Up in the Air by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online

down brown dirt roads. Swigging a Coke on the beach in Malibu. Flying Great West over central Colorado. It’s a feeling of restfulness and order akin, I suspect, to how the ancient Egyptians felt watching the planets line up above the Pyramids. You’re in the right place, you’re running with the right forces, and if the wind should howl tomorrow, let it.
    Below me, through the milky oval window, I can see a pair of alpine lakes glowing an unnatural chemical blue, the color of pools inside nuclear reactors. Mountains topped by radio towers rise to the south and west. That’s Aspen there, the runs cut like bowling alleys between the pines, the metal roofs of the lodges and second homes sending up Morse code glints of morning sunlight. It’s a good day in Airworld. I turn on my tape recorder and enjoy a few minutes of Verbal Edge through headphones.
    We’re flying at half capacity, if that—Desert Air’s discounts have been poaching passengers. It’s more than a price war, it’s opera, this duel. Young Soren Morse, with his B-school line of blarney, against Major Buck Garrett, Korea flying ace. The marketer versus the aviator. Sad. Sad because Garrett, the rugged national treasure, doesn’t have a prayer. He does his own TV spots to save money and comes off as a crank. Worse, he refuses to institute a bonus program. Garrett believes that cheap tickets sell themselves, and so they do, for a certain kind of customer—retirees who fly once a year, if that.
    Standing on her seat a few rows up, a toddler plays peekaboo with me. The secret involvements children have with strangers behind their parents’ backs. I wink, she ducks. “Recognizance: a bond or obligation entered into before a court of law.” I study the backs of other passengers’ heads. A Dairy Queen spiral of frosty, sprayed gray hair, pinned with a platinum snake. A polished bald spot dented in the center and freckled in the dent.
    It’s the people I’ll never meet who most intrigue me.
    “Seditious: given to promoting revolt.”
    I smile to myself. It all connects up here. Across the aisle from me a famous businessman, a securities analyst with his own TV show and a foundation for troubled urban youth, has fallen asleep with a Sprite in his right hand and the beam from the overhead reading light shining into his slack and gaping mouth. The gold in there is amazing, a savage image that I feel strangely privileged to behold. The flight attendant peeks, too—we share a smirk. That mouth moves markets, and look at it: an ore field!
    Celebrities always seem slightly lost on planes. Five years ago, I found myself surrounded by a rock band I’d worshiped as a kid. Two of them sat alone in their own rows and two had girls with them. Their trademark hairstyles—tortured, spiky crests of dull black thatch—looked overdone in such a neutral setting. The drummer, an alleged hotel-room smasher who’d supposedly had his blood replaced at an exclusive clinic in Geneva, thumbed a handheld video game. The singer, the star, sat still and stared ahead as though he’d lost power and was waiting for repairs. His fame seemed to call for a class beyond first, and I couldn’t help but think less of him, somehow, for sharing a cabin with the likes of me.
    The professional athletes stick out most of all. The moment they were scouted in their teens everything stopped for them. Just stay well and eat. They’re served special meals, fat steaks with huge chef’s salads, and if they want more salt they hail a trainer, who tells a flight attendant, who hops to it. The players discuss their injuries, their cars, their investments in nightclubs and auto dealerships. It’s a sleepy existence, from what I can see, devoted to conserving energy. Parents push sheepish kids to shake their hands and the athletes oblige with a minimum of effort, sometimes without even turning their massive heads. Such inertia, such stillness. I envy it.
    This is the place to see America, not down