Eastern Standard Tribe

Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl to the sofa cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look at me. The doctor cleared his throat. "Group, this is Art. Glad you made it, Art. You're a little late, but we're just getting started here, so that's OK. This is Lucy, Fatima, and Manuel. Why don't you have a seat?" His voice was professionally smooth and stultifying.

I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust motes that danced in the sun streaming through the windows. It also exhaled a breath of trapped ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the parfum de asylum that gradually numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap and tried to look attentive.

"All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here, so you don't have to worry about not knowing what's what. There are no right or wrong things. The only rules are that you can't interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize, you have to criticize the idea, and not the person who said it. All right?"

"Sure," I said. "Sure. Let's get started."

"Well, aren't you eager?" the doctor said warmly. "OK. Manuel was just telling us about his friends."

"They're not my friends," Manuel said angrily. "They're the reason I'm here. I hate them."

"Go on," the doctor said.

"I already told you, yesterday! Tony and Musafir, they're trying to get rid of me. I make them look bad, so they want to get rid of me."

"Why do you think you make them look bad?"

"Because I'm better than them-I'm smarter, I dress better, I get better grades, I score more goals. The girls like me better. They hate me for it."

"Oh yeah, you're the cat's ass, pookie," Lucy said. She was about fifteen, voluminously fat, and her full lips twisted in an elaborate sneer as she spoke.

"Lucy," the doctor said patiently, favoring her with a patronizing smile. "That's not cool, OK? Criticize the idea, not the person, and only when it's your turn, OK?"

Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.

"All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any positive suggestions for Manuel?"

Stony silence.

"OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some of us are good at others. Your friends don't hate you, and I'm sure that if you think about it, you'll know that you don't hate them. Didn't they come visit you last weekend? Successful people are well liked, and you're no exception. We'll come back to this tomorrow-why don't you spend the time until then thinking of three examples of how your friends showed you that they liked you, and you can tell us about it tomorrow?"

Manuel stared out the window.

"OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you're here."

"I'm in for observation. There's a competency hearing at the end of the week."

Linda snorted and Fatima giggled.

The doctor ignored them. "But tell us why you think you ended up here."

"You want the whole story?"

"Whatever parts you think are important."

"It's a Tribal thing."

"I see," the doctor said.

"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you'd grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you'd never even think to question it. If you were a genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."

"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going to tell us how you ended up here."

"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."

"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city, chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go and-" I waved my hands, "be gay, right? But if you were from a small town, you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay-you might think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.