By the time I've driven to the school, the ambulance has still not arrived. Tanto is lying in the sickbay, which is dominated by a bunch of gaudy posters promoting the consumption of "angels' tears" (a health propaganda term for "water") and denigrating "demon suck" (a rather clunky term which apparently designates sugared soft drinks).
        Tanto recognizes me but is drowsy and is not particularly coherent. There is blood on his gums and the teacher who is sitting with him, the music teacher, Ms. Zantafali, the one who has that mysterious green false tooth jammed in amongst her ivories, tells me that he had a nose bleed earlier.
        "What was he doing when he, uh, collapsed?" I ask.
        "It was in Home Economics," says Ms. Zantafali. "The boys were strapping on these ... what can you call them? A kind of harness with a medicine ball. It gives them an idea of what it's like to be pregnant."
        It's not immediately clear to me why my fourteen year old son needs to experience a simulated pregnancy, but who am I to quibble with modern educational methods? I'm just a middle-aged taxpayer, remote from the world of education. My only function is to pay for it.
        "Anyway," says Ms. Zantafali, "Tanto strapped on the, the simulator weight, and then collapsed."
        I suppose it would be possible to construct a complicated psychodramatic explanation for this, if you were so minded, but I'm incapable of thinking that my indomitably perky hooligan of a son could be so psychologically fragile as to be overwhelmed by a spot of pregnancy playacting.
        Consequently, my son's collapse is, for the moment, without any convenient explanation. A bizarre aberration, which hints of terrifying possibilities. A stroke? Could Tanto possibly have had a stroke, at fourteen? Well ... there are party pills on the market which can do horrific damage at overdose levels. And Cousin Po is busy marketing party pills. So we can't rule out drugs. Or a brain tumor. Or epilepsy -- what do I know about epilepsy?
        What can I do? I feel helpless, out of my depth. I end up sitting there holding Tanto's hand, which is cold and clammy. His eyes focus on me then roll up into their sockets. He coughs, shudders, and seems to become unconscious. Is he still breathing? Yes. I take his pulse. It's thin, thready and irregular.
        Eventually, after what seems an interminable delay, the ambulance finally shows up. Tanto is loaded aboard and I follow it to Yendo Central Hospital, which turns out to be in a state of alarm bell chaos. There has been a major fire at the Watamakuni Chemical Plant in Ontonarauji, in the south of Yendo, and this has resulted in a mass evacuation. Many people have fallen ill as a consequence of breathing in toxic fumes. The hospital has been overwhelmed by incoming casualties and there are people waiting in the corridors for treatment.
        After a long time spent waiting on a stretcher in a corridor, Tanto is eventually transferred to a hospital bed in a ward full of people who seem ominously sick, one busy throwing up on a nonstop basis and another coughing recklessly all over the place. As a father, it doesn't seem right to me that my son should be in such proximity to sick people. They might have something contagious.
        Delay follows delay, until at last Tanto is seen by a boy doctor who decides that there's nothing wrong with him. By this time, Tanto is conscious again and fully mobile. The boy doctor, Shikarabunji by name, is all for discharging Tanto immediately, but I'm not having it. My son collapsed and there must be a reason for this. Faced with my intransigence, Shikarabunji goes off to get a second opinion.
        It's at that point that my cellphone rings, making me feel guilty, since the rules say my phone should be off. Guilt notwithstanding, I take the call. It's Kitty, phoning to see how things are going. I explain that the hospital wants to kick us out.
        "Don't let them do that," says Kitty. "Tell them you'll sue them."
        "That's uh ... well ... very Merlercian," I say.
        In Merlercia, it would probably be a credible threat. If you had a beef with the hospital system, you could probably find a lawyer ready to represent you on a contingency basis, and could go to war recklessly. But I can't imagine Mitodarni being ready to take on Yendo Central Hospital without very good reason, and a Nizonian law court would probably favor the hospital rather than the plaintiff. (A conservative bias is a natural consequence of having decisions made by a judge rather than by a jury.)
        "You don't have to sue them and win," says Kitty. "All you have to do is make the threat. Keep them from kicking Tanto out of hospital. He's very important to us."
        That's the point at which Shikarabunji returns with a female colleague who is as junior as he is. They're undecided as to what to do. I get her name as well, which is Warialana, and threaten to sue both of them for medical malpractice if anything goes wrong with my son.
        It's plain that they feel I'm being aggressively irrational, that I'm a kind of hypochondriac by proxy, projecting imaginary problems onto my perfectly healthy teenage son. But Kitty is right. The threat of legal action works. They decide that Tanto will get to see a neurologist, though we're warned that this will involve waiting for some hours.
        "Good," says Tanto, when the junior doctors have departed. "I want to get checked out. I felt really weird."
        "Weird?" I say. "I what way?"
        "Like, it was this, this big wave," says Tanto. "Big and heavy. Big water, with eels in it. Only the eels were furry, and they had teeth. Teeth like buttons."
        "What drugs have you been using?" I ask, trying to make sense of this hallucinatory image.
        "Dad," says Tanto, "no drugs. This just happened, okay? You know. Like Grandfather Hondo's stroke."
        "Grandfather Hondo's stroke happened when he was eight-six years old," I say.
        But Tanto cannot provide me with a simple, logical explanation for whatever problem has beset him. It remains an unexplained anomaly, an attack out of nowhere.
        I sit by Tanto's bed, waiting for the neurologist, a guy called ... whatever he's called. I was informed of his name but seem to have forgotten it. What I do remember is Kitty talking about Tanto and saying "He's very important to us." An odd turn of phrase, now I think about it. Who is "us" in this context? Logically, it would seem to mean "you, Ken, and your family." But, rightly or wrongly, I get the feeling that Kitty's choice of words betray an inappropriate proprietary attitude.
        As if Tanto belonged to her world of "us," to the world of Merlercia, to the world of South Zeast Commercial Acquisitions. Which doesn't make sense. Tanto is a fourteen year old kid whose talents do not extend beyond smashing windows and (in theory, at least) impregnating incautious girlfriends. His world of comic books and bubblegum irresponsibility nowhere intersects with the hard-nosed world of a bunch of property speculators like the South Zeast mob.
        I tell myself that I should make a conscious effort to relax out of my anxieties, and eventually do so with such success that I doze off in the chair at Tanto's bedside, much to Tanto's disgust. As he makes it clear, after he wakes me up, I'm his father, and I shouldn't be downplaying the drama of what he portentously refers to as his "crisis".