Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

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 suggested 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.”