"No, let's talk about my f.u.c.king ex, by all means." She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off points on her fingers. "His name is Toby, he's half-j.a.panese, half-white. He's about your height. Your d.i.c.k is bigger, but he's better in bed. He's a user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never f.u.c.king shuts up about what's wrong with this or that. We dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me G.o.dd.a.m.ned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?"

"That was fine," Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. "Thank you."

She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. "Look, I don't like to talk about it -- it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't take his calls anymore, how about that?"

"I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's a.s.s if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you could 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 could come if you want -- there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood."

"That's OK," Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood shifts. "But if 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, and in 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 time with me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, but it's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to give it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of bad conversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit of a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting to prevent them in others.

"How the h.e.l.l do you become a user-experience guy?"

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

"Erectile tissue?"

"Yeah. Synthetic turtle p.e.n.i.s. Small and pliable and capable of going large and rigid very quickly."

"Sounds delightful."

"Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circ.u.mcisionist's wallet 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, temporary shelters, 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 I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic *au pairs* and their tots, and I was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were blond G.o.ddesses. 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 better acquainted.

"Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and p.r.o.ne to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.

"I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it *synthetic turtle p.e.n.i.s*, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't *that*

earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.

"Then Machinery comes over and s.n.a.t.c.hes the thing away from Marta and starts pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombsh.e.l.l nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the 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 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."

"d.a.m.n, 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 s.h.a.g. 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.t.

"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 f.u.c.k 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."

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.