Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
8
They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag – which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he’d waited out half a day to change buses – was deserted, the only evidence of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store drive-through lane.
“Jesus, who divorced me this time?” Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.
“Fear and Loathing again, right?”
“It’s the road-trip novel,” she said.
“What about On the Road?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isn’t fit for human consumption.”
“Thompson isn’t a dope fiend?”
“No. That was just a put-on. He wrote about drugs, not on drugs.”
“Have you read Kerouac?”
“I couldn’t get into it,” she said.
He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.
“What’s this?” she said.
“The library,” he said. “Come on.”
It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books he’d ever seen. Sweet, dusty.
“Here,” he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section at the library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupied its own corner of overstuffed bookcases. “Here,” he said, running his finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the faded Dewey labels.
H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he’d remembered from all those years ago. On the Road.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got it.”
“You can’t check that out,” she said.
He pulled out his wallet as they drew up closer to the checkout counter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the health card and the driver’s license – not a very good likeness of his face or his name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that it looked like a pirate’s map on parchment. He slid it delicately out of the plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlike surface of the card, the furry type.
He slid the card and the book across the counter. Mimi and the librarian – a boy of possibly Mimi’s age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his patrons, but at a certain angle that suggest urbane irony – goggled at it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece.
The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf of his card.
“This isn’t –” the boy began.
“It’s a library card,” Alan said. “They used to let me use it here.”
The boy set it down on the counter again.
Mimi peered at it. “There’s no name on that card,” she said.
“Never needed one,” he said.
He’d gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle off into the shelves and start pulling down books. She’d rolled it into her typewriter and then they’d both gone chasing after Brad, then she’d asked him again for his name and they’d gone chasing after Brad, then for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No one ever looked closely at it again – not even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who’d let him take out a stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for the morning bus to Toronto.
He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece of identification he ever owned, and in some ways, the most important.
“I have to give you a new card,” the mesh-back kid said. “With a bar code. We don’t take that card anymore.” He picked it up and made to tear it in half.
“NO!” Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kid’s wrists.
The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan’s iron grip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid dropped the card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.
“Give it to me,” Alan said. The boy’s eyes, wide with shock, began to screw shut with pain. Alan let go his wrists, and the kid chafed them, backing away another step.
His shout had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to terminating children’s mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving cautiously toward them, sizing them up.
“We should go,” Mimi said.
“I need my library card,” he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and wounded.
Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of her man’s jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when she took to the air.
She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.
“We’re going,” Mimi said. “Now.”
Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi’s hand, though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his throat.
“Here,” she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card stock, he snapped back to himself. “Sorry,” he said lamely to the mesh-back kid.
Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.
He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He’d forgotten about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.
“Alan?” Mimi said.
“It was my first piece of identification,” he said. “It made me a person who could get a book out of the library.”
They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.
“What did I just say?” Alan said.
“You said it was your first piece of ID,” Mimi said. She was twitching worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving, steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around the traffic. “You said it made you a person –”
“That’s right,” Alan said. “It did.”
He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it – the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmates did have Big Wheels, catcher’s mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents’ night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays – Alan’s birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn’t be an issue. So did his brothers’, when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins – a tithe of the golems – were fit subject for a brief exposition.
“Did your mom buy you any real shoes?” It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan’s flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he’d figured out how to fit in, that he’d observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.
They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say, Do I know you from somewhere? or, if he was feeling generous, I wonder where you live? The latter was scarier than the former.
For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he’d fancied himself. There wasn’t much money around the mountain that season – the flakes he’d brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he’d brought to fill Bradley’s little round belly.
He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He’d walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn’t welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.
It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.
Credentialed.
He’d read the word in a book of war stories.
He liked the sound of it.
“What did Krishna do?”
“What do you mean?” She was looking at him guardedly now, but his madness seemed to have past.
“I mean,” he said, reaching over and taking her hand, “what did Krishna do when you went out for coffee with him?”
“Oh,” she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a steep hill. “He made me laugh.”
“He doesn’t seem that funny,” Alan said.
“We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about them. ’She’s a little old to be breeding,’ or ’Oh, is that how they’re wearing their eyebrow in the old country?’ or ’Looks like he beats his wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.’ And when he said it, I knew it wasn’t just a mean little remark, I knew it was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn’t take long before I guessed that that meant that he might know my secret.”
“So we drank our coffee,” she said, and then stopped when the body thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a hill. “We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open palm with his fingertips and he said, ’Why did you come out with me?’
“And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, ’You look like a nice guy, it’s just coffee, shit, don’t make a big deal out of it,’ and he looked like I’d just canceled Christmas and said, ’Oh, well, too bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I’d be a good guy to really hang out with a lot, if you know what I mean.’ He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I’d had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I’d never returned the signals, never could.
“I told him I didn’t think I could be romantically involved with him, and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table under it and he said, ’If it’s your deformity, don’t let that bother you. I thought I could fix that for you.’ I almost pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I couldn’t really, I knew he knew I knew. I said, ’How?’ as in, How did you know and How can you fix it? but it just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back on and said, ’Does it really matter?’
“I told him it didn’t, and then we went back to his place in Kensington Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to the bathroom and took off my shirt and he –”
“He cut you,” Alan said.
“He fixed me,” she said.
Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. “Were you broken?”
“Of course I was,” she snapped, pulling back. “I couldn’t talk to people. I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t a person,” she said.
“Right,” Alan said. “I’m following you.”
She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing with rain. “Is it much farther?” she said.
“An hour or so, if I remember right,” he said.
“I know how stupid that sounds,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out if he was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never needed it after that. He’d do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and I was able to be a person again – to wear cute clothes and go where I wanted. It was like my life had started over again.”
The hills loomed over the horizon now, low and rolling up toward the mountains. One of them was his. He sucked in a breath and the car wavered on the slick road. He pumped the brakes and coasted them to a stop on the shoulder.
“Is that it?” she said.
“That’s it,” he said. He pointed. His father was green and craggy and smaller than he remembered. The body rolled in the trunk. “I feel –” he said. “We’re taking him home, at least. And my father will know what to do.”
“No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks,” she said.
Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. “You can wait in the car if you want,” he said.
Krishna came home,
(she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway, looking at the mountains on the horizon)
Krishna came home,
(she said, after he’d pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them)
Krishna came home,
(she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn’t look at him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold)
and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street that I’d walked past a hundred times but never gone into.
He’d left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I felt...glorious. Gloried in. He’d been so attentive.
He’d touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had ever touched me that way. He’d touched me with...reverence. He’s gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in church or something. He’d kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he’d been saying all along, “Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God,” and I’d felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious.
He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I knew they’d never go on over my wings, and they were so beautiful.
“This one will look really good on you,” he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I’d never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn’t, my wings would stick out a mile.
I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for – the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.
I’d been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh, I had loved it, I realized. I’d thought I’d hated it, but I’d loved it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I would never be part of, but I could be next to the stories and that was enough.
I was going to live in an attic again.
I started to cry.
He came to me. he put his arms around me. He nuzzled my throat and licked up the tears as they slid past my chin. “Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”
He took off my jacket and my sweater, peeled down my jeans and my panties, and ran his fingertips over me, stroking me until I quietned.
He touched me reverently still, his breath hot on my skin. No one had ever touched me like that. He said, “I can fix you.”
I said, “No one can fix me.”
He said, “I can, but you’ll have to be brave.”
I nodded slowly. I could do brave. He led me by the hand into the bathroom and he took a towel down off of the hook on the back of the door and folded it into a long strip. He handed it to me. “Bite down on this,” he said, and helped me stand in the tub and face into the corner, to count the grid of tiles and the greenish mildew in the grout.
“Hold still and bite down,” he said, and I heard the door close behind me. Reverent fingertips on my wing, unfolding it, holding it away from my body.
“Be brave,” he said. And then he cut off my wing.
It hurt so much, I pitched forward involuntarily and cracked my head against the tile. It hurt so much I bit through two thicknesses of towel. It hurt so much my legs went to mush and I began to sit down quickly, like I was fainting.
He caught me, under my armpits, and held me up, and I felt something icy pressed to where my wing had been – I closed my eyes, but I heard the leathery thump as my wing hit the tile floor, a wet sound – and gauzy fabric was wrapped around my chest, holding the icy towel in place over the wound, once twice thrice, between my tits.
“Hold still,” he said. And he cut off the other one.
I screamed this time, because he brushed the wound he’d left the first time, but I managed to stay upright and to not crack my head on anything. I felt myself crying but couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t hear anything, nothing except a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.
He kissed my cheek after he’d wound a second bandage, holding a second cold compress over my second wound. “You’re a very brave girl,” he said. “Come on.”
He led me into the living room, where he pulled the cushions off his sofa and opened it up to reveal a hide-a-bed. He helped me lie down on my belly, and arranged pillows around me and under my head, so that I was facing the TV.
“I got you movies,” he said, and held up a stack of DVD rental boxes from Martian Signal. “We got Pretty in Pink, The Blues Brothers, The Princess Bride, a Robin Williams stand-up tape and a really funny-looking porno called Edward Penishands.”
I had to smile in spite of myself, in spite of the pain. He stepped into his kitchenette and came back with a box of chocolates. “Truffles,” he said. “So you can laze on the sofa, eating bonbons.”
I smiled more widely then.
“Such a beautiful smile,” he said. “Want a cup of coffee?”
“No,” I said, choking it out past my raw-from-screaming throat.
“All right,” he said. “Which video do you want to watch?”
“Princess Bride,” I said. I hadn’t heard of any of them, but I didn’t want to admit it.
“You don’t want to start with Edward Penishands?”
Alan stood out front of the video shop for a while, watching Natalie wait on her customers. She was friendly without being perky, and it was clear that the mostly male clientele had a bit of a crush on her, as did her mooning, cow-eyed co-worker who was too distracted to efficiently shelve the videos he pulled from the box before him. Alan smiled. Hiring cute girls for your shop was tricky business. If they had brains, they’d sell the hell out of your stock and be entertaining as hell; but a lot of pretty girls (and boys!) had gotten a free ride in life and got affronted when you asked them to do any real work.
Natalie was clearly efficient, and Alan knew that she wasn’t afraid of hard work, but it was good to see her doing her thing, quickly and efficiently taking people’s money, answering their questions, handing them receipts, counting out change... He would have loved to have had someone like her working for him in one of his shops.
Once the little rush at the counter was cleared, he eased himself into the shop. Natalie was working for him, of course, in the impromptu assembly line in Kurt’s storefront. She’d proven herself to be as efficient at assembling and testing the access points as she was at running the till.
“Alan!” she said, smiling broadly. Her co-worker turned and scowled jealously at him. “I’m going on break, okay?” she said to him, ignoring his sour puss.
“What, now?” he said petulantly.
“No, I thought I’d wait until we got busy again,” she said, not unkindly, and smiled at him. “I’ll be back in ten,” she said.
She came around the counter with her cigs in one hand and her lighter in the other. “Coffee?” she said.
“Absolutely,” he said, and led her up the street.
“You liking the job?” he said.
“It’s better now,” she said. “I’ve been bringing home two or three movies every night and watching them, just to get to know the stock, and I put on different things in the store, the kind of thing I’d never have watched before. Old horror movies, tentacle porn, crappy kung-fu epics. So now they all bow to me.”
“That’s great,” Alan said. “And Kurt tells me you’ve been doing amazing work with him, too.”
“Oh, that’s just fun,” she said. “I went along on a couple of dumpster runs with the gang. I found the most amazing cosmetics baskets at the Shiseido dumpster. Never would have thought that I’d go in for that girly stuff, but when you get it for free out of the trash, it feels pretty macha. Smell,” she said, tilting her head and stretching her neck.
He sniffed cautiously. “Very macha,” he said. He realized that the other patrons in the shop were eyeballing him, a middle-aged man, with his face buried in this alterna-girl’s throat.
He remembered suddenly that he still hadn’t put in a call to get her a job somewhere else, and was smitten with guilt. “Hey,” he said. “Damn. I was supposed to call Tropic?l and see about getting you a job. I’ll do it right away.” He pulled a little steno pad out of his pocket and started jotting down a note to himself.
She put her hand out. “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I really like this job. I’ve been looking up all my old high school friends: You were right, everyone I ever knew has an account with Martian Signal. God, you should see the movies they rent.”
“You keep that on file, huh?”
“Sure, everything. It’s creepy.”
“Do you need that much info?”
“Well, we need to know who took a tape out last if someone returns it and says that it’s broken or recorded over or whatever –”
“So you need, what, the last couple months’ worth of rentals?”
“Something like that. Maybe longer for the weirder tapes, they only get checked out once a year or so –”
“So maybe you keep the last two names associated with each tape?”
“That’d work.”
“You should do that.”
She snorted and drank her coffee. “I don’t have any say in it.”
“Tell your boss,” he said. “It’s how good ideas happen in business – people working at the cash register figure stuff out, and they tell their bosses.”
“So I should just tell my boss that I think we should change our whole rental system because it’s creepy?”
“Damned right. Tell him it’s creepy. You’re keeping information you don’t need to keep, and paying to store it. You’re keeping information that cops or snoops or other people could take advantage of. And you’re keeping information that your customers almost certainly assume you’re not keeping. All of those are good reasons not to keep that information. Trust me on this one. Bosses love to hear suggestions from people who work for them. It shows that you’re engaged, paying attention to their business.”
“God, now I feel guilty for snooping.”
“Well, maybe you don’t mention to your boss that you’ve been spending a lot of time looking through rental histories.”
She laughed. God, he liked working with young people. “So, why I’m here,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I want to put an access point in the second-floor window and around back of the shop. Your boss owns the building, right?”
“Yeah, but I really don’t think I can explain all this stuff to him –”
“I don’t need you to – I just need you to introduce me to him. I’ll do all the explaining.”
She blushed a little. “I don’t know, Abe...” She trailed off.
“Is that a problem?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She looked distressed.
Suddenly he was at sea. He’d felt like he was in charge of this interaction, like he understood what was going on. He’d carefully rehearsed what he was going to say and what Natalie was likely to say, and now she was, what, afraid to introduce him to her boss? Because why? Because the boss was an ogre? Then she would have pushed back harder when he told her to talk to him about the rental records. Because she was shy? Natalie wasn’t shy. Because –
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Sorry. I was being stupid. It’s just – you come on a little strong sometimes. My boss, I get the feeling that he doesn’t like it when people come on strong with him.”
Ah, he thought. She was nervous because he was so goddamned weird. Well, there you had it. He couldn’t even get sad about it. Story of his life, really.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “What if I assure you that I’ll come on easy?”
She blushed. It had really been awkward for her, then. He felt bad. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. Sorry, man –”
He held up a hand. “It’s nothing.”
He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who’d endowed it with huge tin testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the time he was done, he was feeling much better.
They got into Kurt’s car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to set. The sun hung on the horizon, right at eye level, for an eternity, slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.
“Summer’s coming on,” Alan said.
“And we’ve barely got the Market covered,” Kurt said. “At this rate, it’ll take ten years to cover the whole city.”
Alan shrugged. “It’s the journey, dude, not the destination – the act of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the art. It’s all worthwhile in and of itself.”
Kurt shook his head. “You want to eat Vietnamese?”
“Sure,” Alan said.
“I know a place,” he said, and nudged the car through traffic and on to the Don Valley Parkway.
“Where the hell are we going?” Alan said, once they’d left the city limits and entered the curved, identical cookie-cutter streets of the industrial suburbs in the north end.
“Place I know,” Kurt said. “It really cheap and really good. All the Peel Region cops eat there.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you about the cop,” he said.
“You were,” Alan said.
“So, one night I’d been diving there.” Kurt pointed to an anonymous low-slung, sprawling brown building. “They print hockey cards, baseball cards, monster cards – you name it.”
He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and spat it out. “Shit, that was last night’s coffee,” he said. “So, one night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean, hockey cards are just paper, right? The only thing that makes them valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks.”
“Tell me how you really feel,” Alan said.
“Sorry,” Kurt said. “The hockey players in junior high were real jerks. I’m mentally scarred.
“So I’m driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they know me, mostly, ’cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespass to Property Act that says that I’m allowed to do what I’m doing, and then I open the trunk and I show him, and he busts a nut: ’You mean you found these in the garbage? My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the garbage?’ He keeps saying, ’In the garbage?’ and his partner leads him away and I put it behind me.
“But then a couple nights later, I go back and there’s someone in the dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards.”
“The cop,” Alan said.
“The cop,” Kurt said. “Right.”
“That’s the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?” Alan said.
“That’s the story. The moral is: We’re all only a c-hair away from jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it.”
“C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?”
“C stands for cock, okay?”
Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn’t had an evening chatting together in some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much Danny on his mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.
“Okay,” Alan said. “We going to eat?”
“We’re going to eat,” Kurt said. “The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing – it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly fucked-up tourist. People suck.”
“Do they?” Alan said. “I quite like them. You know, there’s pretty good Vietnamese in Chinatown.”
“This is good Vietnamese.”
“Better than Chinatown?”
“Better situated,” Kurt said. “If you’re going dumpster diving afterward. I’m gonna take your cherry, buddy.” He clapped a hand on Alan’s shoulder. Real people didn’t touch Alan much. He didn’t know if he liked it.
“God,” Alan said. “This is so sudden.” But he was happy about it. He’d tried to picture what Kurt actually did any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he’d bought one day after the shirt he’d worn to the store – the wind-up toy store? – got soaked in a cloudburst.
The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. “Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good,” Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. “That’s how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot.”
Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. “Where are we going?” he asked.
Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. “Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There’s enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I’ve got to be selective. I know how each company’s trash has been running – lots of good stuff or mostly crap – lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I’d love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they’re like Stalag Thirteen – razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They’re the only companies that take secrecy seriously.” Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex.
“Spidey-sense is tingling,” he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. “Ready to lose your virginity?” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“I wish you’d stop using that metaphor,” Alan said. “Ick.”
But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan’s door.
“That dumpster is full of cardboard,” he said, gesturing. “It’s recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one,” he said, oofing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he’d clenched between his teeth, “is where they put the good stuff. Looky here.”
Alan tried to climb the dumpster’s sticky walls, but couldn’t get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster’s transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the rattle. “This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot of defective product, since it’s cheaper than shipping it all back to Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,” he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He passed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on the handle.
It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk of metal growing out of its ass.
“More of these, huh?” Kurt said. “I found about a thousand of these last month. They’re USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they’ve all got a manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color – whatever shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.
“I’ve got a couple thousand of these back home, but they’re selling briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and we’ll snag a couple hundred more.”
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he was grinding underfoot.
Once they’d finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. “We don’t want them to know that we’ve been here or they’ll start hitting the duckies with a hammer before they pitch ’em out.”
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn’t bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he’d transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a dozen times – he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies and other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, “You see those old rum-dums pushing a shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking morons – they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten bucks a pop, but instead they’re rooting around like raccoons in the trash, chasing after nickel deposits.”
“But then what would you pick?”
Kurt stared at him. “You kidding me? Didn’t you see? There’s a hundred times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had a squint of ambition, we could double the amount we save from the trash.”
“You’re an extraordinary person,” Alan said. He wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment. After all, wasn’t he an extraordinary person, too?
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in its LCD.
He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year’s software. The smells were largely inoffensive – Kurt mentioned that the picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.
“How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?” Kurt said. “I mean, all this work, and we’ve hardly gotten four or five square blocks covered.”
“Buck up,” Alan said. “We could spend another two years just helping people in the Market use what we’ve installed, and it would still be productive.” Kurt’s mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. “Not that I’m proposing that we do that. I just mean there’s plenty of good that’s been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can’t fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work.”
“So what do we get them to do?”
“It’s a good question. There’s something I saw online the other day I wanted to show you. Why don’t we go home and get connected?”
“There’s still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home anyway – I know a place.”
They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage showed no signs of use.
Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from the others and took the laptop from under the Buick’s seat, plugging it into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.
“There’s an open network here,” Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.
“How the hell did you find that?” Alan said, looking at the darkened window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the back an aboveground pool.
Kurt laughed. “These ’security consultants’” – he made little quotes with his fingers – “wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections available to baby-eating terrorists.
“One of the access points they identified was mine, for chrissakes, and mine was open because I’m a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I’m an ignorant ’consumer’ who doesn’t know any better, and that got me to thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I really was trying to remember who’d played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I’d dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street.
“So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice sofas and things.
“When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the name of the network was ’ParasiteNet.’”
Alan said, “Huh?” because ParasiteNet was Kurt’s name for his wireless project, though they hadn’t used it much since Alan got involved and they’d gotten halfway legit. But still.
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “That’s what I said – huh? So I googled ParasiteNet to see what I could find, and I found an old message I’d posted to toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his network after it.
“So I figger: This guy wants to share packets with me, for sure, and so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online.”
“You’ve never met him, huh?”
“Never. I’m always out here at two a.m. or so, and there’s never a light on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the bell and say hello. Never got to it.”
Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.
“He’s got a shitkicking net connection, though – tell you what. Feels like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need a browser, right?”
Alan shook his head. “You know, I can’t even remember what it was I wanted to show you. There’s some kind of idea kicking at me now, though...”
Kurt shifted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and the antenna. “What’s up?”
“Let’s do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more dumpsters you want to show me?”
“Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years.”
It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of the networks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop up on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.
Alan didn’t even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish drive-time on the night-dark streets.
“Here’s the thing,” Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the smallest hours of the morning. “I started off thinking, well, the cell companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and grassroots and democratic.”
“Right,” Alan said. “I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?”
“Yeah,” Kurt said.
“Sure, you won’t get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who already know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who’ve never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls.”
“Right,” Kurt said, getting more excited. “Right! I mean, it’s just ego, right? Why do we need to control the network?” He spun around on his cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. “Gimme some apple pie, please,” he said. “This is the best part: it’s going to violate the hell out of everyone’s contracts with their ISPs – they sell you an all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they’ll cut off your service if you’re too hungry. Well, fuck that! It’s not just community networking, it’ll be civil disobedience against shitty service-provider terms of service!”
There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and waved. “Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that’s so good, you can’t help but do a little dance?”
One of the hard-hats smiled. “Yeah, but his wife always turns me down.” He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.
The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. “Nice. Very nice. You’re gonna be a lot of fun today, I can tell.”
They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt’s Buick.
“Hang on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a walk, okay?” The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury’s factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. It invigorated him, made him feel part of something huge and all-encompassing, like being in his father the mountain.
“Up there,” Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hill that rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plastic rocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.
“Up there,” Alan agreed, and they set off, kicking droplets of dew off the grass beside the sidewalk.
The sunrise was a thousand times more striking from atop the climber, filtered through the new shoots on the tree branches. Kurt lit a cigarette and blew plumes into the shafting light and they admired the effect of the wind whipping it away.
“I think this will work,” Alan said. “We’ll do something splashy for the press, get a lot of people to change the names of their networks – more people will use the networks, more will create them... It’s a good plan.”
Kurt nodded. “Yeah. We’re smart guys.”
Something smashed into Alan’s head and bounced to the dirt below the climber. A small, sharp rock. Alan reeled and tumbled from the climber, stunned, barely managing to twist to his side before landing. The air whooshed out of his lungs and tears sprang into his eyes.
Gingerly, he touched his head. His fingers came away wet. Kurt was shouting something, but he couldn’t hear it. Something moved in the bushes, moved into his line of sight. Moved deliberately into his line of sight.
Danny. He had another rock in his hand and he wound up and pitched it. It hit Alan in the forehead and his head snapped back and he grunted.
Kurt’s feet landed in the dirt a few inches from his eyes, big boots a-jangle with chains. Davey flitted out of the bushes and onto the plastic rocking-horses, jumping from the horse to the duck to the chicken, leaving the big springs beneath them to rock and creak. Kurt took two steps toward him, but Davey was away, under the chain link fence and over the edge of the hill leading down to Dupont Street.
“You okay?” Kurt said, crouching down beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Need a doctor?”
“No doctors,” Alan said. “No doctors. I’ll be okay.”
They inched their way back to the car, the world spinning around them. The hard-hats met them on the way out of the Vesta Lunch and their eyes went to Alan’s bloodied face. They looked away. Alan felt his kinship with the woken world around him slip away and knew he’d never be truly a part of it.
He wouldn’t let Kurt walk him up the steps and put him to bed, so instead Kurt watched from the curb until Alan went inside, then gunned the engine and pulled away. It was still morning rush hour, and the Market-dwellers were clacking toward work on hard leather shoes or piling their offspring into minivans.
Alan washed the blood off his scalp and face and took a gingerly shower. When he turned off the water, he heard muffled sounds coming through the open windows. A wailing electric guitar. He went to the window and stuck his head out and saw Krishna sitting on an unmade bed in the unsoundproofed bedroom, in a grimy housecoat, guitar on his lap, eyes closed, concentrating on the screams he was wringing from the instrument’s long neck.
Alan wanted to sleep, but the noise and the throb of his head – going in counterpoint – and the sight of Davey, flicking from climber to bush to hillside, scuttling so quickly Alan was scarce sure he’d seen him, it all conspired to keep him awake.
He bought coffees at the Donut Time on College – the Greek’s wouldn’t be open for hours – and brought it over to Kurt’s storefront, but the lights were out, so he wandered slowly home, sucking back the coffee.
Benny had another seizure halfway up the mountain, stiffening up and falling down before they could catch him.
As Billy lay supine in the dirt, Alan heard a distant howl, not like a wolf, but like a thing that a wolf had caught and is savaging with its jaws. The sound made his neck prickle and when he looked at the little ones, he saw that their eyes were rolling crazily.
“Got to get him home,” Alan said, lifting Benny up with a grunt. The little ones tried to help, but they just got tangled up in Benny’s long loose limbs and so Alan shooed them off, telling them to keep a lookout behind him, look for Davey lurking on an outcropping or in a branch, rock held at the ready.
When they came to the cave mouth again, he heard another one of the screams. Brendan stirred over his shoulders and Alan set him down, heart thundering, looking every way for Davey, who had come back.
“He’s gone away for the night,” Burt said conversationally. He sat up and then gingerly got to his feet. “He’ll be back in the morning, though.”
The cave was destroyed. Alan’s books, Ern-Felix-Grad’s toys were smashed. Their clothes were bubbling in the hot spring in rags and tatters. Brian’s carvings were broken and smashed. Schoolbooks were ruined.
“You all right?” Alan said.
Brian dusted himself off and stretched his arms and legs out. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s not me he’s after.”
Alan stared blankly as the brothers tidied up the cave and made piles of their belongings. The little ones looked scared, without any of the hardness he remembered from that day when they’d fought it out on the hillside.
Benny retreated to his perch, but before the sun set and the cave darkened, he brought a couple blankets down and dropped them beside the nook where Alan slept. He had his baseball bat with him, and it made a good, solid aluminum sound when he leaned it against the wall.
Silently, the small ones crossed the cave with a pile of their own blankets, George bringing up the rear with a torn T-shirt stuffed with sharp stones.
Alan looked at them and listened to the mountain breathe around them. It had been years since his father had had anything to say to them. It had been years since their mother had done anything except wash the clothes. Was there a voice in the cave now? A wind? A smell?
He couldn’t smell anything. He couldn’t hear anything. Benny propped himself up against the cave wall with a blanket around his shoulders and the baseball bat held loose and ready between his knees.
A smell then, on the wind. Sewage and sulfur. A stink of fear.
Alan looked to his brothers, then he got up and left the cave without a look back. He wasn’t going to wait for Davey to come to him.
The night had come up warm, and the highway sounds down at the bottom of the hill mingled with the spring breeze in the new buds on the trees and the new needles on the pines, the small sounds of birds and bugs foraging in the new year. Alan slipped out the cave mouth and looked around into the twilight, hoping for a glimpse of something out of the ordinary, but apart from an early owl and a handful of fireflies sparking off like distant stars, he saw nothing amiss.
He padded around the mountainside, stooped down low, stopping every few steps to listen for footfalls. At the high, small entrance to the golems’ cave, he paused, lay on his belly, and slowly peered around the fissure.
It had been years since Alvin had come up to the golems’ cave, years since one had appeared in their father’s cave. They had long ago ceased bringing their kills to the threshold of the boys’ cave, ceased leaving pelts in neat piles on the eve of the waning moon.
The view from the outcropping was stunning. The village had grown to a town, fast on its way to being a city. A million lights twinkled. The highway cut a glistening ribbon of streetlamps through the night, a straight line slicing the hills and curves. There were thousands of people down there, all connected by a humming net-work – a work of nets, cunning knots tied in a cunning grid – of wire and radio and civilization.
Slowly, he looked back into the golems’ cave. He remembered it as being lined with ranks of bones, a barbarian cathedral whose arches were decorated with ranked skulls and interlocked, tiny animal tibia. Now those bones were scattered and broken, the ossified wainscoting rendered gap-toothed by missing and tumbled bones.
Alan wondered how the golems had reacted when Darl had ruined their centuries of careful work. Then, looking more closely, he realized that the bones were dusty and grimed, cobwebbed and moldering. They’d been lying around for a lot longer than a couple hours.
Alan crept into the cave now, eyes open, ears straining. Puffs of dust rose with his footfalls, illuminated in the moonlight and city light streaming in from the cave mouth. Another set of feet had crossed this floor: small, boyish feet that took slow, arthritic steps. They’d come in, circled the cave, and gone out again.
Alan listened for the golems and heard nothing. He did his own slow circle of the cave, peering into the shadows. Where had they gone?
There. A streak of red clay, leading to a mound. Alan drew up alongside of it and made out the runny outlines of the legs and arms, the torso and the head. The golem had dragged itself into this corner and had fallen to mud. The dust on the floor was red. Dried mud. Golem-dust.
How long since he’d been in this cave? How long since he’d come around this side of the mountain? Two months. Three? Four? Longer. How long had the golems lain dead and dust in this cave?
They’d carved his cradle. Fed him. Taught him to talk and to walk. In some sense, they were his fathers, as much as the mountain was.
He fished around inside himself for emotion and found none. Relief, maybe. Relief.
The golems were an embodiment of his strangeness, as weird as his smooth, navelless belly, an element of his secret waiting to surface and – what? What had he been afraid of? Contempt? Vivisection? He didn’t know anymore, but knew that he wanted to fit in and that the golems’ absence made that more possible.
There was a smell on the wind in here, the death and corruption smell he’d noticed in the sleeping cave. Father was worried.
No. Davey was inside. That was his smell, the smell of Davey long dead and back from the grave.
Alan walked deeper into the tunnels, following his nose.
Davey dropped down onto his shoulders from a ledge in an opening where the ceiling stretched far over their heads. He was so light, at first Alan thought someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders.
Then the fingers dug into his eyes. Then the fingers fishhooked the corner of his mouth.
Then the screech, thick as a desiccated tongue, dry as the dust of a golem, like no sound and like all the sounds at once.
The smell of corruption was everywhere, filling his nostrils like his face has been ground into a pile of rotten meat. He tugged at the dry, thin hands tangled in his face, and found them strong as iron bands, and then he screamed.
Then they were both screeching and rolling on the ground, and he had Danny’s thumb in his hand, bending it back painfully, until snap, it came off clean with a sound like dry wood cracking.
Doug was off him then, crawling off toward the shadows. Alan got to his knees, still holding the thumb, and made ready to charge him, holding his sore face with one hand, when he heard the slap of running footfalls behind him and then Bill was streaking past him, baseball bat at ready, and he swung it like a polo-mallet and connected with a hollow crunch of aluminum on chitinous leathery skin.
The sound shocked Alan to his feet, wet sick rising in his gorge. Benny was winding up for a second blow, aiming for Darren’s head this time, an out-of-the park smack that would have knocked that shrunken head off the skinny, blackened neck, and Alan shouted, “NO!” and roared at Benny and leapt for him. As he sailed through the air, he thought he was saving Benny from the feeling he’d carried with him for a decade, but as he connected with Benny, he felt a biting-down feeling, clean and hard, and he knew he was defending Drew, saving him for once instead of hurting him.
He was still holding on to the thumb, and Davey was inches from his face, and he was atop Benny, and they breathed together, chests heaving. Alan wobbled slowly to his feet and dropped the thumb onto Drew’s chest, then he helped Billy to his feet and they limped off to their beds. Behind them, they heard the dry sounds of Davey getting to his feet, coughing and hacking with a crunch of thin, cracked ribs.
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