Eastern Standard Tribe

by Cory Doctorow

Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass if you want to chatwith your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if youcould talk it over with me."

  "I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own.Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You couldcome if you want -- there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."

  "That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "Butif you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto."

  "You're so understanding," she cooed. "Tell me about your grandmother again --you're sure she'll like me?"

  "She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, andin my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren."

  "Cluck."

  "Cluck?"

  "Just practicing my brood-hen."

  21.

  Doc Szandor's a good egg. He's keeping the shrinks at bay, spending more timewith me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, butit's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to giveit up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of badconversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bitof a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting toprevent them in others.

  "How the hell do you become a user-experience guy?"

  "Sheer orneriness," I say, grinning. "I was just in the right place at the righttime. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that hadmade this artificial erectile tissue."

  "Erectile tissue?"

  "Yeah. Synthetic turtle penis. Small and pliable and capable of going large andrigid very quickly."

  "Sounds delightful."

  "Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circumcisionist'swallet made from foreskins?"

  "Sure, I heard it premed -- he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?"

  "That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporaryshelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it:'Ardorite.'"

  "Ho ho ho."

  "Yeah. So they weren't shipping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then Ispent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he wasvisiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stufflying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off myshoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down toMadison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there becauseit was always full of these very cute Icelandic *au pairs* and their tots, and Iwas a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learnedfrom a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thoughtthey were blond goddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh,Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're betteracquainted.

  "Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinderof a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom inone year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was threeand liked to bang things against other things arythmically while holleringatonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and prone to tripping. I'd getMarta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink ittogether while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening playwith the other kids in the park.

  "I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it*synthetic turtle penis*, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't *that*earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale bluefingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.

  "Then Machinery comes over and snatches the thing away from Marta and startspounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternatelysoftened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him andtore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowdedaround her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbedall the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spentthe next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids andtheir bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my handwith her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids homefor their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to usethe stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses,like a portable crib.

  "So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed hisboss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house inWestchester."

  "Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?"Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Acebandage.

  "Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn'tany good -- they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beingsinteract with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing -- they addeda million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for sixmonths, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products Idesigned for them."

  "That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shippedanything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left toproductize their tech with. But my buddy *did* get another gig with a companythat was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and heshowed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had ano-fooling career."

  "Damn, that's cool."

  "You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what usersdo and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss theengineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected becauseengineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea hownormal people do stuff."

  The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one ofthose fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habitfix without the noxious smoke, "it's not my area of specialty, but you seem likea basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you'renot like most of the people we've got here. What are you doing here?"

  Doctor Szandor is young, younger even than me, I realize. Maybe twenty-six. Ican see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see sometelltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He's got to bethe youngest staff member I've met here, and he's got a fundamentally differentaffect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the feltslippers.

  So I tell him my story, the highlights, anyway. The more I tell him about Lindaand Fede, the dumber my own actions sound to me.

  "Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?" Szandor says, sucking onhis pacifier.

  "The usual reasons, I guess," I say, squirming.

  "Lemme tell you something," he says. He's got his feet up on the table now,hands laced behind his neck. "It's the smartest thing my dad ever said to me,just as my high-school girl and me were breaking up before I went away to medschool. She was nice enough, but, you know, *unstable.* I'd gotten to the pointwhere I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for herto lose her shit.

  "So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, 'Szandor, you know Ilike that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, reallycrazy. Maybe she won't be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won't bebecause of you. Trust me, I know this. You can't fuck a crazy girl sane, son.'"

  I can't help smiling. "Truer words," I say. "But harsh."

  "Harsh is relative," he says. "Contrast it with, say, getting someone committedon trumped-up evidence."

  It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. "It dawns on me that you beli
eveme."

  He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. "Well, why not? You're not any crazier than Iam, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story's plausibleenough."

  I get excited. "Is this your *professional* opinion?"

  "Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don't have professionalopinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion."

  "Oh, well."

  "So where are