"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."