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

shop—snarky customers, shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of it. He’d never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last.

Until his brothers arrived.

He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he’d wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he’d inspire them to see what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they’d gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon, as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George’s hangdog expression at the thought.

They’d walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a Bakelite coffee carafe.

The arguments went like this:

George: Look, it’s a milk container!

Ed: I don’t think that that’s for milk.

Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable.

George: Why don’t you think it’s for milk? Look at the silver inside, that’s to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold and fresh.

Fred: Put it down, you’re going to break it.

George: Fine, I’ll put it down, but tell me, why don’t you think it’s for milk?

Ed: Because it’s a thermos container, and that’s to keep hot stuff hot, and it’s got a screwtop and whatever it’s made of looks like it’d take a hard knock without breaking.

And so on, nattering at each other like cave men puzzling over a walkman, until Alan was called upon to settle the matter with the authoritative answer.

It got so that he set his alarm for four a.m. so that he could sneak past their snoring form on the sofa and so avoid the awkward, desperate pleas to let them come with him into the shop and cadge a free breakfast of poutine and eggs from the Harvey’s next door while they were at it. George had taken up coffee on his second day in the city, bugging the other two until they got him a cup, six or seven cups a day, so that they flitted from place to place like a hummingbird, thrashed in their sleep, babbled when they spoke.

It came to a head on the third night, when they dropped by the shop while he was on the phone and ducked into the back room in order to separate into threes again, with George wearing the pork pie hat even though it was a size too big for his head and hung down around his ears.

Adam was talking to a woman who’d come into the shop that afternoon and greatly admired an institutional sofa from the mid-seventies whose lines betrayed a pathetic slavish devotion to Danish Moderne aesthetics. The woman had sat on the sofa, admired the sofa, walked around the sofa, hand trailing on its back, had been fascinated to see the provenance he’d turned up, an inventory sticker from the University of Toronto maintenance department indicating that this sofa had originally been installed at the Robarts Library, itself of great and glorious aesthetic obsolescence.

Here was Adam on the phone with this woman, closing a deal to turn a $3,000 profit on an item he’d acquired at the Goodwill As-Is Center for five bucks, and here were his brothers, in the store, angry about something, shouting at each other about something. They ran around like three fat lunatics, reeking of the BO that they exuded like the ass end of a cow: Loud, boorish, and indescribably weird. Weird beyond the quaint weirdness of his little curiosity show. Weird beyond the interesting weirdness of the punks and the goths and the mods who were wearing their subcultures like political affiliations as they strolled by the shops. Those were redeemable weirds, weirds within the bounds of normal human endeavor. His brothers, on the other hand, were utterly, utterly irredeemable.

He sank down behind the counter as George said something to Fred in their own little shorthand language, a combination of grunts and nonsense syllables that the three had spoken together for so long that he’d not even noticed it until they were taken out of their context and put in his. He put his back against the wall and brought his chest to his knees and tried to sound like he had a belly button as he said to the woman, “Yes, absolutely, I can have this delivered tomorrow if you’d like to courier over a check.”

This check, it was enough money to keep his business afloat for another 30 days, to pay his rent and pay the minimum-wage kid and buy his groceries. And there were his brothers, and now Ed was barking like a dog—a rare moment of mirth from him, who had been the sober outer bark since he was a child and rarely acted like the 17-year-old he was behaving like today.

“Is everything all right?” she said down the phone, this woman who’d been smartly turned out in a cashmere sweater and a checked scarf and a pair of boot-cut jeans that looked new and good over her designer shoes with little heels. They’d flirted a little, even though she was at least ten years older than him, because flirting was a new thing for Alan, and he’d discovered that he wasn’t bad at it.

“Everything is fine,” he said. “Just some goofballs out in the street out front. How about if I drop off the sofa for six o’clock?”

“KILLED HER, CUT HER UP, SLICED HER OPEN,” George screeched suddenly, skidding around the counter, rolling past him, yanking the phone out of the wall.

And in that moment, he realized what the sounds they had been making in their private speech had been: They had been a reenactment, a grunting, squeaking playback of the day, the fateful day, the day he’d taken his knife and done his mischief with it.

He reached for the phone cable and plugged it back into the wall, but it was as though his hand were moving of its own accord, because his attention was focused elsewhere, on the three of them arrayed in a triangle, as they had been on the hillside, as they had been when they had chanted at him when the knife grip was sure in the palm of his hands.

The ritual—that’s what it was, it was a ritual—the ritual had the feel of something worn smooth with countless repetitions. He found himself rigid with shock, offended to his bones. This was what they did now, in the cave, with Davey sitting atop their mother, black and shriveled, this was how they behaved, running through this reenactment of his great shame, of the day Danny died?

No wonder Darrel had terrorized them out of their home. They were beyond odd and eccentric, they were—unfit. Unfit for polite company. For human society.

The phone in his hand rang. It was the woman.

“You know, I’m thinking that maybe I should come back in with a tape measure and measure up the sofa before I commit to it. It’s a lot of money, and to be honest, I just don’t know if I have room—”

“What if I measure it for you? I could measure it for you and call you back with the numbers.” The three brothers stared at him with identical glassy, alien stares.

“That’s okay. I can come in,” and he knew that she meant, I won’t ever come in again.

“What if I bring it by anyway? I could bring it by tomorrow night and you could see it and make up your mind. No obligation.”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid that I’ll be out tomorrow evening—”

“Friday? I could come by Friday—” He was trying to remember how to flirt now, but he couldn’t. “I could come by and we could have a glass of wine or something,” and he knew he’d said the exact wrong thing.

“It’s all right,” she said coldly. “I’ll come by later in the week to have another look.

“I have to go now, my husband is home,” and he was pretty sure she wasn’t married, but he said good bye and hung up the phone.

He looked at his solemn brothers now and they looked at him.

“When are you going home?” he said, and Edward looked satisfied and Fred looked a little disappointed and George looked like he wanted to throw himself in front of a subway, and his bottom lip began to tremble.

“It was Ed’s game,” he said. “The Davey game, it was his.” He pointed a finger. “You know, I’m not like them. I can be on my own. I’m what they need, they’re not what I need.”

The other two stared at their fat bellies in the direction of their fat feet. Andrew had never heard George say this, had never even suspected that this thought lurked in his heart, but now that it was out on the table, it seemed like a pretty obvious fact to have taken note of. All things being equal, things weren’t equal. He was cold and numb.

“That’s a really terrible thing to say, George,” is what he said.

“That’s easy for you to say,” is what George said. “You are here, you are in the world. It’s easy for you to say that we should be happy with things the way they are.”

George turned on his heel and put his head down and bulled out the door, slamming it behind him so that the mail slot rattled and the glass shook and a stack of nice melamine cafeteria trays fell off a shelf and clattered to the ground.

He didn’t come back that night. He didn’t come back the next day. Ed and Fred held their grumbling tummies and chewed at the insides of their plump cheeks and sat on the unsold Danish Modern sofa in the shop and freaked out the few customers that drifted in and then drifted out.

“This is worse than last time,” Ed said, licking his lips and staring at the donut that Albert refused to feel guilty about eating in front of them.

“Last time?” he said, not missing Felix’s quick warning glare at Ed, even though Ed appeared to.

“He went away for a whole day, just disappeared into town. When he came back, he said that he’d needed some away time. That he’d had an amazing day on his own. That he wanted to come and see you and that he’d do it whether we wanted to come or not.”

“Ah,” Alvin said, understanding then how the three had come to be staying with him. He wondered how long they’d last without the middle, without the ability to eat. He remembered holding the infant Eddie in his arms, the boy light and hollowed out. He remembered holding the three boys at once, heavy as a bowling ball. “Ah,” he said. “I’ll have to have a word with him.”