SF to New York night flight

He arrives in New York.

In his hotel, a better one than that which he usually stays in, there is an enormous world map cut out from cast iron attached to the wall behind the reception desk. It is a shock to his sense of self, to see the world faking it like that, up on the wall, acting like nothing at all.

-

In Milan he has been waking up thinking to himself ‘I am the company’ – I’ve become the company, his voice is its voice. For a kid like him this is some sudden revelation, a concrete shock and not one he immediately knows how to use, first thing he says to himself, when he comes to his senses is ‘It was so easy.’
He’s been travelling enough, in and out of the flat, for the place to get a kind of scuffed look, brushed through too many times, dirty, but not because somebody dirty has been living there, rather it’s a result of a certain speed, moving too fast through the place he’s roughed it up. He keeps almost everything packed away for this reason – he wants to wear the scuffs – this place is a rocket – a few work stations and a low slung bed, a multi-purpose bathtub: small enough for the less than 30 square metres he has and a shape which allows it to double as an armchair (there is no space for one anywhere else).

When he’s certain that not even the appearance of age will obscure his intentions, he shaves himself really clean – glowing with absurd youth. He leans himself forward over the waistband of his underwear and in an old tic, he grabs at the flesh that bulges over on his stomach then leans backwards and sees what remains in his hand, if anything. His scales are precise, analogue, enormous, like a set of hands, they cost more than all the other things put together, he pushes them right under the sink with his foot. All he’ll remember afterwards of this place, this flat at this hour, is how empty it seemed, it’s a different romance to that he’d imagined, to shout at himself from the bed when he wakes up. The emptiness is recurring: the first coach from the station to the airport, empty airports, the smells that actually wafted – gelled heads, women’s armpits with synthetics and brittle perfume, cheap brioches defrosted in the oven, coffee, empty puddles in the rain, high ceilings – the days he washed his hair and shaved and felt like a set of clean white sheets.

Other mornings, the gently jetlagged ones, soul violently in the throes of rediscovering his alienation like a long-distance lover, his piss is completely odourless and sounds exactly like black morning winter rain outside as it hits the side of bowl, casual and relentless. He looks around his rocket, he wonders when he’ll have the time to get really skinny – his colleague the day before asked him when he’d started cycling – he told the kid it’s over FOR ME nothing remains of cycling, I’m finished, nothing remains of it, just staying thin, getting thinner, the feeling of not eating when you’re hungry, the cleanliness of being empty, I can’t remember NOTHING else about it. He can’t remember the last time he really rode, but still his legs are shaved – the light is glassy as he stands in the bath contorting his leg, picking up tendons like experts pick horses from a form guide – maybe I’ve earned them and now they’ll never leave?

-

His pitch has become more and more radical, he can hardly believe he can get away with it.
He goes to San Francisco before New York. He stays in the same hotel he got sick in last time. This time he resists the smell of cats which lingers underneath lemon flavoured candles and dust, each time he breathes in he is quite consciously on the defense, he sleeps with a woollen hat on and the window open.
The scene is different to what he expected and not what he likes. He meets with Mike and they talk shop, a six months ago he’d been nervous, unable to pitch directly, instead drifting ideas through beer and compliments, feeling his way – six months ago he’d just delighted in the influential company, listening to Mike talk magic numbers: ‘Everything has a magic number, quantity, price, colours, everything, each product has its magic numbers, that’s what we do.’ Overseas he has learnt how the brand grows agile.
This time he’s more confident, he can claim to know his way around, they look at the new website, its features and menus and he is able to use word ‘tactility’ regarding electronics and make himself understood.
Mike is on a different line, though, this time, not the same vicious edge that made him blow up the whole movement a few years ago. Now he’s talking, whining even he thinks, about doing right by people, teaching them the basics of maintenance, sharing&caring – it irritates him immediately, this straying from the point: all he can see in his head is a fuck you cool. The most extreme un-repenting forms, shirts folded so tight you can’t touch them, big video screens of helmet cam footage, virtual racing, stacks of tvs, nighttime meetings, concrete graphic design, the most vulgar and sculptural combination of styles – Velcro straps on classic machines for one – fear and more fear until you can hold in your self constantly with no worries -he ends up saying, it falls out of him almost: ‘I can’t understand you because I’m not part of any community – your thoughts,’ and maybe he meant motivations here, ‘are completely alien to me.’
And to his surprise Mike replies ‘You’re right, that’s a good point.’ To Mike there seems to be no conflict in this outsider position, just another line.

And so he ends up dealing in internationalism, and telling people too.
City what city – the shining city he imagines – shining in his mind, a beacon, the silent glide at night - information jumps through portals from one urban density to another, cities are just for shittalking, he realises when he gets back.

The days in foreign cities are so long he often can’t even remember what he was saying to himself in the morning to keep himself alive, his motivations are fatless, constantly forgotten, updated and refined – he travels from San Francisco to New York with seven or eight pieces of attitude he writes on the airplane – when he comes out of meetings often he’s screaming to himself in his head ‘I NEVER MISS I NEVER FUCKNG MISS”. It’s a pretty lonely feeling but at least this makes him aware there’s no way back, that he’s on a suicide run.

‘Hustling is just getting off on your own performance’ he says over the phone, in the guise of advice, to his brother who is 10 000km.

‘My expertise is moving between cultures.’ He says in Italy, without a moment of doubt. But in New York he keeps its tighter, knowing how they like it. The first time he meets Brett and James upstairs on Wooster St he exaggeratedly articulates his knowingness, puts parentheses around the situation ‘I know that things stand like this and that therefore its difficult for me to understand where you’re at but from what I can gather, as somebody who feels some kind of aesthetic affinity with you – I might have ideas that could be of interest.’ Pitching it that way, on the long run, he ignores the fact his cheeks have been red for three days and even redder now, that he forgot to gel his hair and push it back in the airport mirror that morning, if he ignores it others won’t notice. Import, export – the trick is never showing who you really belong to, or better yet, and the time he realised this was the time he started worrying a little less about being found out - don’t actually belong to anywhere, permanently.
He masks his stink all day in coffee and horse hide leather jacket which still stinks – in the evening he tries to come off it all, the constant coffee, with two quick beers – he feels it in his head, trying to relax his blood, for a moment the caffeine and alcohol mix in a high pitched fever – he is shaky, sick feeling, paranoid – he still can’t shake the paranoia of illness abroad– then the fevered moment passes and he begins to relax into great fatigue.