Eastern Standard Tribe Page 22

that."

  She waves a chubby pish-tosh at me with her freckled hand and walks over to thechimney, leaving me staring at the sky, knees bent, waiting for the stretchercrew.

  When they arrive, Caitlin watches as they strap me onto the board, tying metighter than is strictly necessary for my safety, and I realize that I'm notbeing 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. Theyhad rather high walls and a rather low water level, both for modesty's sake andto prevent spills. Art passed through the miniature sauna/shower and into thetub after his massage, somewhere over Newfoundland, and just as the plane hitturbulence, buffeting him with chlorinated water that stung his eyes and got uphis nose and soaked the magazine on offshore investing that he'd found in theback of his seat pocket.

  He landed at JFK still smelling of chlorine and sandalwood massage oil and thecantaloupe-scented lotion in the fancy toilets. Tension melted away from him ashe meandered to the shuttle stop. The air had an indefinable character ofhomeliness, or maybe it was the sunlight. Amateur Tribal anthropologists werealways thrashing about light among themselves, arguing about the sun's charactervarying from latitude to latitude, filtered through this city's pollutionsignature or that.

  The light or the air, the latitude or the smog, it felt like home. The womenwalked 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. Thepeople were a riot of ethnicities and their speech was a riotous babel ofaccents, idioms and languages. Aggressive pretzel vendors vied with aggressivepanhandlers to shake down the people waiting on the shuttle bus. Art bought astale, sterno-reeking pretzel that was crusted with inedible volumes ofyellowing salt and squirted a couple bucks at a panhandler who had beenpestering him in thick Jamaican patois but thanked him in adenoidal Brooklynese.

  By the time he boarded his connection to Logan he was joggling his kneesuncontrollably in his seat, his delight barely contained. He got an undrinkablecan of watery Budweiser and propped it up on his tray table alongside hisinedible pretzel and arranged them in a kind of symbolic tableau of all thingsESTian.

  He commed Fede from the guts of the tunnels that honeycombed Boston, realizingwith a thrill as Fede picked up that it was two in the morning in London, at thenominal GMT+0, while here at GMT-5 -- at the default, plus-zero time zone of hislife, 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 fromany number of middle-of-the-night calls.

  There was a cheap Malaysian comm that he'd once bought because of its hyped upde-hibernate feature -- its ability to go from its deepest power-savingsleepmode to full waking glory without the customary thirty seconds ofdrive-churning housekeeping as it reestablished its network connection, verifiedits file system and memory, and pinged its buddy-list for state and presenceinfo. This Malaysian comm, the Crackler, had the uncanny ability to go intosuspended animation indefinitely, and yet throw your workspace back on itsdisplay in a hot instant.

  When Art actually laid hands on it, after it meandered its way across the worldby slow boat, corrupt GMT+8 Posts and Telegraphs authorities, over-engineeredcourier services and Revenue Canada's Customs agents, he was enchanted by thisfeature. He could put the device into deep sleep, close it up, and pop its coveropen and poof! there were his windows. It took him three days and an interestingcrash to notice that even though he was seeing his workspace, he wasn't able tointeract with it for thirty seconds. The auspicious crash revealed the presenceof a screenshot of his pre-hibernation workspace on the drive, and he realizedthat the machine was tricking him, displaying the screenshot -- the illusion ofwakefulness -- when he woke it up, relying on the illusion to endure while itperformed its housekeeping tasks in the background. A little stopwatch workproved that this chicanery actually added three seconds to the overallwake-time, and taught him his first important user-experience lesson: perceptionof functionality trumps the actual function.

  And here was Fede, throwing up a verbal screenshot of wakefulness while hechurned in the background, housekeeping himself into real alertness. "Fede, I'mhere, I'm in Boston!"

  "Good Art, good. How was the trip?"

  "Wonderful. Virgin Upper was fantastic -- dancing girls, midget wrestling, hashbrownies..."

  "Good, very good."

  "And now I'm driving around under Boston through a land-yacht regatta. The boatsare mambo, but I think that banana patch the hotel soon."

  "Glad to hear it." Art heard water running dimly, realized that Fede was takinga leak.

  "Meeting with the Jersey boys tomorrow. We're having brunch at a strip club."

  "OK, OK, very funny," Fede said. "I'm awake. What's up?"

  "Nothing. I just wanted to check in with you and let you know I arrived safe andsound. How're things in London?"

  "Your girlfriend called me."

  "Linda?"

  "You got another girlfriend?"

  "What did she want?"

  "She wanted to chew me out for sending you overseas with your 'crippling backinjury.' She told me she'd hold me responsible if you got into trouble overthere."

  "God, Fede, I'm sorry. I didn't put her up to it or anything --"

  "Don't worry about it. I'm glad that there's someone out there who cares aboutyou. We're getting together for dinner tonight."

  "Fede, you know, I think Linda's terrific, but she's a little, you know,volatile."

  "Art, everyone in O'Malley House knows just how volatile she is. 'I won't tellyou again, Art. Moderate your tone. I won't be shouted at.'"

  "Christ, you heard that, too?"

  "Don't worry about it. She's cool and I like her and I can stand to be shoutedat a little. When did you say you were meeting with Perceptronics?"

  The word shocked him. They never mentioned the name of the Jersey clients. Itstarted as a game, but soon became woven into Fede's paranoid procedures.

  Now they had reached the endgame. Within a matter of weeks, they'd be turning intheir resignations to V/DT and taking the final flight across the Atlantic andback to GMT-5, provocateurs no longer.

  "Tomorrow afternoon. We're starting late to give me time to get a full night'ssleep." The last conference call with Perceptronics had gone fantastically. Hisnormal handlers -- sour men with nasty minds who glommed onto irrelevancies inV/DT's strategy and teased at them until they conjured up shadowy and shrewdconspiracies where none existed -- weren't on that call. Instead, he'd spent arollicking four hours on the line with the sharp and snarky product designersand engineers, bouncing ideas back and forth at speed. Even over the phone, thehomey voices and points of view felt indefinably comfortable and familiar.They'd been delighted to start late in the day for his benefit, and had offeredto work late and follow up with a visit to a bar where he could get a burger thesize of a baby's head. "We're meeting at Perceptronics' branch office in Actontomorrow and the day after, then going into MassPike. The Perceptronics guyssound really excited." Just saying the name of the company was a thrill.

  "That's really excellent, Art. Go easy, though --"

  "Oh, don't worry about me. My back's feeling miles better." And it was, looseand supple the way it did after a good workout.

  "That's good, but it's not what I meant. We're still closing this deal, stilldickering over price. I need another day, maybe, to settle it. So go easytomorrow. Give me a little leverage, OK?"

  "I don't get it. I thought we had a deal."

  "Nothing's final till it's vinyl, you know that. They're balking at the royaltyclause" -- Fede was proposing to sell Perceptronics an exclusive license on thebusiness-model patent he'd filed for using Art's notes in exchange for jobs, alump-sum
payment and a royalty on every sub-license that Perceptronics sold tothe world's toll roads -- "and we're renegotiating. They're just playinghardball, is all. Another day, tops, and I'll have it sorted."

  "I'm confused. What do you want me to do?"

  "Just, you know, *stall* them. Get there late. Play up your jetlag. Leave early.Don't get anything, you know, *done*. Use your imagination."

  "Is there a deal or isn't there, Fede?"

  "There's a deal, there's a deal. I'll