? Do we have to play these games right now? I just spent a year investing in my future, dictating notes from here to Amarillo and all points in between, and now you tell me this Ricks, this jobless loser, who scored in the lousy twentieth percentile for follow-through and reliability—facts I concealed from him because I’m decent—strolled back to his sad little house and scooped me blind. When was this rip-off published, anyway?”

“Four years ago.”

“He worked fast. Did this thing sell?”

“Hardly at all, but it wasn’t pushed correctly. Scattershot marketing. Hangdog author’s photo. A golf publisher that went out on a cute limb.”

“That’s good news, at least.”

“I’ll do much better. This is Advanta’s sweet spot. We’ll swat this ball.”

“Incredible. You’re one nervy little fatso. Is that a weave or plugs? Dyed beaver? Orlon?”

“Ricks says you had him fired.”

“Ricks distorts.”

“You fire people for a living. Now that’s a book. You’d have to strike the somber, reflective pose—the old recovery gambit—but that’s a memoir. Advanta has crack ghostwriters, real mind readers. You’ll think every comma is yours. Your natural hair.”

“Such thick skin on you reptiles. I’m gone. Cover this check. That iced tea was powdered, too.”

On my way out of the Carvery I sweep the crests off the wall, a dozen of them, and no one stops me because they know I’m serious, Bingham the dragon slayer. We go way back.

a
VIP commotion at the gate complicates and prolongs the boarding process. A convoy of electric carts sweeps in loaded with uniformed security and a couple of bison-shouldered civilian toughs talking like princesses on cute red radios. The pedestrian flow through the concourse snags and eddies and at the heart of the turbulence I spot him: the retired Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, General Norman Schwarzkopf, signing autographs for full-grown men who are lying if they say they want them for their kids. I’ve seen these mementos, and I know where they go: under plate glass on desktops, front and center, for a quick-hit morale boost during high-stakes conference calls. They’d pluck the last hairs from the general’s rhino head, but he’s probably already selling them through an untraceable chain of sub-sub-agents, encased in clear acrylic, as paperweights. The relics that come off these supermen—astonishing. I’ve seen every stick of gum Mantle ever chewed in some corner office
or another, every last Zippo Patton ever lit.

Schwarzkopf is a motivational mainstay, right up there with Tarkenton, Robbins, Ditka, the pre-trial O. J. Simpson, and Famous Amos, so it’s no surprise to see him here, mobilizing for GoalQuest with us ants. I’ve heard him four times in six years, and he delivers. B vitamins straight to the heart muscle itself. You stand up afterwards ready to thump someone, just name the cause, and though this wears off and leaves a startling thirst that not even gallons of Vigorade could quench, a virtuous residue has been deposited that kicks back into the veins when you grow weak and jolts you straight when you nod off at the wheel. The magic works, almost all of it, to some degree, and that’s what the skeptics find so intolerable. Just peek at the gurus’ pay stubs. The market knows.