Free Up in the Air by Walter Kirn

jam in earplugs, don a blackout mask, and lay down with her clothes on for a dreamless nap.
    In no time we’re at the gate and on our feet, shuffling out of the plane like day care toddlers holding one of those ropes with all the loops. I walk a step behind her. It’s goodbye.
    “Good luck with that witch of a senator.”
    “I’ll need it.”
    “That Colonial checkout procedure? They’ve streamlined it. You might want to give them another shot.”
    “I will.”
    Where do they go when they leave me? The last I see of her, she’s standing by the baggage carousel, fluffing her hair and waiting for the pet crate. I’d be surprised if the kitten arrived alive, and I realize that I’ve been suppressing real anger at Alex for risking its health just to ease her loneliness. That was my job, her seatmate’s, but she let me go. And I let her go. We forgot that in Airworld each other is all we have.
four

    i used to try to be interesting. That passed. Now I try to be pleasant and on time.
    That will be impossible today. Behind the rental car counter a dull trainee labors to slip a key onto a ring and fold my contract to fit inside its envelope. He should be in college, judging by his age, but instead he’s already failing at his first job. After he runs my credit card—still frozen; I have to use my AmEx from ISM, which generates no miles—he manages to drop it and step on it, scratching and ruining the magnetic strip. The kid’s pathetic excuse is greasy hands; he just finished eating a box of chicken strips. I tell him he’d better evaluate his goals and he acts as though I’ve complimented him, thanking me and handing me a map.
    “Excuse me, what’s your job?” I say.
    “My job? Filling out rental agreements.”
    “No it’s not. Your job is providing a service that meets a need.”
    He stares at me.
    “Tell me the need,” I say.
    “A four-door Nissan.”
    “Actually, what I want, my basic desire, is to get to a business meeting across town punctually, comfortably, and safely. The Nissan’s a means to an end. It’s just a detail. Try to think less about isolated tasks and more about the overarching process. It will serve you, believe me.”
    “So you’re some millionaire?”
    “No. Do I have to be rich to give advice?”
    “For me to listen to it, you do,” he says.
    The car, a new model I’ve never driven before, smells of a fruity industrial deodorant that’s worse than any odor it might be masking. The mirrors point off in random directions as though the last driver was a schizophrenic. The radio is tuned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it’s as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they’re devoted. After the cops led away her second husband, Julie spent a summer as a born-again and worked in a St. Paul religous gift shop whose manager played in a band called Precious Blood. We took in one of their concerts, a spectacle of fog and laser lights and colored scrims. The band released white doves during the encore, and afterwards Julie and others rushed the stage and dropped to their knees before a neon cross next to the drum kit. It shook me to see such need in her, such thirst.
    I turn up the station, reorient the mirrors, and drive to the guard’s booth, waving my rental papers. The old guy winks and raises the red-striped gate arm and I roll over the angled spikes, away.
    On the way to Art’s house, where he insists on meeting, I dictate some lines for the preface to
The Garage
into the microrecorder at my chin.
    For years it has been the same message: Grow or die. But is this necessarily the truth? Too often, growth for its own sake leads to chaos: unsustainable capital expansion, ill-timed acquisitions, a stressful workplace. In
The Garage,
I propose a bold new formula to replace the lurching pursuit of profit: “Sufficient Plenitude.” Enough really can be enough, that is. A heresy?