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

off with him: He was making me goddamned crazy and he wanted me to come
back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and
go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me
choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?"

"That was fine," Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched,
spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. "Thank you."

She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. "Look, I don't like to
talk about it -- it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't
take his calls anymore, how about that?"

"I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass if you want to chat
with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you
could talk it over with me."

"I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own.
Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You could
come if you want -- there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."

"That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "But
if you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto."

"You're so understanding," she cooed. "Tell me about your grandmother again --
you're sure she'll like me?"

"She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, and
in my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren."

"Cluck."

"Cluck?"

"Just practicing my brood-hen."

21.

Doc Szandor's a good egg. He's keeping the shrinks at bay, spending more time
with me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, but
it's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to give
it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of bad
conversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit
of a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting to
prevent them in others.

"How the hell do you become a user-experience guy?"

"Sheer orneriness," I say, grinning. "I was just in the right place at the right
time. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that had
made this artificial erectile tissue."

"Erectile tissue?"

"Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and capable of going large and
rigid very quickly."

"Sounds delightful."

"Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circumcisionist's
wallet made from foreskins?"

"Sure, I heard it premed -- he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?"

"That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporary
shelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it:
'Ardorite.'"

"Ho ho ho."

"Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I
spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was
visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff
lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my
shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to
Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because
it was always full of these very cute Icelandic *au pairs* and their tots, and I
was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned
from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought
they were blond goddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh,
Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're better
acquainted.

"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder
of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in
one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three
and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering
atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd get
Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it
together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play
with the other kids in the park.

"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it
*synthetic turtle penis*, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't *that*
earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue
fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.

"Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and starts
pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately
softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and
tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded
around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed
all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent
the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and
their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand
with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home
for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use
the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses,
like a portable crib.

"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his
boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in
Westchester."

"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?"
Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace
bandage.

"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't
any good -- they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings
interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing -- they added
a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six
months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I
designed for them."

"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped
anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to
productize their tech with. But my buddy *did* get another gig with a company
that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he
showed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a
no-fooling career."

"Damn, that's cool."

"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users
do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the
engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how
normal people do stuff."

The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of
those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit
fix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem like
a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you're
not like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"

Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe twenty-six. I
can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see some
telltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He's got to be
the youngest staff member I've met here, and he's got a fundamentally different
affect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the felt
slippers.

So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell him about Linda
and Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to me.

"Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?" Szandor says, sucking on
his pacifier.

"The usual reasons, I guess," I say, squirming.

"Lemme tell you something," he says. He's got his feet up on the table now,
hands laced behind his neck. "It's the smartest thing my dad ever said to me,
just as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away to med
school. She was nice enough, but, you know, *unstable.* I'd gotten to the point
where I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her
to lose her shit.

"So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, 'Szandor, you know I
like that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, really
crazy. Maybe she won't be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won't be
because of you. Trust me, I know this. You can't fuck a crazy girl sane, son.'"

I can't help smiling. "Truer words," I say. "But harsh."

"Harsh is relative," he says. "Contrast it with, say, getting someone committed
on trumped-up evidence."

It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. "It dawns on me that you believe
me."

He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. "Well, why not? You're not any crazier than I
am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story's plausible
enough."

I get excited. "Is this your *professional* opinion?"

"Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don't have professional
opinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion."

"Oh, well."

"So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the hospital?"

"Well, they don't tell me much, but as near as I can make out, I am stuck here
semipermanently. The court found me incompetent and ordered me held until I was.
I can't get anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve it
-- when I try, I get accused of being 'difficult.' Of course, escaping onto the
roof is a little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I'm going to be in pretty
deep shit. Do they know about the car?"

"The car?"

"In the parking lot. The one that blew up."

Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across the room and
lands in a hazmat bucket. "You son of a bitch -- that was you?"

"Yeah," I say, and drum my feet against the tin cupboards under the examination
table.

"That was *my fucking car*!"

"Oh, Christ, I'm sorry," I say. "God."

"No no no," he says, fishing in his pocket and unwrapping a fresh pacifier.
"It's OK. Insurance. I'm getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence,
though," he says.

Coincidence. He's making disgusting hamster-cage noises, grinding away at his
pacifier. "Szandor, do you sometimes sneak out onto the landing to have a
cigarette? Use a bit of tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind
you?"

"Why do you ask?"

"'Cause that's how I got out onto the roof."

"Oh, shit," he says.

"It's our secret," I say. "I