Up in the Air by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online Page A

there, where the show is almost over. After college, I crossed the country with a girlfriend, loading a Subaru wagon with beer and sleeping bags and flipping coins to pick that day’s state highway. The girl was sheltered, the daughter of two professors who’d consulted with campus colleagues on her upbringing. No TV. A multilingual reading list. She hungered for mini-golf, for roadside farm stands, for wicked stares from old-timers in greasy spoons. She read
On the Road
as we drove, declaimed the thing. I knew I was being used—her native guide—and that she’d drop me once the trip looped back to her parents’ cottage on Nantucket, but I wanted to show her something she hadn’t seen.
    I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims. They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards. The hitchhikers didn’t tell stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys. In Kansas, my girlfriend threw away the book at a truckstop Dunkin’ Donuts stand and called her father for a ticket home. She’s a Penn State sociologist now, raising her kids the same way she was raised, and I doubt that she’s thought twice in fifteen years about our hoboing. No reason to. The real America had left the ground and we’d spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.
    The TV stock-picker wakes and blows his nose, then inspects the airline hand towel for lost gold. I take off my earphones and open the AirMall catalogue tucked in my seatback to browse for wedding presents. AirMall guarantees next-day delivery on items ordered in-flight, via airphone, and features offbeat products not found in stores: silver space pens whose ink flows upside down, alarm clocks that beam the time onto the ceiling, portable inversion boards for back pain. Sometimes I fall for these gimmicky wonder items, sending them ahead to my hotel so I’ll have something waiting with my name on it. I have a weakness for white-noise machines that simulate waterfalls and breaking surf. Lately, I can’t sleep without these gadgets. The one I own now is tuned to “summer cloudburst” and I can’t wait to turn it on tonight.
    I narrow my choices to a robot lawn mower that tracks a grid of buried wires (dyslexic Julie will misread the instructions and send the thing careening across the street) and the safer selection, a six-piece luggage “system” fashioned from heavy nylon with Kevlar inserts. It’s not a set I’d ever buy for myself—a light packer, I prefer leather, for its warmth, and because the patterns of scuffs and scratches provide a fossil record of my travels—but for Julie and Keith of the annual jaunt to Florida and the Christmas coach tour of the Holy Land that my mother and the Lovely Man gave them in lieu of a secular honeymoon, these bags should be the ticket. Pockets galore for Julie’s personal pharmacy, stain-resistant if she vomits on them.
    The girl is past delicate. She frightens me.
    Though Kara won’t forgive me if I go through with it, I owe Keith a briefing this week, the whole case history, starting with the bogus model search when Julie was fifteen. Like the other local girls caught up in the fraud, she stopped eating. She ran. She gorged on laxatives. When the promoters vanished with her entry fee, she and a few of the other dupes kept dieting. They started shoplifting, formed a little crime club. The school called in social workers from St. Paul. There was a drug bust, a suicide attempt. Eventually, something turned the girls around, though. They filled out. They got educations. They learned some sense.
    Except for my kid sister. So much grief. The teenage marriage. The teenage divorce. The year in massage school. The food fads and the pills. The racist