Steve Kistulentz: Panorama

In the reference monitor, Richard saw Max Peterson stack the papers of his fake script one last time and smile at the camera. “We’ll return in a moment.”

AT THE deserted concourse gates of the Salt Lake City International Airport, the waiting areas flickered with the light of soundless televisions blinking out the last of the year’s news. A science correspondent talked about the prevailing winds, the patterns of frigid Pacific currents, the historical increase in temperatures, all to an audience of empty plastic chairs. At each gate, video terminals predicted the on-time departure of tomorrow morning’s earliest flights. Maintenance personnel tended to the business of cleaning; their slapping mops and whirling floor polishers, their muffled whistles of boredom and melancholy, all reverberated off the terminal’s exposed girder-and-crossbeam ceiling. Forty-gallon garbage bags stuffed with stale cinnamon rolls sat abandoned near an unattended customer-service kiosk.

Because the most delicious cigarette is a surreptitious one, the workers inside smoked too; cigarettes dangled from their pursed lips as they completed the last items on a checklist of second-shift chores. Behind the closed pull-down gate of an airport shop, a twentysomething employee they called Heavy Metal Bob stacked and tied together bundles of the previous morning’s newspapers, December 31 headed for the recycling bin. Tomorrow’s travelers would congregate over a stack of them, four different varieties with the same set of headlines: Sri Lankan Ferry Disaster Claims Hundreds; Heat Wave Dominates for Third Straight Day; For California Businesses, Everything Turns Up Roses.

They called him Heavy Metal Bob thanks to his long, straight hair and endless supply of concert T-shirts. Behind his back, coworkers scoffed at his ratty jeans and the navy suede sneakers that on rainy days left his white tube socks stained at the toes and heels. The people he worked with assumed he was high, but he’d gotten and stayed clean, if only to spite the naysayers. He blocked out their sniping comments and the day-to-day sounds of the airport with an old Walkman he’d found near gate A18, and worked with the perpetual slowness of someone barely awake.

Bob spent the end of his New Year’s Eve shift dusting around shelves of souvenirs, stuffed animals, shot glasses and snow globes, bric-a-brac labeled with the city’s name, purple T-shirts emblazoned with the incongruous words Utah Jazz. He’d volunteered to work, to give the family men on the custodial staff the evening off, and in the near solitude of late evening, he did what so many others across the nation were doing at that exact moment, using the year’s waning hours for self-assessment—this personal inventory his only distraction as he counted his way through a rack of paperback bestsellers. His resolutions were meager—put away a few dollars for the future, stop wasting so many on 900 numbers and late fees at the video store, get a few more fresh vegetables into the diet.

Bob dreamed of an airline job, counter agent or baggage thrower, one that might mean someone to talk to at work. All he’d ever wanted was to help people, to be dependable; in the parlance of the cop show he’d watched last night at 2:00 a.m., you could say anything you wanted about Bob Denovo, but he was a stand-up guy, the kind of guy who’d bail you out of the city lockup, no questions asked, the kind of guy who, if there was one sandwich left in all the world, would offer you half. How easy it had become to ignore the guy with the garbage bags and the headphones; most evenings, as he passed the women who worked at the hamburger joint on the A concourse, he received only a nod in return to his greetings. Someday, he hoped, one of them would wave him over and say thank you for carrying out the bags of stale buns and rancid meat. They might talk for a few minutes, but it wouldn’t be anything like working on the ramp.

Maybe he could be the guy with the flashlights, steering the pilots toward the Jetway. He had no idea what the guys with ear protection and fluorescent vests actually did, just a peculiar confidence: whatever it was, he could do it too. Besides, no way you could sit out on the ramp all day, loading and unloading planes, and never find anything to talk about.

His plans were for an evening of television and a modest splurge, delivered pizza and a Sprite (he wasn’t Mormon but had adopted some of the Latter-Day disciplines, such as skipping caffeine, mostly to avoid strangers who might ask the question of his faith). As he watched the illuminated ball descend over the Times Square throng, he would feel the total absence of human contact in his life, a longing for someone, anyone, to kiss at midnight. What else could he do besides watch television? A cable network offered a marathon of reruns, this science fiction series he was trying to catch up on, where government agents were complicit in the cover-up of an impending alien invasion. This plot made perfect sense to Bob; on the edge of the high desert, he’d seen inexplicable displays of celestial lights, phenomena known by obtuse-sounding titles that combined numbers and initials. The only other thing on TV was going to be the news, and whenever he could help it, Bob paid no attention to the events of the world outside.

At the top of the ten o’clock news, a fat weatherman—the standard-issue avuncular type—offered a scientific explanation for the week’s weather pattern. We were just two days away from perihelion, the time when the earth moved closest to the sun; B-roll video showed coastal North Carolina, buffeted by a week’s worth of unusually strong surf, the result of a convergence of the latest nor’easter and the tidal pull of a full moon. Under the constancy of fifty-knot winds, a handful of million-dollar homes had already toppled into the sea near Wrightsville Beach, but those disembodied images were the nation’s only bit of bad news this New Year’s Eve.

The optimism of the New Year was reflected in the forecast: the jet stream crept farther north across Canada’s prairie provinces, flooding the states below with an abundance of surprising warmth; the weatherman spoke of the prospects for record high temperatures, a dearth of snow. The first day of January would arrive from sea to shining sea under the brightest spotlight of clear winter, American sunlight, no chance of foul weather.

THE HOTEL, an elegant stone high-rise off Temple Square, stood just feet from the spot where the city of Salt Lake began. Tourists gathered in the shadows of the six steeples of the great temple and took photographs of the statue of the angel Moroni as he beckoned the faithful to arms with his blazing golden trumpet.

In the dead hours just before dinner, the lower floors of the hotel bustled with preparations for the evening’s festivities. Uniformed employees vacuumed ballrooms while men in jeans and black T-shirts assembled modular stages; bar backs sliced limes, and $6.74-an-hour kitchen help wrapped frozen scallops in bacon slices. The musicians in cover bands—a schoolteacher, a car salesman, the produce manager of a local market, a hired-gun horn section that had once, in an emergency, played behind Chuck Berry—geared up for their various New Year’s Eve parties, restringing guitars and reviewing their cheat sheets, the charts that would allow them to churn out perfunctory versions of the top hits of yesterday and today.

And on the seventh floor, Mary Beth Blumenthal primped for a night out. She opened her room’s window to release the accumulated steam of her shower and admit the lush breeze of a warm December night, pausing in her preparations to admire the precise layout of the city. In front of a vanity mirror that made her look ten pounds heavier, she vowed to be remarried by this time next year, a preamble to her next New Year’s resolution: provide a strong male role model for her son, Gabriel, who on his next birthday would be seven years old and had never known his biological father.