Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow

Presented by

Public Domain Books

7

When I was two years old,

(she said, later, as she reclined against the headboard and he reclined against her, their asses deforming the rusted springs of the mattress so that it sloped toward them and the tins of soda they’d opened to replenish their bodily fluids lost in sweat and otherwise threatened to tip over on the slope; she encased him in her wings, shutting out the light and filling their air with the smell of cinnamon and pepper from the downy hair)

When I was two years old,

(she said, speaking into the shaggy hair at the back of his neck, as his sore muscles trembled and as the sweat dried to a white salt residue on his skin, as he lay there in the dark of the room and the wings, watching the constellation of reflected clock-radio lights in the black TV screen)

When I was two years old,

(she began, her body tensing from toes to tip in a movement that he felt along the length of his body, portending the time when lovers close their eyes and open their mouths and utter the secrets that they hide from everyone, even themselves)

When I was two years old, my wings were the size of a cherub’s, and they had featherlets that were white as snow. I lived with my “aunt,” an old Russian lady near Downsview Air Force Base, a blasted suburb where the shops all closed on Saturday for Sabbath and the black-hatted Hasids marked the days by walking from one end to the other on their way to temple.

The old Russian lady took me out for walks in a big black baby buggy the size of a bathtub. She tucked me in tight so that my wings were pinned beneath me. But when we were at home, in her little apartment with the wind-up Sputnik that played “The Internationale,” she would let my wings out and light the candles and watch me wobble around the room, my wings flapping, her chin in her hands, her eyes bright. She made me mashed up cabbage and seed and beef, and bottles of dilute juice. For dessert, we had hard candies, and I’d toddle around with my toys, drooling sugar syrup while the old Russian lady watched.

By the time I was four, the feathers had all fallen out, and I was supposed to go to school, I knew that. “Auntie” had explained to me that the kids that I saw passing by were on their way to school, and that I’d go some day and learn, too.

She didn’t speak much English, so I grew up speaking a creole of Russian, Ukranian, Polish and English, and I used my words to ask her, with more and more insistence, when I’d get to go to class.

I couldn’t read or write, and neither could she. But I could take apart gadgets like nobody’s business. Someone – maybe Auntie’s long dead husband – had left her a junky tool kit with cracked handles and chipped tips, and I attacked anything that I could get unplugged from the wall: the big cabinet TV and radio, the suitcase record player, the Sputnik music box. I unwired the lamps and peered at the workings of the electric kitchen clock.

That was four. Five was the year I put it all back together again. I started with the lamps, then the motor in the blender, then the toaster elements. I made the old TV work. I don’t think I knew how any of it really worked – couldn’t tell you a thing about, you know, electrical engineering, but I just got a sense of how it was supposed to go together.

Auntie didn’t let me out of the apartment after five. I could watch the kids go by from the window – skinny Hasids with side-curls and Filipinos with pretty ribbons and teenagers who smoked, but I couldn’t go to them. I watched Sesame Street and Mr. Dressup and I began to soak up English. I began to soak up the idea of playing with other kids.

I began to soak up the fact that none of the kids on the TV had wings.

Auntie left me alone in the afternoons while she went out shopping and banking and whatever else it was she did, and it was during those times that I could get myself into her bedroom and go rooting around her things.

She had a lot of mysterious beige foundation garments that were utterly inexplicable, and a little box of jewelry that I liked to taste, because the real gold tasted really rich when I sucked on it, and a stack of old cigarette tins full of frayed photos.

The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they’d been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if you squinted at them and cocked your head, you could kind of see her features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and sober.

The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as though they’d put their heads through a black curtain.

But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of the old pictures.

The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on Auntie’s armchair in the living room, which had whorls of paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.

And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently sketched. I’d seen a Polka Dot Door episode where the hosts showed how you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.

That’s what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture, using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the surface of the photo.

And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was, where it wasn’t. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the photos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing the shape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.

Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve, using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and long before I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. I drew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I had drawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretching out of the shot.

 

She curled the prehensile tips of her wings up the soles of his feet, making him go, Yeek! and jump in the bed.

“Are you awake?” she said, twisting her head around to brush her lips over his.

“Rapt,” he said.

She giggled and her tits bounced.

“Good,” she said. “’Cause this is the important part.”

 

Auntie came home early that day and found me sitting at her vanity, with the photos and the water glass and the drawings on the paper sacks spread out before me.

Our eyes met for a moment. Her pupils shrank down to tiny dots, I remember it, remember seeing them vanish, leaving behind rings of yellowed hazel. One of her hands lashed out in a claw and sank into my hair. She lifted me out of the chair by my hair before I’d even had a chance to cry out, almost before I’d registered the fact that she was hurting me – she’d never so much as spanked me until then.

She was strong, in that slow old Russian lady way, strong enough to grunt ten sacks of groceries in a bundle-buggy up the stairs to the apartment. When she picked me up and tossed me, it was like being fired out of a cannon. I rebounded off the framed motel-room art over the bed, shattering the glass, and bounced twice on the mattress before coming to rest on the floor. My arm was hanging at a funny angle, and when I tried to move it, it hurt so much that I heard a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.

I lay still as the old lady yanked the drawers out of her vanity and upended them on the floor until she found an old book of matches. She swept the photos and my sketches into the tin wastebasket and then lit a match with trembling hands and dropped it in. It went out. She repeated it, and on the fourth try she got the idea of using the match to light all the remaining matches in the folder and drop that into the bin. A moment later, it was burning cheerfully, spitting curling red embers into the air on clouds of dark smoke. I buried my face in the matted carpet and tried not to hear that high note, tried to will away the sick grating feeling in my upper arm.

She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For a moment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did, would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secret with murder. I’d watched enough daytime television to know about dark secrets.

But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, and she lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tears in her eyes.

She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumped out on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewing shears, then she cut away my T-shirt, supporting my broken arm with her hand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it got tangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down to my back and freed the shirt and tossed it in the pile of junk on her normally spotless floor.

She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television and begun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotated my fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minute movements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.

“Is broken,” she said. “Cholera,” she said. “I am so sorry, lovenu,” she said.

 

“I’ve never been to the doctor’s,” she said. “Never had a pap smear or been felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this,” she said, and put her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertips over it, finding a hard bump halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.

“What’s this?” he said.

“It’s how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don’t get a cast. Crooked.”

“Jesus,” he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what it was, he thought – or perhaps fancied – that he could feel how the unevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angle and fused together by the knitting process.

“She made me a sling, and she fed me every meal and brushed my teeth. I had to stop her from following me into the toilet to wipe me up. And I didn’t care: She could have broken both of my arms if she’d only explained the photos to me, or left them with me so that I could go on investigating them, but she did neither. She hardly spoke a word to me.”

She resettled herself against the pillows, then pulled him back against her again and plumped his head against her breasts.

“Are you falling in love with me?” she said.

He startled. The way she said it, she didn’t sound like a young adult, she sounded like a small child.

“Mimi –” he began, then stopped himself. “I don’t think so. I mean, I like you –”

“Good,” she said. “No falling in love, all right?”

 

Auntie died six months later. She keeled over on the staircase on her way up to the apartment, and I heard her moaning and thrashing out there. I hauled her up the stairs with my good arm, and she crawled along on her knees, making gargling noises.

I got her laid out on the rug in the living room. I tried to get her up on the sofa, but I couldn’t budge her. So I gave her pillows from the sofa and water and then I tried tea, but she couldn’t take it. She threw up once, and I soaked it up with a tea towel that had fussy roses on it.

She took my hand and her grip was weak, her strong hands suddenly thin and shaky.

It took an hour for her to die.

When she died, she made a rasping, rattling sound and then she shat herself. I could smell it.

It was all I could smell, as I sat there in the little apartment, six years old, hot as hell outside and stuffy inside. I opened the windows and watched the Hasids walk past. I felt like I should do something for the old lady, but I didn’t know what.

I formulated a plan. I would go outside and bring in some grown-up to take care of the old lady. I would do the grocery shopping and eat sandwiches until I was twelve, at which point I would be grown up and I would get a job fixing televisions.

I marched into my room and changed into my best clothes, the little Alice-blue dress I wore to dinner on Sundays, and I brushed my hair and put on my socks with the blue pom-poms at the ankles, and found my shoes in the hall closet. But it had been three years since I’d last worn the shoes, and I could barely fit three toes in them. The old lady’s shoes were so big I could fit both feet in either one.

I took off my socks – sometimes I’d seen kids going by barefoot outside, but never in just socks – and reached for the doorknob. I touched it.

I stopped.

I turned around again.

There was a stain forming under Auntie, piss and shit and death-juice, and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn’t be right to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I’d seen dead people on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospital nighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn’t know how far I could get, but I thought I owed it to her to try.

I figured that it was better than going outside.

She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could drag her into the bathroom and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed to wash her before anyone else came up.

I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elastic girdle beneath, and an enormous brassiere, and they were too tough – too tight – to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each one going spung as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinched and sore-looking.

When I got to her bra, I had a moment’s pause. She was a modest person – I’d never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but the smell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in a nightie and clean sheets and, you know, went for it.

Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her back. Found myself staring at.

Two little wings.

The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey neck I’d once found in the trash after she’d made soup with it.

 

“How did you get out?”

“With my wings?”

“Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead over the tub?”

She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.

“I don’t know,” she breathed, hot in his ear.

He arched his back. “You don’t know?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I remember, for five years.”

He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs, making her shudder and jerk her wings back.

That’s when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.

 

He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes after it rose.

They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside, skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited for he and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic demonstrativeness.

He marched right into Mr. Davenport’s office with his brothers in tow.

“We’re back,” he said.

Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his glasses. “You are, are you?”

“Mom took sick,” he said. “Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt, and she was too far away for us to get to school.”

“I see,” Mr. Davenport said.

“I taught the littler ones as best as I could,” Alan said. He liked Mr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everything to be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and his brothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excuse when they came back. Alan could respect that. “And I read ahead in my textbooks. I think we’ll be okay.”

“I’m sure you will be,” Mr. Davenport said. “How is your mother now?”

“She’s better,” he said. “But she was very sick. In the hospital.”

“What was she sick with?”

Alan hadn’t thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but he was out of practice. “Cancer,” he said, thinking of Marci’s mother.

“Cancer?” Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.

“But she’s better now,” Alan said.

“I see. You boys, why don’t you get to class? Alan, please wait here a moment.”

His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, looking at the class ring on Mr. Davenport’s hairy finger, remembering the time that Davey had kicked him. He’d never asked Alan where Davey was after that, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shared a secret.

“Are you all right, Alan?” he asked, settling down behind his desk, taking off his glasses.

“Yes, sir,” Alan said.

“You’re getting enough to eat at home? There’s a quiet place where you can work?”

“Yes,” Alan said, squirming. “It’s fine, now that Mom is home.”

“I see,” Mr. Davenport said. “Listen to me, son,” he said, putting his hands flat on the desk. “The school district has some resources available: clothes, lunch vouchers, Big Brother programs. They’re not anything you have to be ashamed of. It’s not charity, it’s just a little booster. A bit of help. The other children, their parents are well and they live in town and have lots of advantages that you and your brothers lack. This is just how we level the playing field. You’re a very bright lad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it’s no sin to accept a little help.”

Alan suddenly felt like laughing. “We’re not underprivileged,” he said, thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love of his father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced by the handful. “We’re very well off,” he said, thinking of home, now free of Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. “Thank you, though,” he said, thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror of Davey’s bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar.

Mr. Davenport scowled and stared hard at him. Alan met his stare and smiled. “It’s time for classes,” he said. “Can I go?”

“Go,” Mr. Davenport said. He shook his head. “But remember, you can always come here if you have anything you want to talk to me about.”

“I’ll remember,” Alan said.

 

Six years later, Bradley was big and strong and he was the star goalie of all the hockey teams in town, in front of the puck before it arrived, making desperate, almost nonchalant saves that had them howling in the stands, stomping their feet, and sloshing their Tim Horton’s coffee over the bleachers, to freeze into brown ice. In the summer, he was the star pitcher on every softball team, and the girls trailed after him like a long comet tail after the games when the other players led him away to a park to drink illicit beers.

Alan watched his games from afar, with his schoolbooks on his lap, and Eric-Franz-Greg nearby playing trucks or reading or gnawing on a sucker.

By the ninth inning or the final period, the young ones would be too tired to play, and they’d come and lean heavily against Alan, like a bag of lead pressing on him, eyes half open, and Alan would put an arm around them and feel at one with the universe.

It snowed on the afternoon of the season opener for the town softball league that year, fat white wet flakes that kissed your cheeks and melted away in an instant, so soft that you weren’t sure they’d be there at all. Bradley caught up with Alan on their lunch break, at the cafeteria in the high school two blocks from the elementary school. He had his mitt with him and a huge grin.

“You planning on playing through the snow?” Alan said, as he set down his cheeseburger and stared out the window at the diffuse white radiance of the April noontime bouncing off the flakes.

“It’ll be gone by tonight. Gonna be warm,” Bradley said, and nodded at his jock buddies sitting at their long table, sucking down Cokes and staring at the girls. “Gonna be a good game. I know it.”

Bradley knew. He knew when they were getting shorted at the assayers’ when they brought in the golems’ gold, just as he knew that showing up for lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushrooms and lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the high school hierarchy, as was dressing like someone who’d been caught in an explosion at the Salvation Army, and so he had money and he had burgers and he had a pair of narrow-leg jeans from the Gap and a Roots sweatshirt and a Stussy baseball hat and Reebok sneakers and he looked, basically, like a real person.

Alan couldn’t say the same for himself, but he’d been making an effort since Bradley got to high school, if only to save his brother the embarrassment of being related to the biggest reject in the building – but Alan still managed to exude his don’t-fuck-with-me aura enough that no one tried to cozy up to him and make friends with him and scrutinize his persona close in, which was just as he wanted it.

Bradley watched a girl walk past, a cute thing with red hair and freckles and a skinny rawboned look, and Alan remembered that she’d been sitting next to him in class for going on two years now and he’d never bothered to learn her name.

And he’d never bothered to notice that she was a dead ringer for Marci.

“I’ve always had a thing for redheads,” Bradley said. “Because of you,” he said. “You and your girlfriend. I mean, if she was good enough for you, well, she had to be the epitome of sophistication and sexiness. Back then, you were like a god to me, so she was like a goddess. I imprinted on her, like the baby ducks in Bio. It’s amazing how much of who I am today I can trace back to those days. Who knew that it was all so important?”

He was a smart kid, introspective without being moody. Integrated. Always popping off these fine little observations in between his easy jokes. The girls adored him, the boys admired him, the teachers were grateful for him and the way he bridged the gap between scholarship and athleticism.

“I must have been a weird kid,” he said. “All that quiet.”

“You were a great kid,” Alan said. “It was a lot of fun back then, mostly.”

“Mostly,” he said.

They both stared at the girl, who noticed them now, and blushed and looked confused. Bradley looked away, but Alvin held his gaze on her, and she whispered to a friend, who looked at him, and they both laughed, and then Alan looked away, too, sorry that he’d inadvertently interacted with his fellow students. He was supposed to watch, not participate.

“He was real,” Bradley said, and Alan knew he meant Davey.

“Yeah,” Alan said.

“I don’t think the little ones really remember him – he’s more like a bad dream to them. But he was real, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Alan said. “But he’s gone now.”

“Was it right?”

“What do you mean?” Alan said. He felt a sear of anger arc along his spine.

“It’s nothing,” Billy said, mumbling into his tray.

“What do you mean, Brad?” Alan said. “What else should we have done? How can you have any doubts?”

“I don’t,” Brad said. “It’s okay.”

Alan looked down at his hands, which appeared to belong to someone else: white lumps of dough clenched into hard fists, knuckles white. He made himself unclench them. “No, it’s not okay. Tell me about this. You remember what he was like. What he...did.”

“I remember it,” Bryan said. “Of course I remember it.” He was staring through the table now, the look he got when he was contemplating a future the rest of them couldn’t see. “But.”

Alan waited. He was trembling inside. He’d done the right thing. He’d saved his family. He knew that. But for six years, he’d found himself turning in his memory to the little boy on the ground, holding the loops of intestine in through slippery red fingers. For six years, whenever he’d been somewhere quiet long enough that his own inner voices fell still, he’d remember the hair in his fist, the knife’s thirsty draught as it drew forth the hot splash of blood from Davey’s throat. He’d remembered the ragged fissure that opened down Clarence’s length and the way that Davey fell down it, so light and desiccated he was almost weightless.

“If you remember it, then you know I did the right thing. I did the only thing.”

We did the only thing,” Brian said, and covered Alan’s hand with his.

Alan nodded and stared at his cheeseburger. “You’d better go catch up with your friends,” he said.

“I love you, Adam,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

Billy crossed the room, nodding to the people who greeted him from every table, geeks and jocks and band and all the meaningless tribes of the high school universe. The cute redhead sprinkled a wiggle-finger wave at him, and he nodded at her, the tips of his ears going pink.

 

The snow stopped by three p.m., and the sun came out and melted it away, so that by the time the game started at five-thirty, its only remnant was the soggy ground around the bleachers with the new grass growing out of the ragged brown memory of last summer’s lawn.

Alan took the little ones for dinner at the diner after school, letting them order double chocolate-chip pancakes. At 13, they’d settled into a fatness that made him think of a foam-rubber toy, the rolls and dimples at their wrists and elbows and knees like the seams on a doll.

“You’re starting high school next year?” Alan said, as they were pouring syrup on their second helping. He was startled by this – how had they gotten so old so quickly?

“Uh-huh,” Eli said. “I guess.”

“So you’re graduating from elementary school this spring?”

“Yeah.” Eli grinned a chocolate smile at him. “It’s no big deal. There’s a party, though.”

“Where?”

“At some kid’s house.”

“It’s okay,” Alan said. “We can celebrate at home. Don’t let them get to you.”

“We can’t go?” Ed suddenly looked a little panicked.

“You’re invited?” He blurted it out and then wished he hadn’t.

“Of course we’re invited,” Fred said from inside Ed’s throat. “There’s going to be dancing.”

“You can dance?” Alan asked.

“We can!” Ed said.

“We learned in gym,” Greg said, with the softest, proudest voice, deep within them.

“Well,” Alan said. He didn’t know what to say. High school. Dancing. Invited to parties. No one had invited him to parties when he’d graduated from elementary school, and he’d been too busy with the little ones to go in any event. He felt a little jealous, but mostly proud. “Want a milkshake?” he asked, mentally totting up the cash in his pocket and thinking that he should probably send Brad to dicker with the assayer again soon.

“No, thank you,” Ed said. “We’re watching our weight.”

Alan laughed, then saw they weren’t joking and tried to turn it into a cough, but it was too late. Their shy, chocolate smile turned into a rubber-lipped pout.

 

The game started bang on time at six p.m., just as the sun was setting. The diamond lights flicked on with an audible click and made a spot of glare that cast out the twilight.

Benny was already on the mound, he’d been warming up with the catcher, tossing them in fast and exuberant and confident and controlled. He looked good on the mound. The ump called the start, and the batter stepped up to the plate, and Benny struck him out in three pitches, and the little ones went nuts, cheering their brother on along with the other fans in the bleachers, a crowd as big as any you’d ever see outside of school, thirty or forty people.

The second batter stepped up and Benny pitched a strike, another strike, and then a wild foul that nearly beaned the batter in the head. The catcher cocked his mask quizzically, and Benny kicked the dirt and windmilled his arm a little and shook his head.

He tossed another wild one, this one coming in so low that it practically rolled across the plate. His teammates were standing up in their box now, watching him carefully.

“Stop kidding around,” Alan heard one of them say. “Just strike him out.”

Benny smiled, spat, caught the ball, and shrugged his shoulders. He wound up, made ready to pitch, and then dropped the ball and fell to his knees, crying out as though he’d been struck.

Alan grabbed the little ones’ hand and pushed onto the diamond before Benny’s knees hit the ground. He caught up with Benny as he keeled over sideways, bringing his knees up to his chest, eyes open and staring and empty.

Alan caught his head and cradled it on his lap and was dimly aware that a crowd had formed round them. He felt Barry’s heart thundering in his chest, and his arms were stuck straight out to his sides, one hand in his pitcher’s glove, the other clenched tightly around the ball.

“It’s a seizure,” someone said from the crowd. “Is he an epileptic? It’s a seizure.”

Someone tried to prize Alan’s fingers from around Barry’s head and he grunted and hissed at them, and they withdrew.

“Barry?” Alan said, looking into Barry’s face. That faraway look in his eyes, a million miles away. Alan knew he’d seen it before, but not in years.

The eyes came back into focus, closed, opened. “Davey’s back,” Barry said.

Alan’s skin went cold and he realized that he was squeezing Barry’s head like a melon. He relaxed his grip and helped him to his feet, got Barry’s arm around his shoulders, and helped him off the diamond.

“You okay?” one of the players asked as they walked past him, but Barry didn’t answer. The little ones were walking beside them now, clutching Barry’s hand, and they turned their back on the town as a family and walked toward the mountain.

 

George had come to visit him once before, not long after Alan’d moved to Toronto. He couldn’t come without bringing down Elliot and Ferdinand, of course, but it was George’s idea to visit, that was clear from the moment they rang the bell of the slightly grotty apartment he’d moved into in the Annex, near the students who were barely older than him but seemed to belong to a different species.

They were about 16 by then, and fat as housecats, with the same sense of grace and inertia in their swinging bellies and wobbling chins.

Alan welcomed them in. Edward was wearing a pair of wool trousers pulled nearly up to his nipples and short suspenders that were taut over his sweat-stained white shirt. He was grinning fleshily, his hair damp with sweat and curled with the humidity.

He opened his mouth, and George’s voice emerged. “This place is...” He stood with his mouth open, while inside him, George thought. “Incredible. I’d never...” He closed his mouth, then opened it again. “Dreamed. What a...”

Now Ed spoke. “Jesus, figure out what you’re going to say before you say it, willya? This is just plain –”

“Rude,” came Fede’s voice from his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” came George’s voice.

Ed was working on his suspenders, then unbuttoning his shirt and dropping his pants, so that he stood in grimy jockeys with his slick, tight, hairy belly before Alan. He tipped himself over, and then Alan was face-to-face with Freddy, who was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts with blue and white stripes. Freddy was scowling comically, and Alan hid a grin behind his hand.

Freddy tipped to one side and there was George, short and delicately formed and pale as a frozen french fry. He grabbed Freddy’s hips like handles and scrambled out of him, springing into the air and coming down on the balls of his feet, holding his soccer-ball-sized gut over his Hulk Underoos.

“It’s incredible,” he hooted, dancing from one foot to the other. “It’s brilliant! God! I’m never, ever going home!”

“Oh, yes?” Alan said, not bothering to hide his smile as Frederick and George separated and righted themselves. “And where will you sleep, then?”

“Here!” he said, running around the tiny apartment, opening the fridge and the stove and the toaster oven, flushing the toilet, turning on the shower faucets.

“Sorry,” Alan called as he ran by. “No vacancies at the Hotel Anders!”

“Then I won’t sleep!” he cried on his next pass. “I’ll play all night and all day in the streets. I’ll knock on every door on every street and introduce myself to every person and learn their stories and read their books and meet their kids and pet their dogs!”

“You’re bonkers,” Alan said, using the word that the lunch lady back at school had used when chastising them for tearing around the cafeteria.

“Easy for you to say,” Greg said, skidding to a stop in front of him. “Easy for you – you’re here, you got away, you don’t have to deal with Davey –” He closed his mouth and his hand went to his lips.

Alan was still young and had a penchant for the dramatic, so he went around to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of vodka out of the freezer and banged it down on the counter, pouring out four shots. He tossed back his shot and returned the bottle to the freezer.

George followed suit and choked and turned purple, but managed to keep his expression neutral. Fred and Ed each took a sip, then set the drinks down with a sour face.

“How’s home?” Alan said quietly, sliding back to sit on the minuscule counter surface in his kitchenette.

“It’s okay,” Ed mumbled, perching on the arm of the Goodwill sofa that came with the apartment. Without his brothers within him, he moved sprightly and lightly.

“It’s fine,” Fred said, looking out the window at the street below, craning his neck to see Bloor Street and the kids smoking out front of the Brunswick House.

“It’s awful,” Greg said, and pulled himself back up on the counter with them. “And I’m not going back.”

The two older brothers looked balefully at him, then mutely appealed to Alan. This was new – since infancy, Earl-Frank-Geoff had acted with complete unity of will. When they were in the first grade, Alan had wondered if they were really just one person in three parts – that was how close their agreements were.

“Brian left last week,” Greg said, and drummed his heels on the grease-streaked cabinet doors. “Didn’t say a word to any of us, just left. He comes and goes like that all the time. Sometimes for weeks.”

Craig was halfway around the world, he was in Toronto, and Brian was God-knew-where. That left just Ed-Fred-George and Davey, alone in the cave. No wonder they were here on his doorstep.

“What’s he doing?”

“He just sits there and watches us, but that’s enough. We’re almost finished with school.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “I thought we could finish here. Find a job. A place to live.” He blushed furiously. “A girl.”

Ed and Fred were staring at their laps. Alan tried to picture the logistics, but he couldn’t, not really. There was no scenario in which he could see his brothers carrying on with –

“Don’t be an idiot,” Ed said. He sounded surprisingly bitter. He was usually a cheerful person – or at least a fat and smiling person. Alan realized for the first time that the two weren’t equivalent.

George jutted his chin toward the sofa and his brothers. “They don’t know what they want to do. They think that, ’cause it’ll be hard to live here, we should hide out in the cave forever.”

“Alan, talk to him,” Fred said. “He’s nuts.”

“Look,” George said. “You’re gone. You’re all gone. The king under the mountain now is Davey. If we stay there, we’ll end up his slaves or his victims. Let him keep it. There’s a whole world out here we can live in.

“I don’t see any reason to let my handicap keep me down.”

“It’s not a handicap,” Edward said patiently. “It’s just how we are. We’re different. We’re not like the rest of them.”

“Neither is Alan,” George said. “And here he is, in the big city, living with them. Working. Meeting people. Out of the mountain.”

“Alan’s more like them than he is like us,” Frederick said. “We’re not like them. We can’t pass for them.”

Alan’s jaw hung slack. Handicapped? Passing? Like them? Not like them? He’d never thought of his brothers this way. They were just his brothers. Just his family. They could communicate with the outside world. They were people. Different, but the same.

“You’re just as good as they are,” he said.

And that shut them up. They all regarded him, as if waiting for him to go on. He didn’t know what to say. Were they, really? Was he? Was he better?

“What are we, Alan?” Edward said it, but Frederick and George mouthed the words after he’d said them.

“You’re my brothers,” he said. “You’re. . .”

“I want to see the city,” George said. “You two can come with me, or you can meet me when I come back.”

“You can’t go without us,” Frederick said. “What if we get hungry?”

“You mean, what if I don’t come back, right?”

“No,” Frederick said, his face turning red.

“Well, how hungry are you going to get in a couple hours? You’re just worried that I’m going to wander off and not come back. Fall into a hole. Meet a girl. Get drunk. And you won’t ever be able to eat again.” He was pacing again.

Ed and Fred looked imploringly at him.

“Why don’t we all go together?” Alan said. “We’ll go out and do something fun – how about ice-skating?”

“Skating?” George said. “Jesus, I didn’t ride a bus for 30 hours just to go skating.”

Edward said, “I want to sleep.”

Frederick said, “I want dinner.”

Perfect, Alan thought. “Perfect. We’ll all be equally displeased with this, then. The skating’s out in front of City Hall. There are lots of people there, and we can take the subway down. We’ll have dinner afterward on Queen Street, then turn in early and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, we’ll negotiate something else. Maybe Chinatown and the zoo.”

They are stared at him.

“This is a limited-time offer,” Alan said. “I had other plans tonight, you know. Going once, going twice –”

“Let’s go,” George said. He went and took his brothers’ hands. “Let’s go, okay?”

They had a really good time.

 

George’s body was propped up at the foot of the bed. He was white and wrinkled as a big toe in a bathtub, skin pulled tight in his face so that his hairline and eyebrows and cheeks seemed raised in surprise.

Alan smelled him now, a stink like a mouse dead between the gyprock in the walls, the worst smell imaginable. He felt Mimi breathing behind him, her chest heaving against his back. He reached out and pushed aside the wings, moving them by their translucent membranes, fingers brushing the tiny fingerlets at the wingtips, recognizing in their touch some evolutionary connection with his own hands.

George toppled over as Alan stepped off the bed, moving in the twilight of the light from under the bathroom door. Mimi came off the bed on the other side and hit the overhead light switch, turning the room as bright as an icebox, making Alan squint painfully. She closed the blinds quickly, then went to the door and shot the chain and the deadbolt closed.

Mimi looked down at him. “Ugly sumbitch, whoever he was.”

“My brother,” Alan said.

“Oh,” she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facing the wall. “Sorry.” She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making the springs squeak.

Alan wasn’t listening. He knelt down and touched George’s cheek. The skin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertips came away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.

“Davey?” Alan said. “Are you in here?”

Mimi’s foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-time sounds in the motel, distant muffled TVs and car engines and fucking, but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.

“He must have come up through the drain,” Alan said. “In the bathroom.” The broad pale moon of George’s belly was abraded in long grey stripes.

He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for the bathroom doorknob. The door swung open, revealing the sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.

“How’d he find us here?”

Mimi, in her outsized blazer and track pants, touched him on his bare shoulder. He suddenly felt terribly naked. He backed out of the bathroom, shoving Mimi aside, and numbly pulled on his jeans and a shapeless sweatshirt that smelled of Mimi and had long curly hairs lurking in the fabric that stuck to his face like cobwebs. He jammed his feet into his sneakers.

He realized that he’d had to step over his brother’s body six times to do this.

He looked at his brother again. He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His balls, shrunk to an albino walnut, his cock shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly, matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.

He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he had that didn’t require stepping over George’s body, back and forth, two paces, turn, two paces, turn.

“I’m going to cover him up,” Mimi said.

“Good, fine,” Alan said.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, fine,” Alan said.

“Are you freaking out?”

Alan didn’t say anything.

George looked an awful lot like Davey had, the day they killed him.

 

Mimi found a spare blanket in the closet, reeking of mothballs and scarred with a few curdled cigarette burns, and she spread it out on the floor and helped him lift Grant’s body onto it and wind it tightly around him.

“What now?” she said.

He looked down at the wound sheet, the lump within it. He sat down heavily on the bed. His chest was tight, and his breath came in short hups.

She sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder, tried to pull his head down to her bosom, but he stiffened his neck.

“I knew this was coming,” he said. “When we killed Darren, I knew.”

She stood and lit a cigarette. “This is your family business,” she said, “why we’re driving up north?”

He nodded, not trusting his voice, seeing the outlines of Grad’s face, outlined in moth-eaten blanket.

“So,” she said. “Let’s get up north, then. Take an end.”

The night was cold, and they staggered under the weight of the body wound in the blanket and laid him out in the trunk of the car, shifting luggage and picnic supplies to the back seat. At two a.m., the motel lights were out and the road was dark and silent but for the soughing of wind and the distant sounds of night animals.

“Are you okay to drive?” she said, as she piled their clothes indiscriminately into the suitcases.

“What?” he said. The cool air on his face was waking him up a little, but he was still in a dream-universe. The air was spicy and outdoors and it reminded him powerfully of home and simpler times.

He looked at Mimi without really seeing her.

“Are you okay to drive?”

The keys were in his hands, the car smelling of the detailing-in-a-can mist that the rental agency sprayed on the upholstery to get rid of the discount traveler farts between rentals.

“I can drive,” he said. Home, and the mountain, and the washing machine, and the nook where he’d slept for 18 years, and the golems, and the cradle they’d hewn for him. Another ten or twelve hours’ driving and they’d be at the foot of the trail where the grass grew to waist-high.

“Well, then, drive.” She got in the car and slammed her door.

He climbed in, started the engine, and put the hertzmobile into reverse.

 

Two hours later, he realized that he was going to nod off. The thumps of the body sliding in the trunk and the suitcases rattling around in the back seat had lost their power to keep him awake.

The body’s thumping had hardly had the power to begin with. Once the initial shock had passed, the body became an object only, a thing, a payload he had to deliver. Alan wondered if he was capable of feeling the loss.

“You were eleven then,” he said. It was suddenly as though no time had past since they’d sat on the bed and she’d told him about Auntie.

“Yes,” she said. “It was as though no time had passed.”

A shiver went up his back.

He was wide awake.

“No time had passed.”

“Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me to a nice girls’ school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had a permanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of four hundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn’t take her top off was hardly noteworthy.”

“The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With a Why. When I asked them where I’d been before, about ’Auntie,’ they looked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. They hugged me and touched my wings and never said anything – and never wiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me a room with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, and asked me to bring home my friends.

“I had none.

“But they found other girls who would come to my ’birthday’ parties, on May 1, which was exactly two months after their son’s birthday and two months before their daughter’s birthday.

“I can’t remember any of their names.

“But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinner and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table, but I couldn’t sit there, though I can’t remember why.”

“Wait a second,” Alan said. “You don’t remember?”

She made a sad noise in her throat. “I was told I was welcome, but I knew I wasn’t. I know that sounds paranoid – crazy. Maybe I was just a teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don’t know what it was. I knew then. They knew it, too – no one blamed me. They loved me, I guess.”

“You stayed with them until you went to school?”

“Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse, more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee’s and drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one bugged me.

“When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered that I’d been away all night. If anything, the parental people might have been a little distraught that I came home. ’I think I’ll get my own place,’ I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name to make things easier. I got a crummy little basement in what the landlord called Cabbagetown but what was really Regent Park, and I switched out to a huge, anonymous high school to finish school. Worked in a restaurant at nights and on weekends to pay the bills.”

The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a cigarette and rolled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind and the smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of the roadside.

“Give me one of those,” Alan said.

She lit another and put it between his lips, damp with her saliva. His skin came up in goosepimples.

“Who knows about your wings?” he said.

“Krishna knows,” she said. “And you.” She looked out into the night. “The family in Oakville. If I could remember where they lived, I’d look them up and ask them about it. Can’t. Can’t remember their names or their faces. I remember the pool, though, and the barbecue.”

“No one else knows?”

“There was no one else before Krishna. No one that I remember, anyway.”

“I have a brother,” he said, then swallowed hard. “I have a brother named Brad. He can see the future.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He pawed around for an ashtray and discovered that it had been removed, along with the lighter, from the rental car’s dashboard. Cursing, he pinched off the coal of the cigarette and flicked it to the roadside, hoping that it would burn out quickly, then he tossed the butt over his shoulder at the back seat. As he did, the body in the trunk rolled while he navigated a curve in the road and he braked hard, getting the car stopped in time for him to open the door and pitch a rush of vomit onto the roadway.

“You okay to drive?”

“Yeah. I am.” He sat up and put the car into gear and inched to the shoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled of sour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in the trunk.

“It’s not easy to be precognizant,” Alan said, and pulled back onto the road, signaling even though there were no taillights or headlights for as far as the eye could see.

“I believe it,” she said.

“He stopped telling us things after a while. It just got him into trouble. I’d be studying for an exam and he’d look at me and shake his head, slowly, sadly. Then I’d flunk out, and I’d be convinced that it was him psyching me out. Or he’d get picked for kickball and he’d say. ’What’s the point, this team’s gonna lose,’ and wander off, and they’d lose, and everyone would hate him. He couldn’t tell the difference between what he knew and what everyone else knew. Didn’t know the difference between the past and the future, sometimes. So he stopped telling us, and when we figured out how to read it in his eyes, he stopped looking at us.

“Then something really – Something terrible... Someone I cared about died. And he didn’t say anything about it. I could have – stopped – it. Prevented it. I could have saved her life, but he wouldn’t talk.”

He drove.

“For real, he could see the future?” she said softly. Her voice had more emotion than he’d ever heard in it and she rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.

“Yeah,” Alan said. “A future or the future, I never figured it out. A little of both, I suppose.”

“He stopped talking, huh?”

“Yeah,” Alan said.

“I know what that’s like,” Mimi said. “I hadn’t spoken more than three words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail house, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything to me, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, reading all those names. I’d dropped out of school after Christmas break, just didn’t bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn’t be any living thing that depended on me.”

She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.

“Krishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my wings were long – the longest they’ve ever been – and wearing a big parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“I turned to look at him and he said, ’I get off at the next stop. Will you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I’ve been riding next to you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you’re like.’

“I wouldn’t have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I’d already said, ’I beg your pardon?’ because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. And once I’d said that, once I’d spoken, I couldn’t bear the thought of not speaking again.”

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