part 1
chapter one
It was a quiet line that stretched across the threshold from the airbridge into the fuselage world, business travelers, mainly, eyes fixed into screens and sipping away their liters of glacial water, an idling American engine.
Further ahead, in the first-class cabin, I glimpsed the Steve Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, blocking the aisle, straining to hoist an overnight bag into an overhead bin. Mid-thirties men unpacked carry-ons monastically, a whisper of directives into their earpieces, virtual meetings stretched to the brink. You got double miles for first class. Champagne fizzed in plastic flutes and the silent flight attendants stood with dim smiles. Behind the economy class partition, an old woman in the window seat, wrapped in a silk shawl, bit an irradiated white peach, chin glassy with nectar. Overhead, dirty plastic TV boxes. Scalded Arabica and microwaved sausage. Pre-departure trickle of Sunday brunch piano, faint Gershwin.
Once the plane was taxiing, the CEO of United, spray-tanned and flanked by subordinates in a hangar, waved an onscreen “Hello.” The new global fleet of today burns less fuel than the fleet of yesterday—emphasis on today. He spoke in the same suit, on different days, from major landmarks in different hubs—the Pantheon, Big Ben, sunset Buddhist temples, the Taj Mahal at dawn—narrating to a brassy version of the score to “An American in Paris” in nearly a full minute of flare-gun promotion. Then he navigated around the new website, swiped screens of the companion app. The next shot was of a Spanish celebrity chef chiffonading basil to make a vinaigrette. The menus on the transatlantic route all bore his name.
When it ended, I calculated the production costs at more than $200,000—come to think of it, the rights to the music alone were definitely over seven figures. I tried to quantify the corn in the fuel, the tonnage of Iowa crop yields incinerating in the engines. This was Tuesday morning.
Soon the captain broke in: we would be landing thirty to forty minutes late. The only choice was patience. He was static omniscience, armed and barricaded behind a terror-proof door. Surveying all the passengers I wondered who else like me had randomly been chosen for pre-screened security check-in—I had simply slipped through the scanner like a mist. Now a safety video played. I started to contemplate my free drink. Cabin life had its preordained rhythms. The goal was not to think.
I had been woken that morning when my vibrating cell phone rattled the water glass on the nightstand with emails coming in from Tokyo. What if I had awoken in the middle of the night, glanced at the alarm, saw that the time was close, and, rather than waking, had pushed in the pin on the clock and fallen back asleep? What if, instead of sitting up with night sweats and drinking the glass empty, showering, rubbing my chin and debating whether to shave, then walking downstairs into the kitchen and making Colin pancakes with chocolate chips sprinkled into the patch of batter, and cellophane-wrapping them for later, the dreaded pale headlights of the sedan waiting in the rain—what if, instead of sinking into the backseat for another trek to Dulles, I had climbed back up the stairs to wake him, hitting the dormant parkway in the Maserati by eight, glazed alpine white, off to one of his tournaments, a good two-hour morning drive? I would have taken the empty roads through the Sunday city, the decaying bridge over the bay to the tallgrass peninsula deep in autumn, to Easton, while he was swaddled in wool in the backseat.
Rising steam from the mug in the cup holder. A satellite broadcast of NHL banter and trade speculation. The only driver for many miles. I headquartered my company in a Leed-certified building where the toilets half-flushed, and my drive in was always a highlight. Weekdays I would take the scenic byway that paralleled the Potomac, blaring music—usually Oasis, especially where Noel Gallagher sings, or R.E.M. or Pearl Jam—or playing YouTube poetry readings by T.S. Eliot or less fortunate poets, or holding myself captive to trade speculation on the radio, and when I saw the spires of Georgetown University across the river, I would decide amongst the three bridges that fed Northern Virginia into the District of Columbia. I took conference calls via Bluetooth, hands at ten and two, and when I skipped the calls or killed the music and the readings, I drove in pleasant catatonic silence, marking the seasons by whether the leaves had turned lemon or garnet, had crisped then fallen, or had come again, tiny green stars on their weary limbs.
This daydream Sunday I would have slowed near the known speed traps, then blown open the engine on the straightaway, passing under wet arches of garnet leaves, their phantom smell entering the car. He would have been asleep, right there with me.
But this was Tuesday and the corn-fed engines roared and flushed the sanitized Gershwin and my plane lifted off, a streaking human lyric in the sky.
It was a steep ascent through silvery clouds, and soon we passed over the Shenandoah, the ink of the Mississippi, the heartland patchwork plains, then the anonymous canyons and camel hump mountain range and the creosote rail ties across it all, and somewhere below there is a rusted Model-T, a cactus grown into the fender, some shotgun shell ghost town, and to the north, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, deer are grazing near the electrified fence surrounding a Google server farm, all those thickets of tendril wires gripping the national privacy. Death Valley. Apache, Cherokee, Hopi, Navajo. Then some stunted green fringe, Silicon Valley. The usual approach: right over San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific, banking eastward and over the polyglot city, the vital edge of America.
My seatmate wore a blue suit with chalky pinstripes and was completely middle-aged, like me. There were still raindrops on his jacket and he smelled like mildewy wool. I declined the champagne, ordered English tea, milk and two sugars, for no apparent reason. He turned to me and asked if I was from the east, a question that I thought was simply déclassé. Usually, I slip-noosed all potential airline comradery with one-word tugs—“yesses”—and if necessary I pretended to speak no English. But he kept at it.
“Politics?” he asked, pinky-stirring his Bloody Mary. He had his laptop open and was sifting through time-sensitive legal briefs, red pen hand-scribbled notes, flipping through timesheets and invoices.
“I’m agnostic,” I said.
“I meant are you on the Hill? I think we’ve met before; you look familiar. I think you’re with Senator Gonzalez, am I right? I think so, right? You were his chief of staff?”
“I’m just a consultant.”
“Consultant,” he said with his head raised, swirling the ice cubes in his now empty glass, as if appraising some ancient scroll. He had a voice full of paver stones. “Litigator. Securities. Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand. “But then you worked for Senator Rogers, I think. What kind of consultant?”
“I, in fact, never worked on Capitol Hill. I’m an agnostic.”
“That’s very funny. Clever. How does that work in principle? I mean, you need to pick a side. Where are you now?”
“A P.R. firm.”
“Democrat or Republican?”