Father Ferlenghetti hasn't been licensed to practice psychiatry in Massachusetts
for forty years, but the court gave him standing. The judge actually winked at
me when he took the stand, and stopped scritching on her comm as the priest said
a lot of fantastically embarrassing things about my general fitness for human
consumption.
The sanitarium sent a single junior doc to my hearing, a kid so young I'd
mistaken him for a hospital driver when he climbed into the van with me and
gunned the engine. But no, he was a doctor who'd apparently been briefed on my
case, though not very well. When the judge asked him if he had any opinions on
Father Ferlenghetti's testimony, he fumbled with his comm while the Father
stared at him through eyebrows thick enough to hide a hamster in, then finally
stammered a few verbatim notes from my intake interview, blushed, and sat down.
"Thank you," the judge said, shaking her head as she said it. Gran, seated
beside me, put one hand on my knee and one hand on the knee of Doc Szandor's
brother-in-law, a hotshot Harvard Law post-doc whom we'd retained as corporate
counsel for a new Limited Liability Corporation. We'd signed the articles of
incorporation the day before, after Group. It was the last thing Doc Szandor did
before resigning his post at the sanitarium to take up the position of Chief
Medical Officer at HumanCare, LLC, a corporation with no assets, no employees,
and a sheaf of shitkicking ideas for redesigning mental hospitals using
off-the-shelf tech and a little bit of UE mojo.
30.
Art was most of the way to the Tube when he ran into Lester. Literally.
Lester must have seen him coming, because he stepped right into Art's path from
out of the crowd. Art ploughed into him, bounced off of his dented armor, and
would have fallen over had Lester not caught his arm and steadied him.
"Art, isn't it? How you doin', mate?"
Art gaped at him. He was thinner than he'd been when he tried to shake Art and
Linda down in the doorway of the Boots, grimier and more desperate. His tone was
just as bemused as ever, though. "Jesus Christ, Lester, not now, I'm in a hurry.
You'll have to rob me later, all right?"
Lester chuckled wryly. "Still a clever bastard. You look like you're having some
hard times, my old son. Maybe that you're not even worth robbing, eh?"
"Right. I'm skint. Sorry. Nice running into you, now I must be going." He tried
to pull away, but Lester's fingers dug into his biceps, emphatically, painfully.
"Hear you ran into Tom, led him a merry chase. You know, I spent a whole week in
the nick on account of you."
Art jerked his arm again, without effect. "You tried to rob me, Les. You knew
the job was dangerous when you took it, all right? Now let me go -- I've got a
train to catch."
"Holidays? How sweet. Thought you were broke, though?"
A motorized scooter pulled up in the kerb lane beside them. It was piloted by a
smart young policewoman with a silly foam helmet and outsized pads on her knees
and elbows. She looked like the kid with the safety-obsessed mom who inflicts
criminally dorky fashions on her daughter, making her the neighborhood
laughingstock.
"Everything all right, gentlemen?"
Lester's eyes closed, and he sighed a put-upon sigh that was halfway to a groan.
"Oh, yes, officer," Art said. "Peter and I were just making some plans to see
our auntie for supper tonight."
Lester opened his eyes, then the corners of his mouth incremented upwards.
"Yeah," he said. "'Sright. Cousin Alphonse is here all the way from Canada and
Auntie's mad to cook him a proper English meal."
The policewoman sized them up, then shook her head. "Sir, begging your pardon,
but I must tell you that we have clubs in London where a gentleman such as
yourself can find a young companion, legally. We thoroughly discourage making
such arrangements on the High Street. Just a word to the wise, all right?"
Art blushed to his eartips. "Thank you, Officer," he said with a weak smile.
"I'll keep that in mind."
The constable gave Lester a hard look, then revved her scooter and pulled into
traffic, her arm slicing the air in a sharp turn signal.
"Well," Lester said, once she was on the roundabout, "*Alphonse*, seems like
you've got reason to avoid the law, too."
"Can't we just call it even? I did you a favor with the law, you leave me be?"
"Oh, I don't know. P'raps I should put in a call to our friend PC McGivens. He
already thinks you're a dreadful tosser -- if you've reason to avoid the law,
McGivens'd be bad news indeed. And the police pay very well for the right
information. I'm a little financially embarrassed, me, just at this moment."
"All right," Art said. "Fine. How about this: I will pay you 800 Euros, which I
will withdraw from an InstaBank once I've got my ticket for the Chunnel train to
Calais in hand and am ready to get onto the platform. I've got all of fifteen
quid in my pocket right now. Take my wallet and you'll have cabfare home.
Accompany me to the train and you'll get a month's rent, which is more than the
police'll give you."
"Oh, you're a villain, you are. What is it that the police will want to talk to
you about, then? I wouldn't want to be aiding and abetting a real criminal --
could mean trouble."
"I beat the piss out of my coworker, Lester. Now, can we go? There's a plane in
Paris I'm hoping to catch."
31.
I have a brand-new translucent Sony Veddic, a series 12. I bought it on credit
-- not mine, mine's sunk; six months of living on plastic and kiting
balance-payments with new cards while getting the patents filed on the eight new
gizmos that constitute HumanCare's sole asset has blackened my good name with
the credit bureaus.
I bought it with the company credit card. The *company credit card*. Our local
Baby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc Szandor faxed over the signed
contract from the Bureau of Health. Half a million bucks for a proof-of-concept
install at the very same Route 128 nuthatch where I'd been "treated." If that
works, we'll be rolling out a dozen more installs over the next year: smart
doors, public drug-prescription stats, locator bracelets that let "clients" --
I've been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed "patient" from
my vocabulary -- discover other clients with similar treatment regimens on the
ward, bells and whistles galore.
I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare's first-ever employee, who is, in
turn, holding onto HumanCare's first-ever paycheck. Caitlin's husband has been
very patient over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailing
machinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs. He's been
likewise patient with my presence on his sagging living-room sofa, where I've
had my nightly ten-hour repose faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I have
actually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been living
under her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my room
at the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even last
a whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge
and prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletries
at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while I
snored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of Doc
Szandor, either -- he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the EST
channels.
I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I am
driving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom -- one to sleep in, one to
work in -- flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their
shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstruse
disciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicine
and business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away
at new designs.
We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steering
wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me a
brochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience.
But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.
The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A bored
attendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUD
comes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service,
now under direct MassPike management.
The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patent
disputes -- I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from
the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her
fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around
them.
I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to
my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely
ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers
stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.
"Thanks," I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.
"You belong in a loony bin, you know that?" she says, punching me in the thigh
harder than is strictly necessary.
"Oh, I know," I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo.
--