Eastern Standard Tribe

'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