9.

It was nearly dawn before they finally made their way out of the police station and back into the street. After identifying Les from an online rogues' gallery, Art had spent the next six hours sitting on a hard bench, chording desultorily on his thigh, doing some housekeeping.

This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in the extreme, though it had sounded like a good idea when he was living in San Francisco and hating every inch of the city, from the alleged pizza to the fucking! drivers!-in New York, the theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting "Ole!" as in, "Ole! You changed lanes!" "Ole! You cut me off!" "Ole! You're driving on the sidewalk!" while in San Francisco, a honking horn meant, "I wish you were dead. Have a nice day. Dude."

And the body language was all screwed up out west. Art believed that your entire unconscious affect was determined by your upbringing. You learned how to stand, how to hold your face in repose, how to gesture, from the adults around you while you were growing up. The Pacific Standard Tribe always seemed a little bovine to him, their facial muscles long conditioned to relax into a kind of spacey, gullible senescence.

Beauty, too. Your local definition of attractive and ugly was conditioned by the people around you at puberty. There was a Pacific "look" that was indefinably off. Hard to say what it was, just that when he went out to a bar or got stuck on a crowded train, the girls just didn't seem all that attractive to him. Objectively, he could recognize their prettiness, but it didn't stir him the way the girls cruising the Chelsea Antiques Market or lounging around Harvard Square could.

He'd always felt at a slight angle to reality in California, something that was reinforced by his continuous efforts in the Tribe, from chatting and gaming until the sun rose, dragging his caffeine-deficient ass around to his clients in a kind of fog before going home, catching a nap and hopping back online at 3 or 4 when the high-octane NYC early risers were practicing work-avoidance and clattering around with their comms.

Gradually, he penetrated deeper into the Tribe, getting invites into private channels, intimate environments where he found himself spilling the most private details of his life. The Tribe stuck together, finding work for each other, offering advice, and it was only a matter of time before someone offered him a gig.

That was Fede, who practically invented Tribal agent-provocateurs. He'd been working for McKinsey, systematically undermining their GMT-based clients with plausibly terrible advice, creating Achilles' heels that their East-coast competitors could exploit. The entire European trust-architecture for relay networks had been ceded by Virgin/Deutsche Telekom to a scrappy band of AT&T Labs refugees whose New Jersey headquarters hosted all the cellular reputation data that Euros' comms consulted when they were routing their calls. The Jersey clients had funneled a nice chunk of the proceeds to Fede's account in the form of rigged winnings from an offshore casino that the Tribe used to launder its money.

Now V/DT was striking back, angling for a government contract in Massachusetts, a fat bit of pork for managing payments to rightsholders whose media was assessed at the MassPike's tollbooths. Rights-societies were a fabulous opportunity to skim and launder and spindle money in plenty, and Virgin's massive repertoire combined with Deutsche Telekom's Teutonic attention to detail was a tough combination to beat. Needless to say, the Route 128-based Tribalists who had the existing contract needed an edge, and would pay handsomely for it.

London nights seemed like a step up from San Francisco mornings to Art-instead of getting up at 4AM to get NYC, he could sleep in and chat them up through the night. The Euro sensibility, with its many nap-breaks, statutory holidays and extended vacations seemed ideally suited to a double agent's life.

But Art hadn't counted on the Tribalists' hands-on approach to his work. They obsessively grepped his daily feed of spreadsheets, whiteboard-output, memos and conversation reports for any of ten thousand hot keywords, querying him for deeper detail on trivial, half-remembered bullshit sessions with the V/DT's user experience engineers. His comm buzzed and blipped at all hours, and his payoff was dependent on his prompt response. They were running him ragged.

Four hours in the police station gave Art ample opportunity to catch up on the backlog of finicky queries. Since the accident, he'd been distracted and tardy, and had begun to invent his responses, since it all seemed so trivial to him anyway.

Fede had sent him about a thousand nagging notes reminding him to generate a new key and phone with the fingerprint. Christ. Fede had been with McKinsey for most of his adult life, and he was superparanoid about being exposed and disgraced in their ranks. Art's experience with the other McKinsey people around the office suggested that the notion of any of those overpaid buzzword-slingers sniffing their traffic was about as likely as a lightning strike. Heaving a dramatic sigh for his own benefit, he began the lengthy process of generating enough randomness to seed the key, mashing the keyboard, whispering nonsense syllables, and pointing the comm's camera lens at arbitrary corners of the police station. After ten minutes of crypto-Tourette's, the comm announced that he'd been sufficiently random and prompted him for a passphrase. Jesus. What a pain in the ass. He struggled to recall all the words to the theme song from a CBC sitcom he'd watched as a kid, and then his comm went into a full-on churn as it laboriously re-ciphered all of his stored files with the new key, leaving Art to login while he waited.

• Trepan: Afternoon!

• Colonelonic: Hey, Trepan. How's it going?

• Trepan: Foul. I'm stuck at a copshop in London with my thumb up my ass. I got mugged.

• Colonelonic: Yikes! You OK?

• Ballgravy: Shit!

• Trepan: Oh, I'm fine — just bored. They didn't hurt me. I commed 999 while they were running their game and showed it to them when they got ready to do the deed, so they took off.

• ##Colonelonic laughs

• Ballgravy: Britain==ass. Lon-dong.

• Colonelonic: Sweet!

• Trepan: Thanks. Now if the cops would only finish the paperwork...

• Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

• Ballgravy: Ass ass ass

• Colonelonic: Shut up, Bgravy

• Ballgravy: Blow me

• Trepan: What's wrong with you, Ballgravy? We're having a grown-up conversation here

• Ballgravy: Just don't like Brits.

• Trepan: What, all of them?

• Ballgravy: Whatever — all the ones I've met have been tight-ass pricks

• ##Colonelonic: (private) He's just a troll, ignore him

• /private Colonelonic: Watch this

• Trepan: How many?

• Ballgravy: How many what?

• Trepan: Have you met?

• Ballgravy: Enough

• Trepan: > 100?

• Ballgravy: No

• Trepan: > 50?

• Ballgravy: No

• Trepan: > 10?

• Ballgravy: Around 10

• Trepan: Where are you from?

• Ballgravy: Queens

• Trepan: Well, you're not going to believe this, but you're the tenth person from Queens I've met — and you're all morons who pick fights with strangers in chat-rooms

• Colonelonic: Queens==ass

• Trepan: Ass ass ass

• Ballgravy: Fuck you both

• ##Ballgravy has left channel #EST.chatter

• Colonelonic: Nicely done

• Colonelonic: He's been boring me stupid for the past hour, following me from channel to channel

• Colonelonic: What are you doing in London, anyway?

• Trepan: Like I said, waiting for the cops

• Colonelonic: But why are you there in the first place

• Trepan: /private Colonelonic It's a work thing. For EST.

• ##Colonelonic: (private) No shit?

• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Yeah. Can't really say much more, you understand

• ##Colonelonic: (private) Cool! Any more jobs? One more day at Merril-Lynch and I'm gonna kill someone

• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Sorry, no. There must be some perks though.

• ##Colonelonic: (private) I can pick fights with strangers in chat rooms! Also, I get to play with Lexus-Nexus all I want

• Trepan: /private Colonelonic That's pretty rad, anyway

• ##Ballgravy has joined channel #EST.chatter

• Ballgravy: Homos

• Trepan: Oh Christ, are you back again, Queens?

• Colonelonic: I've gotta go anyway

• Trepan: See ya

• ##Colonelonic has left channel #EST.chatter

• ##Trepan has left channel #EST.chatter

Art stood up and blinked. He approached the desk sergeant and asked if he thought it would be much longer. The sergeant fiddled with a comm for a moment, then said, "Oh, we're quite done with you sir, thank you." Art repressed a vituperative response, counted three, then thanked the cop.

He commed Linda.

"What's up?"

"They say we're free to go. I think they've been just keeping us here for shits and giggles. Can you believe that?"

"Whatever-I've been having a nice chat with Constable McGivens. Constable, is it all right if we go now?"

There was some distant, English rumbling, then Linda giggled. "All right, then. Thank you so much, officer!

"Art? I'll meet you at the front doors, all right?"

"That's great," Art said. He stretched. His ass was numb, his head throbbed, and he wanted to strangle Linda.

She emerged into the dawn blinking and grinning, and surprised him with a long, full-body hug. "Sorry I was so snappish before," she said. "I was just scared. The cops say that you were quite brave. Thank you."

Art's adrenals dry-fired as he tried to work up a good angry head of steam, then he gave up. "It's all right."

"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 goddamned roof.

I've tried hollering myself hoarse 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 massed and devious forces of the Pacific Daylight Tribe and the Greenwich Mean Tribe. I am officially Not Responsible. Confused and Prone 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 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.