Inside, a moment of night-blind blackout yields to imprinted ghostlights from the dance club and then to a Russian Orthodox cathedralscape of shadows and candleglow. The room's mock-suite shape, its notional entryway, blocks a full-Broadway beholding of the king bed and whatever pose my date has chosen there-champagne flapper, minky Marilyn, Cleopatra with serpents. I see the flowers, though. Carnivorous white lilies on the pool table and more of them on the dresser-credenza thing. No music, though. No beatnik minstrelsy. That Wurlitzer let us both down. Three steps, a turn.

Home to fulfill the obsession I deserved.

It's like a fairy tale. The bed stripped down to its sheets. The banks of roses. The powdered skin and many, many lit tapers. All gauzy and medieval and surely calculated to address the ancient child in me even as it rebukes the infant grown-up. That seems to have been her intention, at least. To enchant and correct at the same time. But her thrashings and half-conscious gropings have mangled things. She's on her side in a kind of frozen crouch, fouled in the linens. The roses are a mess. Only the chess-set lineup of pill bottles on the nightstand beside my sonic sleep machine-tuned to the "rain forest" track; I hear the dripping now-memorializes my girl's perfectionism.

I receive it all as a kindness. She could have hung herself.

To grab the phone I have to reach through flames, and I suffer a burn I won't feel till hours later. The receiver is off the hook-evidence of second thoughts? I'm shaking her with one hand, but I'm also listening for a dial tone. Then I see the cord yanked from the wall jack. I frisk myself for my mobile. 911? Or patch through to the desk for the in-house team of medics that any hotel this size must have on standby? The decision hangs. I shouldn't have to make one. I've outsmarted myself by imagining the medics.

The emergency operator wants my room number, which I never noted; I followed the jasmine. The lady drawls. Her westernness offends me. I run to the hall, read the number off the door, then hustle back to list the names of the poisons, the medications. I arrive at the wrong side of the broad mattress and instead of circling around I climb across. I brush her skin, traversing. It might be colder. Still time to pump her stomach, to give the shots. The small print on the bottles' labels is faded, low contrast. I squint and report. I'm asked to speak more clearly.

Instructions next. Check the airway for obstructions; the victim may have aspirated vomit. I don't understand. "With your fingers," drawls the operator. I'm surprised she didn't call me "hon." I ask her for specifics, mechanical drawings. Which fingers? How many? In the throat? Somehow I fumble the handset in my scramble and lose it in all the roses and knotted laundry. It rings seconds later, an automated callback, but I perform the more critical mission first. I roll her on her back-I'm sure I'm wrong here; the victim belongs belongs on its side, so it can drool; so its gullet can eject the foreign material-and I spread her wet chin and jaw and make my probe, index and middle, it's coming back to me. on its side, so it can drool; so its gullet can eject the foreign material-and I spread her wet chin and jaw and make my probe, index and middle, it's coming back to me.

Jaws dully close and gum me-wakefulness. Then her head makes a ripping, canine shake. She bites.

"The f.u.c.king h.e.l.l . . . ?" Huge eyes she has. Like Lazarus.

"Alex, oh f.u.c.king G.o.d."

"You choked me. s.h.i.t!" She jerks back her knees and goes fetal against the headboard. Cornered, curled, as if I had a knife. Extremely wakeful, though. My phone still ringing.

"You never came," she says. "I fell asleep. Where were you?"

"Are you okay? You said to wait."

"Not two hours," she says. The phone is by her hand, I see. She slaps it and it goes quiet.

"I," I say. "I," I continue. "I," I offer. I pause.

"Playing cards? Just one more hand?" she says. She gathers the sheets and covers all her good parts. Again the phone rings. She answers it and listens and says, "I'm fine," and repeats it until even I'm convinced, her face showing comprehension of my mistake, of everyone's mistakes, and then disgust.

"Thank you. I know, but it wasn't that," she says. "He's self-important, so he thought it was. He knew I used sedatives, but apparently . . . I know, I know." They're hitting it off, these gals. "He got himself all hung up in the casino and tiptoed in here with a guilty conscience and saw what he wanted to or hoped or something. His poor, poor Juliet. If you want to send someone over to confirm, be my guest . . . Right. Okay. She wants to talk to you."

I explain that there's no emergency after all and turn the mobile off and face my date. If she lit all these candles when she first came in and they were new then and now they're this burned down I'm surprised it was only two hours I wasted down there.

"You got the bear, I noticed," she says. "From Paula. My friend. Who you don't remember, either. Tall. Wore flannel slacks. She worked that mannish thing."

"A Paula. Statuesque," I say. "A Paula."

"When I told her I saw you on the Reno flight, she said 'Oh goody,' and asked me for your info. You ticked her off. She's touchy, but she's a gas. She said she was going to do something, but not what, though it must have been her because she gave those bears for Christmas once, the year we were fired, when those bears were big. She's back in PR, in Miami. Fashion stuff."

"I should probably get my own room tonight, you feel."

"Get me one. This one's trashed. I want fresh blankets. I spent a lot of money on all this gear."

"Or maybe we can both get a new room."

"You must think I'm a pretty lonely lady. Pretty twisted, too. Just say it."

"No."

"That was your moment of grandeur, wasn't it? Your slain despondent virgin," Alex says. "I know your big atonement's set for nine, but I'd just call and cancel if I were you. You haven't really earned the cross, you know? You flatter yourself and it's sort of getting old. Try to book me another suite. Or anything. It doesn't even have to be Mount O."

I take down the cue when I'm alone again and venture a few four-b.u.mper extravaganzas, but I'm out of my groove and not much sinks. Pool b.a.l.l.s not sinking, just knocking around, are sad. Some entertainment? I should love this Wurlitzer. These are my people. Haggard. Baez. Hank. Country-Western Music as Literature. I'm told I had ambitions as a folk singer, and I don't doubt it, but it's too late to learn an instrument. I click my sleep machine to "prairie wind" and gobble a pill I found under the sink and an Ambien from my pocket, to hedge my bets.

I call Alex in her new room three floors above me to see if she's comfortable and to make sure she won't be down to murder me in my sleep. She answers from the bathroom, from the john, whose whirlpooling I can hear when she picks up. I'm calling from the same spot-we've found a wavelength?-though I've already flushed. I flush again, a kind of mating call, and Alex says she's preparing to go out again and I say, compet.i.tively, that I am, too. "As what?" she says. It's the question I should have asked her; she's the one who's always going out as things. "As Danny," I say, and at last I get a laugh from her. Why didn't we begin things in this fashion, toilet to toilet, at a modest remove, the way the balanced Mormons do their courting?

I ask her why she takes so many pills, my concern for her seeming genuine, even to me, and she says she doesn't-the pills are a collection, a way of adapting to the flying life and self-employment, which she's never grown used to. Consulting with a doctor in each new city is like redesigning the lighting in her hotel rooms; it helps her to feel connected and at ease; and she only asks the physicians for prescriptions because she's from Wyoming and grew up poor and believes in value for her money. She broke them out tonight because she saw I'd stolen a fair number and she concluded that drugs were my pa.s.sion or maybe just my pastime and she wanted to swing along, not be a spoilsport. I tell her I buy all this, although few others would, because I know what she's up against out here, having to set up anew each time she lands-I do it, too, by rooting for local teams, and I tell her the story about the Bulls and Timberwolves. "So: Poseidon's Grotto in fifteen minutes? Come as whoever," I say. And then I add: "I finally remembered you," because it's true. A minute ago, when I realized there'd be no penalty, I flashed on the morning I played headhunter to Alex's kittenish job seeker in cashmere, though the nuts were peanuts, not pistachios.

"We had chemistry, didn't we?" she says.

"I wouldn't go that far. I enjoyed the outfits. I wasn't capable then of having chemistry."

"You think our limo's still out front?"

"I'm certain."

"We could drive to that secret air base in the desert where they supposedly autopsy the aliens and sit on a rock with a carton of cold milk and watch the skies for experimental craft."

Now, that's my idea of doing Las Vegas. "Yes."

"Why weren't you like this before?"

Can't answer that.

"Or maybe," she says, "we should wait a week or two and see if we're still interested?"

"Oh."

"That would be wiser, I think."

In bed, alone, I recall that tonight was about survival only, so I've succeeded. The rest was all a bonus. And I may just have met my soul mate tonight, though I'm still not sure which one she was.

sixteen.

this business of ha.s.sled travelers waking up not knowing where they are has always seemed false to me, a form of bragging, as when someone tells me at a business lunch that it's been years since he really tasted his food. The more I've traveled, the better I've become at orienting myself with a few clues, and the harder it's gotten to lose myself. I'm perpetually mapping and triangulating, alert to accents, hairstyles, cloud formations, the chemical bouquets of drinking water. Nomadism means vigilance, and to wake up bewildered and drifting and unmoored is a privilege of the settled, it seems to me-of the farmer who's spent his whole life in one white house, rising to the same roosters.

The light in my room is Las Vegas morning light, there's none other like it in all America-a stun gun to the soul. It picks out the pistils and stamens in the lilies and the ashes of the spent incense cones. My mobile is halfway through its second ring, and because I'm now down to unwelcome callers only, I hesitate before answering. I'd give anything for a moment of dislocation, a blessed buffer zone.

"I'm downstairs with a car on the way," Craig Gregory says. "I thought you might like a ride to the convention center. You'll want to check the acoustics, the power spots. You going to use a lectern and sermonize or do the walkabout talk-show act? We're curious."

"I haven't showered."

"Use it for effect. Too conscience-stricken to bathe. I'll wait out front, next to the big pink granite Dionysus."

I do my best with razor, soap, and toothbrush, but it's like polishing a wormy apple. Motivation is low. Virtue's bugle call is silent. I rehea.r.s.e a few brave phrases from my talk but the face in the steamy mirror seems unmoved. The point of the speech was to hear myself deliver it, but I already have, a hundred times, and clearly my best performance is behind me. The true act of courage this morning would be to cancel and live with the knowledge of Craig Gregory's office-wide "I told you so's." It's the sole penance left to me, and I must s.n.a.t.c.h it.

I pack up my carry-on but it won't zip. I leave it on the bed. My briefcase, too. Luggage, for me, was an affectation anyway, a way to rea.s.sure strangers and hotel clerks that I hadn't just been released from prison and that I'd make good on my bills. I ditch the white-noise generator as well. The thing enfeebled me. If a person can't lose consciousness on his own, if thinking his thoughts is that important to him, then let him lie on his bed of nails. He'll cope.

Only the HandStar is indispensable, if only for nine more hours or so. Its flight schedules, mileage charts, and activity logs will tell me when I've pa.s.sed over my meridian. After that, the trash. My credit cards, too. The fewer numerical portals into my affairs, the fewer intruders. I may keep one Visa so I can pump my gas without having to face a human clerk, but I'll toss the rest on the unloved-numbers dump. 787 59643 85732, you may no longer act as my agent. Permission denied. My phone I'll retain in case I witness a car wreck and can be of aid. The boots stay, too. To help me walk the surface of the earth and look silly doing it, which is how I'll feel. Not forever, I hope, but certainly at first.

I check out by remote, via the TV, and ride the elevator to the casino, where I notice a few of the players from last night still humped up over the tables and machines, though not the fellow who copped my lucky blackjack stool, who's probably out yacht-shopping by now, nagged by a faint sense of illegitimacy he's drinking hard to mask.

I'm almost out the door and MythTech-bound, heading for a rear exit to miss Craig Gregory, when I fix on a familiar profile alone at a corner mini-baccarat table. They got him. I'm devastated. They waylaid Pinter. There he is, stubbly, strung out on the odds, a monk who ventured from his cell just once and plunged straightaway down Lucifer's rabbit hole. It's my duty to try to haul him out.

It takes him a moment to see me once I've sat down. This game of no skill and one binary decision-Player or Banker; an embryo could do it-has fossilized his nerves. The whites of his eyes are the color of old teeth, and so are his old teeth.

"I was just getting up to come hear you speak," he says. Optimistically.

"I was up against CEO-to-be-announced. I bowed out. How's it going over here?"

"Better and better. I'm almost back to even." He wets his gray lips and commits two chips to Banker, then has an epiphany and shifts to Player. If he wins this, he'll think he has the touch. If he loses he'll think he had had the touch, but doubted himself. He'll resolve not to doubt himself and keep on playing. the touch, but doubted himself. He'll resolve not to doubt himself and keep on playing.

"Have you thought any more about the Pinter Zone?"

He smashes out a hand-rolled cigarette. "I've decided to license those rights to Tony Marlowe. I'm sorry. I planned to tell you at your talk."

"May I ask why?" As if I don't know, and as though I care now. Marlowe's a smiler. He grooms. He follows up. The perennial philosophy.

"You may, but my answer would only make you feel bad."

Fair enough. But he stabs me anyhow. "You're a graduate of my seminars," he says. "Marlowe's not. His brain's not full of goop. He sees me for what I am, another businessman, not an avatar. It takes the pressure off. You, I would have disillusioned."

Wrong. Watching him kill himself to get "back to even" (where but in Las Vegas is reaching zero considered an accomplishment?) has already done that job.

"You seeing the general this afternoon?" he says. "This man won a ma.s.sive set-piece desert battle. Imagine the confidence that must instill."

"I've heard him. I've gotten all he has to give. I'm off to Omaha. s.p.a.ck and Sarrazin."

"Say h.e.l.lo to them for me."

He chooses Banker. Loses. The El Dorado of evenness recedes before a new grail: bankruptcy with dignity. I buy a few chips. I'll join him in his ruin.

"I'm not even sure I still want to work for them. I might live on my savings for a year. Read the cla.s.sics."

"The cla.s.sics will just depress you. I fled a country nurtured on the cla.s.sics and everyone there was drunk or suicidal. Keep occupied. Work. Earn money. Help others earn money. Ignorance of the cla.s.sics is your best a.s.set. If MythTech shows interest, accept. Don't ponder Dante."

I've won two hands, that fast, and I can see the swinging pocket watch of last night's trance. I collect my chips and scoot my stool back, rise.

"Stay. You're the charm," says Pinter. "Five more hands. I'm back within striking distance of where I stood when I felt I was starting to catch up."

Too sad, that remark. And I owe the old man, too, even if he's dancing with Marlowe now. He did something for me once. He did a lot. The sophisticates may sniff, but it's all true: in the course of certain American lives, way out in the flyover gloom between the coasts, it's possible to arrive-through loss of love, through the long, formless shock of watching parents age, through inadequacies of moral training, through money problems-at a stage or a juncture or a pa.s.sage-dismiss the buzzwords at your peril-when we find ourselves alone in a strange city where no one lives any longer than he must and all of our neighbors come from somewhere else, and d.a.m.n it, things just aren't working out for us, and we've tried everything, diets, gyms, jobs, churches, but so far not this thing, which we read about on a glossy flyer tucked under our windshields: a breakthrough new course in Dynamic Self-Management developed over decades of experience training America's Top Business Leaders and GUARANTEED TO GET YOU WHERE YOU'RE GOING GUARANTEED TO GET YOU WHERE YOU'RE GOING!

And we go. And feel better. Because there's wisdom there, more than we gained at our lousy college, at least, and more importantly there's an old man's face-beamed in from California by satellite-which appears to be looking at us alone, the ninety-eight-pound weaklings, and not laughing! A miracle. Not even smirking! Beholding us!

"I win again. Are you watching this?" says Pinter. "Don't move an inch. I'm tripling my wagers."

Only for him would I do this: stand around impersonating good luck when I have a flight to catch.

"I'm there! I'm even!"

"You might want to stop now," I say.

Pinter nods. "Unless you can postpone Omaha."

"I can't."

He pockets the chips he sat down with like golden loot dredged from a wreck. He steps back from the table. Look: no handcuffs.

"I'm sorry about Marlowe. I can't unsign. I can, however, run up to my room and call Mr. Sarrazin and vouch for you and suggest that he send a car when you get in. When's your arrival?"

I tell him.

"You brought me back!" He shakes my hand and won't stop, and though one dreams of someday being thanked by one's old mentor, one doesn't want him to cling this way. It's painful. My favor was so small. I did so little.

Though I guess that depends on how much he was down.

There's always a change in Denver. It's unavoidable. A trip to the bathroom out west means changing in Denver. If you've done it, you've seen the city at its best. Not because the rest of Denver is dull (I've been told my old city possesses a "thriving arts scene," whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks) but because the airport is a wonder. Along with Hartsfield and O'Hare, DIA is one of Airworld's three great capitals. It's the best home that someone between homes could ever want.

But today is goodbye. I'll change in Denver again someday-I'll still fly, I suppose, though less often, and mostly for pleasure-but this won't be the same DIA, where I know everybody and most folks at least act like they know me. The ten-minute chair-ma.s.sage girl who just had twins. The shoeshine guys, Baron and Gideon and Phil. The health-walking retired G-man who shows up every weekday at 6 A.M. A.M. to clock his nine miles, shielded from the weather by those soaring conical canopies said to invoke a native teepee village, though to me they've always looked like sails. to clock his nine miles, shielded from the weather by those soaring conical canopies said to invoke a native teepee village, though to me they've always looked like sails.

And Linda, of course, whom I had to go and sleep with, perverting the pristine relationship of kind and competent receptionist and busy man who loved being received.

I stare at them as I walk between my gates. If I catch someone's eye I make a finger pistol and shoot them a big "Howdy" or "Keep on truckin'." A few shoot back, but only one person speaks-Sharon, the quickie ma.s.sage girl. "Flamingo neck, get over here! You need me!"

I mount her odd-looking chair and rest my head, facing down and forward, between two pads. I watch the floor go by. Nothing stays in place; it all goes by. Floors just do it more slowly than other things.

"Hear that Rice Krispies sound? That's your fascia crackling." She always brings up my fascia. She pities them. She believes that if people, particularly people in power, "would only listen to their bodies," war would cease and pollution would abate-and for as long as I'm in her oily hands, I believe it, too. Imagine the red faces if the answer turns out to be that simple. It just may.

I'd tell her "So long," but I don't want to confuse her. Of course I'm going away; I'm in an airport.

I walk to the Compa.s.s Club desk and ask the woman filling in for Linda to pa.s.s a note to her I wrote on the flight in. Not much of a note: "Keep smiling, okay? I'm sorry about last night. I'll be away. Tell the boys to expect big parcels on their birthdays and yes, you'd make a terrific nurse. Pursue that."

"Are you Ryan?" the sub asks. "The one she always talks about? You fit the description perfectly. You must be."

"Describe the description."

"Medium short hair. A big vocabulary. Flat but pleasing voice."

"With that, you pegged me?"

"Great West ran your picture in the employee newsletter. They've been updating us on your progress. You'll be our tenth."