Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow

Copyright 2004 Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

http://www.craphound.com/est

Tor Books, March 2004

ISBN: 0765307596

Blurbs:

“Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar—a hard
combination to beat (or, these days, to find).”

- William Gibson,

Author of Neuromancer

“Cory Doctorow knocks me out. In a good way.“

- Pat Cadigan,

Author of Synners

“Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of the game to
give you that authentic chill of the future, and close enough to
home for us to know that he’s talking about where we live as
well as where we’re going to live; a connected world full of
disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself
through the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as
steel.”

- Warren Ellis,

Author of Transmetropolitan

A note about this book:

Last year, in January 2003, my first novel came out. I was 31
years old, and I’d been calling myself a novelist since the
age of 12. It was the storied dream-of-a-lifetime,
come-true-at-last. I was and am proud as hell of that book, even
though it is just one book among many released last year, better
than some, poorer than others; and even though the print-run (which
sold out very quickly!) though generous by science fiction
standards, hardly qualifies it as a work of mass entertainment.

The thing that’s extraordinary about that first novel is
that it was released under terms governed by a Creative Commons license that
allowed my readers to copy the book freely and distribute it far
and wide. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were made and
distributed this way. Hundreds of thousands.

Today, I release my second novel, and my third, a
collaboration with Charlie Stross is due any day, and
two
more are under contract. My career as a novelist is now well
underway—in other words, I am firmly afoot on a long road
that stretches into the future: my future, science fiction’s
future, publishing’s future and the future of the world.

The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science
fiction writer. One way to know the future is to look good and hard
at the present. Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the
present: more people are reading more words off of more
screens than ever before. Here’s another thing
I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are
reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before.
That doesn’t mean that the book is dying—no
more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying—but it does
mean that the book is changing. I think that literature is
alive and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think
that the complex social practice of “book”—of
which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere
expression—is transforming and will transform further.

I intend on figuring out what it’s transforming into. I
intend on figuring out the way that some writers—that
this writer, right here, wearing my underwear—is going
to get rich and famous from his craft. I intend on figuring out how
this writer’s words can become part of the social
discourse, can be relevant in the way that literature at its best
can be.

I don’t know what the future of book looks like. To figure
it out, I’m doing some pretty basic science. I’m
peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it
sits in the year 2004, and I’m making a perturbation.
I’m stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see
if the system reveals itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils.
Once that happens, maybe I’ll be able to formulate an
hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe—just
maybe—I’ll get to the bottom of book-in-2004 and beat
the competition to making it work, and maybe I’ll go home
with all (or most) of the marbles.

It’s a long shot, but I’m a pretty sharp guy, and I
know as much about this stuff as anyone out there. More to the
point, trying stuff and doing research yields a non-zero chance of
success. The alternatives—sitting pat, or worse, getting into
a moral panic about “piracy” and accusing the readers
who are blazing new trail of “the moral equivalent of
shoplifting”—have a zero percent chance of
success.

Most artists never “succeed” in the sense of
attaining fame and modest fortune. A career in the arts is a risky
long-shot kind of business. I’m doing what I can to sweeten
my odds.

So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called
Eastern Standard Tribe, which you can walk into shops all over the
world and buy as a
physical artifact—a very nice physical artifact, designed
by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene Gallo and her designer
Shelley Eshkar, published by Tor Books, a huge, profit-making arm
of an enormous, multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching
what happens to this book nearly as keenly as I am, because
we’re all very interested in what the book is turning
into.

To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A
file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an
instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very
quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers,
tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits.
These tools demand that their users copy and slice and
dice—rip, mix and burn!—and that’s what I’m
hoping you will do with this.

Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob.
Not because Tor is run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have
been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because
you—the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers—hold
in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing.
Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or
him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the
money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network
that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten,
and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its
author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

I’m unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a
new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from
inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks. Put it
on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show
me—and my colleagues, and my publisher—what the future
of book looks like.

I’ll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But
as cool and wonderful as writing is, it’s not half so cool as
inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.

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Dedication

For my parents.

For my family.

For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down. You
know who you are. Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt
apologies.

Cory

1.

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference
between Chinese and Western medicine thus: “Western medicine
is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead
bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living
flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans.”

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and
stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from
a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime
when the world takes on a hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like
now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a sanatorium in
the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it’s merely a cloud of dust like
a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit
here with a pencil up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies
and wouldn’t it be nice if I gave myself one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is
the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The
difference between reading a story and studying a story is the
difference between living the story and killing the story and
looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories
that I’d escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged
their organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes,
recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the
story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are
propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and
insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut
them open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in
daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing
it: “What is the theme of this story?”

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it
and understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you
rather be smart or happy?”

This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing
smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then
it’s a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It’s
a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He’s a foil for the theme, so he’s drawn in
simple lines. Here he is:

2.

Art Berry was born to argue.

There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and
speed, they are the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable.
There are born ballerinas, confectionery girls whose parents
subject them to rigors every bit as intense as the tripwire and
poison on which the assassins are reared. There are children born
to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations
and die heroically in the noble tradition of their forebears;
children born to tread the boards or shred the turf or leave
smoking rubber on the racetrack.

Art’s earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting
room of one of the innumerable doctors who attended him in his
infancy. He is perhaps three, and his attention span is already as
robust as it will ever be, and in his dream—which is fast
becoming a nightmare—he is bored silly.

The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that
once held toy blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks,
which look like they’d be a hell of a lot of fun, if someone
hadn’t lost them all.

Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely
fascinating. They confer briefly, then do something to the
cylinder, and it unravels, extruding into the third dimension,
turning into a stack of blocks.

Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret
knowledge that older people posses, the strange magic that is used
to operate cars and elevators and shoelaces.

Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him
how the blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many
other mysteries are revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane
than the last: even flying a plane seemed easy enough when the nice
stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a while en route to New
York—Art’s awe at the complexity of adult knowledge
fell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual
terrible twos, fearlessly shouting “no” at the
world’s every rule, arguing the morals and reason behind them
until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave up and
swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.

In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed
visit to church with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that
had the parishioners and the clergy arguing with him in teams and
relays.

It started innocently enough: “Why does God care if we
take off our hats, Gran?” But the nosy ladies in the nearby
pews couldn’t bear to simply listen in, and the argument
spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the
priest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some
half-remembered philosophical word games from Descartes in which
the objective truth of reality is used to prove the beneficence of
God and vice-versa, and culminates with “I think therefore I
am.” Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into the
thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art’s shrill
little voice answered from within the congregation.

Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of
Descartes’s fairly tricksy riddles in as long as it took to
describe them, and then went on to use those same arguments to
prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the necessary
nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home
then, but the priest—who’d watched Jesuits play
intellectual table tennis and recognized a natural when he saw
one—called him to the pulpit, whence Art took on the entire
congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed his reasoning
and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that they
blundered into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father
Ferlenghetti laughed and clarified the points when they were
stuttered out by some marble-mouthed rhetorical amateur from the
audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his thing. Not much
was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still the
Communion to be administered, but God knew it had been a long time
since the congregation was engaged so thoroughly with coming to
grips with God and what their faith meant.

Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized,
thin-lipped Gran, Father Ferlenghetti made a point of warmly
embracing her and telling her that Art was welcome at his pulpit
any time, and suggested a future in the seminary. Gran was amazed,
and blushed under her Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his
shoulder became a caress.

3.

The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or
maybe happiness over smarts. Art’s a good guy. He’s
smart as hell. That’s his schtick. If he were a cartoon
character, he’d be the pain-in-the-ass poindexter who is all
the time dispelling the mysteries that fascinate his buddies.
It’s not easy being Art’s friend.

Which is, of course, how Art (“not his real name”)
ended up sitting 45 stories over the woodsy Massachusetts
countryside, hot August wind ruffling his hair and blowing up the
legs of his boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his story
preparatory to dissecting it. In order to preserve the narrative
integrity, Art (“not his real name”) may take some
liberties with the truth. This is autobiographical fiction, after
all, not an autobiography.

Call me Art (“not my real name”). I am an
agent-provocateur in the Eastern Standard Tribe, though I’ve
spent most of my life in GMT-9 and at various latitudes of Zulu,
which means that my poor pineal gland has all but forgotten how to
do its job without that I drown it in melatonin precursors and
treat it to multi-hour nine-kilolumen sessions in the glare of my
travel lantern.

The tribes are taking over the world. You can track our progress
by the rise of minor traffic accidents. The sleep-deprived are
terrible, terrible drivers. Daylight savings time is a widowmaker:
stay off the roads on Leap Forward day!

Here is the second character in the morality play. She’s
the love interest. Was. We broke up, just before I got sent to the
sanatorium. Our circadians weren’t compatible.

4.

April 3, 2012 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and
only woman he ever really loved. It was her fault.

Art’s car was running low on lard after a week in the
Benelux countries, where the residents were all high-net-worth
cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded their arteries from the
depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they squirreled their
money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and
delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran
like water and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply
fuelled and the vodka could run down his gullet instead of into his
tank.

He was in the Kensington High Street on a sleepy Sunday morning,
GMT0300h—2100h back in EDT—and the GPS was showing
insufficient data-points to even gauge traffic between his geoloc
and the Camden High where he kept his rooms. When the GPS
can’t find enough peers on the relay network to color its
maps with traffic data, you know you’ve hit a sweet spot in
the city’s uber-circadian, a moment of grace where the roads
are very nearly exclusively yours.

So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that
had just made it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules
governing the disposal of heavy water in the EU. The java just
wouldn’t cool off, remaining hot enough to guarantee optimal
caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.

If he was jittery, it was no more so than was customary for
ESTalists at GMT+0, and he was driving safely and with due caution.
If the woman had looked out before stepping off the kerb and into
the anemically thin road, if she hadn’t been wearing stylish
black in the pitchy dark of the curve before the Royal Garden
Hotel, if she hadn’t stepped right in front of his
runabout, he would have merely swerved and sworn and given her
a bit of a fright.

But she didn’t, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake
as hard as he could, twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped
her hipside and sent her ass-over-teakettle before the runabout did
its own barrel roll, making three complete revolutions across the
Kensington High before lodging in the Royal Garden Hotel’s
shrubs. Art was covered in scorching, molten coffium, screaming and
clawing at his eyes, upside down, when the porters from the Royal
Garden opened his runabout’s upside-down door, undid his
safety harness and pulled him out from behind the rapidly
flacciding airbag. They plunged his face into the ornamental
birdbath, which had a skin of ice that shattered on his nose and
jangled against his jawbone as the icy water cooled the coffium and
stopped the terrible, terrible burning.

He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering,
and cleared his eyes in time to see the woman he’d hit being
carried out of the middle of the road on a human travois made of
the porters’ linked arms of red wool and gold brocade.

“Assholes!” she was hollering. “I could have a
goddamn spinal injury! You’re not supposed to move
me!”

“Look, Miss,” one porter said, a young chap with the
kind of fantastic dentition that only an insecure teabag would ever
pay for, teeth so white and flawless they strobed in the sodium
streetlamps. “Look. We can leave you in the middle of the
road, right, and not move you, like we’re supposed to. But if
we do that, chances are you’re going to get run over before
the paramedics get here, and then you certainly will have
a spinal injury, and a crushed skull besides, like as not. Do you
follow me?”

“You!” she said, pointing a long and accusing finger
at Art. “You! Don’t you watch where you’re going,
you fool! You could have killed me!”

Art shook water off his face and blew a mist from his dripping
moustache. “Sorry,” he said, weakly. She had an
American accent, Californian maybe, a litigious stridency that
tightened his sphincter like an alum enema and miraculously flensed
him of the impulse to argue.

“Sorry?” she said, as the porters lowered her gently
to the narrow strip turf out beside the sidewalk. “Sorry?
Jesus, is that the best you can do?”

“Well you did step out in front of my car,”
he said, trying to marshal some spine.

She attempted to sit up, then slumped back down, wincing.
“You were going too fast!”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m
pretty sure I was doing 45—that’s five clicks under the
limit. Of course, the GPS will tell for sure.”

At the mention of empirical evidence, she seemed to lose
interest in being angry. “Give me a phone, will
you?”

Mortals may be promiscuous with their handsets, but for a
tribalist, one’s relationship with one’s comm is deeply
personal. Art would have sooner shared his underwear. But he
had hit her with his car. Reluctantly, Art passed her his
comm.

The woman stabbed at the handset with the fingers of her left
hand, squinting at it in the dim light. Eventually, she clamped it
to her head. “Johnny? It’s Linda. Yes, I’m still
in London. How’s tricks out there? Good, good to hear.
How’s Marybeth? Oh, that’s too bad. Want to hear how I
am?” She grinned devilishly. “I just got hit by a car.
No, just now. Five minutes ago. Of course I’m hurt! I think
he broke my hip—maybe my spine, too. Yes, I can wiggle my
toes. Maybe he shattered a disc and it’s sawing through the
cord right now. Concussion? Oh, almost certainly. Pain and
suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, missed wages...” She
looked up at Art. “You’re insured, right?”

Art nodded, miserably, fishing for an argument that would not
come.

“Half a mil, easy. Easy! Get the papers going, will you?
I’ll call you when the ambulance gets here. Bye. Love you
too. Bye. Bye. Bye, Johnny. I got to go. Bye!” She made a
kissy noise and tossed the comm back at Art. He snatched it out of
the air in a panic, closed its cover reverentially and slipped it
back in his jacket pocket.

“C’mere,” she said, crooking a finger. He
knelt beside her.

“I’m Linda,” she said, shaking his hand, then
pulling it to her chest.

“Art,” Art said.

“Art. Here’s the deal, Art. It’s no
one’s fault, OK? It was dark, you were driving under the
limit, I was proceeding with due caution. Just one of those things.
But you did hit me. Your insurer’s gonna
have to pay out—rehab, pain and suffering, you get it.
That’s going to be serious kwan. I’ll go splits with
you, you play along.”

Art looked puzzled.

“Art. Art. Art. Art, here’s the thing. Maybe you
were distracted. Lost. Not looking. Not saying you were, but maybe.
Maybe you were, and if you were, my lawyer’s going to get
that out of you, he’s going to nail you, and I’ll get a
big, fat check. On the other hand, you could just, you know, cop to
it. Play along. You make this easy, we’ll make this easy.
Split it down the middle, once my lawyer gets his piece. Sure, your
premiums’ll go up, but there’ll be enough to cover both
of us. Couldn’t you use some ready cash? Lots of zeroes.
Couple hundred grand, maybe more. I’m being nice here—I
could keep it all for me.”

“I don’t think—”

“Sure you don’t. You’re an honest man. I
understand, Art. Art. Art, I understand. But what has your insurer
done for you, lately? My uncle Ed, he got caught in a threshing
machine, paid his premiums every week for forty years, what did he
get? Nothing. Insurance companies. They’re the great satan.
No one likes an insurance company. Come on, Art. Art. You
don’t have to say anything now, but think about it, OK,
Art?”

She released his hand, and he stood. The porter with the teeth
flashed them at him. “Mad,” he said, “just mad.
Watch yourself, mate. Get your solicitor on the line, I were
you.”

He stepped back as far as the narrow sidewalk would allow and
fired up his comm and tunneled to a pseudonymous relay, bouncing
the call off a dozen mixmasters. He was, after all, in deep cover
as a GMTalist, and it wouldn’t do to have his enciphered
packets’ destination in the clear—a little traffic
analysis and his cover’d be blown. He velcroed the keyboard
to his thigh and started chording.

Trepan: Any UK solicitors on the channel?

Gink-Go: Lawyers. Heh. Kill 'em all. Specially eurofag
fixers.

Junta: Hey, I resemble that remark

Trepan: Junta, you're a UK lawyer?

Gink-Go: Use autocounsel, dude. L{ia|awye}rs suck. Channel
#autocounsel. Chatterbot with all major legal systems on the
backend.

Trepan: Whatever. I need a human lawyer.

Trepan: Junta, you there?

Gink-Go: Off raping humanity.

Gink-Go: Fuck lawyers.

Trepan: /shitlist Gink-Go

##Gink-Go added to Trepan's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go'
to see messages again

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

##Gink-Go added to Junta's shitlist. Use '/unshit Gink-Go'
to see messages again

##Gink-Go added to Thomas-hawk's shitlist. Use '/unshit
Gink-Go' to see messages again

##Gink-Go added to opencolon's shitlist. Use '/unshit
Gink-Go' to see messages again

##Gink-Go added to jackyardbackoff's shitlist. Use '/unshit
Gink-Go' to see messages again

##Gink-Go added to freddy-kugel's shitlist. Use '/unshit
Gink-Go' to see messages again

opencolon: Trolls suck. Gink-Go away.

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

Gink-Go: <shitlisted/>

##Gink-Go has left channel #EST.chatter

Junta: You were saying?

##Junta (private) (file transfer)

##Received credential from Junta. Verifying. Credential
identified: "Solicitor, registered with the Law Society to practice
in England and Wales, also registered in Australia."

Trepan: /private Junta I just hit a woman while driving the
Kensington High Street. Her fault. She's hurt. Wants me to admit
culpability in exchange for half the insurance. Advice?

##Junta (private): I beg your pardon?

Trepan: /private Junta She's crazy. She just got off the
phone with some kinda lawyer in the States. Says she can get
$5*10^5 at least, and will split with me if I don't
dispute.

##Junta (private): Bloody Americans. No offense. What kind
of instrumentation recorded it?

Trepan: /private Junta My GPS. Maybe some secams.
Eyewitnesses, maybe.

##Junta (private): And you'll say what, exactly? That you
were distracted? Fiddling with something?

Trepan: /private Junta I guess.

##Junta (private): You're looking at three points off your
licence. Statutory increase in premiums totalling EU 2*10^5 over
five years. How's your record?

##Transferring credential "Driving record" to Junta. Receipt
confirmed.

##Junta (private): Hmmm.

##Junta (private): Nothing outrageous. _Were_ you
distracted?

Trepan: /private Junta I guess. Maybe.

##Junta (private): You guess. Well, who would know better
than you, right? My fee's 10 percent. Stop guessing. You _were_
distracted. Overtired. It's late. Regrettable. Sincerely sorry.
Have her solicitor contact me directly. I'll meet you here at 1000h
GMT/0400h EDT and go over it with you, yes? Agreeable?

Trepan: /private Junta Agreed. Thanks.

##Junta (private) (file transfer)

##Received smartcontract from Junta. Verifying.
Smartcontract "Representation agreement" verified.

Trepan: /join #autocounsel

counselbot: Welcome, Trepan! How can I help you?

##Transferring smartcontract "Representation agreement" to
counselbot. Receipt confirmed.

Trepan: /private counselbot What is the legal standing of
this contract?

##counselbot (private): Smartcontract "Representation
agreement" is an ISO standard representation agreement between a
client and a solicitor for purposes of litigation in the
UK.

##autocounsel (private) (file transfer)

##Received "representation agreement faq uk 2.3.2 2JAN22"
from autocounsel.

Trepan: /join #EST.chatter

Trepan: /private Junta It's a deal

##Transferring key-signed smartcontract "Representation
agreement" to Junta. Receipt confirmed.

Trepan: /quit Gotta go, thanks!

##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter "Gotta go,
thanks!"

5.

Once the messy business of negotiating EU healthcare for foreign
nationals had been sorted out with the EMTs and the Casualty Intake
triage, once they’d both been digested and shat out by a
dozen diagnostic devices from X-rays to MRIs, once the harried
house officers had impersonally prodded them and presented them
both with hardcopy FAQs for their various injuries (second-degree
burns, mild shock for Art; pelvic dislocation, minor kidney
bruising, broken femur, whiplash, concussion and mandible trauma
for Linda), they found themselves in adjacent beds in the recovery
room, which bustled as though it, too, were working on GMT-6, busy
as a 9PM restaurant on a Saturday night.

Art had an IV taped to the inside of his left arm, dripping
saline and tranqs, making him logy and challenging his circadians.
Still, he was the more mobile of the two, as Linda was swaddled in
smartcasts that both immobilized her and massaged her, all the
while osmosing transdermal antiinflammatories and painkillers. He
tottered the two steps to the chair at her bedside and shook her
hand again.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like
hell,” he said.

She smiled. Her jaw made an audible pop. “Get a picture,
will you? It’ll be good in court.”

He chuckled.

“No, seriously. Get a picture.”

So he took out his comm and snapped a couple pix, including one
with nightvision filters on to compensate for the dimmed recovery
room lighting. “You’re a cool customer, you know
that?” he said, as he tucked his camera away.

“Not so cool. This is all a coping strategy. I’m
pretty shook up, you want to know the truth. I could have
died.”

“What were you doing on the street at three AM
anyway?”

“I was upset, so I took a walk, thought I’d get
something to eat or a beer or something.”

“You haven’t been here long, huh?”

She laughed, and it turned into a groan. “What the hell is
wrong with the English, anyway? The sun sets and the city rolls up
its streets. It’s not like they’ve got this great
tradition of staying home and surfing cable or anything.”

“They’re all snug in their beds, farting away their
lentil roasts.”

“That’s it! You can’t get a steak here to save
your life. Mad cows, all of ’em. If I see one more gray soy
sausage, I’m going to kill the waitress and eat
her.”

“You just need to get hooked up,” he said.
“Once we’re out of here, I’ll take you out for a
genuine blood pudding, roast beef and oily chips. I know a
place.”

“I’m drooling. Can I borrow your phone again? Uh, I
think you’re going to have to dial for me.”

“That’s OK. Give me the number.”

She did, and he cradled his comm to her head. He was close
enough to her that he could hear the tinny, distinctive ringing of
a namerican circuit at the other end. He heard her shallow
breathing, heard her jaw creak. He smelled her shampoo, a
free-polymer new-car smell, smelled a hint of her sweat. A cord
stood out on her neck, merging in an elegant vee with her
collarbone, an arrow pointing at the swell of her breast under her
paper gown.

“Toby, it’s Linda.”

A munchkin voice chittered down the line.

“Shut up, OK. Shut up. Shut. I’m in the
hospital.” More chipmunk. “Got hit by a car. I’ll
be OK. No. Shut up. I’ll be fine. I’ll send you the
FAQs. I just wanted to say. . .” She heaved a sigh, closed
her eyes. “You know what I wanted to say. Sorry, all right?
Sorry it came to this. You’ll be OK. I’ll be OK. I just
didn’t want to leave you hanging.” She sounded groggy,
but there was a sob there, too. “I can’t talk long.
I’m on a shitload of dope. Yes, it’s good dope.
I’ll call you later. I don’t know when I’m coming
back, but we’ll sort it out there, all right? OK. Shut up.
OK. You too.”

She looked up at Art. “My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Not
sure who’s leaving who at this point. Thanks.” She
closed her eyes. Her eyelids were mauve, a tracery of pink veins.
She snored softly.

Art set an alarm that would wake him up in time to meet his
lawyer, folded up his comm and crawled back into bed. His
circadians swelled and crashed against the sides of his skull, and
before he knew it, he was out.

6.

Hospitals operate around the clock, but they still have their
own circadians. The noontime staff were still overworked and
harried but chipper and efficient, too, without the raccoon-eyed
jitters of the night before. Art and Linda were efficiently fed,
watered and evacuated, then left to their own devices, blinking in
the weak English sunlight that streamed through the windows.

“The lawyers’ve worked it out, I think,” Art
said.

“Good. Good news.” She was dopamine-heavy, her words
lizard-slow. Art figured her temper was drugged senseless, and it
gave him the courage to ask her the question that’d been on
his mind since they’d met.

“Can I ask you something? It may be offensive.”

“G’head. I may be offended.”

“Do you do. . .this. . .a lot? I mean, the insurance
thing?”

She snorted, then moaned. “It’s the Los Angeles
Lottery, dude. I haven’t done it before, but I was starting
to feel a little left out, to tell the truth.”

“I thought screenplays were the LA Lotto.”

“Naw. A good lotto is one you can win.”

She favored him with half a smile and he saw that she had a
lopsided, left-hand dimple.

“You’re from LA, then?”

“Got it in one. Orange County. I’m a
third-generation failed actor. Grandpa once had a line in a
Hitchcock film. Mom was the ditzy neighbor on a three-episode Fox
sitcom in the 90s. I’m still waiting for my moment in the
sun. You live here?”

“For now. Since September. I’m from
Toronto.”

“Canadia! Goddamn snowbacks. What are you doing in
London?”

His comm rang, giving him a moment to gather his cover story.
“Hello?”

“Art! It’s Fede!” Federico was another
provocateur in GMT. He wasn’t exactly Art’s
superior—the tribes didn’t work like that—but he
had seniority.

“Fede—can I call you back?”

“Look, I heard about your accident, and I wouldn’t
have called, but it’s urgent.”

Art groaned and rolled his eyes in Linda’s direction to
let her know that he, too, was exasperated by the call, then
retreated to the other side of his bed and hunched over.

“What is it?”

“We’ve been sniffed. I’m four-fifths
positive.”

Art groaned again. Fede lived in perennial terror of being found
out and exposed as an ESTribesman, fired, deported, humiliated. He
was always at least three-fifths positive, and the extra fifth was
hardly an anomaly. “What’s up now?”

“It’s the VP of HR at Virgin/Deutsche Telekom.
He’s called me in for a meeting this afternoon. Wants to go
over the core hours recommendation.” Fede was a McKinsey
consultant offline, producing inflammatory recommendation packages
for Fortune 100 companies. He was working the lazy-Euro angle,
pushing for extra daycare, time off for sick relatives and spouses.
The last policy binder he’d dumped on V/DT had contained
enough obscure leave-granting clauses that an employee who was
sufficiently lawyer-minded could conceivably claim 450 days of paid
leave a year. Now he was pushing for the abolishment of “core
hours,” Corporate Eurospeak for the time after lunch but
before afternoon naps when everyone showed up at the office, so
that they could get some face-time. Enough of this, and GMT would
be the laughingstock of the world, and so caught up in internecine
struggles that the clear superiority of the stress-feeding EST
ethos would sweep them away. That was the theory, anyway. Of
course, there were rival Tribalists in every single management
consulting firm in the world working against us. Management
consultants have always worked on old-boys’ networks, after
all—it was a very short step from interning your frat buddy
to interning your Tribesman.

“That’s it? A meeting? Jesus, it’s just a
meeting. He probably wants you to reassure him before he presents
to the CEO, is all.”

“No, I’m sure that’s not it. He’s got us
sniffed—both of us. He’s been going through the
product-design stuff, too, which is totally outside of his
bailiwick. I tried to call him yesterday and his voicemail rolled
over to a boardroom in O’Malley House.” O’Malley
House was the usability lab, a nice old row of connected Victorian
townhouses just off Picadilly. It was where Art consulted out of.
Also, two-hundred-odd usability specialists, product designers,
experience engineers, cog-psych cranks and other tinkerers with the
mind. They were the hairface hackers of Art’s generation,
unmanageable creative darlings—no surprise that the VP of HR
would have cause to spend a little face-time with someone there.
Try telling Fede that, though.

“All right, Fede, what do you want me to do?”

“Just—Just be careful. Sanitize your storage.
I’m pushing a new personal key to you now, too. Here,
I’ll read you the fingerprint.” The key would be an
unimaginably long string of crypto-gibberish, and just to make sure
that it wasn’t intercepted and changed en route, Fede wanted
to read him a slightly less long mathematical fingerprint hashed
out of it. Once it arrived, Art was supposed to generate a
fingerprint from Fede’s new key and compare it to the one
that Fede wanted him to jot down.

Art closed his eyes and reclined. “All right, I’ve
got a pen,” he said, though he had no such thing.

Fede read him the long, long string of digits and characters and
he repeated them back, pretending to be noting them down. Paranoid
bastard.

“OK, I got it. I’ll get you a new key later today,
all right?”

“Do it quick, man.”

“Whatever, Fede. Back off, OK?”

“Sorry, sorry. Oh, and feel better, all right?”

“Bye, Fede.”

“What was that?” Linda had her neck craned
around to watch him.

He slipped into his cover story with a conscious effort.
“I’m a user-experience consultant. My coworkers are all
paranoid about a deadline.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not another one. God. Look, we go
out for dinner, don’t say a word about the kerb design or the
waiter or the menu or the presentation, OK? OK? I’m
serious.”

Art solemnly crossed his heart. “Who else do you know in
the biz?”

“My ex. He wouldn’t or couldn’t shut up about
how much everything sucked. He was right, but so what? I wanted to
enjoy it, suckitude and all.”

“OK, I promise. We’re going out for dinner,
then?”

“The minute I can walk, you’re taking me out for as
much flesh and entrails as I can eat.”

“It’s a deal.”

And then they both slept again.

7.

Met cute, huh? Linda was short and curvy, dark eyes and pursed
lips and an hourglass figure that she thought made her look
topheavy and big-assed, but I thought she was fabulous and soft and
bouncy. She tasted like pepper, and her hair smelled of the
abstruse polymers that kept it hanging in a brusque bob that
brushed her firm, long jawline.

I’m getting a sunburn, and the pebbles on the roof are
digging into my ass. I don’t know if I’m going to push
the pencil or not, but if I do, it’s going to be somewhere
more comfortable than this roof.

Except that the roof door, which I had wedged open before I
snuck away from my attendants and slunk up the firecode-mandated
stairwell, is locked. The small cairn of pebbles that I created in
front of it has been strewn apart. It is locked tight. And me
without my comm. Ah, me. I take an inventory of my person: a
pencil, a hospital gown, a pair of boxer shorts and a head full of
bad cess. I am 450’ above the summery, muggy, verdant
Massachusetts countryside. It is very hot, and I am turning the
color of the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, a kind of labial pink
that is both painful and perversely cheerful.

I’ve spent my life going in the back door and coming out
the side door. That’s the way it is now. When it only takes
two years for your job to morph into something that would have been
unimaginable twenty-four months before, it’s not really
practical to go in through the front door. Not really practical to
get the degree, the certification, the appropriate experience. I
mean, even if you went back to university, the major you’d
need by the time you graduated would be in a subject that
hadn’t been invented when you enrolled. So I’m good at
back doors and side doors. It’s what the Tribe does for
me—provides me with entries into places where I technically
don’t belong. And thank God for them, anyway. Without the
Tribes, no one would be qualified to do anything
worth doing.

Going out the side door has backfired on me today, though.

Oh. Shit. I peer over the building’s edge, down into the
parking lot. The cars are thinly spread, the weather too fine for
anyone out there in the real world to be visiting with their crazy
relatives. Half a dozen beaters are parked down there,
methane-breathers that the ESTalists call fartmobiles. I’d
been driving something much the same on that fateful Leap Forward
day in London. I left something out of my inventory: pebbles. The
roof is littered, covered with a layer of gray, round riverstones,
about the size of wasabi chickpeas. No one down there is going to
notice me all the way up here. Not without that I give them a sign.
A cracked windshield or two ought to do it.

I gather a small pile of rocks by the roof’s edge and
carefully take aim. I have to be cautious. Careful. A pebble
dropped from this height—I remember the stories about the
penny dropped from the top of the CN Tower that sunk six inches
into the concrete below.

I select a small piece of gravel and carefully aim for the
windshield of a little blue Sony Veddic and it’s bombs away.
I can only follow the stone’s progress for a few seconds
before my eyes can no longer disambiguate it from the surrounding
countryside. What little I do see of its trajectory is
disheartening, though: the wind whips it away on an almost
horizontal parabola, off towards Boston. Forgetting all about
Newton, I try lobbing and then hurling the gravel downward, but it
gets taken away, off to neverneverland, and the windscreens remain
whole.

I go off to prospect for bigger rocks.

You know the sort of horror movie where the suspense builds and
builds and builds, partially collapsed at regular intervals by
something jumping out and yelling “Boo!” whereupon the
heroes have to flee, deeper into danger, and the tension rises and
rises? You know how sometimes the director just doesn’t know
when to quit, and the bogeymen keep jumping out and yelling boo,
the wobbly bridges keep on collapsing, the small arms fire keeps
blowing out more windows in the office tower?

It’s not like the tension goes away—it just get
boring. Boring tension. You know that the climax is coming soon,
that any minute now Our Hero will face down the archvillain and
either kick his ass or have his ass kicked, the whole world riding
on the outcome. You know that it will be satisfying, with much
explosions and partial nudity. You know that afterward, Our Hero
will retire to the space-bar and chill out and collect kisses from
the love interest and that we’ll all have a moment to get our
adrenals back under control before the hand pops out of the grave
and we all give a nervous jump and start eagerly anticipating the
sequel.

You just wish it would happen already. You just wish
that the little climaces could be taken as read, that the director
would trust the audience to know that Our Hero really does wade
through an entire ocean of shit en route to the final showdown.

I’m bored with being excited. I’ve been betrayed,
shot at, institutionalized and stranded on the roof of a nuthouse,
and I just want the fucking climax to come by and happen to me, so
that I can know: smart or happy.

I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down
the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used
that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other
side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little
pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the
doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some
malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or
something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and
falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk,
punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue
flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited
assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and
boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a
parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender
skin, even from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this
isn’t the climax.

8.

Linda didn’t like to argue—fight: yes, argue: no.
That was going to be a problem, Art knew, but when you’re
falling in love, you’re able to rationalize all kinds of
things.

The yobs who cornered them on the way out of a bloody supper of
contraband, antisocial animal flesh were young, large and bristling
with testosterone. They wore killsport armor with strategic
transparent panels that revealed their steroid-curdled muscles,
visible through the likewise transparent insets they’d had
grafted in place of the skin that covered their abs and quads.
There were three of them, grinning and flexing, and they boxed in
Art and Linda in the tiny, shuttered entrance of a Boots
Pharmacy.

“Evening, sir, evening, miss,” one said.

“Hey,” Art muttered and looked over the yob’s
shoulder, trying to spot a secam or a cop. Neither was in
sight.

“I wonder if we could beg a favor of you?” another
said.

“Sure,” Art said.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” the third
said.

“Canadian, actually.”

“Marvelous. Bloody marvelous. I hear that Canada’s a
lovely place. How are you enjoying England?”

“I live here, actually. I like it a lot.”

“Glad to hear that, sir. And you, Miss?”

Linda was wide-eyed, halfway behind Art. “It’s
fine.”

“Good to hear,” the first one said, grinning even
more broadly. “Now, as to that favor. My friends and I,
we’ve got a problem. We’ve grown bored of our wallets.
They are dull and uninteresting.”

“And empty,” the third one interjected, with a
little, stoned giggle.

“Oh yes, and empty. We thought, well, perhaps you visitors
from abroad would find them suitable souvenirs of England. We
thought perhaps you’d like to trade, like?”

Art smiled in spite of himself. He hadn’t been mugged in
London, but he’d heard of this. Ever since a pair of
Manchester toughs had been acquitted based on the claim that their
robbery and menacing of a Pakistani couple had been a simple
cross-cultural misunderstanding, crafty British yobs had been
taking off increasingly baroque scores from tourists.

Art felt the familiar buzz that meant he was about to get into
an argument, and before he knew it, he was talking: “Do you
really think that’d hold up in court? I think that even the
dimmest judge would be able to tell that the idea of a Canadian
being mistaken about trading two wallets full of cash for three
empty ones was in no way an error in cross-cultural communication.
Really now. If you’re going to mug us—”

“Mug you, sir? Dear oh dear, who’s mugging
you?” the first one said.

“Well, in that case, you won’t mind if we say no,
right?”

“Well, it would be rather rude,” the first said.
“After all, we’re offering you a souvenir in the spirit
of transatlantic solidarity. Genuine English leather, mine is.
Belonged to my grandfather.”

“Let me see it,” Art said.

“Beg pardon?”

“I want to see it. If we’re going to trade, I should
be able to examine the goods first, right?”

“All right, sir, all right, here you are.”

The wallet was tattered and leather, and it was indeed made in
England, as the frayed tag sewn into the billfold attested. Art
turned it over in his hands, then, still smiling, emptied the card
slot and started paging through the ID. “Lester?”

Lester swore under his breath. “Les, actually. Hand those
over, please—they don’t come with the
wallet.”

“They don’t? But surely a real British wallet is
hardly complete without real British identification. Maybe I could
keep the NHS card, something to show around to Americans. They
think socialized medicine is a fairy tale, you know.”

“I really must insist, sir.”

“Fuck it, Les,” the second one said, reaching into
his pocket. “This is stupid. Get the money, and let’s
push off.”

“It’s not that easy any more, is it?” the
third one said. “Fellow’s got your name, Les.
’Sbad.”

“Well, yes, of course I do,” Art said. “But so
what? You three are hardly nondescript. You think it’d be
hard to pick your faces out of a rogues gallery? Oh, and wait a
minute! Isn’t this a trade? What happened to the spirit of
transatlantic solidarity?”

“Right,” Les said. “Don’t matter if
you’ve got my name, ’cos we’re all friends,
right, sir?”

“Right!” Art said. He put the tattered wallet in his
already bulging jacket pocket, making a great show of tamping it
down so it wouldn’t come loose. Once his hand was free, he
extended it. “Art Berry. Late of Toronto. Pleased to
meetcha!”

Les shook his hand. “I’m Les. These are my friends,
Tony and Tom.”

“Fuck!” Tom, the second one, said. “Les, you
stupid cunt! Now they got our names, too!” The hand
he’d put in his pocket came out, holding a tazer that sparked
and hummed. “Gotta get rid of ’em now.”

Art smiled, and reached very slowly into his pocket. He pulled
out his comm, dislodging Les’s wallet so that it fell to the
street. Les, Tom and Tony stared at the glowing comm in his hand.
“Could you repeat that, Tom? I don’t think the 999
operator heard you clearly.”

Tom stared dumbfounded at the comm, watching it as though it
were a snake. The numbers “999” were clearly visible on
its display, along with the position data that pinpointed its
location to the meter. Les turned abruptly and began walking
briskly towards the tube station. In a moment, Tony followed,
leaving Tom alone, the tazer still hissing and spitting. His face
contorted with frustrated anger, and he feinted with the tazer,
barking a laugh when Art and Linda cringed back, then he took off
at a good run after his mates.

Art clamped the comm to his head. “They’ve gone
away,” he announced, prideful. “Did you get that
exchange? There were three of them and they’ve gone
away.”

From the comm came a tight, efficient voice, a male emergency
operator. The speech was accented, and it took a moment to place
it. Then Art remembered that the overnight emergency call-centers
had been outsourced by the English government to low-cost
cube-farms in Manila. “Yes, Mr. Berry.” His comm had
already transmitted his name, immigration status and location,
creating a degree of customization more typical of fast-food
delivery than governmental bureaucracies. That was bad, Art
thought, professionally. GMT polezeidom was meant to be a solid
wall of oatmeal-thick bureaucracy, courtesy of some crafty,
anonymous PDTalist. “Please, stay at your current location.
The police will be on the scene shortly. Very well done,
sir.”

Art turned to Linda, triumphant, ready for the traditional,
postrhetorical accolades that witnesses of his verbal acrobatics
were wont to dole out, and found her in an attitude of abject
terror. Her eyes were crazily wide, the whites visible around the
irises—something he’d read about but never seen
firsthand. She was breathing shallowly and had gone ashen.

Though they were not an actual couple yet, Art tried to gather
her into his arms for some manly comforting, but she was stiff in
his embrace, and after a moment, planted her palms on his chest and
pushed him back firmly, even aggressively.

“Are you all right?” he asked. He was adrenalized,
flushed.

“What if they’d decided to kill us?”
she said, spittle flying from her lips.

“Oh, they weren’t going to hurt us,” he said.
“No guts at all.”

“Goddammit, you didn’t know that! Where do
you get off playing around with my safety? Why the hell
didn’t you just hand over your wallet, call the cops and be
done with it? Macho fucking horseshit!”

The triumph was fading, fast replaced by anger.
“What’s wrong with you? Do you always have to snatch
defeat from the jaws of victory? I just beat off those three
assholes without raising a hand, and all you want to do is
criticize? Christ, OK, next time we can hand over our wallets.
Maybe they’ll want a little rape, too—should I go along
with that? You just tell me what the rules are, and I’ll be
sure and obey them.”

“You fucking pig! Where the fuck do you get off
raising your voice to me? And don’t you ever joke
about rape. It’s not even slightly funny, you arrogant
fucking prick.”

Art’s triumph deflated. “Jesus,” he said,
“Jesus, Linda, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how
scared you must have been—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.
I’ve been mugged a dozen times. I hand over my wallet, cancel
my cards, go to my insurer. No one’s ever hurt me. I
wasn’t the least bit scared until you opened up your big
goddamned mouth.”

“Sorry, sorry. Sorry about the rape crack. I was just
trying to make a point. I didn’t know—” He wanted
to say, I didn’t know you’d been raped, but
thought better of it—“it was so...personal for
you—”

“Oh, Christ. Just because I don’t want to joke about
rape, you think I’m some kind of victim, that
I’ve been raped”—Art
grimaced—“well, I haven’t, shithead. But
it’s not something you should be using as a goddamned example
in one of your stupid points. Rape is serious.”

The cops arrived then, two of them on scooters, looking like
meter maids. Art and Linda glared at each other for a moment, then
forced smiles at the cops, who had dismounted and shed their
helmets. They were young men, in their twenties, and to Art, they
looked like kids playing dress up.

“Evening sir, miss,” one said. “I’m PC
McGivens and this is PC DeMoss. You called emergency
services?” McGivens had his comm out and it was pointed at
them, slurping in their identity on police override.

“Yes,” Art said. “But it’s OK now. They
took off. One of them left his wallet behind.” He bent and
picked it up and made to hand it to PC DeMoss, who was closer. The
cop ignored it.

“Please sir, put that down. We’ll gather the
evidence.”

Art lowered it to the ground, felt himself blushing. His hands
were shaking now, whether from embarrassment, triumph or hurt he
couldn’t say. He held up his now-empty palms in a gesture of
surrender.

“Step over here, please, sir,” PC McGivens said, and
led him off a short ways, while PC Blaylock closed on Linda.

“Now, sir,” McGivens said, in a businesslike way,
“please tell me exactly what happened.”

So Art did, tastefully omitting the meat-parlor where the
evening’s festivities had begun. He started to get into it,
to evangelize his fast-thinking bravery with the phone. McGivens
obliged him with a little grin.

“Very good. Now, again, please, sir?”

“I’m sorry?” Art said.

“Can you repeat it, please? Procedure.”

“Why?”

“Can’t really say, sir. It’s
procedure.”

Art thought about arguing, but managed to control the impulse.
The man was a cop, he was a foreigner—albeit a thoroughly
documented one—and what would it cost? He’d probably
left something out anyway.

He retold the story from the top, speaking slowly and clearly.
PC McGivens aimed his comm Artwards, and tapped out the occasional
note as Art spoke.

“Thank you sir. Now, once more, please?”

Art blew out an exasperated sigh. His feet hurt, and his bladder
was swollen with drink. “You’re joking.”

“No sir, I’m afraid not. Procedure.”

“But it’s stupid! The guys who tried to mug us are
long gone, I’ve given you their descriptions, you have their
identification—” But they didn’t, not
yet. The wallet still lay where Art had dropped it.

PC McGivens shook his head slowly, as though marveling at the
previously unsuspected inanity of his daily round. “All very
true, sir, but it’s procedure. Worked out by some clever lad
using statistics. All this, it increases our success rate.
’Sproven.”

Here it was. Some busy tribalist provocateur, some compatriot of
Fede, had stirred the oats into Her Majesty’s Royal
Constabulary. Art snuck a look at Linda, who was no doubt being
subjected to the same procedure by PC DeMoss. She’d lost her
rigid, angry posture, and was
seemingly—amazingly—enjoying herself, chatting up the
constable like an old pal.

“How many more times have we got to do this,
officer?”

“This is the last time you’ll have to repeat it to
me.”

Art’s professional instincts perked up at the weasel words
in the sentence. “To you? Who else do I need to go over this
with?”

The officer shook his head, caught out. “Well,
you’ll have to repeat it three times to PC DeMoss, once
he’s done with your friend, sir. Procedure.”

“How about this,” Art says, “how about I
record this last statement to you with my comm, and then I can
play it back three times for PC DeMoss?”

“Oh, I’m sure that won’t do, sir. Not really
the spirit of the thing, is it?”

“And what is the spirit of the thing?
Humiliation? Boredom? An exercise in raw power?”

PC McGivens lost his faint smile. “I really couldn’t
say, sir. Now, again if you please?”

“What if I don’t please? I haven’t been
assaulted. I haven’t been robbed. It’s none of my
business. What if I walk away right now?”

“Not really allowed, sir. It’s expected that
everyone in England—HM’s subjects and her
guests—will assist the police with their inquiries.
Required, actually.”

Reminded of his precarious immigration status, Art lost his
attitude. “Once more for you, three more times for your
partner, and we’re done, right? I want to get
home.”

“We’ll see, sir.”

Art recited the facts a third time, and they waited while Linda
finished her third recounting.

He switched over to PC DeMoss, who pointed his comm expectantly.
“Is all this just to make people reluctant to call the cops?
I mean, this whole procedure seems like a hell of a
disincentive.”

“Just the way we do things, sir,” PC DeMoss said
without rancor. “Now, let’s have it, if you
please?”

From a few yards away, Linda laughed at something PC McGivens
said, which just escalated Art’s frustration. He spat out the
description three times fast. “Now, I need to find a toilet.
Are we done yet?”

“‘Fraid not, sir. Going to have to come by the
Station House to look through some photos. There’s a toilet
there.”

“It can’t wait that long, officer.”

PC DeMoss gave him a reproachful look.

“I’m sorry, all right?” Art said. “I
lack the foresight to empty my bladder before being accosted in the
street. That being said, can we arrive at some kind of
solution?” In his head, Art was already writing an angry
letter to the Times, dripping with sarcasm.

“Just a moment, sir,” PC DeMoss said. He conferred
briefly with his partner, leaving Art to stare ruefully at their
backs and avoid Linda’s gaze. When he finally met it, she
gave him a sunny smile. It seemed that she—at
least—wasn’t angry any more.

“Come this way, please, sir,” PC DeMoss said,
striking off for the High Street. “There’s a pub
’round the corner where you can use the
facilities.”

9.

It was nearly dawn before they finally made their way out of the
police station and back into the street. After identifying Les from
an online rogues’ gallery, Art had spent the next six hours
sitting on a hard bench, chording desultorily on his thigh, doing
some housekeeping.

This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in
the extreme, though it had sounded like a good idea when he was
living in San Francisco and hating every inch of the city, from the
alleged pizza to the fucking! drivers!—in New York, the
theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting
“Ole!” as in, “Ole! You changed lanes!”
“Ole! You cut me off!” “Ole! You’re driving
on the sidewalk!” while in San Francisco, a honking horn
meant, “I wish you were dead. Have a nice day.
Dude.”

And the body language was all screwed up out west. Art believed
that your entire unconscious affect was determined by your
upbringing. You learned how to stand, how to hold your face in
repose, how to gesture, from the adults around you while you were
growing up. The Pacific Standard Tribe always seemed a little
bovine to him, their facial muscles long conditioned to relax into
a kind of spacey, gullible senescence.

Beauty, too. Your local definition of attractive and ugly was
conditioned by the people around you at puberty. There was a
Pacific “look” that was indefinably off. Hard to say
what it was, just that when he went out to a bar or got stuck on a
crowded train, the girls just didn’t seem all that attractive
to him. Objectively, he could recognize their prettiness, but it
didn’t stir him the way the girls cruising the Chelsea
Antiques Market or lounging around Harvard Square could.

He’d always felt at a slight angle to reality in
California, something that was reinforced by his continuous efforts
in the Tribe, from chatting and gaming until the sun rose, dragging
his caffeine-deficient ass around to his clients in a kind of fog
before going home, catching a nap and hopping back online at 3 or 4
when the high-octane NYC early risers were practicing
work-avoidance and clattering around with their comms.

Gradually, he penetrated deeper into the Tribe, getting invites
into private channels, intimate environments where he found himself
spilling the most private details of his life. The Tribe stuck
together, finding work for each other, offering advice, and it was
only a matter of time before someone offered him a gig.

That was Fede, who practically invented Tribal
agent-provocateurs. He’d been working for McKinsey,
systematically undermining their GMT-based clients with plausibly
terrible advice, creating Achilles’ heels that their
East-coast competitors could exploit. The entire European
trust-architecture for relay networks had been ceded by
Virgin/Deutsche Telekom to a scrappy band of AT&T Labs refugees
whose New Jersey headquarters hosted all the cellular reputation
data that Euros’ comms consulted when they were routing their
calls. The Jersey clients had funneled a nice chunk of the proceeds
to Fede’s account in the form of rigged winnings from an
offshore casino that the Tribe used to launder its money.

Now V/DT was striking back, angling for a government contract in
Massachusetts, a fat bit of pork for managing payments to
rightsholders whose media was assessed at the MassPike’s
tollbooths. Rights-societies were a fabulous opportunity to skim
and launder and spindle money in plenty, and Virgin’s massive
repertoire combined with Deutsche Telekom’s Teutonic
attention to detail was a tough combination to beat. Needless to
say, the Route 128-based Tribalists who had the existing contract
needed an edge, and would pay handsomely for it.

London nights seemed like a step up from San Francisco mornings
to Art—instead of getting up at 4AM to get NYC, he could
sleep in and chat them up through the night. The Euro sensibility,
with its many nap-breaks, statutory holidays and extended vacations
seemed ideally suited to a double agent’s life.

But Art hadn’t counted on the Tribalists’ hands-on
approach to his work. They obsessively grepped his daily feed of
spreadsheets, whiteboard-output, memos and conversation reports for
any of ten thousand hot keywords, querying him for deeper detail on
trivial, half-remembered bullshit sessions with the V/DT’s
user experience engineers. His comm buzzed and blipped at all
hours, and his payoff was dependent on his prompt response. They
were running him ragged.

Four hours in the police station gave Art ample opportunity to
catch up on the backlog of finicky queries. Since the accident,
he’d been distracted and tardy, and had begun to invent his
responses, since it all seemed so trivial to him anyway.

Fede had sent him about a thousand nagging notes reminding him
to generate a new key and phone with the fingerprint. Christ. Fede
had been with McKinsey for most of his adult life, and he was
superparanoid about being exposed and disgraced in their ranks.
Art’s experience with the other McKinsey people around the
office suggested that the notion of any of those overpaid
buzzword-slingers sniffing their traffic was about as likely as a
lightning strike. Heaving a dramatic sigh for his own benefit, he
began the lengthy process of generating enough randomness to seed
the key, mashing the keyboard, whispering nonsense syllables, and
pointing the comm’s camera lens at arbitrary corners of the
police station. After ten minutes of crypto-Tourette’s, the
comm announced that he’d been sufficiently random and
prompted him for a passphrase. Jesus. What a pain in the ass. He
struggled to recall all the words to the theme song from a CBC
sitcom he’d watched as a kid, and then his comm went into a
full-on churn as it laboriously re-ciphered all of his stored files
with the new key, leaving Art to login while he waited.

Trepan: Afternoon!

Colonelonic: Hey, Trepan. How's it going?

Trepan: Foul. I'm stuck at a copshop in London with my thumb
up my ass. I got mugged.

Colonelonic: Yikes! You OK?

Ballgravy: Shit!

Trepan: Oh, I'm fine -- just bored. They didn't hurt me. I
commed 999 while they were running their game and showed it to them
when they got ready to do the deed, so they took off.

##Colonelonic laughs

Ballgravy: Britain==ass. Lon-dong.

Colonelonic: Sweet!

Trepan: Thanks. Now if the cops would only finish the
paperwork...

Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

Ballgravy: Ass ass ass

Colonelonic: Shut up, Bgravy

Ballgravy: Blow me

Trepan: What's wrong with you, Ballgravy? We're having a
grown-up conversation here

Ballgravy: Just don't like Brits.

Trepan: What, all of them?

Ballgravy: Whatever -- all the ones I've met have been
tight-ass pricks

##Colonelonic: (private) He's just a troll, ignore
him

/private Colonelonic: Watch this

Trepan: How many?

Ballgravy: How many what?

Trepan: Have you met?

Ballgravy: Enough

Trepan: > 100?

Ballgravy: No

Trepan: > 50?

Ballgravy: No

Trepan: > 10?

Ballgravy: Around 10

Trepan: Where are you from?

Ballgravy: Queens

Trepan: Well, you're not going to believe this, but you're
the tenth person from Queens I've met -- and you're all morons who
pick fights with strangers in chat-rooms

Colonelonic: Queens==ass

Trepan: Ass ass ass

Ballgravy: Fuck you both

##Ballgravy has left channel #EST.chatter

Colonelonic: Nicely done

Colonelonic: He's been boring me stupid for the past hour,
following me from channel to channel

Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

Trepan: Like I said, waiting for the cops

Colonelonic: But why are you there in the first
place

Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's a work thing. For
EST.

##Colonelonic: (private) No shit?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Yeah. Can't really say much
more, you understand

##Colonelonic: (private) Cool! Any more jobs? One more day
at Merril-Lynch and I'm gonna kill someone

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Sorry, no. There must be some
perks though.

##Colonelonic: (private) I can pick fights with strangers in
chat rooms! Also, I get to play with Lexis-Nexus all I
want

Trepan: /private Colonelonic That's pretty rad,
anyway

##Ballgravy has joined channel #EST.chatter

Ballgravy: Homos

Trepan: Oh Christ, are you back again, Queens?

Colonelonic: I've gotta go anyway

Trepan: See ya

##Colonelonic has left channel #EST.chatter

##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter

Art stood up and blinked. He approached the desk sergeant and
asked if he thought it would be much longer. The sergeant fiddled
with a comm for a moment, then said, “Oh, we’re quite
done with you sir, thank you.” Art repressed a vituperative
response, counted three, then thanked the cop.

He commed Linda.

“What’s up?”

“They say we’re free to go. I think they’ve
been just keeping us here for shits and giggles. Can you believe
that?”

“Whatever—I’ve been having a nice chat with
Constable McGivens. Constable, is it all right if we go
now?”

There was some distant, English rumbling, then Linda giggled.
“All right, then. Thank you so much, officer!

“Art? I’ll meet you at the front doors, all
right?”

“That’s great,” Art said. He stretched. His
ass was numb, his head throbbed, and he wanted to strangle
Linda.

She emerged into the dawn blinking and grinning, and surprised
him with a long, full-body hug. “Sorry I was so snappish
before,” she said. “I was just scared. The cops say
that you were quite brave. Thank you.”

Art’s adrenals dry-fired as he tried to work up a good
angry head of steam, then he gave up. “It’s all
right.”

“Let’s go get some breakfast, OK?”

10.

The parking-lot is aswarm with people, fire engines and
ambulances. There’s a siren going off somewhere down in the
bowels of the sanatorium, and still I can’t get anyone to
look up at the goddamned roof.

I’ve tried hollering myself hoarse into the updrafts from
the cheery blaze, but the wind’s against me, my shouts rising
up past my ears. I’ve tried dropping more pebbles, but the
winds whip them away, and I’ve learned my lesson about
half-bricks.

Weirdly, I’m not worried about getting into trouble.
I’ve already been involuntarily committed by the
Tribe’s enemies, the massed and devious forces of the Pacific
Daylight Tribe and the Greenwich Mean Tribe. I am officially Not
Responsible. Confused and Prone to Wandering. Coo-Coo for
Coco-Puffs. It’s not like I hurt anyone, just decremented the
number of roadworthy fartmobiles by one.

I got up this morning at four, awakened by the tiniest sound
from the ward corridors, a wheel from a pharmaceuticals tray maybe.
Three weeks on medically prescribed sleepytime drugs have barely
scratched the surface of the damage wrought by years of circadian
abuse. I’d been having a fragile shadow of a dream, the ghost
of a REM cycle, and it was the old dream, the dream of the
doctor’s office and the older kids who could manage the trick
of making a picture into reality.

I went from that state to total wakefulness in an instant, and
knew to a certainty that I wouldn’t be sleeping again any
time soon. I paced my small room, smelled the cheerful flowers my
cousins brought last week when they visited from Toronto, watched
the horizon for signs of a breaking dawn. I wished futilely for my
comm and a nice private channel where I could sling some bullshit
and have some slung in my direction, just connect with another
human being at a nice, safe remove.

They chide me for arguing on the ward, call it belligerence and
try to sidetrack me with questions about my motivations, a tactic
rating barely above ad hominems in my book. No one to talk
to—the other patients get violent or nod off, depending on
their medication levels, and the staff just patronize me.

Four AM and I’m going nuts, hamsters in my mind spinning
their wheels at a thousand RPM, chittering away. I snort—if I
wasn’t crazy to begin with, I’m sure getting there.

The hamsters won’t stop arguing with each other over all
the terrible errors of judgment I’ve made to get here.
Trusting the Tribe, trusting strangers. Argue, argue, argue. God,
if only someone else were around, I could argue the definition of
sanity, I could argue the ethics of involuntary committal, I could
argue the food. But my head is full of argument and there’s
nowhere to spill it and soon enough I’ll be talking aloud,
arguing with the air like the schizoids on the ward who
muttergrumbleshout through the day and through the night.

Why didn’t I just leave London when I could, come home,
move in with Gran, get a regular job? Why didn’t I swear off
the whole business of secrecy and provocation?

I was too smart for my own good. I could always argue myself
into doing the sexy, futuristic thing instead of being a nice,
mundane, nonaffiliated individual. Too smart to settle down, take a
job and watch TV after work, spend two weeks a year at the cottage
and go online to find movie listings. Too smart is too restless and
no happiness, ever, without that it’s chased by obsessive
maundering moping about what comes next.

Smart or happy?

The hamsters have hopped off their wheels and are gnawing at the
blood-brain barrier, trying to get out of my skull. This is a good
sanatorium, but still, the toilets are communal on my floor, which
means that I’ve got an unlocked door that lights up at the
nurses’ station down the corridor when I open the door, and
goes berserk if I don’t reopen it again within the mandated
fifteen-minute maximum potty-break. I figured out how to defeat the
system the first day, but it was a theoretical hack, and now
it’s time to put it into practice.

I step out the door and the lintel goes pink, deepens toward
red. Once it’s red, whoopwhoopwhoop. I pad down to the lav,
step inside, wait, step out again. I go back to my room—the
lintel is orange now—and open it, move my torso across the
long electric eye, then pull it back and let the door swing closed.
The lintel is white, and that means that the room thinks I’m
inside, but I’m outside. You put your torso in, you take your
torso out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about.

In the corridor. I pad away from the nurses’ station, past
the closed doors and through the muffled, narcotized groans and
snores and farts that are the twilight symphony of night on the
ward. I duck past an intersection, head for the elevator doors,
then remember the tattletale I’m wearing on my ankle, which
will go spectacularly berserk if I try to leave by that exit. Also,
I’m in my underwear. I can’t just walk nonchalantly
into the lobby.

The ward is making wakeful sounds, and I’m sure I hear the
soft tread of a white-soled shoe coming round the bend. I double my
pace, begin to jog at random—the hamsters, they tell me
I’m acting with all the forethought of a crazy person, and
why not just report for extra meds instead of all this
mishegas?

There’s definitely someone coming down a nearby corridor.
The tread of sneakers, the squeak of a wheel. I’ve seen what
they do to the wanderers: a nice chemical straightjacket, a
cocktail of pills that’ll quiet the hamsters down for days.
Time to get gone.

There’s an EXIT sign glowing over a door at the far end of
the corridor. I pant towards it, find it propped open and the alarm
system disabled by means of a strip of surgical tape. Stepping
through into the emergency stairwell, I see an ashtray fashioned
from a wadded up bit of tinfoil, heaped with butts—evidence
of late-night smoke breaks by someone on the ward staff.
Massachusetts’s harsh antismoking regs are the best friend an
escaping loony ever had.

The stairwell is gray and industrial and refreshingly hard-edged
after three padded weeks on the ward. Down, down is the exit and
freedom. Find clothes somewhere and out I go into Boston.

From below, then: the huffing, laborious breathing of some
goddamned overweight, middle-aged doc climbing the stairs for his
health. I peer down the well and see his gleaming pate, his white
knuckles on the railing, two, maybe three flights down.

Up! Up to the roof. I’m on the twentieth floor, which
means that I’ve got twenty-five more to go, two flights per,
fifty in total, gotta move. Up! I stop two or three times and pant
and wheeze and make it ten stories and collapse. I’m sweating
freely—no air-conditioning in the stairwell, nor is there
anything to mop up the sweat rolling down my body, filling the
crack of my ass, coursing down my legs. I press my face to the cool
painted cinderblock walls, one cheek and then the other, and
continue on.

When I finally open the door that leads out onto the pebbled
roof, the dawn cool is balm. Fingers of light are hauling the
sunrise up over the horizon. I step onto the roof and feel the
pebbles dig into the soft soles of my feet, cool as the bottom of
the riverbed whence they’d been dredged. The door starts to
swing shut heavily behind me, and I whirl and catch it just in
time, getting my fingers mashed against the jamb for my trouble. I
haul it back open again against its pneumatic closure
mechanism.

Using the side of my foot as a bulldozer, I scrape up a cairn of
pebbles as high as the door’s bottom edge, twice as high. I
fall into the rhythm of the work, making the cairn higher and wider
until I can’t close the door no matter how I push against it.
The last thing I want is to get stuck on the goddamn roof.

There’s detritus mixed in with the pebbles: cigarette
butts, burnt out matches, a condom wrapper and a bright yellow
Eberhard pencil with a point as sharp as a spear, the eraser as
pink and softly resilient as a nipple.

I pick up the pencil and twiddle it between forefinger and
thumb, tap a nervous rattle against the roof’s edge as I
dangle my feet over the bottomless plummet until the sun is high
and warm on my skin.

The hamsters get going again once the sun is high and the cars
start pulling into the parking lot below, rattling and chittering
and whispering, yes o yes, put the pencil in your nose,
wouldn’t you rather be happy than smart?

11.

Art and Linda in Linda’s miniscule joke of a flat.
She’s two months into a six-month house-swap with some
friends of friends who have a fourth-storey walkup in Kensington
with a partial (i.e. fictional) view of the park. The lights are on
timers and you need to race them to her flat’s door,
otherwise there’s no way you’ll fit the archaic key
into the battered keyhole—the windows in the stairwell are so
grimed as to provide more of a suggestion of light than light
itself.

Art’s ass aches and he paces the flat’s three wee
rooms and drinks hormone-enhanced high-energy liquid breakfast from
the half-fridge in the efficiency kitchen. Linda’s taken dibs
on the first shower, which is fine by Art, who can’t get the
hang of the goddamned-English-plumbing, which delivers an
energy-efficient, eat-your-vegetables-and-save-the-planet trickle
of scalding water.

Art has switched off his comm, his frazzled nerves no longer
capable of coping with its perennial and demanding beeping and
buzzing. This is very nearly unthinkable but necessary, he
rationalizes, given the extraordinary events of the past
twenty-four hours. And Fede can go fuck himself, for that matter,
that paranoid asshole, and then he can fuck the clients in Jersey
and the whole of V/DT while he’s at it.

The energy bev is kicking in and making his heart race and his
pulse throb in his throat and he’s so unbearably hyperkinetic
that he turns the coffee table on its end in the galley kitchen and
clears a space in the living room that’s barely big enough to
spin around in, and starts to work through a slow, slow set of Tai
Chi, so slow that he barely moves at all, except that inside he can
feel the moving, can feel the muscles’ every flex and groan
as they wind up release, move and swing and slide.

Single whip slides into crane opens wings and he needs to crouch
down low, lower than his woolen slacks will let him, and
they’re grimy and gross anyway, so he undoes his belt and
kicks them off. Down low as white crane opens wings and brush knee,
punch, apparent closure, then low again, creakingly achingly low
into wave hands like clouds, until his spine and his coccyx crackle
and give, springing open, fascia open ribs open smooth breath
rising and falling with his diaphragm smooth mind smooth and sweat
cool in the mat of his hair.

He moves through the set and does not notice Linda until he
unwinds into a slow, ponderous lotus kick, closes again, breathes a
moment and looks around slowly, grinning like a holy fool.

She’s in a tartan housecoat with a threadbare towel
wrapped around her hair, water beading on her bony ankles and long,
skinny feet. “Art! Goddamn, Art! What the hell was
that?”

“Tai chi,” he says, drawing a deep breath in through
his nostrils, feeling each rib expand in turn, exhaling through his
mouth. “I do it to unwind.”

“It was beautiful! Art! Art. Art. That was, I mean, wow.
Inspiring. Something. You’re going to show me how to do that,
Art. Right? You’re gonna.”

“I could try,” Art says. “I’m not really
qualified to teach it—I stopped going to class ten years
ago.”

“Shut, shut up, Art. You can teach that, damn, you can
teach that, I know you can. That was, wow.” She rushes
forward and takes his hands. She squeezes and looks into his eyes.
She squeezes again and tugs his hands towards her hips, reeling his
chest towards her breasts tilting her chin up and angling that long
jawline that’s so long as to be almost horsey, but it
isn’t, it’s strong and clean. Art smells shampoo and
sandalwood talc and his skin puckers in a crinkle that’s so
sudden and massive that it’s almost audible.

They’ve been together continuously for the past five days,
almost without interruption and he’s already conditioned to
her smell and her body language and the subtle signals of her
face’s many mobile bits and pieces. She is afire, he is
afire, their bodies are talking to each other in some secret
language of shifting centers of gravity and unconscious pheromones,
and his face tilts down towards her, slowly with all the time in
the world. Lowers and lowers, week-old whiskers actually tickling
the tip of her nose, his lips parting now, and her breath moistens
them, beads them with liquid condensed out of her vapor.

His top lip touches her bottom lip. He could leave it at that
and be happy, the touch is so satisfying, and he is contented there
for a long moment, then moves to engage his lower lip, moving,
tilting.

His comm rings.

His comm, which he has switched off, rings.

Shit.

“Hello!” he says, he shouts.

“Arthur?” says a voice that is old and hurt and
melancholy. His Gran’s voice. His Gran, who can override his
ringer, switch on his comm at a distance because Art is a good
grandson who was raised almost entirely by his saintly and frail
(and depressive and melodramatic and obsessive) grandmother, and of
course his comm is set to pass her calls. Not because he is a suck,
but because he is loyal and sensitive and he loves his Gran.

“Gran, hi! Sorry, I was just in the middle of something,
sorry.” He checks his comm, which tells him that it’s
only six in the morning in Toronto, noon in London, and that the
date is April 8, and that today is the day that he should have
known his grandmother would call.

“You forgot,” she says, no accusation, just a weary
and disappointed sadness. He has indeed forgotten.

“No, Gran, I didn’t forget.”

But he did. It is the eighth of April, 2022, which means that it
is twenty-one years to the day since his mother died. And he has
forgotten.

“It’s all right. You’re busy, I understand.
Tell me, Art, how are you? When will you visit Toronto?”

“I’m fine, Gran. I’m sorry I haven’t
called, I’ve been sick.” Shit. Wrong lie.

“You’re sick? What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing. I—I put my back out. Working
too hard. Stress. It’s nothing, Gran.”

He chances to look up at Linda, who is standing where he left
her when he dived reflexively for his comm, staring disbelievingly
at him. Her robe is open to her navel, and he sees the three curls
of pubic hair above the knot in its belt that curl towards her
groin, sees the hourglass made by the edges of her breasts that are
visible in the vee of the robe, sees the edge of one areole, the
left one. He is in a tee shirt and bare feet and boxers, crouching
over his trousers, talking to his Gran, and he locks eyes with
Linda and shakes his head apologetically, then settles down to sit
cross-legged, hunched over an erection he didn’t know he had,
resolves to look at her while he talks.

“Stress! Always stress. You should take some vacation
time. Are you seeing someone? A chiropractor?”

He’s entangled in the lie. “Yes. I have an
appointment tomorrow.”

“How will you get there? Don’t take the subway. Take
a taxi. And give me the doctor’s name, I’ll look him
up.”

“I’ll take a cab, it’ll be fine, he’s
the only one my travel insurance covers.”

“The only one? Art! What kind of insurance do you have?
I’ll call them, I’ll find you a chiropractor. Betty
Melville, she has family in London, they’ll know
someone.”

God. “It’s fine, Gran. How are you?”

A sigh. “How am I? On this day, how am I?”

“How is your health? Are you keeping busy?”

“My health is fine. I keep busy. Father Ferlenghetti came
to dinner last night at the house. I made a nice roast, and
I’ll have sandwiches today.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m thinking of your mother, you know.”

“I know.”

“Do you think of her, Art? You were so young when she
went, but you remember her, don’t you?”

“I do, Gran.” He remembers her, albeit dimly. He was
barely nine when she died.

“Of course—of course you remember your mother.
It’s a terrible thing for a mother to live longer than her
daughter.”

His Gran says this every year. Art still hasn’t figured
out how to respond to it. Time for another stab at it.
“I’m glad you’re still here, Gran.”

Wrong thing. Gran is sobbing now. Art drops his eyes from
Linda’s and looks at the crazy weft and woof of the faded old
Oriental rug. “Oh, Gran,” he says. “I’m
sorry.”

In truth, Art has mourned and buried his mother. He was raised
just fine by his Gran, and when he remembers his mother, he is more
sad about not being sad than sad about her.

“I’m an old lady, you know that. You’ll
remember me when I go, won’t you Art?”

This, too, is a ritual question that Art can’t answer well
enough no matter how he practices. “Of course, Gran. But
you’ll be around for a good while yet!”

“When are you coming back to Toronto?” He’d
ducked the question before, but Gran’s a master of circling
back and upping the ante. Now that we’ve established my
imminent demise...

“Soon as I can, Gran. Maybe when I finish this contract.
September, maybe.”

“You’ll stay here? I can take the sofa. When do you
think you’ll arrive? My friends all want to see you again.
You remember Mrs. Tomkins? You used to play with her daughter
Alice. Alice is single, you know. She has a good job,
too—working at an insurance company. Maybe she can get you a
better health plan.”

“I don’t know, Gran. I’ll try to come
back after I finish my contract, but I can’t tell
what’ll be happening then. I’ll let you know,
OK?”

“Oh, Art. Please come back soon—I miss you.
I’m going to visit your mother’s grave today and put
some flowers on it. They keep it very nice at Mount Pleasant, and
the trees are just blooming now.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can, Gran. I love
you.”

“I love you too, Arthur.”

“Bye, Gran.”

“I’ll call you once I speak to Betty about the
chiropractor, all right?”

“All right, Gran.” He is going to have to go to the
chiropractor now, even though his back feels as good as it has in
years. His Gran will be checking up on it.

“Bye, Arthur. I love you.”

“Bye, Gran.”

“Bye.”

He shakes his head and holsters the comm back in his pants, then
rocks back and lies down on the rug, facing the ceiling, eyes
closed. A moment later, the hem of Linda’s robe brushes his
arm and she lies down next to him, takes his hand.

“Everything OK?”

“It’s just my Gran.” And he tells her about
this date’s significance.

“How did she die?”

“It was stupid. She slipped in the tub and cracked her
skull on the tap. I was off at a friend’s place for the
weekend and no one found her for two days. She lived for a week on
life support, and they pulled the plug. No brain activity. They
wouldn’t let me into the hospital room after the first day.
My Gran practically moved in, though. She raised me after that. I
think that if she hadn’t had to take care of me, she would
have just given up, you know? She’s pretty lonely back home
alone.”

“What about your dad?”

“You know, there used to be a big mystery about that. Gran
and Mom, they were always tragic and secretive when I asked them
about him. I had lots of stories to explain his absence: ran off
with another woman, thrown in jail for running guns, murdered in a
bar fight. I used to be a bit of a celeb at school—lots of
kids didn’t have dads around, but they all knew where their
fathers were. We could always kill an afternoon making up his who
and where and why. Even the teachers got into it, getting all
apologetic when we had to do a genealogy project. I found out the
truth, finally, when I was nineteen. Just looked it up online. It
never occurred to me that my mom would be that secretive about
something that was so easy to find out, so I never
bothered.”

“So, what happened to him?”

“Oh, you know. He and mom split when I was a kid. He moved
back in with his folks in a little town in the Thousand Islands,
near Ottawa. Four or five years later, he got a job planting trees
for a summer up north, and he drowned swimming in a lake during a
party. By the time I found out about him, his folks were dead,
too.”

“Did you tell your friends about him, once you found
out?”

“Oh, by then I’d lost touch with most of them. After
elementary school, we moved across town, to a condo my grandmother
retired into on the lakeshore, out in the suburbs. In high school,
I didn’t really chum around much, so there wasn’t
anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was
such a big secret, and she said it wasn’t, she said
she’d told me years before, but she hadn’t. I think
that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before
telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she
hadn’t told me. We got into a big fight over that.”

“That’s a weird story, dude. So, do you think of
yourself as an orphan?”

Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a
laugh. “God, that’s so—Dickensian. No
one ever asked me that before. I don’t think so. You
can’t really be an adult and be an orphan—you’re
just someone with dead parents. And I didn’t find out about
my dad until I was older, so I always figured that he was alive and
well somewhere. What about your folks?”

Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her
lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily
so—somewhere in telling his story, he’s figured out
that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they’re just
getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple,
which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a
round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky
square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him,
then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.

“I told you about my mom, right? Wanted to act—who
doesn’t? But she was too conscious of the cliche to mope
about it. She got some little parts—nothing fab, then went on
to work at a Sony dealership. Ten years later, she bought a
franchise. Dad and second-wife run a retreat in West Hollywood for
sexually dysfunctional couples. No sibs. Happy childhood. Happy
adolescence. Largely unsatisfying adulthood, to date.”

“Wow, you sound like you’ve practiced
that.”

She tweaks his nose, then drapes her arm across his chest.
“Got me. Always writing my autobiography in my
head—gotta have a snappy opener when I’m cornered by
the stalkerazzi.”

He laces his fingers in hers, moves close enough to smell her
toothpaste-sweet breath. “Tell me something unrehearsed about
growing up.”

“That’s a stupid request.” Her tone is
snappish, and her fingers stiffen in his.

“Why?”

“It just is! Don’t try to get under my skin, OK? My
childhood was fine.”

“Look, I don’t want to piss you off. I’m just
trying to get to know you. Because... you know... I like you. A
lot. And I try to get to know the people I like.”

She smiles her lopsided dimple. “Sorry, I just don’t
like people who try to mess with my head. My problem, not yours.
OK, something unrehearsed.” She closes her eyes and treats
him to the smooth pinkness of her eyelids, and keeps them closed as
she speaks. “I once stole a Veddic Series 7 off my
mom’s lot, when I was fifteen. It had all the girly safety
features, including a tracker and a panic button, but I
didn’t think my mom would miss it. I just wanted to take it
out for a drive. It’s LA, right? No wheels, no life. So I get
as far as Venice Beach, and I’m cruising the
Boardwalk—this was just after it went topless, so I was
swinging in the breeze—and suddenly the engine dies, right in
the middle of this clump of out-of-towners, frat kids from Kansas
or something. Mom had called in a dealer override and Sony shut
down the engine by radio.”

“Wow, what did you do?”

“Well, I put my shirt back on. Then I popped the hood and
poked randomly at the engine, pulling out the user-servicables and
reseating them. The thing was newer than new, right? How could it
be broken already? The fratboys all gathered around and gave me
advice, and I played up all bitchy, you know, ‘I’ve
been fixing these things since I was ten, get lost,’
whatever. They loved it. I was all spunky. A couple of them were
pretty cute even, and the attention was great. I felt
safe—lots of people hanging around, they weren’t going
to try anything funny. Only I was starting to freak out about the
car—it was really dead. I’d reseated everything,
self-tested every component, double-checked the fuel. Nothing
nothing nothing! I was going to have to call a tow and my mom was
going to kill me.

“So I’m trying not to let it get to me, trying to
keep it all cool, but I’m not doing a great job. The frat
guys are all standing too close and they smell like beer, and
I’m not trying to be perky anymore, just want them to stay!
away! but they won’t back off. I’m trying not to
cry.

“And then the cops showed up. Not real cops, but
Sony’s Vehicle Recovery Squad. All dressed up in Vaio gear,
stylish as a Pepsi ad, packing lots of semilethals and silvery
aeorosol shut-up-and-be-still juice, ready to nab the bad, bad perp
who boosted this lovely Veddic Series 7 from Mom’s lot. Part
of the franchise package, that kind of response. It took me a
second to figure it out—Mom didn’t know it was
me who had the car, so she’d called in a theft and bam,
I was about to get arrested. The frat rats tried to run away, which
is a bad idea, you just don’t ever run from
cops—stupid, stupid, stupid. They ended up rolling around on
the ground, screaming and trying to pull their faces off. It took,
like a second. I threw my hands in the air. ‘Don’t
shoot!’ They gassed me anyway.

“So then I was rolling around on the ground,
feeling like my sinuses were trying to explode out of my face.
Feeling like my eyeballs were melting. Feeling like my lungs were
all shriveled up into raisins. I couldn’t scream, I
couldn’t even breathe. By the time I could even roll over and
open my eyes, they had me cuffed: ankles and wrists in zapstraps
that were so tight, they felt like piano wire. I was a cool fifteen
year old, but not that cool. I started up the waterworks,
boohoohoo, couldn’t shut it down, couldn’t even get
angry. I just wanted to die. The Sony cops had seen it all before,
so they put a tarp down on the Veddic’s backseat upholstery,
threw me in it, then rolled it into their recovery truck and drove
me to the police station.

“I puked on the tarp twice before they got me there, and
almost did it a third time on the way to booking. It got up my
sinuses and down my throat, too. I couldn’t stop gagging,
couldn’t stop crying, but by now I was getting pissed.
I’d been raised on the whole Sony message: ‘A Car for
the Rest of Us,’ gone with Mom to their Empowerment Seminars,
wore the little tee shirts and the temporary tats and chatted up
the tire-kickers about the Sony Family while Mom was busy. This
wasn’t the Sony Family I knew.

“I was tied up on the floor beside the desk
sergeant’s counter, and a Sony cop was filling in my
paperwork, and so I spat out the crud from my mouth, stopped
sniveling, hawked back my spit and put on my best voice.
‘This isn’t necessary, sir,’ I said.
‘I’m not a thief. My mother owns the dealership. It was
wrong to take the car, but I’m sure she didn’t intend
for this to happen. Certainly, I don’t need to be tied up in
here. Please, take off the restraints—they’re cutting
off my circulation.’ The Sony cop flipped up his goofy little
facemask and squinted at me, then shook his head and went back to
his paperwork.

“‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look! I’m not a
criminal. This is a misunderstanding. If you check my ID and call
my mother, we can work this all out. Look!’ I read his name
off his epaulettes. ‘Look! Officer Langtree! Just let me up
and we’ll sort this out like adults. Come on, I don’t
blame you—I’m glad!—you were right to take me in.
This is my mom’s merchandise; it’s good that you went
after the thief and recovered the car. But now you know the truth,
it’s my mother’s car, and if you just let me up,
I’m sure we can work this out. Please, Officer Langtree. My
wallet’s in my back pocket. Just get it out and check my ID
before you do this.’

“But he just went on filling in the paperwork. ‘Why?
Why won’t you just take a second to check? Why
not?’

“He turned around again, looked at me for a long time, and
I was sure he was going to check, that it was all going to be fine,
but then he said, ‘Look, I’ve had about as much of your
bullshit as I’m going to take, little girl. Shut your hole or
I’ll gag you. I just want to get out of here and back to my
job, all right?’

“‘What?’ I said, and it sounded like a shriek
to me. ‘What did you say to me? What the hell did you say to
me? Didn’t you hear what I said? That’s my
mother’s car—she owns the lot I took it off of. Do
you honestly think she wants you to do this? This is the stupidest
goddamned thing—’

“‘That’s it,’ he said, and took a little
silver micropore hood off his belt, the kind that you cinch up
under the chin so the person inside can’t talk? I started
squirming away then, pleading with him, and I finally caught the
desk sergeant’s eye. ‘He can’t do this! Please!
Don’t let him do this! I’m in a police
station—why are you letting him do this?’

“And the cop smiled and said, ‘You’re
absolutely right, little girl. That’s enough of that.’
The Sony cop didn’t pay any attention. He grabbed my head and
stuffed it into the hood and tried to get the chin strap in place.
I shook my head as best as I could, and then the hood was being
taken off my head again, and the Sony cop looked like he wanted to
nail the other cop, but he didn’t. The desk sergeant bent
down and cut my straps, then helped me to my feet.

“‘You’re not going to give me any trouble, are
you?’ he said, as he led me around to a nice, ergo office
chair.

“‘No sir!’

“‘You just sit there, then, and I’ll be with
you in a moment.’

“I sat down and rubbed my wrists and ankles. My left ankle
was oozing blood from where it had been rubbed raw. I
couldn’t believe that the Sony Family could inflict such
indignities on my cute little person. I was so goddamn
self-righteous, and I know I was smirking as the desk sergeant
chewed out the Sony cop, taking down his badge number and so on so
that I’d have it.

“I thanked the cop profusely, and I kept on thanking him
as he booked me and printed me and took my mug shots. I was joking
and maybe even flirting a little. I was a cute fifteen-year-old and
I knew it. After the nastiness with the Sony cops, being processed
into the criminal justice system seemed mild and inoffensive. It
didn’t really occur to me that I was being arrested
until my good pal the cop asked me to turn out my pockets before he
put me in the cell.

“‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Sergeant Lorenzi,
wait! You don’t have to put me in a cell, do you,
Sergeant Lorenzi? Sergeant Lorenzi! I don’t need to go into a
cell! Let me call my mom, she’ll come down and drop the
charges, and I can wait here. I’ll help out. I can get
coffee. Sergeant Lorenzi!’

“For a second, it looked like he was going to go through
with it. Then he relented and I spent the next couple hours
fetching and filing and even running out for
coffee—that’s how much he trusted me—while we
waited for Mom to show up. I was actually feeling pretty good about
it by the time she arrived. Of course, that didn’t last too
long.

“She came through the door like Yosemite Sam, frothing at
the chops and howling for my blood. She wanted to press charges,
see me locked up to teach me a lesson. She didn’t care how
the Sony cops had gassed and trussed me—as far as she was
concerned, I’d betrayed her and nothing was going to make it
right. She kept howling for the sergeant to give her the papers to
sign, she wanted to swear out a complaint, and he just let her run
out of steam, his face perfectly expressionless until she was
done.

“‘All right then, Mrs. Walchuk, all right. You swear
out the complaint, and we’ll hold her overnight until her
bail hearing. We only got the one holding cell, though, you
understand. No juvenile facility. Rough crowd. A couple of biowar
enthusiasts in there right now, caught ’em trying to thrax a
bus terminal; a girl who killed her pimp and nailed his privates to
the door of his hotel room before she took off; a couple of hard
old drunks. No telling what else will come in today. We take away
their knives and boots and purses, but those girls like to mess up
fresh young things, scar them with the bars or their nails. We
can’t watch them all the time.’ He was leaning right
across the desk at my mom, cold and still, and then he nudged my
foot with his foot and I knew that he was yanking her chain.

“‘Is that what you want, then,
ma’am?’

“Mom looked like she wanted to tell him yes, go ahead,
call his bluff, but he was too good at it. She broke. ‘No,
it’s not,’ she said. ‘I’ll take her home
and deal with her there.’

“‘That’s fundamentally sound,’ he said.
‘And Linda, you give me a call if you want to file a
complaint against Sony. We have secam footage of the Boardwalk and
the Station House if you need it, and I have that guy’s badge
ID, too.’

“Mom looked alarmed, and I held out my raw, bruisey wrists
to her. ‘They gassed me before they took me in.’

“‘Did you run? You never run from the cops,
Linda, you should have known better—’

“I didn’t run. I put my arms in the air and they
gassed me and tied me up and took me in.’

“‘That can’t be, Linda. You must have done
something—’ Mom always was ready to believe
that I deserved whatever trouble I got into. She was the only one
who didn’t care how cute I was.

“‘No mom. I put my hands in the air. I surrendered.
They got me anyway. They didn’t care. It’ll be on the
tape. I’ll get it from sergeant Lorenzi when I file my
complaint.’

“‘You’ll do no such thing. You stole a car,
you endangered lives, and now you want to go sniveling to the
authorities because Sony played a little rough when they brought
you in? You committed a criminal act, Linda. You got
treated like a criminal.’

“I wanted to smack her. I knew that this was really about
not embarrassing her in front of the Sony Family, the nosy chattery
ladies with the other franchises that Mom competed against for
whuffie and bragging rights. But I’d learned something about
drawing flies with honey that afternoon. The Sergeant could have
made things very hard on me, but by giving him a little sugar, I
turned it into an almost fun afternoon.

“Mom took me home and screamed herself raw, and I played
it all very contrite, then walked over to the minimall so that I
could buy some saline solution for my eyes, which were still as red
as stoplights. We never spoke of it again, and on my sixteenth
birthday, Mom gave me the keys to a Veddic Series 8, and the first
thing I did was download new firmware for the antitheft transponder
that killed it. Two months later, it was stolen. I haven’t
driven a Sony since.”

Linda smiles and then purses her lips. “Unrehearsed
enough?”

Art shakes his head. “Wow. What a story.”

“Do you want to kiss me now?” Linda says,
conversationally.

“I believe I do,” Art says, and he does.

Linda pulls the back of his head to hers with one arm, and with
the other, she half-shrugs out her robe. Art pulls his shirt up to
his armpits, feels the scorching softness of her chest on his, and
groans. His erection grinds into her mons through his Jockey
shorts, and he groans again as she sucks his tongue into her mouth
and masticates it just shy of hard enough to hurt.

She breaks off and reaches down for the waistband of his Jockeys
and his whole body arches in anticipation.

Then his comm rings.

Again.

“Fuck!” Art says, just as Linda says,
“Shit!” and they both snort a laugh. Linda pulls his
hand to her nipple again and Art shivers, sighs, and reaches for
his comm, which won’t stop ringing.

“It’s me,” Fede says.

“Jesus, Fede. What is it?”

“What is it? Art, you haven’t been to the office for
more than four hours in a week. It’s going on noon, and you
still aren’t here.” Fede’s voice is hot and
unreasoning.

Art feels his own temper rise in response. Where the hell did
Fede get off, anyway? “So fucking what, Fede? I
don’t actually work for you, you know. I’ve been taking
care of stuff offsite.”

“Oh, sure. Art, if you get in trouble, I’ll get in
trouble, and you know exactly what I mean.”

“I’m not in trouble, Fede. I’m taking
the day off—why don’t you call me tomorrow?”

“What the hell does that mean? You can’t just
‘take the day off.’ I wrote the goddamned
procedure. You have to fill in the form and get it signed by your
supervisor. It needs to be documented. Are you
trying to undermine me?”

“You are so goddamned paranoid, Federico. I got
mugged last night, all right? I’ve been in a police station
for the past eighteen hours straight. I am going to take a shower
and I am going to take a nap and I am going to get a massage, and I
am not going into the office and I am not going
to fill in any forms. This is not about you.”

Fede pauses for a moment, and Art senses him marshalling his bad
temper for another salvo. “I don’t give a shit, Art. If
you’re not coming into the office, you tell me, you hear? The
VP of HR is going berserk, and I know exactly what it’s
about. He is on to us, you hear me? Every day that you’re
away and I’m covering for your ass, he gets more and more
certain. If you keep this shit up, we’re both
dead.”

“Hey, fuck you, Fede.” Art is surprised to hear the
words coming out of his mouth, but once they’re out, he
decides to go with them. “You can indulge your paranoid
fantasies to your heart’s content, but don’t drag me
into them. I got mugged last night. I had a near-fatal car crash a
week ago. If the VP of HR wants to find out why I haven’t
been in the office, he can send me an email and I’ll tell him
exactly what’s going on, and if he doesn’t like it, he
can toss my goddamned salad. But I don’t report to you. If
you want to have a discussion, you call me and act like a human
goddamned being. Tomorrow. Good-bye, Fede.” Art rings the
comm off and snarls at it, then switches it off, switches off the
emergency override, and briefly considers tossing it out the
goddamned window onto the precious English paving stones below.
Instead, he hurls it into the soft cushions of the sofa.

He turns back to Linda and makes a conscious effort to wipe the
snarl off his face. He ratchets a smile onto his lips.
“Sorry, sorry. Last time, I swear.” He crawls over to
her on all fours. She’s pulled her robe tight around her, and
he slides a finger under the collar and slides it aside and darts
in for a kiss on the hollow of her collarbone. She shies away and
drops her cheek to her shoulder, shielding the affected area.

“I’m not—” she starts. “The
moment’s passed, OK? Why don’t we just cuddle,
OK?”

12.

Art was at his desk at O’Malley House the next day when
Fede knocked on his door. Fede was bearing a small translucent
gift-bag made of some cunning combination of rough handmade paper
and slick polymer. Art looked up from his comm and waved at the
door.

Fede came in and put the parcel on Art’s desk. Art looked
askance at Fede, and Fede just waved at the bag with a go-ahead
gesture. Art felt for the catch that would open the bag without
tearing the materials, couldn’t find it immediately, and
reflexively fired up his comm and started to make notes on how a
revised version of the bag could provide visual cues showing how to
open it. Fede caught him at it and they traded grins.

Art probed the bag’s orifice a while longer, then happened
upon the release. The bag sighed apart, falling in three petals,
and revealed its payload: a small, leather-worked box with a simple
brass catch. Art flipped the catch and eased the box open. Inside,
in a fitted foam cavity, was a gray lump of stone.

“It’s an axe-head,” Fede said.
“It’s 200,000 years old.”

Art lifted it out of the box carefully and turned it about,
admiring the clean tool marks from its shaping. It had heft and
brutal simplicity, and a thin spot where a handle must have been
lashed once upon a time. Art ran his fingertips over the smooth
tool marks, over the tapered business end, where the stone had been
painstakingly flaked into an edge. It was perfect.

Now that he was holding it, it was so obviously an axe, so
clearly an axe. It needed no instruction. It explained itself. I am
an axe. Hit things with me. Art couldn’t think of a single
means by which it could be improved.

“Fede,” he said, “Fede, this is
incredible—”

“I figured we needed to bury the hatchet, huh?”

“God, that’s awful. Here’s a tip: When you
give a gift like this, just leave humor out of it, OK? You
don’t have the knack.” Art slapped him on the shoulder
to show him he was kidding, and reverently returned the axe to its
cavity. “That is really one hell of a gift, Fede. Thank
you.”

Fede stuck his hand out. Art shook it, and some of the
week’s tension melted away.

“Now, you’re going to buy me lunch,” Fede
said.

“Deal.”

They toddled off to Picadilly and grabbed seats at the counter
of a South Indian place for a businessmen’s lunch of thali
and thick mango lassi, which coated their tongues in alkaline
sweetness that put out the flames from the spiced veggies. Both men
were sweating by the time they ordered their second round of lassi
and Art had his hands on his belly, amazed as ever that something
as insubstantial as the little platter’s complement of
veggies and naan could fill him as efficiently as it had.

“What are you working on now?” Fede asked,
suppressing a curry-whiffing belch.

“Same shit,” Art said. “There are a million
ways to make the service work. The rights-societies want lots of
accounting and lots of pay-per-use. MassPike hates that. It’s
a pain in the ass to manage, and the clickthrough licenses and
warnings they want to slap on are heinous. People are going to
crash their cars fucking around with the ‘I Agree’
buttons. Not to mention they want to require a firmware check on
every stereo system that gets a song, make sure that this
week’s copy-protection is installed. So I’m coopering
up all these user studies with weasels from the legal departments
at the studios, where they just slaver all over this stuff, talking
about how warm it all makes them feel to make sure that
they’re compensating artists and how grateful they are for
the reminders to keep their software up to date and shit. I’m
modeling a system that has a clickthrough every time you cue up a
new song, too. It’s going to be perfect: the rights-societies
are going to love it, and I’ve handpicked the peer review
group at V/DT, stacked it up with total assholes who love manuals
and following rules. It’s going to sail through
approval.”

Fede grunted. “You don’t think it’ll be too
obvious?”

Art laughed. “There is no such thing as too obvious in
this context, man. These guys, they hate the end user, and for
years they’ve been getting away with it because all their
users are already used to being treated like shit at the post
office and the tube station. I mean, these people grew up with
coin-operated stoves, for chrissakes! They pay television tax!
Feed ’em shit and they’ll ask you for second helpings.
Beg you for ’em! So no, I don’t think it’ll be
too obvious. They’ll mock up the whole system and march right
into MassPike with it, grinning like idiots. Don’t worry
about a thing.”

“OK, OK. I get it. I won’t worry.”

Art signalled the counterman for their bill. The counterman
waved distractedly in the manner of a harried restaurateur dealing
with his regulars, and said something in Korean to the busgirl, who
along with the Vietnamese chef and the Congolese sous chef, lent
the joint a transworld sensibility that made it a favorite among
the painfully global darlings of O’Malley House. The bus-girl
found a pad and started totting up numbers, then keyed them into a
Point-of-Sale terminal, which juiced Art’s comm with an
accounting for their lunch. This business with hand-noting
everything before entering it into the PoS had driven Art to
distraction when he’d first encountered it. He’d
assumed that the terminal’s UI was such that a
computer-illiterate busgirl couldn’t reliably key in the data
without having it in front of her, and for months he’d cited
it in net-bullshit sessions as more evidence of the pervasive
user-hostility that characterized the whole damned GMT.

He’d finally tried out his rant on the counterman, one
foreigner to another, just a little Briton-bashing session between
two refugees from the Colonial Jackboot. To his everlasting
surprise, the counterman had vigorously defended the system, saying
that he liked the PoS data-entry system just fine, but that the
stack of torn-off paper stubs from the busgirl’s receipt book
was a good visualization tool, letting him eyeball the customer
volume from hour to hour by checking the spike beside the till, and
the rubberbanded stacks of yellowing paper lining his
cellar’s shelves gave him a wonderfully physical evidence of
the growing success of his little eatery. There was a lesson there,
Art knew, though he’d yet to codify it. User mythology was
tricky that way.

Every time Art scribbled a tip into his comm and squirted it
back at the PoS, he considered this little puzzle, eyes unfocusing
for a moment while his vision turned inwards. As his eyes snapped
back into focus, he noticed the young lad sitting on the long leg
of the ell formed by the counter. He had bully short hair and broad
shoulders, and a sneer that didn’t quite disappear as he
shoveled up the dhal with his biodegradable bamboo disposable
spork.

He knew that guy from somewhere. The guy caught him staring and
they locked eyes for a moment, and in that instant Art knew who the
guy was. It was Tom, whom he had last seen stabbing at him with a
tazer clutched in one shaking fist, face twisted in fury. Tom
wasn’t wearing his killsport armor, just nondescript athletic
wear, and he wasn’t with Lester and Tony, but it was him. Art
watched Tom cock his head to jog his memory, and then saw Tom
recognize him. Uh-oh.

“We have to go. Now,” he said to Fede, standing and
walking away quickly, hand going to his comm. He stopped short of
dialing 999, though—he wasn’t up for another
police-station all-nighter. He got halfway up Picadilly before
looking over his shoulder, and he saw Fede shouldering his way
through the lunchtime crowd, looking pissed. A few paces behind him
came Tom, face contorted in a sadistic snarl.

Art did a little two-step of indecision, moving towards Fede,
then away from him. He met Tom’s eyes again, and Tom’s
ferocious, bared teeth spurred him on. He turned abruptly into the
tube station, waved his comm at a turnstile and dove into the thick
of the crowd heading down the stairs to the Elephant and Castle
platform. His comm rang.

“What is wrong with you, man?” Fede
said.

“One of the guys who mugged me,” he hissed.
“He was sitting right across from us. He’s a couple
steps behind you. I’m in the tube station. I’ll ride a
stop and catch a cab back to the office.”

“He’s behind me? Where?”

Art’s comm lit up with a grainy feed from Fede’s
comm. It jiggled as Fede hustled through the crowd.

“Jesus, Fede, stop! Don’t go to the goddamned tube
station—he’ll follow you here.”

“Where do you want me to go? I got to go back to the
office.”

“Don’t go there either. Get a cab and circle the
block a couple times. Don’t lead him back.”

“This is stupid. Why don’t I just call the
cops?”

“Don’t bother. They won’t do shit. I’ve
been through this already. I just want to lose that guy and not
have him find me again later.”

“Christ.”

Art squeaked as Tom filled his screen, then passed by, swinging
his head from side to side with saurian rage.

“What?” Fede said.

“That was him. He just walked past you. He must not know
you’re with me. Go back to the office, I’ll meet you
there.”

“That dipshit? Art, he’s all of five feet
tall!”

“He’s a fucking psycho, Fede. Don’t screw
around with him or he’ll give you a Tesla enema.”

Fede winced. “I hate tazers.”

“The train is pulling in. I’ll talk to you
later.”

“OK, OK.”

Art formed up in queue with the rest of the passengers and
shuffled through the gas chromatograph, tensing up a little as it
sniffed his personal space for black powder residue. Once on board,
he tore a sani-wipe from the roll in the ceiling, ignoring the V/DT
ad on it, and grabbed the stainless steel rail with it, stamping on
the drifts of sani-wipe mulch on the train’s floor.

He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, willed his
heart to stop pounding. He was still juiced with adrenaline, and
his mind raced. He needed to do something constructive with his
time, but his mind kept wandering. Finally, he gave in and let it
wander.

Something about the counterman, about his slips of paper, about
the MassPike. It was knocking around in his brain and he just
couldn’t figure out how to bring it to the fore. The
counterman kept his slips in the basement so that he could sit
among them and see how his business had grown, every slip a person
served, a ring on the till, money in the bank. Drivers on the
MassPike who used traffic jams to download music from nearby cars
and then paid to license the songs. Only they didn’t. They
circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg
operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for
sheer volume. Some people drove in promiscuous mode, collecting
every song in every car on the turnpike, cruising the tunnels that
riddled Boston like mobile pirate radio stations, dumping their
collections to other drivers when it came time to quit the turnpike
and settle up for their music at the toll booth.

It was these war-drivers that MassPike was really worried about.
Admittedly, they actually made the system go. Your average
fartmobile driver had all of ten songs in his queue, and the
short-range, broadband connection you had on MassPike meant that if
you were stuck in a jam of these cars, your selection would be
severely limited. The war-drivers, though, were mobile jukeboxes.
The highway patrol had actually seized cars with over 300,000
tracks on their drives. Without these fat caches on the highway,
MassPike would have to spend a fortune on essentially replicating
the system with their own mobile libraries.

The war-drivers were the collective memory of the
MassPike’s music-listeners.

Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of MassPike.
Like Dark Ages scholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them
against the depredations of barbarism, passing their collections
carefully from car to car. He’d investigated the highway
patrol reports on these guys, and there were hints there, shadowy
clues of an organized subculture, one with a hierarchy, where
newbies tricked out their storage with libraries of novel and rare
tuneage in a bid to convince the established elite that they were
worthy of joining the collective memory.

Thinking of war-drivers as a collective memory was like staring
at an optical illusion and seeing the vase emerge from the two
faces. Art’s entire perception of the problem involuted
itself in his mind. He heard panting and realized it was him; he
was hyperventilating.

If these guys were the collective memory of the MassPike, that
meant that they were performing a service, reducing
MassPike’s costs significantly. That meant that they were
tastemakers, injecting fresh music into the static world of Boston
drivers. Mmmm. Trace that. Find out how influential they were.
Someone would know—the MassPike had stats on how songs
migrated from car to car. Even without investigating it, Art just
knew that these guys were offsetting millions of dollars
in marketing.

So. So. So. So, feed that culture. War-drivers needed
to be devoted to make it into the subculture. They had to spend
four or five hours a day cruising the freeways to accumulate and
propagate their collections. They couldn’t leave the
MassPike until they found someone to hand their collections off
to.

What if MassPike rewarded these guys? What if MassPike
charged nothing for people with more than, say 50,000
tunes in their cache? Art whipped out his comm and his keyboard and
started making notes, snatching at the silver rail with his
keyboard hand every time the train jerked and threatened to topple
him. That’s how the tube cops found him, once the train
reached Elephant and Castle and they did their rounds, politely but
firmly rousting him.

13.

I am already in as much trouble as I can be, I think. I have
left my room, hit and detonated some poor cafeteria
hash-slinger’s fartmobile, and certainly damned some hapless
secret smoker to employee Hades for his security lapses. When I get
down from here, I will be bound up in a chemical straightjacket.
I’ll be one of the ward-corner droolers, propped up in a
wheelchair in front of the video, tended twice daily for diaper
changes, feeding and re-medication.

That is the worst they can do, and I’m in for it. This
leaves me asking two questions:

1. Why am I so damned eager to be rescued from my rooftop aerie?
I am sunburned and sad, but I am more free than I have been in
weeks.

2. Why am I so reluctant to take further action in the service
of getting someone up onto the roof? I could topple a ventilator
chimney by moving the cinderblocks that hold its apron down and
giving it the shoulder. I could dump rattling handfuls of gravel
down its maw and wake the psychotics below.

I could, but I won’t. Maybe I don’t want to go back
just yet.

They cooked it up between them. The Jersey customers, Fede, and
Linda. I should have known better.

When I landed at Logan, I was full of beans, ready to design and
implement my war-driving scheme for the Jersey customers and
advance the glorious cause of the Eastern Standard Tribe. I
gleefully hopped up and down the coast, chilling in Manhattan for a
day or two, hanging out with Gran in Toronto.

That Linda followed me out made it all even better. We rented
cars and drove them from city to city, dropping them off at the
city limits and switching to top-grade EST public transit, eating
top-grade EST pizza, heads turning to follow the impeccably
dressed, buff couples that strolled the pedestrian-friendly streets
arm in arm. We sat on stoops in Brooklyn with old ladies who talked
softly in the gloaming of the pollution-tinged sunsets while their
grandchildren chased each other down the street. We joined a pickup
game of street-hockey in Boston, yelling “Car!” and
clearing the net every time a fartmobile turned into the
cul-de-sac.

We played like kids. I got commed during working hours and my
evenings were blissfully devoid of buzzes, beeps and alerts. It
surprised the hell out of me when I discovered Fede’s
treachery and Linda’s complicity and found myself flying
cattle class to London to kick Fede’s ass. What an idiot I
am.

I have never won an argument with Fede. I thought I had that
time, of course, but I should have known better. I was hardly back
in Boston for a day before the men with the white coats came to
take me away.

They showed up at the Novotel, soothing and grim, and opened my
room’s keycard reader with a mental-hygiene override. There
were four of them, wiry and fast with the no-nonsense manner of men
who have been unexpectedly hammered by outwardly calm psychopaths.
That I was harmlessly having a rare cigarette on the balcony,
dripping from the shower, made no impression on them. They dropped
their faceplates, moved quickly to the balcony and boxed me in.

One of them recited a Miranda-esque litany that ended with
“Do you understand.” It wasn’t really a question,
but I answered anyway. “No! No I don’t! Who the hell
are you, and what are you doing in my fucking hotel
room?”

In my heart, though, I knew. I’d lived enough of my life
on the hallucinatory edge of sleepdep to have anticipated this
moment during a thousand freakouts. I was being led away to the
sanatorium, because someone, somewhere, had figured out about the
scurrying hamsters in my brain. About time.

As soon as I said the f-word, the guns came out. I tried to
relax. I knew intuitively that this could either be a routine and
impersonal affair, or a screaming, kicking, biting nightmare. I
knew that arriving at the intake in a calm frame of mind would make
the difference between a chemical straightjacket and a sleeping
pill.

The guns were nonlethals, and varied: two kinds of nasty
aerosol, a dart-gun, and a tazer. The tazer captured my attention,
whipping horizontal lightning in the spring breeze. The Tesla
enema, they called it in London. Supposedly club-kids used them
recreationally, but everyone I knew who’d been hit with one
described the experience as fundamentally and uniquely
horrible.

I slowly raised my hands. “I would like to pack a bag, and
I would like to see documentary evidence of your authority. May
I?” I kept my voice as calm as I could, but it cracked on
“May I?”

The reader of the litany nodded slowly. “You tell us what
you want packed and we’ll pack it. Once that’s done,
I’ll show you the committal document, all right?”

“Thank you,” I said.

They drove me through the Route 128 traffic in the sealed and
padded compartment in the back of their van. I was strapped in at
the waist, and strapped over with my shoulders with a padded
harness that reminded me of a rollercoaster restraint. We made slow
progress, jerking and changing lanes at regular intervals. The
traffic signature of 128 was unmistakable.

The intake doctor wanded me for contraband, drew fluids from my
various parts, and made light chitchat with me along the way. It
was the last time I saw him. Before I knew it, a beefy orderly had
me by the arm and was leading me to my room. He had a thick Eastern
European accent, and he ran down the house rules for me in battered
English. I tried to devote my attention to it, to forget the
slack-eyed ward denizens I’d passed on my way in. I succeeded
enough to understand the relationship of my legcuff, the door frame
and the elevators. The orderly fished in his smock and produced a
hypo.

“For sleepink,” he said.

Panic, suppressed since my arrival, welled up and burst over.
“Wait!” I said. “What about my things? I had a
bag with me.”

“Talk to doctor in morning,” he said, gesturing with
the hypo, fitting it with a needle-and-dosage cartridge and popping
the sterile wrap off with a thumbswitch. “Now, for
sleepink.” He advanced on me.

I’d been telling myself that this was a chance to rest, to
relax and gather my wits. Soon enough, I’d sort things out
with the doctors and I’d be on my way. I’d argue my way
out of it. But here came Boris Badinoff with his magic needle, and
all reason fled. I scrambled back over the bed and pressed against
the window.

“It’s barely three,” I said, guessing at the
time in the absence of my comm. “I’m not tired.
I’ll go to sleep when I am.”

“For sleepink,” he repeated, in a more soothing
tone.

“No, that’s all right. I’m tired enough. Long
night last night. I’ll just lie down and nap now, all right?
No need for needles, OK?”

He grabbed my wrist. I tried to tug it out of his grasp, to
squirm away. There’s a lot of good, old-fashioned dirty
fighting in Tai Chi—eye-gouging, groin punches, hold-breaks
and come-alongs—and they all fled me. I thrashed like a fish
on a line as he ran the hypo over the crook of my elbow until the
vein-sensing LED glowed white. He jabbed down with it and I felt a
prick. For a second, I thought that it hadn’t taken
effect—I’ve done enough chemical sleep in my years with
the Tribe that I’ve developed quite a tolerance for most
varieties—but then I felt that unmistakable heaviness in my
eyelids, the melatonin crash that signalled the onslaught of
merciless rest. I collapsed into bed.

I spent the next day in a drugged stupor. I’ve become
quite accustomed to functioning in a stupor over the years, but
this was different. No caffeine, for starters. They fed me and I
had a meeting with a nice doctor who ran it down for me. I was here
for observation pending a competency hearing in a week. I had seven
days to prove that I wasn’t a danger to myself or others, and
if I could, the judge would let me go.

“It’s like I’m a drug addict, huh?” I
said to the doctor, who was used to non sequiturs.

“Sure, sure it is.” He shifted in the hard chair
opposite my bed, getting ready to go.

“No, really, I’m not just running my mouth.
It’s like this: I don’t think I have a problem
here. I think that my way of conducting my life is perfectly
harmless. Like a speedfreak who thinks that she’s just having
a great time, being ultraproductive and coming out ahead of the
game. But her friends, they’re convinced she’s
destroying herself—they see the danger she’s putting
herself in, they see her health deteriorating. So they put her into
rehab, kicking and screaming, where she stays until she figures it
out.

“So, it’s like I’m addicted to being nuts. I
have a nonrational view of the world around me. An
inaccurate view. You are meant to be the objective observer,
to make such notes as are necessary to determine if I’m
seeing things properly, or through a haze of nutziness. For as long
as I go on taking my drug—shooting up my craziness—you
keep me here. Once I stop, once I accept the objective truth of
reality, you let me go. What then? Do I become a recovering
nutcase? Do I have to stand ever-vigilant against the siren song of
craziness?”

The doctor ran his hands through his long hair and bounced his
knee up and down. “You could put it that way, I
guess.”

“So tell me, what’s the next step? What is my
optimum strategy for providing compelling evidence of my
repudiation of my worldview?”

“Well, that’s where the analogy breaks down. This
isn’t about anything demonstrable. There’s no one thing
we look for in making our diagnosis. It’s a collection of
things, a protocol for evaluating you. It doesn’t happen
overnight, either. You were committed on the basis of evidence that
you had made threats to your coworkers due to a belief that they
were seeking to harm you.”

“Interesting. Can we try a little thought experiment,
Doctor? Say that your coworkers really were seeking to
harm you—this is not without historical precedent, right?
They’re seeking to sabotage you because you’ve
discovered some terrible treachery on their part, and they want to
hush you up. So they provoke a reaction from you and use it as the
basis for an involuntary committal. How would you, as a medical
professional, distinguish that scenario from one in which the
patient is genuinely paranoid and delusional?”

The doctor looked away. “It’s in the
protocol—we find it there.”

“I see,” I said, moving in for the kill. “I
see. Where would I get more information on the protocol? I’d
like to research it before my hearing.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “we
don’t provide access to medical texts to our
patients.”

“Why not? How can I defend myself against a charge if
I’m not made aware of the means by which my defense is
judged? That hardly seems fair.”

The doctor stood and smoothed his coat, turned his badge’s
lanyard so that his picture faced outwards. “Art,
you’re not here to defend yourself. You’re here so that
we can take a look at you and understand what’s going on. If
you have been set up, we’ll discover it—”

“What’s the ratio of real paranoids to people
who’ve been set up, in your experience?”

“I don’t keep stats on that sort of
thing—”

“How many paranoids have been released because they were
vindicated?”

“I’d have to go through my case
histories—”

“Is it more than ten?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so—”

“More than five?”

“Art, I don’t think—”

“Have any paranoids ever been vindicated? Is this
observation period anything more than a formality en route to
committal? Come on, Doctor, just let me know where I
stand.”

“Art, we’re on your side here. If you want to make
this easy on yourself, then you should understand that. The nurse
will be in with your lunch and your meds in a few minutes, then
you’ll be allowed out on the ward. I’ll speak to you
there more, if you want.”

“Doctor, it’s a simple question: Has anyone ever
been admitted to this facility because it was believed he had
paranoid delusions, and later released because he was indeed the
center of a plot?”

“Art, it’s not appropriate for me to discuss other
patients’ histories—”

“Don’t you publish case studies? Don’t those
contain confidential information disguised with
pseudonyms?”

“That’s not the point—”

“What is the point? It seems to me that my
optimal strategy here is to repudiate my belief that Fede and Linda
are plotting against me—even if I still believe this
to be true, even if it is true—and profess a belief
that they are my good and concerned friends. In other words, if
they are indeed plotting against me, I must profess to a delusional
belief that they aren’t, in order to prove that I am not
delusional.”

“I read Catch-22 too, Art. That’s not what
this is about, but your attitude isn’t going to help you any
here.” The doctor scribbled on his comm briefly, tapped at
some menus. I leaned across and stared at the screen.

“That looks like a prescription, Doctor.”

“It is. I’m giving you a mild sedative. We
can’t help you until you’re calmer and ready to
listen.”

“I’m perfectly calm. I just disagree with you. I am
the sort of person who learns through debate. Medication
won’t stop that.”

“We’ll see,” the doctor said, and left, before
I could muster a riposte.

I was finally allowed onto the ward, dressed in what the nurses
called “day clothes”—the civilian duds that
I’d packed before leaving the hotel, which an orderly
retrieved for me from a locked closet in my room. The clustered
nuts were watching slackjaw TV, or staring out the windows, or
rocking in place, fidgeting and muttering. I found myself a seat
next to a birdy woman whose long oily hair was parted down the
middle, leaving a furrow in her scalp lined with twin rows of
dandruff. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and seemed the least
stuporous of the lot.

“Hello,” I said to her.

She smiled shyly, then pitched forward and vomited copiously and
noisily between her knees. I shrank back and struggled to keep my
face neutral. A nurse hastened to her side and dropped a plastic
bucket in the stream of puke, which was still gushing out of her
mouth, her thin chest heaving.

“Here, Sarah, in here,” the nurse said, with an air
of irritation.

“Can I help?” I said, ridiculously.

She looked sharply at me. “Art, isn’t it? Why
aren’t you in Group? It’s after one!”

“Group?” I asked.

“Group. In that corner, there.” She gestured at a
collection of sagging sofas underneath one of the ward’s
grilled-in windows. “You’re late, and they’ve
started without you.”

There were four other people there, two women and a young boy,
and a doctor in mufti, identifiable by his shoes—not
slippers—and his staff of office, the almighty
badge-on-a-lanyard.

Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl
to the sofa cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look
at me. The doctor cleared his throat. “Group, this is Art.
Glad you made it, Art. You’re a little late, but we’re
just getting started here, so that’s OK. This is Lucy,
Fatima, and Manuel. Why don’t you have a seat?” His
voice was professionally smooth and stultifying.

I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust
motes that danced in the sun streaming through the windows. It also
exhaled a breath of trapped ancient farts, barf-smell, and
antiseptic, the parfum de asylum that gradually numbed my
nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap
and tried to look attentive.

“All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here,
so you don’t have to worry about not knowing what’s
what. There are no right or wrong things. The only rules are that
you can’t interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize, you
have to criticize the idea, and not the person who said it. All
right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. Let’s get
started.”

“Well, aren’t you eager?” the doctor said
warmly. “OK. Manuel was just telling us about his
friends.”

“They’re not my friends,” Manuel said angrily.
“They’re the reason I’m here. I hate
them.”

“Go on,” the doctor said.

“I already told you, yesterday! Tony and Musafir,
they’re trying to get rid of me. I make them look bad, so
they want to get rid of me.”

“Why do you think you make them look bad?”

“Because I’m better than them—I’m
smarter, I dress better, I get better grades, I score more goals.
The girls like me better. They hate me for it.”

“Oh yeah, you’re the cat’s ass, pookie,”
Lucy said. She was about fifteen, voluminously fat, and her full
lips twisted in an elaborate sneer as she spoke.

“Lucy,” the doctor said patiently, favoring her with
a patronizing smile. “That’s not cool, OK? Criticize
the idea, not the person, and only when it’s your turn,
OK?”

Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.

“All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any
positive suggestions for Manuel?”

Stony silence.

“OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some
of us are good at others. Your friends don’t hate you, and
I’m sure that if you think about it, you’ll know that
you don’t hate them. Didn’t they come visit you last
weekend? Successful people are well liked, and you’re no
exception. We’ll come back to this tomorrow—why
don’t you spend the time until then thinking of three
examples of how your friends showed you that they liked you, and
you can tell us about it tomorrow?”

Manuel stared out the window.

“OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you’re
here.”

“I’m in for observation. There’s a competency
hearing at the end of the week.”

Lisa snorted and Fatima giggled.

The doctor ignored them. “But tell us why you
think you ended up here.”

“You want the whole story?”

“Whatever parts you think are important.”

“It’s a Tribal thing.”

“I see,” the doctor said.

“It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be
that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most
like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived
near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people
you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden
days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances
were that you’d grow up so immersed in the local doctrine
that you’d never even think to question it. If you were a
genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of
thinking, and if you could pull it off, you’d either gather
up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you’d go
somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little
colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though,
people who didn’t get along with their neighbors just moped
around until they died.”

“Very interesting,” the doctor said, interrupting
smoothly, “but you were going to tell us how you ended up
here.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, “this isn’t a history
lesson, it’s Group. Get to the point.”

“I’m getting there,” I said. “It just
takes some background if you’re going to understand it. Now,
once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out
about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along
with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay
and from a big city, chances were that you could figure out where
other gay people hung out and go and—” I waved my
hands, “be gay, right? But if you were from a small
town, you might not even know that there was such a thing as being
gay—you might think it was just a perversion. But as time
went by, the gay people in the big cities started making a bigger
and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all the information
that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that
information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved
to the big cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.

“So back when the New World was forming and sorting out
its borders and territories, information was flowing pretty well.
You had telegraphs, you had the Pony Express, you had thousands of
little newspapers that got carried around on railroads and
streetcars and steamers, and it wasn’t long before everyone
knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia.
People immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based
on what sort of people they wanted to be with, which ideas they
liked best. A lot of it was religious, but that was just on the
surface—underneath it all was aesthetics. You wanted to go
somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood
prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where
shops sold goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at
play, too, of course—jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but
the tug of finding people like you is like gravity. Lots of things
work against gravity, but gravity always wins in the end—in
the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with
the people that are most like them that they can find.”

I was warming to my subject now, in that flow state that great
athletes get into when they just know where to swing their bat,
where to plant their foot. I knew that I was working up a great
rant.

“Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we
begin to mediate almost all of our communication over networks. Why
walk down the hallway to ask a coworker a question, when you can
just send email? You don’t need to interrupt them, and you
can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer,
you can just open the message again and look at the response.
There’re all kinds of ways to interact with our friends over
the network: we can play hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures,
code, music, funny articles, metric fuckloads of porn... The
interaction is high-quality! Sure, you gain three pounds every year
you spend behind the desk instead of walking down the hall to ask
your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that’s a small
price to pay.

“So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona,
but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are
eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your
desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles
you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South
Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read
their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the
kind of people who’d really appreciate you for who you are.
In the old days, you’d pack your bags and hitchhike across
the country and move to your community. But you’re sixteen,
and that’s a pretty scary step.

“Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before
school, and all night, they’re comming in, talking trash,
sending around photos, chatting. Online, you can be a peer. You can
hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with one hand
while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

“Only you can’t. You can’t, because they chat
at seven AM while they’re getting ready for school. They chat
at five PM, while they’re working on their homework. Their
late nights end at three AM. But those are their local
times, not yours. If you get up at seven, they’re already at
school, ’cause it’s ten there.

“So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at
four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine,
’cause that’s when they go to bed. Used to be that it
was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind
of thing, but now it’s anyone who doesn’t fit in. The
geniuses and lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They
choose their peers based on similarity, not geography, and they
keep themselves awake at the same time as them. But you need to
make some nod to localness, too—gotta be at work with
everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it’s open, gotta
buy your groceries. You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up
sneaking naps in the middle of the day, or after dinner, trying to
reconcile biological imperatives with cultural ones. Needless to
say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home, and
drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of
choice.

“So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are
really secret agents for some other time zone, some other way of
looking at the world, some other zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes,
you can change allegiance by doing nothing more that resetting your
alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to each
other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That
may sound extreme, but this is what it comes down to.

“Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos.
Traditions. Ways of getting things done. They’re competitive.
They may not all be based on time-zones. There are knitting Tribes
and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but
they’ve always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more
than a sub-culture. It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural
fissioning of fan-fiction or knitting into a full-blown conspiracy.
Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A
Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman’s restaurant, or
give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because of
xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my
Tribesman’s taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a
way that I’m comfortable with, whether I’m in San
Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be
palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will
be a good read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the
exacting standards of my Tribe.

“Like I said, though, unless you’re at ground zero,
in the Tribe’s native time zone, your sleep sched is just
raped. You live on sleepdep and chat and secret agentry
until it’s second nature. You’re cranky and subrational
most of the time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint
themselves on the back of your lids, demanding their time, almost
as heavy as gravity, almost as remorseless. There’s a lot of
flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes. They’re more
fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built up
incredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they
were first recognized—most of ’em are online; you can
look ’em up. We stab each other in the back routinely and
with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination.

“Which is how I got here. I’m a member of the
Eastern Standard Tribe. We’re centered around New York, but
we’re ramified up and down the coast, Boston and Toronto and
Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate New
York, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in
London, serving the Eastern Standard Agenda, working with a couple
of Tribesmen, well, one Tribesman and my girlfriend, who I thought
was unaffiliated. Turns out, though, that they’re both double
agents. They sold out to the Pacific Daylight Tribe, lameass
phonies out in LA, slick Silicon Valley bizdev sharks, pseudo
hipsters in San Franscarcity. Once I threatened to expose them,
they set me up, had me thrown in here.”

I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little
excursion through a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore
looked back at me, stony and bovine and uncomprehending.

“Baby,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes again,
“you need some new meds.”

“Could be,” I said. “But this is for real. Is
there a comm on the ward? We can look it up together.”

“Oh, that’all prove it, all right. Nothing
but truth online.”

“I didn’t say that. There’re peer-reviewed
articles about the Tribes. It was a lead story on the CBC’s
social science site last year.”

“Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch
videos.”

“I’m talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let’s go
look it up.”

Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and
prodding at it with an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible
pair of spectacles on her nose and nodded sagely. “Oh yeah,
sure, really interesting stuff.”

I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to
the doctor. “You must have read about the Tribes,
right?”

The doctor acted as if he hadn’t heard me.
“That’s just fascinating, Art. Thank you for sharing
that. Now, here’s a question I’d like you to think
about, and maybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the
ways that your friends—the ones you say betrayed
you—used to show you how much they respected you and liked
you? Think hard about this. I think you’ll be surprised by
the conclusions you come to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your
friends interacted and you’ll see that they really like
you.”

“Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the
Tribes?”

“Sure, sure. But this isn’t about the Tribes, Art.
This is about you and—” he consulted his comm,
“Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal and
they’re terribly worried about you. You just think about it.
Now,” he said, recrossing his legs, “Fatima, you told
us yesterday about your mother and I asked you to think about how
she feels. Can you tell the group what you found
out?”

But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging
slack. Manuel nudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to
stir, aimed a kick at her shin. The doctor held a hand out and
grabbed Manuel’s slippered toe. “That’s all
right, let’s move on to Lucy.”

I tuned out as Lucy began an elaborate and well-worn rant about
her eating habits, prodded on by the doctor. The enormity of the
situation was coming home to me. I couldn’t win. If I averred
that Fede and Linda were my boon companions, I’d still be
found incompetent—after all, what competent person threatens
his boon companions? If I stuck to my story, I’d be found
incompetent, and medicated besides, like poor little Fatima,
zombified by the psychoactive cocktail. Either way, I was
stuck.

Stuck on the roof now, and it’s getting very uncomfortable
indeed. Stuck because I am officially incompetent and doomed and
damned to indefinite rest on the ward. Stuck because every passing
moment here is additional time for the hamsters to run their
courses in my mind, piling regret on worry.

Stuck because as soon as I am discovered, I will be stupified by
the meds, administered by stern and loving and thoroughly
disappointed doctors. I still haven’t managed to remember any
of their names. They are interchangeable, well shod and endowed
with badges on lanyards and soothing and implacable and entirely
unappreciative of my rhetorical skills.

Stuck. The sheet-metal chimneys stand tall around the roof,
unevenly distributed according to some inscrutable logic that could
only be understood with the assistance of as-built drawings,
blueprints, mechanical and structural engineering diagrams. Surely
though, they are optimized to wick hot air out of the giant brick
pile’s guts and exhaust it.

I move to the one nearest the stairwell. It is tarred in place,
its apron lined with a double-row of cinderblocks that have pools
of brackish water and cobwebs gathered in their holes. I stick my
hand in the first and drag it off the apron. I repeat it.

Now the chimney is standing on its own, in the middle of a
nonsensical cinderblock-henge. My hands are dripping with muck and
grotendousness. I wipe them off on the pea gravel and then dry them
on my boxer shorts, then hug the chimney and lean forward. It
gives, slowly, slightly, and springs back. I give it a harder push,
really give it my weight, but it won’t budge. Belatedly, I
realize that I’m standing on its apron, trying to lift myself
along with the chimney.

I take a step back and lean way forward, try again. It’s
awkward, but I’m making progress, bent like an ell, pushing
with my legs and lower back. I feel something pop around my sacrum,
know that I’ll regret this deeply when my back kacks out
completely, but it’ll be all for naught if I don’t
keep! on! pushing!

Then, suddenly, the chimney gives, its apron swinging up and
hitting me in the knees so that I topple forward with it, smashing
my chin on its hood. For a moment, I lie down atop it, like a
stupefied lover, awestruck by my own inanity. The smell of blood
rouses me. I tentatively reach my hand to my chin and feel the
ragged edge of a cut there, opened from the tip and along my
jawbone almost to my ear. The cut is too fresh to hurt, but
it’s bleeding freely and I know it’ll sting like a
bastard soon enough. I go to my knees and scream, then scream again
as I rend open my chin further.

My knees and shins are grooved with deep, parallel cuts, gritted
with gravel and grime. Standing hurts so much that I go back to my
knees, holler again at the pain in my legs as I grind more gravel
into my cuts, and again as I tear my face open some more. I end up
fetal on my side, sticky with blood and weeping softly with an
exquisite self-pity that is more than the cuts and bruises, more
than the betrayal, more than the foreknowledge of punishment. I am
weeping for myself, and my identity, and my smarts over happiness
and the thought that I would indeed choose happiness over smarts
any day.

Too damned smart for my own good.

14.

“I just don’t get it,” Fede said.

Art tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice.
“It’s simple,” he said. “It’s like a
car radio with a fast-forward button. You drive around on the
MassPike, and your car automatically peers with nearby vehicles. It
grabs the current song on someone else’s stereo and
streamloads it. You listen to it. If you don’t hit the
fast-forward button, the car starts grabbing everything it can from
the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued
play. Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list
of its peers—the cars that it’s getting its music
from—and sees if any of them are in range, and downloads from
them. So, it’s like you’re exploring a taste-network,
doing an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose
owner has collected the music you most want to listen
to.”

“But I hate your music—I don’t want to listen
to the stuff on your radio.”

“Fine. That’s what the fast-forward button is for.
It skips to another car and starts streamloading off of its
drive.” Fede started to say something, and Art held up his
hand. “And if you exhaust all the available cars, the system
recycles, but asks its peers for files collected from other
sources. You might hate the songs I downloaded from Al, but the
songs I got from Bennie are right up your alley.

“The war-drivers backstop the whole system. They’ve
got the biggest collections on the freeway, and they’re the
ones most likely to build carefully thought-out playlists.
They’ve got entire genres—the whole history of the
blues, say, from steel cylinders on—on their drives. So we
encourage them. When you go through a paypoint—a toll
booth—we debit you for the stuff that you didn’t
fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is,
you’ve got more than, say, 10,000 songs onboard. Then you go
free. It’s counterintuitive, I know, but just look at the
numbers.”

“OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward button. I think I get
it.”

“But?”

“But who’s going to want to use this? It’s
unpredictable. You’ve got no guarantee you’ll get the
songs you want to hear.”

Art smiled. “Exactly!”

Fede gave him a go-on wave.

“Don’t you see? That’s the crack-cocaine part!
It’s the thrill of the chase! Nobody gets excited about
beating traffic on a back road that’s always empty. But get
on the M-5 after a hard day at work and drive it at 100 km/h for
two hours without once touching your brakes and it’s like
God’s reached down and parted the Red Seas for you. You get a
sense of accomplishment! Most of the time, your car
stereo’s gonna play the same junk you’ve always heard,
just background sound, but sometimes, ah! Sometimes you’ll
hit a sweet spot and get the best tunes you’ve ever heard. If
you put a rat in a cage with a lever that doesn’t give food
pellets, he’ll push it once or twice and give up. Set the
lever to always deliver food pellets and he’ll push it when
he gets hungry. Set it to sometimes deliver food pellets
and he’ll bang on it until he passes out!”

“Heh,” Fede said. “Good rant.”

“And?”

“And it’s cool.” Fede looked off into the
middle distance a while. “Radio with a fast-forward button.
That’s great, actually. Amazing. Stupendous!” He
snatched the axe-head from its box on Art’s desk and did a
little war dance around the room, whooping. Art followed the dance
from his ergonomic chair, swiveling around as the interface
tchotchkes that branched from its undersides chittered to keep his
various bones and muscles firmly supported.

His office was more like a three-fifths-scale model of a proper
office, in Lilliputian London style, so the war dance was less
impressive than it might have been with more room to express
itself. “You like it, then,” Art said, once Fede had
run out of steam.

“I do, I do, I do!”

“Great.”

“Great.”

“So.”

“Yes?”

“So what do we do with it? Should I write up a formal
proposal and send it to Jersey? How much detail? Sketches? Code
fragments? Want me to mock up the interface and the network
model?”

Fede cocked an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking
about?”

“Well, we give this to Jersey, they submit the proposal,
they walk away with the contract, right? That’s our job,
right?”

“No, Art, that’s not our job. Our job is to see to
it that V/DT submits a bad proposal, not that Jersey submits a good
one. This is big. We roll this together and it’s bigger than
MassPike. We can run this across every goddamned toll road in the
world! Jersey’s not paying for this—not yet,
anyway—and someone should.”

“You want to sell this to them?”

“Well, I want to sell this. Who to sell it to is another
matter.”

Art waved his hands confusedly. “You’re joking,
right?”

Fede crouched down beside Art and looked into his eyes.
“No, Art, I am serious as a funeral here. This is big, and
it’s not in the scope of work that we signed up for. You and
me, we can score big on this, but not by handing it over to those
shitheads in Jersey and begging for a bonus.”

“What are you talking about? Who else would pay for
this?”

“You have to ask? V/DT for starters. Anyone working on a
bid for MassPike, or TollPass, or FastPass, or EuroPass.”

“But we can’t sell this to just anyone,
Fede!”

“Why not?”

“Jesus. Why not? Because of the Tribes.”

Fede quirked him half a smile. “Sure, the
Tribes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Art, you know that stuff is four-fifths’ horseshit,
right? It’s just a game. When it comes down to your personal
welfare, you can’t depend on time zones. This is more job
than calling, you know.”

Art squirmed and flushed. “Lots of us take this stuff
seriously, Fede. It’s not just a mind-game. Doesn’t
loyalty mean anything to you?”

Fede laughed nastily. “Loyalty! If you’re doing all
of this out of loyalty, then why are you drawing a paycheck? Look,
I’d rather that this go to Jersey. They’re basically
decent sorts, and I’ve drawn a lot of pay from them over the
years, but they haven’t paid for this. They wouldn’t
give us a free ride, so why should we give them one? All I’m
saying is, we can offer this to Jersey, of course, but they have to
bid for it in a competitive marketplace. I don’t want to
gouge them, just collect a fair market price for our
goods.”

“You’re saying you don’t feel any fundamental
loyalty to anything, Fede?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“And you’re saying that I’m a sucker for
putting loyalty ahead of personal gain—after all, no one else
is, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Then how did this idea become ‘ours,’ Fede? I
came up with it.”

Fede lost his nasty smile. “There’s loyalty and then
there’s loyalty.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really. You and I are a team. I rely on you and you
rely on me. We’re loyal to something concrete—each
other. The Eastern Standard Tribe is an abstraction. It’s a
whole bunch of people, and neither of us like most of ’em.
It’s useful and pleasant, but you can’t put your trust
in institutions—otherwise you get Nazism.”

“And patriotism.”

“Blind patriotism.”

“So there’s no other kind? Just jingoism?
You’re either loyal to your immediate circle of friends or
you’re a deluded dupe?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“So where does informed loyalty leave off and jingoism
begin? You come on all patronizing when I talk about being loyal to
the Tribe, and you’re certainly not loyal to V/DT, nor are
you loyal to Jersey. What greater purpose are you loyal
to?”

“Well, humanity, for starters.”

“Really. What’s that when it’s at
home?”

“Huh?”

“How do you express loyalty to something as big and
abstract as ‘humanity’?”

“Well, that comes down to morals, right? Not doing things
that poison the world. Paying taxes. Change to panhandlers.
Supporting charities.” Fede drummed his fingers on his
thighs. “Not murdering or raping, you know. Being a good
person. A moral person.”

“OK, that’s a good code of conduct. I’m all
for not murdering and raping, and not just because it’s
wrong, but because a world where the social norms include
murdering and raping is a bad one for me to live in.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s the purpose of morals and loyalty, right? To
create social norms that produce a world you want to live
in.”

“Right! And that’s why personal loyalty is
important.”

Art smiled. Trap baited and sprung. “OK. So institutional
loyalty—loyalty to a Tribe or a nation—that’s not
an important social norm. As far as you’re concerned, we
could abandon all pretense of institutional loyalty.” Art
dropped his voice. “You could go to work for the Jersey boys,
sabotaging Virgin/Deutsche Telekom, just because they’re
willing to pay you to do it. Nothing to do with Tribal loyalty,
just a job.”

Fede looked uncomfortable, sensing the impending rhetorical
headlock. He nodded cautiously.

“Which means that the Jersey boys have no reason to be
loyal to you. It’s just a job. So if there were an
opportunity for them to gain some personal advantage by selling you
out, turning you into a patsy for them, well, they should just go
ahead and do it, right?”

“Uh—”

“Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question.
Jersey boys sell you out. You take their fall, they benefit. If
there was no institutional loyalty, that’s where you’d
end up, right? That’s the social norm you want.”

“No, of course it isn’t.”

“No, of course not. You want a social norm where
individuals can be disloyal to the collective, but not vice
versa.”

“Yes—”

“Yes, but loyalty is bidirectional. There’s no basis
on which you may expect loyalty from an institution unless
you’re loyal to it.”

“I suppose.”

“You know it. I know it. Institutional loyalty is every
bit as much about informed self-interest as personal loyalty is.
The Tribe takes care of me, I take care of the Tribe. We’ll
negotiate a separate payment from Jersey for this—after all,
this is outside of the scope of work that we’re being paid
for—and we’ll split the money, down the middle.
We’ll work in a residual income with Jersey, too, because, as
you say, this is bigger than MassPike. It’s a genuinely good
idea, and there’s enough to go around. All right?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m asking you. This will require both of our
cooperation. I’m going to need to manufacture an excuse to go
stateside to explain this to them and supervise the prototyping.
You’re going to have to hold down the fort here at V/DT and
make sure that I’m clear to do my thing. If you want to go
and sell this idea elsewhere, well, that’s going to require
my cooperation, or at least my silence—if I turn this over to
V/DT, they’ll pop you for industrial espionage. So we need
each other.”

Art stood and looked down at Fede, who was a good ten
centimeters shorter than he, looked down at Fede’s sweaty
upper lip and creased brow. “We’re a good team, Fede. I
don’t want to toss away an opportunity, but I also
don’t want to exploit it at the expense of my own morals. Can
you agree to work with me on this, and trust me to do the right
thing?”

Fede looked up. “Yes,” he said. On later reflection,
Art thought that the yes came too quickly, but then, he
was just relieved to hear it. “Of course. Of course. Yes.
Let’s do it.”

“That’s just fine,” Art said.
“Let’s get to work, then.”

They fell into their traditional division of labor then, Art
working on a variety of user-experience plans, dividing each into
subplans, then devising protocols for user testing to see what
would work in the field; Fede working on logistics from plane
tickets to personal days to budget and critical-path charts. They
worked side by side, but still used the collaboration tools that
Art had grown up with, designed to allow remote, pseudonymous
parties to fit their separate work components into the same
structure, resolving schedule and planning collisions where it
could and throwing exceptions where it couldn’t. They worked
beside each other and each hardly knew the other was there, and
that, Art thought, when he thought of it, when the receptionist
commed him to tell him that
“Linderrr”—freakin’ teabags—was there
for him, that was the defining characteristic of a Tribalist. A
norm, a modus operandi, a way of being that did not distinguish
between communication face-to-face and communication at a
distance.

“Linderrr?” Fede said, cocking an eyebrow.

“I hit her with my car,” Art said.

“Ah,” Fede said. “Smooth.”

Art waved a hand impatiently at him and went out to the
reception area to fetch her. The receptionist had precious little
patience for entertaining personal visitors, and Linda, in track
pants and a baggy sweater, was clearly not a professional contact.
The receptionist glared at him as he commed into the lobby and
extended his hand to Linda, who took it, put it on her shoulder,
grabbed his ass, crushed their pelvises together and jammed her
tongue in his ear. “I missed you,” she slurped, the
buzz of her voice making him writhe. “I’m not wearing
any knickers,” she continued, loud enough that he was sure
that the receptionist heard. He felt the blush creeping over his
face and neck and ears.

The receptionist. Dammit, why was he thinking about the
receptionist? “Linda,” he said, pulling away. Introduce
her, he thought. Introduce them, and that’ll make it less
socially awkward. The English can’t abide social awkwardness.
“Linda, meet—” and he trailed off, realizing he
didn’t actually know the receptionist’s name.

The receptionist glared at him from under a cap of shining
candy-apple red hair, narrowing her eyes, which were painted in
high style with Kubrick action-figure faces.

“My name is Tonaishah,” she hissed. Or
maybe it was Tanya Iseah, or Taneesha. He still
didn’t know her goddamned name.

“And this is Linda,” he said, weakly.
“We’re going out tonight.”

“And won’t you have a dirty great time, then?”
Tonaishah said.

“I’m sure we will,” he said.

“Yes,” Tonaishah said.

Art commed the door and missed the handle, then snagged it and
grabbed Linda’s hand and yanked her through.

“I’m a little randy,” she said, directly into
his ear. “Sorry.” She giggled.

“Someone you have to meet,” he said, reaching down
to rearrange his pants to hide his boner.

“Ooh, right here in your office?” Linda said,
covering his hand with hers.

“Someone with two eyes,” he said, moving
her hand to his hip.

“Ahh,” she said. “What a
disappointment.”

“I’m serious. I want you to meet my friend Fede. I
think you two will really hit it off.”

“Wait,” Linda said. “Isn’t this a major
step? Meeting the friends? Are we getting that serious
already?”

“Oh, I think we’re ready for it,” Art said,
draping an arm around her shoulders and resting his fingertips on
the upper swell of her breast.

She ducked out from under his arm and stopped in her tracks.
“Well, I don’t. Don’t I get a say in
this?”

“What?” Art said.

“Whether it’s time for me to meet your friends or
not. Shouldn’t I have a say?”

“Linda, I just wanted to introduce you to a coworker
before we went out. He’s in my office—I gotta grab my
jacket there, anyway.”

“Wait, is he a friend or a coworker?”

“He’s a friend I work with. Come on, what’s
the big deal?”

“Well, first you spring this on me, then you change your
story and tell me he’s a coworker, now he’s a friend
again. I don’t want to be put on display for your pals. If
we’re going to meet your friends, I’ll dress for it,
put on some makeup. This isn’t fair.”

“Linda,” Art said, placating.

“No,” she said. “Screw it. I’m not here
to meet your friends. I came all the way across town to meet you at
your office because you wanted to head back to your place after
work, and you play headgames with me like this?”

“All right,” Art said. “I’ll show you
back out to the lobby and you can wait with Tonaishah while I get
my jacket.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” she said.

“What tone?” Art said. “Jesus Christ! You
can’t wait in the hall, it’s against policy. You
don’t have a badge, so you have to be with me or in the
lobby. I don’t give a shit if you meet Fede or
not.”

“I won’t tell you again, Art,” she said.
“Moderate your tone. I won’t be shouted at.”

Art tried to rewind the conversation and figure out how they
came to this pass, but he couldn’t. Was Linda really acting
this nuts? Or was he just reading her wrong or pushing her
buttons or something?

“Let’s start over,” he said, grabbing both of
her hands in his. “I need to get my jacket from my office.
You can come with me if you want to, and meet my friend Fede.
Otherwise you can wait in the lobby, I won’t be a
minute.”

“Let’s go meet Fede,” she said. “I hope
he wasn’t expecting anything special, I’m not really
dressed for it.”

He stifled a snotty remark. After all that, she was going to go
and meet Fede? So what the hell were they arguing about? On the
other hand, he’d gotten his way, hadn’t he? He led her
by the hand to his office, and beyond every doorway they passed was
a V/DT Experience Designer pretending not to peek at them as they
walked by, having heard every word through the tricky acoustics of
O’Malley House.

“Fede,” he said, stiffly, “This is Linda.
Linda, this is Fede.”

Fede stood and treated Linda to his big, suave grin. Fede might
be short and he might have paranoid delusions, but he was trim and
well groomed, with the sort of finicky moustache that looked like a
rotting caterpillar if you didn’t trim it every morning. He
liked to work out, and had a tight waist and a gut you could bounce
a quarter off of, and liked to wear tight shirts that showed off
his overall fitness, made him stand out among the spongy
mouse-potatoes of the corporate world. Art had never given it much
thought, but now, standing with Fede and Linda in his tiny office,
breathing in Fede’s Lilac Vegetal and Linda’s
new-car-smell shampoo, he felt paunchy and sloppy.

“Ah,” Fede said, taking her hand. “The one you
hit with your car. It’s a pleasure. You seem to be recovering
nicely, too.”

Linda smiled and gave him a peck on the cheek, a few strands of
her bobbed hair sticking to his moustache like cobwebs as she
pulled away.

“It was just a love tap,” she said.
“I’ll be fine.”

“Fede’s from New York,” Art said. “We
colonials like to stick together around the office. And
Linda’s from Los Angeles.”

“Aren’t there any, you know, British people in
London?” Linda said, wrinkling her nose.

“There’s Tonaishah,” Art said weakly.

“Who?” Fede said.

“The receptionist,” Linda said. “Not a very
nice person.”

“With the eyes?” Fede said, wriggling his fingers
around his temples to indicate elaborate eye makeup.

“That’s her,” Linda said.

“Nasty piece of work,” Fede said. “Never
trusted her.”

“You’re not another UE person, are
you?” Linda said, sizing Fede up and giving Art a playful
elbow in the ribs.

“Who, me? Nah. I’m a management consultant. I work
in Chelsea mostly, but when I come slumming in Picadilly, I like to
comandeer Art’s office. He’s not bad, for a
UE-geek.”

“Not bad at all,” Linda said, slipping an arm around
Art’s waist, wrapping her fingers around the waistband of his
trousers. “Did you need to grab your jacket,
honey?”

Art’s jacket was hanging on the back of his office door,
and to get at it, he had to crush himself against Linda and
maneuver the door shut. He felt her breasts soft on his chest, felt
her breath tickle his ear, and forgot all about their argument in
the corridor.

“All right,” Art said, hooking his jacket over his
shoulder with a finger, feeling flushed and fluttery. “OK,
let’s go.”

“Lovely to have met you, Fede,” Linda said, taking
his hand.

“And likewise,” Fede said.

15.

Vigorous sex ensued.

16.

Art rolled out of bed at dark o’clock in the morning,
awakened by circadians and endorphins and bladder. He staggered to
the toilet in the familiar gloom of his shabby little rooms, did
his business, marveled at the tenderness of his privates, fumbled
for the flush mechanism—“British” and
“Plumbing” being two completely opposite
notions—and staggered back to bed. The screen of his comm,
nestled on the end table, washed the room in liquid-crystal light.
He’d tugged the sheets off of Linda when he got up, and there
she was, chest rising and falling softly, body rumpled and sprawled
after their gymnastics. It had been transcendent and messy, and the
sheets were coarse with dried fluids.

He knelt on the bed and fussed with the covers some, trying for
an equitable—if not chivalrously so—division of
blankets. He bent forward to kiss at a bite-mark he’d left on
her shoulder.

His back went “pop.”

Somewhere down in the lumbar, somewhere just above his tailbone,
a deep and unforgiving pop, ominous as the cocking of a
revolver. He put his hand there and it felt OK, so he cautiously
lay back. Three-quarters of the way down, his entire lower back
seized up, needles of fire raced down his legs and through his
groin, and he collapsed.

He barked with pain, an inhuman sound he hadn’t
known he could make, and the rapid emptying of his lungs deepened
the spasm, and he mewled. Linda opened a groggy eye and put her
hand on his shoulder. “What is it, hon?”

He tried to straighten out, to find a position in which the
horrible, relentless pain returned whence it came. Each motion was
agony. Finally, the pain subsided, and he found himself pretzelled,
knees up, body twisted to the left, head twisted to the right. He
did not dare budge from this posture, terrified that the pain would
return.

“It’s my back,” he gasped.

“Whah? Your back?”

“I—I put it out. Haven’t done it in years. I
need an icepack, OK? There’re some headache pills in the
medicine cabinet. Three of those.”

“Seriously?”

“Look, I’d get ’em myself, but I can’t
even sit up, much less walk. I gotta ice this down now before it
gets too inflamed.”

“How did it happen?”

“It just happens. Tai Chi helps. Please, I need
ice.”

Half an hour later, he had gingerly arranged himself with his
knees up and his hips straight, and he was breathing deeply,
willing the spasms to unclench. “Thanks,” he said.

“What now? Should I call a doctor?”

“He’d just give me painkillers and tell me to lose
some weight. I’ll probably be like this for a week. Shit.
Fede’s going to kill me. I was supposed to go to Boston next
Friday, too.”

“Boston? What for? For how long?”

Art bunched the sheets in his fists. He hadn’t meant to
tell her about Boston yet—he and Fede hadn’t worked out
his cover story. “Meetings,” he said. “Two or
three days. I was going to take some personal time and go see my
family, too. Goddamnit. Pass me my comm, OK?”

“You’re going to work now?”

“I’m just going to send Fede a message and send out
for some muscle-relaxants. There’s a twenty-four-hour
chemist’s at Paddington Station that delivers.”

“I’ll do it, you lie flat.”

And so it began. Bad enough to be helpless, weak as a kitten and
immobile, but to be at the whim of someone else, to have to provide
sufficient excuse for every use of his comm, every crawl across the
flat... Christ. “Just give me my comm, please. I can do it
faster than I can explain how to do it.”

In thirty-six hours, he was ready to tear the throat out of
anyone who tried to communicate with him. He’d harangued
Linda out of the flat and crawled to the kitchen floor,
painstakingly assembling a nest of pillows and sofa cushions, close
to the icemaker and the painkillers and toilet. His landlady, an
unfriendly Chinese lady who had apparently been wealthy beyond
words in Hong Kong and clearly resented her reduced station, agreed
to sign for the supply drops he commed to various retailers around
London.

He was giving himself a serious crick in his neck and shoulder
from working supine, comm held over his head. The painkillers
weighted his arms and churned his guts, and at least twice an hour,
he’d grog his way into a better position, forgetting the
tenderness in his back, and bark afresh as his nerves shrieked and
sizzled.

Two days later and he was almost unrecognizable, a gamey,
unshaven lump in the tiny kitchen, his nest gray with sweat and
stiff with spilled take-away curry. He suspected that he was
overmedicating, forgetting whether he’d taken his tablets and
taking more. In one of his more lucid moments, he realized that
there was a feedback cycle at play here—the more pills he
took, the less equipped he was to judge whether he’d taken
his pills, so the more pills he took. His mind meandered through a
solution to this, a timer-equipped pillcase that reset when you
took the lid off and chimed if you took the lid off again before
the set interval had elapsed. He reached for his comm to make some
notes, found it wedged under one of his hocks, greasy with sweat,
batteries dead. He hadn’t let his comm run down in a decade,
at least.

His landlady let Linda in on the fourth day, as he was sleeping
fitfully with a pillow over his face to shut out the light from the
window. He’d tried to draw the curtains a day—two
days?—before, but had given up when he tried to pull himself
upright on the sill only to collapse in a fresh gout of writhing.
Linda crouched by his head and stroked his greasy hair softly until
he flipped the pillow off his face with a movement of his neck. He
squinted up at her, impossibly fresh and put together and
incongruous in his world of reduced circumstances.

“Art. Art. Art. Art! You’re a mess, Art! Jesus. Why
aren’t you in bed?”

“Too far,” he mumbled.

“What would your grandmother say? Dear-oh-dearie. Come on,
let’s get you up and into bed, and then I’m going to
have a doctor and a massage therapist sent in. You need a nice, hot
bath, too. It’ll be good for you and hygienic
besides.”

“No tub,” he said petulantly.

“I know, I know. Don’t worry about it. I’ll
sort it out.”

And she did, easing him to his feet and helping him into bed.
She took his house keys and disappeared for some unknowable time,
then reappeared with fresh linen in store wrappers, which she lay
on the bed carefully, making tight hospital corners and rolling him
over, nurse-style, to do the other side. He heard her clattering in
the kitchen, running the faucets, moving furniture. He reminded
himself to ask her to drop his comm in its charger, then
forgot.

“Come on, time to get up again,” she said, gently
peeling the sheets back.

“It’s OK,” he said, waving weakly at her.

“Yes, it is. Let’s get up.” She took his
ankles and gradually turned him on the bed so that his feet were on
the floor, then grabbed him by his stinking armpits and helped him
to his feet. He stumbled with her into his crowded living room,
dimly aware of the furniture stacked on itself around him. She left
him hanging on the door lintel and then began removing his clothes.
She actually used a scissors to cut away his stained tee shirt and
boxer shorts. “All right,” she said, “into the
tub.”

“No tub,” he said.

“Look down, Art,” she said.

He did. An inflatable wading pool sat in the middle of his
living room, flanked by an upended coffee table and his sofa,
standing on its ear. The pool was full of steaming, cloudy water.
“There’s a bunch of eucalyptus oil and Epsom salts in
there. You’re gonna love it.”

That night, Art actually tottered into the kitchen and got
himself a glass of water, one hand pressed on his lower back. The
cool air of the apartment fanned the mentholated liniment on his
back and puckered goose pimples all over his body. After days of
leaden limbs, he felt light and clean, his senses singing as though
he was emerging from a fever. He drank the water, and retrieved his
comm from its cradle.

He propped several pillows up on his headboard and fired up his
comm. Immediately, it began to buzz and hum and chatter and blink,
throwing up alerts about urgent messages, pages and calls pending.
The lightness he’d felt fled him, and he began the rotten
business of triaging his in-box.

One strong impression emerged almost immediately: Fede wanted
him in Boston.

The Jersey clients were interested in the teasers that Fede had
forwarded to them. The Jersey clients were obsessed with the
teasers that Fede had forwarded to them. The Jersey clients were
howling for more after the teasers that Fede had forwarded to them.
Fede had negotiated some big bucks on approval if only Art would go
and talk to the Jersey clients. The Jersey clients had arranged a
meeting with some of the MassPike decision-makers for the following
week, and now they were panicking because they didn’t have
anything except the teasers Fede had forwarded to
them.

You should really try to go to Boston, Art. We need you in
Boston, Art. You have to go to Boston, Art. Art, go to Boston.
Boston, Art. Boston.

Linda rolled over in bed and peered up at him.
“You’re not working again, are you?”

“Shhh,” Art said. “It’s less stressful
if I get stuff done than if I let it pile up.”

“Then why is your forehead all wrinkled up?”

“I have to go to Boston,” he said. “Day after
tomorrow, I think.”

“Jesus, are you insane? Trying to cripple
yourself?”

“I can recover in a hotel room just as well as I can
recover here. It’s just rest from here on in, anyway. And a
hotel will probably have a tub.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.
You’re not going to recover in Boston. You’ll
be at meetings and stuff. Christ!”

“I’ve got to do this,” Art said. “I just
need to figure out how. I’ll go business class, take along a
lumbar pillow, and spend every moment that I’m not in a
meeting in a tub or getting a massage. I could use a change of
scenery about now, anyway.”

“You’re a goddamned idiot, you know that?”

Art knew it. He also knew that here was an opportunity to get
back to EST, to make a good impression on the Jersey clients, to
make his name in the Tribe and to make a bundle of cash. His back
be damned, he was sick of lying around anyway. “I’ve
got to go, Linda.”

“It’s your life,” she said, and tossed aside
the covers. “But I don’t have to sit around watching
you ruin it.” She disappeared into the hallway, then
reemerged, dressed and with her coat on. “I’m out of
here.”

“Linda,” Art said.

“No,” she said. “Shut up. Why the fuck should
I care if you don’t, huh? I’m going. See you
around.”

“Come on, let’s talk about this.”

East-Coast pizza. Flat Boston twangs. The coeds rushing through
Harvard Square and oh, maybe a side trip to New York, maybe another
up to Toronto and a roti at one of the halal Guyanese places on
Queen Street. He levered himself painfully out of bed and hobbled
to the living room, where Linda was arguing with a taxi dispatcher
over her comm, trying to get them to send out a cab at two in the
morning.

“Come on,” Art said. “Hang that up.
Let’s talk about this.”

She shot him a dirty look and turned her back, kept on ranting
down the comm at the dispatcher.

“Linda, don’t do this. Come on.”

“I am on the phone!” she said to him, covering the
mouthpiece. “Shut the fuck up, will you?” She uncovered
the mouthpiece. “Hello? Hello?” The dispatcher had hung
up. She snapped the comm shut and slammed it into her purse. She
whirled to face Art, snorting angry breaths through her nostrils.
Her face was such a mask of rage that Art recoiled, and his back
twinged. He clasped at it and carefully lowered himself onto the
sofa.

“Don’t do this, OK?” he said. “I need
support, not haranguing.”

“What’s there to say? Your mind’s already made
up. You’re going to go off and be a fucking idiot and cripple
yourself. Go ahead, you don’t need my permission.”

“Sit down, please, Linda, and talk to me. Let me explain
my plan and my reasons, OK? Then I’ll listen to you. Maybe we
can sort this out and actually, you know, come to understand each
other’s point of view.”

“Fine,” she said, and slammed herself into the sofa.
Art bounced and he seized his back reflexively, waiting for the
pain, but beyond a low-grade throbbing, he was OK.

“I have a very large opportunity in Boston right now. One
that could really change my life. Money, sure, but prestige and
profile, too. A dream of an opportunity. I need to attend one or
two meetings, and then I can take a couple days off. I’ll get
Fede to OK a first-class flight—we get chits we can use to
upgrade to Virgin Upper; they’ve got hot tubs and massage
therapists now. I’ll check into a spa—they’ve got
a bunch on Route 128—and get a massage every morning and have
a physiotherapist up to the room every night. I can’t afford
that stuff here, but Fede’ll spring for it if I go to Boston,
let me expense it. I’ll be a good lad, I promise.”

“I still think you’re being an idiot. Why
can’t Fede go?”

“Because it’s my deal.”

“Why can’t whoever you’re meeting with come
here?”

“That’s complicated.”

“Bullshit. I thought you wanted to talk about
this?”

“I do. I just can’t talk about that part.”

“Why not? Are you afraid I’ll blab? Christ, Art.
Give me some credit. Who the hell would I blab to,
anyway?”

“Look, Linda, the deal itself is confidential—a
secret. A secret’s only a secret if you don’t tell it
to anyone, all right? So I’m not going to tell you.
It’s not relevant to the discussion, anyway.”

“Art. Art. Art. Art, you make it all sound so reasonable,
and you can dress it up with whatever words you want, but at the
end of the day, we both know you’re full of shit on this.
There’s no way that doing this is better for you
than staying here in bed. If Fede’s the problem, let me talk
to him.”

“Jesus, no!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not appropriate, Linda. This is a work-related
issue. It wouldn’t be professional. OK, I’ll concede
that flying and going to meeting is more stressful than not flying
and not going to meetings, but let’s take it as a given that
I really need to go to Boston. Can’t we agree on
that, and then discuss the ways that we can mitigate the risks
associated with the trip?”

“Jesus, you’re an idiot,” she said, but she
seemed to be on the verge of smiling.

“But I’m your idiot, right?” Art
said, hopefully.

“Sure, sure you are.” She did smile then,
and cuddle up to him on the sofa. “They don’t have
fucking hot tubs in Virgin Upper, do they?”

“Yeah,” Art said, kissing her earlobe. “They
really do.”

17.

Once the blood coursing from my shins slows and clots, I take an
opportunity to inspect the damage more closely. The cuts are
relatively shallow, certainly less serious than they were in my
runamuck imagination, which had vivid slashes of white bone visible
through the divided skin. I cautiously pick out the larger grit and
gravel and turn my attention spinewards.

I have done a number on my back, that much is certain. My old
friends, the sacroiliac joints, feel as tight as drumheads, and
they creak ominously when I shift to a sitting position with my
back propped up on the chimney’s upended butt, the aluminum
skirting cool as a kiss on my skin. They’re only just
starting to twinge, a hint of the agonies to come.

My jaw, though, is pretty bad. My whole face feels swollen, and
if I open my mouth the blood starts anew.

You know, on sober reflection, I believe that coming up to the
roof was a really bad idea.

I use the chimney to lever myself upright again, and circle it
to see exactly what kind of damage I’ve done. There’s a
neat circular hole in the roof where the chimney used to be,
gusting warm air into my face as I peer into its depths. The hole
is the mouth of a piece of shiny metal conduit about the
circumference of a basketball hoop. When I put my head into it, I
hear the white noise of a fan, somewhere below in the
building’s attic. I toss some gravel down the conduit and
listen to the report as it pings off the fan blades down
below. That’s a good, loud sound, and one that is certain to
echo through the building.

I rain gravel down the exhaust tube by the handful, getting into
a mindless, shuffling rhythm, wearing the sides of my hands raw and
red as I scrape the pebbles up into handy piles. Soon I am
shuffling afield of the fallen chimney, one hand on my lumbar,
crouched over like a chimp, knees splayed in an effort to shift
stress away from my grooved calves.

I’m really beating the shit out of that poor fan, I can
tell. The shooting-gallery rattle of the gravel ricocheting off the
blades is dulling now, sometimes followed by secondary rattles as
the pebbles bounce back into the blades. Not sure what I’ll
do if the fan gives out before someone notices me up here.

It’s not an issue, as it turns out. The heavy fire door
beyond the chimney swings open abruptly. A hospital maintenance gal
in coveralls, roly-poly and draped with tool belts and bandoliers.
She’s red-faced from the trek up the stairs, and it gives her
the aspect of a fairy tale baker or candy-seller. She reinforces
this impression by putting her plump hands to her enormous bosom
and gasping when she catches sight of me.

It comes to me that I am quite a fucking sight. Bloody,
sunburnt, wild-eyed, with my simian hunch and my scabby jaw set at
a crazy angle to my face and reality both. Not to mention my near
nudity, which I’m semipositive is not her idea of light
entertainment. “Hey,” I say. “I, uh, I got stuck
on the roof. The door shut.” Talking reopens the wound on my
jaw and I feel more blood trickling down my neck.
“Unfortunately, I only get one chance to make a first
impression, huh? I’m not, you know, really crazy, I
was just a little bored and so I went exploring and got stuck and
tried to get someone’s attention, had a couple accidents...
It’s a long story. Hey! My name’s Art. What’s
yours?”

“Oh my Lord!” she said, and her hand jumps to the
hammer in its bandolier holster on her round tummy. She claws at it
frantically.

“Please,” I say, holding my hands in front of me.
“Please. I’m hurt is all. I came up here to get some
fresh air and the door swung shut behind me. I tripped when I
knocked over the chimney to get someone’s attention.
I’m not dangerous. Please. Just help me get back down to the
twentieth floor—I think I might need a stretcher crew, my
back is pretty bad.”

“It’s Caitlin,” she says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My name is Caitlin,” she says.

“Hi, Caitlin,” I said. I extend my hand, but she
doesn’t move the ten yards she would have to cross in order
to take it. I think about moving towards her, but think better of
it.

“You’re not up here to jump, are you?”

“Jump? Christ, no! Just stuck is all. Just
stuck.”

Linda’s goddamned boyfriend was into all this flaky
Getting to Yes shit, subliminal means of establishing rapport and
so on. Linda and I once spent an afternoon at the Children’s
Carousel uptown in Manhattan, making fun of all his newage
theories. The one that stood out in my mind as funniest was
synching your breathing—“What you resist persists, so
you need to turn resistance into assistance,” Linda
recounted. You match breathing with your subject for fifteen
breaths and they unconsciously become receptive to your
suggestions. I have a suspicion that Caitlin might bolt, duck back
through the door and pound down the stairs on her chubby little
legs and leave me stranded.

So I try it, match my breath to her heaving bosom. She’s
still panting from her trek up the stairs and fifteen breaths go by
in a quick pause. The silence stretches, and I try to remember what
I’m supposed to do next. Lead the subject, that’s it. I
slow my breathing down gradually and, amazingly, her breath slows
down along with mine, until we’re both breathing great, slow
breaths. It works—it’s flaky and goofy California shit,
but it works.

“Caitlin,” I say calmly, making it part of an
exhalation.

“Yes,” she says, still wary.

“Have you got a comm?”

“I do, yes.”

“Can you please call downstairs and ask them to send up a
stretcher crew? I’ve hurt my back and I won’t be able
to handle the stairs.”

“I can do that, yes.”

“Thank you, Caitlin.”

It feels like cheating. I didn’t have to browbeat her or
puncture her bad reasoning—all it took was a little rapport,
a little putting myself in her shoes. I can’t believe it
worked, but Caitlin flips a ruggedized comm off her hip and speaks
into it in a calm, efficient manner.

“Thank you, Caitlin,” I say again. I start to ease
myself to a sitting position, and my back gives way, so that I
crash to the rooftop, mewling, hands clutched to my spasming
lumbar. And then Caitlin’s at my side, pushing my hands away
from my back, strong thumbs digging into the spasming muscles
around my iliac crests, soothing and smoothing them out, tracing
the lines of fire back to the nodes of the joints, patiently
kneading the spasms out until the pain recedes to a soft
throbbing.

“My old man used to get that,” she said. “All
us kids had to take turns working it out for him.” I’m
on my back, staring up over her curves and rolls and into her
earnest, freckled face.

“Oh, God, that feels good,” I say.

“That’s what the old man used to say. You’re
too young to have a bad back.”

“I have to agree,” I say.

“All right, I’m going to prop your knees up and lay
your head down. I need to have a look at that
ventilator.”

I grimace. “I’m afraid I did a real number on
it,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

She waves a chubby pish-tosh at me with her freckled hand and
walks over to the chimney, leaving me staring at the sky, knees
bent, waiting for the stretcher crew.

When they arrive, Caitlin watches as they strap me onto the
board, tying me tighter than is strictly necessary for my safety,
and I realize that I’m not being tied down,
I’m being tied up.

“Thanks, Caitlin,” I say.

“You’re welcome, Art.”

“Good luck with the ventilator—sorry
again.”

“That’s all right, kid. It’s my job, after
all.”

18.

Virgin Upper’s hot tubs were more theoretically soothing
than actually so. They had rather high walls and a rather low water
level, both for modesty’s sake and to prevent spills. Art
passed through the miniature sauna/shower and into the tub after
his massage, somewhere over Newfoundland, and just as the plane hit
turbulence, buffeting him with chlorinated water that stung his
eyes and got up his nose and soaked the magazine on offshore
investing that he’d found in the back of his seat pocket.

He landed at JFK still smelling of chlorine and sandalwood
massage oil and the cantaloupe-scented lotion in the fancy toilets.
Tension melted away from him as he meandered to the shuttle stop.
The air had an indefinable character of homeliness, or maybe it was
the sunlight. Amateur Tribal anthropologists were always thrashing
about light among themselves, arguing about the sun’s
character varying from latitude to latitude, filtered through this
city’s pollution signature or that.

The light or the air, the latitude or the smog, it felt like
home. The women walked with a reassuring, confident clack clack
clack of heel on hard tile; the men talked louder than was
necessary to one another or to their comms. The people were a riot
of ethnicities and their speech was a riotous babel of accents,
idioms and languages. Aggressive pretzel vendors vied with
aggressive panhandlers to shake down the people waiting on the
shuttle bus. Art bought a stale, sterno-reeking pretzel that was
crusted with inedible volumes of yellowing salt and squirted a
couple bucks at a panhandler who had been pestering him in thick
Jamaican patois but thanked him in adenoidal Brooklynese.

By the time he boarded his connection to Logan he was joggling
his knees uncontrollably in his seat, his delight barely contained.
He got an undrinkable can of watery Budweiser and propped it up on
his tray table alongside his inedible pretzel and arranged them in
a kind of symbolic tableau of all things ESTian.

He commed Fede from the guts of the tunnels that honeycombed
Boston, realizing with a thrill as Fede picked up that it was two
in the morning in London, at the nominal GMT+0, while here at
GMT-6—at the default, plus-zero time zone of his life,
livelihood and lifestyle—it was only 9PM.

“Fede!” Art said into the comm.

“Hey, Art!” Fede said, with a false air of
chipperness that Art recognized from any number of
middle-of-the-night calls.

There was a cheap Malaysian comm that he’d once bought
because of its hyped up de-hibernate feature—its ability to
go from its deepest power-saving sleepmode to full waking glory
without the customary thirty seconds of drive-churning housekeeping
as it reestablished its network connection, verified its file
system and memory, and pinged its buddy-list for state and presence
info. This Malaysian comm, the Crackler, had the uncanny ability to
go into suspended animation indefinitely, and yet throw your
workspace back on its display in a hot instant.

When Art actually laid hands on it, after it meandered its way
across the world by slow boat, corrupt GMT+8 Posts and Telegraphs
authorities, over-engineered courier services and Revenue
Canada’s Customs agents, he was enchanted by this feature. He
could put the device into deep sleep, close it up, and pop its
cover open and poof! there were his windows. It took him three days
and an interesting crash to notice that even though he was seeing
his workspace, he wasn’t able to interact with it for thirty
seconds. The auspicious crash revealed the presence of a screenshot
of his pre-hibernation workspace on the drive, and he realized that
the machine was tricking him, displaying the screenshot—the
illusion of wakefulness—when he woke it up, relying on the
illusion to endure while it performed its housekeeping tasks in the
background. A little stopwatch work proved that this chicanery
actually added three seconds to the overall wake-time, and taught
him his first important user-experience lesson: perception of
functionality trumps the actual function.

And here was Fede, throwing up a verbal screenshot of
wakefulness while he churned in the background, housekeeping
himself into real alertness. “Fede, I’m here, I’m
in Boston!”

“Good Art, good. How was the trip?”

“Wonderful. Virgin Upper was fantastic—dancing
girls, midget wrestling, hash brownies...”

“Good, very good.”

“And now I’m driving around under Boston through a
land-yacht regatta. The boats are mambo, but I think that banana
patch the hotel soon.”

“Glad to hear it.” Art heard water running dimly,
realized that Fede was taking a leak.

“Meeting with the Jersey boys tomorrow. We’re having
brunch at a strip club.”

“OK, OK, very funny,” Fede said. “I’m
awake. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to check in with you and let you
know I arrived safe and sound. How’re things in
London?”

“Your girlfriend called me.”

“Linda?”

“You got another girlfriend?”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to chew me out for sending you overseas with
your ‘crippling back injury.’ She told me she’d
hold me responsible if you got into trouble over there.”

“God, Fede, I’m sorry. I didn’t put her up to
it or anything—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m glad that
there’s someone out there who cares about you. We’re
getting together for dinner tonight.”

“Fede, you know, I think Linda’s terrific, but
she’s a little, you know, volatile.”

“Art, everyone in O’Malley House knows just how
volatile she is. ‘I won’t tell you again, Art. Moderate
your tone. I won’t be shouted at.’”

“Christ, you heard that, too?”

“Don’t worry about it. She’s cool and I like
her and I can stand to be shouted at a little. When did you say you
were meeting with Perceptronics?”

The word shocked him. They never mentioned the name of the
Jersey clients. It started as a game, but soon became woven into
Fede’s paranoid procedures.

Now they had reached the endgame. Within a matter of weeks,
they’d be turning in their resignations to V/DT and taking
the final flight across the Atlantic and back to GMT-6,
provocateurs no longer.

“Tomorrow afternoon. We’re starting late to give me
time to get a full night’s sleep.” The last conference
call with Perceptronics had gone fantastically. His normal
handlers—sour men with nasty minds who glommed onto
irrelevancies in V/DT’s strategy and teased at them until
they conjured up shadowy and shrewd conspiracies where none
existed—weren’t on that call. Instead, he’d spent
a rollicking four hours on the line with the sharp and snarky
product designers and engineers, bouncing ideas back and forth at
speed. Even over the phone, the homey voices and points of view
felt indefinably comfortable and familiar. They’d been
delighted to start late in the day for his benefit, and had offered
to work late and follow up with a visit to a bar where he could get
a burger the size of a baby’s head. “We’re
meeting at Perceptronics’ branch office in Acton tomorrow and
the day after, then going into MassPike. The Perceptronics guys
sound really excited.” Just saying the name of the company
was a thrill.

“That’s really excellent, Art. Go easy,
though—”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. My back’s feeling
miles better.” And it was, loose and supple the way it did
after a good workout.

“That’s good, but it’s not what I meant.
We’re still closing this deal, still dickering over price. I
need another day, maybe, to settle it. So go easy tomorrow. Give me
a little leverage, OK?”

“I don’t get it. I thought we had a deal.”

“Nothing’s final till it’s vinyl, you know
that. They’re balking at the royalty clause”—Fede
was proposing to sell Perceptronics an exclusive license on the
business-model patent he’d filed for using Art’s notes
in exchange for jobs, a lump-sum payment and a royalty on every
sub-license that Perceptronics sold to the world’s toll
roads—“and we’re renegotiating. They’re
just playing hardball, is all. Another day, tops, and I’ll
have it sorted.”

“I’m confused. What do you want me to do?”

“Just, you know, stall them. Get there late. Play
up your jetlag. Leave early. Don’t get anything, you know,
done. Use your imagination.”

“Is there a deal or isn’t there, Fede?”

“There’s a deal, there’s a deal. I’ll do
my thing, you’ll do your thing, and we’ll both be rich
and living in New York before you know it. Do you
understand?”

“Not really.”

“OK, that’ll have to be good enough for now. Jesus,
Art, I’m doing my best here, all right?”

“Say hi to Linda for me, OK?”

“Don’t be pissed at me, Art.”

“I’m not pissed. I’ll stall them. You do your
thing. I’ll take it easy, rest up my back.”

“All right. Have a great time, OK?”

“I will, Fede.”

Art rang off, feeling exhausted and aggravated. He followed the
tunnel signs to the nearest up-ramp, wanting to get into the
sunlight and architecture and warm himself with both. A miniscule
BMW Flea blatted its horn at him when he changed lanes. Had he cut
the car off? He was still looking the wrong way, still anticipating
oncoming traffic on the right. He raised a hand in an apologetic
wave.

It wasn’t enough for the Flea’s driver. The car ran
right up to his bumper, then zipped into the adjacent lane,
accelerated and cut him off, nearly causing a wreck. As it was, Art
had to swerve into the parking lane on Mass Ave—how did he
get to Mass Ave? God, he was lost already—to avoid him. The
Flea backed off and switched lanes again, then pulled up alongside
of him. The driver rolled down his window.

“How the fuck do you like it, jackoff? Don’t
ever fucking cut me off!” He was a middle aged white guy
in a suit, driving a car that was worth a year’s wages to
Art, purple-faced and pop-eyed.

Art felt something give way inside, and then he was shouting
back. “When I want your opinion, I’ll squeeze your
fucking head, you sack of shit! As it is, I can barely contain my
rage at the thought that a scumbag like you is consuming
air that the rest of us could be breathing! Now, roll up your
goddamned window and drive your fucking bourge-mobile before I
smash your fucking head in!”

He shut his mouth, alarmed. What the hell was he saying? How did
he end up standing here, outside of his car, shouting at the other
driver, stalking towards the Flea with his hands balled into fists?
Why was he picking a fight with this goddamned psycho, anyway? A
year in peaceful, pistol-free London had eased his normal road-rage
defense systems. Now they came up full, and he wondered if the
road-rager he’d just snapped at would haul out a
Second-Amendment Special and cap him.

But the other driver looked as shocked as Art felt. He rolled up
his window and sped off, turning wildly at the next
corner—Brookline, Art saw. Art got back into his rental,
pulled off to the curb and asked his comm to generate an optimal
route to his hotel, and drove in numb silence the rest of the
way.

19.

They let me call Gran on my second day here. Of course, Linda
had already called her and briefed her on my supposed mental
breakdown. I had no doubt that she’d managed to fake
hysterical anxiety well enough to convince Gran that I’d lost
it completely; Gran was already four-fifths certain that I was
nuts.

“Hi, Gran,” I said.

“Arthur! My God, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Gran. It’s a big mistake is
all.”

“A mistake? Your lady friend called me and told me what
you’d done in London. Arthur, you need help.”

“What did Linda say?”

“She said that you threatened to kill a coworker. She said
you threatened to kill her. That you had a knife. Oh,
Arthur, I’m so worried—”

“It’s not true, Gran. She’s lying to
you.”

“She told me you’d say that.”

“Of course she did. She and Fede—a guy I worked with
in London—they’re trying to get rid of me. They had me
locked up. I had a business deal with Fede, we were selling one of
my ideas to a company in New Jersey. Linda talked him into selling
to some people she knows in LA instead, and they conspired to cut
me out of the deal. When I caught them at it, they got me sent
away. Let me guess, she told you I was going to say this, too,
right?”

“Arthur, I know—”

“You know that I’m a good guy. You raised me.
I’m not nuts, OK? They just wanted to get me out of the way
while they did their deal. A week or two and I’ll be out
again, but it will be too late. Do you believe that you know me
better than some girl I met a month ago?”

“Of course I do, Arthur. But why would the
hospital take you away if—”

“If I wasn’t crazy? I’m in here for
observation—they want to find out if I’m
crazy. If they’re not sure, then you can’t be
sure, right?”

“All right. Oh, I’ve been sick with
worry.”

“I’m sorry, Gran. I need to get through this week
and I’ll be free and clear and I’ll come back to
Toronto.”

“I’m going to come down there to see you. Linda told
me visitors weren’t allowed, is that true?”

“No, it’s not true.” I thought about Gran
seeing me in the ward amidst the pukers and the screamers and the
droolers and the fondlers and flinched away from the
phone. “But if you’re going to come down, come for the
hearing at the end of the week. There’s nothing you can do
here now.”

“Even if I can’t help, I just want to come and see
you. It was so nice when you were here.”

“I know, I know. I’ll be coming back soon,
don’t worry.”

If only Gran could see me now, on the infirmary examination
table, in four-point restraint. Good thing she can’t.

A doctor looms over me. “How are you feeling,
Art?”

“I’ve had better days,” I say, with what I
hope is stark sanity and humor. Aren’t crazy people incapable
of humor? “I went for a walk and the door swung shut behind
me.”

“Well, they’ll do that,” the doctor says.
“My name is Szandor,” he says, and shakes my hand in
its restraint.

“A pleasure to meet you,” I say. “You’re
a doctor doctor, aren’t you?”

“An MD? Yup. There’re a couple of us around the
place.”

“But you’re not a shrink of any
description?”

“Nope. How’d you guess?”

“Bedside manner. You didn’t patronize me.”

Dr. Szandor tries to suppress a grin, then gives up. “We
all do our bit,” he says. “How’d you get up on
the roof without setting off your room alarm, anyway?”

“If I tell you how I did it, I won’t be able to
repeat the trick,” I say jokingly. He’s swabbing down
my shins now with something that stings and cools at the same time.
From time to time, he takes tweezers in hand and plucks loose some
gravel or grit and plinks it into a steel tray on a rolling table
by his side. He’s so gentle, I hardly feel it.

“What, you never heard of doctor-patient
confidentiality?”

“Is that thing still around?”

“Oh sure! We had a mandatory workshop on it yesterday
afternoon. Those are always a lot of fun.”

“So, you’re saying that you’ve got
professional expertise in the keeping of secrets, huh? I suppose I
could spill it for you, then.” And I do, explaining my little
hack for tricking the door into thinking that I’d left and
returned to the room.

“Huh—now that you explain it, it’s pretty
obvious.”

“That’s my job—figuring out the obvious way of
doing something.”

And we fall to talking about my job with V/DT, and the
discussion branches into the theory and practice of UE, only
slowing a little when he picks the crud out of the scrape down my
jaw and tugs through a couple of quick stitches. It occurs to me
that he’s just keeping me distracted, using a highly evolved
skill for placating psychopaths through small talk so that they
don’t thrash while he’s knitting their bodies back
together.

I decide that I don’t care. I get to natter on about a
subject that I’m nearly autistically fixated on, and I do it
in a context where I know that I’m sane and smart and
charming and occasionally mind-blowing.

“...and the whole thing pays for itself through EZPass,
where we collect the payments for the music downloaded while
you’re on the road.” As I finish my spiel, I realize
I’ve been keeping him distracted, standing
there with the tweezers in one hand and a swab in the other.

“Wow!” he said. “So, when’s this all
going to happen?”

“You’d use it, huh?”

“Hell, yeah! I’ve got a good twenty, thirty thousand
on my car right now! You’re saying I could plunder anyone
else’s stereo at will, for free, and keep it, while I’m
stuck in traffic, and because I’m a—what’d you
call it, a super-peer?—a super-peer, it’s all free and
legal? Damn!”

“Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East
Coast. It’ll probably roll out in LA first, then San
Francisco, Seattle...”

“What? Why?”

“It’s a long story,” I say. “And it ends
with me on the roof of a goddamned nuthouse on Route 128 doing a
one-man tribute to the Three Stooges.”

20.

Three days later, Art finally realized that something big and
ugly was in the offing. Fede had repeatedly talked him out of going
to Perceptronics’s offices, offering increasingly flimsy
excuses and distracting him by calling the hotel’s front desk
and sending up surprise massage therapists to interrupt Art as he
stewed in his juices, throbbing with resentment at having been
flown thousands of klicks while injured in order to check into a
faceless hotel on a faceless stretch of highway and insert this
thumb into his asshole and wait for Fede—who was still in
fucking London!—to sort out the mess so that he could
present himself at the Perceptronics Acton offices and get their
guys prepped for the ever-receding meeting with MassPike.

“Jesus, Federico, what the fuck am I doing
here?”

“I know, Art, I know.” Art had taken to calling Fede
at the extreme ends of circadian compatibility, three AM and eleven
PM and then noon on Fede’s clock, as a subtle means of making
the experience just as unpleasant for Fede as it was for Art.
“I screwed up,” Fede yawned. “I screwed up and
now we’re both paying the price. You handled your end
beautifully and I dropped mine. And I intend to make it up to
you.”

“I don’t want more massages, Fede. I want
to get this shit done and I want to come home and see my
girlfriend.”

Fede tittered over the phone.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing much,” Fede said. “Just sit tight
there for a couple minutes, OK? Call me back once it happens and
tell me what you wanna do, all right?”

“Once what happens?”

“You’ll know.”

It was Linda, of course. Knocking on Art’s hotel room door
minutes later, throwing her arms—and then her
legs—around him, and banging him stupid, half on and half off
the hotel room bed. Riding him and then being ridden in turns,
slurping and wet and energetic until they both lay sprawled on the
hotel room’s very nice Persian rugs, dehydrated and panting
and Art commed Fede, and Fede told him it could take a couple weeks
to sort things out, and why didn’t he and Linda rent a car
and do some sight-seeing on the East Coast?

That’s exactly what they did. Starting in Boston, where
they cruised Cambridge, watching the cute nerdyboys and geekygirls
wander the streets, having heated technical debates, lugging
half-finished works of technology and art through the sopping
summertime, a riot of townie accents and highbrow
engineerspeak.

Then a week in New York, where they walked until they thought
their feet would give out entirely, necks cricked at a permanent,
upward-staring angle to gawp at the topless towers of Manhattan.
The sound the sound the sound of Manhattan rang in their ears, a
gray and deep rumble of cars and footfalls and subways and
steampipes and sirens and music and conversation and ring tones and
hucksters and schizophrenic ranters, a veritable Las Vegas of
cacophony, and it made Linda uncomfortable, she who was raised in
the white noise susurrations of LA’s freeway forests, but it
made Art feel wonderful. He kept his comm switched off,
though the underfoot rumble of the subway had him reaching for it a
hundred times a day, convinced that he’d left it on in
vibe-alert mode.

They took a milk-run train to Toronto, chuffing through sleepy
upstate New York towns, past lakes and rolling countryside in full
summer glory. Art and Linda drank ginger beer in the observation
car, spiking it with rum from a flask that Linda carried in a
garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to reach
naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of
body-temperature liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides
were dulled by the soft oil of her thigh.

Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border,
sending Art for a full inspection—a privilege of being a
Canadian citizen and hence perennially under suspicion of smuggling
goods from the tax havens of the US into the country—and
leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin.

When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly
peered into, he found Linda standing on the platform, leaning
against a pillar, back arched, one foot flat against the bricks,
corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless winds of the
trainyard. From Art’s point of view, she was a gleaming
vision skewered on a beam of late day sunlight that made her hair
gleam like licorice. Her long and lazy jaw caught and lost the sun
as she talked animatedly down her comm, and Art was struck with a
sudden need to sneak up behind her and run his tongue down the line
that began with the knob of her mandible under her ear and ran down
to the tiny half-dimple in her chin, to skate it on the soft pouch
of flesh under her chin, to end with a tasting of her soft
lips.

Thought became deed. He crept up on her, smelling her new-car
hair products on the breeze that wafted back from her, and was
about to begin his tonguing when she barked, “Fuck
off! Stop calling me!” and closed her comm and stormed
off trainwards, leaving Art standing on the opposite side of the
pillar with a thoroughly wilted romantic urge.

More carefully, he followed her into the train, back to their
little cabin, and reached for the palm-pad to open the door when he
heard her agitated comm voice. “No, goddamnit, no. Not yet.
Keep calling me and not ever, do you
understand?”

Art opened the door. Linda was composed and neat and sweet in
her plush seat, shoulders back, smile winning. “Hey honey,
did the bad Customs man finally let you go?”

“He did! That sounded like a doozy of a phone
conversation, though. What’s wrong?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said.

“All right,” Art said, sitting down opposite her,
knee-to-knee, bending forward to plant a kiss on the top of her
exposed thigh. “I don’t.”

“Good.”

He continued to kiss his way up her thigh.
“Only...”

“Yes?”

“I think I probably do. Curiosity is one of my worst
failings of character.”

“Really?”

“Quite so,” he said. He’d slid her sundress
right up to the waistband of her cotton drawers, and now he worried
one of the pubic hairs that poked out from the elastic with his
teeth.

She shrieked and pushed him away. “Someone will
see!” she said. “This is a border crossing, not a
bordello!”

He sat back, but inserted a finger in the elastic before Linda
straightened out her dress, so that his fingertip rested in the
crease at the top of her groin.

“You are naughty,” she said.

“And curious,” Art agreed, giving his fingertip a
playful wiggle.

“I give up. That was my fucking ex,” she said.
“That is how I will refer to him henceforth. ‘My
fucking ex.’ My fucking, pain-in-the-ass, touchy-feely ex. My
fucking ex, who wants to have the Talk, even though it’s been
months and months. He’s figured out that I’m stateside
from my calling times, and he’s offering to come out to meet
me and really Work Things Out, Once And For All.”

“Oh, my,” Art said.

“That boy’s got too much LA in him for his own good.
There’s no problem that can’t be resolved through
sufficient dialog.”

“We never really talked about him,” Art said.

“Nope, we sure didn’t.”

“Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?”

“‘Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?’
Why yes, Art, I would. How perceptive of you.” She pushed his
hand away and crossed her arms and legs simultaneously.

“Wait, I’m confused,” Art said. “Does
that mean you want to talk about him, or that you
don’t?”

“Fine, we’ll talk about him. What do you want to
know about my fucking ex?”

Art resisted a terrible urge to fan her fires, to return the
vitriol that dripped from her voice. “Look, you don’t
want to talk about him, we won’t talk about him,” he
managed.

“No, let’s talk about my fucking ex, by all
means.” She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off
points on her fingers. “His name is Toby, he’s
half-Japanese, half-white. He’s about your height. Your dick
is bigger, but he’s better in bed. He’s a
user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never
fucking shuts up about what’s wrong with this or that. We
dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just
before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me
goddamned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live
with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to
my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me
choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you,
Arthur?”

“That was fine,” Art said. Linda’s face had
gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips
as she spat out the words. “Thank you.”

She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs.
“Look, I don’t like to talk about it—it’s
painful. I’m sorry he’s ruining our holiday. I just
won’t take his calls anymore, how about that?”

“I don’t care, Linda, Honestly, I don’t give a
rat’s ass if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how
upset you were and I thought it might help if you could talk it
over with me.”

“I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things
out all on my own. Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk
things over with him. You could come if you want—there are
some wicked bars in West Hollywood.”

“That’s OK,” Art said, whipsawed by
Linda’s incomprehensible mood shifts. “But if you need
to go, go. I’ve got plenty of old pals to hang out with in
Toronto.”

“You’re so understanding,” she cooed.
“Tell me about your grandmother again—you’re sure
she’ll like me?”

“She’ll love you. She loves anything that’s
female, of childbearing years, and in my company. She has great and
unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren.”

“Cluck.”

“Cluck?”

“Just practicing my brood-hen.”

21.

Doc Szandor’s a good egg. He’s keeping the shrinks
at bay, spending more time with me than is strictly necessary. I
hope he isn’t neglecting his patients, but it’s been so
long since I had a normal conversation, I just can’t bear to
give it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor’s in a
similar pit of bad conversation with psychopaths and
psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit of a natter with
someone who isn’t either having hallucinations or attempting
to prevent them in others.

“How the hell do you become a user-experience
guy?”

“Sheer orneriness,” I say, grinning. “I was
just in the right place at the right time. I had a pal in New York
who was working for a biotech company that had made this artificial
erectile tissue.”

“Erectile tissue?”

“Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and
capable of going large and rigid very quickly.”

“Sounds delightful.”

“Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about
the circumcisionist’s wallet made from foreskins?”

“Sure, I heard it premed—he rubs it and it becomes a
suitcase, right?”

“That’s the one. So these guys were thinking about
making drawbridges, temporary shelters, that kind of thing out of
it. They even had a cute name for it:
‘Ardorite.’”

“Ho ho ho.”

“Yeah. So they weren’t shipping a whole lot of
product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in
Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his
folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff
lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the
soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I
took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it
there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of
these very cute Icelandic au pairs and their tots, and I
was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of
Icelandic I’d learned from a friend’s mom in high
school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were
blond goddesses. I’d gotten to be friends with one named
Marta, oh, Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I’ll come back
to her once we’re better acquainted.

“Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the
spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers
who’d vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most
of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and
liked to bang things against other things arythmically while
hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone
to tripping. I’d get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks
on Twenty-third and we’d drink it together while Machinery
and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the
other kids in the park.

“I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough
not to call it synthetic turtle penis, because while Marta
was earthy, she wasn’t that earthy and, truth be
told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers
fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened
it.

“Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away
from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in
the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed
it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of
kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her,
spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy’s apartment and
grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back
to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu
focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play
with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool
fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for
their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways
to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of
miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.

“So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the
phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving
dinner at his boss’s house in Westchester.”

“Weren’t you worried he’d rip off your ideas
and not pay you anything for them?” Szandor’s
spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an
Ace bandage.

“Didn’t even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to
do just that, but it wasn’t any good—they were
engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with
their environments. The stuff wasn’t
self-revealing—they added a million cool features and a
manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called
me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I
designed for them.”

“That musta been worth a fortune,” says Szandor.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Actually, they
folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital
on R&D, didn’t have anything left to productize their
tech with. But my buddy did get another gig with a company
that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic
materials and he showed them the stuff I’d done with the
Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a no-fooling career.”

“Damn, that’s cool.”

“You betcha. It’s all about being an advocate for
the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out
what they’re trying to do, and then boss the engineers
around, getting them to remove the barriers they’ve erected
because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who
have no idea how normal people do stuff.”

The doctor chuckles. “Look,” he says, producing a
nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral
fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious
smoke, “it’s not my area of specialty, but you seem
like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures.
Certainly, you’re not like most of the people we’ve got
here. What are you doing here?”

Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe
twenty-six. I can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the
collar of his shirt, see some telltale remnant of a fashionable
haircut in his grown-out shag. He’s got to be the youngest
staff member I’ve met here, and he’s got a
fundamentally different affect from the zombies in the lab coats
who maintain the zombies in the felt slippers.

So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell
him about Linda and Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to
me.

“Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?”
Szandor says, sucking on his pacifier.

“The usual reasons, I guess,” I say, squirming.

“Lemme tell you something,” he says. He’s got
his feet up on the table now, hands laced behind his neck.
“It’s the smartest thing my dad ever said to me, just
as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away
to med school. She was nice enough, but, you know,
unstable. I’d gotten to the point where I ducked and ran
for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her to lose
her shit.

“So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said,
’Szandor, you know I like that girlfriend of yours, but she
is crazy. Not a little crazy, really crazy. Maybe she won’t
be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won’t be because
of you. Trust me, I know this. You can’t fuck a crazy girl
sane, son.’”

I can’t help smiling. “Truer words,” I say.
“But harsh.”

“Harsh is relative,” he says. “Contrast it
with, say, getting someone committed on trumped-up
evidence.”

It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. “It dawns on
me that you believe me.”

He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. “Well, why not?
You’re not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me.
You have neat ideas. Your story’s plausible
enough.”

I get excited. “Is this your professional
opinion?”

“Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I
don’t have professional opinions on your mental health. It
is, however, my amateur opinion.”

“Oh, well.”

“So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the
hospital?”

“Well, they don’t tell me much, but as near as I can
make out, I am stuck here semipermanently. The court found me
incompetent and ordered me held until I was. I can’t get
anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve
it—when I try, I get accused of being
‘difficult.’ Of course, escaping onto the roof is a
little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I’m going to be in
pretty deep shit. Do they know about the car?”

“The car?”

“In the parking lot. The one that blew up.”

Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across
the room and lands in a hazmat bucket. “You son of a
bitch—that was you?”

“Yeah,” I say, and drum my feet against the tin
cupboards under the examination table.

“That was my fucking car!”

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” I say.
“God.”

“No no no,” he says, fishing in his pocket and
unwrapping a fresh pacifier. “It’s OK. Insurance.
I’m getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence,
though,” he says.

Coincidence. He’s making disgusting hamster-cage noises,
grinding away at his pacifier. “Szandor, do you sometimes
sneak out onto the landing to have a cigarette? Use a bit of
tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“‘Cause that’s how I got out onto the
roof.”

“Oh, shit,” he says.

“It’s our secret,” I say. “I can tell
them I don’t know how I got out. I’m incompetent,
remember?”

“You’re a good egg, Art,” he says. “How
the hell are we going to get you out of here?”

“Hey what?”

“No, really. There’s no good reason for you to be
here, right? You’re occupying valuable bed space.”

“Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have a feeling
that as soon as you turn me loose, I’m gonna be doped up to
the tits for a good long while.”

He grimaces. “Right, right. They like their meds. Are your
parents alive?”

“What? No, they’re both dead.”

“Aha. Died suddenly?”

“Yeah. Dad drowned, Mom fell—”

“Ah ah ah! Shhh. Mom died suddenly. She was taking Haldol
when it happened, a low antianxiety dose, right?”

“Huh?”

“Probably she was. Probably she had a terrible drug
interaction. Sudden Death Syndrome. It’s hereditary. And you
say she fell? Seizure. We’ll sign you up for a PET scan,
that’ll take at least a month to set up. You could be an
epileptic and not even know it. Shaking the radioisotopes loose for
the scan from the AEC, woah, that’s a week’s worth of
paperwork right there! No Thorazine for you young man, not until
we’re absolutely sure it won’t kill you dead where you
stand. The hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on
this very subject not a month ago. I’ll just make some notes
in your medical history.” He picked up his comm and
scribbled.

“Never woulda thought of that,” I say.
“I’m impressed.”

“It’s something I’ve been playing with for a
while now. I think that psychiatric care is a good thing, of
course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away
prescription pads would be a good start.”

“Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had
prescribed how much of what and how often. Put ’em on a chart
in the ward where the patients’ families could see
’em.”

“That’s nasty!” he says. “I
love it. We’re supposed to be accountable, right? What
else?”

“Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking
bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and
vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies. Create
a dating service that automatically links patients who respond
similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing
with location data from other trackers, you could get stats on
which therapies make people more sociable, just by counting the
frequency with which patients stop and spend time in proximity to
other patients. It’d give you empirical data with which you
track your own progress.”

“This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?”

I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people
understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my
ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to
design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow.
God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?

“It’s my job,” I say, and give a modest
shrug.

“What do you charge for work like that?”

“Why, are you in the market?”

“Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we
can go into biz together, redesigning nuthatches.”

22.

Linda’s first meeting with Art’s Gran went off
without a hitch. Gran met them at Union Station with an obsolete
red cap who was as ancient as she was, a vestige of a more genteel
era of train travel and bulky luggage. Just seeing him made
Art’s brain whir with plans for conveyor systems, luggage
escalators, cart dispensers. They barely had enough luggage between
the two of them to make it worth the old man’s time, but he
dutifully marked their bags with a stub of chalk and hauled them
onto his cart, then trundled off to the service elevators.

Gran gave Art a long and teary hug. She was less frail than
she’d been in his memory, taller and sturdier. The smell of
her powder and the familiar acoustics of Union Station’s
cavernous platform whirled him back to his childhood in Toronto, to
the homey time before he’d gotten on the circadian
merry-go-round.

“Gran, this is Linda,” he said.

“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you,” Gran
said, taking Linda’s hands in hers. “Call me
Julie.”

Linda smiled a great, pretty, toothy smile. “Julie,
Art’s told me all about you. I just know we’ll
be great friends.”

“I’m sure we will. Are you hungry? Did they feed you
on the train? You must be exhausted after such a long trip. Which
would you rather do first, eat or rest?”

“Well, I’m up for seeing the town,”
Linda said. “Your grandson’s been yawning his head off
since Buffalo, though.” She put her arm around his waist and
squeezed his tummy.

“What a fantastic couple you make,” Gran said.
“You didn’t tell me she was so pretty,
Arthur!”

“Here it comes,” Art said. “She’s going
to ask about great-grandchildren.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gran said, cuffing him
gently upside the head. “You’re always
exaggerating.”

“Well I think it’s a splendid idea,”
Linda said. “Shall we have two? Three? Four?”

“Make it ten,” Art said, kissing her cheek.

“Oh, I couldn’t have ten,” Linda said.
“But five is a nice compromise. Five it will be. We’ll
name the first one Julie if it’s a girl, or Julius if
it’s a boy.”

“Oh, we are going to get along,” Gran said,
and led them up to the curb, where the red cap had loaded their
bags into a cab.

They ate dinner at Lindy’s on Yonge Street, right in the
middle of the sleaze strip. The steakhouse had been there for the
better part of a century, and its cracked red-vinyl booths and
thick rib eyes smothered in horseradish and HP Sauce were just as
Art had remembered. Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had
seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt
restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his
head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only
briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda
nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo,
the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower,
all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary
school.

By the time Art lay down in his bed, belly tight with undigested
steak, he was feeling wonderful and at peace with the world. Linda
climbed in beside him, wrestled away a pillow and some covers, and
snuggled up to him.

“That went well,” Art said. “I’m really
glad you two hit it off.”

“Me too, honey,” Linda said, kissing his shoulder
through his tee shirt. He’d been able to get his head around
the idea of sharing a bed with his girlfriend under his
grandmother’s roof, but doing so nude seemed somehow
wrong.

“We’re going to have a great week,” he said.
“I wish it would never end.”

“Yeah,” she said, and began to snore into his
neck.

The next morning, Art woke stiff and serene. He stretched out on
the bed, dimly noted Linda’s absence, and padded to the
bathroom to relieve his bladder. He thought about crawling back
into bed, was on the verge of doing so, when he heard the familiar,
nervewracking harangue of Linda arguing down her comm. He opened
the door to his old bedroom and there she was, stark naked and
beautiful in the morning sun, comm in hand, eyes focused in the
middle distance, shouting.

“No, goddamnit, no! Not here. Jesus, are you a moron? I
said no!”

Art reached out to touch her back, noticed that it was
trembling, visibly tense and rigid, and pulled his hand back.
Instead, he quietly set about fishing in his small bag for a change
of clothes.

“This is not a good time. I’m at
Art’s grandmother’s place, all right? I’ll talk
to you later.” She threw her comm at the bed and whirled
around.

“Everything all right?” Art said timidly.

“No, goddamnit, no it isn’t.”

Art pulled on his pants and kept his eyes on her comm, which was
dented and scratched from a hundred thousand angry hang ups. He
hated it when she got like this, radiating anger and spoiling for a
fight.

“I’m going to have to go, I think,” she
said.

“Go?”

“To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go
and sort things out with him.”

“Your ex knows who I am?”

She looked blank.

“You told him you were at my grandmother’s place. He
knows who I am?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He does. I told him, so
he’d get off my back.”

“And you have to go to California?”

“Today. I have to go to California today.”

“Jesus, today? We just got here!”

“Look, you’ve got lots of catching up to do with
your Gran and your friends here. You won’t even miss me.
I’ll go for a couple days and then come back.”

“If you gotta go,” he said.

“I gotta go.”

He explained things as best as he could to Gran while Linda
repacked her backpack, and then saw Linda off in a taxi. She was
already savaging her comm, booking a ticket to LA. He called Fede
from the condo’s driveway.

“Hey, Art! How’s Toronto?”

“How’d you know I was in Toronto?” Art said,
but he knew, he knew then, though he couldn’t
explain how he knew, he knew that Linda and Fede had been talking.
He knew that Linda had been talking to Fede that morning,
and not her fucking ex (God, he was thinking of the poor schmuck
that way already, “fucking ex”). Christ, it was
five in the morning on the West Coast. It couldn’t be
the ex. He just knew.

“Lucky guess,” Fede said breezily. “How is
it?”

“Oh, terrific. Great to see the old hometown and all.
How’re things with Perceptronics? When should I plan on being
back in Boston?”

“Oh, it’s going all right, but slow. Hurry up and
wait, right? Look, don’t worry about it, just relax there,
I’ll call you when the deal’s ready and you’ll go
back to Boston and we’ll sort it out and it’ll all be
fantastic and don’t worry, really, all right?”

“Fine, Fede.” Art wasn’t listening any more.
Fede had gone into bullshit mode, and all Art was thinking of was
why Linda would talk to Fede and then book a flight to LA.
“How’re things in London?” he said
automatically.

“Fine, fine,” Fede said, just as automatically.
“Not the same without you, of course.”

“Of course,” Art said. “Well, bye
then.”

“Bye,” Fede said.

Art felt an unsuspected cunning stirring within him. He commed
Linda, in her cab. “Hey, dude,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, sounding harassed.

“Look, I just spoke to my Gran and she’s really
upset you had to go. She really liked you.”

“Well, I liked her, too.”

“Great. Here’s the thing,” he said, and drew
in a breath. “Gran made you a sweater. She made me one, too.
She’s a knitter. She wanted me to send it along after you. It
looks pretty good. So, if you give me your ex’s address, I
can FedEx it there and you can get it.”

There was a lengthy pause. “Why don’t I just pick it
up when I see you again?” Linda said, finally.

Gotcha, Art thought. “Well, I know that’d
be the sensible thing, but my Gran, I dunno, she really
wants me to do this. It’d make her so happy.”

“I dunno—my ex might cut it up or
something.”

“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. I could
just schedule the delivery for after you arrive, that way you can
sign for it. What do you think?”

“I really don’t think—”

“Come on, Linda, I know it’s nuts, but it’s my
Gran. She really likes you.”

Linda sighed. “Let me comm you the address, OK?”

“Thanks, Linda,” Art said, watching the address in
Van Nuys scroll onto his comm’s screen. “Thanks a
bunch. Have a great trip—don’t let your ex get you
down.”

Now, armed with Linda’s fucking ex’s name, Art went
to work. He told Gran he had some administrative chores to catch up
on for an hour or two, promised to have supper with her and Father
Ferlenghetti that night, and went out onto the condo’s
sundeck with his keyboard velcroed to his thigh.

Trepan: Hey!

Colonelonic: Trepan! Hey, what's up? I hear you're back on
the East Coast!

Trepan: True enough. Back in Toronto. How's things with
you?

Colonelonic: Same as ever. Trying to quit the
dayjob.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Are you still working at
Merril-Lynch?

## Colonelonic (private): Yeah.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Still got access to
Lexis-Nexus?

## Colonelonic (private): Sure -- but they're on our asses
about abusing the accounts. Every search is logged and has to be
accounted for.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Can you get me background on
just one guy?

## Colonelonic (private): Who is he? Why?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's stupid. I think that
someone I know is about to go into biz with him, and I don't trust
him. I'm probably just being paranoid, but...

## Colonelonic (private): I don't know, man. Is it really
important?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Oh, crap, look. It's my
girlfriend. I think she's screwing this guy. I just wanna get an
idea of who he is, what he does, you know.

## Colonelonic (private): Heh. That sucks. OK -- check back
in a couple hours. There's a guy across the hall who never logs out
of his box when he goes to lunch. I'll sneak in there and look it
up on his machine.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Kick ass. Thanks.

##Transferring addressbook entry "Toby Ginsburg" to
Colonelonic. Receipt confirmed.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Thanks again!

## Colonelonic (private): Check in with me later -- I'll
have something for you then.

Art logged off, flushed with triumph. Whatever Fede and Linda
were cooking up, he’d get wise to it and then he’d nail
’em. What the hell was it, though?

23.

My cousins visited me a week after I arrived at the nuthouse.
I’d never been very close to them, and certainly our
relationship had hardly blossomed during the week I spent in
Toronto, trying to track down Linda and Fede’s plot.

I have two cousins. They’re my father’s
sister’s kids, and I didn’t even meet them until I was
about twenty and tracking down my family history. They’re
Ottawa Valley kids, raised on government-town pork, aging hippie
muesli, and country-style corn pone. It’s a weird mix, and
we’ve never had a conversation that I would consider a
success. Ever met a violent, aggressive hippie with an intimate
knowledge of whose genitals one must masticate in order to get a
building permit or to make a pot bust vanish? It ain’t
pretty.

Cousin the first is Audie. She’s a year older than me, and
she’s the smart one on that side of the family, the one who
ended up at Queen’s University for a BS in Electrical
Engineering and an MA in Poli Sci, and even so finished up back in
Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese
and Sierra Leonese OEM importers. Audie’s married to a nice
fella whose name I can never remember and they’re gonna have
kids in five years; it’s on a timetable that she actually
showed me once when I went out there on biz and stopped in to see
her at the office.

Cousin the second is Alphie—three years younger than me,
raised in the shadow of his overachieving sister, he was the capo
of Ottawa Valley script kiddies, a low-rent hacker who downloaded
other people’s code for defeating copyright use-control
systems and made a little biz for himself bootlegging games, porn,
music and video, until the WIPO bots found him through traffic
analysis and busted his ass, bankrupting him and landing him in the
clink for sixty days.

Audie and Alfie are blond and ruddy and a little heavyset, all
characteristics they got from their father’s side, so add
that to the fact that I grew up without being aware of their
existence and you’ll understand the absence of any real
fellow-feeling for them. I don’t dislike them, but I have so
little in common with them that it’s like hanging out with
time travelers from the least-interesting historical era
imaginable.

But they came to Boston and looked me up in the nuthatch.

They found me sitting on the sofa in the ward, post-Group, arms
and ankles crossed, dozing in a shaft of sunlight. It was my
habitual napping spot, and I found that a nap between Group and
dinner was a good way to sharpen my appetite and anasthetize my
taste buds, which made the mealtime slop bearable.

Audie shook my shoulder gently. I assumed at first that she was
one of the inmates trying to get me involved in a game of Martian
narco-checkers, so I brushed her hand away.

“They’ve probably got him all doped up,” Audie
said. The voice was familiar and unplaceable and so I cracked my
eyelid, squinting up at her silhouette in the afternoon sun.
“There he is,” she said. “Come on, up and at
’em, tiger.”

I sat up abruptly and scrubbed at my eyes. “Audie?”
I asked.

“Yup. And Alphie.” Alphie’s pink face hove
into view.

“Hi, Art,” he mumbled.

“Jesus,” I said, getting to my feet. Audie put out a
superfluous steadying hand. “Wow.”

“Surprised?” Audie said.

“Yeah!” I said. Audie thrust a bouquet of flowers
into my arms. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, your grandmother told me you were here. I was coming
down to Boston for work anyway, so I flew in a day early so I could
drop in. Alphie came down with me—he’s my assistant
now.”

I almost said something about convicted felons working for
government contractors, but I held onto my tongue. Consequently, an
awkward silence blossomed.

“Well,” Audie said, at last. “Well!
Let’s have a look at you, then.” She actually took a
lap around me, looking me up and down, making little noises.
“You look all right, Art. Maybe a little skinny, even.
Alphie’s got a box of cookies for you.” Alphie stepped
forward and produced the box, a family pack of President’s
Choice Ridiculous Chocoholic Extra Chewies, a Canadian store brand
I’d been raised on. Within seconds of seeing them, my mouth
was sloshing with saliva.

“It’s good to see you, Audie, Alphie.” I
managed to say it without spitting, an impressive feat, given the
amount of saliva I was contending with. “Thanks for the care
package.”

We stared at each other blankly.

“So, Art,” Alphie said, “So! How do you like
it here?”

“Well, Alphie,” I said. “I can’t say as
I do, really. As far as I can tell, I’m sane as I’ve
ever been. It’s just a bunch of unfortunate coincidences and
bad judgment that got me here.” I refrain from mentioning
Alphie’s propensity for lapses in judgment.

“Wow,” Alphie said. “That’s a bummer. We
should do something, you know, Audie?”

“Not really my area of expertise,” Audie said in
clipped tones. “I would if I could, you know that, right Art?
We’re family, after all.”

“Oh, sure,” I say magnanimously. But now that
I’m looking at them, my cousins who got into a thousand times
more trouble than I ever did, driving drunk, pirating software,
growing naughty smokables in the backyard, and got away from it
unscathed, I feel a stirring of desperate hope.
“Only...”

“Only what?” Alphie said.

“Only, maybe, Audie, do you think you could, that is, if
you’ve got the time, do you think you could have a little
look around and see if any of your contacts could maybe set me up
with a decent lawyer who might be able to get my case reheard? Or a
shrink, for that matter? Something? ’Cause frankly it
doesn’t really seem like they’re going to let me go,
ever. Ever.”

Audie squirmed and glared at her brother. “I don’t
really know anyone that fits the bill,” she said at last.

“Well, not firsthand, sure, why would you? You
wouldn’t.” I thought that I was starting to babble, but
I couldn’t help myself. “You wouldn’t. But maybe
there’s someone that someone you know knows who can do
something about it? I mean, it can’t hurt to ask around, can
it?”

“I suppose it can’t,” she said.

“Wow,” I said, “that would just be fantastic,
you know. Thanks in advance, Audie, really, I mean it, just for
trying, I can’t thank you enough. This place, well, it really
sucks.”

There it was, hanging out, my desperate and pathetic plea for
help. Really, there was nowhere to go but down from there. Still,
the silence stretched and snapped and I said, “Hey, speaking
of, can I offer you guys a tour of the ward? I mean, it’s not
much, but it’s home.”

So I showed them: the droolers and the fondlers and the pukers
and my horrible little room and the scarred ping-pong table and the
sticky decks of cards and the meshed-in TV. Alphie actually seemed
to dig it, in a kind of horrified way. He started comparing it to
the new Kingston Pen, where he’d done his six-month bit.
After seeing the first puker, Audie went quiet and thin-lipped,
leaving nothing but Alphie’s enthusiastic gurgling as
counterpoint to my tour.

“Art,” Audie said finally, desperately, “do
you think they’d let us take you out for a cup of coffee or a
walk around the grounds?”

I asked. The nurse looked at a comm for a while, then shook her
head.

“Nope,” I reported. “They need a day’s
notice of off-ward supervised excursions.”

“Well, too bad,” Audie said. I understood her
strategy immediately. “Too bad. Nothing for it, then. Guess
we should get back to our hotel.” I planted a dry kiss on her
cheek, shook Alphie’s sweaty hand, and they were gone. I
skipped supper that night and ate cookies until I couldn’t
eat another bite of rich chocolate.

#

“Got a comm?” I ask Doc Szandor, casually.

“What for?”

“Wanna get some of this down. The ideas for the hospital.
Before I go back out on the ward.” And it is what I
want to do, mostly. But the temptation to just log on and do my
thing—oh!

“Sure,” he says, checking his watch. “I can
probably stall them for a couple hours more. Feel free to make a
call or whatever, too.”

Doc Szandor’s a good egg.

24.

Father Ferlenghetti showed up at Art’s Gran’s at
7PM, just as the sun began to set over the lake, and Art and he
shared lemonade on Gran’s sunporch and watched as the waves
on Lake Ontario turned harshly golden.

“So, Arthur, tell me, what are you doing with your
life?” the Father said. He had grown exquisitely aged, almost
translucent, since Art had seen him last. In his dog collar and
old-fashioned aviator’s shades, he looked like a waxworks
figure.

Art had forgotten all about the Father’s visit until Gran
stepped out of her superheated kitchen to remind him. He’d
hastily showered and changed into fresh slacks and a mostly clean
tee shirt, and had agreed to entertain the priest while his Gran
finished cooking supper. Now, he wished he’d signed up to do
the cooking.

“I’m working in London,” he said. “The
same work as ever, but for an English firm.”

“That’s what your grandmother tells me. But is it
making you happy? Is it what you plan to do with the rest of your
life?”

“I guess so,” Art said. “Sure.”

“You don’t sound so sure,” Father Ferlenghetti
said.

“Well, the work part’s excellent. The
politics are pretty ugly, though, to tell the truth.”

“Ah. Well, we can’t avoid politics, can
we?”

“No, I guess we can’t.”

“Art, I’ve always known that you were a very smart
young man, but being smart isn’t the same as being happy. If
you’re very lucky, you’ll get to be my age and
you’ll look back on your life and be glad you lived
it.”

Gran called him in for dinner before he could think of a reply.
He settled down at the table and Gran handed him a pen.

“What’s this for?” he asked.

“Sign the tablecloth,” she said. “Write a
little something and sign it and date it, nice and clear,
please.”

“Sign the tablecloth?”

“Yes. I’ve just started a fresh one. I have everyone
sign my tablecloth and then I embroider the signatures in, so I
have a record of everyone who’s been here for supper.
They’ll make a nice heirloom for your
children—I’ll show you the old ones after we
eat.”

“What should I write?”

“It’s up to you.”

While Gran and the Father looked on, Art uncapped the felt-tip
pen and thought and thought, his mind blank. Finally, he wrote,
“For my Gran. No matter where I am, I know you’re
thinking of me.” He signed it with a flourish.

“Lovely. Let’s eat now.”

Art meant to log in and see if Colonelonic had dredged up any
intel on Linda’s ex, but he found himself trapped on the
sunporch with Gran and the Father and a small stack of linen
tablecloths hairy with embroidered wishes. He traced their braille
with his fingertips, recognizing the names of his childhood. Gran
and the Father talked late into the night, and the next thing Art
knew, Gran was shaking him awake. He was draped in a tablecloth
that he’d pulled over himself like a blanket, and she folded
it and put it away while he ungummed his eyes and staggered off to
bed.

Audie called him early the next morning, waking him up.

“Hey, Art! It’s your cousin!”

“Audie?”

“You don’t have any other female cousins, so yes,
that’s a good guess. Your Gran told me you were in Canada for
a change.”

“Yup, I am. Just for a little holiday.”

“Well, it’s been long enough. What do you do in
London again?”

“I’m a consultant for Virgin/Deutsche
Telekom.” He has this part of the conversation every time he
speaks with Audie. Somehow, the particulars of his job just
couldn’t seem to stick in her mind.

“What kind of consultant?”

“User experience. I help design their interactive stuff.
How’s Ottawa?”

“They pay you for that, huh? Well, nice work if you can
get it.”

Art believed that Audie was being sincere in her amazement at
his niche in the working world, and not sneering at all. Still, he
had to keep himself from saying something snide about the lack of
tangible good resulting from keeping MPs up to date on the
poleconomy of semiconductor production in PacRim sweatshops.

“They sure do. How’s Ottawa?”

“Amazing. And why London? Can’t you find work at
home?”

“Yeah, I suppose I could. This just seemed like a good job
at the time. How’s Ottawa?

“Seemed, huh? You going to be moving back, then?
Quitting?”

“Not anytime soon. How’s Ottawa?”

“Ottawa? It’s beautiful this time of year. Alphie
and Enoch and I were going to go to the trailer for the weekend, in
Calabogie. You could drive up and meet us. Swim, hike. We’ve
built a sweatlodge near the dock; you and Alphie could bake up
together.”

“Wow,” Art said, wishing he had Audie’s gift
for changing the subject. “Sounds great. But. Well, you know.
Gotta catch up with friends here in Toronto. It’s been a
while, you know. Well.” The image of sharing a smoke-filled
dome with Alphie’s naked, cross-legged, sweat-slimed paunch
had seared itself across his waking mind.

“No? Geez. Too bad. I’d really hoped that we could
reconnect, you and me and Alphie. We really should spend some more
time together, keep connected, you know?”

“Well,” Art said. “Sure. Yes.” Relations
or no, Audie and Alphie were basically strangers to him, and it was
beyond him why Audie thought they should be spending time together,
but there it was. Reconnect, keep connected. Hippies.
“We should. Next time I’m in Canada, for sure,
we’ll get together, I’ll come to Ottawa. Maybe
Christmas. Skating on the canal, OK?”

“Very good,” Audie said. “I’ll pencil
you in for Christmas week. Here, I’ll send you the wish lists
for Alphie and Enoch and me, so you’ll know what to
get.”

Xmas wishlists in July. Organized hippies! What planet did his
cousins grow up on, anyway?

“Thanks, Audie. I’ll put together a wishlist and
pass it along to you soon, OK?” His bladder nagged at him.
“I gotta run now, all right?”

“Great. Listen, Art, it’s been, well, great to talk
to you again. It really makes me feel whole to connect with you.
Don’t be a stranger, all right?”

“Yeah, OK! Nice to talk to you, too. Bye!”

“Safe travels and wishes fulfilled,” Audie said.

“You too!”

25.

Now I’ve got a comm, I hardly know what to do with it.
Call Gran? Call Audie? Call Fede? Login to an EST chat and see
who’s up to what?

How about the Jersey clients?

There’s an idea. Give them everything, all the notes I
built for Fede and his damned patent application, sign over the
exclusive rights to the patent for one dollar and services rendered
(i.e., getting me a decent lawyer and springing me from this damned
hole).

My last lawyer was a dickhead. He met me at the courtroom
fifteen minutes before the hearing, in a private room whose
fixtures had the sticky filthiness of a bus-station toilet.
“Art, yes, hello, I’m Allan Mendelson, your attorney.
How are you?

He was well over 6’6”, but weighed no more than 120
lbs and hunched over his skinny ribs while he talked, dry-washing
his hands. His suit looked like the kind of thing you’d see
on a Picadilly Station homeless person, clean enough and
well-enough fitting, but with an indefinable air of cheapness and
falsehood.

“Well, not so good,” I said. “They upped my
meds this morning, so I’m pretty logy. Can’t
concentrate. They said it was to keep me calm while I was
transported. Dirty trick, huh?”

“What?” he’d been browsing through his comm,
tapping through what I assumed was my file. “No, no.
It’s perfectly standard. This isn’t a trial, it’s
a hearing. We’re all on the same side, here.” He tapped
some more. “Your side.”

“Good,” Art said. “My grandmother came down,
and she wants to testify on my behalf.”

“Oooh,” the fixer said, shaking his head. “No,
not a great idea. She’s not a mental health professional, is
she?”

“No,” I said. “But she’s known me all my
life. She knows I’m not a danger to myself or
others.”

“Sorry, that’s not appropriate. We all love our
families, but the court wants to hear from people who have
qualified opinions on this subject. Your doctors will speak, of
course.”

“Do I get to speak?”

“If you really want to. That’s not a very
good idea, either, though, I’m afraid. If the judge wants to
hear from you, she’ll address you. Otherwise, your best bet
is to sit still, no fidgeting, look as sane and calm as you
can.”

I felt like I had bricks dangling from my limbs and one stuck in
my brain. The new meds painted the world with translucent
whitewash, stuffed cotton in my ears and made my tongue thick.
Slowly, my brain absorbed all of this.

“You mean that my Gran can’t talk, I can’t
talk, and all the court hears is the doctors?”

“Don’t be difficult, Art. This is a hearing to
determine your competency. A group of talented mental health
professionals have observed you for the past week and they’ve
come to some conclusions based on those observations. If everyone
who came before the court for a competency hearing brought out a
bunch of irrelevant witnesses and made long speeches, the court
calendar would be backlogged for decades. Then other people who
were in for observation wouldn’t be able to get their
hearings. It wouldn’t work for anyone. You see that,
right?”

“Not really. I really think it would be better if I got to
testify on my behalf. I have that right, don’t I?”

He sighed and looked very put-upon. “If you insist,
I’ll call you to speak. But as your lawyer, it’s my
professional opinion that you should not do
this.”

“I really would prefer to.”

He snapped his comm shut. “I’ll meet you in the
courtroom, then. The bailiff will take you in.”

“Can you tell my Gran where I am? She’s waiting in
the court, I think.”

“Sorry. I have other cases to cope with—I
can’t really play messenger, I’m afraid.”

When he left the little office, I felt as though I’d been
switched off. The drugs weighted my eyelids and soothed my panic
and outrage. Later, I’d be livid, but right then I could
barely keep from folding my arms on the grimy table and resting my
head on them.

The hearing went so fast I barely even noticed it. I sat with my
lawyer and the doctors stood up and entered their reports into
evidence—I don’t think they read them aloud, even, just
squirted them at the court reporter. My Gran sat behind me, on a
chair that was separated from the court proper by a banister. She
had her hand on my shoulder the whole time, and it felt like an
anvil there to my dopey muscles.

“All right, Art,” my jackass lawyer said, giving me
a prod. “Here’s your turn. Stand up and keep it
brief.”

I struggled to my feet. The judge was an Asian woman about my
age, a small round head set atop a shapeless robe and perched on a
high seat behind a high bench.

“Your Honor,” I said. I didn’t know what to
say next. All my wonderful rhetoric had fled me. The judge looked
at me briefly, then went back to tapping her comm. Maybe she was
playing solitaire or looking at porn. “I asked to have a
moment to address the Court. My lawyer suggested that I not do
this, but I insisted.

“Here’s the thing. There’s no way for me to
win here. There’s a long story about how I got here.
Basically, I had a disagreement with some of my coworkers who were
doing something that I thought was immoral. They decided that it
would be best for their plans if I was out of the way for a little
while, so that I couldn’t screw them up, so they coopered
this up, told the London police that I’d gone nuts.

“So I ended up in an institution here for observation, on
the grounds that I was dangerously paranoid. When the people at the
institution asked me about it, I told them what had happened.
Because I was claiming that the people who had me locked up were
conspiring to make me look paranoid, the doctors decided that I
was paranoid. But tell me, how could I demonstrate my
non-paranoia? I mean, as far as I can tell, the second I was put
away for observation, I was guaranteed to be found wanting. Nothing
I could have said or done would have made a difference.”

The judge looked up from her comm and gave me another once-over.
I was wearing my best day clothes, which were my basic London
shabby chic white shirt and gray wool slacks and narrow blue tie.
It looked natty enough in the UK, but I knew that in the US it made
me look like an overaged door-to-door Mormon. The judge kept
looking at me. Call to action, I thought. End your
speeches with a call to action. It was another bit of goofy
West Coast Vulcan Mind Control, courtesy of Linda’s fucking
ex.

“So here’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to stand up
here and let you know what had happened to me and ask you for
advice. If we assume for the moment that I’m not
crazy, how should I demonstrate that here in the court?”

The judge rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder, making
glossy black waterfalls of her hair. The whole hearing is very
fuzzy for me, but that hair! Who ever heard of a civil servant with
good hair?

“Mr. Berry,” she said, “I’m afraid I
don’t have much to tell you. It’s my responsibility to
listen to qualified testimony and make a ruling. You haven’t
presented any qualified testimony to support your position. In the
absence of such testimony, my only option is to remand you into the
custody of the Department of Mental Health until such time as a
group of qualified professionals see fit to release you.” I
expected her to bang a gavel, but instead she just scritched at her
comm and squirted the order at the court reporter and I was led
away.

I didn’t even have a chance to talk to Gran.

26.

##Received address book entry "Toby Ginsburg" from
Colonelonic.

## Colonelonic (private): This guy's up to something. Flew
to Boston twice this week. Put a down payment on a house in Orange
County. _Big_ house. _Big_ down payment. A car, too: vintage T-bird
convertible. A gas burner! Bought CO2 credits for an entire year to
go with it.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Huh. Who's he working
for?

## Colonelonic (private): Himself. He Federally incorporated
last week, something called "TunePay, Inc." He's the Chairman, but
he's only a minority shareholder. The rest of the common shares are
held by a dummy corporation in London. Couldn't get any details on
that without using a forensic accounting package, and that'd get me
fired right quick.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's OK. I get the picture. I
owe you one, all right?

## Colonelonic (private): sweat.value==0 Are you going to
tell me what this is all about someday? Not some bullshit about
your girlfriend?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Heh. That part was true,
actually. I'll tell you the rest, maybe, someday. Not today,
though. I gotta go to London.

Art’s vision throbbed with his pulse as he jammed his
clothes back into his backpack with one hand while he booked a
ticket to London on his comm with the other. Sweat beaded on his
forehead as he ordered the taxi while scribbling a note to Gran on
the smart-surface of her fridge.

He was verging on berserk by the time he hit airport security.
The guard played the ultrasound flashlight over him and looked him
up and down with his goggles, then had him walk through the
chromatograph twice. Art tried to breathe calmly, but it
wasn’t happening. He’d take two deep breaths, think
about how he was yup, calming down, pretty good, especially since
he was going to London to confront Fede about the fact that his
friend had screwed him stabbed him in the back using his girlfriend
to distract him and meanwhile she was in Los Angeles sleeping with
her fucking ex who was going to steal his idea and sell it as his
own that fucking prick boning his girl right then almost certainly
laughing about poor old Art, dumbfuck stuck in Toronto with his
thumb up his ass, oh Fede was going to pay, that’s right, he
was—and then he’d be huffing down his nose,
hyperventilating, really losing his shit right there.

The security guard finally asked him if he needed a doctor.

“No,” Art said. “That’s fine. I’m
just upset. A friend of mine died suddenly and I’m flying to
London for the funeral.” The guard seemed satisfied with this
explanation and let him pass, finally.

He fought the urge to get plastered on the flight and vibrated
in his seat instead, jiggling his leg until his seatmate—an
elderly businessman who’d spent the flight thus far wrinkling
his brow at a series of spreadsheets on his comm—actually put
a hand on Art’s knee and said, “Switch off the motor,
son. You’re gonna burn it out if you idle it that high all
the way to Gatwick.”

Art nearly leapt out of his seat when the flight attendant
wheeled up the duty-free cart, bristling with novelty beakers of
fantastically old whiskey shaped like jigging Scotchmen and drunken
leprechauns swinging from lampposts.

By the time he hit UK customs he was supersonic, ready to hammer
an entire packet of Player’s filterless into his face and
light them with a blowtorch. It wasn’t even 0600h GMT, and
the Sikh working the booth looked three-quarters asleep under his
turban, but he woke right up when Art stepped past the red line and
slapped both palms on the counter and used them as a lever to
support him as he pogoed in place.

“Your business in England, sir?”

“I work for Virgin/Deutsche Telekom. Let me beam you my
visa.” His hands were shaking so badly he dropped his comm to
the hard floor with an ominous clatter. He snatched it up and
rubbed at the fresh dent in the cover, then flipped it open and
stabbed at it with a filthy fingernail.

“Thank you, sir. Door number two, please.”

Art took one step towards the baggage carousel when the words
registered. Customs search! Godfuckingdammit! He jittered in the
private interview room until another Customs officer showed up,
overrode his comm and read in his ID and credentials, then stared
at them for a long moment.

“Are you quite all right, sir?”

“Just a little wound up,” Art said, trying
desperately to sound normal. He thought about telling the dead
friend story again, but unlike a lowly airport security drone, the
Customs man had the ability and inclination to actually verify it.
“Too much coffee on the plane. Need to have a slash like you
wouldn’t believe.”

The Customs man grimaced slightly, then chewed a corner of his
little moustache. “Everything else is all right,
though?”

“Everything’s fine. Back from a business trip to the
States and Canada, all jetlagged. You know. Can you believe the
bastards actually expect me at the office today?” This might
work. Piss and moan about the office until he gets bored and lets
him go. “I mean, you work your guts out, fly halfway around
the world and do it some more, get strapped into a torture
seat—you think Virgin springs for business-class tickets for
its employees? Hell no!—for six hours, then they want you at
the goddamned office.”

“Virgin?” the Customs man said, eyebrows going up.
“But you flew in on BA, sir.”

Shit. Of course he hadn’t booked a Virgin flight.
That’s what Fede’d be expecting him to do, he’d
be watching for Art to use his employee discount and hop a flight
back. “Yes, can you believe it?” Art thought furiously.
“They called me back suddenly, wouldn’t even let me
wait around for one of their own damned planes. One minute
I’m eating breakfast, the next I’m in a taxi heading
for the airport. I forgot half of my damned underwear in the hotel
room! You’d think they could cope with one little
problem without crawling up my cock, wouldn’t
you?”

“Sir, please, calm down.” The Customs man looked
alarmed and Art realized that he’d begun to pace.

“Sorry, sorry. It just sucks. Bad job. Time to quit, I
think.”

“I should think so,” the Customs man said.
“Welcome to England.”

Traffic was early-morning light and the cabbie drove like a
madman. Art kept flinching away from the oncoming traffic, already
unaccustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road. England
seemed filthy and gray and shabby to him now, tiny little cars with
tiny, anal-retentive drivers filled with self-loathing, vegetarian
meat-substitutes and bad dentistry. In his rooms in Camden Town,
Art took a hasty and vengeful census of his stupid belongings,
sagging rental furniture and bad art prints hanging askew (not any
more, not after he smashed them to the floor). Bad English clothes
(toss ’em onto the floor, looking for one thing he’d be
caught dead wearing in NYC, and guess what, not a single thing).
Stupid keepsakes from the Camden market, funny novelty lighters,
retro rave flyers preserved in glassine envelopes.

He was about to overturn his ugly little pressboard coffee table
when he realized that there was something on it.

A small, leather-worked box with a simple brass catch. Inside,
the axe-head. Two hundred thousand years old. Heavy with the weight
of the ages. He hefted it in his hand. It felt ancient and lethal.
He dropped it into his jacket pocket, instantly deforming the
jacket into a stroke-y left-hanging slant. He kicked the coffee
table over.

Time to go see Fede.

27.

I have wished for a comm a hundred thousand times an hour since
they stuck me in this shithole, and now that I have one, I
don’t know who to call. Not smart. Not happy.

I run my fingers over the keypad, think about all the stupid,
terrible decisions that I made on the way to this place in my life.
I feel like I could burst into tears, like I could tear the hair
out of my head, like I could pound my fists bloody on the floor. My
fingers, splayed over the keypad, tap out the old nervous rhythms
of the phone numbers I’ve know all my life, my first house,
my Mom’s comm, Gran’s place.

Gran. I tap out her number and hit the commit button. I put the
phone to my head.

“Gran?”

“Arthur?”

“Oh, Gran!”

“Arthur, I’m so worried about you. I spoke to your
cousins yesterday, they tell me you’re not doing so good
there.”

“No, no I’m not.” The stitches in my jaw throb
in counterpoint with my back.

“I tried to explain it all to Father Ferlenghetti, but I
didn’t have the details right. He said it didn’t make
any sense.”

“It doesn’t. They don’t care. They’ve
just put me here.”

“He said that they should have let you put your own
experts up when you had your hearing.”

“Well, of course they should have.”

“No, he said that they had to, that it was the
law in Massachusetts. He used to live there, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh yes, he had a congregation in Newton. That was before
he moved to Toronto. He seemed very sure of it.”

“Why was he living in Newton?”

“Oh, he moved there after university. He’s a Harvard
man, you know.”

“I think you’ve got that wrong. Harvard
doesn’t have a divinity school.”

“No, this was after divinity school. He was doing
a psychiatry degree at Harvard.”

Oh, my.

“Oh, my.”

“What is it, Arthur?”

“Do you have Father Ferlenghetti’s number,
Gran?”

28.

Tonaishah’s Kubrick-figure facepaint distorted into wild
grimaces when Art banged into O’Malley House, raccoon-eyed
with sleepdep, airline crud crusted at the corners of his lips,
whole person quivering with righteous smitefulness. He commed the
door savagely and yanked it so hard that the gas-lift snapped with
a popping sound like a metal ruler being whacked on a desk. The
door caromed back into his heel and nearly sent him sprawling, but
he converted its momentum into a jog through the halls to his
miniature office—the last three times he’d spoken to
Fede, the bastard had been working out of his office—stealing
his papers, no doubt, though that hadn’t occurred to Art
until his plane was somewhere over Ireland.

Fede was halfway out of Art’s chair when Art bounded into
the office. Fede’s face was gratifyingly pale, his eyes
thoroughly wide and scared. Art didn’t bother to slow down,
just slammed into Fede, bashing foreheads with him. Art smelled a
puff of his own travel sweat and Fede’s spicy Lilac Vegetal,
saw blood welling from Fede’s eyebrow.

“Hi, pal!” he said, kicking the door shut with a
crash that resounded through the paper-thin walls.

“Art! Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell is wrong with
you?” Fede backed away to the far corner of the office,
sending Art’s chair over backwards, wheels spinning,
ergonomic adjustment knobs and rods sticking up in the air like the
legs of an overturned beetle.

“TunePay, Inc.?” Art said, booting the chair into
Fede’s shins. “Is that the best fucking name you could
come up with? Or did Toby and Linda cook it up?”

Fede held his hands out, palms first. “What are you
talking about, buddy? What’s wrong with you?”

Art shook his head slowly. “Come on, Fede, it’s time
to stop blowing smoke up my cock.”

“I honestly have no idea—”

“Bullshit!” Art bellowed, closing up with
Fede, getting close enough to see the flecks of spittle flying off
his lips spatter Fede’s face. “I’ve had enough
bullshit, Fede!”

Abruptly, Fede lurched forward, sweeping Art’s feet out
from underneath him and landing on Art’s chest seconds after
Art slammed to the scratched and splintered hardwood floor. He
pinned Art’s arms under his knees, then leaned forward and
crushed Art’s windpipe with his forearm, bearing down.

“You dumb sack of shit,” he hissed. “We were
going to cut you in, after it was done. We knew you wouldn’t
go for it, but we were still going to cut you in—you think
that was your little whore’s idea? No, it was mine! I stuck
up for you! But not anymore, you hear? Not anymore. You’re
through. Jesus, I gave you this fucking job! I set up the deal in
Cali. Fuck-off heaps of money! I’m through with you, now.
You’re done. I’m ratting you out to V/DT, and I’m
flying to California tonight. Enjoy your deportation hearing, you
dumb Canuck boy-scout.”

Art’s vision had contracted to a fuzzy black vignette with
Fede’s florid face in the center of it. He gasped
convulsively, fighting for air. He felt his bladder go, and hot
urine stream down his groin and over his thighs.

An instant later, Fede sprang back from him, face twisted in
disgust, hands brushing at his urine-stained pants. “Damn
it,” he said, as Art rolled onto his side and retched. Art
got up on all fours, then lurched erect. As he did, the axe head in
his pocket swung wildly and knocked against the glass pane beside
his office’s door, spiderwebbing it with cracks.

Moving with dreamlike slowness, Art reached into his pocket,
clasped the axe head, turned it in his hand so that the edge was
pointing outwards. He lifted it out of his pocket and held his hand
behind his back. He staggered to Fede, who was glaring at him,
daring him to do something, his chest heaving.

Art windmilled his arm over his head and brought the axe head
down solidly on Fede’s head. It hit with an impact that
jarred his arm to the shoulder, and he dropped the axe head to the
floor, where it fell with a thud, crusted with blood and hair for
the first time in 200,000 years.

Fede crumpled back into the office’s wall, slid down it
into a sitting position. His eyes were open and staring. Blood
streamed over his face.

Art looked at Fede in horrified fascination. He noticed that
Fede was breathing shallowly, almost panting, and realized dimly
that this meant he wasn’t a murderer. He turned and fled the
office, nearly bowling Tonaishah over in the corridor.

“Call an ambulance,” he said, then shoved her aside
and fled O’Malley House and disappeared into the Picadilly
lunchtime crowd.

29.

I am: sprung.

Father Ferlenghetti hasn’t been licensed to practice
psychiatry in Massachusetts for forty years, but the court gave him
standing. The judge actually winked at me when he took the stand,
and stopped scritching on her comm as the priest said a lot of
fantastically embarrassing things about my general fitness for
human consumption.

The sanitarium sent a single junior doc to my hearing, a kid so
young I’d mistaken him for a hospital driver when he climbed
into the van with me and gunned the engine. But no, he was a doctor
who’d apparently been briefed on my case, though not very
well. When the judge asked him if he had any opinions on Father
Ferlenghetti’s testimony, he fumbled with his comm while the
Father stared at him through eyebrows thick enough to hide a
hamster in, then finally stammered a few verbatim notes from my
intake interview, blushed, and sat down.

“Thank you,” the judge said, shaking her head as she
said it. Gran, seated beside me, put one hand on my knee and one
hand on the knee of Doc Szandor’s brother-in-law, a hotshot
Harvard Law post-doc whom we’d retained as corporate counsel
for a new Limited Liability Corporation. We’d signed the
articles of incorporation the day before, after Group. It was the
last thing Doc Szandor did before resigning his post at the
sanitarium to take up the position of Chief Medical Officer at
HumanCare, LLC, a corporation with no assets, no employees, and a
sheaf of shitkicking ideas for redesigning mental hospitals using
off-the-shelf tech and a little bit of UE mojo.

30.

Art was most of the way to the Tube when he ran into Lester.
Literally.

Lester must have seen him coming, because he stepped right into
Art’s path from out of the crowd. Art ploughed into him,
bounced off of his dented armor, and would have fallen over had
Lester not caught his arm and steadied him.

“Art, isn’t it? How you doin’,
mate?”

Art gaped at him. He was thinner than he’d been when he
tried to shake Art and Linda down in the doorway of the Boots,
grimier and more desperate. His tone was just as bemused as ever,
though. “Jesus Christ, Lester, not now, I’m in a hurry.
You’ll have to rob me later, all right?”

Lester chuckled wryly. “Still a clever bastard. You look
like you’re having some hard times, my old son. Maybe that
you’re not even worth robbing, eh?”

“Right. I’m skint. Sorry. Nice running into you, now
I must be going.” He tried to pull away, but Lester’s
fingers dug into his biceps, emphatically, painfully.

“Hear you ran into Tom, led him a merry chase. You know, I
spent a whole week in the nick on account of you.”

Art jerked his arm again, without effect. “You tried to
rob me, Les. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, all
right? Now let me go—I’ve got a train to
catch.”

“Holidays? How sweet. Thought you were broke,
though?”

A motorized scooter pulled up in the kerb lane beside them. It
was piloted by a smart young policewoman with a silly foam helmet
and outsized pads on her knees and elbows. She looked like the kid
with the safety-obsessed mom who inflicts criminally dorky fashions
on her daughter, making her the neighborhood laughingstock.

“Everything all right, gentlemen?”

Lester’s eyes closed, and he sighed a put-upon sigh that
was halfway to a groan.

“Oh, yes, officer,” Art said. “Peter and I
were just making some plans to see our auntie for supper
tonight.”

Lester opened his eyes, then the corners of his mouth
incremented upwards. “Yeah,” he said.
“‘Sright. Cousin Alphonse is here all the way from
Canada and Auntie’s mad to cook him a proper English
meal.”

The policewoman sized them up, then shook her head. “Sir,
begging your pardon, but I must tell you that we have clubs in
London where a gentleman such as yourself can find a young
companion, legally. We thoroughly discourage making such
arrangements on the High Street. Just a word to the wise, all
right?”

Art blushed to his eartips. “Thank you, Officer,” he
said with a weak smile. “I’ll keep that in
mind.”

The constable gave Lester a hard look, then revved her scooter
and pulled into traffic, her arm slicing the air in a sharp turn
signal.

“Well,” Lester said, once she was on the roundabout,
“Alphonse, seems like you’ve got reason to
avoid the law, too.”

“Can’t we just call it even? I did you a favor with
the law, you leave me be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. P’raps I should put in a
call to our friend PC McGivens. He already thinks you’re a
dreadful tosser—if you’ve reason to avoid the law,
McGivens’d be bad news indeed. And the police pay very well
for the right information. I’m a little financially
embarrassed, me, just at this moment.”

“All right,” Art said. “Fine. How about this:
I will pay you 800 Euros, which I will withdraw from an InstaBank
once I’ve got my ticket for the Chunnel train to Calais in
hand and am ready to get onto the platform. I’ve got all of
fifteen quid in my pocket right now. Take my wallet and
you’ll have cabfare home. Accompany me to the train and
you’ll get a month’s rent, which is more than the
police’ll give you.”

“Oh, you’re a villain, you are. What is it that the
police will want to talk to you about, then? I wouldn’t want
to be aiding and abetting a real criminal—could mean
trouble.”

“I beat the piss out of my coworker, Lester. Now, can we
go? There’s a plane in Paris I’m hoping to
catch.”

31.

I have a brand-new translucent Sony Veddic, a series 12. I
bought it on credit—not mine, mine’s sunk; six months
of living on plastic and kiting balance-payments with new cards
while getting the patents filed on the eight new gizmos that
constitute HumanCare’s sole asset has blackened my good name
with the credit bureaus.

I bought it with the company credit card. The company credit
card. Our local Baby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc
Szandor faxed over the signed contract from the Bureau of Health.
Half a million bucks for a proof-of-concept install at the very
same Route 128 nuthatch where I’d been “treated.”
If that works, we’ll be rolling out a dozen more installs
over the next year: smart doors, public drug-prescription stats,
locator bracelets that let “clients”—I’ve
been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed
“patient” from my vocabulary—discover other
clients with similar treatment regimens on the ward, bells and
whistles galore.

I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare’s first-ever
employee, who is, in turn, holding onto HumanCare’s
first-ever paycheck. Caitlin’s husband has been very patient
over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailing
machinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs.
He’s been likewise patient with my presence on his sagging
living-room sofa, where I’ve had my nightly ten-hour repose
faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I have actually seen
precious little of each other considering that I’ve been
living under her roof. (Doc Szandor’s Cambridge apartment is
hardly bigger than my room at the hospital, and between his snoring
and the hard floor, I didn’t even last a whole night there.)
We’ve communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge and
prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged
toiletries at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in
from her workbench while I snored away the nights. Come to think of
it, I haven’t really seen much of Doc Szandor,
either—he’s been holed up in his rooms, chatting away
on the EST channels.

I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is
flowing. I am driving my few belongings to a lovely
two-bedroom—one to sleep in, one to work in—flat
overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their
shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a
dozen abstruse disciplines. I’m looking forward to picking up
a basic physics, law, medicine and business vocabulary just by
sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away at new designs.

We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding,
human-centric steering wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer
installed the transponder and gave me a brochure explaining the
Sony Family’s approach to maximum driving convenience. But as
I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.

The Veddic’s HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to
the booth. A bored attendant leans out of the toll booth and
squirts his comm at me, and the HUD comes to life with an animated
commercial for the new, improved TunePay service, now under direct
MassPike management.

The TunePay scandal’s been hot news for weeks now.
Bribery, corruption, patent disputes—I’d been gratified
to discover that my name had been removed from the patent
applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and
her fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net
tightened around them.

I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and
walks around to my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the
passenger side. She serenely ignores the blaring of the horns from
the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers stacked up behind us,
walks back to the driver’s side and takes the wheel.

“Thanks,” I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy,
freckled arm.

“You belong in a loony bin, you know that?” she
says, punching me in the thigh harder than is strictly
necessary.

“Oh, I know,” I say, and dial up some music on the
car stereo.

Acknowledgements

This novel was workshopped by the Cecil Street Irregulars, the
Novelettes and the Gibraltar Point gang, and received excellent
feedback from the first readers on the est-preview list (especially
Pat York). Likewise, I’m indebted to all the people who read
and commented on this book along the way.

Thanks go to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for reading this
so quickly—minutes after I finished it! Likewise to my agent,
Don Maass, thank you.

Thanks to Irene Gallo and Shelley Eshkar for knocking
two out of the park with their cover-designs for my books.

Thanks to my co-editors at Boing Boing and all the collaborators
I’ve written with, who’ve made me a better writer.

Thanks, I suppose, to the villains in my life, who inspired me
to write this book rather than do something ugly that I’d
regret.

Thanks to Paul Boutin for commissioning the Wired
article of the same name.

Thanks to the readers and bloggers and Tribespeople who cared
enough to check out my first book and liked it enough to check out
this one.

Thanks to Creative Commons for the licenses that give me the
freedom to say “Some Rights Reserved.”

Bio

Cory Doctorow is the author
of Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, A Place So
Foreign and Eight More, and The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (with Karl
Schroeder). He was raised in Toronto and lives in San Francisco,
where he works for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. He’s a
journalist, editorialist and blogger. Boing Boing, the weblog he
co-edits, is the most linked-to blog on the Net, according to Technorati. He won the John W.
Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugos. You can
download this book for free from craphound.com/est.

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