"I'm sorry, all right?" Art said. "I lack the foresight to empty my bladder before being accosted in the street. That being said, can we arrive at some kind of solution?" In his head, Art was already writing an angry letter to the *Times*, dripping with sarcasm.
"Just a moment, sir," PC DeMoss said. He conferred briefly with his partner, leaving Art to stare ruefully at their backs and avoid Linda's gaze. When he finally met it, she gave him a sunny smile. It seemed that she — at least — wasn't angry any more.
"Come this way, please, sir," PC DeMoss said, striking off for the High Street.
"There's a pub 'round the corner where you can use the facilities."
9.
It was nearly dawn before they finally made their way out of the police station and back into the street. After identifying Les from an online rogues' gallery, Art had spent the next six hours sitting on a hard bench, chording desultorily on his thigh, doing some housekeeping.
This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in the extreme, though it had sounded like a good idea when he was living in San Francisco and hating every inch of the city, from the alleged pizza to the fucking! drivers! — in New York, the theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting "Ole!" as in, "Ole! You changed lanes!" "Ole! You cut me off!" "Ole! You're driving on the sidewalk!" while in San Francisco, a honking horn meant, "I wish you were dead. Have a nice day. Dude."
And the body language was all screwed up out west. Art believed that your entire unconscious affect was determined by your upbringing. You learned how to stand, how to hold your face in repose, how to gesture, from the adults around you while you were growing up. The Pacific Standard Tribe always seemed a little bovine to him, their facial muscles long conditioned to relax into a kind of spacey, gullible senescence.
Beauty, too. Your local definition of attractive and ugly was conditioned by the people around you at puberty. There was a Pacific "look" that was indefinably off. Hard to say what it was, just that when he went out to a bar or got stuck on a crowded train, the girls just didn't seem all that attractive to him. Objectively, he could recognize their prettiness, but it didn't stir him the way the girls cruising the Chelsea Antiques Market or lounging around Harvard Square could.
He'd always felt at a slight angle to reality in California, something that was reinforced by his continuous efforts in the Tribe, from chatting and gaming until the sun rose, dragging his caffeine-deficient ass around to his clients in a kind of fog before going home, catching a nap and hopping back online at 3 or 4 when the high-octane NYC early risers were practicing work-avoidance and clattering around with their comms.
Gradually, he penetrated deeper into the Tribe, getting invites into private channels, intimate environments where he found himself spilling the most private details of his life. The Tribe stuck together, finding work for each other, offering advice, and it was only a matter of time before someone offered him a gig.