America is not a big country, he remembers. He’s jumped across it before in aircraft; New York–Chicago–New Orleans–Vegas–San Francisco–LA. It was like going round Scotland in a bus, only at ground level you could see the vastness of the country in the changing landscape. One function of wealth is to shrink the world. And, like poverty, it has at least the potential to breed dissatisfaction. Florida, he knows, he will encounter as Scotland, immense and irreducible by the plane. A tremor of excitement passes through him as he awaits its grandeur. For beyond the plexiglas he sees Miami, gleaming silvery-white constructions straddling the edge of a milky turquoise sea and its harbours. The water is rashed with emerald-purple shadows cast up from below by submerged islands. Tiny sailboats surge along like yellow dots against a radar display backdrop, leaving a fading trail behind them. People clap as the plane lands – so smoothly he’s barely aware of the touchdown he had braced himself for hours ago, since surviving take-off and turbulence.
