Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
11
He made pancakes and cut up pears and peaches and apples and bananas for fruit salad.
“This reminds me of the pancake house in town,” Bart said. “Remember?”
Adam nodded. It had been Ed-Fred-George’s favorite Sunday dinner place.
“Do you live here now?” Mimi said.
Alan said, “Yes.” She slipped her hand into his and squeezed his thumb. It felt good and unexpected.
“Are you going to tell her?” Billy said.
She withdrew her hand. “What is it.” Her voice was cold.
Billy said, “There’s no good comes of keeping secrets. Krishna and Davey are planning to attack Kurt. Krishna says he owns you. He’ll probably come for you.”
“Did you see that?” Adam said. “Him coming for her?”
“Not that kind of seeing. I just understand enough about people to know what that means.”
Trey met her at six, and he was paunchier than she’d remembered, his high school brawn run to a little fat. He shoved a gift into her hand, a brown paper bag with a quart of cheap vodka in it. She thanked him simperingly and tucked it in her knapsack. “It’s a nice night. Let’s get takeout and eat it in High Park.”
She saw the wheels turn in his head, meal plus booze plus secluded park equals pussy, pussy, pussy, and she let the tip of her tongue touch her lips. This would be even easier than she’d thought.
“How can you tell the difference?” Arthur said. “Between seeing and understanding?”
“You’ll never mistake them. Seeing it is like remembering spying on someone, only you haven’t spied on him yet. Like you were standing behind him and he just didn’t notice. You hear it, you smell it, you see it. Like you were standing in him sometimes, like it happened to you.
“Understanding, that’s totally different. That’s like a little voice in your head explaining it to you, telling you what it all means.”
“Oh,” Andy said.
“You thought you’d seen, right?”
“Yeah. Thought that I was running out of time and going to die, or kill Davey again, or something. It was a feeling, though, not like being there, not like having anything explained.”
“Is that going to happen?” Mimi asked Brad.
Brad looked down at the table. “’Answer unclear, ask again later.’ That’s what this Magic 8-Ball I bought in a store once used to say.”
“Does that mean you don’t know?”
“I think it means I don’t want to know.”
“Don’t worry,” Bert said. “Kurt’s safe tonight.”
Alan stopped lacing up his shoes and slumped back on the bench in his foyer. Mimi had done the dishes, Bill had dried, and he’d fretted about Kurt. But it wasn’t until he couldn’t take it anymore and was ready to go and find him, bring him home if necessary, that Billy had come to talk to him.
“Do you know that for sure?”
“Yes. He has dinner with a woman, then he takes her dumpster diving and comes home and goes to bed. I can see that.”
“But you don’t see everything?”
“No, but I saw that.”
“Fine,” Adam said. He felt hopeless in the face of these predictions, as though the future were something set and immutable.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Billy said, and made his way upstairs while Alan moved to a sofa and paged absently through an old edition of Alice in Wonderland whose marbled frontispiece had come detached.
A moment later, Mimi joined him, sitting down next to him, her wings unfolded across the sofa back.
“How big are they going to get, do you think?” she said, arranging them.
“You don’t know?”
“They’re bigger than they’ve ever been. That was good food,” she said. “I think I should go talk to Krishna.”
Adam shook his head. “Whoa.”
“You don’t need to be in between us. Maybe I can get him to back off on you, on your family.”
“Mimi, I don’t even want to discuss it.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “It’s not fair to you to stay.”
“You want to have your wings cut,” Alan said. “That’s why you want to go back to him.”
She shied back as though he’d slapped her. “No –”
“You do. But what Billy didn’t tell you is that Krishna’s out there with other women, I saw him today. With a girl. Young. Pretty. Normal. If he takes you back, it will be as a toy, not as a lover. He can’t love.”
“Christ,” she said. “Why are you saying this?”
“Because I don’t want to watch you self-destruct, Mimi. Stay here. We’ll sort out Krishna together. And my brother. Billy’s here now, that means they can’t sneak up on us.”
“And these?” she said, flapping her wings, one great heave that sent currents of air across the room, that blew the loose frontispiece from Alice in Wonderland toward the fireplace grate. “You’ll sort these out, too?”
“What do you want from me, Mimi?” He was angry now. She hadn’t spoken a word to him in weeks, and now –
“Cut them off, Alan. Make me into someone who can go out again, who can be seen. Do it. I have the knife.”
Adam squeezed his eyes shut. “No,” he said.
“Good-bye,” she said, and stood, headed for the stairs. Upstairs, the toilet flushed and they heard the sink running.
“Wait!” he said, running after her. She had her hand on the doorknob.
“No,” she said. She was crying now. “I won’t stay. I won’t be trapped again. Better to be with him than trapped –”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “If you still want me to do it in two days, I’ll do it.”
She looked gravely at him. “Don’t you lie to me about this,” she said. “Don’t you dare be lying.”
He took her hands. “I swear,” he said.
From the top of the stairs then, “Whups,” said Billy. “I think I’ll just tuck myself into bed.”
Mimi smiled and hugged Alan fiercely.
Trey’s ardor came out with his drunkenness. First a clammy arm around her shoulder, then a casual grope at her boob, then a sloppy kiss on the corner of her mouth. That was as far as she was going to let it go. She waited for him to move in for another kiss, then slipped out from under his arm so that he fell into the roots of the big tree they’d been leaning against. She brained him with the vodka bottle before he’d had a chance to recover, then, as he rocked and moaned, she calmly took the hunting knife she’d bought at the Yonge Street survivalist store out of her bag. She prized one of his hands off his clutched head and turned it over, then swiftly drew the blade across his palm, laying it open to the muscle.
She hadn’t been sure that she’d be capable of doing that, but it was easier than she’d thought. She had nothing to worry about. She was capable of that and more.
They climbed into bed together at the same time for the first time since they’d come home, like a domesticated couple, and Mimi dug under her pillow and set something down with a tin tink on the bedstand, a sound too tinny to be the hunting knife. Alan squinted. It was the robot, the one he’d given her, the pretty thing with the Dutch Master craquelure up its tuna-can skirts.
“He’s beautiful,” she said. “Like you.” She wrapped her wings around him tightly, soft fur softer than any down comforter, and pressed her dimpled knees into the hollows of his legs, snuggling in.
He cried like a baby once the pain in his hand set in. She pointed the knifepoint at his face, close enough to stab him if need be. “I won’t kill you if you don’t scream,” she said. “But I will be taking one joint of one toe and one joint of one finger tonight. Just so you know.”
He tried not to fall asleep, tried to stay awake and savor that feeling of her pressed against him, of her breath on the nape of his neck, of the enfolded engulfment of her wings, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Soon enough, he was asleep.
What roused him, he couldn’t say, but he found himself groggily awake in the close heat of those wings, held tight. He listened attentively, heard something else, a tinny sound. The robot.
His bladder was full. He gently extricated himself from Mimi, from her wings, and stood. There was the robot, silhouetted on the end table. He smiled and padded off to the toilet. He came back to find Mimi splayed across the whole bed, occupying its length and breadth, a faintly naughty smile on her face. He began to ease himself into bed again, when he heard the sound, tinny, a little rattle. He looked at the robot.
It was moving. Its arms were moving. That was impossible. Its arms were painted on. He sat up quickly, rousing Mimi, who let out a small sound, and something small and bent emerged from behind the robot and made a dash for the edge of the end table. The way the thing ran, it reminded him of an animal that had been crippled by a trap. He shrank back from it instinctively, even as he reached out for the table light and switched it on.
Mimi scrunched her eyelids and flung an arm over her face, but he hardly noticed, even when she gave an outraged groan. He was looking at the little, crippled thing, struggling to get down off the end table on Mimi’s side of the bed.
It was the Allen. Though he hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years, he recognized it. Tiny, malformed, and bandy-legged, it was still the spitting image of him. Had Davey been holding on to it all these years? Tending it in a cage? Torturing it with pins?
Mimi groaned again. “Switch off the light, baby,” she said, a moment’s domesticity.
“In a sec,” he said, and edged closer to The Allen, which was huddled in on itself, staring and crazy.
“Shhh,” Adam breathed. “It’s okay.” He very slowly moved one hand toward the end table, leaning over Mimi, kneeing her wing out of the way.
The Allen shied back farther.
“What’re you doing?” Mimi said, squinting up at him.
“Be very still,” he said to her. “I don’t want to frighten it. Don’t scream or make any sudden movements. I’m counting on you.”
Her eyes grew round and she slowly looked over toward the end table. She sucked in sudden air, but didn’t scream.
“What is –”
“It’s me,” he said. “It grew out of a piece of me. My thumb. After Davey bit it off.”
“Jesus,” she said.
The Allen was quaking now, and Alan cooed to it.
“It’s hurt,” Mimi said.
“A long time ago,” Andreas said.
“No, now. It’s bleeding.”
She was right. A small bead of blood had formed beneath it. He extended his hand farther. Its bandy scurry was pathetic.
Holding his breath, Alan lifted the Allen gently, cradling it in his palms. It squirmed and thrashed weakly. “Shh,” he said again. His hands were instantly made slippery and sticky with its blood. “Shh.” Something sharp pricked at his hand.
Now that he had it up close, he could see where the blood was coming from: A broken-off sewing needle, shoved rudely through its distended abdomen.
“Cover up,” Bradley said, “I’m coming up.” They heard his lopsided tread on the steps.
Mimi pulled the blanket up around her chin. “Okay,” she said.
Bert opened the door quickly. He wore nothing but the oversized jeans that Alan had given him, his scrawny chest and mutilated feet bare.
“It’s going to die,” Brad said, hunkering down beside the bed. “Davey pinned it and then sent Link over with it. It can’t last through the night.”
Adam felt like he was choking. “We can help it,” he said. “It can heal. It healed before.”
“It won’t this time. See how much pain it’s in? It’s out of its mind.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“We need to put it out of its misery,” Brad said. “It’s the right thing.”
In his hands, the thing squirmed and made a small, hurt sound. “Shhh,” Alan said. The sound it made was like sobbing, but small, so small. And weak.
Mimi said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Yeah, I can see that.”
She lifted herself out of bed, unmindful of her nudity, and pushed her way past him to the door, to the bathroom.
"Stop being such a baby,” she told Trey as he clutched at his foot. “It’s almost stopped bleeding already.”
He looked up at her with murder in his eyes. “Shall I take another one?” she said. He looked away.
"If I get word that you’ve come within a mile of my brother, I will come back and take your eyes. The toe and the finger joint were just a down payment on that.”
He made a sullen sound, so she took his vain and girlish blond hair in her fist and tugged his head back and kissed his throat with the knife.
"Nod if you understand. Slowly." #
“The knife is under Mimi’s pillow.”
“I can’t do it,” Alan said.
“I know,” Brian said. “I will.”
And he did. Took the knife. Took the Allen. It cried. Mimi threw up in another room, the sound more felt than heard. The toilet flushed and Brian’s hands were sure and swift, but not sure enough. The Allen made a sound like a dog whistle. Bruce’s hand moved again, and then it was over. He dug a sock out of the hamper and rolled up the Allen’s remains in it. “I’ll bury it,” he said. “In the back.”
Numbly, Alan stood and began dressing. “No,” he said. “I will.”
Mimi joined them, wrapped in a blanket. Alan dug and Brent held the sock and Mimi watched solemnly.
A trapezoid of light knifed across the back garden. They looked up and saw Krishna staring down at them from a third-floor window. He was smiling very slightly. A moment later, Link appeared in the window, reeling like he was drunk, giggling.
They all looked at one another for a frozen moment, then Alan turned back to his shoveling. He dug down three feet, and Brent laid the little Allen down in the earth gently as putting it to bed, and Alan filled the hole back up. Mimi looked back up at the window, eyes locked on Krishna’s.
“I’m going inside,” Adam announced. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah,” Mimi said, but she didn’t. She stayed out there for ten minutes, then twenty, and when Alan looked out his window at her, he saw she was still staring up at Krishna, mesmerized.
He loudly opened his window and leaned out. Mimi’s eyes flicked to him, and then she slowly made her way back into the house.
She took his pants and his shoes and left him in the park, crying and drunk. All things considered, it had gone well. When Trey told her that he had no idea where her brother was, she believed him. It was okay, she’d find her brother. He had lots of friends.
Alan thought that that was the end of the story, maybe. Short and sweet. A kind of lady or the tiger thing. Let the reader’s imagination do the rest.
There on the screen, it seemed awfully thin. Here in the house he’d built for it, it seemed awfully unimportant. Such a big and elaborate envelope for such a small thing. He saved the file and went back up to bed. Mimi was asleep, which was good, because he didn’t think he’d be able to fall asleep with her twice that night.
He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to forget the sound the Allen had made.
"What is wrong with you?" "Not a thing,” she said. Her brother’s phone-call hadn’t been unexpected.
"You’re fucking insane." "Maybe,” she said. "What do you want from me?" "I want you to behave yourself." "You’re completely fucking insane.”
He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a note on the kitchen table, terse: “Gone out. B.” The handwriting sent him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days when they’d been a family, when he’d signed Brad’s report cards and hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.
Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare words there. She was draped in her wings.
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said. “Out.”
“Is this what your family is like?”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “This is what they’re like.”
“Are you going to go out, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine,” she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. “Tomorrow, you cut these tomorrow!” she said, and her wings flared open, knocking the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books. “Tomorrow!” she said.
“Good morning, Natalie,” he said. She was red-eyed and her face was puffy, and her hand shook so that the smoke from her cigarette rose in a nervous spiral.
“Andy,” she said, nodding.
He looked at her across the railing that divided their porches. “Would you like to join me for a coffee?”
“I’m hardly dressed for it,” she said. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs and house slippers and a shapeless green T-shirt that hung down past her butt.
“The Greek doesn’t stand on ceremony,” he said. He was hardly dressed better. He hadn’t wanted to go up to the master bedroom and face Mimi, so he’d dressed himself out of the laundry hamper in the basement.
“I don’t have shoes,” Alan.
“You could go in and get some,” he said.
She shook her head.
Her shoulders were tensed, her whole skinny body a cringe.
“We’ll go barefoot and sit on the patio,” he said after a moment, kicking his shoes off.
She looked at him and gave a sad laugh. “Okay.”
The sidewalk was still cool enough for bare feet. The Greek didn’t give their bare feet a second look, but brought iced coffees and yogurt with walnuts and honey.
“Do you want to tell me about them?”
“It’s been bad ever since – ever since Mimi left. All of a sudden, Krishna’s Link’s best friend. He follows him around.”
Alan nodded. “Krishna beat Mimi up,” he said.
“I know it,” she said. “I heard it. I didn’t do anything, goddamn me, but I heard it happen.”
“Eat,” he said. “Here.” He reached for a clean napkin from the next table and handed it to her. She dried her eyes and wiped her nose and ate a spoonful of yogurt. “Drink,” he said, and handed her the coffee. She drank.
“They brought those girls home last night. Little girls. Teenyboppers. Disappeared into their bedrooms. The noises they made.”
“Drink,” Alan said, and then handed her the napkin again.
“Drunk. They got them drunk and brought them home.”
“You should get out of there,” Andrew said, surprising himself. “Get out. Today, even. Go stay with your mom and find a new apartment next month.”
She set her cup down carefully. “No,” she said.
“I’m serious. It’s a bad situation that you can’t improve and the more you stay there, the worse it’s going to get.”
“That’s not a practical suggestion.”
“Staying there, in potential danger, is not practical. You need to get out. Staying there will only make things worse for you.”
She clenched her jaw. “You know, there comes a point where you’re not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you’re just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. That’s not very fucking helpful, you know. I’m holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it’s not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I’m capable of.”
Alan digested this. She’d said it loudly, and a few of the other morning patrons at the Greek’s were staring at them. He looked away, across the street, and spied Billy standing in a doorway, watching. Billy met his eyes, then looked away.
“I’m sorry, Natalie,” he said. “You’re right.”
She blew air out her nostrils.
“What about this. You can knock on my door any time. I’ll make up the sofa for you.” He thought of Mimi and cringed inwardly. She’d have to stay upstairs and be quiet if there were strangers in the house. Then he remembered his promise about her wings. He bit his lip.
She let out a harsh chuckle. “Will I be any safer there?”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met, Alvin. I mean, sorry, no offense, but why the hell would I knock on your door?”
She stood and turned on her barefoot heel and took herself away, walking at a brisk and gingerly pace.
Barry moseyed over and sat in her seat. “She’ll be okay,” he said. He picked up her spoon and began to finish her breakfast. “You know, I can’t watch the way I could yesterday, not anymore. Too visible. What do I do now?”
Aaron shrugged. “Find a job. Be visible. Get a place to live. We can have each other over for dinner.”
Brett said, “Maybe I could get a job where I got to watch. Security guard.”
August nodded. He closed his eyes.
“She’s very pretty,” Barry said. “Prettier than Mimi.”
“If you say so.”
“Kurt’s awake.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You could introduce me to him.”
I did it for your own good, you know. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, for the enormity of what she’d done was overwhelming her. She’d found three of his friends and treated each of them to an evening of terror and hurt, and none of them would tell her where her brother was, none of them knew. Maybe they’d been innocent all along.
"Where are you?" "Far from you,” he said. In the background, she heard a girl crying.
“It’s going to happen, we’re going to cover the whole Market,” Kurt said. He had the latest coverage map out and it looked like he was right. “Look at this.” The overlapping rings of WiFi false-colored over the map were nearly total.
“Are those our own nodes, or just friendlies?” Alan asked, all his confusion and worry forgotten at the sight of the map.
“Those are our own,” Kurt said. “Not so many friendlies.” He tapped a key and showed a map of the city with a pitiful sprinkling of fellow travelers who’d opened up their networks and renamed them “ParasiteNet.”
“You’ll have more,” Buddy said. Kurt looked a question at Alan.
“My brother Brent,” he said. “Meet Kurt.”
They shook.
“Your brother?”
Adam nodded.
“Not one of the missing ones?”
He shook his head. “A different one.”
“It’s nice to meet you.” Kurt wiped off his palms. Adam looked around the little private nest at the back of the shop, at the small, meshed-in window on the back wall. Danny watched at that window sometimes.
“I’m gonna send a screengrab of this to Lyman, he’ll bust a nut.”
It made Anton smile. Lyman and Kurt were the unlikeliest of pals, but pals they were.
“You do that.”
“Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”
Anton smiled shyly. “No volunteers today?”
Kurt shrugged, a jingle of chains. “Nope. Slow day. Some days just are. Was thinking of seeing a movie or something. Wanna come?”
“I can’t,” Anton said.
“Sure,” Brett said, oblivious to the fact that the invitation hadn’t really been directed at him. “I’d like that.”
“O-kaaay,” Kurt said. “Great. Gimme an hour or so and meet me out front.”
“It’s a date.”
He was half a block from home when he spotted Natalie sitting on her porch, staring at the park. Kurt and Link were gone. The patio at the Greek’s was full. He was stood in his bare feet in the middle of Kensington Market on a busy shopping day, and he had absolutely nowhere to go. Nowhere he belonged.
He realized the Natalie had never put him in touch with her boss at Martian Signal.
Barefoot, there wasn’t much of anywhere he could go. But he didn’t want to be home with Mimi and he didn’t want to walk past Natalie. Barefoot, he ended up in the alleyway behind Kurt’s again, with nowhere else to go.
Blake and Kurt got back around suppertime, and by then Alan had counted every shingle on the roofs of the garages, had carefully snapped the sharps off of two syringes he found in some weeds, and then sat and waited until he was ready to scream.
Blake walked confidently into the shop, through Kurt’s nest, and to the back door. He opened it and smiled at Adam. “Come on in,” he said.
“Right,” Alan said. “How was the movie?”
“It was fine,” Kurt said.
“Incredible,” Burt said. “I mean, incredible. God, I haven’t been to the movies in ten years at least. So loud, Jesus, I’ve never heard anything like that.”
“It was just A&E,” Kurt said. “Asses and explosions.”
Alan felt a wave of affection for his friend, and an indefinite sadness, a feeling that they were soon to be parted.
Kurt stretched and cracked his knuckles. “Getting time for me to go out diving.”
“Let’s go get some dinner, okay?” Andy said to Brad.
“G’night guys,” Kurt said, locking the door behind them.
"I’m sorry,” she said. There had been five minutes of near-silence on the line, only the girl crying in the background at his end. She wasn’t sure if he’d set the phone down or if he was listening, but the “sorry” drew a small audible breath out of him.
"I’m really, really sorry,” she said, and her hands felt sticky with blood. “God, I just wanted to save you.”
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