Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow [reading e books TXT] 📗

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