Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
5
The Waldos all showed up in a bunch, with plastic brown liter bottles filled with murky homemade beer and a giant bag of skunk-weed. The party had only been on for a couple hours, but it had already balkanized into inward-facing groups: merchants, kids, hackers. Kurt kept turning the music way up ("If they’re not going to talk with one another, they might as well dance.” “Kurt, those people are old. Old people don’t dance to music like this.” “Shut up, Lyman.” “Make me.”), and Andy kept turning it down.
The bookstore people drifted in, then stopped and moved vaguely toward the middle of the floor, there to found their own breakaway conversational republic. Lyman startled. “Sara?” he said and one of the anarchists looked up sharply.
“Lyman?” She had two short ponytails and a round face that made her look teenage young, but on closer inspection she was more Lyman’s age, mid-thirties. She laughed and crossed the gap to their little republic and threw her arms around Lyman’s neck. “Crispy Christ, what are you doing here?”
“I work with these guys!” He turned to Arnold and Kurt. “This is my cousin Sara,” he said. “These are Albert and Kurt. I’m helping them out.”
“Hi, Sara,” Kurt said.
“Hey, Kurt,” she said looking away. It was clear even to Alan that they knew each other already. The other bookstore people were looking on with suspicion, drinking their beer out of refillable coffee-store thermos cups.
“It’s great to meet you!” Alan said taking her hand in both of his and shaking it hard. “I’m really glad you folks came down.”
She looked askance at him, but Lyman interposed himself. “Now, Sara, these guys really, really wanted to talk something over with you all, but they’ve been having a hard time getting a hearing.”
Kurt and Alan traded uneasy glances. They’d carefully planned out a subtle easeway into this conversation, but Lyman was running with it.
“You didn’t know that I was involved, huh?”
“Surprised the hell outta me,” Lyman said. “Will you hear them out?”
She looked back at her collective. “What the hell. Yeah, I’ll talk ’em into it.”
“It starts with the sinking of the Titanic,” Kurt said. They’d arranged their mismatched chairs in a circle in the cramped back room of the bookstore and were drinking and eating organic crumbly things with the taste and consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they’d have ten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan’d spent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that had swayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurt would win this fight.
“There’s this ship going down, and it’s signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but the message didn’t get out, because the shipping lanes were full of other ships with other radios, radios that clobbered the Titanic’s signal. That’s because there were no rules for radio back then, so anyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at any frequency. Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of their lungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.
“After that, they decided that fed regulators would divide up the radio spectrum into bands, and give those bands to exclusive licensees who’d know that their radio waves would reach their destination without being clobbered, because any clobberers would get shut down by the cops.
“But today, we’ve got a better way: We can make radios that are capable of intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios that use databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bands aren’t in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk between the gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for other radios. They can even try to detect the presence of dumb radio devices, like TVs and FM tuners, and grab the signal they’re meant to be receiving off of the Internet and pass it on, so that the dumb device doesn’t even realize that the world has moved on.
“Now, the original radio rules were supposed to protect free expression because if everyone was allowed to speak at once, no one would be heard. That may have been true, but it was a pretty poor system as it went: Mostly, the people who got radio licenses were cops, spooks, and media barons. There aren’t a lot of average people using the airwaves to communicate for free with one another. Not a lot of free speech.
“But now we have all this new technology where computers direct the operation of flexible radios, radios whose characteristics are determined by software, and it’s looking like the scarcity of the electromagnetic spectrum has been pretty grossly overstated. It’s hard to prove, because now we’ve got a world where lighting up a bunch of smart, agile radios is a crime against the ’legit’ license-holders.
“But Parliament’s not going to throw the airwaves open because no elected politician can be responsible for screwing up the voters’ televisions, because that’s the surest-fire way to not get reelected. Which means that when you say, ’Hey, our freedom of speech is being clobbered by bad laws,’ the other side can say, ’Go study some physics, hippie, or produce a working network, or shut up.’
“The radios we’re installing now are about one millionth as smart as they could be, and they use one millionth as much spectrum as they could without stepping on anyone else’s signal, but they’re legal, and they’re letting more people communicate than ever. There are people all over the world doing this, and whenever the policy wonks go to the radio cops to ask for more radio spectrum to do this stuff with, they parade people like us in front of them. We’re like the Pinocchio’s nose on the face of the radio cops: They say that only their big business buddies can be trusted with the people’s airwaves, and we show them up for giant liars.”
He fell silent and looked at them. Adam held his breath.
Sara nodded and broke the silence. “You know, that sounds pretty cool, actually.”
Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lyman steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of “cousins.” They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long dead.
So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and toppled backward. It was only Kurt’s wild bark of panic that got Adam to instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of Kurt’s fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.
“You okay?” Alan said once he’d gotten his breath back.
“Oof,” Kurt said. “Yeah.”
They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman and Sara bent to help them apart. “Nice catch,” Lyman said. Kurt was helped to his feet, and he declared that he’d sprained his ankle and nothing worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.
There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him the stats for the day’s network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole while.
One morning, Alan threw a clatter of toonies down on the Greek’s counter and walked around the Market, smelling the last night’s staggering pissers and the morning’s blossoms.
Here were his neighbors, multicolored heads at the windows of their sagging house adjoining his, Link and Natalie in the adjacent windows farthest from his front door, Mimi’s face suspicious at her window, and was that Krishna behind her, watching over her shoulder, hand between her wings, fingers tracing the scars depending from the muscles there?
He waved at them. The reluctant winter made every day feel like the day before a holiday weekend. The bankers and the retail slaves coming into and out of the Market had a festive air.
He waved at the neighbors, and Link waved back, and then so did Natalie, and he hefted his sack of coffees from the Greek’s suggestively, and Mimi shut her curtains with a snap, but Natalie and Link smiled, and a moment later they were sitting in twig chairs on his porch in their jammies, watching the world go past as the sun began to boil the air and the coffee tasted as good as it smelled.
“Beautiful day,” Natalie said rubbing the duckling fuzz on her scalp and closing her eyes.
“Found any work yet?” Alan said remembering his promise to put her in touch with one of his fashionista prot?g?s.
She made a face. “In a video store. Bo-ring.”
Link made a rude noise. “You are so spoiled. Not just any video store, she’s working at Martian Signal on Queen Street.”
Alan knew it, a great shop with a huge selection of cult movies and a brisk trade in zines, transgressive literature, action figures and T-shirts.
“It must be great there,” he said.
She smiled and looked away. “It’s okay.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think I like working retail,” she said.
“Ah, retail!” he said. “Retail would be fantastic if it wasn’t for the fucking customers.”
She giggled.
“Don’t let them get to you,” he said. “Get to be really smart about the stock, so that there’s always something you know more about than they do, and when that isn’t true, get them to teach you more so you’ll be in control the next time.”
She nodded.
“And have fun with the computer when it’s slow,” he said.
“What?”
“A store like that, it’s got the home phone number of about seventy percent of the people in Toronto you’d want to ever hang out with. Most of your school friends, even the ones you’ve lost track of. All the things they’ve rented. All their old addresses – you can figure out who’s living together, who gave their apartment to whom, all of that stuff. That kind of database is way more fun than you realize. You can get lost in it for months.”
She was nodding slowly. “I can see that,” she said. She upended her coffee and set it down. “Listen, Arbus –” she began, then bit her lip again. She looked at Link, who tugged at his fading pink shock of hair.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “We get emotionally overwrought about friends and family. I have as much to apologize for as... Well, I owe you an apology.” They stared at the park across the street, at the damaged wading pool where Edward had vanished.
“So, sorries all ’round and kisses and hugs, and now we’re all friends again, huh?” Link said. Natalie made a rude noise and ruffled his hair, then wiped her hand off on his shirt.
Alan, though, solemnly shook each of their hands in turn, and thanked them. When he was done, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from him. Next door, Mimi’s window slammed shut.
“What is it you’re doing around here, Akin?” Link said. “I keep seeing you running around with ladders and tool belts. I thought you were a writer. Are you soundproofing the whole Market?”
“I never told you?” Alan said. He’d been explaining wireless networking to anyone who could sit still and had been beginning to believe that he’d run it down for every denizen of Kensington, but he’d forgotten to clue in his own neighbors!
“Right,” he said. “Are you seated comfortably? Then I shall begin. When we connect computers together, we call it a network. There’s a big network of millions of computers, called the Internet.”
“Even I know this,” Natalie said.
“Shush,” Alan said. “I’ll start at the beginning, where I started a year ago, and work my way forward. It’s weird, it’s big and it’s cool.” And he told them the story, the things he’d learned from Kurt, the arguments he’d honed on the shopkeepers, the things Lyman had told him.
“So that’s the holy mission,” he said at last. “You give everyone a voice and a chance to speak on a level playing field with the rich and powerful, and you make democracy, which is good.”
He looked at Link and Natalie, who were looking to one another rather intensely, communicating in some silent idiom of sibling body-language.
“Plate-o-shrimp,” Natalie said.
“Funny coincidence,” Link said.
“We were just talking about this yesterday.”
“Spectrum?” Alan quirked his eyebrows.
“No, not exactly,” Natalie said. “About making a difference. About holy missions. Wondering if there were any left.”
“I mean,” Link said, “riding a bike or renting out videos are honest ways to make a living and all, and they keep us in beer and rent money, but they’re not –”
“– important.” Natalie said.
“Ah,” Alan said.
“Ah?”
“Well, that’s the thing we all want, right? Making a difference.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is why you went into fashion,” Link said giving her skinny shoulder a playful shove.
She shoved him back. “And why you went into electrical engineering!”
“Okay,” Alan said. “It’s not necessarily about what career you pick. It’s about how you do what you do. Natalie, you told me you used to shop at Tropic?l.”
She nodded.
“You liked it, you used to shop there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And it inspired you to go into fashion design. It also provided employment for a couple dozen people over the years. I sometimes got to help out little alternative girls from North Toronto buy vintage prom dresses at the end of the year, and I helped Motown revival bands put together matching outfits of red blazers and wide trousers. Four or five little shops opened up nearby selling the same kind of thing, imitating me – that whole little strip down there started with Tropic?l.”
Natalie nodded. “Okay, I knew that, I guess. But it’s not the same as really making a difference, is it?”
Link flicked his butt to the curb. “You’re changing people’s lives for the better either way, right?”
“Exactly,” Alan said.
Then Link grinned. “But there’s something pretty, oh, I dunno, ballsy, about this wireless thing, yeah? It’s not the same.”
“Not the same,” Alan said grinning. “Better.”
“How can we help?”
Kurt had an assembly line cranking out his access points now. Half a dozen street kids worked in the front of his place, in a cleared-out space with a makeshift workbench made from bowed plywood and scratched IKEA table-legs. It made Alan feel better to watch them making sense of it all, made him feel a little like he felt when he was working on The Inventory. The kids worked from noon, when Kurt got back from breakfast, until 9 or 10, when he went out to dive.
The kids were smart, but screwed up: half by teenaged hormones and half by bad parents or bad drugs or just bad brain chemistry. Alan understood their type, trying to carve some atom of individual identity away from family and background, putting pins through their bodies and affecting unconvincing tough mannerisms. They were often bright – the used bookstore had been full of their type, buying good, beat-up books off the sale rack for 50 cents, trading them back for 20 cents’ credit the next day, and buying more.
Natalie and Link were in that morning, along with some newcomers, Montreal street punks trying their hand at something other than squeegee bumming. The punks and his neighbors gave each other uneasy looks, but Alan had deliberately put the sugar for the coffee at the punks’ end of the table and the cream in front of Natalie and the stirs by the bathroom door with the baklava and the napkins, so a rudimentary social intercourse was begun.
First, one of the punks (who had a rusty “NO FUTURE” pin that Alan thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors’ market) asked Natalie to pass her the cream. Then Link and another punk (foppy silly black hair and a cut-down private school blazer with the short sleeves pinned on with rows of safety pins) met over the baklava, and the punk offered Link a napkin. Another punk spilled her coffee on her lap, screeching horrendous Quebecois blasphemies as curses, and that cracked everyone up, and Arnold, watching from near the blanket that fenced off Kurt’s monkish sleeping area, figured that they would get along.
“Kurt,” he said pulling aside the blanket, handing a double-double coffee over to Kurt as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing a white T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, and baggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sipped reverently.
Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on on the other side of the blanket. “Christ, they’re at it already?”
“I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago – or maybe they were up all night.”
Kurt groaned theatrically. “I’m running a halfway house for geeky street kids.”
“All for the cause,” Alan said. “So, what’s on the plate for today?”
“You know the church kittycorner from your place?”
“Yeah?” Alan said cautiously.
“Its spire is just about the highest point in the Market. An omnidirectional up there...”
“The church?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the new condos at the top of Baldwin? They’re tall.”
“They are. But they’re up on the northern edge. From the bell-tower of that church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side of Oxford Street, along with the backs of all the shops on Augusta.”
“How are we going to get the church to go along with it. Christ, what are they, Ukranian Orthodox?”
“Greek Orthodox,” Kurt said. “Yeah, they’re pretty conservative.”
“So?”
“So, I need a smooth-talking, upstanding cit to go and put the case to the pastor. Priest. Bishop. Whatever.”
“Groan,” Alex said.
“Oh, come on, you’re good at it.”
“If I get time,” he said. He looked into his coffee for a moment. “I’m going to go home,” he said.
“Home?”
“To the mountain,” he said. “Home,” he said. “To my father,” he said.
“Whoa,” Kurt said. “Alone?”
Alan sat on the floor and leaned back against a milk crate full of low-capacity hard drives. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking of...” He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge of tears. It had been three weeks since Davey had vanished into the night, and he’d dreamt of Eugene-Fabio-Greg every night since, terrible dreams, in which he’d dug like a dog to uncover their hands, their arms, their legs, but never their heads. He swallowed hard.
He and Kurt hadn’t spoken of that night since.
“I sometimes wonder if it really happened,” Kurt said.
Alan nodded. “It’s hard to believe. Even for me.”
“I believe it,” Kurt said. “I won’t ever not believe it. I think that’s probably important to you.”
Alan felt a sob well up in his chest and swallowed it down again. “Thanks,” he managed to say.
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’m going to rent a car and drive up,” he said.
“How long?”
“I dunno,” he said. He was feeling morose now. “A couple days. A week, maybe. No longer.”
“Well, don’t sweat the Bishop. He can wait. Come and get a beer with me tonight before I go out?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That sounds good. On a patio on Kensington. We can people-watch.”
How Alan and his brothers killed Davey: very deliberately.
Alan spent the rest of the winter in the cave, and Davey spent the spring in the golem’s cave, and through that spring, neither of them went down to the school, so that the younger brothers had to escort themselves to class. When the thaws came and icy meltoff carved temporary streams in the mountainside, they stopped going to school, too – instead, they played on the mountainside, making dams and canals and locks with rocks and imagination.
Their father was livid. The mountain rumbled as it warmed unevenly, as the sheets of ice slid off its slopes and skittered down toward the highway. The sons of the mountain reveled in their dark ignorance, their separation from the school and from the nonsensical and nonmagical society of the town. They snared small animals and ate them raw, and didn’t wash their clothes, and grew fierce and guttural through the slow spring.
Alan kept silent through those months, becoming almost nocturnal, refusing to talk to any brother who dared to talk to him. When Ed-Fred-George brought home a note from the vice principal asking when he thought he’d be coming back to school, Alan shoved it into his mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed, until the paper was reduced to gruel, then he spat it by the matted pile of his bedding.
The mountain grumbled and he didn’t care. The golems came to parley, and he turned his back to them. The stalactites crashed to the cave’s floor until it was carpeted in ankle-deep chips of stone, and he waded through them.
He waited and bided. He waited for Davey to try to come home.
“What have we here?” Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt’s shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.
He was roundly ignored – and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.
Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. “Howdy!” he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.
“Howdy yourself,” Alan said. “What do we have here?”
“We have a glut of volunteers,” Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. “I can’t figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything,” he said, cocking his head. “But they’ve been taking up space for far too long. Time we moved them.”
Alan looked around and realized that the workers he’d taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt’s diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good – great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.
“Where’d they all come from?”
Kurt shrugged. “I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It’s a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers.” He shrugged again. “I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides.”
The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. “If either of you says something like, Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of society, I’m gonna puke.”
“The thought never crossed my mind,” Alan said solemnly.
“Keep it up, Wes,” Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. “See you at the Greek’s tonight?”
“Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the Market,” Wes said, winking at Alan.
“It’s cash in the door,” Kurt said. “Buying components is a lot more efficient than trying to find just the right parts.” He gave Alan a mildly reproachful look. Ever since they’d gone to strictly controlled designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crap that never made its way into an access point.
“This is pretty amazing,” Alan said. “You’re splitting the money with them?”
“The profit – anything leftover after buying packaging and paying postage.” He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. “God, I love this. It’s like Napster for dumpsters.”
“How’s that?” Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT cream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.
“Most of the music ever recorded isn’t for sale at any price. Like 80 percent of it. And the labels, they’ve made copyright so strong, no one can figure out who all that music belongs to – not even them! Costs a fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year – and he had only cleared one song!
“So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people an incentive to rip their old CDs – hell, their old vinyl and tapes, too! – and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that, but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a library raising!”
Alan nodded. “So what’s your point – that companies’ dumpsters are being napstered by people like you?” A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt the rightness of it.
Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it on the side of the table. “Exactly!” he said. “This is garbage – it’s like the deleted music that you can’t buy today, except at the bottom of bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into digital files and upload it to the net – but if you give people an incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work to help you...” He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and popped its latches and swung it open.
“Look at that – I didn’t get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in her dumpster –”
“Her?”
“Trying not to be sexist,” Kurt said.
“Are there female dumpster divers?”
“Got me,” Kurt said. “In ten years of this, I’ve only run into other divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where it needs to be. So it’s not cost effective for some big corporation to figure out how to use or sell these – so what? It’s not cost-effective for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of my favorite bands in print, either. We’ll figure it out. We’re spookily good at it.”
“Spookily?”
“Trying to be more poetic.” He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. “Got a new girlfriend, she says there’s not enough poetry in my views on garbage.”
They found one of Davey’s old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market’s second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan’s attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he’d found in Bell Canada’s Willowdale switching station dumpster.
Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue’s roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple’s youth caucus and getting them to explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.
They’d worried about the fight they’d have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn’t have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt’s heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt’s face, ashen, wide-eyed.
“I saw something,” he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.
“What?”
“Footprints,” he said. “There’s a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler’s footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs – so dried up that I couldn’t figure out what they were at first.
“But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips.”
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
“Be careful, it’s all rotten up there,” Kurt called. Alan nodded.
“Sure, thank you,” he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.
The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn’t been eaten, they’d been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue’s roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.
He wondered if he was catching Bradley’s precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.
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