Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

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."

#

When Greg came home, Alan was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa,
holding his head up with one hand. Eli and Fred snored uneasily in his
bed, breathing heavily through their noses.

"Hey," he said as he came through the door, scuffing at the lock with
his key for a minute or two first. He was rumpled and dirty, streaked
with grime on his jawline and hair hanging limp and greasy over his
forehead.

"Greg," Alan said, nodding, straightening out his spine and listening to
it pop.

"I'm back," George said, looking down at his sneakers, which squished
with grey water that oozed over his carpet. Art didn't say anything,
just sat pat and waited, the way he did sometimes when con artists came
into the shop with some kind of scam that they wanted him to play along
with.

It worked the same with George. After a hard stare at his shoes, he
shook his head and began to defend himself, revealing the things that he
knew were indefensible. "I had to do it, I just had to. I couldn't live
in that cave, with that thing, anymore. I couldn't live inside those two
anymore. I'm going crazy. There's a whole world out here and every day I
get farther away from it. I get weirder. I just wanted to be normal.

"I just wanted to be like you.

"They stopped letting me into the clubs after I ran out of money, and
they kicked me out of the cafés. I tried to ride the subway all night,
but they threw me off at the end of the line, so I ended up digging a
transfer out of a trash can and taking an all-night bus back downtown.

"No one looked at me twice