In Transit

Mostly, they are unremarkable. One is called Kooper. One is Japanese, and has limited English but access to a distribution network in Japan and tens of millions of yen, no small amount, despite the yen's present sluggishness. Another smiles. His bloodshot eyes stare at a management thing called The Art of Summary. His name is Walsh; he has highlighted almost 40 per cent of the facing page. Among them sits a lone woman, her flagrant tresses bound, her poker face the mask that females must adopt for corporate environments. She talks to Moriyama.

Presley Frey, or Press as he prefers to be called, does not see them at first. LAX Delta Airlines terminal is crowded and the group, with their Gap chinos, white-soled trainers and checked shirts featuring button-down tabs, blends in. The costume is prescribed by intranet memos at their company as ‘applicable to travel and/or social contact’. It is called ‘Global Business Casual’. In business, uniformity is prized, even uniformity of rebellion; that leisure might also be so codified does not seem abnormal to Press's colleagues. After two and something years of living in the USA, Press understands that Americans can love only the most homogenous expressions of individualism.

Press wears a suit (used gum pellet, chinos, laundry mix-up, don't ask). He carries a canvas satchel containing his lap top and the screwed-up chinos, and bagged junk food—the latter he hopes will neutralise an error of judgement, okay, clear-cut bad deed. As a boy he had placated his mother with hand-drawn cards; a chain of wrongs and contrition extended behind him, to what, some pure state, pre-birth? Such are the thoughts of the departure lounge. The burgers in his hand are cooling. He feels frazzled. Soon the group will board a plane to Montreal, the place where he grew up, yet rarely visits.

He trudges. Around him, brightly dressed passengers mosey.

Five days on the road; a bad itinerary that put Las Vegas before Chicago and St Louis before LA (and then haul-ass back to Montreal):

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Press has not slept. He has tried, lying on his back and sides alternately, flipping torrid pillows, feeling their heat renew around his ears. He has taken showers, read reports, and watched the Tom Hanks movie Big on cable in three states. Hotel ceilings have passed over him like stucco clouds. Last night he lay in bed at the LAX Ramada Inn while the laundry massacred his chinos; outside his window, jets ascended like futuristic sheep hurdling fences. He dozed but, finding himself in a familiar dreamscape and moving, woke at once.

Seeing his team, Press quickens his step. His mouth is dry; he has abstained from drinking liquids since leaving New York, a little nutty maybe, but he is working on something. You made mistakes, you tried to correct them. He makes directly for the ponytailed woman.

Press moved to New York from Biloxi after Chaftech, the technology/financial services operation he worked for, had consumed and not digested a larger but still very niche telco called Thurcon. Though Press had been an analyst, soon after his arrival he was promoted to team leader. ‘You have something,’ said his supervisor Coverdale, shifting from one foot to another, as if the floor beneath him was hot. ‘You're going to meet resistance …’ Ellie—the redhead—Walsh and Kooper were old-school Thurcon. Press was Chaftech alumni, and Canadian. Ellie, also, was team leader then.

Ellie reminds Press of a girl, the girl, from his past. The resemblance is not obvious. Angela was mild and urbane; Ellie is not subtle. Press wonders if he isn't vibing himself with Ellie. Maybe after a certain number of relationships women, for reasons of mental efficiency, became doppelgängers. Press hopes not. His sister Stephanie married a climatologist called Brett when she was twenty. She has two kids and makes embarrassing a sides about Press's Lothario status. No way did he expect to have slept with so many girls (he was less inclined now to call them girls) but what else is going to happen when you stay single into your early-thirties?

‘We need Moriyama and his guys on board,’ continued Coverdale, jiggling. ‘Get the name right. Mo-ri-ya-ma. Projections are that Asia's bouncing back. Be a leader. Show him the margins; remember Chaftech's values … It's not just about numbers, it's about human values.’

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In fact, the times were without protocol. Over five years, US GDP had increased by one quarter. Equity markets had become forums for passion and optimism. The small consumed the large, nimbly, and all around Press and Coverdale, all about everywhere, fidgety mosaics of yesses and noes were being electrified into the air, digitising sentiment and disgorging treasure. It was a breathtaking, possibly endless, moment to be alive.

Press walks to Ellie. He deposits his canvas satchel; it tips over. He extends a grease-smudged bag. ‘For you, Ellie, a present.’

‘We board in about two minutes, Press.’ She resumes conversing with Mr Moriyama. Talk to Moriyama! thinks Press. He has reminded himself thus before—but the hurly burly of flights, meetings and strate-gising has consumed these good intentions like so many hors d'oeuvres.

Press recites the burger company's slogan: ‘Ellie, it just tastes better.’

In the last meeting Press corrected her on her stat projections before a client. Most guys in business have a pet sport and metaphor fund, and this client's was golf. Press compared her error to a double bogey. Ellie, as redheads do, blushed. The client snickered. Walsh and Kooper emitted courtier-like giggles, which Moriyama mimicked bewilderedly; Press had gone too far.

Ellie regards the burgers. ‘No. Thank you.’ The others are stirring. Press straightens his back, and his preposterous suit jacket tightens at his shoulders. This scene, he thinks, might be from a software advert; the new breed, casually dressed and determined, facing off with an analogue square. Goddamn hotel laundry!

Though Press had run the Biloxi office well enough, business lore held that analysts—as Press had been—lacked the personal resources, i.e. manipulative feistiness, that was required of management. On his promotion, Press counterattacked. He confided college sexcapades to Walsh, and nodded as Walsh, gross rather than droll, reciprocated. He loaned Kooper $250 for an unspecified emergency. He called them ‘team’, an unoriginal choice it was true yet his high school experiences playing white-boy basketball had convinced him of the word's ability to fabricate allegiance. Taking an idea from one of his management theory books, he suggested they ‘self-introduce’, or stand before each other, say, ‘My name is …’, and tell their story, something about their page 144 background, what they hoped to achieve; the result, ideally, being emotional bonds.

The self-introduction afternoon seemed to create some warmth. They met in a bar/restaurant in Murray Street. Press portrayed himself as disciplined but fun, flexible and functional, someone who wore a portentous name lightly yet knew the importance of respect. The others offered self-assessments that recalled the business magazine features they read on the extraterrestrials at the top of the management food chain. Only the success was missing, but this was merely a matter of time. In the near future, everyone would be rich. They drank draft beer and mingled. Ellie appeared to thaw a little, calling Press ‘Waldo’. Later he learned Waldo was a children's book character who is difficult to find in a crowd.

He had a personal word with Ellie about that. ‘Is the core issue here that I got your job?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ she replied. Direct answers unsettle Press. ‘I don't care if you undermine me,’ he told her, ‘but don't compromise the group.’ Ellie is tough and slim, a gym aficionado whose tan and fine lines suggest partiality for the temperature at which skin roasts. She scrutinised him, her expression somewhere between exasperation and tolerance. ‘That self-introduction …’ she began.

‘What?’ said Press.

‘You have to trust us enough to be honest.’

‘I was being honest.’

‘We can't like what we don't know.’

‘I think everyone made a good start today,’ he replied.

She relented. They shook hands. Walsh claims Ellie is sleeping with Chaftech's CFO, a rumour that Press—without making a judgement—tries to discourage. He has seen enough offices to know it is a set piece of office gossip, male and female, to insist that all successful women penetrate the glass ceiling while prone.

Press brandishes the hamburger sack at Mr Moriyama, who looks as if he has been offered a severed head. Kooper winces, Walsh looks up from his book, smiles. Walsh is Press's closest ally on the team. Walsh wants to take one. He really does, Press can see it. Walsh resumes pretending to read.

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Press goads them. ‘Can't you guys make your own minds up?’

Kooper, lowest in the pecking order and normally silent, moves his lips.

‘Speak up,’ says Press.

Kooper blushes. ‘I only said, um, hardly the offer of a lifetime.’

Press wants to beat Kooper with a Whopper and scream, ‘Where's my money, motherfucker!’ but leaders must lead even-temperedly. Press's hand enters the sack. The American travelling public swirls by, clutching cardboard goblets of coffee, propelling luggage; above them television monitors relay the status of their comings and goings: on time, boarding, final call, Knoxville, Atlanta. Walsh shuts his book. His widely spaced blue eyes dart. ‘Press,’ he says, ‘maybe you should sit down.’

Press complies. He always overreaches. In a grand mal hissy fit (Stephanie that time), he once threw his wallet into the shrubs before their house in Montreal. The Freys were going, as families did then on a Friday, into the city, and were waiting on his father. But his father was late and Stephanie had been teasing him, and … Working in semi-darkness, his mother cut the bushes almost to nothing but neither the wallet nor its $23 contents could be found. They ate scrambled eggs that night in silence. The next day Press drew his mother a card with ‘I love you’ inside a heart.

Press chews cold hamburger; a paste of meat and bun insinuates itself around his parched gums. He feels that his flesh has abandoned him, leaving a walking cutaway of the kind med students study, human in form but not human.

But Press is eating, and so must exist.

He will build on this.

At Chaftech in Biloxi, Press shone. The high-ups were baby boomers, so he used generational idioms such as ‘freaked out’ to relax and engage them. And he was not above correcting peers before his elders, a trait he justified by invoking the group's best interests. Inaccurate, but Press was liked nonetheless, forever socialising with his workmates, chasing a ball through the muggy Biloxi air, organising unskilled chummy activities like bowling. The nearness of the sea recalled Vancouver, page 146 where Press's father would wake him on a Sunday, muss his bed and say, ‘Play time, kiddo.’ To this day love connotes activity for Press, the bliss of being swung around the kitchen by his dad, his mother and Stephanie shrieking in concert, their hearts sweetly raw.

However, contentment is not fungible, and a career demands portability, so Press left crowded happy Biloxi to be alone in New York. New Yorkers themselves seemed pleasant enough but their tastes were decadent. They sought genuine exotics, sombre Eritreans or jive-ass Croats; Canadians didn't rate. His answer machine remained empty. Lengthy emails to ex-colleagues in Biloxi returned terse replies. Walking down Lexington Ave through the poulticing dusk to his too-warm apartment, it seemed to Press that he had inadvertently volunteered for one of the medical trials advertised in the Village Voice: ‘Wanted, subjects for crisis, crisis to be announced.’

The airline gate clerk announces boarding for the Montreal flight. Ellie and the others face the counter. Press spits hamburger mush into the paper bag. A kid is watching, so he secretes the bag under the seat beside him.

Before Press left, he dreamed he was briefing everyone back at the Biloxi Chaftech. Ellie appeared, bustling him into a lecture theatre. The meeting, slow in starting, ended inconclusively. Ellie asked about projected debt. He replied and she corrected, ‘No. I said death.’ Then he was racing her through a forest. He zigzagged and could not feel his feet. He and Ellie were neck and neck. A urinal appeared, porcelain and inviting. Yes.

Press woke to warmth, liquid and disbelief.

How readily the rituals returned. Strip the sheets; towel the bed; find a fresh towel; lay it on the mattress. No, remove it, you're not going to piss the bed twice in a night. Or are you? Aiming by sound, Press drained his bladder in the darkened bathroom. He decided against showering. Back in bed he dozed for a second. The phone rang; someone informed him the town car was two blocks away. Press closed his eyes. The door was being battered. He shouted. The battering ceased. He dressed quickly, collected his suitcase and laptop, and left. Forty minutes later he was at Newark hustling his bags onto scales, and smelling about himself a urinary, fraudulent tang.

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They board. Walsh sits across the aircraft's aisle, reading and marking his book. Moriyama and Kooper are side by side, mutually inarticulate. Up a little, Ellie sits with a couple; the man wears a T-shirt listing reasons why beer is better than a woman. Ellie plays to the woman, leaning across the husband's stomach to whisper to her. She has such populist deftness, a love of moments and people that shows spontan-eously, and that Press recognises because once he had it also. In Vegas a couple of days ago, the team had visited the Bellagio, a hotel that serves 15,000 meals each day. All guests were either morbidly obese or thin. The Bellagio overlooked a man-made lake where at set times a water-show was enacted. Crowds collected to watch towers of liquid bursting towards the desert sky; Italian tenors sang from landscaped boulders. After the evening show, everyone cheered and clapped. Ellie punched the air and though she was from New Jersey whooped, and shouted, ‘Giddy-up!’ She looked gorgeous. Within the applause, Press folded his arms and hoped no one noticed. The water mocked him.

Press thinks, I hoard emotions while others swing to and from them like cheerful apes! He licks his chafed lips. So swing. Press leans across the aisle, and asks Walsh, sort of not caring, ‘Did I make a dick of myself with the burgers, or what?’

The magic marker is raised. ‘You and Ellie have this … energy.’

True enough, if a little Californian. Walsh draws closer. Behind his ear, orange haze ascends from the tarmac. ‘… If you smile on the outside,’ he says, ‘then you're programming yourself to be happy. It's a cognitive model.’ Press nods. ‘I've read a heap of stuff on it. I was like you at your age.’ Walsh has three years on Press, tops.

In young children, bedwetting or enuresis is often caused by constipation. The rectum is never truly empty, thus the sphincter presses on the immature bladder, which divulges its humiliating cargo. Hospitalisation, or the loss of a parent, entering school or the arrival of a new baby are factors of what is called co-morbidity. Press liked to blame his sister Steph; he sometimes entertained himself by imagining tearful assertions of this to his mom and dad. In his heart, he knew the scenario was wrong.

Walsh says, ‘Your parents liked the King, right?’

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‘Well, the old man did.’ At school Press thought his Christian name was romantic. Later he added it to a list headed with uprooting the family from Vancouver. Families, like corporations, have official histories. FreyCorp's was that his father Barton had sacrificed himself, working long hours to make the transition from the small engineering firm to middle management at a national conglomerate. The Freys’ new house in St Michel, Montreal, was so large that the furniture they had trucked from Vancouver seemed to have shrunk during the journey. Press found French difficult to master; the francophone kids jeered him—Steph picked it up as quickly as she might a dollar note from the side walk. In Montreal, his dad slept late on Sunday, the door of his parents’ room remaining closed. He wet his bed shortly after the shift, as he half expected he would. His mom rather than his father would clean him up, sleepwalking him to the shower, towelling him vigorously. After the towels, Press's replacement pyjamas felt so soft.

Press pats Walsh's arm. ‘I'm glad we talked, you know. I need to know you're behind me.’ Walsh nods. ‘I'm with you 150 per cent.’ He pauses. ‘But the real problem is that Ellie likes you. I mean like-likes you.’ He winks, shuts his eyes and appears to fall immediately asleep.

Press luxuriates momentarily in this racy development, but his self-regard is interrupted by an Asian man standing in the aisle. The guy appears 100 years old and the red plastic badge on his sports jacket identifies him as Cultural Commissioner for Orange Country, Calif. Hilarious. Press thinks of Ellie like-liking him. He lifts the old guy's hand luggage to the over head locker. ‘May I call you Commissioner?’ he asks

With some encouragement, the Commissioner relates how he came to the US shortly after the fall of Saigon. ‘We were the first wave,’ he says, explaining that intellectuals and the middle class, fearing reprisals, left after the NVA took Saigon. ‘We arrived at Camp Pendleton, California,’ he says, ‘thousands of us. We had no English. We put salt in our tea and sugar on our beef. The children learned English more quickly than the adults. They became adults …’

Abruptly, everyone is standing, as the intercom relays that a fault page 149 has been found in the aircraft's galley. They must ‘deplane’. Press advises the Commissioner to call the nephew who is supposed to meet him in Montreal, and tell him of the delay. He grasps a wrinkled hand and wishes him luck, emigrant to emigrant.

After a brief conference, Press updates Coverdale by phone. Coverdale reminds him to ‘get’ Moriyama. The team emerges from the air bridge they had entered 40 minutes before: Press first, Ellie second, then Moriyama, etc, office hierarchy still in force. A man wearing a white business shirt sits where Press deposited his burger bag. The man holds the bag, his jaws moving. He wears ragged sandals. His toenails are filthy claws. Press realises the man is homeless. But how? LAX is filled with signs forbidding travellers to give money to what are called panhandlers, but in fact are beggars. Press keeps walking.

At ticketing, computers scan barcodes. The customer service reps’ expressions grow more rigid. Old boarding passes, now useless, are torn up. The lines are enormous and move timidly. This would be a perfect time to sit with Moriyama, one on one.

‘America on line,’ jokes Orange County's Cultural Commissioner. He is standing before Press, overloaded with baggage. Press hesitates, then admits him to the queue.

On Press's thirtieth birthday, after a year of living together and six months after his father's death, Angela, the love of his life, told him she wanted to see other people. Press translated this as: I want to sleep with other people, and fully availed himself of the slight. They had met through Startel, a financial services company he worked at in Toronto. Showing off during after-work drinks, he asked her to stand on a barstool. Physically strong, his intention had been to lift her aloft by the ankles, a trick that had always worked on college babes. Angela described the ploy as ‘sophomoric’, her preferred epithet of derision. ‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘Like what?’ he asked, and smiled. Press has good teeth, but he didn't know then that Americans regard tooth enamel as a window to the soul. She refused to go home with him that night; three days later they ate dinner together.

He loved her almost immediately. She pronounced ‘about’ as ‘a-bart’ rather than the Canadian ‘a-boot’. Watching television, he would page 150 imagine her as the anchorwoman, reading the news to him alone. He accepted her preference for Italian food without complaint, though its heavy sauces disagreed with his stomach. Working late in the deserted Startel office, he would visit her desk, pick up her phone receiver and smell where her mouth had been. The aroma was totally Angela; Press even chewed her brand of sugar-free gum, winding the used cud into the wrapper as she did. He pocketed these absent-mindedly and they went through the wash, ruining garments. His chinos had been killed thus by the Ramada Inn today.

Angela quizzed him on his past and seemed to find his replies interesting. He grew reckless. Spooning in the darkness one night, he described a high-school basketball game in which he had been fouled endlessly by this little defensive guard. Enraged, he had beaten the offender bloody. ‘Fair play is important to me,’ Press said, hoping to sound convincing. Angela reached back with her delicate foot and clasped her toes around his big toe. Her cropped hair was dyed brunette in those days; she later reverted to a shoulder-length blonde style, and unbecoming glamour. Perhaps he had been an experiment also.

Following Angela's announcement about other people, Press could not face a party in the apartment, so he celebrated his birthday at a bar. He did not drink much, nor—knowing she would expect one—did he make a scene. He was so cool it was shabby. Angela left with a college friend called Ed. Her departure prompted further exits. ‘Hey,’ Press said, ‘I don't turn thirty every day.’ But tribes of people do and by 11 pm he found himself alone. Other night-orphans lingered, drunk and gregarious. Press joined in for a while, contributing some well-rehearsed anecdotes. Encouraged, he began to relate the story of the basketball game. His listeners’ faces clouded. The world is not full of love, he remembered, and he made his excuses and left.

Ed didn't last, yet neither did Angela return, trading up for an alpha male called Chad. Love—or its curtailment—can exert surprising justice. Ed tried to buddy up with Press, as if being dumped by Angela gave them common ground. Press rebuffed him. He took a smaller apartment, and found he could not bring himself to unpack his stuff. When he finally did, the first sweater he unfolded contained a long blonde hair. He stared at the strand for the longest time, then opened page 151 a window, and let it be taken by the wind. Often he felt sorry for himself; other times he knew he had gotten everything he asked for.

The airport windows frame silhouettes of men and women who hold mobile phones, describing their hopes for the future. ‘I'll take two point …’ ‘Iterate that again …’ ‘… accost the downsides …’ Press feels comforted by the economy; it is a machine populated by strangers finding value, making self-interest into common interest. Ellie's phone rings. She takes the call, running a cord from the device and plugging it to her ear. The chorus at the window says, ‘IRA … HMO … IPO …’

Ellie steps out of the line. Press can hear her. ‘Hi … Put him on. I don't … time for this … What do you …? Don't …’ She sees Press is listening, covers her mouth, and walks towards the crowded window. He wonders if the rumoured-CFO-lover has caused this problem. He wonders if he has.

Press listens as the Commissioner gives an explanation of ‘positiv-iseem’, a philosophy he espouses. The old man stands very close to him. Seniors, as they're called here, smell like baking that has been left in tins too long, sugar and metal commingled. The Commissioner adds that he cannot reach his nephew, and leaves the sentence unfinished. Press senses he is about to become responsible for his new friend.

His dad rose from the shop floor, but any shyness Barton might have felt at his lack of education did not prevent him disparaging what he saw as Press's impracticality. Barton could be implacable. An unhappy vacation in Newfoundland during late childhood had produced an abiding hatred for the place and its people. He smoked twenty cigarettes a day until he turned 49, quitting cold turkey. Following the basketball beating, Barton drew unhelpful parallels between emotional and physical incontinence. When he talked about Elvis, his posture, however, seemed to shrug. He collected alternate takes of songs, and used the word ‘intricate’ to describe vocal inflections. He bought books on Elvis, which Press and his mother called ‘Elvis-o-graphies’. Press trawled them dutifully and listened to the records but the resonances the writers and Barton identified (honest Memphis, the triumphal 1968 comeback page 152 special, tragedy and abandon) failed him. He heard only a competent baritone and guitars that recalled poultry.

‘To understand is one thing, to question another. But to do!’ says Orange County's Commissioner of Culture, ‘that is the most difficult!’

In adolescence, the roles reversed. Press discovered industrial music. Barton examined the record covers a few times and Press played him some tracks, but he could only muster preoccupation. The two of them disagreed on everything. They argued retrospectively about the Montreal Olympic Games, which had been compromised by a boycott by 28 African nations after New Zealand—one of the smallest nations competing—had hosted a racist South African rugby team. Both agreed the tour should not have proceeded: Barton because to do so risked hurting innocent parties, like Canada; Press because racism was evil.

‘To do!’ says the Commissioner.

One winter, Barton slipped, injuring his back. A chiropractor was consulted uselessly. There was a blood test, then injected dyes that detected alien life in his lungs. The old man died at home two years ago after a brief rather than brave struggle. Press was doing a shitawful restructure at a fishing company in Newfoundland; incomplete books, everyone had spending authority, tax investigators sniffing everywhere. Though Startel had been auditing, its consultants were also advising the board, a possible conflict of interest. The economy was pretty good, Press told Barton over the phone, even Newfies shouldn't go bust. He did not believe this, but he hoped the old guy might be gratified to hear his prejudices repeated. By then Barton had returned home from hospital for what was expected to be the last time.

‘I'll come back now,’ said Press, ‘if you like …’ but his father interrupted him, and asked for the name of the industrial band Press had forced him to listen to so many years before. Press told him. Shortly before his plane touched down in Montreal, the old man died.

‘To do!’ reiterates the Commissioner, whose luggage Press has taken to moving as the line nudges forward. The plastic suitcases, expression-istically stained, are barely portable but there is physical pleasure in hefting them. In age, you do for strangers what you should have done for your heart's original owners. ‘I was the head of the Vietnamese television service,’ says the Commissioner. ‘After Saigon fell they put page 153 me in jail for three months.’ Aged nine, Press wet Billy Vautier's sister's bed on a sleepover, repeating himself at home a week later. The secret reached school. Someone poured water inside his knapsack, soaking his textbooks. Tough boys held him down, called him ‘Pisser Frey’. His friends dispersed. He got into fights and his mother wanted to take him out of school. Having absorbed the lesson that difficult situations must be endured rather than remedied Press begged to stay. Four years later he puddled again, precipitating discussions of a pad and bell alarm (unreliable, prone to triggering by perspiration, the Night Sentinel). Barton vetoed it as too expensive. He suggested cold showers, what he called the ‘Pavlovan’ solution, and offered to supervise his own therapy. On the first night, as Press stood shivering in the icy water, Barton had rolled up his pyjama sleeve and reached in, clasping his son's hand.

The Commissioner detects Press's unresponsiveness, for he says, ‘Do you have some troubles?’

Press grins. ‘I'm fine,’ he says. Press hadn't wept at the funeral and despite being complimented on the eulogy, he knew he had delivered the thing like a quarterly report. Barton's cremains returned home in a tin container, sealed inside a plastic bag. Brett, Steph, the kids, Angela and himself stood around as his mother deposited the tin's contents in the front yard, just before the shrubs where Press had lost his wallet. His mom cried. Later Press asked Brett what he thought the weather was going to do that year. Steph and the family went back to Ottowa, he to Toronto, his mother to widowhood, with its duties: answering condolence letters, accepting visits from relatives, deciding whether to dispose of the house. Moving to Montreal had taught Press how porous a family could be, so he spent hundreds on phone calls, and visited as often as he could. He didn't cry. Angela wept as her and Press's relationship disintegrated. Sometimes he found himself on the phone to his distraught mother as his girlfriend sobbed in the next room, quadraphonic tears.

By the time his mom stopped crying they had gained the habits of intimacy. She told him about her girlhood, the dances she had attended before meeting Barton. In-jokes entered their conversations, in-jokes about Barton's relatives. After Angela left their calls became even more page 154 frequent. Then his mother sold the house, took an apartment, and someone called Gus muscled his way into their conversations and Press realised his mother had been a surrogate girlfriend. Gus turned out to be the super in her new building; they seemed content and (reading between the lines) sexually active. Press guessed Gus had a moustache.

The ticket line moves, and Press thinks that none of the above was included in his self-introduction. The aim had been to promote honest dialogue, but such discussions were tantamount to career suicide: why bother?

‘Maybe you're sad,’ says the old man. He tells a joke. A Vietnamese immigrant goes to the labour department. He informs the desk clerk that he was the minister of education in Vietnam. ‘Yes,’ says the clerk, ‘but can you cook Chinese food?’

Press nods as he lifts the old guy's bag onto the scales at the counter. The Commissioner asks if he will ‘join’ him for lunch. As Press accepts, the old man begins to cough. He cannot stop; he bends into it, as if fending off an invisible assailant. The spasm lasts long enough for Press to decide to split. He could barely organise himself, let alone a sick old stranger! Offering the Commissioner an excuse, Press falls into the crowd, staring at the middle distance in a state of wakeful dreaming. He walks along with everyone, without thought or purpose. How much time passes, he cannot accurately determine, but Walsh's hand, landing on his shoulder, brings him to himself, and he finds he is standing in another line, about to cash in the $10 lunch voucher the airline has given for the delayed flight.

‘Press, Press,’ says Walsh as they walk, ‘you run off, get mixed up with some weird old dude. Man, you should've just …’ Walsh assumes a karate stance, and chops the air decisively. He winks, ‘Find yourself, brother.’ Press wants to lose himself. Rather than discovered, wasn't identity manufactured from will and experience? During Press's second week at college he soaked his dorm mattress. Basketball requires overnight trips, and the fear of his team mates finding dripping sheets caused him to exchange the sport for the gym and barbells. He worked out in silence. At the gym the largest men alone seemed permitted to speak; they spoke loudly.

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Following a six-month courtship, he and Angela took an adorable two-bedroom place. Domestication agreed with Press. He and Angela met friends in good restaurants; they fantasised about what they would do if they'd had Microsoft stock options. They watched sitcoms. They shopped, holding hands publicly. Even their garbage, the bags and tissue paper discarded after Sunday mall expeditions, smelled of prosperity. Wet sheets, and the associated shame and fear, receded from Press like a bad stopover.

Airport franchises encircle Press and Walsh as they walk: Burger King, Starbucks, McDonald's; these are gold-making machines: captive passengers stuff themselves fretfully before being thrown aloft to eat … airline food. Press eyes the drink containers, the customers sucking black liquid into their mouths through straws. His tongue scrapes the roof of his mouth. He thinks, You abandoned the Commissioner.

Walsh revisits a theory that Ellie is suffering frustrated maternal instinct. ‘When you were promoted,’ he tells Press, ‘we, her kids, were taken away.’

‘Does she have kids?’ asks Press. Walsh shakes his head. Then Ellie is a woman's magazine article: mid-thirties, ambitious, affair possibly with a superior, childless and maybe hoping; wistful, angry. If she was the group's mother, is Press now the father? They find the guys ensconced in a beer'n'sausage joint on concourse E.

Grief is sometimes expressed as a loathing of life. Back in Toronto after the funeral, Press ignored or attacked Angela. Having detected a terrible coldness within himself, he wondered if it was in her also. Criticising her appearance was, according to his personal code, forbidden so he assaulted her habits and tics, the footprints of her personality. He castigated her housekeeping. His mom was always tidy! Instead of Italian, he demanded that they eat Thai three weeks in a row; she baulked. So this was the future, al dente. Why couldn't she adapt? She responded with ‘spontaneity’ (two grim weekends in the country) and sexual practices that hitherto she had found objectionable. She cried, each tear a stone that smashed the windows of Press's heart; but he would not come out.

Angela was no fool. ‘Don't blame me,’ she murmured, ‘because you chose your job over Barton's deathbed.’ They were standing in page 156 the supermarket, an impossible place to fight. ‘Not true,’ answered Press, though he had often made the same accusation. Should he have asked death to come back later, when he felt more capable? He bunted the shopping cart at Angela, knocking her hand. She winced and placed it under her armpit. Press walked off without saying a word. Cue: slutty blonde hair and sophomoric behaviour. At work he took the stairs in preference to finding her in the elevator; at home he watched television, though the sitcom season had ended. Angela would come home, shut herself in the bathroom, and speak on the phone, calling her interlocutors ‘girlfriend!’ Then she went out, returning in the small hours, smelling of wine and undressing in the darkness with affected poise.

The beer'n'sausage joint sucks. Beyond dilatory bitching about its products, no one talks. Did Walsh seek him out for this? Press asks Moriyama whether he believes the Japanese economy will improve this year. Moriyama answers that there are some positive indicators, but structural problems still persist, particularly in the banking sector. Moriyama's English being what it is, this takes about ten minutes.

On one of those fraught terminal nights moisture came. Press twitched, rousing Angela. His first thought was to blame her, but the wet spot's location precluded this. ‘What?’ she said, then, ‘Euuwww.’

‘It was me,’ he said, jumping out of bed, pulling on underwear. ‘I've been drinking.’

‘Press,’ she said, ‘I've been drinking.’ He had returned from the bathroom with a towel and was trying simultaneously to mop and strip the mattress and locate replacement sheets. She moved her head close to his lips. He thought for a second that she wanted to kiss him. He would forgive her everything. ‘Let me smell your breath,’ she said. His hand shook as he pushed her away. She began to weep.

Press tucked a sheet corner.

‘Why can't you cry?’ she screamed. ‘You haven't even cried for Barton. What's your problem?’

The ensuing fight was an energetic and ceremonial reprise of earlier disputes, and their last.

Press takes out a piece of sugarless gum. Recalling his gum-ruined chinos and old ways, he returns the gum to his pocket. He trades the page 157 airline voucher for a bottle of water and does not get change. He chugs thirstily, licking his lips. Ellie watches him drink.

‘What?’ he says.

She dismounts her stool and enters the crowd. He glimpses her a moment later, head in hands. Walsh, who has not seen her pose, restrains him. ‘You'll just make it worse for yourself.’ Press's phone sounds.

Barton died, Angela left, his mom found Gus; Press was so desolate that he considered sponsoring a child in the Third World. The arrangement—at $150 a year—seemed right: food donated in exchange for morsels of self-worth. Then he received a PC catalogue; heavier paper, slick images, porno-like stats on gigabytes and video streaming. Consumerism could ennoble, plus, you got to keep stuff. Press returned the charity info and a token $20.

His pain found trivial resonances. The modem on his new toy ululated sympathetically when connecting to the ISP. He purged his apartment of Angela, including the oatmeal she ate for breakfast. But the break was not clean. She would ring and demand that he return a CD or book that she had not taken when she left. ‘You gave that to me,’ he would say. This was sometimes true. He found the Biloxi position on a website, was interviewed and offered the job. To his surprise, the city consisted of a couple of casinos fringed with housing on the Gulf of Mexico.

In the airport, Press is trying to answer his phone. ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘Hello.’ He moves from the table, hoping for better coverage. Coverdale? In the main concourse, the throng lifts him downstream. His feet zig and zag; the backs of people's heads bob. Months after being dumped, Press ran into an ex-Startel colleague in a departure lounge at O'Hare Airport. Though the guy had worked on Press's team, he seemed evasive. At length he said, ‘Angela told us you …’ At the expectation of his watery secret, Press's insides curdled. ‘… had stolen a lot of stuff from her, books and CDs.’

Press liked the US of A. Life was easy, the service excellent. When the refrigerator in his apartment malfunctioned, causing his yoghurt to release a clear fluid that—he could not help thinking—resembled tears, he rang the super and got a new one the next day. His co-workers were more playful than Canadians. They emailed each other urban page 158 myths: numbskulls who fixed jet engines to Cadillacs and splattered themselves against mountains; white-skinned naifs partying in Bangkok who woke up to an ice-filled bath, bad suture work where their kidneys had been and a note saying, ‘Don't move!’

He returned to Montreal and visited his mom. Her new apartment smelled weird, thanks to Gus's fondness for garlic. Clean shaven, and about 55, Gus was noisier than Barton, and his mom was always telling him to shut up. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the kitchen; the video/television unit was covered in dust. Gus offered an hypothesis that dust was actually minuscule pieces of stars that had floated down from space, and thus kind of charming. His mother laughed uproar-iously. Promising to come back as soon as possible, Press flew out a day ahead of schedule. He drove through St Michel on the way to airport. Their old house had been flattened, replaced by a townhouse; Barton lay somewhere below, or dispersed perhaps. Press blinked experimentally, but his eyes remained dry.

Press stops. About ten feet to his right, the Commissioner is bent over, struggling with his green luggage.

In Biloxi, after socialising with the office guys, Press lingered in humid bars, waking up hungover, unable to move, and alone. Sometimes he failed even at this and would find a woman beside him. ‘It looks like you're camping in here,’ said one as she examined his bare apartment. Press—still drunk, thank Christ those days were over—laughed out loud. That was exactly what he was doing. He dated her and the girls that followed, big-hipped cheerful Southern chicks, for about three months a piece. Anguish emits pheromones. His girlfriends demanded snapshots for their wallets; they contrived introductions to their parents. Their passions developed with onerous speed. He would engineer certain reliable misbehaviours, so that with degrees of reluctance they ditched him. Press didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Bedwetting had made him hypersensitive to rejection. He chose to fight love in Biloxi, but since moving to New York it had ignored him. He'd banged—to use the local verb—a couple of women; neither proclaimed so much as infatuation.

Hoping to hide from the Commissioner, Press skips into a toilet where a fat, pyjama-clad Indian washes his feet in the hand basin. page 159 ‘Goddamn,’ mutters the cleaner from a safe distance, ‘dirty, dirty.’ Press retreats to a cubicle.

Someone occupies the adjacent stall. Latterly Press fantasised he was impregnating the women who slept with him. He put on a condom just before ejaculating, but it aroused him to imagine his babies pouring into them, his flesh taking hold elsewhere. Peering below the dividing wall Press sees his neighbour has small feet and cheap shoes. The Commissioner? Press opens his cubicle door and exits the toilet. Ellie is waiting for him. She holds her mobile. ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘were you just calling me?’ Ellie nods. She says, ‘We need to talk.’ She sobs, padding tissue at her reddened eyes. ‘Shit,’ she says, ‘shit.’

‘I'm sorry about the golf thing,’ he offers. He rubs her shoulder. She sniffs, then smiles. Her brown finger touches his cheek gently. Press says, or thinks he says, ‘But you hate me.’ He forgets what he is thinking. It's marvellous. She leans close, her hand on his arm.

As he inhales her scent, lavender and conservative, he feels the same constriction he experienced watching the Commissioner cough. He starts walking away. He speeds up

In the crowded lanes, his bulk is a handicap. He can see her over his shoulder, pursuing him, her hair billowing like a rocket's flare. He doesn't want to run. His legs are longer; it seems he might escape. She shouts, ‘Press!’ ‘Press!’

Spoken, his name retains an incapacitating authority. He stops. She is out of breath. He catches only pieces: ‘… something between us. You and I. We conflict, but … Walsh told me you might be … receptive to me. I don't trust him. We were involved …’

‘Walsh and you?’

‘It's over now. Completely.’

Press asks, ‘What about the CFO?’

‘CFO?’

He explains Walsh's rumour about her and the CFO.

‘Walsh,’ she says, ‘has an uneasy relationship with the truth.’ She asks, ‘What do you think of me?’

‘I … think about you,’ he offers. Why is he being so legalistic? His mental arguments as to their incompatibility often consisted of how closely they resembled each other: the same sector, same age, almost, page 160 and—Christ!—desperate. Love was desperation for wholeness. If Ellie recalled Angela, perhaps Angela was the presentiment of Ellie? Her vulnerability is contagious. ‘Maybe we have some kind of fate thing,’ he says. They talk a little, then with provocative bluntness she suggests they go to the Starbucks on concourse Q.

Bodies detour around them. Destinations are being called. If he sleeps with Ellie, if he dreams of running through bushes, if he leaks? On a visit home from college he pulled back the sheets of his childhood bed to find that his mother had flipped the mattress, hiding floral stains. Women sought intimacy while detesting weakness. The poorly tuned radio of Ellie's voice scratches in his ear.

‘You don't know me,’ he says.

She takes a breath. ‘Let's find out.’

Press says, ‘I don't know you. I don't know the first thing about you.’

‘Well, I have a beautiful son …’

Walsh had lied about that too. Press offers a platitude about children, means it, then means it when he attacks: ‘What if you decide you don't like me, then what? I don't trust you.’

‘Press, let's find out.’

He talks quickly. It becomes ranting. It goes on for some time. The muscles in his face tire from manufacturing the same expression but he does not waver. Her black shoes, eventually, retreat.

Later Press stands at a window. The sun sets over LA, illuminating the sky and smog particles. Why is it that affection's most accurate measurement can only be obtained by its destruction? Cars crawl the expressways, expressing distance. He cannot believe they're still stuck here! Adult enuresis could be contained but not treated. Doctors offered control strategies: no liquids after 7 pm, an antidepressant called Imipramine. On one website Press visited, DiaperKen from Terre Haute, Indiana, pleaded for women to write to him in the hope they would share his life, ‘so much to share’.

The guys have left the beer'n'sausage place and the flight is being called. Press retrieves his water bottle. He stops at a water fountain and fills it.

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In the plane's aisle, Press sees Moriyama is sitting between Walsh and Kooper, his nose in a magazine. The deal, the deal! Press needs to get the contract inked. Passing Walsh, he wants to whisper, ‘So you're a liar.’ He moves compliantly down the aisle and takes his seat. A conversation with an aluminium garage salesman improves his mood. Certain fish can grow their tails back; the same might apply to self-assurance. Up ahead in first class, he sees a female hand grasping the rail below the overhead luggage compartment. My cock, he thinks. Then Ellie is asking the garage guy to swap seats. As she kicks off her shoes, Press smells alcohol.

‘Let me tell you, Press,’ she says, ‘you know nothing about life until you've had a kid.’ Was she drunk before? The Commissioner appears. Press asks, ‘Did you get your nephew?’ The old man stares at him. Press indicates Ellie, as if she is the reason he departed, ‘This is my co-worker, here.’

Ellie says, ‘I'm not with him.’ The Commissioner shakes his head and departs; Press wants to shout, ‘I helped you pal!’ but Ellie is pushing a snapshot on him.

Straggly mullet, wired teeth: the boy in the image is thin, perhaps 12. She must've had him, what, at 24, when Press was greeting his girlfriend's period as a victory for wiliness. ‘Kevin,’ she announces. It's a simple name, the kind he would have murdered for in school. During Barton's late 40s, in contradiction of the male infantilism that is usually approaching a premium then, he stopped playing his Elvis records. Mass-market legal thrillers replaced the latest Elvis-o-graphy. Press asked him about it. ‘I guess I've used him up,’ Barton said. Press blushed. He could not help but feel that he too was dispensable.

At the front of the plane, to general inattention, the hostesses mime safety drills. Agitatedly, Ellie tells Press about the call he overheard at LAX. Kevin's nanny had discovered some cheats the boy had written for a video game he had. By picking up prostitutes, players were rewarded with more lives or bullets. Press shrugs. ‘Maybe I should be grateful,’ snaps Ellie, ‘that Kevin didn't call them hos.’ To retrieve the money, a player had to shoot the hookers in the neck. ‘… If you're really mean,’ she says. ‘Mean was the word he used.’

Ellie says, ‘What do you think about that?’

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Press shakes his head disapprovingly. What can he do? Everyone wants pieces of him: his mom, Angela, Walsh; even the Commissioner! They want to utilise him, to gobble any tenderness he might have and leave only bones.

‘You men,’ says Ellie, ‘making your video games, passing on your fucked ideas. Walsh dumped me today. And you can't even …’

‘I can't love you,’ Press exclaims, ‘just give it up!’

Ellie frowns momentarily then laughs, a disbelieving tintinnabulation that extends through the plane. Heads turn. She punches him, her sunbaked fist hitting his jaw. It hurts. ‘Who said anything about love?’ she smirks, ‘I just want to talk. Sucker.’

He had been wrong. Christ, if his judgment is flawed, what next? She winds up again. Press parries, catching her hair, dislodging the ponytail. She is squealing. They rise, slapping more, the action decelerating in adrenalin's slow-mo. Tired suddenly, he reproaches himself; his hypervigilance of emotional promiscuity had conjured it in others. His hand connects with Ellie's cheek. He is aware this is bad, but he feels little inclination, as he once might have, to strike harder; swatting is enough, that's progress, right?

An arm encircles Press's neck, pulling tight. Flashing dots appear; they wriggle to the periphery of his vision. Moriyama is on Press, shouting, pursued by Walsh. Press swings wildly. He hits a stowed tray table. Jesus! Moriyama twists Press's hand. There is no room on these planes. Press loses his balance. He falls across Ellie. They flail together.

Much later, he whispers, ‘Ellie.’ He taps her shoulder, she shivers. The mark on her cheekbone where his hand landed has begun—despite the tan—to glow. What a nightmare. The stewardesses came, then the purser, who threatened them with the captain and ejection from the flight. Some passengers booed. Walsh offered his business card, but they were all made to produce photo ID, like getting into a bar. Ellie kept her dignity. She refused Moriyama's offer of his seat.

Ellie's small bare toes—even these are brown—are tightly curled. Such enviable access to emotion. Her nickname for him, ‘Waldo’, was taken from a kid's book. Before bedtime in Vancouver, Barton had read him Green Eggs and Ham, his voice a universe of love. Press felt so much, and in confusion. Weren't neuroses better suppressed? Yet Ellie page 163 had not shown restraint. To Press, she seems noble. Press wishes Moriyama had torn his arm from the socket. He could match her suffering.

He makes a decision. He says, ‘My name is Presley Frey.’ He stops. How inane names sound, how incapable of containing the smallest detail. Press repeats himself, commencing a kind of self-introduction. Easy stuff first: his mother, Stephanie. Recalling the spinning kitchen in Vancouver, he describes his father, or tries to. Ellie stares ahead as Press rummages in time. He cannot accept that he is a shadow cast from light burning in the past. He cannot forget his dream either, the running, the gothic tangle of branches. In his mid twenties he learned of a genetic predisposition to enuresis, the child's risk increasing if both parents are bedwetters. Were his mom and Barton reviewing their own humiliations? Weakness could be found even the strongest people. He tells about Angela, briefly, sparing Ellie, sparing himself.

The cabin lights dim, the jet turbines reach a pitch, the plane speeds and he talks. Press often played a game during take-off. As the ground slipped away, and pressure swelled in his ears, and landmarks were atomised, he thought, ‘If I fell from this height, I'd break my legs; from here I'd break my back … That tree might save me, if I was lucky …’ They rise and—as always—flight becomes ordinary, the fear passes. He wants that! He wants to bust out, to soar and behold the earth like a creator. Ellie has turned to face him. Press is talking as he has not done since college when he would sit up with his roommate, dragging on borrowed Marlboros, loquacious with nalveté. He describes returning from Newfoundland after Barton had died; he recalls stepping into the lounge and seeing his nephew, who should have been in bed normally, sitting before the television; Steph hurrying downstairs; the snow on his collar melting, his neck wet. He describes examining the shaving mirror the morning of Barton's funeral, hoping for private tears. A TV in the ceiling says they are at 22,000 feet and that the outside air temperature is 27 below. Wasn't bedwetting an ascent into innocence? Press relates his dream. ‘I was racing you,’ he tells Ellie. She nods. Press omits the bedwetting, but as he hastens to conclude he feels optimistic. Perhaps he is not broken, only disjointed. Yoghurt, given the correct circumstances, could weep; he might also.

page 164

Her head tips decisively. Ellie is asleep.

Press stops. In his heart he feels balm. Reaching for his water bottle, he finds the cabin's air pressure has pushed it out of shape. He's seen the in-flight movie twice: Julia Roberts gets the guy without sacrificing her principles. Dinner is either chicken or lamb. His head nods forward. He feels himself slipping along the night, stumbling. He falls into blackness, and falls and falls until he forgets he is falling.

Press comes awake to the vestigial aroma of fricassee. Below, Toronto's streetlights suggest the unjoined dots of a child's picture puzzle. The Captain's voice fills the intercom, saying that passengers bound for Montreal must ‘hasten along’ as the connecting Rapid Air flight has to leave, repeat has to leave, in twenty minutes. Ellie too is awake. ‘Sorry, Press, I fell asleep. We're buds again, right?’ She extends her hand.

Press shifts groggily to meet her; he is damp.

Forty minutes later, outside the customs area, Press is slouching beside his luggage and the Commissioner's, picking distractedly at his chinos. He reads a poster warning against the importation of food material. Walsh's book The Art of Summary lies near his foot. Baggage claim is deserted, the transferring passengers have left, the team also, Walsh virtually doing a victory dance with Moriyama, Kooper and Ellie. The Commissioner remains in customs, still arguing perhaps. This place feels like the only room awake in the world. They have about five minutes to catch the connecting flight.

After finding he was wet, Pres blundered down the aisle and locked himself in the cramped toilet. ‘We're landing, sir,’ whined the hostess, banging on the door. Bracing himself against the tilting cabin, Press removed his wet suit trousers and underpants. An attempt at rinsing only doused his chest. Angrily, he balled up the sodden underpants and trousers. He stuffed them into the garbage chute. The floor's incline began to steepen. Press dragged his chinos from his hand luggage. He used his nails—without success—on the grey baked nubbins of gum, then applied his teeth. The plane hit the runway. He bounced against a wall and hoped they would crash. From the toilet mirror, his image leered at him: the grasshopper legs, genitals like walnuts.

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Press continued biting.

Splashed then, panting and deranged, he greeted the team outside the aircraft toilet door along with the hostess. They noticed the chinos at once. Thinking of the goodness he had felt in talking to Ellie, Press half-confessed. ‘What? What?’ said Walsh, ‘you peed yourself?’ The juvenile verb contained Press's every horror. He bowed his head. ‘We have a problem,’ said Walsh. Press was about to dispute this, but they all started talking at once. Moriyama had exited the deal. Then Coverdale was on the phone, declaring a ‘severe values deficit’ but commiserating about his ‘problem’. Walsh had told him everything.

The flight disembarked. Coverdale was still talking, demanding an immediate inflection point, strangely, because he had also told Press that he was no longer team leader. They entered customs as the P/A recounted the connecting flight's imminent departure. Press stood in the ‘Canadian Passport’ line. Hearing the immigration officers say ‘T'ronno’ he smiled despite himself. The Commissioner materialised, small and bamboozled amongst jostling Elks from Denver, punk rockers and no-necked Mexicans. He asked what line he should take. Press muted his phone and patted the aging sports jacket, marvelling at its emptiness. Barton often complained that the Freys should've left Vancouver a couple of years later; an influx of Vietnamese boat people had superheated the housing market there and they could have got a quarter more on the sale price. Press felt suddenly, as he searched the Commissioner's withered physique, that he and this little man, in fact that this mass of people that expanded and contracted around them, were linked. They related by chance, true, but such true encounters demanded compassion. Press stepped from the queue to direct the Commissioner, relieving him of his hand carry and suitcase. Sometime during this, semi-consciously, he hung up on Coverdale.

Press takes a page from Walsh's book, The Art of Summary, and tears it out. In baggage claim Walsh said that Coverdale had forbidden him from talking to Moriyama. ‘We're all victims here,’ said Walsh; then he did a strange thing, he reached out and hugged Press. ‘So you and Ellie were an item?’ Press asked. ‘She needed me,’ said Walsh. Press's hands hung at his sides. ‘Hug me back, man,’ Walsh breathed. ‘No hard feelings, right? I really meant that stuff about trying to help you, page 166 y'know with the cognitive stuff.’ Aware of his absent underpants, Press hugged Walsh. Walsh hadn't mentioned Ellie's boy; rat that he was, he was still capable of loyalty. They released each other. Press insisted on waiting for the Commissioner. ‘Make the flight,’ said Walsh. Already he was the manager Press could not have been: confident, assertive, a necessary irritant. Empty-handed, at a loss, Press asked for, and received, The Art of Summary.

He attempts to rip the spine, but the book is strongly bound. Press hunches his shoulders and tears as the old man walks out of immigration, his cheap shoes squeaking. Press deposits the torn book on his own hand carry. By returning it thus, he may spur Walsh to make a scene. Ha. No scene can save him; he is lost. The Commissioner offers a convoluted explanation involving an immigration canard and a phone call to the nephew who is supposed to pick him up in Montreal. ‘He's not there,’ says the Commissioner, wretchedly. ‘This boy, I've never met him, I hear he's very busy at school …’

Press picks the Commissioner's bag and slings it over his shoulder. ‘We have to catch the plane,’ he says.

The Commissioner ignores him. ‘We made it up in Camp Pendleton! The extended family. We had lost our wives and children, our friends. We replaced them with uncles and nephews. It was a fable.’ ‘Mmmm,’ says Press. Rapid Air, flight four something something. The airport reminds him of a hospital.

‘What do you know?’ The Commissioner seems angry. ‘An American, with your Mom and Pop and Apple Pie.’ Press considers telling him that he is Canadian. He should have been more truthful.

‘Why are you helping me?’ the Commissioner demands. ‘Are you in trouble?’ ‘Come on,’ says Press. He balances his cases with the Commission-er's. So laden, he begins to walk.

Barton's body was removed to a funeral home, the undertaker and assistant taking the casket warily through the snow. Angela arrived and hovered ineptly in the kitchen, drying dishes for his mother, who whispered to Press, ‘Stop her. She doesn't know where anything goes.’ Stephanie liked Angela but from a distance, preoccupied with kids.

page 167

The way his mom fusses over those little monsters! Everyone agreed the Elvis records should be sold. Angela found a picture of Barton and Press in the front yard in Vancouver, open-armed and mugging for the lens, the cartage truck behind them, the future hopeful. How young they had been. His mom grasped Press, encouraging him to weep, saying, ‘You were a cheerful little boy! You're so uptight now.’ Stephanie sobbed, ‘You were, Press. Remember how you used to piggyback me on the way home from school?’ Stephanie never cried; her outburst frightened Press. He hugged them both rigidly.

Press had visited his father several times in the cancer ward. Despite the diagnosis, the old guy remained cocky. He indicated other patients and said, ‘Don't let me get like that.’ What was the alternative? The disease outmanoeuvred chemotherapy, which took Barton's hair, and then fed on his body. On one visit, a middle-aged guy loitered outside Barton's room, metallic staples travelling along the side of his head. Flesh could be interfered with, then zippered shut. It could decline and be saved. His father's tastebuds were interpreting sour as sweet, a consequence of medication; there was no sign of food when Press entered, carrying a jar of pickles. Barton was then so small that Press could have swung him around the room with one hand. The old man extended his arms, saying, ‘Here's an angel.’ Press's ears burned.

Barton cavilled—understandably—in fear of his own death. To Press, the relatives and friends that appeared after it were both excited to be alive and grieving for themselves preparatorily. The thanatological crush that he expected at the wake (catered; they were rich now, so was everyone) failed to eventuate; intervening decades had shrunk the house to the right balance of furnishings and occupation; they had grown into the place. During the ecumenical service, someone played a tape of ‘Wooden Heart’, erroneously for his father often proclaimed the irrelevance of Elvis's post-Army output. Almost every Elvis fan believes this and Barton was a conventional man. Press supposes, despite what he might have believed during college, that he is also.

Press's soles clatter in the empty concourse. He walks several steps ahead of the Commissioner. He wants to run, but the old guy will never keep up. ‘Rapid Air,’ he says, ‘we're looking for Rapid Air.’

‘But we are Delta,’ says the Commissioner. ‘We've changed,’ replies page 168 Press. They have about three minutes to make the flight, maybe four. He mounts an escalator and ascends. The windows here are enormous also, framing a queue of aircraft at rest in the tarmac lights. Beyond them, the universe flexes. Pessimists insist the current boom is funded by increased consumer debt: common sense suggests it will soon unravel. Press's legs are exhausted, but he still walks; his plastic cards are maxed out, he can get more credit; if people are finite, isn't love also? His shoulders ache. One floor below, the Commissioner ambles past the escalator, headed in the wrong direction. Press yells redundantly. He turns, and the bags shift as Stephanie used to when he piggybacked her home from school. She wriggled so fearlessly; he could never support her for more than a few steps.

Press persuades the Commissioner their gate lies upstairs. They return but the escalator has stopped. Function by function, the airport is shutting down. The immobilised escalator proves more taxing than any stairs might be. The Commissioner stops halfway to catch his breath. ‘All … of my friends are dead,’ he says. So join them, Press thinks. The Commissioner continues, ‘I waken each day at 5.30. When I see I'm alive I roll away from the window and face the wall.’ For Press's mother, sadness had preceded vitality. ‘Come on, guy,’ he says, placating, ‘I know you want to die. I believe you.’

‘You know nothing,’ says the Commissioner.

Press steps from the escalator and keeps walking. He does not want to look behind him. One of his management textbooks said, ‘Give subordinates room, and they will grow.’ So he did not see his father succumb, big deal. There had been no benedictory wisdom, Steph and his mom had assured him of that. ‘Press,’ his mom later confided, in the forthright manner he attributed to Gus's influence, ‘your dad was doped to the eyeballs.’ Significant moments need not evince heft, rather they often expressed simple processes like decay, or evacuations of luck or health. Press can't bear the suspense. He turns around.

The old man is stopped, his hands hanging uselessly. Press drops the luggage and runs to him. ‘Fuck!’ he says. ‘Come on.’

The Commissioner shakes his head. ‘I can't!’

‘Now!’ roars Press. ‘Move now!’

The Commissioner coughs, his neck creasing. He hawks and page 169 swallows, regains his breath and says, ‘You should have some … respect.’

Press shouts, ‘I'm not your fuckin’ kid. I don't have to do anything!’

The Commissioner tries to shout also. ‘I have … five … children and … sixteen grand …’ Abruptly he announces, ‘I'm staying here. Go; leave me.’ His legs slacken, and he collapses into a sitting position.

Press's fists are clenched, a customary heat rises to his cheeks. You can't count on anyone! How many times does he have to learn the lesson? Duty alone is trustworthy. The others want him to join them, to participate in boarding. Through success and heartbreak, through cities; Toronto, Biloxi, New York, Vegas, LA, all those destinations, he has kept moving. To pause was certain death. He told Ellie almost everything! He has almost lost himself! How much more can he give? Press's hands are clenched tightly. The offensive guard on the basketball court had looked tiny in his clothes also. This is where today is headed, to beating the Commissioner as he had flung his wallet, as he had pushed Ellie away; slapping and shoving to feel the simple relief of activity, to applaud carnivalesque waters in a desert far-off.

Press grabs the old man's wrist. He turns, bends and pulls the wrist over his shoulder. He repeats this with the other arm. Recollecting the procedure of piggybacking his sister, he leans back, finds purchase on the small frame, then inclines forward. The Commissioner protests but Press hoists him. Bark-like hands close around his neck. Press makes stirrups of his elbows. The Commissioner secures himself.

Press takes a step. The airport reels. Press leans forward, lowering his centre of gravity. The Commissioner is prone across his back. They move. At the discarded luggage, Press stops. He sedulously collects the shoulder straps of his suitcases and hand carry, taking care not to dislodge the torn book. He lifts the Commissioner's small suitcase. He moves again. The cases bump his legs.

Abandoned and quiet, the airport is cavernous. His mom and Stephanie had cried and wailed and he could not. But he had pissed in beds across North America. Barton built a family. What had Press offered the universe's indifference? Air miles? His tear ducts, like his bladder, told the truth: I'm scared, I don't understand, I distrust what I feel.

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He and the Commissioner advance haltingly. Sweat films at Press's temples, in his oily hair. His shoulders and thighs burn, but he, they, have a rhythm. The Commissioner's breath is clammy on Press's neck. He clutches at Press's suit jacket, tipping them sideways, top heavy. Walsh's book falls; the pages disperse, striped yellow. Press continues, tightening his lateral muscles, grateful for the silent gym, its morose rituals of power. He imagines marrying Ellie amidst a blizzard of good wishes. When expressed, his every desire seems grotesque. But you continue. Ahead at the departure gate, two attendants stand akimbo. The tendons in his hands are killing him, white heat arcs down the backs of his legs, he staggers again and recovers. They advance.

At the gate Press drops the bags. He eases the Commissioner onto a couch. The Commissioner coughs, stands, finds a trash bin and spits into it. One of the attendants, a boy with patchy sideburns, rolls his eyes. Press cannot speak; without the Commissioner and suitcases, he feels so light.

The young attendant yawns; so does the older one. The kid says, ‘I set you off, man.’ The Commissioner gets a boarding pass, as does Press. Press turns to the air bridge. He inhales aviation gas. They have won.

Press walks, daydreaming. Maybe he will arrive in the plane as a hero, maybe Ellie will see and forgive. He will be bold with her now, Walsh also. He will be new, balanced as he has sought to be, his fears modest. He hears a rustle, as if a large poster has detached itself from a wall. Press looks up. The old man has collapsed to the floor before him, face up, his legs half-crossed. Press walks a couple of steps more, then stops. The Commissioner remains static. Several hours pass. Press calls, ‘Help! Emergency!’ No one comes.

Press kneels and gingerly places his hand on the chest.

The Commissioner grasps him. One staring eye blinks. ‘It's OK, old-timer,’ says Press, moving to get help. But the Commissioner restrains him. The corridor seems so large, the lighting cruel. Press tries again to shake off the Commissioner's grip, but the old man moves Press's hand to his neck, applying it so the small Adam's apple presses against Press's palm. Press shakes his head. The old man wants death; Press wants a lot of foolish things. Again the Commissioner pushes page 171 Press's hand below his chin. Press feels the jugular ticking. ‘No!’ he says. His voice startles him; he pushes down.

Press pushes. Behind lie desolate concourses, a tide of piss and forested dreams, and they're pushing too. Press pushes. Christ, the old buzzard is strong. His body fights Press's fingers. This is death? The air bridge is the place of the dead and he has walked through it a million times. Press is still squeezing, choking the background noise out; the silence is the silence of stars disintegrating. Press had schooled himself to laugh at how he had imagined Angela reading the news to him, but wasn't he laughing at himself, at solace? Press goes to lean forward and bring his full weight onto the windpipe, and he feels the frailty of what he is holding.

Press releases his grip. The shallow chest inflates sharply, the Commissioner gasps.

‘I'm sorry,’ Press whispers.

He apologises again, more loudly. The Commissioner's shoulders shove back, elevating his chest; his hand is searching about as if plucking at something invisible. Press takes it. The old man holds tightly. ‘I'm sorry,’ Press repeats to the mottled ear, ‘I'm sorry.’ He lies down, his bones jutting against the floor. Someone is shouting, but Press doesn't want to disturb the old man as his chest bucks and kicks. The Commissioner clasps him, and Press returns the grip, curling himself to be close to it. His other hand holds the old man's shoulder; they are like two astronauts. The Commissioner flares his nostrils and bares his teeth. Press is shaking, lying beside him; the shouting intensifies. He realises he doesn't even know the Commissioner's name, and this regret finds Barton and Angela. To be forgotten, they have taken parts of himself; he hates them for this theft, and himself for abetting the crime. By trying to continue, Press has devalued exquisite items, moments that are unforeseen, wonderful: her toes closing around his in darkness, Barton reaching through the shower hail. Press doesn't know why he is shaking so much.

The Commissioner's fingers collect suddenly in Press's grip and he is gone. A black substance pours from the old mouth.

Press realises the shouting is his own; he stops.

From the air bridge's periphery, footfalls advance. Press takes a breath.

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He thinks to right himself in anticipation of the questions that will follow. Someone, possibly two people, are coming. But he can't get up, so he remains, cradling the Commissioner's body. Press discovers the skin on his face is wet; moisture also runs on his neck. From where? His first thought is that he has pissed himself. Attempting decorum, he looks upwards, searching for a leak in the air bridge ceiling, and his tears run to his temples.