--
1.
I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and
Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you
discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is
based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans."
The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not
particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your
mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory
hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a
sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant
buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose,
thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be nice if I gave myself one.
Deep breath.
The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection
versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a
story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and
killing the story and looking at its guts.
School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escaped
into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals
with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us what
the story was about, but never what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda,
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly
into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a
nightclub in daylight.
The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the
theme of this story?"
Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand
it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"
This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness.
Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness
over smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:
2.
Art Berry was born to argue.
There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they are
the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas,
confectionery girls whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as
the tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There are children
born to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations and die
heroically in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread the
boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.
Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of the
innumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, and
his attention span is already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream --
which is fast becoming a nightmare -- he is bored silly.
The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toy
blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be a
hell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't lost them all.
Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. They
confer briefly, then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extruding
into the third dimension, turning into a stack of blocks.
Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge that
older people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars and
elevators and shoelaces.
Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the
blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are
revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a
plane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a
while en route to New York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge
fell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible
twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule, arguing the morals and
reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave up
and swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.
In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to church
with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and the
clergy arguing with him in teams and relays.
It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?"
But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, and
the argument spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the
priest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered
philosophical word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of reality
is used to prove the beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "I
think therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into the
thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill little voice
answered from within the congregation.
Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairly
tricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to use
those same arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the
necessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home
then, but the priest -- who'd watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis and
recognized a natural when he saw one -- called him to the pulpit, whence Art
took on the entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed his
reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that they blundered
into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father Ferlenghetti laughed and
clarified the points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthed
rhetorical amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his
thing. Not much was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still the
Communion to be administered, but God knew it had been a long time since the
congregation was engaged so thoroughly with coming to grips with God and what
their faith meant.
Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-lipped Gran, Father
Ferlenghetti made a point of warmly embracing her and telling her that Art was
welcome at his pulpit any time, and suggested a future in the seminary. Gran was
amazed, and blushed under her Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his shoulder
became a caress.
3.
The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or maybe happiness
over smarts. Art's a good guy. He's smart as hell. That's his schtick. If he
were a cartoon character, he'd be the pain-in-the-ass poindexter who is all the
time dispelling the mysteries that fascinate his buddies. It's not easy being
Art's friend.
Which is, of course, how Art ("not his real name") ended up sitting 45 stories
over the woodsy Massachusetts countryside, hot August wind ruffling his hair and
blowing up the legs of his boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his story
preparatory to dissecting it. In order to preserve the narrative integrity, Art
("not his real name") may take some liberties with the truth. This is
autobiographical fiction, after all, not an autobiography.
Call me Art ("not my real name"). I am an agent-provocateur in the Eastern
Standard Tribe, though I've spent most of my life in GMT-9 and at various
latitudes of Zulu, which means that my poor pineal gland has all but forgotten
how to do its job without that I drown it in melatonin precursors and treat it
to multi-hour nine-kilolumen sessions in the glare of my travel lantern.
The tribes are taking over the world. You can track our progress by the rise of
minor traffic accidents. The sleep-deprived are terrible, terrible drivers.
Daylight savings time is a widowmaker: stay off the roads on Leap Forward day!
Here is the second character in the morality play. She's the love interest. Was.
We broke up, just before I got sent to the sanatorium. Our circadians weren't
compatible.
4.
April 3, 2022 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and only woman he
ever really loved. It was her fault.
Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, where
the residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded
their arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they
squirreled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and
delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water
and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could
run down his gullet instead of into his tank.
He was in the Kensington High Street on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h --
2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to even
gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms.
When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with
traffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a
moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.
So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just made
it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy
water in the EU. The java just wouldn't cool off, remaining hot enough to
guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.
If he was jittery, it was no more so than was customary for ESTalists at GMT+0,
and he was driving safely and with due caution. If the woman had looked out
before stepping off the kerb and into the anemically thin road, if she hadn't
been wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark of the curve before the Royal
Garden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped *right in front of his runabout*, he would
have merely swerved and sworn and given her a bit of a fright.
But she didn't, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake as hard as he could,
twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped her hipside and sent her
ass-over-teakettle before the runabout did its own barrel roll, making three
complete revolutions across the Kensington High before lodging in the Royal
Garden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in scorching, molten coffium, screaming
and clawing at his eyes, upside down, when the porters from the Royal Garden
opened his runabout's upside-down door, undid his safety harness and pulled him
out from behind the rapidly flacciding airbag. They plunged his face into the
ornamental birdbath, which had a skin of ice that shattered on his nose and
jangled against his jawbone as the icy water cooled the coffium and stopped the
terrible, terrible burning.
He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering, and cleared his
eyes in time to see the woman he'd hit being carried out of the middle of the
road on a human travois made of the porters' linked arms of red wool and gold
brocade.
"Assholes!" she was hollering. "I could have a goddamn spinal injury! You're not
supposed to move me!"
"Look, Miss," one porter said, a young chap with the kind of fantastic dentition
that only an insecure teabag would ever pay for, teeth so white and flawless
they strobed in the sodium streetlamps. "Look. We can leave you in the middle of
the road, right, and not move you, like we're supposed to. But if we do that,
chances are you're going to get run over before the paramedics get here, and
then you certainly *will* have a spinal injury, and a crushed skull besides,
like as not. Do you follow me?"
"You!" she said, pointing a long and accusing finger at Art. "You! Don't you
watch where you're going, you fool! You could have killed me!"
Art shook water off his face and blew a mist from his dripping moustache.
"Sorry," he said, weakly. She had an American accent, Californian maybe, a
litigious stridency that tightened his sphincter like an alum enema and
miraculously flensed him of the impulse to argue.
"Sorry?" she said, as the porters lowered her gently to the narrow strip turf
out beside the sidewalk. "Sorry? Jesus, is that the best you can do?"
"Well you *did* step out in front of my car," he said, trying to marshal some
spine.
She attempted to sit up, then slumped back down, wincing. "You were going too
fast!"
"I don't think so," he said. "I'm pretty sure I was doing 45 -- that's five
clicks under the limit. Of course, the GPS will tell for sure."
At the mention of empirical evidence, she seemed to lose interest in being
angry. "Give me a phone, will you?"
Mortals may be promiscuous with their handsets, but for a tribalist, one's
relationship with one's comm is deeply personal. Art would have sooner shared
his underwear. But he *had* hit her with his car. Reluctantly, Art passed her
his comm.
The woman stabbed at the handset with the fingers of her left hand, squinting at
it in the dim light. Eventually, she clamped it to her head. "Johnny? It's
Linda. Yes, I'm still in London. How's tricks out there? Good, good to hear.
How's Marybeth? Oh, that's too bad. Want to hear how I am?" She grinned
devilishly. "I just got hit by a car. No, just now. Five minutes ago. Of course
I'm hurt! I think he broke my hip -- maybe my spine, too. Yes, I can wiggle my
toes. Maybe he shattered a disc and it's sawing through the cord right now.
Concussion? Oh, almost certainly. Pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life,
missed wages..." She looked up at Art. "You're insured, right?"
Art nodded, miserably, fishing for an argument that would not come.
"Half a mil, easy. Easy! Get the papers going, will you? I'll call you when the
ambulance gets here. Bye. Love you too. Bye. Bye. Bye, Johnny. I got to go.
Bye!" She made a kissy noise and tossed the comm back at Art. He snatched it out
of the air in a panic, closed its cover reverentially and slipped it back in his
jacket pocket.
"C'mere," she said, crooking a finger. He knelt beside her.
"I'm Linda," she said, shaking his hand, then pulling it to her chest.
"Art," Art said.
"Art. Here's the deal, Art. It's no one's fault, OK? It was dark, you were
driving under the limit, I was proceeding with due caution. Just one of those
things. But *you* did hit *me*. Your insurer's gonna have to pay out -- rehab,
pain and suffering, you get it. That's going to be serious kwan. I'll go splits
with you, you play along."
Art looked puzzled.
"Art. Art. Art. Art, here's the thing. Maybe you were distracted. Lost. Not
looking. Not saying you were, but maybe. Maybe you were, and if you were, my
lawyer's going to get that out of you, he's going to nail you, and I'll get a
big, fat check. On the other hand, you could just, you know, cop to it. Play
along. You make this easy, we'll make this easy. Split it down the middle, once
my lawyer gets his piece. Sure, your premiums'll go up, but there'll be enough
to cover both of us. Couldn't you use some ready cash? Lots of zeroes. Couple
hundred grand, maybe more. I'm being nice here -- I could keep it all for me."
"I don't think --"
"Sure you don't. You're an honest man. I understand, Art. Art. Art, I
understand. But what has your insurer done for you, lately? My uncle Ed, he got
caught in a threshing machine, paid his premiums every week for forty years,
what did he get? Nothing. Insurance companies. They're the great satan. No one
likes an insurance company. Come on, Art. Art. You don't have to say anything
now, but think about it, OK, Art?"
She released his hand, and he stood. The porter with the teeth flashed them at
him. "Mad," he said, "just mad. Watch yourself, mate. Get your solicitor on the
line, I were you."
He stepped back as far as the narrow sidewalk would allow and fired up his comm
and tunneled to a pseudonymous relay, bouncing the call off a dozen mixmasters.
He was, after all, in deep cover as a GMTalist, and it wouldn't do to have his
enciphered packets' destination in the clear -- a little traffic analysis and
his cover'd be blown. He velcroed the keyboard to his thigh and started
chording.
Trepan: Any UK solicitors on the channel?
Gink-Go: Lawyers. Heh. Kill 'em all. Specially eurofag fixers.