Eastern Standard Tribe, Page 3

dissectionversus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading astory and studying a story is the difference between living the story andkilling the story and looking at its guts.

  School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escapedinto, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitalswith polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us whatthe story was about, but never what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda,virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directlyinto your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as anightclub in daylight.

  The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is thetheme of this story?"

  Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understandit. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"

  This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness.Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happinessover smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take thestage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:

  2.

  Art Berry was born to argue.

  There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they arethe stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas,confectionery girls whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense asthe tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There are childrenborn to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations and dieheroically in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread theboards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.

  Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of theinnumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, andhis attention span is already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream --which is fast becoming a nightmare -- he is bored silly.

  The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toyblocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be ahell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't lost them all.

  Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. Theyconfer briefly, then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extrudinginto the third dimension, turning into a stack of blocks.

  Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge thatolder people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars andelevators and shoelaces.

  Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how theblocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries arerevealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying aplane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for awhile en route to New York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledgefell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terribletwos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule, arguing the morals andreason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave upand swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.

  In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to churchwith his Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and theclergy arguing with him in teams and relays.

  It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?"But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, andthe argument spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where thepriest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-rememberedphilosophical word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of realityis used to prove the beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "Ithink therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into thethread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill little voiceanswered from within the congregation.

  Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairlytricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to usethose same arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by thenecessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him homethen, but the priest -- who'd watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis andrecognized a natural when he saw one -- called him to the pulpit, whence Arttook on the entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed hisreasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that they blunderedinto with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father Ferlenghetti laughed andclarified the points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthedrhetorical amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did histhing. Not much was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still theCommunion to be administered, but God knew it had been a long time since thecongregation was engaged so thoroughly with coming to grips with God and whattheir faith meant.

  Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-lipped Gran, FatherFerlenghetti made a point of warmly embracing her and telling her that Art waswelcome at his pulpit any time, and suggested a future in the seminary. Gran wasamazed, and blushed under her Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his shoulderbecame a caress.

  3.

  The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or maybe happinessover smarts. Art's a good guy. He's smart as hell. That's his schtick. If hewere a cartoon character, he'd be the pain-in-the-ass poindexter who is all thetime dispelling the mysteries that fascinate his buddies. It's not easy beingArt's friend.

  Which is, of course, how Art ("not his real name") ended up sitting 45 storiesover the woodsy Massachusetts countryside, hot August wind ruffling his hair andblowing up the legs of his boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his storypreparatory to dissecting it. In order to preserve the narrative integrity, Art("not his real name") may take some liberties with the truth. This isautobiographical fiction, after all, not an autobiography.

  Call me Art ("not my real name"). I am an agent-provocateur in the EasternStandard Tribe, though I've spent most of my life in GMT-9 and at variouslatitudes of Zulu, which means that my poor pineal gland has all but forgottenhow to do its job without that I drown it in melatonin precursors and treat itto multi-hour nine-kilolumen sessions in the glare of my travel lantern.

  The tribes are taking over the world. You can track our progress by the rise ofminor traffic accidents. The sleep-deprived are terrible, terrible drivers.Daylight savings time is a widowmaker: stay off the roads on Leap Forward day!

  Here is the second character in the morality play. She's the love interest. Was.We broke up, just before I got sent to the sanatorium. Our circadians weren'tcompatible.

  4.

  April 3, 2022 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and only woman heever really loved. It was her fault.

  Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, wherethe residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guardedtheir arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as theysquirreled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled anddelighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like waterand his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka couldrun down his gullet instead of into his tank.

  He was in the Kensington High Street on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h --2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to evengauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms.When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps withtraffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, amoment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.

  So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just madeit to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavywater in the EU. The java just wouldn't c
ool off, remaining hot enough toguarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.

  If he was jittery, it was no more so than was customary for ESTalists at GMT+0,and he was driving safely and with due caution. If the woman had looked outbefore stepping off the kerb and into the anemically thin road, if she hadn'tbeen wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark of the curve before the RoyalGarden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped *right in front of his runabout*, he wouldhave merely swerved and sworn and given her a bit of a fright.

  But she didn't, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake as hard as he could,twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped her hipside and sent herass-over-teakettle before the runabout did its own barrel roll, making threecomplete revolutions across the Kensington High before lodging in the RoyalGarden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in