Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
10
She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he’d collapsed in.
“I need to get Georgie out of the car,” he said. “I’m going to leave him in the cave. It’s right.”
She bit her lip and nodded slowly. “I can help you with that,” she said.
“I don’t need help,” he said lamely.
“I didn’t say you did, but I can help anyway.”
They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and looked down.
The journey hadn’t been good to Gregg. He’d come undone from his winding sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.
Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung to his fingers.
Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she’d been shaking him for some time. “You can’t do that here,” she said. “Would you listen to me? You can’t do that here. Someone will see.” She held something up. His keys.
“I’ll back it up to the trailhead,” she said. “Close the trunk and wait for me there.”
She got behind the wheel and he sloped off to the trailhead and stood, numbly, holding the lump on his forehead and staring at a rusted Coke can in a muddy puddle.
She backed the car up almost to his shins, put it in park, and came around to the trunk. She popped the lid and looked in and wrinkled her nose.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll get him covered and we’ll carry him up the hill.”
“Mimi –” he began. “Mimi, it’s okay. You don’t need to go in there for me. I know it’s hard for you –”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m over it, Andy. Now that I know what’s up there, it’s not scary any longer.”
He watched her shoulders work, watched her wings work, as she wrapped up his brother. When she was done, he took one end of the bundle and hoisted it, trying to ignore the rain of skin and hair that shook off over the bumper and his trousers.
“Up we go,” she said, and moved to take the front. “Tell me when to turn.”
They had to set him down twice before they made it all the way up the hill. The first time, they just stood in silence, wiping their cramped hands on their thighs. The second time, she came to him and put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek that felt like a feather.
“Almost there?” she said.
He nodded and bent to pick up his end.
Mimi plunged through the cave mouth without a moment’s hesitation and they set him down just inside the entrance, near a pair of stained cotton Y-fronts.
Alan waited for his heart to stop thudding and the sweat to cool on his brow and then he kicked the underwear away as an afterthought.
“God,” he said. She moved to him, put her arm around his shoulder.
“You’re being brave,” she said.
“God,” he said again.
“Let it out, you know, if you want to.”
But he didn’t, he wanted to sit down. He moved to his mother’s side and leaned against her.
Mimi sat on her hunkers before him and took his hand and tried to tilt his chin up with one finger, but he resisted her pull and she rose and began to explore the cave. He heard her stop near Marci’s skeleton for a long while, then move some more. She circled him and his mother, then opened her lid and stared into her hamper. He wanted to tell her not to touch his mother, but the words sounded ridiculous in his head and he didn’t dare find out how stupid they sounded moving through freespace.
And then the washing machine bucked and made a snapping sound and hummed to life.
The generator’s dead, he thought. And she’s all rusted through. And still the washing machine moved. He heard the gush of water filling her, a wet and muddy sound.
“What did you do?” he asked. He climbed slowly to his feet, facing away from his mother, not wanting to see her terrible bucking as she wobbled on her broken foot.
“Nothing,” Mimi said. “I just looked inside and it started up.”
He stared at his mother, enraptured, mesmerized. Mimi stole alongside of him and he noticed that she’d taken off her jacket and the sweatshirt, splaying out her wings around her.
Her hand found his and squeezed. The machine rocked. His mother rocked and gurgled and rushed, and then she found some local point of stability and settled into a soft rocking rhythm.
The rush of water echoed off the cave walls, a white-noise shushing that sounded like skis cutting through powder. It was a beautiful sound, one that transported him to a million mornings spent waiting for the boys’ laundry to finish and be hung on the line.
All gone
He jerked his head up so fast that something in his neck cracked, needling pain up into his temples and forehead. He looked at Mimi, but she gave no sign of having heard the voice, the words, All gone.
All gone
Mimi looked at him and cocked her head. “What?” she said.
He touched her lips with a finger, forgetting to be mindful of the swelling there, and she flinched away. There was a rustle of wings and clothing.
My sons, all my sons, gone.
The voice emerged from that white-noise roar of water humming and sloshing back and forth in her basket. Mimi squeezed his hand so hard he felt the bones grate.
“Mom?” he said softly, his voice cracking. He took half a step toward the washer.
So tired. I’m worn out. I’ve been worn out.
He touched the enamel on the lid of the washer, and felt the vibrations through his fingertips. “I can – I can take you home,” he said. “I’ll take care of you, in the city.”
Too late
There was a snapping sound and then a front corner of the machine settled heavily. One rusted out foot, broken clean off, rolled across the cave floor.
The water sounds stilled.
Mimi breathed some words, something like Oh my God, but maybe in another language, or maybe he’d just forgotten his own tongue.
“I need to go,” he said.
They stayed in a different motel on their way home from the mountain, and Mimi tried to cuddle him as he lay in the bed, but her wings got in the way, and he edged over to his side until he was almost falling off before she took the hint and curled up on her side. He lay still until he heard her snore softly, then rose and went and sat on the toilet, head in his hands, staring at the moldy grout on the tiled floor in the white light, trying not to think of the bones, the hank of brittle red hair, tied tightly in a shopping bag in the trunk of the rental car.
Sunrise found him pacing the bathroom, waiting for Mimi to stir, and when she padded in and sat on the toilet, she wouldn’t meet his eye. He found himself thinking of her standing in the tub, rolled towel between her teeth, as Krishna approached her wings with his knife, and he went back into the room to dress.
“We going to eat breakfast?” she asked in the smallest voice.
He said nothing, couldn’t will himself to talk.
“There’s still food in the car,” she said after some silence had slipped by. “We can eat that.”
And without any more words, they climbed into the car and he put the pedal down, all the way to Toronto, stopping only once for gas and cigarettes after he smoked all the ones left in her pack.
When they cleared the city limits and drove under the viaduct at Danforth Avenue, getting into the proper downtown, he eased off the Parkway and into the city traffic, taking the main roads with their high buildings and stoplights and people, people, people.
“We’re going home?” she said. The last thing she’d said was, “Are you hungry?” fourteen hours before and he’d only shook his head.
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
Was Krishna home? She was rooting in her purse now, and he knew that she was looking for her knife.
“You staying with me?” he said.
“Can I?” she said. They were at a red light, so he looked into her eyes. They were shiny and empty as marbles.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. And I will have a word with Krishna.”
She looked out the window. “I expect he’ll want to have a word with you, too.”
Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he’d moved into the house, he’d felt the shape of that story. All the while that he’d sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.
But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him, fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening sentence,
I suspect that my father is dead
and deleted it. Then undid the delete.
He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb, paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his sentence.
My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue’s roof for God knows how long.
The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited it. He hit the delete key.
The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because she could always while away the hours looking up the rental histories of the popular girls who’d shunned her in high school.
That’s when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit the text editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, he thought.
“Link!” he said. “Come in!”
The kid had put on ten or fifteen pounds since they’d first met, and no longer made Alan want to shout, Someone administer a sandwich stat! Most of it was muscle from hard riding as a bike messenger, a gig that Link had kept up right through the cold winter, dressing up like a gore-tex Martian in tights and ski goggles and a fleece that showed hints of purple beneath its skin of crusted road salt and pollution.
Andrew had noticed the girls in the Market and at Kurt’s shop noticing Link, whose spring wardrobe showed off all that new muscle to new effect, and gathered from the various hurt looks and sulks from the various girls that Link was getting more ass than a toilet-seat.
Her brother spent the winter turning into the kind of stud that she’d figured out how to avoid before she finished high school, and it pained her to see the hordes of dumb-bunnies making goo-goo eyes at him.
That would be a good second sentence for his story.
“You okay, Abby?” Link said, looking concerned. Albert realized that he’d been on another planet for a moment there.
“Sorry, just fell down a rabbit hole,” he said, flapping his arms comically. “I was writing “ – felt good to say that – “and I’m in a bit of a, how you say, creative fog.”
Link took a step back. “I don’t want to disturb you,” he said.
But for all that, she still approved his outfits before he left the house, refusing to let him succumb to the ephemeral awful trendiness of mesh-back caps and too-tight boy-scout jamboree shirts. Instead, she put him into slightly fitted cotton shirts that emphasized his long lean belly and his broad shoulders.
“Don’t sweat it. I could use a break. Come in and have a drink or something.” He checked the yellowing face of the tick-tock clock he kept on the mantelpiece and saw that it was just past noon. “Past lunchtime, that means that it’s okay to crack a beer. You want a beer?”
And for all that, her brother still managed to come home looking like some kind of frat-rat pussy-hound, the kind of boy she’d always hoped he wouldn’t be.
“Beer would be great,” Link said. He stepped into the cool of the living room and blinked as his eyes adjusted. “This really is a hell of a place,” he said, looking around at the glass cases, the teetering stacks of books that Andrew had pulled down and not reshelved, making ziggurats of them instead next to all the chairs.
“What can I do for you?” Adam said, handing him a glass of Upper Canada Lager with a little wedge of lime. He’d bought a few cases of beer that week and had been going through them steadily in the living room, paging through the most favored of his books, trying to find something, though he wasn’t sure what.
Link sipped. “Summer’s here,” he said.
“Yeah,” Alan said.
“Well, the thing is, summer. I’m going to be working longer hours and, you know, evenings. Well. I mean. I’m 19 years old, Andy.”
Alan raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. “What’s the message you’re trying to convey to me, Link?”
“I’m not going to be going around your friend’s shop anymore. I really had fun doing it all year, but I want to try something different with my spare time this summer, you understand?”
“Sure,” Alan said. He’d had kids quit on him before. That’s what kids did. Attention spans.
“Right. And, well, you know: I never really understood what we were doing...”
“Which part?”
“The WiFi stuff –”
“Well, you see –”
“Stop, okay? I’ve heard you explain it ten times now and I still don’t get it. Maybe after a semester or two of electrical engineering it’ll make more sense.”
“Okay,” Adam said, smiling broadly to show no hard feelings. “Hey,” he said, carefully. “If you didn’t understand what we were doing, then why did you do it?”
Link cocked his head, as if examining him for traces of sarcasm, then looked away. “I don’t know. It was exciting, even if I didn’t quite get it. Everyone else seemed to get it, sort of, and it was fun to work alongside of them, and sometimes the money was okay.”
Which is why she decided to – Damn, what did she decide to do? That was shaping up to be a really good opener.
Which is why she wasn’t surprised when he didn’t come home for three nights in a row.
Aha.
“No hard feelings, Link,” Adam said. “I’m really grateful for the help you gave us and I hope you’ll think about helping again in the fall...”
But on the fourth night, she got worried, and she started calling his friends. They were all poor students, so none of them had land-line numbers you could look up in the phone book, but that was okay, since they all had accounts with the video store where she worked, with their deadbeat pre-paid mobile numbers listed.
“Yeah, that sounds great, you know, September, it gets dark early. Just got word that I got into Ryerson for the fall, so I’ll be taking engineering classes. Maybe I can help out that way?”
“Perfect,” Alan said. Link took a step backward, drained his beer, held out the glass.
“Well, thanks,” Link said, and turned. Alan reached past him and opened the door. There were a couple of girls there, little suburban girls of the type that you could find by the hatful in the Market on Saturday mornings, shopping for crazy clothes at the vintage shops. They looked 14, but might have been as old as 16 or 17 and just heartbreakingly naive. Link looked over his shoulder and had the decency to look slightly embarrassed as they smiled at him.
“Okay, thanks, then,” he said, and one of the girls looked past him to get a glimpse inside the house. Andy instinctively stepped aside to give her a better view of his showroom and he was about to offer her a soda before he caught himself.
“You’ve got a nice place,” she said. “Look at all those books!”
Her friend said, “Have you read all those books?” She was wearing thick concealer over her acne, but she had a round face and heart-shaped lips that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see on the cover of a magazine. She said it with a kind of sneer.
Link said, “Are you kidding? What’s the point of a houseful of books you’ve already read?”
They both laughed adoringly – if Adam was feeling uncharitable, he’d say it was simpering, not laughing, and took off for the exciting throngs in the Market.
Alan watched them go, with Link’s empty glass in one hand and his full glass in the other. It was hot out in the Market, sunny, and it felt like the spring had rushed up on him and taken him by surprise when he wasn’t looking. He had owned the house for more than a year now, and the story only had three or four paragraphs to it (and none of them were written down yet!).
"You can’t wash shit,” is what her mother said when she called home and asked what she should do about her brother. “That kid’s been a screw-up since he was five years old.”
He should write the story down. He went back upstairs and sat down at the keyboard and pecked out the sentences that had come to him, but they seemed very sterile there aglow on the screen, in just the same way that they’d felt restless and alive a moment before. The sunny day beamed through the study window and put a glare up on his screen that made it hard to type, and when he moved to the other side of the desk, he found himself looking out window at the city and the spring.
He checked his calendar and his watch and saw that he only had a couple hours before the reporter from NOW magazine came by. The reporter – a summer intern – was the only person to respond to his all-fluff press release on the open network. He and Kurt had argued about the wording all night and when he was done, he almost pitched it out, as the editorial thrash had gutted it to the point of meaninglessness.
Oh well. The breeze made the new leaves in the trees across the street sway, and now the sun was in his eyes, and the sentences were inert on the screen.
He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the house as fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn’t leave then, he wouldn’t get out all day.
As he got closer to Kurt’s storefront, he slowed down. The crowds were thick, laughing suburban kids and old men in buttoned-up cardigans and fisherman’s caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths and punks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth.
He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shop apartments, passing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between his knees. Link didn’t see him, he was laughing at something the boy behind him said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he’d shaved his head and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along the double seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked like it had been abandoned on the set of Space: 1999.
Krishna had his own little girl between his knees, with heart-shaped lips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually on her shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it.
Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flattening himself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to see Mimi, and wanting to rush out and shield her from the sight, but she was nowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his?
And then he spied Natalie, standing at the other end of the street, holding on to the handles of one of the show bicycles out front of Bikes on Wheels. She was watching her brother closely, with narrowed eyes.
It was her fault, in some way. Or at least she thought it was. She’d caught him looking at Internet porn and laughed at him, humiliating him, telling him he should get out and find a girl whose last name wasn’t “Jpeg.”
He saw that her hands were clenched into fists and realized that his were, too.
It was her fault in some way, because she’d seen the kind of person he was hanging out with and she hadn’t done a thing about it.
He moved into the crowd and waded through it, up the street on the opposite side from his neighbors. He closed in on Natalie and ended up right in front of her before she noticed he was there.
“Oh!” she said, and blushed hard. She’d been growing out her hair for a couple months and it was long enough to clip a couple of barrettes to. With the hair, she looked less skinny, a little older, a little less vulnerable. She tugged at a hank of it absently. “Hi.”
“We going to do anything about that?” he said, jerking his head toward the steps. Krishna had his hand down the little girl’s top now, cupping her breast, then laughing when she slapped it away.
She shrugged, bit her lip. She shook her head angrily. “None of my business. None of your business.”
She looked at her feet. “Look, there’s a thing I’ve been meaning to tell you. I don’t think I can keep on volunteering at the shop, okay? I’ve got stuff to do, assignments, and I’m taking some extra shifts at the store –”
He held up a hand. “I’m grateful for all the work you’ve done, Natalie. You don’t need to apologize.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked indecisively around, then seemed to make up her mind and she hugged him hard. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
It struck him as funny. “I can take care of myself just fine, don’t worry about me for a second. You still looking for fashion work? I think Tropic?l will be hiring for the summer. I could put in that phone-call.”
“No,” she said. “No, that’s okay.” She looked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. He turned around and saw that Krishna and Link had spotted them, and that Krishna was whispering something in Link’s ear that was making Link grin nastily.
“I should go,” she said. Krishna’s hand was still down the little girl’s top, and he jiggled her breast at Alan.
The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an attitude.
“So here’s what I don’t get. You’ve got the Market wired –”
“Unwired,” Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.
“Unwired, right.” The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming, Yes, that is a very cute jargon you’ve invented, dork. “You’ve got the Market unwired and you’re going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street.”
“Well, eventually,” Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks...it had no focus, it wasn’t a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He’d tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she’d been totally lost.
“Eventually?” The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who’d been volunteering in the shopfront when he’d appeared.
“That’s the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference.” Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.
“Okay, that’s the goal.”
“But it’s not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself – hell, the network is people. So we’ve got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in.”
“And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?”
Kurt nodded vigorously. “Zactly.”
“And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?”
Alan nodded slowly. “We’ve been thinking about a mapping application –”
“But we decided that it was stupid,” Kurt said. “No one needed to draw a map of the Web – it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don’t need centralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking –”
“The chains on my mind?” The kid snorted.
Alan held his hands up placatingly. “Wait a second,” he said. “Let’s take a step back here and talk about values. The project here is about free expression and cooperation. Sure, it’d be nice to have a city-wide network, but in my opinion, it’s a lot more important to have a city full of people working on that network because they value expression and understand how cooperation gets us more of that.”
“And we’ll get this free expression how?”
“By giving everyone free Internet access.”
The kid laughed and shook his head. “That’s a weird kind of ’free,’ if you don’t mind my saying so.” He flipped over his phone. “I mean, it’s like, ’Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and want to sit down and type on it.’”
“I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks,” Kurt said. “We’re drowning in PC parts.”
“Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free expression so long as you’re sitting at home with your PC plugged into the wall?”
“Well, it’s not like we’re talking about displacing all the other kinds of expression,” Alan said. “This is in addition to all the ways you’ve had to talk –”
“Right, like this thing,” the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. “This was free – not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars – just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone’s got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actual talking.“
The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.
Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.
“But that’s communication through the phone company,” Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn’t see how sucktastic that proposition was. “How is that free speech?”
The kid rolled his eyes. “Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other – even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.
“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don’t give us real democracy. It’s so much bullshit.”
He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt’s mouth hung open.
“I’m not old,” he said finally.
“You’re older than me,” the kid said. His tone softened. “Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy.”
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt’s shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there’s a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day” – he thought of Lyman – “this is the phone company we’re talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.
“Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network – even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.
“If you invent a new way of using the phone network – say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can’t roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, ’Hey, I’ve invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?’
“But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.
“So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it’s not tied to the phone network. It doesn’t care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It’s got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That’s why we care about this.”
The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he’d heard this already.
“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for free. I can talk to everyone with it. I can say anything I want. I can use it anywhere. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I’m being censored?”
“Of course not,” Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Fine, it’s not an either-or thing. You can have your phones, I can have my Internet, and we’ll both do our thing. It’s not like the absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges are good for free expression, Christ. We’re trying to unbreak the net so that no one can own it or control it. We’re trying to put it on every corner of the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We’re doing it with recycled garbage, and we’re paying homeless teenagers enough money to get off the street as part of the program. What’s not to fucking like?”
The kid scribbled hard on his pad. “Now you’re giving me some quotes I can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. ’What’s not to fucking like?’ That’s good.”
He and Link saw each other later that day, and Link still had his two little girls with him, sitting on the patio at the Greek’s, drinking beers, and laughing at his jokes.
“Hey, you’re the guy with the books,” one of them said when he passed by.
He stopped and nodded. “That’s me, all right,” he said.
Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff of shredded paper in the ashtray before him. “Hey, Abe,” he said.
“Hey, Link,” he said. He looked down at the little girls’ bags. “You’ve made some finds,” he said. “Congratulations.”
They were wearing different clothes now – double-knit neon pop-art dresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flashing beneath the tabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, which seemed comically large in their hands.
Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek’s and saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn’t smart enough to know that serving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.
“Where’s Krishna?” he asked.
One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.
And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it’s your fault that something has turned to shit, you have to wash shit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that, step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up.
“He took off,” the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during the day and her acne wasn’t so bad that she’d needed it. “He took off running, like he’d forgotten something important. Looked scared.”
“Why don’t you go get more beers,” Link said angrily, cutting her off, and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna’s Renfield, a recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that remained of Darrel.
And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the simple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them.
She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes.
“Where’d he go, Link?” Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to go somewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about.
Link’s expression closed up like a door slamming shut. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know?”
The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer.
Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle.
“The Greek would bar you for life if he knew you were bringing underaged drinkers into here,” Alan said.
“Plenty of other bars in the Market,” Link said, shrugging his newly broad shoulders elaborately.
Trey was the kid who’d known her brother since third grade and whose puberty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utter turd. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper, fetishizing her panties, and she’d shouted at him and he’d just ducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapable of wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would enjoy this.
“And they all know the Greek,” Alan said. “Three, two, one.” He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“Wait!” Link called. The girl swallowed a giggle. He sounded desperate and not cool at all anymore.
Alan stopped and turned his body halfway, looking impatiently over his shoulder.
Link mumbled something.
“What?”
“Behind Kurt’s place,” Link said. “He said he was going to go look around behind Kurt’s place.”
“Thank you, Link,” he said. He turned all the way around and got down to eye level with the other girl. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He wanted to tell her, Be careful or Stay alert or Get out while the getting’s good, but none of that seemed likely to make much of an impression on her.
She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. “You’ve got a great house,” she said.
Her friend said, “Yeah, it’s amazing.”
“Well, thank you,” he said.
“Bye,” they said.
Link’s gaze bored into the spot between his shoulder blades the whole way to the end of the block.
The back-alleys of Kensington were a maze of coach houses, fences, dead ends and narrow doorways. Kids who knew their secrets played ball-hockey nearly undisturbed by cars, junkies turned them into reeking pissoirs, homeless people dossed down in the lees of their low, crazy-angled buildings, teenagers came and necked around corners.
But Alan knew their secrets. He’d seen the aerial maps, and he’d clambered their length and breadth and height with Kurt, checking sight lines for his network, sticking virtual pushpins into the map on his screen where he thought he could get some real benefit out of an access point.
So once he reached Kensington Avenue, he slipped behind a Guyanese patty stand and stepped through a wooden gate and began to make his way to the back of Kurt’s place. Cautiously.
From behind, the riot of colors and the ramshackle signs and subculture of Kensington was revealed as a superfice, a skin stretched over slightly daggy brick two-stories with tiny yards and tumbledown garages. From behind, he could be walking the back ways of any anonymous housing development, a no-personality greyzone of nothing and no one.
The sun went behind a cloud and the whole scene turned into something monochromatic, a black-and-white clip from an old home movie.
Carefully, he proceeded. Carefully, slipping from doorway to doorway, slipping up the alleyway to the next, to the corner that led to the alley that led to Kurt’s. Carefully, listening, watching.
And he managed to sneak up on Krishna and Davey, and he knew that for once, he’d be in the position to throw the rocks.
Krishna sat with his back against the cinderblock wall near Kurt’s back door, knees and hands splayed, head down in a posture of supplication. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, which he nervously shifted from corner to corner, like a soggy toothpick. Behind him, standing atop the dented and scabrous garbage cans, Dumont.
He rested his head on his folded arms, which he rested on the sill, and he stood on tiptoe to see in the window.
“I’m hungry,” Krishna said. “I want to go get some food. Can I go and get food and come back?”
“Quiet,” Dewayne said. “Not another fucking word, you sack of shit.” He said it quietly in a neutral tone that was belied by his words. He settled his head back on his folded forearms like a babe settling its head in a bosom and looked back through the window. “Ah,” he said, like he had taken a drink.
Krishna climbed slowly to his feet and stood off a pace or two, staring at Drew. He reached into the pocket of his old bomber jacket and found a lighter and flicked it nervously a couple times.
“Don’t you light that cigarette,” Davey said. “Don’t you dare.”
“How long are we going to be here?” Krishna’s whine was utterly devoid of his customary swagger.
“What kind of person is he?” Davey said. “What kind of person is he? He is in love with my brother, looks at him with cow-eyes when he sees him, hangs on his words like a love-struck girl.” He laughed nastily. “Like your love-struck girl, like she looks at him.
“I wonder if he’s had her yet. Do you think he has?”
“I don’t care,” Krishna said petulantly, and levered himself to his feet. He began to pace and Alan hastily backed himself into the doorway he’d been hiding in. “She’s mine, no matter who she’s fucking. I own her.”
“Look at that,” Darrel said. “Look at him talking to them, his little army, like a general giving them a pep talk. He got that from my brother, I’m sure. Everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of manipulators who run other people’s lives.”
Alan’s stomach clenched in on itself, and his butt and thighs ached suddenly, like he’d been running hard. He thought about his prot?g?s with their shops and their young employees, learning the trade from them as they’d learned it from him. How long had Don been watching him?
“When are we going to do it?” Krishna spat out his cigarette and shook another out of his pack and stuck it in his mouth.
“Don’t light it,” Drew said. “We’re going to do it when I say it’s time to do it. You have to watch first – watching is the most important part. It’s how you find out what needs doing and to whom. It’s how you find out where you can do the most damage.”
“I know what needs doing,” Krishna said. “We can just go in there and trash the place and fuck him up. That’d suit me just fine. Send the right message, too.”
Danny hopped down off the trash can abruptly and Krishna froze in his paces at the dry rasp of hard blackened skin on the pavement. Davey walked toward him in a bowlegged, splay-hipped gait that was more a scuttle than a walk, the motion of some inhuman creature not accustomed to two legs.
“Have you ever watched your kind, ever? Do you understand them, even a little? Just because you managed to get a little power over one of my people, you think you understand it all. You don’t. That one in there is bone-loyal to my brother. If you vandalized his little shop, he’d just go to my brother for protection and end up more loyal and more. Please stop thinking you know anything, it’ll make it much easier for us to get along.”
Krishna stiffened. “I know things,” he said.
“Your pathetic little birdie girl is nothing,” Davey said. He stumped over to Krishna, stood almost on his toes, looking up at him. Krishna took an involuntary step backward. “A little one-off, a changeling without clan or magic of any kind.”
Krishna stuck his balled fists into the pockets of his space-age future-sarcastic jacket. “I know something about you,” he said. “About your kind.”
“Oh, yes?” Davey’s tone was low, dangerous.
“I know how to recognize you, even when you’re passing for normal. I know how to spot you in a crowd, in a second.” He smiled. “You’ve been watching my kind all your life, but I’ve been watching your kind for all of mine. I’ve seen you on the subway and running corner stores, teaching in classrooms and driving to work.”
Davey smiled then, showing blackened stumps. “Yes, you can, you certainly can.” He reached out one small, delicate hand and stroked the inside of Krishna’s wrist. “You’re very clever that way, you are.” Krishna closed his eyes and breathed heavily through his nose, as though in pain or ecstasy. “That’s a good skill to have.”
They stood there for a moment while Davey slowly trailed his fingertips over Krishna’s wrist. Then, abruptly, he grabbed Krishna’s thumb and wrenched it far back. Krishna dropped abruptly to his knees, squeaking in pain.
“You can spot my kind, but you know nothing about us. You are nothing, do you understand me?” Krishna nodded slowly. Alan felt a sympathetic ache in his thumb and a sympathetic grin on his face at the sight of Krishna knelt down and made to acquiesce. “You understand me?” Krishna nodded again.
Davey released him and he climbed slowly to his feet. Davey took his wrist again, gently. “Let’s get you something to eat,” he said.
Before Alan knew it, they were nearly upon him, walking back down the alley straight toward his hiding place. Blood roared in his ears and he pressed his back up against the doorway. They were only a step or two away, and after a couple of indiscreetly loud panting gasps, he clamped his lips shut and held his breath.
There was no way they could miss him. He pressed his back harder against the door, and it abruptly swung open and a cold hand wrapped itself around his bicep and pulled his through into a darkened, oil- and must-smelling garage.
He tripped over his own heel and started to go over, but a pair of hands caught him and settled him gently to the floor.
“Quiet,” came a hoarse whisper in a voice he could not place.
And then he knew who his rescuer was. He stood up silently and gave Billy a long hug. He was as skinny as death.
Trey’s phone number was still current in the video store’s database, so she called him.
"Hey, Trey,” she said. “It’s Lara." "Lara, heeeeeeyyyy,” he said, in a tone that left no doubt that he was picturing her panties. “Sorry, your bro ain’t here.”
"Want to take me out to dinner tonight?" The silence on the other end of the line made her want to laugh, but she bit her lip and rolled her eyes and amused the girl browsing the chop-socky epics and visibly eavesdropping.
"Trey?" "Lara, uh, yes, I’d love to, sure. Is this like a group thing or...”
"No, Trey, I thought I’d keep this between the two of us. I’ll be at the store until six – meet me here?”
"Yeah, okay. Okay! Sure. I’ll see you tonight.”
Brad was so thin he looked like a corpse. He was still tall, though, and his hair and beard were grown out into long, bad-smelling straggles of knot and grime. In the half-light of the garage, he had the instantly identifiable silhouette of a street person.
He gathered Adam up in a hug that reeked of piss and booze, a hug like a bundle of twigs in his arms.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Andrew backed away and held him at arm’s length. His skin had gone to deep creases lined with soot, his eyes filmed with something that looked like pond scum.
“Brady. What are you doing here?”
He held a finger up to his lips, then opened the door again onto the now-empty alley. Alan peered the way that Davey and Krishna had gone, just in time to see them turn a distant corner.
“Give it another minute,” Blake said, drawing the door nearly closed again. A moment later, they heard another door open and then Kurt’s chain-draped boots jangled past, headed the other way. They listened to them recede, and then Brian swung the door wide again.
“It’s okay now,” he said.
They stepped out into the sunlight and Bert started to walk slowly away. Alan caught up with him and Bert took his arm with long bony fingers, leaning on him. He had a slight limp.
“Where have you been?” Alan asked when they had gone halfway home through deft, confident turnings led by Blake.
“Watching you,” he said. “Of course. When I came to the city, I worked out at the racetrack for a week and made enough money to live off of for a couple months, and avoided the tough guys who watched me winning and waited to catch me alone at the streetcar stop. I made enough and then I went to watch you.
“I knew where you were, of course. Always knew where you were. I could see you whenever I closed my eyes. I knew when you opened your shops and I went by at night and in the busy parts of the day so that I could get a better sense of them. I kept an eye on you, Alan, watched over you. I had to get close enough to smell you and hear you and see you, though, it wasn’t enough to see you in my mind.
“Because I had to know the why. I could see the what, but I had to know the why – why were you opening your stores? Why were you saying the things you said? I had to get close enough because from the outside, it’s impossible to tell if you’re winking because you’ve got a secret, or if you’ve got dust in your eye, or if you’re making fun of someone who’s winking, or if you’re trying out a wink to see how it might feel later.
“It’s been four years I’ve been watching you when I could, going back to the track for more when I ran out of money, and you know what? I know what you’re doing.”
Alan nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“You’re watching. You’re doing what I’m doing. You’re watching them to figure out what they’re doing.”
Alvin nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“You don’t know any more about the world than I do.”
Albert nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
Billy shook his head and leaned more heavily on Alan’s arm. “I want a drink,” he said.
“I’ve got some vodka in the freezer,” Alan said.
“I’ll take some of the Irish whiskey on the sideboard in the living room.”
Adam looked at him sharply and he shrugged and smiled an apologetic smile. “I’ve been watching,” he said.
They crossed the park together and Buddy stopped to look hard at the fountain. “That’s where he took Edward, right? I saw that.”
“Yeah,” Alvin said. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Gone.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Yeah.”
They started walking now, Billy’s limp more pronounced.
“What’s with your leg?”
“My foot. I lost a couple toes last year to frostbite and never got them looked at properly.” He reeked of piss and booze.
“They didn’t...grow back?”
Bradley shook his head. “They didn’t,” he said. “Not mine. Hello, Krishna,” he said.
Alan looked to his neighbors’ porch. Krishna stood there, stock still, against the wall.
“Friend of yours, huh?” Krishna said. “Boyfriend?”
“He offered me a bottle of wine if I let him take me home,” Bradley said. “Best offer I had all week. Wanna make it a threesome? An ’ow you say ’mange ma twat?’”
Krishna contorted his face into an elaborate sneer. “Puke,” he said.
“Bye, Krishna,” Buddy said. Alan put his key into the lock and let them in.
Blaine made a hobbling beeline for the sideboard and picked up the Jim Beam Apollo 8 commemorative decanter that Adam kept full of Bushmills 1608 and poured himself a tall glass of it. He drank it back in two swallows, then rolled his tongue around in his mouth with his eyes closed while he breathed out the fumes.
“I have been thinking about that bottle ever since you bought it,” he said. “This stuff is legendary. God, that’s good. I mean, that’s fucking magical.”
“It’s good,” Andrew said. “You can have more if you want.”
“Yeah,” Burke said, and poured out another drink. He carried it and the decanter to the sofa and settled into it. “Nice sofa,” he said. “Nice living room. Nice house. Not very normal, though.”
“No,” Andrew said. “I’m not fitting in very well.”
“I fit in great.” He drank back another glug of whiskey and poured out another twenty dollars’ worth. “Just great, it’s the truth. I’m totally invisible and indistinguishable. I’ve been sleeping at the Scott Mission for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can’t even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes or my food in the night, I’m always awake and watching them and just shaking my head.”
The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac tinge. “What if I find you some clothes and a towel?”
“Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration and become visible again?” He drank more, breathed out the fumes. “Sure, why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You’ve seen me, Krishna’s seen me. Davey’s gonna see me. Least I got to see them first.”
And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets – though the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which neither of them had.
And so he let his brother trim away his beard, first with scissors and then with an electric razor, and so he let his brother brush out his long hair and tie it back with an elastic taken from around a bunch of broccoli in the vegetable crisper.
And so, by the time the work was done and he was dressed in too-big clothes that hung over his sunken chest and spindly legs like a tent, he was quite sober and quite clean and quite different.
“You look fine,” Adam said, as Brent fingered his chin and watched the reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of Alan’s study. “You look great.”
“I look conspicuous. Visible. Used to be that eyes just slid off of me. Now they’ll come to rest on me, if only for a few seconds.”
Andy nodded. “Sure, that’s right. You know, being invisible isn’t the same as being normal. Normal people are visible.”
“Yeah,” Brad said, nodding miserably. He pawed again at the smooth hollows of his cheeks.
“You can stay in here,” Alan said, gesturing at his study. The desk and his laptop and his little beginning of a story sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by a litter of access points in various stages of repair and printed literature full of optimistic, nontechnical explanations of ParasiteNet. “I’ll move all that stuff out.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “You should. Just put it in the basement in boxes. I’ve been watching you screw around with that wireless stuff and you know, it’s not real normal, either. It’s pretty desperately weird. Danny’s right – that Kurt guy, following you around, like he’s in love with you. That’s not normal.” He flushed, and his hands were in fists. “Christ, Adam, you’re living in this goddamned museum and nailing those stupid science-fair projects to the sides of buildings. You’ve got this comet tail of druggy kids following you around, buying dope with the money they make off of the work they do for you. You’re not just visible, you’re strobing, and you’re so weird even I get the crawlies around you.”
His bare feet slapped the shining cool wood as he paced the room, lame foot making a different sound from the good one.
Andy looked out the window at the green maple-keys rattling in the wind. “They’re buying drugs?”
Benny snorted. “You’re bankrolling weekly heroin parties at two warehouses on Oxford, and three raves a month down on Liberty Street.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Mimi’s awake now,” he said. “Better introduce me.”
Mimi kept her own schedule, mostly nocturnal, padding quietly around his house while he slept, coming silently to bed after he rose, while he was in the bathroom. She hadn’t spoken a word to him in more than a week, and he had said nothing to her. But for the snores and the warmth of the bed when he lay down and the morning dishes in the sink, she might not have been living with him at all. But for his constant awareness of her presence in his house and but for the shirts with cut-away backs in the laundry hamper, he might be living all on his own.
But for the knife that he found under the mattress, compass set into the handle, serrated edge glinting, he might have forgotten those wings, which drooped near to the floor now.
Footsteps crossing between the master bedroom and the bathroom. Pausing at the top of the stairs. A soft cough.
“Alan?”
“It’s okay, Mimi,” he said.
She came down in a pair of his boxer shorts, with the topsheet complicatedly draped over her chest in a way that left her wings free. Their tips touched the ground.
“This is my brother Bentley,” Adam said. “I told you about him.”
“You can see the future,” she said reproachfully.
“You have wings,” he said.
She held out her hand and he shook it.
“I want breakfast,” she said.
“Sounds good to me,” Brent said.
Alan nodded. “I’ll cook.”
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