Free Up in the Air by Walter Kirn Page A

Not to students of the human body, who know that optimum health is not achieved by ever-greater consumption and activity, but by functioning within certain dynamic parameters of diet and exercise, work and leisure. So too with the corporation, whose core objective should not be the amassing of good numbers, but the creation and management of abundance. Read on and you will discover in
The Garage:
the Four Plenteous Attitudes, the Six False Missions . . .
    Where these words come from I have no idea. Like the rest of the book, which I wrote over ten months, dictating for two hours before bed in a succession of identical suites whose regulation layouts and amenities allowed me to work undistracted, without thinking, the preface feels like a gift, a transcribed dream. What this means for its value, I don’t know. I fear sometimes that the book is just the overflow of a brain so overstuffed with jargon that it’s spontaneously sloughing off the excess. I’ve allowed myself to reread it only once, and some of the ideas felt foreign to me, with no connection to how I actually operate. Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.
    Art Krusk’s directions guide me through the foothills into the smoke, which smells like burning tires. I know Art moved to a golf course recently, but it’s hard to imagine green fairways on these brown mounds. Where does the water come from? It’s a sin. The golf culture, which I’ve had ample chances to join, draws its allure, I’m convinced, from wastefulness, from the lavish imbalance between its massive inputs—acreage, labor, fertilizer, machines—and its nonexistent output. Sad. The few times I’ve played the game, I’ve come away feeling like an ecological glutton.
    I reach a gatehouse manned by an old woman so flayed by the sun that her skin is like a bat’s wing, all pigmentless gray tissue and thready veins. I state my name and she consults her clipboard.
    “Art said go on up, the house is open. He had an errand.”
    “When will he be back?”
    “He tore out of here an hour ago. Don’t know. Try to drive slowly and watch out for the carts. A lot of our residents won’t hear you coming.”
    The development is unfinished, with heaps of sand along its noodle-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. With so many tiny lanes and dead-end byways, the developer ran out of normal street names. I take a left on Lassie Drive and curve around right on Paul Newman Avenue. The houses (“Starting in the mid $200s,” according to a billboard) ape many styles, the most popular being a sort of Greco-ranch thing combining flat tile roofs with stocky columns. Art’s house is among the more elaborate models, with a fresh sod lawn whose seams still show and a faux-marble fountain of dancing cupids. For someone in his predicament, it’s offensive. His restaurants send half of Nevada to the ER and the man builds a palace in Mafia Moderne.
    I’m tempted to leave a stinging note and return to the airport. Cutting Art adrift would let me build in crucial extra hours to my overloaded schedule. I could buy a thesaurus and touch up
The Garage
. I could get to a gym and tone my flabby lats. ISM would understand—Art’s a small client and a chronic late payer—but I have to consider MythTech’s feelings, too. If it’s true that they’re auditioning me from afar, I have to behave impeccably this week. Plus, I like Art. He’s crude, but he’s a searcher.
    I dial the credit card people on my mobile and wander behind the house to the pool, a free-form blue pond with an artificial island and two stray golf balls lying on the bottom, looking like undissolved Alka-Seltzer tablets. My call is passed from computer to computer and then to a person who only sounds like one.
    “Where are you presently located?” she asks.
    “Nevada. Reno.”
    “Did you make any large purchases last Friday?”
    “That’s why I’m calling. You cut my credit off.”
    “Who am I speaking to?”
    I