Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe
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Cory Doctorow >> Eastern Standard Tribe
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"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* if
I'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 and
I'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.
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