His landlady let Linda in on the fourth day, as he was sleeping fitfully with a pillow over his face to shut out the light from the window. He'd tried to draw the curtains a day — two days? — before, but had given up when he tried to pull himself upright on the sill only to collapse in a fresh gout of writhing. Linda crouched by his head and stroked his greasy hair softly until he flipped the pillow off his face with a movement of his neck. He squinted up at her, impossibly fresh and put together and incongruous in his world of reduced circumstances.
"Art. Art. Art. Art! You're a mess, Art! Jesus. Why aren't you in bed?"
"Too far," he mumbled.
"What would your grandmother say? Dear-oh-dearie. Come on, let's get you up and into bed, and then I'm going to have a doctor and a massage therapist sent in. You need a nice, hot bath, too. It'll be good for you and hygienic besides."
"No tub," he said petulantly.
"I know, I know. Don't worry about it. I'll sort it out."
And she did, easing him to his feet and helping him into bed. She took his house keys and disappeared for some unknowable time, then reappeared with fresh linen in store wrappers, which she lay on the bed carefully, making tight hospital corners and rolling him over, nurse-style, to do the other side. He heard her clattering in the kitchen, running the faucets, moving furniture. He reminded himself to ask her to drop his comm in its charger, then forgot.
"Come on, time to get up again," she said, gently peeling the sheets back.
"It's OK," he said, waving weakly at her.
"Yes, it is. Let's get up." She took his ankles and gradually turned him on the bed so that his feet were on the floor, then grabbed him by his stinking armpits and helped him to his feet. He stumbled with her into his crowded living room, dimly aware of the furniture stacked on itself around him. She left him hanging on the door lintel and then began removing his clothes. She actually used a scissors to cut away his stained tee shirt and boxer shorts. "All right," she said, "into the tub."
"No tub," he said.
"Look down, Art," she said.
He did. An inflatable wading pool sat in the middle of his living room, flanked by an upended coffee table and his sofa, standing on its ear. The pool was full of steaming, cloudy water. "There's a bunch of eucalyptus oil and Epsom salts in there. You're gonna love it."
That night, Art actually tottered into the kitchen and got himself a glass of water, one hand pressed on his lower back. The cool air of the apartment fanned the mentholated liniment on his back and puckered goose pimples all over his body. After days of leaden limbs, he felt light and clean, his senses singing as though he was emerging from a fever. He drank the water, and retrieved his comm from its cradle.
He propped several pillows up on his headboard and fired up his comm. Immediately, it began to buzz and hum and chatter and blink, throwing up alerts about urgent messages, pages and calls pending. The lightness he'd felt fled him, and he began the rotten business of triaging his in-box.
One strong impression emerged almost immediately: Fede wanted him in Boston.
The Jersey clients were interested in the teasers that Fede had forwarded to them. The Jersey clients were obsessed with the teasers that Fede had forwarded to them. The Jersey clients were howling for more after the teasers that Fede had forwarded to them. Fede had negotiated some big bucks on approval if only Art would go and talk to the Jersey clients. The Jersey clients had arranged a meeting with some of the MassPike decision-makers for the following week, and now they were panicking because they didn't have anything *except* the teasers Fede had forwarded to them.
You should really try to go to Boston, Art. We need you in Boston, Art. You have to go to Boston, Art. Art, go to Boston. Boston, Art. Boston.
Linda rolled over in bed and peered up at him. "You're *not* working again, are you?"
"Shhh," Art said. "It's less stressful if I get stuff done than if I let it pile up."
"Then why is your forehead all wrinkled up?"
"I have to go to Boston," he said. "Day after tomorrow, I think."
"Jesus, are you insane? Trying to cripple yourself?"
"I can recover in a hotel room just as well as I can recover here. It's just rest from here on in, anyway. And a hotel will probably have a tub."
"I can't believe I'm hearing this. You're not going to *recover* in Boston.You'll be at meetings and stuff. Christ!"
"I've got to do this," Art said. "I just need to figure out how. I'll go business class, take along a lumbar pillow, and spend every moment that I'm not in a meeting in a tub or getting a massage. I could use a change of scenery about now, anyway."
"You're a goddamned idiot, you know that?"
Art knew it. He also knew that here was an opportunity to get back to EST, to make a good impression on the Jersey clients, to make his name in the Tribe and to make a bundle of cash. His back be damned, he was sick of lying around anyway. "I've got to go, Linda."
"It's your life," she said, and tossed aside the covers. "But I don't have to sit around watching you ruin it." She disappeared into the hallway, then reemerged, dressed and with her coat on. "I'm out of here."
"Linda," Art said.
"No," she said. "Shut up. Why the fuck should I care if you don't, huh? I'm going. See you around."
"Come on, let's talk about this."
East-Coast pizza. Flat Boston twangs. The coeds rushing through Harvard Square and oh, maybe a side trip to New York, maybe another up to Toronto and a roti at one of the halal Guyanese places on Queen Street. He levered himself painfully out of bed and hobbled to the living room, where Linda was arguing with a taxi dispatcher over her comm, trying to get them to send out a cab at two in the morning.
"Come on," Art said. "Hang that up. Let's talk about this."
She shot him a dirty look and turned her back, kept on ranting down the comm at the dispatcher.
"Linda, don't do this. Come on."
"I am on the phone!" she said to him, covering the mouthpiece. "Shut the fuck up, will you?" She uncovered the mouthpiece. "Hello? Hello?" The dispatcher had hung up. She snapped the comm shut and slammed it into her purse. She whirled to face Art, snorting angry breaths through her nostrils. Her face was such a mask of rage that Art recoiled, and his back twinged. He clasped at it and carefully lowered himself onto the sofa.
"Don't do this, OK?" he said. "I need support, not haranguing."
"What's there to say? Your mind's already made up. You're going to go off and be a fucking idiot and cripple yourself. Go ahead, you don't need my permission."
"Sit down, please, Linda, and talk to me. Let me explain my plan and my reasons, OK? Then I'll listen to you. Maybe we can sort this out and actually, you know, come to understand each other's point of view."
"Fine," she said, and slammed herself into the sofa. Art bounced and he seized his back reflexively, waiting for the pain, but beyond a low-grade throbbing, he was OK.
"I have a very large opportunity in Boston right now. One that could really change my life. Money, sure, but prestige and profile, too. A dream of an opportunity. I need to attend one or two meetings, and then I can take a couple days off. I'll get Fede to OK a first-class flight — we get chits we can use to upgrade to Virgin Upper; they've got hot tubs and massage therapists now. I'll check into a spa — they've got a bunch on Route 128 — and get a massage every morning and have a physiotherapist up to the room every night. I can't afford that stuff here, but Fede'll spring for it if I go to Boston, let me expense it. I'll be a good lad, I promise."
"I still think you're being an idiot. Why can't Fede go?"
"Because it's my deal."
"Why can't whoever you're meeting with come here?"
"That's complicated."
"Bullshit. I thought you wanted to talk about this?"
"I do. I just can't talk about that part."
"Why not? Are you afraid I'll blab? Christ, Art. Give me some credit. Who the hell would I blab *to*, anyway?"
"Look, Linda, the deal itself is confidential — a secret. A secret's only a secret if you don't tell it to anyone, all right? So I'm not going to tell you. It's not relevant to the discussion, anyway."
"Art. Art. Art. Art, you make it all sound so reasonable, and you can dress it up with whatever words you want, but at the end of the day, we both know you're full of shit on this. There's no *way* that doing this is better for you than staying here in bed. If Fede's the problem, let me talk to him."
"Jesus, no!"
"Why not?"
"It's not appropriate, Linda. This is a work-related issue. It wouldn't be professional. OK, I'll concede that flying and going to meeting is more stressful than not flying and not going to meetings, but let's take it as a given that I *really* need to go to Boston. Can't we agree on that, and then discuss the ways that we can mitigate the risks associated with the trip?"
"Jesus, you're an idiot," she said, but she seemed to be on the verge of smiling.
"But I'm *your* idiot, right?" Art said, hopefully.
"Sure, sure you are." She *did* smile then, and cuddle up to him on the sofa."They don't have fucking *hot tubs* in Virgin Upper, do they?"
"Yeah," Art said, kissing her earlobe. "They really do."
17.
Once the blood coursing from my shins slows and clots, I take an opportunity to inspect the damage more closely. The cuts are relatively shallow, certainly less serious than they were in my runamuck imagination, which had vivid slashes of white bone visible through the divided skin. I cautiously pick out the larger grit and gravel and turn my attention spinewards.
I have done a number on my back, that much is certain. My old friends, the sacroiliac joints, feel as tight as drumheads, and they creak ominously when I shift to a sitting position with my back propped up on the chimney's upended butt, the aluminum skirting cool as a kiss on my skin. They're only just starting to twinge, a hint of the agonies to come.
My jaw, though, is pretty bad. My whole face feels swollen, and if I open my mouth the blood starts anew.
You know, on sober reflection, I believe that coming up to the roof was a really bad idea.
I use the chimney to lever myself upright again, and circle it to see exactly what kind of damage I've done. There's a neat circular hole in the roof where the chimney used to be, gusting warm air into my face as I peer into its depths. The hole is the mouth of a piece of shiny metal conduit about the circumference of a basketball hoop. When I put my head into it, I hear the white noise of a fan, somewhere below in the building's attic. I toss some gravel down the conduit and listen to the report as it *ping*s off the fan blades down below. That's a good, loud sound, and one that is certain to echo through the building.
I rain gravel down the exhaust tube by the handful, getting into a mindless, shuffling rhythm, wearing the sides of my hands raw and red as I scrape the pebbles up into handy piles. Soon I am shuffling afield of the fallen chimney, one hand on my lumbar, crouched over like a chimp, knees splayed in an effort to shift stress away from my grooved calves.
I'm really beating the shit out of that poor fan, I can tell. The shooting-gallery rattle of the gravel ricocheting off the blades is dulling now, sometimes followed by secondary rattles as the pebbles bounce back into the blades. Not sure what I'll do if the fan gives out before someone notices me up here.
It's not an issue, as it turns out. The heavy fire door beyond the chimney swings open abruptly. A hospital maintenance gal in coveralls, roly-poly and draped with tool belts and bandoliers. She's red-faced from the trek up the stairs, and it gives her the aspect of a fairy tale baker or candy-seller. She reinforces this impression by putting her plump hands to her enormous bosom and gasping when she catches sight of me.
It comes to me that I am quite a fucking sight. Bloody, sunburnt, wild-eyed, with my simian hunch and my scabby jaw set at a crazy angle to my face and reality both. Not to mention my near nudity, which I'm semipositive is not her idea of light entertainment. "Hey," I say. "I, uh, I got stuck on the roof. The door shut." Talking reopens the wound on my jaw and I feel more blood trickling down my neck. "Unfortunately, I only get one chance to make a first impression, huh? I'm not, you know, really *crazy,* I was just a little bored and so I went exploring and got stuck and tried to get someone's attention, had a couple accidents… It's a long story. Hey! My name's Art. What's yours?"
"Oh my Lord!" she said, and her hand jumps to the hammer in its bandolier holster on her round tummy. She claws at it frantically.
"Please," I say, holding my hands in front of me. "Please. I'm hurt is all. I came up here to get some fresh air and the door swung shut behind me. I tripped when I knocked over the chimney to get someone's attention. I'm not dangerous. Please. Just help me get back down to the twentieth floor — I think I might need a stretcher crew, my back is pretty bad."
"It's Caitlin," she says.
"I beg your pardon?"
"My name is Caitlin," she says.
"Hi, Caitlin," I said. I extend my hand, but she doesn't move the ten yards she would have to cross in order to take it. I think about moving towards her, but think better of it.
"You're not up here to jump, are you?"
"Jump? Christ, no! Just stuck is all. Just stuck."
Linda's goddamned boyfriend was into all this flaky Getting to Yes shit, subliminal means of establishing rapport and so on. Linda and I once spent an afternoon at the Children's Carousel uptown in Manhattan, making fun of all his newage theories. The one that stood out in my mind as funniest was synching your breathing — "What you resist persists, so you need to turn resistance into assistance," Linda recounted. You match breathing with your subject for fifteen breaths and they unconsciously become receptive to your suggestions. I have a suspicion that Caitlin might bolt, duck back through the door and pound down the stairs on her chubby little legs and leave me stranded.
So I try it, match my breath to her heaving bosom. She's still panting from her trek up the stairs and fifteen breaths go by in a quick pause. The silence stretches, and I try to remember what I'm supposed to do next. Lead the subject, that's it. I slow my breathing down gradually and, amazingly, her breath slows down along with mine, until we're both breathing great, slow breaths. It works — it's flaky and goofy California shit, but it works.
"Caitlin," I say calmly, making it part of an exhalation.
"Yes," she says, still wary.
"Have you got a comm?"
"I do, yes."
"Can you please call downstairs and ask them to send up a stretcher crew? I've hurt my back and I won't be able to handle the stairs."
"I can do that, yes."
"Thank you, Caitlin."
It feels like cheating. I didn't have to browbeat her or puncture her bad reasoning — all it took was a little rapport, a little putting myself in her shoes. I can't believe it worked, but Caitlin flips a ruggedized comm off her hip and speaks into it in a calm, efficient manner.
"Thank you, Caitlin," I say again. I start to ease myself to a sitting position, and my back gives way, so that I crash to the rooftop, mewling, hands clutched to my spasming lumbar. And then Caitlin's at my side, pushing my hands away from my back, strong thumbs digging into the spasming muscles around my iliac crests, soothing and smoothing them out, tracing the lines of fire back to the nodes of the joints, patiently kneading the spasms out until the pain recedes to a soft throbbing.
"My old man used to get that," she said. "All us kids had to take turns working it out for him." I'm on my back, staring up over her curves and rolls and into her earnest, freckled face.
"Oh, God, that feels good," I say.
"That's what the old man used to say. You're too young to have a bad back."
"I have to agree," I say.
"All right, I'm going to prop your knees up and lay your head down. I need to have a look at that ventilator."
I grimace. "I'm afraid I did a real number on it," I say. "Sorry about that."
She waves a chubby pish-tosh at me with her freckled hand and walks over to the chimney, leaving me staring at the sky, knees bent, waiting for the stretcher crew.
When they arrive, Caitlin watches as they strap me onto the board, tying me tighter than is strictly necessary for my safety, and I realize that I'm not being tied *down*, I'm being tied *up*.
"Thanks, Caitlin," I say.
"You're welcome, Art."
"Good luck with the ventilator — sorry again."
"That's all right, kid. It's my job, after all."
18.
Virgin Upper's hot tubs were more theoretically soothing than actually so. They had rather high walls and a rather low water level, both for modesty's sake and to prevent spills. Art passed through the miniature sauna/shower and into the tub after his massage, somewhere over Newfoundland, and just as the plane hit turbulence, buffeting him with chlorinated water that stung his eyes and got up his nose and soaked the magazine on offshore investing that he'd found in the back of his seat pocket.
He landed at JFK still smelling of chlorine and sandalwood massage oil and the cantaloupe-scented lotion in the fancy toilets. Tension melted away from him as he meandered to the shuttle stop. The air had an indefinable character of homeliness, or maybe it was the sunlight. Amateur Tribal anthropologists were always thrashing about light among themselves, arguing about the sun's character varying from latitude to latitude, filtered through this city's pollution signature or that.
The light or the air, the latitude or the smog, it felt like home. The women walked with a reassuring, confident *clack clack clack* of heel on hard tile; the men talked louder than was necessary to one another or to their comms. The people were a riot of ethnicities and their speech was a riotous babel of accents, idioms and languages. Aggressive pretzel vendors vied with aggressive panhandlers to shake down the people waiting on the shuttle bus. Art bought a stale, sterno-reeking pretzel that was crusted with inedible volumes of yellowing salt and squirted a couple bucks at a panhandler who had been pestering him in thick Jamaican patois but thanked him in adenoidal Brooklynese.
By the time he boarded his connection to Logan he was joggling his knees uncontrollably in his seat, his delight barely contained. He got an undrinkable can of watery Budweiser and propped it up on his tray table alongside his inedible pretzel and arranged them in a kind of symbolic tableau of all things ESTian.
He commed Fede from the guts of the tunnels that honeycombed Boston, realizing with a thrill as Fede picked up that it was two in the morning in London, at the nominal GMT+0, while here at GMT-5 — at the default, plus-zero time zone of his life, livelihood and lifestyle — it was only 9PM.
"Fede!" Art said into the comm.
"Hey, Art!" Fede said, with a false air of chipperness that Art recognized from any number of middle-of-the-night calls.
There was a cheap Malaysian comm that he'd once bought because of its hyped up de-hibernate feature — its ability to go from its deepest power-saving sleepmode to full waking glory without the customary thirty seconds of drive-churning housekeeping as it reestablished its network connection, verified its file system and memory, and pinged its buddy-list for state and presence info. This Malaysian comm, the Crackler, had the uncanny ability to go into suspended animation indefinitely, and yet throw your workspace back on its display in a hot instant.
When Art actually laid hands on it, after it meandered its way across the world by slow boat, corrupt GMT+8 Posts and Telegraphs authorities, over-engineered courier services and Revenue Canada's Customs agents, he was enchanted by this feature. He could put the device into deep sleep, close it up, and pop its cover open and poof! there were his windows. It took him three days and an interesting crash to notice that even though he was seeing his workspace, he wasn't able to interact with it for thirty seconds. The auspicious crash revealed the presence of a screenshot of his pre-hibernation workspace on the drive, and he realized that the machine was tricking him, displaying the screenshot — the illusion of wakefulness — when he woke it up, relying on the illusion to endure while it performed its housekeeping tasks in the background. A little stopwatch work proved that this chicanery actually added three seconds to the overall wake-time, and taught him his first important user-experience lesson: perception of functionality trumps the actual function.
And here was Fede, throwing up a verbal screenshot of wakefulness while he churned in the background, housekeeping himself into real alertness. "Fede, I'm here, I'm in Boston!"
"Good Art, good. How was the trip?"
"Wonderful. Virgin Upper was fantastic — dancing girls, midget wrestling, hash brownies…"
"Good, very good."
"And now I'm driving around under Boston through a land-yacht regatta. The boats are mambo, but I think that banana patch the hotel soon."
"Glad to hear it." Art heard water running dimly, realized that Fede was taking a leak.
"Meeting with the Jersey boys tomorrow. We're having brunch at a strip club."
"OK, OK, very funny," Fede said. "I'm awake. What's up?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to check in with you and let you know I arrived safe and sound. How're things in London?"
"Your girlfriend called me."
"Linda?"
"You got another girlfriend?"
"What did she want?"
"She wanted to chew me out for sending you overseas with your 'crippling back injury.' She told me she'd hold me responsible if you got into trouble over there."
"God, Fede, I'm sorry. I didn't put her up to it or anything —"
"Don't worry about it. I'm glad that there's someone out there who cares about you. We're getting together for dinner tonight."
"Fede, you know, I think Linda's terrific, but she's a little, you know, volatile."
"Art, everyone in O'Malley House knows just how volatile she is. 'I won't tell you again, Art. Moderate your tone. I won't be shouted at.'"
"Christ, you heard that, too?"
"Don't worry about it. She's cool and I like her and I can stand to be shouted at a little. When did you say you were meeting with Perceptronics?"
The word shocked him. They never mentioned the name of the Jersey clients. It started as a game, but soon became woven into Fede's paranoid procedures.
Now they had reached the endgame. Within a matter of weeks, they'd be turning in their resignations to V/DT and taking the final flight across the Atlantic and back to GMT-5, provocateurs no longer.
"Tomorrow afternoon. We're starting late to give me time to get a full night's sleep." The last conference call with Perceptronics had gone fantastically. His normal handlers — sour men with nasty minds who glommed onto irrelevancies in V/DT's strategy and teased at them until they conjured up shadowy and shrewd conspiracies where none existed — weren't on that call. Instead, he'd spent a rollicking four hours on the line with the sharp and snarky product designers and engineers, bouncing ideas back and forth at speed. Even over the phone, the homey voices and points of view felt indefinably comfortable and familiar. They'd been delighted to start late in the day for his benefit, and had offered to work late and follow up with a visit to a bar where he could get a burger the size of a baby's head. "We're meeting at Perceptronics' branch office in Acton tomorrow and the day after, then going into MassPike. The Perceptronics guys sound really excited." Just saying the name of the company was a thrill.
"That's really excellent, Art. Go easy, though —"
"Oh, don't worry about me. My back's feeling miles better." And it was, loose and supple the way it did after a good workout.
"That's good, but it's not what I meant. We're still closing this deal, still dickering over price. I need another day, maybe, to settle it. So go easy tomorrow. Give me a little leverage, OK?"
"I don't get it. I thought we had a deal."
"Nothing's final till it's vinyl, you know that. They're balking at the royalty clause" — Fede was proposing to sell Perceptronics an exclusive license on the business-model patent he'd filed for using Art's notes in exchange for jobs, a lump-sum payment and a royalty on every sub-license that Perceptronics sold to the world's toll roads — "and we're renegotiating. They're just playing hardball, is all. Another day, tops, and I'll have it sorted."
"I'm confused. What do you want me to do?"
"Just, you know, *stall* them. Get there late. Play up your jetlag. Leave early.Don't get anything, you know, *done*. Use your imagination."
"Is there a deal or isn't there, Fede?"
"There's a deal, there's a deal. I'll do my thing, you'll do your thing, and we'll both be rich and living in New York before you know it. Do you understand?"
"Not really."
"OK, that'll have to be good enough for now. Jesus, Art, I'm doing my best here, all right?"
"Say hi to Linda for me, OK?"
"Don't be pissed at me, Art."
"I'm not pissed. I'll stall them. You do your thing. I'll take it easy, rest up my back."
"All right. Have a great time, OK?"
"I will, Fede."
Art rang off, feeling exhausted and aggravated. He followed the tunnel signs to the nearest up-ramp, wanting to get into the sunlight and architecture and warm himself with both. A miniscule BMW Flea blatted its horn at him when he changed lanes. Had he cut the car off? He was still looking the wrong way, still anticipating oncoming traffic on the right. He raised a hand in an apologetic wave.
It wasn't enough for the Flea's driver. The car ran right up to his bumper, then zipped into the adjacent lane, accelerated and cut him off, nearly causing a wreck. As it was, Art had to swerve into the parking lane on Mass Ave — how did he get to Mass Ave? God, he was lost already — to avoid him. The Flea backed off and switched lanes again, then pulled up alongside of him. The driver rolled down his window.
"How the fuck do you like it, jackoff? Don't *ever* fucking cut me off!" He was a middle aged white guy in a suit, driving a car that was worth a year's wages to Art, purple-faced and pop-eyed.
Art felt something give way inside, and then he was shouting back. "When I want your opinion, I'll squeeze your fucking head, you sack of shit! As it is, I can barely contain my rage at the thought that a scumbag like you is consuming *air* that the rest of us could be breathing! Now, roll up your goddamned window and drive your fucking bourge-mobile before I smash your fucking head in!"
He shut his mouth, alarmed. What the hell was he saying? How did he end up standing here, outside of his car, shouting at the other driver, stalking towards the Flea with his hands balled into fists? Why was he picking a fight with this goddamned psycho, anyway? A year in peaceful, pistol-free London had eased his normal road-rage defense systems. Now they came up full, and he wondered if the road-rager he'd just snapped at would haul out a Second-Amendment Special and cap him.
But the other driver looked as shocked as Art felt. He rolled up his window and sped off, turning wildly at the next corner — Brookline, Art saw. Art got back into his rental, pulled off to the curb and asked his comm to generate an optimal route to his hotel, and drove in numb silence the rest of the way.
19.
They let me call Gran on my second day here. Of course, Linda had already called her and briefed her on my supposed mental breakdown. I had no doubt that she'd managed to fake hysterical anxiety well enough to convince Gran that I'd lost it completely; Gran was already four-fifths certain that I was nuts.
"Hi, Gran," I said.
"Arthur! My God, how are you?"
"I'm fine, Gran. It's a big mistake is all."
"A mistake? Your lady friend called me and told me what you'd done in London.Arthur, you need help."
"What did Linda say?"
"She said that you threatened to kill a coworker. She said you threatened to kill *her*. That you had a knife. Oh, Arthur, I'm so worried —"
"It's not true, Gran. She's lying to you."
"She told me you'd say that."
"Of course she did. She and Fede — a guy I worked with in London — they're trying to get rid of me. They had me locked up. I had a business deal with Fede, we were selling one of my ideas to a company in New Jersey. Linda talked him into selling to some people she knows in LA instead, and they conspired to cut me out of the deal. When I caught them at it, they got me sent away. Let me guess, she told you I was going to say this, too, right?"
"Arthur, I know —"
"You know that I'm a good guy. You raised me. I'm not nuts, OK? They just wanted to get me out of the way while they did their deal. A week or two and I'll be out again, but it will be too late. Do you believe that you know me better than some girl I met a month ago?"
"Of *course* I do, Arthur. But why would the hospital take you away if —"
"If I wasn't crazy? I'm in here for observation — they want to find *out* ifI'm crazy. If *they're* not sure, then you can't be sure, right?"
"All right. Oh, I've been sick with worry."
"I'm sorry, Gran. I need to get through this week and I'll be free and clear andI'll come back to Toronto."
"I'm going to come down there to see you. Linda told me visitors weren't allowed, is that true?"
"No, it's not true." I thought about Gran seeing me in the ward amidst the pukers and the screamers and the droolers and the *fondlers* and flinched away from the phone. "But if you're going to come down, come for the hearing at the end of the week. There's nothing you can do here now."
"Even if I can't help, I just want to come and see you. It was so nice when you were here."
"I know, I know. I'll be coming back soon, don't worry."
If only Gran could see me now, on the infirmary examination table, in four-point restraint. Good thing she can't.
A doctor looms over me. "How are you feeling, Art?"
"I've had better days," I say, with what I hope is stark sanity and humor. Aren't crazy people incapable of humor? "I went for a walk and the door swung shut behind me."
"Well, they'll do that," the doctor says. "My name is Szandor," he says, and shakes my hand in its restraint.
"A pleasure to meet you," I say. "You're a *doctor* doctor, aren't you?"
"An MD? Yup. There're a couple of us around the place."
"But you're not a shrink of any description?"
"Nope. How'd you guess?"
"Bedside manner. You didn't patronize me."
Dr. Szandor tries to suppress a grin, then gives up. "We all do our bit," he says. "How'd you get up on the roof without setting off your room alarm, anyway?"
"If I tell you how I did it, I won't be able to repeat the trick," I say jokingly. He's swabbing down my shins now with something that stings and cools at the same time. From time to time, he takes tweezers in hand and plucks loose some gravel or grit and plinks it into a steel tray on a rolling table by his side. He's so gentle, I hardly feel it.
"What, you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?"
"Is that thing still around?"
"Oh sure! We had a mandatory workshop on it yesterday afternoon. Those are always a lot of fun."
"So, you're saying that you've got professional expertise in the keeping of secrets, huh? I suppose I could spill it for you, then." And I do, explaining my little hack for tricking the door into thinking that I'd left and returned to the room.
"Huh — now that you explain it, it's pretty obvious."
"That's my job — figuring out the obvious way of doing something."
And we fall to talking about my job with V/DT, and the discussion branches into the theory and practice of UE, only slowing a little when he picks the crud out of the scrape down my jaw and tugs through a couple of quick stitches. It occurs to me that he's just keeping me distracted, using a highly evolved skill for placating psychopaths through small talk so that they don't thrash while he's knitting their bodies back together.
I decide that I don't care. I get to natter on about a subject that I'm nearly autistically fixated on, and I do it in a context where I know that I'm sane and smart and charming and occasionally mind-blowing.
"…and the whole thing pays for itself through EZPass, where we collect the payments for the music downloaded while you're on the road." As I finish my spiel, I realize *I've* been keeping *him* distracted, standing there with the tweezers in one hand and a swab in the other.
"Wow!" he said. "So, when's this all going to happen?"
"You'd use it, huh?"
"Hell, yeah! I've got a good twenty, thirty thousand on my car right now! You're saying I could plunder anyone else's stereo at will, for free, and keep it, while I'm stuck in traffic, and because I'm a — what'd you call it, a super-peer? — a super-peer, it's all free and legal? Damn!"
"Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East Coast. It'll probably roll out in LA first, then San Francisco, Seattle…"
"What? Why?"
"It's a long story," I say. "And it ends with me on the roof of a goddamned nuthouse on Route 128 doing a one-man tribute to the Three Stooges."
20.
Three days later, Art finally realized that something big and ugly was in the offing. Fede had repeatedly talked him out of going to Perceptronics's offices, offering increasingly flimsy excuses and distracting him by calling the hotel's front desk and sending up surprise massage therapists to interrupt Art as he stewed in his juices, throbbing with resentment at having been flown thousands of klicks while injured in order to check into a faceless hotel on a faceless stretch of highway and insert this thumb into his asshole and wait for Fede — *who was still in fucking London!* — to sort out the mess so that he could present himself at the Perceptronics Acton offices and get their guys prepped for the ever-receding meeting with MassPike.
"Jesus, Federico, what the fuck am I *doing* here?"
"I know, Art, I know." Art had taken to calling Fede at the extreme ends of circadian compatibility, three AM and eleven PM and then noon on Fede's clock, as a subtle means of making the experience just as unpleasant for Fede as it was for Art. "I screwed up," Fede yawned. "I screwed up and now we're both paying the price. You handled your end beautifully and I dropped mine. And I intend to make it up to you."
"I don't *want* more massages, Fede. I want to get this shit done and I want to come home and see my girlfriend."
Fede tittered over the phone.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothing much," Fede said. "Just sit tight there for a couple minutes, OK? Call me back once it happens and tell me what you wanna do, all right?"
"Once what happens?"
"You'll know."
It was Linda, of course. Knocking on Art's hotel room door minutes later, throwing her arms — and then her legs — around him, and banging him stupid, half on and half off the hotel room bed. Riding him and then being ridden in turns, slurping and wet and energetic until they both lay sprawled on the hotel room's very nice Persian rugs, dehydrated and panting and Art commed Fede, and Fede told him it could take a couple weeks to sort things out, and why didn't he and Linda rent a car and do some sight-seeing on the East Coast?
That's exactly what they did. Starting in Boston, where they cruised Cambridge, watching the cute nerdyboys and geekygirls wander the streets, having heated technical debates, lugging half-finished works of technology and art through the sopping summertime, a riot of townie accents and highbrow engineerspeak.
Then a week in New York, where they walked until they thought their feet would give out entirely, necks cricked at a permanent, upward-staring angle to gawp at the topless towers of Manhattan. The sound the sound the sound of Manhattan rang in their ears, a gray and deep rumble of cars and footfalls and subways and steampipes and sirens and music and conversation and ring tones and hucksters and schizophrenic ranters, a veritable Las Vegas of cacophony, and it made Linda uncomfortable, she who was raised in the white noise susurrations of LA's freeway forests, but it made Art feel *wonderful*. He kept his comm switched off, though the underfoot rumble of the subway had him reaching for it a hundred times a day, convinced that he'd left it on in vibe-alert mode.
They took a milk-run train to Toronto, chuffing through sleepy upstate New York towns, past lakes and rolling countryside in full summer glory. Art and Linda drank ginger beer in the observation car, spiking it with rum from a flask that Linda carried in a garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to reach naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of body-temperature liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides were dulled by the soft oil of her thigh.
Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border, sending Art for a full inspection — a privilege of being a Canadian citizen and hence perennially under suspicion of smuggling goods from the tax havens of the US into the country — and leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin.
When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly peered into, he found Linda standing on the platform, leaning against a pillar, back arched, one foot flat against the bricks, corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless winds of the trainyard. From Art's point of view, she was a gleaming vision skewered on a beam of late day sunlight that made her hair gleam like licorice. Her long and lazy jaw caught and lost the sun as she talked animatedly down her comm, and Art was struck with a sudden need to sneak up behind her and run his tongue down the line that began with the knob of her mandible under her ear and ran down to the tiny half-dimple in her chin, to skate it on the soft pouch of flesh under her chin, to end with a tasting of her soft lips.
Thought became deed. He crept up on her, smelling her new-car hair products on the breeze that wafted back from her, and was about to begin his tonguing when she barked, "Fuck *off*! Stop calling me!" and closed her comm and stormed off trainwards, leaving Art standing on the opposite side of the pillar with a thoroughly wilted romantic urge.
More carefully, he followed her into the train, back to their little cabin, and reached for the palm-pad to open the door when he heard her agitated comm voice. "No, goddamnit, no. Not yet. Keep calling me and not *ever*, do you understand?"
Art opened the door. Linda was composed and neat and sweet in her plush seat, shoulders back, smile winning. "Hey honey, did the bad Customs man finally let you go?"
"He did! That sounded like a doozy of a phone conversation, though. What's wrong?"
"You don't want to know," she said.
"All right," Art said, sitting down opposite her, knee-to-knee, bending forward to plant a kiss on the top of her exposed thigh. "I don't."
"Good."
He continued to kiss his way up her thigh. "Only…"
"Yes?"
"I think I probably do. Curiosity is one of my worst failings of character."
"Really?"
"Quite so," he said. He'd slid her sundress right up to the waistband of her cotton drawers, and now he worried one of the pubic hairs that poked out from the elastic with his teeth.
She shrieked and pushed him away. "Someone will see!" she said. "This is a border crossing, not a bordello!"
He sat back, but inserted a finger in the elastic before Linda straightened out her dress, so that his fingertip rested in the crease at the top of her groin.
"You are *naughty*," she said.
"And curious," Art agreed, giving his fingertip a playful wiggle.
"I give up. That was my fucking ex," she said. "That is how I will refer to him henceforth. 'My fucking ex.' My fucking, pain-in-the-ass, touchy-feely ex. My fucking ex, who wants to have the Talk, even though it's been months and months. He's figured out that I'm stateside from my calling times, and he's offering to come out to meet me and really Work Things Out, Once And For All."
"Oh, my," Art said.
"That boy's got too much LA in him for his own good. There's no problem that can't be resolved through sufficient dialog."
"We never really talked about him," Art said.
"Nope, we sure didn't."
"Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?"
"'Did you want to talk about him now, Linda?' Why yes, Art, I would. How perceptive of you." She pushed his hand away and crossed her arms and legs simultaneously.
"Wait, I'm confused," Art said. "Does that mean you want to talk about him, or that you don't?"
"Fine, we'll talk about him. What do you want to know about my fucking ex?"
Art resisted a terrible urge to fan her fires, to return the vitriol that dripped from her voice. "Look, you don't want to talk about him, we won't talk about him," he managed.
"No, let's talk about my fucking ex, by all means." She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off points on her fingers. "His name is Toby, he's half-Japanese, half-white. He's about your height. Your dick is bigger, but he's better in bed. He's a user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never fucking shuts up about what's wrong with this or that. We dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me goddamned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?"
"That was fine," Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. "Thank you."
She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. "Look, I don't like to talk about it — it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't take his calls anymore, how about that?"
"I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you could talk it over with me."
"I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own. Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You could come if you want — there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."
"That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "But if you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto."
"You're so understanding," she cooed. "Tell me about your grandmother again — you're sure she'll like me?"
"She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, and in my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren."
"Cluck."
"Cluck?"
"Just practicing my brood-hen."
21.
Doc Szandor's a good egg. He's keeping the shrinks at bay, spending more time with me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, but it's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to give it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of bad conversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit of a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting to prevent them in others.
"How the hell do you become a user-experience guy?"
"Sheer orneriness," I say, grinning. "I was just in the right place at the right time. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that had made this artificial erectile tissue."
"Erectile tissue?"
"Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and capable of going large and rigid very quickly."
"Sounds delightful."
"Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circumcisionist's wallet made from foreskins?"
"Sure, I heard it premed — he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?"
"That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporary shelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it: 'Ardorite.'"
"Ho ho ho."
"Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic *au pairs* and their tots, and I was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were blond goddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh, Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're better acquainted.
"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.
"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it *synthetic turtle penis*, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't *that* earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.
"Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.
"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in Westchester."
"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?" Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace bandage.
"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't any good — they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing — they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them."
"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to productize their tech with. But my buddy *did* get another gig with a company that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he showed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a no-fooling career."
"Damn, that's cool."
"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff."
The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you're not like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"
Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe twenty-six. I can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see some telltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He's got to be the youngest staff member I've met here, and he's got a fundamentally different affect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the felt slippers.
So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell him about Linda and Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to me.
"Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?" Szandor says, sucking on his pacifier.
"The usual reasons, I guess," I say, squirming.
"Lemme tell you something," he says. He's got his feet up on the table now, hands laced behind his neck. "It's the smartest thing my dad ever said to me, just as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away to med school. She was nice enough, but, you know, *unstable.* I'd gotten to the point where I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her to lose her shit.
"So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, 'Szandor, you know I like that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, really crazy. Maybe she won't be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won't be because of you. Trust me, I know this. You can't fuck a crazy girl sane, son.'"
I can't help smiling. "Truer words," I say. "But harsh."
"Harsh is relative," he says. "Contrast it with, say, getting someone committed on trumped-up evidence."
It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. "It dawns on me that you believe me."
He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. "Well, why not? You're not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story's plausible enough."
I get excited. "Is this your *professional* opinion?"
"Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don't have professional opinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion."
"Oh, well."
"So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the hospital?"
"Well, they don't tell me much, but as near as I can make out, I am stuck here semipermanently. The court found me incompetent and ordered me held until I was. I can't get anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve it — when I try, I get accused of being 'difficult.' Of course, escaping onto the roof is a little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I'm going to be in pretty deep shit. Do they know about the car?"
"The car?"
"In the parking lot. The one that blew up."
Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across the room and lands in a hazmat bucket. "You son of a bitch — that was you?"
"Yeah," I say, and drum my feet against the tin cupboards under the examination table.
"That was *my fucking car*!"
"Oh, Christ, I'm sorry," I say. "God."
"No no no," he says, fishing in his pocket and unwrapping a fresh pacifier. "It's OK. Insurance. I'm getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence, though," he says.
Coincidence. He's making disgusting hamster-cage noises, grinding away at his pacifier. "Szandor, do you sometimes sneak out onto the landing to have a cigarette? Use a bit of tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind you?"
"Why do you ask?"
"'Cause that's how I got out onto the roof."
"Oh, shit," he says.
"It's our secret," I say. "I can tell them I don't know how I got out. I'm incompetent, remember?"
"You're a good egg, Art," he says. "How the hell are we going to get you out of here?"
"Hey what?"
"No, really. There's no good reason for you to be here, right? You're occupying valuable bed space."
"Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have a feeling that as soon as you turn me loose, I'm gonna be doped up to the tits for a good long while."
He grimaces. "Right, right. They like their meds. Are your parents alive?"
"What? No, they're both dead."
"Aha. Died suddenly?"
"Yeah. Dad drowned, Mom fell —"
"Ah ah ah! Shhh. Mom died suddenly. She was taking Haldol when it happened, a low antianxiety dose, right?"
"Huh?"
"Probably she was. Probably she had a terrible drug interaction. Sudden Death Syndrome. It's hereditary. And you say she fell? Seizure. We'll sign you up for a PET scan, that'll take at least a month to set up. You could be an epileptic and not even know it. Shaking the radioisotopes loose for the scan from the AEC, woah, that's a week's worth of paperwork right there! No Thorazine for you young man, not until we're absolutely sure it won't kill you dead where you stand. The hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on this very subject not a month ago. I'll just make some notes in your medical history." He picked up his comm and scribbled.
"Never woulda thought of that," I say. "I'm impressed."
"It's something I've been playing with for a while now. I think that psychiatric care is a good thing, of course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away prescription pads would be a good start."
"Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had prescribed how much of what and how often. Put 'em on a chart in the ward where the patients' families could see 'em."
"That's *nasty*!" he says. "I love it. We're supposed to be accountable, right?What else?"
"Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies. Create a dating service that automatically links patients who respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing with location data from other trackers, you could get stats on which therapies make people more sociable, just by counting the frequency with which patients stop and spend time in proximity to other patients. It'd give you empirical data with which you track your own progress."
"This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?"
I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?
"It's my job," I say, and give a modest shrug.
"What do you charge for work like that?"
"Why, are you in the market?"
"Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we can go into biz together, redesigning nuthatches."
22.
Linda's first meeting with Art's Gran went off without a hitch. Gran met them at Union Station with an obsolete red cap who was as ancient as she was, a vestige of a more genteel era of train travel and bulky luggage. Just seeing him made Art's brain whir with plans for conveyor systems, luggage escalators, cart dispensers. They barely had enough luggage between the two of them to make it worth the old man's time, but he dutifully marked their bags with a stub of chalk and hauled them onto his cart, then trundled off to the service elevators.
Gran gave Art a long and teary hug. She was less frail than she'd been in his memory, taller and sturdier. The smell of her powder and the familiar acoustics of Union Station's cavernous platform whirled him back to his childhood in Toronto, to the homey time before he'd gotten on the circadian merry-go-round.
"Gran, this is Linda," he said.
"Oh, it's so *nice* to meet you," Gran said, taking Linda's hands in hers. "Call me Julie."
Linda smiled a great, pretty, toothy smile. "Julie, Art's told me all about you.I just *know* we'll be great friends."
"I'm sure we will. Are you hungry? Did they feed you on the train? You must be exhausted after such a long trip. Which would you rather do first, eat or rest?"
"Well, *I'm* up for seeing the town," Linda said. "Your grandson's been yawning his head off since Buffalo, though." She put her arm around his waist and squeezed his tummy.
"What a fantastic couple you make," Gran said. "You didn't tell me she was so *pretty*, Arthur!"
"Here it comes," Art said. "She's going to ask about great-grandchildren."
"Don't be silly," Gran said, cuffing him gently upside the head. "You're always exaggerating."
"Well *I* think it's a splendid idea," Linda said. "Shall we have two? Three?Four?"
"Make it ten," Art said, kissing her cheek.
"Oh, I couldn't have ten," Linda said. "But five is a nice compromise. Five it will be. We'll name the first one Julie if it's a girl, or Julius if it's a boy."
"Oh, we *are* going to get along," Gran said, and led them up to the curb, where the red cap had loaded their bags into a cab.
They ate dinner at Lindy's on Yonge Street, right in the middle of the sleaze strip. The steakhouse had been there for the better part of a century, and its cracked red-vinyl booths and thick rib eyes smothered in horseradish and HP Sauce were just as Art had remembered. Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo, the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower, all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary school.
By the time Art lay down in his bed, belly tight with undigested steak, he was feeling wonderful and at peace with the world. Linda climbed in beside him, wrestled away a pillow and some covers, and snuggled up to him.
"That went well," Art said. "I'm really glad you two hit it off."
"Me too, honey," Linda said, kissing his shoulder through his tee shirt. He'd been able to get his head around the idea of sharing a bed with his girlfriend under his grandmother's roof, but doing so nude seemed somehow wrong.
"We're going to have a great week," he said. "I wish it would never end."
"Yeah," she said, and began to snore into his neck.
The next morning, Art woke stiff and serene. He stretched out on the bed, dimly noted Linda's absence, and padded to the bathroom to relieve his bladder. He thought about crawling back into bed, was on the verge of doing so, when he heard the familiar, nervewracking harangue of Linda arguing down her comm. He opened the door to his old bedroom and there she was, stark naked and beautiful in the morning sun, comm in hand, eyes focused in the middle distance, shouting.
"No, goddamnit, no! Not here. Jesus, are you a moron? I said *no*!"
Art reached out to touch her back, noticed that it was trembling, visibly tense and rigid, and pulled his hand back. Instead, he quietly set about fishing in his small bag for a change of clothes.
"This is *not* a good time. I'm at Art's grandmother's place, all right? I'll talk to you later." She threw her comm at the bed and whirled around.
"Everything all right?" Art said timidly.
"No, goddamnit, no it isn't."
Art pulled on his pants and kept his eyes on her comm, which was dented and scratched from a hundred thousand angry hang ups. He hated it when she got like this, radiating anger and spoiling for a fight.
"I'm going to have to go, I think," she said.
"Go?"
"To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go and sort things out with him."
"Your ex knows who I am?"
She looked blank.
"You told him you were at my grandmother's place. He knows who I am?"
"Yeah," she said. "He does. I told him, so he'd get off my back."
"And you have to go to California?"
"Today. I have to go to California today."
"Jesus, today? We just got here!"
"Look, you've got lots of catching up to do with your Gran and your friends here. You won't even miss me. I'll go for a couple days and then come back."
"If you gotta go," he said.
"I gotta go."
He explained things as best as he could to Gran while Linda repacked her backpack, and then saw Linda off in a taxi. She was already savaging her comm, booking a ticket to LA. He called Fede from the condo's driveway.