But I can’t, because I’m meant to be getting on an airplane. That doesn’t stop my mind from working as I drive through the darkened city, passing empty office buildings lit from within like empty stages waiting for their actors to come on.

It occurs the me that ghosts must be on a different schedule than the rest of us. They must like the quiet an solitude of the late night hours, the early morning when they can wander through the empty offices and, for just a little while, pretend.

I see then sitting at desks, pretending to answer phone calls or file reports… Or wander into the kitchen an open the fridge, just to stand and stare for a while…

I know how that feels.

***

Last week I asked my wife “What do you think ghosts do more, watch the living have sex or watch us eat?”

Neither of us had the answer. But I expect we’ll find out, eventually.

***

In the security line, twenty young men stand and chat together in identical black suits. Each wears a different colored shirt, open at the color. They are cheerful and businesslike.

One of them is wearing headphones shaped like pandas, bobbing his head. I don’t think he’s going to last in this job, whatever it is.

***

We land in the midst of what I can only assume is a tropical storm clearing its throat, getting ready to speak its mind.

My room is on the 27th floor. I can feel the hotel sway under my feet as I unpack.

I discover that the sliding glass door actually opens. I’ve got free access to the wind and rain and, if I were so inclined, gravity as well. This surprises me.

There is a Gideon Bible and a Book of Mormon in the nightstand. Above, my copy of The Hermetic Museum sits next to the alarm clock.

I brought it along to research a possible project for NaNoWriMo. This will turn out to be an empty gesture, as I will get nothing done while I am here.

***

Up early the next morning for a day full of meetings followed by a night out with my colleagues and clients.

They ply me with rum — it is Florida, after all — but I demur. “If I’m going to fall of the wagon, it’s going to be for Irish whiskey.”

Other people in our party are drinking watermelon mojitos. I rest my fucking case.

Fortunately, a bartender that looks uncommonly like Ray Stevenson is more than happy to provide me with Bushmills. He does not sneer when I ask for soda.

One drink in and I find that I’m explaining to a high-priced and pretty-damn-smart consultant that all modern brands are merely an extension of celebrity which is, in turn, nothing more than a modern manifestation of the shift from the Pantheon to demigods and, as a marketer, he’s a modern acolyte or (since he bills at a higher rate than I) quite possibly a priest.

“All culture derives from cult,” I say, quoting Alan Moore — and not for the first time, neither.

The consultant nods and looks away, entirely uninterested in my metaphysical plagiarism.

I sip my drink and think about how much I missed whiskey and didn’t even know it. Until now.

Dinner is delicious. Living in the midwest for the past fifteen years or so, I’d forgotten how clean and fresh seafood and shellfish could be when you were on the coast — that is, when I lived on the coast . . . the west coast. A long time ago.

I’m meant to be contacting family in Florida and connecting up. But my schedule with clients is proving unsympathetic to those plans. Even the social times are turning out to be important conversations with clients. In fact, the most important one I have during the whole trip takes place in the upstairs of a nightclub. We shout back and forth while, down below, women stand on the bar and dance to live salsa music.

***

The rest of my time is spent in my hotel room, looking out the window and waiting to go home.

There’s two actors onstage at the moment, going through a mock version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (complete with a celebrity lookalike for Regis). Everything has been scripted to map to the company’s culture and business . . . which means people are laughing at jokes that are only funny in this room.

“Regis” tells a real joke: When you do a good job here, it’s like peeing your pants when you’re wearing a dark suit. You get a warm feeling but no one notices.

Suddenly we’re in the Catskills. No one laughs.

It’s all got an additional layer of surreality, because I know the actor playing the contestant.

But here’s the ultimate in surreal: I spent four hours yesterday pressing a button over and over again. This morning I have to watch someone else press the button.

The actor just won a million dollars. Yay.

I just finished up a long night trying to solve the problems of the world, with a little help from Steve, and now I’m going to go wander for a bit in the Underworld.

(Meaning, it’s time to write for a while — no matter how late it is, I have to do it. That’s my spoon, scraping against the wall of the prison. At least, that’s what the card said.)

Write, then.

And then goodnight.

Before I could answer, one of the other guys at the table said “You’re from Virginia.”

Which is, of course, entirely true — I was born in Virginia but moved out of state when I was three or four years old.

Strange thing is, this guy caught that in my voice. There’s some thirty-plus year olf remnant of a southern accent lurking in there somewhere.

I was impressed and told him so. Then someone else at the table chimed in: “Yeah, but don’t be too impressed. His track record isn’t perfect.”

Seems that the last time the guy pulled his carnival act, he detected a faint drawl in a prospective customer’s voice and asked her where she was from. She told him that she was from Michigan, born and bred. But he wouldn’t let it go, commenting throughout the meeting on her southern accent.

Later, he found out that she had a stroke two or three years before that left her with permanent damage to her speech centers. I didn’t ask if he got her business.

At the end of my meeting this morning, the Dutch Kreskin asked me what T.M. stood for.

I told him to take a wild guess.

“Oh, I don’t think so T.M. — I don’t think they know that yet.”

Ouch.

(The ache in my testicles is courtesy of Steve.)