Eastern Standard Tribe Part 8

"Let's go get some breakfast, OK?"

10.

The parking-lot is aswarm with people, fire engines and ambulances. There's a siren going off somewhere down in the bowels of the sanatorium, and still I can't get anyone to look up at the G.o.dd.a.m.ned roof.

I've tried hollering myself hoa.r.s.e into the updrafts from the cheery blaze, but the wind's against me, my shouts rising up past my ears. I've tried dropping more pebbles, but the winds whip them away, and I've learned my lesson about half-bricks.

Weirdly, I'm not worried about getting into trouble. I've already been involuntarily committed by the Tribe's enemies, the ma.s.sed and devious forces of the Pacific Daylight Tribe and the Greenwich Mean Tribe. I am officially Not Responsible. Confused and p.r.o.ne to Wandering. Coo-Coo for Coco-Puffs. It's not like I hurt anyone, just decremented the number of roadworthy fartmobiles by one.

I got up this morning at four, awakened by the tiniest sound from the ward corridors, a wheel from a pharmaceuticals tray maybe. Three weeks on medically prescribed sleepytime drugs have barely scratched the surface of the damage wrought by years of circadian abuse. I'd been having a fragile shadow of a dream, the ghost of a REM cycle, and it was the old dream, the dream of the doctor's office and the older kids who could manage 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 bulls.h.i.t 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. G.o.d, 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 s.e.xy, 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 b.u.t.ts -- evidence of late-night smoke breaks by someone on the ward staff. Ma.s.sachusetts'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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 a.s.s, 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n roof.

There's detritus mixed in with the pebbles: cigarette b.u.t.ts, 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 a.s.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned-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 f.u.c.k himself, for that matter, that paranoid a.s.shole, and then he can f.u.c.k 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 s.p.a.ce 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! G.o.d*d.a.m.n*, Art!

What the h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s ten years ago."

"Shut, shut up, Art. You can teach that, d.a.m.n, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 ma.s.sive 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 signals of her face's many mobile bits and pieces. She is afire, he is afire, their bodies are talking to each other in some secret language of shifting centers of gravity and unconscious pheromones, and his face tilts down towards her, slowly with all the time in the world. Lowers and lowers, week-old whiskers actually tickling the tip of her nose, his lips parting now, and her breath moistens them, beads them with liquid condensed out of her vapor.

His top lip touches her bottom lip. He could leave it at that and be happy, the touch is so satisfying, and he is contented there for a long moment, then moves to engage his lower lip, moving, tilting.

His comm rings.

His comm, which he has switched off, rings.

s.h.i.t.

"h.e.l.lo!" he says, he shouts.

"Arthur?" says a voice that is old and hurt and melancholy. His Gran's voice.

His Gran, who can override his ringer, switch on his comm at a distance because Art is a good grandson who was raised almost entirely by his saintly and frail (and depressive and melodramatic and obsessive) grandmother, and of course his comm is set to pa.s.s her calls. Not because he is a suck, but because he is loyal and sensitive and he loves his Gran.

"Gran, hi! Sorry, I was just in the middle of something, sorry." He checks his comm, which tells him that it's only six in the morning in Toronto, noon in London, and that the date is April 8, and that today is the day that he should have known his grandmother would call.

"You forgot," she says, no accusation, just a weary and disappointed sadness. He has indeed forgotten.