Up in the Air (31 page)

I’m hoping Pinter unplugged the baccarat brainjack long enough to reach a phone and order some runway foam for me in Omaha. A driver at the gate holding a placard with my name only slightly misspelled in sloppy black capitals would add a certain something to my deplaning. It would help my arrival feel like an arrival and not just another departure in the making.

I call for my two percent and, yes, it’s true—the flight attendant’s smile seems to exceed the parabolic millimetric facial crack diagrammed in her Great West training manual. She’s not a free being as you and I are free, and when her behavior varies, it’s on purpose. Federal regulations rule her life, dictating shift lengths and rest periods and cycles of alcohol and prescription-drug consumption; her contract with the airline covers the rest. Even the bows in her shoelaces have been optimized. Two loops, just so. If she wore laced shoes, that is. It’s forbidden; she might trip on them evacuating, helping some class-ring salesman down the slide.

How I mistook my teammates’ grins and backslaps for mockery and obstruction, I’m still not sure. It’s as though I’ve confused a dinner in my honor for a penitentiary last meal. These two events might look much the same, perhaps—undue attention from people who’ve ignored one, telegrams, reporters, handkerchiefs. Maybe it’s not all me.

Omaha looms in my window, but its looming stems from my expectations, not its grandeur. On past trips the city has struck me as forlorn, a project that’s outlived its founding imperatives and hung on thanks to block grants and inertia and handouts from one or two civic-minded billionaires. This time it may as well be the risen Atlantis. The stubby, aging skyline snags on cloud. The spotty late-morning traffic seems darkly guided. Omaha, city of mystery. Home to MythTech, who guides our hands through supermarket freezers toward rising-crust pizzas and breadcrumbed mozzarella sticks that seem overpriced and skimpy, but what the hell. It’s our money. We’ll spend it as we please.

I want to be in on that thing, whatever it is. To be safe from them one must be one of them. We dock with the Jetway and I join the line. It’s not a job I’m seeking, it’s citizenship, a seat inside the Dome. Key modules in the canopy hang from cranes and not every duct is flanged and sealed, but unless I get in before the structure’s dedicated, I’ll be a spectator. A mark. If MythTech turns out to be seven twenty-five-year-olds shooting wastebasket hoops and munching protein bars, I’ll still want in, if this is where it’s going. Even the big stuff starts in the Garage.

Sam lets me call him Sam. I ride up front with him. He’s not a veteran, like Driver, but he tries, and I suspect he bills clients electronically and doesn’t grant show tickets on the honor system. He’s in college, no doubt, and this is just a sideline; that Penguin Classics
Bleak House
is no breeze, and half the pages are tabbed and paper-clipped. Sam nods at the sights. A famous jewelry store favored by British royals and software titans who know their Color, Cut, and Clarity. Warren Buffet’s first office—see that broken window? It’s the one directly above it, with the pigeons.

Someone must want me to feel at home in Omaha, and just in case Sam is reporting back to him, I show interest in salvaged toolworks and thoughtful greenways and redbrick loft districts zoned for art. I’m restless, though. We’re leaving downtown along the sluggish Missouri. Paddle-wheel casinos, stacked raw lumber, the home of the nine-dollar T-bone, the eight, the seven. Big dreams and low rents can make beautiful music together, but as the steak dinners give way to dollar Buds, I start to wonder. Does MythTech have no pride?

“Where’s world headquarters?”

“For what?” Sam says. “They gave me an address, not a press release.”

Low pay, long hours. I don’t take his snapping personally.

He looks from side to side, then at the sky, his chin out over the steering wheel. He’s lost. Searching the sky while driving on the ground is like kicking the dropped fly ball that ended the game.

“Did they give you a time to get me there?” I say.

“In my glove compartment there’s a phone.”

Sam dials yet keeps driving; I lose faith in him. Once in the soup, persistence is no virtue. Muffler shops now. Unaffiliated churches. A Dairy Queen rival from the early seventies with a listing discolored cone that doesn’t spin. MythTech hired this car, and by a firm’s subcontractors you shall know its soul.

“We passed it. I knew it!”

Sam’s illegal U-turn ends at an old low warehouse that I’ll admit has definite rock-and-roll capitalism potential but could use a few satellite dishes on the roof to close the deal. I open my door; I wish I’d kept my briefcase. Sam tells me he needs to deliver a late tuition payment but promises to be back within the hour.

The intercom panel beside the vault-like door is promisingly rich in lighted buttons but none of them are labeled or even numbered. I hold them down four at a time and in response a buzzer sounds and a hidden latch clunks open. I snatch at the door handle, having never been told how long to expect such bolts to stay retracted. It’s always a panic, this moment, for us nervous types.

The space is well-lit thanks to banks of vintage skylights honeycombed with reinforcing wires and remarkably free of bird droppings and dust. There’s an old-fashioned gallery or mezzanine of frosted-glass offices served by iron stairways that horseshoes around what must have been the floor of some grand factory from Omaha’s golden age as a center of whatever industry—boilermaking?—that survives in the names of its high school football teams. But there’s no one around and no visible reception center where one might inquire where they’ve gone. The rough plank floor is as empty as a rink and hasn’t been lovingly sanded and refinished to the customary retro luster or painted with foul lines to afford young geniuses those crucial brainstorming games of lunch-break basketball without which there’d be no Internet, no HandStar.

The only object evoking work or purpose is a sheet metal cube painted army surplus green and the size of an industrial air conditioner. It’s featureless, with no rivets or vents or panels, but the sheen coming off it suggests it’s well maintained. It’s evidence of my investment in MythTech’s legend that despite a stint in a high-tech field that taught me what supercomputers really look like—nothing much; they’re no bigger than a dishwasher—I insist on seeing the cube as a huge cyber-brain capable of predicting how and when America’s recently rekindled romance with the traditional station wagon will end. It’s a drab-olive thinking monolith, that thing.

“Hello down there. Can I help you?”

“It’s Ryan Bingham!”

The man at the rail of the mezzanine withdraws into the warren of glass offices and out pops a new face, young but very pale. The kid has on an orange Hawaiian shirt that’s probably an expensive tribute to the Hawaiian shirt of old, since this one is louder and busier and brighter than any I ever saw my father wear at his annual company picnic in the Lion’s Park. The kid’s wearing flip-flop sandals, too. Encouraging. This is the look of the new-class robber barons.

“Can I help you?” Same question, but spoken with more authority, even a faint ring of profit participation. The kid considers this strange domain his own.

“This is MythTech, isn’t it?” I say.

“Sure is. I’m sorry, though—no more odd jobs. We finished the packing and loading two days ago. Are you from Manpower?”

“I’m dressed like I’m from Manpower? Is Spack or Sarrazin here? It’s Ryan Bingham.”

“They’re already up in Calgary,” he says. Why won’t he come down the stairs and make this civilized? “It’s just me and four temps and two security guys until we can hoist that thing there on a truck. Then we’re gone, too. Are you the one I sent the Town Car for?”

“Someone did. That was you?”

“I got a call from one of our old backers,” the kid shouts down. “Send a car to meet a plane, he said, and when I asked why and who for the guy got snippy and told me I’m too low to ask him questions. I had to remind the old snot we’re not top-down here. We’re horizontal.”

“Sandy Pinter?”

“One of those guys with all the wrong old concepts, the ones that put General Motors in the tank.”

“Pinter’s a MythTech backer?”

“From the old days. He got in early third quarter of ’98. You haven’t said how I can help you yet. Adam called you out here?”

“Indirectly.”

“Back-channel stuff?”

“Right.”

“It’s all back channel lately. Did they contact you via microwave or radar? Or AM radio?”

This is not a high point in my life. I’m being teased by a mental inferior who thinks that America didn’t get off the ground until September 1999, or whenever he opened his first IRA. But I deserve his jeers. What do I tell him? That they summoned me on an airport loudspeaker using a mini-mart pay phone?

“What’s in Calgary?”

“Tax breaks. Lax accounting standards. Who knows? Strict banking privacy laws. Skilled immigrants. It’s not like we’re quarrying Nebraska sandstone—we can run this shop from Djakarta.” He snaps his fingers and the echo pings around the space. “Unless you can tell me how to be of service, though, I’ve got an office swamped with cords and cables that need some pretty serious untangling.”

“The name Ryan Bingham means nothing to you?” I say.

“Right now it means frustration. An hour ago I probably would’ve thought it was my senator. I mean it: I have big-time wire to spool, a jumbo commercial coffeemaker to clean. I also have two large guards on antipsychotics. Insanity defense? They’ve got it memorized.”

“What’s your name? I’m going to write it down.”

“I can give you my log-in. I go by that,” he says. “2BZ2CU.”

I shift my center of gravity toward the door, but technically I hold my ground. I glance at the cube; it pulsed just now. It scanned me. I have sensitive mitochondria, rubbed raw by X-rays. I know when I’ve been scanned.

“I came to see that,” I say, pointing. “Over there. My assistant took Sarrazin’s call. He screwed the dates up. I worked on its prototype in Colorado.”

The young man cocks his body skeptically and folds his thin white arms. He’s bluff, all bluff, just another Starbucks M.B.A.; a fashion-forward brat in a VW who probably says he admires the Dalai Lama, but inside he’s all stock options, all wireless day trades. I’ve felt these kindergartners at my back for going on a decade, and they scare me. Time to confront that. Kid doesn’t know crap. Suspects he’s not going to Calgary, either, I bet. These outfits don’t go cross-border and non-dollar so they can haul along their slacker trash.

This needn’t be pure humiliation, this errand. I can alpha this geek and exit in big black boots. So no one here was expecting me? That happens. I’m used to it by now. But I can at least view the cube and ride off tall into my million-mile sunset flight.

“Professional courtesy call,” I say. “Get down here. Give me a tour or Pinter’s calling Spack and Spack’ll pay your severance in rubles.”

2BZ shows Ryan his downy throat. He hits the stairs and flip-flops down in quick-time. The skylights dim as clouds slide over the sun but the cube holds its own in the gloom. It’s homeostatic. 2BZ sets us up at a distance from the thing and won’t fully face it; he just gives it his profile. He’s acting like he’s wishing for a lead apron.

“Is it turned on?” I say.

“Huh? It’s always ‘on.’ ”

“On inside quotation marks?”

“I’m really not the expert,” says 2BZ. “We work on a need-to-know basis in this firm. It’s horizontal, but layered-horizontal. I’m infrastructure. I’m shipping and receiving. I can tell you it’s insured and that it’s fragile and that it travels on a special flatbed that should have been here half an hour ago. I can tell you they already got in touch with Customs and that it wasn’t your shortest phone call ever. I think they made two calls, in fact.”

“So what’s its nickname? Around the central office?”

“This was the back office. People work at home. This place was mostly support and storage,” he says. “I’m not sure I have a job once it’s cleared out. Who do you work for?”

“Myself. Like everyone. So basically you’re ancillary and clueless.”

“They told me I was critical. You smoke? Mind if I do?”

2BZ hand-rolls one from a pouch too fragrant to hold mere tobacco. Cloves or dope? These kids smoke all sorts of mixtures, and they should know better. I ask for one, too, but I won’t inhale, just steep myself. I’ve worn a few Hawaiian shirts myself.

“I do have a few ideas about it,” he says. “It’s pretty skeletal here, there’s not much company, just FedEx and UPS, so I spin out sometimes. Whole place was wired for sound once. Sequenced amps. I pirated off the Net and blasted everything. Tried to see if I could break those skylights. Or get myself fired. You know how all the shrinks say that children now are crying out for firmness and discipline and clear-cut values? I think it’s true. I always got positive evaluations, but what I wanted was someone to storm in here and kill the music and kick a little butt.”

“What ideas?” I’m inhaling some. You think you won’t, but in practice it’s hard not to. Just three hundred more miles to go, so I deserve it. Forty thousand feet above the wheat, and no one will even look up. As long as
I
know.