My cousins visited me a week after I arrived at the nuthouse. I’d never been very close to them, and certainly our relationship had hardly blossomed during the week I spent in Toronto, trying to track down Linda and Fede’s plot.

I have two cousins. They’re my father’s sister’s kids, and I didn’t even meet them until I was about twenty and tracking down my family history. They’re Ottawa Valley kids, raised on government-town pork, aging hippie muesli, and country-style corn pone. It’s a weird mix, and we’ve never had a conversation that I would consider a success. Ever met a violent, aggressive hippie with an intimate knowledge of whose genitals one must masticate in order to get a building permit or to make a pot bust vanish? It ain’t pretty.

Cousin the first is Audie. She’s a year older than me, and she’s the smart one on that side of the family, the one who ended up at Queen’s University for a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MA in Poli Sci, and even so finished up back in Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese and Sierra Leonese OEM importers. Audie’s married to a nice fella whose name I can never remember and they’re gonna have kids in five years; it’s on a timetable that she actually showed me once when I went out there on biz and stopped in to see her at the office.

Cousin the second is Alphie—three years younger than me, raised in the shadow of his overachieving sister, he was the capo of Ottawa Valley script kiddies, a low-rent hacker who downloaded other people’s code for defeating copyright use-control systems and made a little biz for himself bootlegging games, porn, music and video, until the WIPO bots found him through traffic analysis and busted his ass, bankrupting him and landing him in the clink for sixty days.

Audie and Alfie are blond and ruddy and a little heavyset, all characteristics they got from their father’s side, so add that to the fact that I grew up without being aware of their existence and you’ll understand the absence of any real fellow-feeling for them. I don’t dislike them, but I have so little in common with them that it’s like hanging out with time travelers from the least-interesting historical era imaginable.

But they came to Boston and looked me up in the nuthatch.

They found me sitting on the sofa in the ward, post-Group, arms and ankles crossed, dozing in a shaft of sunlight. It was my habitual napping spot, and I found that a nap between Group and dinner was a good way to sharpen my appetite and anasthetize my taste buds, which made the mealtime slop bearable.

Audie shook my shoulder gently. I assumed at first that she was one of the inmates trying to get me involved in a game of Martian narco-checkers, so I brushed her hand away.

“They’ve probably got him all doped up,” Audie said. The voice was familiar and unplaceable and so I cracked my eyelid, squinting up at her silhouette in the afternoon sun. “There he is,” she said. “Come on, up and at ’em, tiger.”

I sat up abruptly and scrubbed at my eyes. “Audie?” I asked.

“Yup. And Alphie.” Alphie’s pink face hove into view.

“Hi, Art,” he mumbled.

“Jesus,” I said, getting to my feet. Audie put out a superfluous steadying hand. “Wow.”

“Surprised?” Audie said.

“Yeah!” I said. Audie thrust a bouquet of flowers into my arms. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, your grandmother told me you were here. I was coming down to Boston for work anyway, so I flew in a day early so I could drop in. Alphie came down with me—he’s my assistant now.”

I almost said something about convicted felons working for government contractors, but I held onto my tongue. Consequently, an awkward silence blossomed.

“Well,” Audie said, at last. “Well! Let’s have a look at you, then.” She actually took a lap around me, looking me up and down, making little noises. “You look all right, Art. Maybe a little skinny, even. Alphie’s got a box of cookies for you.” Alphie stepped forward and produced the box, a family pack of President’s Choice Ridiculous Chocoholic Extra Chewies, a Canadian store brand I’d been raised on. Within seconds of seeing them, my mouth was sloshing with saliva.

“I’m going to have to go, I think,” she said.

“Go?”

“To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go and sort things out with him.”

“Your ex knows who I am?”

She looked blank.

“You told him you were at my grandmother’s place. He knows who I am?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He does. I told him, so he’d get off my back.”

“And you have to go to California?”

“Today. I have to go to California today.”

“Jesus, today? We just got here!”

“Look, you’ve got lots of catching up to do with your Gran and your friends here. You won’t even miss me. I’ll go for a couple days and then come back.”

“If you gotta go,” he said.

“I gotta go.”

He explained things as best as he could to Gran while Linda repacked her backpack, and then saw Linda off in a taxi. She was already savaging her comm, booking a ticket to LA. He called Fede from the condo’s driveway.

“Hey, Art! How’s Toronto?”

“How’d you know I was in Toronto?” Art said, but he knew, he knew then, though he couldn’t explain how he knew, he knew that Linda and Fede had been talking. He knew that Linda had been talking to Fede that morning, and not her fucking ex (God, he was thinking of the poor schmuck that way already, “fucking ex”). Christ, it was five in the morning on the West Coast. It couldn’t be the ex. He just knew.

“Lucky guess,” Fede said breezily. “How is it?”

“Oh, terrific. Great to see the old hometown and all. How’re things with Perceptronics? When should I plan on being back in Boston?”

“Oh, it’s going all right, but slow. Hurry up and wait, right? Look, don’t worry about it, just relax there, I’ll call you when the deal’s ready and you’ll go back to Boston and we’ll sort it out and it’ll all be fantastic and don’t worry, really, all right?”

“Fine, Fede.” Art wasn’t listening any more. Fede had gone into bullshit mode, and all Art was thinking of was why Linda would talk to Fede and then book a flight to LA. “How’re things in London?” he said automatically.

“Fine, fine,” Fede said, just as automatically. “Not the same without you, of course.”

“Of course,” Art said. “Well, bye then.”

“Bye,” Fede said.

Art felt an unsuspected cunning stirring within him. He commed Linda, in her cab. “Hey, dude,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, sounding harassed.

“Look, I just spoke to my Gran and she’s really upset you had to go. She really liked you.”

“Well, I liked her, too.”

“Great. Here’s the thing,” he said, and drew in a breath. “Gran made you a sweater. She made me one, too. She’s a knitter. She wanted me to send it along after you. It looks pretty good. So, if you give me your ex’s address, I can FedEx it there and you can get it.”

There was a lengthy pause. “Why don’t I just pick it up when I see you again?” Linda said, finally.

Gotcha, Art thought. “Well, I know that’d be the sensible thing, but my Gran, I dunno, she really wants me to do this. It’d make her so happy.”

“I dunno—my ex might cut it up or something.”

“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. I could just schedule the delivery for after you arrive, that way you can sign for it. What do you think?”

“I really don’t think—”

“Come on, Linda, I know it’s nuts, but it’s my Gran. She really likes you.”

Linda sighed. “Let me comm you the address, OK?”

“Thanks, Linda,” Art said, watching the address in Van Nuys scroll onto his comm’s screen. “Thanks a bunch. Have a great trip—don’t let your ex get you down.”

Now, armed with Linda’s fucking ex’s name, Art went to work. He told Gran he had some administrative chores to catch up on for an hour or two, promised to have supper with her and Father Ferlenghetti that night, and went out onto the condo’s sundeck with his keyboard velcroed to his thigh.

Trepan: Hey!

Colonelonic: Trepan! Hey, what’s up? I hear you’re back on the East Coast!

Trepan: True enough. Back in Toronto. How’s things with you?

Colonelonic: Same as ever. Trying to quit the dayjob.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Are you still working at Merril-Lynch?

## Colonelonic (private): Yeah.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Still got access to Lexus-Nexus?

## Colonelonic (private): Sure — but they’re on our asses about abusing the accounts. Every search is logged and has to be accounted for.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Can you get me background on just one guy?

## Colonelonic (private): Who is he? Why?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic It’s stupid. I think that someone I know is about to go into biz with him, and I don’t trust him. I’m probably just being paranoid, but…

## Colonelonic (private): I don’t know, man. Is it really important?

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Oh, crap, look. It’s my girlfriend. I think she’s screwing this guy. I just wanna get an idea of who he is, what he does, you know.

## Colonelonic (private): Heh. That sucks. OK — check back in a couple hours. There’s a guy across the hall who never logs out of his box when he goes to lunch. I’ll sneak in there and look it up on his machine.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Kick ass. Thanks.

##Transferring addressbook entry “Toby Ginsburg” to Colonelonic. Receipt confirmed.

Trepan: /private Colonelonic Thanks again!

## Colonelonic (private): Check in with me later — I’ll have something for you then.

Art logged off, flushed with triumph. Whatever Fede and Linda were cooking up, he’d get wise to it and then he’d nail ’em. What the hell was it, though?

Linda’s first meeting with Art’s Gran went off without a hitch. Gran met them at Union Station with an obsolete red cap who was as ancient as she was, a vestige of a more genteel era of train travel and bulky luggage. Just seeing him made Art’s brain whir with plans for conveyor systems, luggage escalators, cart dispensers. They barely had enough luggage between the two of them to make it worth the old man’s time, but he dutifully marked their bags with a stub of chalk and hauled them onto his cart, then trundled off to the service elevators.

Gran gave Art a long and teary hug. She was less frail than she’d been in his memory, taller and sturdier. The smell of her powder and the familiar acoustics of Union Station’s cavernous platform whirled him back to his childhood in Toronto, to the homey time before he’d gotten on the circadian merry-go-round.

“Gran, this is Linda,” he said.

“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you,” Gran said, taking Linda’s hands in hers. “Call me Julie.”

Linda smiled a great, pretty, toothy smile. “Julie, Art’s told me all about you. I just know we’ll be great friends.”

“I’m sure we will. Are you hungry? Did they feed you on the train? You must be exhausted after such a long trip. Which would you rather do first, eat or rest?”

“Well, I’m up for seeing the town,” Linda said. “Your grandson’s been yawning his head off since Buffalo, though.” She put her arm around his waist and squeezed his tummy.

“What a fantastic couple you make,” Gran said. “You didn’t tell me she was so pretty, Arthur!”

“Here it comes,” Art said. “She’s going to ask about great-grandchildren.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gran said, cuffing him gently upside the head. “You’re always exaggerating.”

“Well I think it’s a splendid idea,” Linda said. “Shall we have two? Three? Four?”

“Make it ten,” Art said, kissing her cheek.

“Oh, I couldn’t have ten,” Linda said. “But five is a nice compromise. Five it will be. We’ll name the first one Julie if it’s a girl, or Julius if it’s a boy.”

“Oh, we are going to get along,” Gran said, and led them up to the curb, where the red cap had loaded their bags into a cab.

They ate dinner at Lindy’s on Yonge Street, right in the middle of the sleaze strip. The steakhouse had been there for the better part of a century, and its cracked red-vinyl booths and thick rib eyes smothered in horseradish and HP Sauce were just as Art had remembered. Riding up Yonge Street, the city lights had seemed charming and understated; even the porn marquees felt restrained after a week in New York. Art ate a steak as big as his head and fell into a postprandial torpor whence he emerged only briefly to essay a satisfied belch. Meanwhile, Gran and Linda nattered away like old friends, making plans for the week: the zoo, the island, a day trip to Niagara Falls, a ride up the CN Tower, all the touristy stuff that Art had last done in elementary school.

By the time Art lay down in his bed, belly tight with undigested steak, he was feeling wonderful and at peace with the world. Linda climbed in beside him, wrestled away a pillow and some covers, and snuggled up to him.

“That went well,” Art said. “I’m really glad you two hit it off.”

“Me too, honey,” Linda said, kissing his shoulder through his tee shirt. He’d been able to get his head around the idea of sharing a bed with his girlfriend under his grandmother’s roof, but doing so nude seemed somehow wrong.

“We’re going to have a great week,” he said. “I wish it would never end.”

“Yeah,” she said, and began to snore into his neck.

The next morning, Art woke stiff and serene. He stretched out on the bed, dimly noted Linda’s absence, and padded to the bathroom to relieve his bladder. He thought about crawling back into bed, was on the verge of doing so, when he heard the familiar, nervewracking harangue of Linda arguing down her comm. He opened the door to his old bedroom and there she was, stark naked and beautiful in the morning sun, comm in hand, eyes focused in the middle distance, shouting.

“No, goddamnit, no! Not here. Jesus, are you a moron? I said no!”

Art reached out to touch her back, noticed that it was trembling, visibly tense and rigid, and pulled his hand back. Instead, he quietly set about fishing in his small bag for a change of clothes.

“This is not a good time. I’m at Art’s grandmother’s place, all right? I’ll talk to you later.” She threw her comm at the bed and whirled around.

“Everything all right?” Art said timidly.

“No, goddamnit, no it isn’t.”

Art pulled on his pants and kept his eyes on her comm, which was dented and scratched from a hundred thousand angry hang ups. He hated it when she got like this, radiating anger and spoiling for a fight.

“I’m going to have to go, I think,” she said.

“Go?”

“To California. That was my fucking ex again. I need to go and sort things out with him.”

“Your ex knows who I am?”

She looked blank.

“You told him you were at my grandmother’s place. He knows who I am?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He does. I told him, so he’d get off my back.”

“And you have to go to California?”

“Today. I have to go to California today.”

“Jesus, today? We just got here!”

“Look, you’ve got lots of catching up to do with your Gran and your friends here. You won’t even miss me. I’ll go for a couple days and then come back.”

I can’t help smiling. “Truer words,” I say. “But harsh.”

“Harsh is relative,” he says. “Contrast it with, say, getting someone committed on trumped-up evidence.”

It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. “It dawns on me that you believe me.”

He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. “Well, why not? You’re not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story’s plausible enough.”

I get excited. “Is this your professional opinion?”

“Sorry, no. I am not a mental health professional, so I don’t have professional opinions on your mental health. It is, however, my amateur opinion.”

“Oh, well.”

“So where are you at now, vis-a-vis the hospital?”

“Well, they don’t tell me much, but as near as I can make out, I am stuck here semipermanently. The court found me incompetent and ordered me held until I was. I can’t get anyone to explain what competency consists of, or how I achieve it—when I try, I get accused of being ‘difficult.’ Of course, escaping onto the roof is a little beyond difficult. I have a feeling I’m going to be in pretty deep shit. Do they know about the car?”

“The car?”

“In the parking lot. The one that blew up.”

Doc Szandor laughs hard enough that his pacifier shoots across the room and lands in a hazmat bucket. “You son of a bitch—that was you?”

“Yeah,” I say, and drum my feet against the tin cupboards under the examination table.

“That was my fucking car!”

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” I say. “God.”

“No no no,” he says, fishing in his pocket and unwrapping a fresh pacifier. “It’s OK. Insurance. I’m getting a bike. Vroom, vroom! What a coincidence, though,” he says.

Coincidence. He’s making disgusting hamster-cage noises, grinding away at his pacifier. “Szandor, do you sometimes sneak out onto the landing to have a cigarette? Use a bit of tinfoil for your ashtray? Prop the door open behind you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“‘Cause that’s how I got out onto the roof.”

“Oh, shit,” he says.

“It’s our secret,” I say. “I can tell them I don’t know how I got out. I’m incompetent, remember?”

“You’re a good egg, Art,” he says. “How the hell are we going to get you out of here?”

“Hey what?”

“No, really. There’s no good reason for you to be here, right? You’re occupying valuable bed space.”

“Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have a feeling that as soon as you turn me loose, I’m gonna be doped up to the tits for a good long while.”

He grimaces. “Right, right. They like their meds. Are your parents alive?”

“What? No, they’re both dead.”

“Aha. Died suddenly?”

“Yeah. Dad drowned, Mom fell—”

“Ah ah ah! Shhh. Mom died suddenly. She was taking Haldol when it happened, a low antianxiety dose, right?”

“Huh?”

“Probably she was. Probably she had a terrible drug interaction. Sudden Death Syndrome. It’s hereditary. And you say she fell? Seizure. We’ll sign you up for a PET scan, that’ll take at least a month to set up. You could be an epileptic and not even know it. Shaking the radioisotopes loose for the scan from the AEC, woah, that’s a week’s worth of paperwork right there! No Thorazine for you young man, not until we’re absolutely sure it won’t kill you dead where you stand. The hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on this very subject not a month ago. I’ll just make some notes in your medical history.” He picked up his comm and scribbled.

“Never woulda thought of that,” I say. “I’m impressed.”

“It’s something I’ve been playing with for a while now. I think that psychiatric care is a good thing, of course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away prescription pads would be a good start.”

“Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had prescribed how much of what and how often. Put ’em on a chart in the ward where the patients’ families could see ’em.”

“That’s nasty!” he says. “I love it. We’re supposed to be accountable, right? What else?”

“Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies. Create a dating service that automatically links patients who respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing with location data from other trackers, you could get stats on which therapies make people more sociable, just by counting the frequency with which patients stop and spend time in proximity to other patients. It’d give you empirical data with which you track your own progress.”

“This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?”

I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?

“It’s my job,” I say, and give a modest shrug.

“What do you charge for work like that?”

“Why, are you in the market?”

“Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we can go into biz together, redesigning nuthatches.”

“So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss’s house in Westchester.”

“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 Ace bandage.

“Didn’t even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn’t any good—they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn’t self-revealing—they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them.”

“That musta been worth a fortune,” says Szandor.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Actually, they folded before they shipped anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn’t have anything left to productize their tech with. But my buddy did get another gig with a company that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he showed them the stuff I’d done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a no-fooling career.”

“Damn, that’s cool.”

“You betcha. It’s all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do and how they do it, figure out what they’re trying to do, and then boss the engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they’ve erected because engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.”

The doctor chuckles. “Look,” he says, producing a nicotine pacifier, one of those fake cigs that gives you the oral fix and the chemical fix and the habit fix without the noxious smoke, “it’s not my area of specialty, but you seem like a basically sane individual, modulo your rooftop adventures. Certainly, you’re not 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. I can see some fancy tattoo-work poking out of the collar of his shirt, see some telltale remnant of a fashionable haircut in his grown-out shag. He’s got to be the youngest staff member I’ve met here, and he’s got a fundamentally different affect from the zombies in the lab coats who maintain the zombies in the felt slippers.

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

“Why the hell did you stick with this Linda anyway?” Szandor says, sucking on his 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 med school. She was nice enough, but, you know, unstable. I’d gotten to the point where I ducked and ran for cover every time she disagreed with me, ready for her to lose her shit.

“So my dad took me aside, put his arm around me, and said, ‘Szandor, you know I like that girlfriend of yours, but she is crazy. Not a little crazy, really crazy. Maybe she won’t be crazy forever, but if she gets better, it won’t be because 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 committed on trumped-up evidence.”

It dawns on me that Doc Szandor believes me. “It dawns on me that you believe me.”

He gnaws fitfully at his pacifier. “Well, why not? You’re not any crazier than I am, that much is clear to me. You have neat ideas. Your story’s plausible enough.”