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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 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."
Linda 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.
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 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."
Linda 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.
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.