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

the trick of making a
picture into reality.

I went from that state to total wakefulness in an instant, and knew to a
certainty that I wouldn't be sleeping again any time soon. I paced my small
room, smelled the cheerful flowers my cousins brought last week when they
visited from Toronto, watched the horizon for signs of a breaking dawn. I wished
futilely for my comm and a nice private channel where I could sling some
bullshit and have some slung in my direction, just connect with another human
being at a nice, safe remove.

They chide me for arguing on the ward, call it belligerence and try to sidetrack
me with questions about my motivations, a tactic rating barely above ad hominems
in my book. No one to talk to -- the other patients get violent or nod off,
depending on their medication levels, and the staff just patronize me.

Four AM and I'm going nuts, hamsters in my mind spinning their wheels at a
thousand RPM, chittering away. I snort -- if I wasn't crazy to begin with, I'm
sure getting there.

The hamsters won't stop arguing with each other over all the terrible errors of
judgment I've made to get here. Trusting the Tribe, trusting strangers. Argue,
argue, argue. God, if only someone else were around, I could argue the
definition of sanity, I could argue the ethics of involuntary committal, I could
argue the food. But my head is full of argument and there's nowhere to spill it
and soon enough I'll be talking aloud, arguing with the air like the schizoids
on the ward who muttergrumbleshout through the day and through the night.

Why didn't I just leave London when I could, come home, move in with Gran, get a
regular job? Why didn't I swear off the whole business of secrecy and
provocation?

I was too smart for my own good. I could always argue myself into doing the
sexy, futuristic thing instead of being a nice, mundane, nonaffiliated
individual. Too smart to settle down, take a job and watch TV after work, spend
two weeks a year at the cottage and go online to find movie listings. Too smart
is too restless and no happiness, ever, without that it's chased by obsessive
maundering moping about what comes next.

Smart or happy?

The hamsters have hopped off their wheels and are gnawing at the blood-brain
barrier, trying to get out of my skull. This is a good sanatorium, but still,
the toilets are communal on my floor, which means that I've got an unlocked door
that lights up at the nurses' station down the corridor when I open the door,
and goes berserk if I don't reopen it again within the mandated fifteen-minute
maximum potty-break. I figured out how to defeat the system the first day, but
it was a theoretical hack, and now it's time to put it into practice.

I step out the door and the lintel goes pink, deepens toward red. Once it's red,
whoopwhoopwhoop. I pad down to the lav, step inside, wait, step out again. I go
back to my room -- the lintel is orange now -- and open it, move my torso across
the long electric eye, then pull it back and let the door swing closed. The
lintel is white, and that means that the room thinks I'm inside, but I'm
outside. You put your torso in, you take your torso out, you do the hokey-pokey
and you shake it all about.

In the corridor. I pad away from the nurses' station, past the closed doors and
through the muffled, narcotized groans and snores and farts that are the
twilight symphony of night on the ward. I duck past an intersection, head for
the elevator doors, then remember the tattletale I'm wearing on my ankle, which
will go spectacularly berserk if I try to leave by that exit. Also, I'm in my
underwear. I can't just walk nonchalantly into the lobby.

The ward is making wakeful sounds, and I'm sure I hear the soft tread of a
white-soled shoe coming round the bend. I double my pace, begin to jog at random
-- the hamsters, they tell me I'm acting with all the forethought of a crazy
person, and why not just report for extra meds instead of all this *mishegas*?

There's definitely someone coming down a nearby corridor. The tread of sneakers,
the squeak of a wheel. I've seen what they do to the wanderers: a nice chemical
straightjacket, a cocktail of pills that'll quiet the hamsters down for days.
Time to get gone.

There's an EXIT sign glowing over a door at the far end of the corridor. I pant
towards it, find it propped open and the alarm system disabled by means of a
strip of surgical tape. Stepping through into the emergency stairwell, I see an
ashtray fashioned from a wadded up bit of tinfoil, heaped with butts -- evidence
of late-night smoke breaks by someone on the ward staff. Massachusetts's harsh
antismoking regs are the best friend an escaping loony ever had.

The stairwell is gray and industrial and refreshingly hard-edged after three
padded weeks on the ward. Down, down is the exit and freedom. Find clothes
somewhere and out I go into Boston.

From below, then: the huffing, laborious breathing of some goddamned overweight,
middle-aged doc climbing the stairs for his health. I peer down the well and see
his gleaming pate, his white knuckles on the railing, two, maybe three flights
down.

Up! Up to the roof. I'm on the twentieth floor, which means that I've got
twenty-five more to go, two flights per, fifty in total, gotta move. Up! I stop
two or three times and pant and wheeze and make it ten stories and collapse. I'm
sweating freely -- no air-conditioning in the stairwell, nor is there anything
to mop up the sweat rolling down my body, filling the crack of my ass, coursing
down my legs. I press my face to the cool painted cinderblock walls, one cheek
and then the other, and continue on.

When I finally open the door that leads out onto the pebbled roof, the dawn cool
is balm. Fingers of light are hauling the sunrise up over the horizon. I step
onto the roof and feel the pebbles dig into the soft soles of my feet, cool as
the bottom of the riverbed whence they'd been dredged. The door starts to swing
shut heavily behind me, and I whirl and catch it just in time, getting my
fingers mashed against the jamb for my trouble. I haul it back open again
against its pneumatic closure mechanism.

Using the side of my foot as a bulldozer, I scrape up a cairn of pebbles as high
as the door's bottom edge, twice as high. I fall into the rhythm of the work,
making the cairn higher and wider until I can't close the door no matter how I
push against it. The last thing I want is to get stuck on the goddamn roof.

There's detritus mixed in with the pebbles: cigarette butts, burnt out matches,
a condom wrapper and a bright yellow Eberhard pencil with a point as sharp as a
spear, the eraser as pink and softly resilient as a nipple.

I pick up the pencil and twiddle it between forefinger and thumb, tap a nervous
rattle against the roof's edge as I dangle my feet over the bottomless plummet
until the sun is high and warm on my skin.

The hamsters get going again once the sun is high and the cars start pulling
into the parking lot below, rattling and chittering and whispering, yes o yes,
put the pencil in your nose, wouldn't you rather be happy than smart?

11.

Art and Linda in Linda's miniscule joke of a flat. She's two months into a
six-month house-swap with some friends of friends who have a fourth-storey
walkup in Kensington with a partial (i.e. fictional) view of the park. The
lights are on timers and you need to race them to her flat's door, otherwise
there's no way you'll fit the archaic key into the battered keyhole -- the
windows in the stairwell are so grimed as to provide more of a suggestion of
light than light itself.

Art's ass aches and he paces the flat's three wee rooms and drinks
hormone-enhanced high-energy liquid breakfast from the half-fridge in the
efficiency kitchen. Linda's taken dibs on the first shower, which is fine by
Art, who can't get the hang of the goddamned-English-plumbing, which delivers an
energy-efficient, eat-your-vegetables-and-save-the-planet trickle of scalding
water.

Art has switched off his comm, his frazzled nerves no longer capable of coping
with its perennial and demanding beeping and buzzing. This is very nearly
unthinkable but necessary, he rationalizes, given the extraordinary events of
the past twenty-four hours. And Fede can go fuck himself, for that matter, that
paranoid asshole, and then he can fuck the clients in Jersey and the whole of
V/DT while he's at it.

The energy bev is kicking in and making his heart race and his pulse throb in
his throat and he's so unbearably hyperkinetic that he turns the coffee table on
its end in the galley kitchen and clears a space in the living room that's
barely big enough to spin around in, and starts to work through a slow, slow set
of Tai Chi, so slow that he barely moves at all, except that inside he can feel
the moving, can feel the muscles' every flex and groan as they wind up release,
move and swing and slide.

Single whip slides into crane opens wings and he needs to crouch down low, lower
than his woolen slacks will let him, and they're grimy and gross anyway, so he
undoes his belt and kicks them off. Down low as white crane opens wings and
brush knee, punch, apparent closure, then low again, creakingly achingly low
into wave hands like clouds, until his spine and his coccyx crackle and give,
springing open, fascia open ribs open smooth breath rising and falling with his
diaphragm smooth mind smooth and sweat cool in the mat of his hair.

He moves through the set and does not notice Linda until he unwinds into a slow,
ponderous lotus kick, closes again, breathes a moment and looks around slowly,
grinning like a holy fool.

She's in a tartan housecoat with a threadbare towel wrapped around her hair,
water beading on her bony ankles and long, skinny feet. "Art! God*damn*, Art!
What the hell was that?"

"Tai chi," he says, drawing a deep breath in through his nostrils, feeling each
rib expand in turn, exhaling through his mouth. "I do it to unwind."

"It was beautiful! Art! Art. Art. That was, I mean, wow. Inspiring. Something.
You're going to show me how to do that, Art. Right? You're gonna."

"I could try," Art says. "I'm not really qualified to teach it -- I stopped
going to class ten years ago."

"Shut, shut up, Art. You can teach that, damn, you can teach that, I know you
can. That was, wow." She rushes forward and takes his hands. She squeezes and
looks into his eyes. She squeezes again and tugs his hands towards her hips,
reeling his chest towards her breasts tilting her chin up and angling that long
jawline that's so long as to be almost horsey, but it isn't, it's strong and
clean. Art smells shampoo and sandalwood talc and his skin puckers in a crinkle
that's so sudden and massive that it's almost audible.

They've been together continuously for the past five days, almost without
interruption and he's already conditioned to her smell and her body language and
the subtle