Eastern Standard Tribe

by Cory Doctorow

I'msure getting there.

  The hamsters won't stop arguing with each other over all the terrible errors ofjudgment I've made to get here. Trusting the Tribe, trusting strangers. Argue,argue, argue. God, if only someone else were around, I could argue thedefinition of sanity, I could argue the ethics of involuntary committal, I couldargue the food. But my head is full of argument and there's nowhere to spill itand soon enough I'll be talking aloud, arguing with the air like the schizoidson 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 aregular job? Why didn't I swear off the whole business of secrecy andprovocation?

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

  Smart or happy?

  The hamsters have hopped off their wheels and are gnawing at the blood-brainbarrier, 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 doorthat 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-minutemaximum potty-break. I figured out how to defeat the system the first day, butit 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 goback to my room -- the lintel is orange now -- and open it, move my torso acrossthe long electric eye, then pull it back and let the door swing closed. Thelintel is white, and that means that the room thinks I'm inside, but I'moutside. You put your torso in, you take your torso out, you do the hokey-pokeyand you shake it all about.

  In the corridor. I pad away from the nurses' station, past the closed doors andthrough the muffled, narcotized groans and snores and farts that are thetwilight symphony of night on the ward. I duck past an intersection, head forthe elevator doors, then remember the tattletale I'm wearing on my ankle, whichwill go spectacularly berserk if I try to leave by that exit. Also, I'm in myunderwear. 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 awhite-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 crazyperson, 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 chemicalstraightjacket, 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 panttowards it, find it propped open and the alarm system disabled by means of astrip of surgical tape. Stepping through into the emergency stairwell, I see anashtray fashioned from a wadded up bit of tinfoil, heaped with butts -- evidenceof late-night smoke breaks by someone on the ward staff. Massachusetts's harshantismoking regs are the best friend an escaping loony ever had.

  The stairwell is gray and industrial and refreshingly hard-edged after threepadded weeks on the ward. Down, down is the exit and freedom. Find clothessomewhere 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 seehis gleaming pate, his white knuckles on the railing, two, maybe three flightsdown.

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

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

  Using the side of my foot as a bulldozer, I scrape up a cairn of pebbles as highas 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 Ipush 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 aspear, the eraser as pink and softly resilient as a nipple.

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

  The hamsters get going again once the sun is high and the cars start pullinginto 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 asix-month house-swap with some friends of friends who have a fourth-storeywalkup in Kensington with a partial (i.e. fictional) view of the park. Thelights are on timers and you need to race them to her flat's door, otherwisethere's no way you'll fit the archaic key into the battered keyhole -- thewindows in the stairwell are so grimed as to provide more of a suggestion oflight than light itself.

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

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

  The energy bev is kicking in and making his heart race and his pulse throb inhis throat and he's so unbearably hyperkinetic that he turns the coffee table onits end in the galley kitchen and clears a space in the living room that'sbarely big enough to spin around in, and starts to work through a slow, slow setof Tai Chi, so slow that he barely moves at all, except that inside he can feelthe 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, lowerthan his woolen slacks will let him, and they're grimy and gross anyway, so heundoes his belt and kicks them off. Down low as white crane opens wings andbrush knee, punch, apparent closure, then low again, creakingly achingly lowinto 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 hisdiaphragm 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 eachrib 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 stoppedgoing to class ten years ago."

  "Shut, shut up, Art. You can teach that, damn, you can teach that, I know youcan. That was, wow." She rushes forward and takes his hands. She squeezes andlooks into his eyes. She