Eastern Standard Tribe | Page 6

future in the seminary. Gran was amazed, and
blushed under her Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his shoulder became a caress.
3.
The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or maybe happiness over
smarts. Art's a good guy. He's smart as hell. That's his schtick. If he were a cartoon
character, he'd be the pain-in-the-ass poindexter who is all the time dispelling the
mysteries that fascinate his buddies. It's not easy being Art's friend.
Which is, of course, how Art ("not his real name") ended up sitting 45 stories over the
woodsy Massachusetts countryside, hot August wind ruffling his hair and blowing up the
legs of his boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his story preparatory to dissecting it. In
order to preserve the narrative integrity, Art ("not his real name") may take some liberties
with the truth. This is autobiographical fiction, after all, not an autobiography.
Call me Art ("not my real name"). I am an agent-provocateur in the Eastern Standard
Tribe, though I've spent most of my life in GMT-9 and at various latitudes of Zulu, which
means that my poor pineal gland has all but forgotten how to do its job without that I
drown it in melatonin precursors and treat it to 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 of minor
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't compatible.
4.
April 3, 2022 was the day that Art nearly killed the first and only woman he ever really
loved. It was her fault.
Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, where the
residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded their
arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they squirreled their money
away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and delighted to be back on British soil,
Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water and his runabout could be kept easily and
cheaply fuelled and the vodka could run 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 even gauge 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 with traffic data, you know
you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a moment 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 made it to the UK,
thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy water in the EU. The
java just wouldn't cool off, remaining hot enough to guarantee 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 out before stepping off
the kerb and into the anemically thin road, if she hadn't been wearing stylish black in the
pitchy dark of the curve before the Royal Garden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped *right in
front of his runabout*, he would have 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 her ass-over-teakettle before the
runabout did its own barrel roll, making three complete revolutions across the Kensington
High before lodging in the Royal Garden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in scorching,
molten coffium, screaming and clawing at his eyes, upside down, when the porters from
the Royal Garden opened his runabout's upside-down door, undid his safety harness and
pulled him out from behind the rapidly flacciding airbag. They plunged his face into the
ornamental birdbath, which had a skin of ice that shattered on his nose and jangled
against his jawbone as the icy water cooled the coffium and stopped the terrible, terrible
burning.
He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering, and cleared his eyes in
time to see the woman he'd hit being carried out of the middle of the road on a human
travois made of the porters' linked arms of red wool and gold brocade.