Eastern Standard Tribe

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.