Free Up in the Air by Walter Kirn Page B

lose my temper. “I’m out here in the middle of a business trip, totally dependent on your card, adhering to our agreement in good faith—”
    The woman adjusts her tone and talks me down. She explains that for the past few days someone has been moving from state to state, ringing up major charges on my account: fifteen hundred dollars in a Salt Lake City electronics store, two hundred to a national teleflorist. The purchases didn’t quite suit my customer profile, so the bank froze my card. The latest charge appeared last Saturday: four hundred dollars in a Texas western store.
    That one was mine. The boots. I tell the woman.
    “You’re certain you’re in Reno now?”
    “I’m here.”
    “And you didn’t send flowers last Thursday? By telephone?”
    I stand at the edge of the pool, confused and spooked. Ordering flowers for my mother’s birthday has been on my to-do list for a week; I even picked out an arrangement from an ad in August’s
Horizons
. But did I send them? Nothing.
    “Where, to what state, did the flowers go?” I ask.
    “Our information isn’t that detailed.”
    “That’s one sentimental thief.”
    “We see it all, sir.”
    I’ve read about this: identity theft, it’s called. They grab your data, your history, your files. They duplicate your economic self. They scan your signature and forge ID cards and head out into the world under your name to gorge on DVD players, fur coats. The damage can be extensive, requiring months for the victim to clear up and undo. He has to work backwards along the chain of fraud, reclaiming his reputation, his good name. But maybe I’m panicking. Maybe my case is simpler. Maybe some crook just found an old receipt in the trash can of an airport deli.
    “There’s something I don’t understand,” the woman says. “You still have the card in your possession?”
    “Yes.” My life on the defensive has begun. “But I wasn’t in Utah last week.”
    “Where were you?”
    I’m thinking. My fast-forward functions, but my reverse is stuck. I can’t even remember when I started forgetting things.
    “Who else knows your schedule?”
    “Assistant. Travel agent.”
    “Is she trustworthy?”
    “He. How would I know? Let’s bottom-line this: how soon can you send a replacement card?”
    “Immediately. Where should it go?”
    “Ontario, California. Send it to Homestead Suites.”
    “That’s a hotel?”
    “Where are you, anyway?”
    “Grand Forks, North Dakota.”
    “It’s a chain of executive lodging facilities.”
    I’m still on the line with the woman when Art shows up, dressed for comfort in a black mesh tank top and a pair of clingy runner’s shorts that graphically mold his chunky, big man’s crotch. He looks like a wilted circus muscleman. His hair is longer than I remember—it must have been tied up when I last saw him. It falls to below his shoulders, a lush gray fan. I’ve seen such hair on female Christian rockers and always found it intriguing, but not on Art.
    He signals me to take my time and busies himself with a telescopic pool tool, vacuuming bits of debris from the water and dragging the golf balls to the shallow end, where he wades in, bends over, and retrieves them, then tosses them over his fence back onto the course as if he were hurling grenades at the Nazis. He seems to be at odds with his new setup, seeing only its shortcomings and flaws. People in their fifties shouldn’t change homes. My parents never recovered from their dream house in a subdivision east of town, where they moved just before my father lost his gas trucks. The Jacuzzi embarrassed them, though they thought they’d like it. The surplus bedrooms made my father blush.
    I pocket my phone and join Art at a table shaded by a Pepsi logo umbrella speckled with gray ash. He’s been pilfering from his restaurants—a bad sign. A black, volcanic-looking rock holds down a rain-warped fishing magazine and a stack of ads for Reno escort services—the sort of flyers