bs were more theoretically soothing than actually so. They
had rather high walls and a rather low water level, both for modesty's sake and
to prevent spills. Art passed through the miniature sauna/shower and into the
tub after his massage, somewhere over Newfoundland, and just as the plane hit
turbulence, buffeting him with chlorinated water that stung his eyes and got up
his nose and soaked the magazine on offshore investing that he'd found in the
back of his seat pocket.

He landed at JFK still smelling of chlorine and sandalwood massage oil and the
cantaloupe-scented lotion in the fancy toilets. Tension melted away from him as
he meandered to the shuttle stop. The air had an indefinable character of
homeliness, or maybe it was the sunlight. Amateur Tribal anthropologists were
always thrashing about light among themselves, arguing about the sun's character
varying from latitude to latitude, filtered through this city's pollution
signature or that.

The light or the air, the latitude or the smog, it felt like home. The women
walked with a reassuring, confident *clack clack clack* of heel on hard tile;
the men talked louder than was necessary to one another or to their comms. The
people were a riot of ethnicities and their speech was a riotous babel of
accents, idioms and languages. Aggressive pretzel vendors vied with aggressive
panhandlers to shake down the people waiting on the shuttle bus. Art bought a
stale, sterno-reeking pretzel that was crusted with inedible volumes of
yellowing salt and squirted a couple bucks at a panhandler who had been
pestering him in thick Jamaican patois but thanked him in adenoidal Brooklynese.

By the time he boarded his connection to Logan he was joggling his knees
uncontrollably in his seat, his delight barely contained. He got an undrinkable
can of watery Budweiser and propped it up on his tray table alongside his
inedible pretzel and arranged them in a kind of symbolic tableau of all things
ESTian.

He commed Fede from the guts of the tunnels that honeycombed Boston, realizing
with a thrill as Fede picked up that it was two in the morning in London, at the
nominal GMT+0, while here at GMT-5 -- at the default, plus-zero time zone of his
life, livelihood and lifestyle -- it was only 9PM.

"Fede!" Art said into the comm.

"Hey, Art!" Fede said, with a false air of chipperness that Art recognized from
any number of middle-of-the-night calls.

There was a cheap Malaysian comm that h