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"Well, they'll do that," the doctor says. "My name is Szandor," he says, and shakes my hand in its restraint.
"A pleasure to meet you," I say. "You're a doctor doctor, aren't you?"
"An MD? Yup. There're a couple of us around the place."
"But you're not a shrink of any description?"
"Nope. How'd you guess?"
"Bedside manner. You didn't patronize me."
Dr. Szandor tries to suppress a grin, then gives up. "We all do our bit," he says. "How'd you get up on the roof without setting off your room alarm, anyway?"
"If I tell you how I did it, I won't be able to repeat the trick," I say jokingly. He's swabbing down my shins now with something that stings and cools at the same time. From time to time, he takes tweezers in hand and plucks loose some gravel or grit and plinks it into a steel tray on a rolling table by his side. He's so gentle, I hardly feel it.
"What, you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?"
"Is that thing still around?"
"Oh sure! We had a mandatory workshop on it yesterday afternoon. Those are always a lot of fun."
"So, you're saying that you've got professional expertise in the keeping of secrets, huh? I suppose I could spill it for you, then." And I do, explaining my little hack for tricking the door into thinking that I'd left and returned to the room.
"Huh-now that you explain it, it's pretty obvious."
"That's my job-figuring out the obvious way of doing something."
And we fall to talking about my job with V/DT, and the discussion branches into the theory and practice of UE, only slowing a little when he picks the crud out of the scrape down my jaw and tugs through a couple of quick stitches. It occurs to me that he's just keeping me distracted, using a highly evolved skill for placating psychopaths through small talk so that they don't thrash while he's knitting their bodies back together.
I decide that I don't care. I get to natter on about a subject that I'm nearly autistically fixated on, and I do it in a context where I know that I'm sane and smart and charming and occasionally mind-blowing.
"...and the whole thing pays for itself through EZPass, where we collect the payments for the music downloaded while you're on the road." As I finish my spiel, I realize I've been keeping him distracted, standing there with the tweezers in one hand and a swab in the other.
"Wow!" he said. "So, when's this all going to happen?"
"You'd use it, huh?"
"Hell, yeah! I've got a good twenty, thirty thousand on my car right now! You're saying I could plunder anyone else's stereo at will, for free, and keep it, while I'm stuck in traffic, and because I'm a-what'd you call it, a super-peer?-a super-peer, it's all free and legal? Damn!"
"Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East Coast. It'll probably roll out in LA first, then San Francisco, Seattle..."
"What? Why?"
"It's a long story," I say. "And it ends with me on the roof of a goddamned nuthouse on Route 128 doing a one-man tribute to the Three Stooges."
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
"A pleasure to meet you," I say. "You're a doctor doctor, aren't you?"
"An MD? Yup. There're a couple of us around the place."
"But you're not a shrink of any description?"
"Nope. How'd you guess?"
"Bedside manner. You didn't patronize me."
Dr. Szandor tries to suppress a grin, then gives up. "We all do our bit," he says. "How'd you get up on the roof without setting off your room alarm, anyway?"
"If I tell you how I did it, I won't be able to repeat the trick," I say jokingly. He's swabbing down my shins now with something that stings and cools at the same time. From time to time, he takes tweezers in hand and plucks loose some gravel or grit and plinks it into a steel tray on a rolling table by his side. He's so gentle, I hardly feel it.
"What, you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?"
"Is that thing still around?"
"Oh sure! We had a mandatory workshop on it yesterday afternoon. Those are always a lot of fun."
"So, you're saying that you've got professional expertise in the keeping of secrets, huh? I suppose I could spill it for you, then." And I do, explaining my little hack for tricking the door into thinking that I'd left and returned to the room.
"Huh-now that you explain it, it's pretty obvious."
"That's my job-figuring out the obvious way of doing something."
And we fall to talking about my job with V/DT, and the discussion branches into the theory and practice of UE, only slowing a little when he picks the crud out of the scrape down my jaw and tugs through a couple of quick stitches. It occurs to me that he's just keeping me distracted, using a highly evolved skill for placating psychopaths through small talk so that they don't thrash while he's knitting their bodies back together.
I decide that I don't care. I get to natter on about a subject that I'm nearly autistically fixated on, and I do it in a context where I know that I'm sane and smart and charming and occasionally mind-blowing.
"...and the whole thing pays for itself through EZPass, where we collect the payments for the music downloaded while you're on the road." As I finish my spiel, I realize I've been keeping him distracted, standing there with the tweezers in one hand and a swab in the other.
"Wow!" he said. "So, when's this all going to happen?"
"You'd use it, huh?"
"Hell, yeah! I've got a good twenty, thirty thousand on my car right now! You're saying I could plunder anyone else's stereo at will, for free, and keep it, while I'm stuck in traffic, and because I'm a-what'd you call it, a super-peer?-a super-peer, it's all free and legal? Damn!"
"Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East Coast. It'll probably roll out in LA first, then San Francisco, Seattle..."
"What? Why?"
"It's a long story," I say. "And it ends with me on the roof of a goddamned nuthouse on Route 128 doing a one-man tribute to the Three Stooges."
20.
Three days later, Art finally realized that something big and ugly was in the offing. Fede had repeatedly talked him out of going to Perceptronics's offices, offering increasingly flimsy excuses and distracting him by calling the hotel's front desk and sending up surprise massage therapists to interrupt Art as he stewed in his juices, throbbing with resentment at having been flown thousands of klicks while injured in order to check into a faceless hotel on a faceless stretch of highway and insert this thumb into his asshole and wait for Fede-who was still in fucking London!—to sort out the mess so that he could present himself at the Perceptronics Acton offices and get their guys prepped for the ever-receding meeting with MassPike.
"Jesus, Federico, what the fuck am I doing here?"
"I know, Art, I know." Art had taken to calling Fede at the extreme ends of circadian compatibility, three AM and eleven PM and then noon on Fede's clock, as a subtle means of making the experience just as unpleasant for Fede as it was for Art. "I screwed up," Fede yawned. "I screwed up and now we're both paying the price. You handled your end beautifully and I dropped mine. And I intend to make it up to you."
"I don't want more massages, Fede. I want to get this shit done and I want to come home and see my girlfriend."
Fede tittered over the phone.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothing much," Fede said. "Just sit tight there for a couple minutes, OK? Call me back once it happens and tell me what you wanna do, all right?"
"Once what happens?"
"You'll know."
It was Linda, of course. Knocking on Art's hotel room door minutes later, throwing her arms-and then her legs-around him, and banging him stupid, half on and half off the hotel room bed. Riding him and then being ridden in turns, slurping and wet and energetic until they both lay sprawled on the hotel room's very nice Persian rugs, dehydrated and panting and Art commed Fede, and Fede told him it could take a couple weeks to sort things out, and why didn't he and Linda rent a car and do some sight-seeing on the East Coast?
That's exactly what they did. Starting in Boston, where they cruised Cambridge, watching the cute nerdyboys and geekygirls wander the streets, having heated technical debates, lugging half-finished works of technology and art through the sopping summertime, a riot of townie accents and highbrow engineerspeak.
Then a week in New York, where they walked until they thought their feet would give out entirely, necks cricked at a permanent, upward-staring angle to gawp at the topless towers of Manhattan. The sound the sound the sound of Manhattan rang in their ears, a gray and deep rumble of cars and footfalls and subways and steampipes and sirens and music and conversation and ring tones and hucksters and schizophrenic ranters, a veritable Las Vegas of cacophony, and it made Linda uncomfortable, she who was raised in the white noise susurrations of LA's freeway forests, but it made Art feel wonderful. He kept his comm switched off, though the underfoot rumble of the subway had him reaching for it a hundred times a day, convinced that he'd left it on in vibe-alert mode.
They took a milk-run train to Toronto, chuffing through sleepy upstate New York towns, past lakes and rolling countryside in full summer glory. Art and Linda drank ginger beer in the observation car, spiking it with rum from a flask that Linda carried in a garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to reach naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of body-temperature liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides were dulled by the soft oil of her thigh.
Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border, sending Art for a full inspection-a privilege of being a Canadian citizen and hence perennially under suspicion of smuggling goods from the tax havens of the US into the country-and leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin.
When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly peered into, he found Linda standing on the platform, leaning against a pillar, back arched, one foot flat against the bricks, corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless winds of the trainyard. From Art's point of view, she was a gleaming vision skewered on a beam of late day sunlight that made her hair gleam like licorice. Her long and lazy jaw caught and lost the sun as she talked animatedly down her comm, and Art was struck with a sudden need to sneak up behind her and run his tongue down the line that began with the knob of her mandible under her ear and ran down to the tiny half-dimple in her chin, to skate it on the soft pouch of flesh under her chin, to end with a tasting of her soft lips.
Thought became deed. He crept up on her, smelling her new-car hair products on the breeze that wafted back from her, and was about to begin his tonguing when she barked, "Fuck off! Stop calling me!" and closed her comm and stormed off trainwards, leaving Art standing on the opposite side of the pillar with a thoroughly wilted romantic urge.
More carefully, he followed her into the train, back to their little cabin, and reached for the palm-pad to open the door when he heard her agitated comm voice. "No, goddamnit, no. Not yet. Keep calling me and not ever, do you understand?"
Art opened the door. Linda was composed and neat and sweet in her plush seat, shoulders back, smile winning. "Hey honey, did the bad Customs man finally let you go?"
"He did! That sounded like a doozy of a phone conversation, though. What's wrong?"
"You don't want to know," she said.
"All right," Art said, sitting down opposite her, knee-to-knee, bending forward to plant a kiss on the top of her exposed thigh. "I don't."
"Good."
He continued to kiss his way up her thigh. "Only..."
"Yes?"
"I think I probably do. Curiosity is one of my worst failings of character."
"Really?"
"Quite so," he said. He'd slid her sundress right up to the waistband of her cotton drawers, and now he worried one of the pubic hairs that poked out from the elastic with his teeth.
She shrieked and pushed him away. "Someone will see!" she said. "This is a border crossing, not a bordello!"
He sat back, but inserted a finger in the elastic before Linda straightened out her dress, so that his fingertip rested in the crease at the top of her groin.
"You are naughty," she said.
"And curious," Art agreed, giving his fingertip a playful wiggle.
"I give up. That was my fucking ex," she said. "That is how I will refer to him henceforth. 'My fucking ex.' My fucking, pain-in-the-ass, touchy-feely ex. My fucking ex, who wants to have the Talk, even though it's been months and months. He's figured out that I'm stateside from my calling times, and he's offering to come out to meet me and really Work Things Out, Once And For All."
"Oh, my," Art said.
"That boy's got too much LA in him for his own good. There's no problem that can't be resolved through sufficient dialog."
"We never really talked about him," Art said.
"Nope, we sure didn't."
"Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?"
"'Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?' Why yes, Art, I would. How perceptive of you." She pushed his hand away and crossed her arms and legs simultaneously.
"Wait, I'm confused," Art said. "Does that mean you want to talk about him, or that you don't?"
"Fine, we'll talk about him. What do you want to know about my fucking ex?"
Art resisted a terrible urge to fan her fires, to return the vitriol that dripped from her voice. "Look, you don't want to talk about him, we won't talk about him," he managed.
"No, let's talk about my fucking ex, by all means." She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off points on her fingers. "His name is Toby, he's half-Japanese, half-white. He's about your height. Your dick is bigger, but he's better in bed. He's a user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never fucking shuts up about what's wrong with this or that. We dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me goddamned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?"
"That was fine," Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. "Thank you."
She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. "Look, I don't like to talk about it-it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't take his calls anymore, how about that?"
"I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you could talk it over with me."
"I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own. Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You could come if you want-there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."
"That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "But if you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto."
"You're so understanding," she cooed. "Tell me about your grandmother again-you're sure she'll like me?"
"She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, and in my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren."
"Cluck."
"Cluck?"
"Just practicing my brood-hen."
"Jesus, Federico, what the fuck am I doing here?"
"I know, Art, I know." Art had taken to calling Fede at the extreme ends of circadian compatibility, three AM and eleven PM and then noon on Fede's clock, as a subtle means of making the experience just as unpleasant for Fede as it was for Art. "I screwed up," Fede yawned. "I screwed up and now we're both paying the price. You handled your end beautifully and I dropped mine. And I intend to make it up to you."
"I don't want more massages, Fede. I want to get this shit done and I want to come home and see my girlfriend."
Fede tittered over the phone.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothing much," Fede said. "Just sit tight there for a couple minutes, OK? Call me back once it happens and tell me what you wanna do, all right?"
"Once what happens?"
"You'll know."
It was Linda, of course. Knocking on Art's hotel room door minutes later, throwing her arms-and then her legs-around him, and banging him stupid, half on and half off the hotel room bed. Riding him and then being ridden in turns, slurping and wet and energetic until they both lay sprawled on the hotel room's very nice Persian rugs, dehydrated and panting and Art commed Fede, and Fede told him it could take a couple weeks to sort things out, and why didn't he and Linda rent a car and do some sight-seeing on the East Coast?
That's exactly what they did. Starting in Boston, where they cruised Cambridge, watching the cute nerdyboys and geekygirls wander the streets, having heated technical debates, lugging half-finished works of technology and art through the sopping summertime, a riot of townie accents and highbrow engineerspeak.
Then a week in New York, where they walked until they thought their feet would give out entirely, necks cricked at a permanent, upward-staring angle to gawp at the topless towers of Manhattan. The sound the sound the sound of Manhattan rang in their ears, a gray and deep rumble of cars and footfalls and subways and steampipes and sirens and music and conversation and ring tones and hucksters and schizophrenic ranters, a veritable Las Vegas of cacophony, and it made Linda uncomfortable, she who was raised in the white noise susurrations of LA's freeway forests, but it made Art feel wonderful. He kept his comm switched off, though the underfoot rumble of the subway had him reaching for it a hundred times a day, convinced that he'd left it on in vibe-alert mode.
They took a milk-run train to Toronto, chuffing through sleepy upstate New York towns, past lakes and rolling countryside in full summer glory. Art and Linda drank ginger beer in the observation car, spiking it with rum from a flask that Linda carried in a garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to reach naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of body-temperature liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides were dulled by the soft oil of her thigh.
Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border, sending Art for a full inspection-a privilege of being a Canadian citizen and hence perennially under suspicion of smuggling goods from the tax havens of the US into the country-and leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin.
When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly peered into, he found Linda standing on the platform, leaning against a pillar, back arched, one foot flat against the bricks, corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless winds of the trainyard. From Art's point of view, she was a gleaming vision skewered on a beam of late day sunlight that made her hair gleam like licorice. Her long and lazy jaw caught and lost the sun as she talked animatedly down her comm, and Art was struck with a sudden need to sneak up behind her and run his tongue down the line that began with the knob of her mandible under her ear and ran down to the tiny half-dimple in her chin, to skate it on the soft pouch of flesh under her chin, to end with a tasting of her soft lips.
Thought became deed. He crept up on her, smelling her new-car hair products on the breeze that wafted back from her, and was about to begin his tonguing when she barked, "Fuck off! Stop calling me!" and closed her comm and stormed off trainwards, leaving Art standing on the opposite side of the pillar with a thoroughly wilted romantic urge.
More carefully, he followed her into the train, back to their little cabin, and reached for the palm-pad to open the door when he heard her agitated comm voice. "No, goddamnit, no. Not yet. Keep calling me and not ever, do you understand?"
Art opened the door. Linda was composed and neat and sweet in her plush seat, shoulders back, smile winning. "Hey honey, did the bad Customs man finally let you go?"
"He did! That sounded like a doozy of a phone conversation, though. What's wrong?"
"You don't want to know," she said.
"All right," Art said, sitting down opposite her, knee-to-knee, bending forward to plant a kiss on the top of her exposed thigh. "I don't."
"Good."
He continued to kiss his way up her thigh. "Only..."
"Yes?"
"I think I probably do. Curiosity is one of my worst failings of character."
"Really?"
"Quite so," he said. He'd slid her sundress right up to the waistband of her cotton drawers, and now he worried one of the pubic hairs that poked out from the elastic with his teeth.
She shrieked and pushed him away. "Someone will see!" she said. "This is a border crossing, not a bordello!"
He sat back, but inserted a finger in the elastic before Linda straightened out her dress, so that his fingertip rested in the crease at the top of her groin.
"You are naughty," she said.
"And curious," Art agreed, giving his fingertip a playful wiggle.
"I give up. That was my fucking ex," she said. "That is how I will refer to him henceforth. 'My fucking ex.' My fucking, pain-in-the-ass, touchy-feely ex. My fucking ex, who wants to have the Talk, even though it's been months and months. He's figured out that I'm stateside from my calling times, and he's offering to come out to meet me and really Work Things Out, Once And For All."
"Oh, my," Art said.
"That boy's got too much LA in him for his own good. There's no problem that can't be resolved through sufficient dialog."
"We never really talked about him," Art said.
"Nope, we sure didn't."
"Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?"
"'Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?' Why yes, Art, I would. How perceptive of you." She pushed his hand away and crossed her arms and legs simultaneously.
"Wait, I'm confused," Art said. "Does that mean you want to talk about him, or that you don't?"
"Fine, we'll talk about him. What do you want to know about my fucking ex?"
Art resisted a terrible urge to fan her fires, to return the vitriol that dripped from her voice. "Look, you don't want to talk about him, we won't talk about him," he managed.
"No, let's talk about my fucking ex, by all means." She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off points on her fingers. "His name is Toby, he's half-Japanese, half-white. He's about your height. Your dick is bigger, but he's better in bed. He's a user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never fucking shuts up about what's wrong with this or that. We dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me goddamned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?"
"That was fine," Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. "Thank you."
She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. "Look, I don't like to talk about it-it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't take his calls anymore, how about that?"
"I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you could talk it over with me."
"I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own. Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You could come if you want-there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."
"That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "But if you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto."
"You're so understanding," she cooed. "Tell me about your grandmother again-you're sure she'll like me?"
"She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, and in my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren."
"Cluck."
"Cluck?"
"Just practicing my brood-hen."
21.
Doc Szandor's a good egg. He's keeping the shrinks at bay, spending more time with me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, but it's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to give it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of bad conversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit of a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting to prevent them in others.
"How the hell do you become a user-experience guy?"
"Sheer orneriness," I say, grinning. "I was just in the right place at the right time. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that had made this artificial erectile tissue."
"Erectile tissue?"
"Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and capable of going large and rigid very quickly."
"Sounds delightful."
"Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circumcisionist's wallet made from foreskins?"
"Sure, I heard it premed-he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?"
"That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporary shelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it: 'Ardorite.'"
"Ho ho ho."
"Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic au pairs and their tots, and I was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were blond goddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh, Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're better acquainted.
"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.
"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it synthetic turtle penis, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't that earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.
"Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.
"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in Westchester."
"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?" Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace bandage.
"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't any good-they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing-they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them."
"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to productize their tech with. But my buddy did get another gig with a company that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he showed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a no-fooling career."
"Damn, that's cool."
"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff."
The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you're not like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"
Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe twenty-six. I can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see some telltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He's got to be the youngest staff member I've met here, and he's got a fundamentally different affect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the felt slippers.
So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell him about Linda and Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to me.
"Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?" Szandor says, sucking on his pacifier.
"The usual reasons, I guess," I say, squirming.
"Lemme tell you something," he says. He's got his feet up on the table now, hands laced behind his neck. "It's the smartest thing my dad ever said to me, just as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away to med school. She was nice enough, but, you know, unstable. I'd gotten to the point where I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her to lose her shit.
"So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, 'Szandor, you know I like that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, really crazy. Maybe she won't be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won't be because of you. Trust me, I know this. You can't fuck a crazy girl sane, son.'"
I can't help smiling. "Truer words," I say. "But harsh."
"Harsh is relative," he says. "Contrast it with, say, getting someone committed on trumped-up evidence."
It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. "It dawns on me that you believe me."
He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. "Well, why not? You're not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story's plausible enough."
I get excited. "Is this your professional opinion?"
"Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don't have professional opinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion."
"Oh, well."
"So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the hospital?"
"Well, they don't tell me much, but as near as I can make out, I am stuck here semipermanently. The court found me incompetent and ordered me held until I was. I can't get anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve it-when I try, I get accused of being 'difficult.' Of course, escaping onto the roof is a little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I'm going to be in pretty deep shit. Do they know about the car?"
"The car?"
"In the parking lot. The one that blew up."
Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across the room and lands in a hazmat bucket. "You son of a bitch-that was you?"
"Yeah," I say, and drum my feet against the tin cupboards under the examination table.
"That was my fucking car!"
"Oh, Christ, I'm sorry," I say. "God."
"No no no," he says, fishing in his pocket and unwrapping a fresh pacifier. "It's OK. Insurance. I'm getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence, though," he says.
Coincidence. He's making disgusting hamster-cage noises, grinding away at his pacifier. "Szandor, do you sometimes sneak out onto the landing to have a cigarette? Use a bit of tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind you?"
"Why do you ask?"
"'Cause that's how I got out onto the roof."
"Oh, shit," he says.
"It's our secret," I say. "I can tell them I don't know how I got out. I'm incompetent, remember?"
"You're a good egg, Art," he says. "How the hell are we going to get you out of here?"
"Hey what?"
"No, really. There's no good reason for you to be here, right? You're occupying valuable bed space."
"Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have a feeling that as soon as you turn me loose, I'm gonna be doped up to the tits for a good long while."
He grimaces. "Right, right. They like their meds. Are your parents alive?"
"What? No, they're both dead."
"Aha. Died suddenly?"
"Yeah. Dad drowned, Mom fell-"
"Ah ah ah! Shhh. Mom died suddenly. She was taking Haldol when it happened, a low antianxiety dose, right?"
"Huh?"
"Probably she was. Probably she had a terrible drug interaction. Sudden Death Syndrome. It's hereditary. And you say she fell? Seizure. We'll sign you up for a PET scan, that'll take at least a month to set up. You could be an epileptic and not even know it. Shaking the radioisotopes loose for the scan from the AEC, woah, that's a week's worth of paperwork right there! No Thorazine for you young man, not until we're absolutely sure it won't kill you dead where you stand. The hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on this very subject not a month ago. I'll just make some notes in your medical history." He picked up his comm and scribbled.
"Never woulda thought of that," I say. "I'm impressed."
"It's something I've been playing with for a while now. I think that psychiatric care is a good thing, of course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away prescription pads would be a good start."
"Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had prescribed how much of what and how often. Put 'em on a chart in the ward where the patients' families could see 'em."
"That's nasty!" he says. "I love it. We're supposed to be accountable, right? What else?"
"Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies. Create a dating service that automatically links patients who respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing with location data from other trackers, you could get stats on which therapies make people more sociable, just by counting the frequency with which patients stop and spend time in proximity to other patients. It'd give you empirical data with which you track your own progress."
"This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?"
I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?
"It's my job," I say, and give a modest shrug.
"What do you charge for work like that?"
"Why, are you in the market?"
"Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we can go into biz together, redesigning nuthatches."
"How the hell do you become a user-experience guy?"
"Sheer orneriness," I say, grinning. "I was just in the right place at the right time. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that had made this artificial erectile tissue."
"Erectile tissue?"
"Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and capable of going large and rigid very quickly."
"Sounds delightful."
"Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circumcisionist's wallet made from foreskins?"
"Sure, I heard it premed-he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?"
"That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporary shelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it: 'Ardorite.'"
"Ho ho ho."
"Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic au pairs and their tots, and I was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were blond goddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh, Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're better acquainted.
"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.
"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it synthetic turtle penis, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't that earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.
"Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.
"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in Westchester."
"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?" Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace bandage.
"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't any good-they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing-they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them."
"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to productize their tech with. But my buddy did get another gig with a company that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he showed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a no-fooling career."
"Damn, that's cool."
"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff."
The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you're not like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"
Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe twenty-six. I can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see some telltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He's got to be the youngest staff member I've met here, and he's got a fundamentally different affect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the felt slippers.
So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell him about Linda and Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to me.
"Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?" Szandor says, sucking on his pacifier.
"The usual reasons, I guess," I say, squirming.
"Lemme tell you something," he says. He's got his feet up on the table now, hands laced behind his neck. "It's the smartest thing my dad ever said to me, just as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away to med school. She was nice enough, but, you know, unstable. I'd gotten to the point where I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her to lose her shit.
"So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, 'Szandor, you know I like that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, really crazy. Maybe she won't be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won't be because of you. Trust me, I know this. You can't fuck a crazy girl sane, son.'"
I can't help smiling. "Truer words," I say. "But harsh."
"Harsh is relative," he says. "Contrast it with, say, getting someone committed on trumped-up evidence."
It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. "It dawns on me that you believe me."
He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. "Well, why not? You're not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story's plausible enough."
I get excited. "Is this your professional opinion?"
"Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don't have professional opinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion."
"Oh, well."
"So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the hospital?"
"Well, they don't tell me much, but as near as I can make out, I am stuck here semipermanently. The court found me incompetent and ordered me held until I was. I can't get anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve it-when I try, I get accused of being 'difficult.' Of course, escaping onto the roof is a little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I'm going to be in pretty deep shit. Do they know about the car?"
"The car?"
"In the parking lot. The one that blew up."
Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across the room and lands in a hazmat bucket. "You son of a bitch-that was you?"
"Yeah," I say, and drum my feet against the tin cupboards under the examination table.
"That was my fucking car!"
"Oh, Christ, I'm sorry," I say. "God."
"No no no," he says, fishing in his pocket and unwrapping a fresh pacifier. "It's OK. Insurance. I'm getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence, though," he says.
Coincidence. He's making disgusting hamster-cage noises, grinding away at his pacifier. "Szandor, do you sometimes sneak out onto the landing to have a cigarette? Use a bit of tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind you?"
"Why do you ask?"
"'Cause that's how I got out onto the roof."
"Oh, shit," he says.
"It's our secret," I say. "I can tell them I don't know how I got out. I'm incompetent, remember?"
"You're a good egg, Art," he says. "How the hell are we going to get you out of here?"
"Hey what?"
"No, really. There's no good reason for you to be here, right? You're occupying valuable bed space."
"Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have a feeling that as soon as you turn me loose, I'm gonna be doped up to the tits for a good long while."
He grimaces. "Right, right. They like their meds. Are your parents alive?"
"What? No, they're both dead."
"Aha. Died suddenly?"
"Yeah. Dad drowned, Mom fell-"
"Ah ah ah! Shhh. Mom died suddenly. She was taking Haldol when it happened, a low antianxiety dose, right?"
"Huh?"
"Probably she was. Probably she had a terrible drug interaction. Sudden Death Syndrome. It's hereditary. And you say she fell? Seizure. We'll sign you up for a PET scan, that'll take at least a month to set up. You could be an epileptic and not even know it. Shaking the radioisotopes loose for the scan from the AEC, woah, that's a week's worth of paperwork right there! No Thorazine for you young man, not until we're absolutely sure it won't kill you dead where you stand. The hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on this very subject not a month ago. I'll just make some notes in your medical history." He picked up his comm and scribbled.
"Never woulda thought of that," I say. "I'm impressed."
"It's something I've been playing with for a while now. I think that psychiatric care is a good thing, of course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away prescription pads would be a good start."
"Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had prescribed how much of what and how often. Put 'em on a chart in the ward where the patients' families could see 'em."
"That's nasty!" he says. "I love it. We're supposed to be accountable, right? What else?"
"Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies. Create a dating service that automatically links patients who respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing with location data from other trackers, you could get stats on which therapies make people more sociable, just by counting the frequency with which patients stop and spend time in proximity to other patients. It'd give you empirical data with which you track your own progress."
"This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?"
I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?
"It's my job," I say, and give a modest shrug.
"What do you charge for work like that?"
"Why, are you in the market?"
"Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we can go into biz together, redesigning nuthatches."
22.
Linda's first meeting with Art's Gran went off without a hitch. Gran met them at Union Station with an obsolete red cap who was as ancient as she was, a vestige of a more genteel era of train travel and bulky luggage. Just seeing him made Art's brain whir with plans for conveyor systems, luggage escalators, cart dispensers. They barely had enough luggage between the two of them to make it worth the old man's time, but he dutifully marked their bags with a stub of chalk and hauled them onto his cart, then trundled off to the service elevators.
Gran gave Art a long and teary hug. She was less frail than she'd been in his memory, taller and sturdier. The smell of her powder and the familiar acoustics of Union Station's cavernous platform whirled him back to his childhood in Toronto, to the homey time before he'd gotten on the circadian merry-go-round.
"Gran, this is Linda," he said.
"Oh, it's so nice to meet you," Gran said, taking Linda's hands in hers. "Call me Julie."
Linda smiled a great, pretty, toothy smile. "Julie, Art's told me all about you. I just know we'll be great friends."
"I'm sure we will. Are you hungry? Did they feed you on the train? You must be exhausted after such a long trip. Which would you rather do first, eat or rest?"
"Well, I'm up for seeing the town," Linda said. "Your grandson's been yawning his head off since Buffalo, though." She put her arm around his waist and squeezed his tummy.
"What a fantastic couple you make," Gran said. "You didn't tell me she was so pretty, Arthur!"
"Here it comes," Art said. "She's going to ask about great-grandchildren."
"Don't be silly," Gran said, cuffing him gently upside the head. "You're always exaggerating."
"Well I think it's a splendid idea," Linda said. "Shall we have two? Three? Four?"
"Make it ten," Art said, kissing her cheek.
"Oh, I couldn't have ten," Linda said. "But five is a nice compromise. Five it will be. We'll name the first one Julie if it's a girl, or Julius if it's a boy."
"Oh, we are going to get along," Gran said, and led them up to the curb, where the red cap had loaded their bags into a cab.
They ate dinner at Lindy's on Yonge Street, right in the middle of the sleaze strip. The steakhouse had been there for the better part of a century, and its cracked red-vinyl booths and thick rib eyes smothered in horseradish and HP Sauce were just as Art had remembered. Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo, the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower, all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary school.
By the time Art lay down in his bed, belly tight with undigested steak, he was feeling wonderful and at peace with the world. Linda climbed in beside him, wrestled away a pillow and some covers, and snuggled up to him.
"That went well," Art said. "I'm really glad you two hit it off."
"Me too, honey," Linda said, kissing his shoulder through his tee shirt. He'd been able to get his head around the idea of sharing a bed with his girlfriend under his grandmother's roof, but doing so nude seemed somehow wrong.
"We're going to have a great week," he said. "I wish it would never end."
"Yeah," she said, and began to snore into his neck.
The next morning, Art woke stiff and serene. He stretched out on the bed, dimly noted Linda's absence, and padded to the bathroom to relieve his bladder. He thought about crawling back into bed, was on the verge of doing so, when he heard the familiar, nervewracking harangue of Linda arguing down her comm. He opened the door to his old bedroom and there she was, stark naked and beautiful in the morning sun, comm in hand, eyes focused in the middle distance, shouting.
"No, goddamnit, no! Not here. Jesus, are you a moron? I said no!"
Art reached out to touch her back, noticed that it was trembling, visibly tense and rigid, and pulled his hand back. Instead, he quietly set about fishing in his small bag for a change of clothes.
"This is not a good time. I'm at Art's grandmother's place, all right? I'll talk to you later." She threw her comm at the bed and whirled around.
"Everything all right?" Art said timidly.
"No, goddamnit, no it isn't."
Art pulled on his pants and kept his eyes on her comm, which was dented and scratched from a hundred thousand angry hang ups. He hated it when she got like this, radiating anger and spoiling for a fight.
"I'm going to have to go, I think," she said.
"Go?"
"To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go and sort things out with him."
"Your ex knows who I am?"
She looked blank.
"You told him you were at my grandmother's place. He knows who I am?"
"Yeah," she said. "He does. I told him, so he'd get off my back."
"And you have to go to California?"
"Today. I have to go to California today."
"Jesus, today? We just got here!"
"Look, you've got lots of catching up to do with your Gran and your friends here. You won't even miss me. I'll go for a couple days and then come back."
"If you gotta go," he said.
"I gotta go."
He explained things as best as he could to Gran while Linda repacked her backpack, and then saw Linda off in a taxi. She was already savaging her comm, booking a ticket to LA. He called Fede from the condo's driveway.
"Hey, Art! How's Toronto?"
"How'd you know I was in Toronto?" Art said, but he knew, he knew then, though he couldn't explain how he knew, he knew that Linda and Fede had been talking. He knew that Linda had been talking to Fede that morning, and not her fucking ex (God, he was thinking of the poor schmuck that way already, "fucking ex"). Christ, it was five in the morning on the West Coast. It couldn't be the ex. He just knew.
"Lucky guess," Fede said breezily. "How is it?"
"Oh, terrific. Great to see the old hometown and all. How're things with Perceptronics? When should I plan on being back in Boston?"
"Oh, it's going all right, but slow. Hurry up and wait, right? Look, don't worry about it, just relax there, I'll call you when the deal's ready and you'll go back to Boston and we'll sort it out and it'll all be fantastic and don't worry, really, all right?"
"Fine, Fede." Art wasn't listening any more. Fede had gone into bullshit mode, and all Art was thinking of was why Linda would talk to Fede and then book a flight to LA. "How're things in London?" he said automatically.
"Fine, fine," Fede said, just as automatically. "Not the same without you, of course."
"Of course," Art said. "Well, bye then."
"Bye," Fede said.
Art felt an unsuspected cunning stirring within him. He commed Linda, in her cab. "Hey, dude," he said.
"Hey," she said, sounding harassed.
"Look, I just spoke to my Gran and she's really upset you had to go. She really liked you."
"Well, I liked her, too."
"Great. Here's the thing," he said, and drew in a breath. "Gran made you a sweater. She made me one, too. She's a knitter. She wanted me to send it along after you. It looks pretty good. So, if you give me your ex's address, I can FedEx it there and you can get it."
There was a lengthy pause. "Why don't I just pick it up when I see you again?" Linda said, finally.
Gotcha, Art thought. "Well, I know that'd be the sensible thing, but my Gran, I dunno, she really wants me to do this. It'd make her so happy."
"I dunno-my ex might cut it up or something."
"Oh, I'm sure he wouldn't do that. I could just schedule the delivery for after you arrive, that way you can sign for it. What do you think?"
"I really don't think-"
"Come on, Linda, I know it's nuts, but it's my Gran. She really likes you."
Linda sighed. "Let me comm you the address, OK?"
"Thanks, Linda," Art said, watching the address in Van Nuys scroll onto his comm's screen. "Thanks a bunch. Have a great trip-don't let your ex get you down."
Now, armed with Linda's fucking ex's name, Art went to work. He told Gran he had some administrative chores to catch up on for an hour or two, promised to have supper with her and Father Ferlenghetti that night, and went out onto the condo's sundeck with his keyboard velcroed to his thigh.
• Trepan: Hey!
• Colonelonic: Trepan! Hey, what's up? I hear you're back on the East Coast!
• Trepan: True enough. Back in Toronto. How's things with you?
• Colonelonic: Same as ever. Trying to quit the dayjob.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Are you still working at Merril-Lynch?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Yeah.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Still got access to Lexus-Nexus?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Sure — but they're on our asses about abusing the accounts. Every search is logged and has to be accounted for.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Can you get me background on just one guy?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Who is he? Why?
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's stupid. I think that someone I know is about to go into biz with him, and I don't trust him. I'm probably just being paranoid, but...
• ## Colonelonic (private): I don't know, man. Is it really important?
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Oh, crap, look. It's my girlfriend. I think she's screwing this guy. I just wanna get an idea of who he is, what he does, you know.
• ## Colonelonic (private): Heh. That sucks. OK — check back in a couple hours. There's a guy across the hall who never logs out of his box when he goes to lunch. I'll sneak in there and look it up on his machine.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Kick ass. Thanks.
• ##Transferring addressbook entry "Toby Ginsburg" to Colonelonic. Receipt confirmed.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Thanks again!
• ## Colonelonic (private): Check in with me later — I'll have something for you then.
Art logged off, flushed with triumph. Whatever Fede and Linda were cooking up, he'd get wise to it and then he'd nail 'em. What the hell was it, though?
Gran gave Art a long and teary hug. She was less frail than she'd been in his memory, taller and sturdier. The smell of her powder and the familiar acoustics of Union Station's cavernous platform whirled him back to his childhood in Toronto, to the homey time before he'd gotten on the circadian merry-go-round.
"Gran, this is Linda," he said.
"Oh, it's so nice to meet you," Gran said, taking Linda's hands in hers. "Call me Julie."
Linda smiled a great, pretty, toothy smile. "Julie, Art's told me all about you. I just know we'll be great friends."
"I'm sure we will. Are you hungry? Did they feed you on the train? You must be exhausted after such a long trip. Which would you rather do first, eat or rest?"
"Well, I'm up for seeing the town," Linda said. "Your grandson's been yawning his head off since Buffalo, though." She put her arm around his waist and squeezed his tummy.
"What a fantastic couple you make," Gran said. "You didn't tell me she was so pretty, Arthur!"
"Here it comes," Art said. "She's going to ask about great-grandchildren."
"Don't be silly," Gran said, cuffing him gently upside the head. "You're always exaggerating."
"Well I think it's a splendid idea," Linda said. "Shall we have two? Three? Four?"
"Make it ten," Art said, kissing her cheek.
"Oh, I couldn't have ten," Linda said. "But five is a nice compromise. Five it will be. We'll name the first one Julie if it's a girl, or Julius if it's a boy."
"Oh, we are going to get along," Gran said, and led them up to the curb, where the red cap had loaded their bags into a cab.
They ate dinner at Lindy's on Yonge Street, right in the middle of the sleaze strip. The steakhouse had been there for the better part of a century, and its cracked red-vinyl booths and thick rib eyes smothered in horseradish and HP Sauce were just as Art had remembered. Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo, the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower, all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary school.
By the time Art lay down in his bed, belly tight with undigested steak, he was feeling wonderful and at peace with the world. Linda climbed in beside him, wrestled away a pillow and some covers, and snuggled up to him.
"That went well," Art said. "I'm really glad you two hit it off."
"Me too, honey," Linda said, kissing his shoulder through his tee shirt. He'd been able to get his head around the idea of sharing a bed with his girlfriend under his grandmother's roof, but doing so nude seemed somehow wrong.
"We're going to have a great week," he said. "I wish it would never end."
"Yeah," she said, and began to snore into his neck.
The next morning, Art woke stiff and serene. He stretched out on the bed, dimly noted Linda's absence, and padded to the bathroom to relieve his bladder. He thought about crawling back into bed, was on the verge of doing so, when he heard the familiar, nervewracking harangue of Linda arguing down her comm. He opened the door to his old bedroom and there she was, stark naked and beautiful in the morning sun, comm in hand, eyes focused in the middle distance, shouting.
"No, goddamnit, no! Not here. Jesus, are you a moron? I said no!"
Art reached out to touch her back, noticed that it was trembling, visibly tense and rigid, and pulled his hand back. Instead, he quietly set about fishing in his small bag for a change of clothes.
"This is not a good time. I'm at Art's grandmother's place, all right? I'll talk to you later." She threw her comm at the bed and whirled around.
"Everything all right?" Art said timidly.
"No, goddamnit, no it isn't."
Art pulled on his pants and kept his eyes on her comm, which was dented and scratched from a hundred thousand angry hang ups. He hated it when she got like this, radiating anger and spoiling for a fight.
"I'm going to have to go, I think," she said.
"Go?"
"To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go and sort things out with him."
"Your ex knows who I am?"
She looked blank.
"You told him you were at my grandmother's place. He knows who I am?"
"Yeah," she said. "He does. I told him, so he'd get off my back."
"And you have to go to California?"
"Today. I have to go to California today."
"Jesus, today? We just got here!"
"Look, you've got lots of catching up to do with your Gran and your friends here. You won't even miss me. I'll go for a couple days and then come back."
"If you gotta go," he said.
"I gotta go."
He explained things as best as he could to Gran while Linda repacked her backpack, and then saw Linda off in a taxi. She was already savaging her comm, booking a ticket to LA. He called Fede from the condo's driveway.
"Hey, Art! How's Toronto?"
"How'd you know I was in Toronto?" Art said, but he knew, he knew then, though he couldn't explain how he knew, he knew that Linda and Fede had been talking. He knew that Linda had been talking to Fede that morning, and not her fucking ex (God, he was thinking of the poor schmuck that way already, "fucking ex"). Christ, it was five in the morning on the West Coast. It couldn't be the ex. He just knew.
"Lucky guess," Fede said breezily. "How is it?"
"Oh, terrific. Great to see the old hometown and all. How're things with Perceptronics? When should I plan on being back in Boston?"
"Oh, it's going all right, but slow. Hurry up and wait, right? Look, don't worry about it, just relax there, I'll call you when the deal's ready and you'll go back to Boston and we'll sort it out and it'll all be fantastic and don't worry, really, all right?"
"Fine, Fede." Art wasn't listening any more. Fede had gone into bullshit mode, and all Art was thinking of was why Linda would talk to Fede and then book a flight to LA. "How're things in London?" he said automatically.
"Fine, fine," Fede said, just as automatically. "Not the same without you, of course."
"Of course," Art said. "Well, bye then."
"Bye," Fede said.
Art felt an unsuspected cunning stirring within him. He commed Linda, in her cab. "Hey, dude," he said.
"Hey," she said, sounding harassed.
"Look, I just spoke to my Gran and she's really upset you had to go. She really liked you."
"Well, I liked her, too."
"Great. Here's the thing," he said, and drew in a breath. "Gran made you a sweater. She made me one, too. She's a knitter. She wanted me to send it along after you. It looks pretty good. So, if you give me your ex's address, I can FedEx it there and you can get it."
There was a lengthy pause. "Why don't I just pick it up when I see you again?" Linda said, finally.
Gotcha, Art thought. "Well, I know that'd be the sensible thing, but my Gran, I dunno, she really wants me to do this. It'd make her so happy."
"I dunno-my ex might cut it up or something."
"Oh, I'm sure he wouldn't do that. I could just schedule the delivery for after you arrive, that way you can sign for it. What do you think?"
"I really don't think-"
"Come on, Linda, I know it's nuts, but it's my Gran. She really likes you."
Linda sighed. "Let me comm you the address, OK?"
"Thanks, Linda," Art said, watching the address in Van Nuys scroll onto his comm's screen. "Thanks a bunch. Have a great trip-don't let your ex get you down."
Now, armed with Linda's fucking ex's name, Art went to work. He told Gran he had some administrative chores to catch up on for an hour or two, promised to have supper with her and Father Ferlenghetti that night, and went out onto the condo's sundeck with his keyboard velcroed to his thigh.
• Trepan: Hey!
• Colonelonic: Trepan! Hey, what's up? I hear you're back on the East Coast!
• Trepan: True enough. Back in Toronto. How's things with you?
• Colonelonic: Same as ever. Trying to quit the dayjob.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Are you still working at Merril-Lynch?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Yeah.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Still got access to Lexus-Nexus?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Sure — but they're on our asses about abusing the accounts. Every search is logged and has to be accounted for.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Can you get me background on just one guy?
• ## Colonelonic (private): Who is he? Why?
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's stupid. I think that someone I know is about to go into biz with him, and I don't trust him. I'm probably just being paranoid, but...
• ## Colonelonic (private): I don't know, man. Is it really important?
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Oh, crap, look. It's my girlfriend. I think she's screwing this guy. I just wanna get an idea of who he is, what he does, you know.
• ## Colonelonic (private): Heh. That sucks. OK — check back in a couple hours. There's a guy across the hall who never logs out of his box when he goes to lunch. I'll sneak in there and look it up on his machine.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Kick ass. Thanks.
• ##Transferring addressbook entry "Toby Ginsburg" to Colonelonic. Receipt confirmed.
• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Thanks again!
• ## Colonelonic (private): Check in with me later — I'll have something for you then.
Art logged off, flushed with triumph. Whatever Fede and Linda were cooking up, he'd get wise to it and then he'd nail 'em. What the hell was it, though?
23.
My cousins visited me a week after I arrived at the nuthouse. I'd never been very close to them, and certainly our relationship had hardly blossomed during the week I spent in Toronto, trying to track down Linda and Fede's plot.
I have two cousins. They're my father's sister's kids, and I didn't even meet them until I was about twenty and tracking down my family history. They're Ottawa Valley kids, raised on government-town pork, aging hippie muesli, and country-style corn pone. It's a weird mix, and we've never had a conversation that I would consider a success. Ever met a violent, aggressive hippie with an intimate knowledge of whose genitals one must masticate in order to get a building permit or to make a pot bust vanish? It ain't pretty.
Cousin the first is Audie. She's a year older than me, and she's the smart one on that side of the family, the one who ended up at Queen's University for a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MA in Poli Sci, and even so finished up back in Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese and Sierra Leonese OEM importers. Audie's married to a nice fella whose name I can never remember and they're gonna have kids in five years; it's on a timetable that she actually showed me once when I went out there on biz and stopped in to see her at the office.
Cousin the second is Alphie-three years younger than me, raised in the shadow of his overachieving sister, he was the capo of Ottawa Valley script kiddies, a low-rent hacker who downloaded other people's code for defeating copyright use-control systems and made a little biz for himself bootlegging games, porn, music and video, until the WIPO bots found him through traffic analysis and busted his ass, bankrupting him and landing him in the clink for sixty days.
Audie and Alfie are blond and ruddy and a little heavyset, all characteristics they got from their father's side, so add that to the fact that I grew up without being aware of their existence and you'll understand the absence of any real fellow-feeling for them. I don't dislike them, but I have so little in common with them that it's like hanging out with time travelers from the least-interesting historical era imaginable.
But they came to Boston and looked me up in the nuthatch.
They found me sitting on the sofa in the ward, post-Group, arms and ankles crossed, dozing in a shaft of sunlight. It was my habitual napping spot, and I found that a nap between Group and dinner was a good way to sharpen my appetite and anasthetize my taste buds, which made the mealtime slop bearable.
Audie shook my shoulder gently. I assumed at first that she was one of the inmates trying to get me involved in a game of Martian narco-checkers, so I brushed her hand away.
"They've probably got him all doped up," Audie said. The voice was familiar and unplaceable and so I cracked my eyelid, squinting up at her silhouette in the afternoon sun. "There he is," she said. "Come on, up and at 'em, tiger."
I sat up abruptly and scrubbed at my eyes. "Audie?" I asked.
"Yup. And Alphie." Alphie's pink face hove into view.
"Hi, Art," he mumbled.
"Jesus," I said, getting to my feet. Audie put out a superfluous steadying hand. "Wow."
"Surprised?" Audie said.
"Yeah!" I said. Audie thrust a bouquet of flowers into my arms. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, your grandmother told me you were here. I was coming down to Boston for work anyway, so I flew in a day early so I could drop in. Alphie came down with me-he's my assistant now."
I almost said something about convicted felons working for government contractors, but I held onto my tongue. Consequently, an awkward silence blossomed.
"Well," Audie said, at last. "Well! Let's have a look at you, then." She actually took a lap around me, looking me up and down, making little noises. "You look all right, Art. Maybe a little skinny, even. Alphie's got a box of cookies for you." Alphie stepped forward and produced the box, a family pack of President's Choice Ridiculous Chocoholic Extra Chewies, a Canadian store brand I'd been raised on. Within seconds of seeing them, my mouth was sloshing with saliva.
"It's good to see you, Audie, Alphie." I managed to say it without spitting, an impressive feat, given the amount of saliva I was contending with. "Thanks for the care package."
We stared at each other blankly.
"So, Art," Alphie said, "So! How do you like it here?"
"Well, Alphie," I said. "I can't say as I do, really. As far as I can tell, I'm sane as I've ever been. It's just a bunch of unfortunate coincidences and bad judgment that got me here." I refrain from mentioning Alphie's propensity for lapses in judgment.
"Wow," Alphie said. "That's a bummer. We should do something, you know, Audie?"
"Not really my area of expertise," Audie said in clipped tones. "I would if I could, you know that, right Art? We're family, after all."
"Oh, sure," I say magnanimously. But now that I'm looking at them, my cousins who got into a thousand times more trouble than I ever did, driving drunk, pirating software, growing naughty smokables in the backyard, and got away from it unscathed, I feel a stirring of desperate hope. "Only..."
"Only what?" Alphie said.
"Only, maybe, Audie, do you think you could, that is, if you've got the time, do you think you could have a little look around and see if any of your contacts could maybe set me up with a decent lawyer who might be able to get my case reheard? Or a shrink, for that matter? Something? 'Cause frankly it doesn't really seem like they're going to let me go, ever. Ever."
Audie squirmed and glared at her brother. "I don't really know anyone that fits the bill," she said at last.
"Well, not firsthand, sure, why would you? You wouldn't." I thought that I was starting to babble, but I couldn't help myself. "You wouldn't. But maybe there's someone that someone you know knows who can do something about it? I mean, it can't hurt to ask around, can it?"
"I suppose it can't," she said.
"Wow," I said, "that would just be fantastic, you know. Thanks in advance, Audie, really, I mean it, just for trying, I can't thank you enough. This place, well, it really sucks."
There it was, hanging out, my desperate and pathetic plea for help. Really, there was nowhere to go but down from there. Still, the silence stretched and snapped and I said, "Hey, speaking of, can I offer you guys a tour of the ward? I mean, it's not much, but it's home."
So I showed them: the droolers and the fondlers and the pukers and my horrible little room and the scarred ping-pong table and the sticky decks of cards and the meshed-in TV. Alphie actually seemed to dig it, in a kind of horrified way. He started comparing it to the new Kingston Pen, where he'd done his six-month bit. After seeing the first puker, Audie went quiet and thin-lipped, leaving nothing but Alphie's enthusiastic gurgling as counterpoint to my tour.
"Art," Audie said finally, desperately, "do you think they'd let us take you out for a cup of coffee or a walk around the grounds?"
I asked. The nurse looked at a comm for a while, then shook her head.
"Nope," I reported. "They need a day's notice of off-ward supervised excursions."
"Well, too bad," Audie said. I understood her strategy immediately. "Too bad. Nothing for it, then. Guess we should get back to our hotel." I planted a dry kiss on her cheek, shook Alphie's sweaty hand, and they were gone. I skipped supper that night and ate cookies until I couldn't eat another bite of rich chocolate.
#
"Got a comm?" I ask Doc Szandor, casually.
"What for?"
"Wanna get some of this down. The ideas for the hospital. Before I go back out on the ward." And it is what I want to do, mostly. But the temptation to just log on and do my thing-oh!
"Sure," he says, checking his watch. "I can probably stall them for a couple hours more. Feel free to make a call or whatever, too."
Doc Szandor's a good egg.
I have two cousins. They're my father's sister's kids, and I didn't even meet them until I was about twenty and tracking down my family history. They're Ottawa Valley kids, raised on government-town pork, aging hippie muesli, and country-style corn pone. It's a weird mix, and we've never had a conversation that I would consider a success. Ever met a violent, aggressive hippie with an intimate knowledge of whose genitals one must masticate in order to get a building permit or to make a pot bust vanish? It ain't pretty.
Cousin the first is Audie. She's a year older than me, and she's the smart one on that side of the family, the one who ended up at Queen's University for a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MA in Poli Sci, and even so finished up back in Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese and Sierra Leonese OEM importers. Audie's married to a nice fella whose name I can never remember and they're gonna have kids in five years; it's on a timetable that she actually showed me once when I went out there on biz and stopped in to see her at the office.
Cousin the second is Alphie-three years younger than me, raised in the shadow of his overachieving sister, he was the capo of Ottawa Valley script kiddies, a low-rent hacker who downloaded other people's code for defeating copyright use-control systems and made a little biz for himself bootlegging games, porn, music and video, until the WIPO bots found him through traffic analysis and busted his ass, bankrupting him and landing him in the clink for sixty days.
Audie and Alfie are blond and ruddy and a little heavyset, all characteristics they got from their father's side, so add that to the fact that I grew up without being aware of their existence and you'll understand the absence of any real fellow-feeling for them. I don't dislike them, but I have so little in common with them that it's like hanging out with time travelers from the least-interesting historical era imaginable.
But they came to Boston and looked me up in the nuthatch.
They found me sitting on the sofa in the ward, post-Group, arms and ankles crossed, dozing in a shaft of sunlight. It was my habitual napping spot, and I found that a nap between Group and dinner was a good way to sharpen my appetite and anasthetize my taste buds, which made the mealtime slop bearable.
Audie shook my shoulder gently. I assumed at first that she was one of the inmates trying to get me involved in a game of Martian narco-checkers, so I brushed her hand away.
"They've probably got him all doped up," Audie said. The voice was familiar and unplaceable and so I cracked my eyelid, squinting up at her silhouette in the afternoon sun. "There he is," she said. "Come on, up and at 'em, tiger."
I sat up abruptly and scrubbed at my eyes. "Audie?" I asked.
"Yup. And Alphie." Alphie's pink face hove into view.
"Hi, Art," he mumbled.
"Jesus," I said, getting to my feet. Audie put out a superfluous steadying hand. "Wow."
"Surprised?" Audie said.
"Yeah!" I said. Audie thrust a bouquet of flowers into my arms. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, your grandmother told me you were here. I was coming down to Boston for work anyway, so I flew in a day early so I could drop in. Alphie came down with me-he's my assistant now."
I almost said something about convicted felons working for government contractors, but I held onto my tongue. Consequently, an awkward silence blossomed.
"Well," Audie said, at last. "Well! Let's have a look at you, then." She actually took a lap around me, looking me up and down, making little noises. "You look all right, Art. Maybe a little skinny, even. Alphie's got a box of cookies for you." Alphie stepped forward and produced the box, a family pack of President's Choice Ridiculous Chocoholic Extra Chewies, a Canadian store brand I'd been raised on. Within seconds of seeing them, my mouth was sloshing with saliva.
"It's good to see you, Audie, Alphie." I managed to say it without spitting, an impressive feat, given the amount of saliva I was contending with. "Thanks for the care package."
We stared at each other blankly.
"So, Art," Alphie said, "So! How do you like it here?"
"Well, Alphie," I said. "I can't say as I do, really. As far as I can tell, I'm sane as I've ever been. It's just a bunch of unfortunate coincidences and bad judgment that got me here." I refrain from mentioning Alphie's propensity for lapses in judgment.
"Wow," Alphie said. "That's a bummer. We should do something, you know, Audie?"
"Not really my area of expertise," Audie said in clipped tones. "I would if I could, you know that, right Art? We're family, after all."
"Oh, sure," I say magnanimously. But now that I'm looking at them, my cousins who got into a thousand times more trouble than I ever did, driving drunk, pirating software, growing naughty smokables in the backyard, and got away from it unscathed, I feel a stirring of desperate hope. "Only..."
"Only what?" Alphie said.
"Only, maybe, Audie, do you think you could, that is, if you've got the time, do you think you could have a little look around and see if any of your contacts could maybe set me up with a decent lawyer who might be able to get my case reheard? Or a shrink, for that matter? Something? 'Cause frankly it doesn't really seem like they're going to let me go, ever. Ever."
Audie squirmed and glared at her brother. "I don't really know anyone that fits the bill," she said at last.
"Well, not firsthand, sure, why would you? You wouldn't." I thought that I was starting to babble, but I couldn't help myself. "You wouldn't. But maybe there's someone that someone you know knows who can do something about it? I mean, it can't hurt to ask around, can it?"
"I suppose it can't," she said.
"Wow," I said, "that would just be fantastic, you know. Thanks in advance, Audie, really, I mean it, just for trying, I can't thank you enough. This place, well, it really sucks."
There it was, hanging out, my desperate and pathetic plea for help. Really, there was nowhere to go but down from there. Still, the silence stretched and snapped and I said, "Hey, speaking of, can I offer you guys a tour of the ward? I mean, it's not much, but it's home."
So I showed them: the droolers and the fondlers and the pukers and my horrible little room and the scarred ping-pong table and the sticky decks of cards and the meshed-in TV. Alphie actually seemed to dig it, in a kind of horrified way. He started comparing it to the new Kingston Pen, where he'd done his six-month bit. After seeing the first puker, Audie went quiet and thin-lipped, leaving nothing but Alphie's enthusiastic gurgling as counterpoint to my tour.
"Art," Audie said finally, desperately, "do you think they'd let us take you out for a cup of coffee or a walk around the grounds?"
I asked. The nurse looked at a comm for a while, then shook her head.
"Nope," I reported. "They need a day's notice of off-ward supervised excursions."
"Well, too bad," Audie said. I understood her strategy immediately. "Too bad. Nothing for it, then. Guess we should get back to our hotel." I planted a dry kiss on her cheek, shook Alphie's sweaty hand, and they were gone. I skipped supper that night and ate cookies until I couldn't eat another bite of rich chocolate.
#
"Got a comm?" I ask Doc Szandor, casually.
"What for?"
"Wanna get some of this down. The ideas for the hospital. Before I go back out on the ward." And it is what I want to do, mostly. But the temptation to just log on and do my thing-oh!
"Sure," he says, checking his watch. "I can probably stall them for a couple hours more. Feel free to make a call or whatever, too."
Doc Szandor's a good egg.