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

moving through freespace.

And then the washing machine bucked and made a snapping sound and hummed
to life.

*The generator's dead,* he thought. *And she's all rusted through.* And
still the washing machine moved. He heard the gush of water filling
her, a wet and muddy sound.

"What did you do?" he asked. He climbed slowly to his feet, facing away
from his mother, not wanting to see her terrible bucking as she wobbled
on her broken foot.

"Nothing," Mimi said. "I just looked inside and it started up."

He stared at his mother, enraptured, mesmerized. Mimi stole alongside of
him and he noticed that she'd taken off her jacket and the sweatshirt,
splaying out her wings around her.

Her hand found his and squeezed. The machine rocked. His mother rocked
and gurgled and rushed, and then she found some local point of stability
and settled into a soft rocking rhythm.

The rush of water echoed off the cave walls, a white-noise shushing that
sounded like skis cutting through powder. It was a beautiful sound, one
that transported him to a million mornings spent waiting for the boys'
laundry to finish and be hung on the line.

*All gone.*

He jerked his head up so fast that something in his neck cracked,
needling pain up into his temples and forehead. He looked at Mimi, but
she gave no sign of having heard the voice, the words, *All gone.*

*All gone.*

Mimi looked at him and cocked her head. "What?" she said.

He touched her lips with a finger, forgetting to be mindful of the
swelling there, and she flinched away. There was a rustle of wings and
clothing.

*My sons, all my sons, gone.*

The voice emerged from that white-noise roar of water humming and
sloshing back and forth in her basket. Mimi squeezed his hand so hard he
felt the bones grate.

"Mom?" he said softly, his voice cracking. He took half a step toward
the washer.

*So tired. I'm worn out. I've been worn out.*

He touched the enamel on the lid of the washer, and felt the vibrations
through his fingertips. "I can -- I can take you home," he said. "I'll
take care of you, in the city."

*Too late.*

There was a snapping sound and then a front corner of the machine
settled heavily. One rusted out foot, broken clean off, rolled across
the cave floor.

The water sounds stilled.

Mimi breathed some words, something like Oh my God, but maybe in another
language, or maybe he'd just forgotten his own tongue.

"I need to go," he said.

#

They stayed in a different motel on their way home from the mountain,
and Mimi tried to cuddle him as he lay in the bed, but her wings got in
the way, and he edged over to his side until he was almost falling off
before she took the hint and curled up on her side. He lay still until
he heard her snore softly, then rose and went and sat on the toilet,
head in his hands, staring at the moldy grout on the tiled floor in the
white light, trying not to think of the bones, the hank of brittle red
hair, tied tightly in a shopping bag in the trunk of the rental car.

Sunrise found him pacing the bathroom, waiting for Mimi to stir, and
when she padded in and sat on the toilet, she wouldn't meet his eye. He
found himself thinking of her standing in the tub, rolled towel between
her teeth, as Krishna approached her wings with his knife, and he went
back into the room to dress.

"We going to eat breakfast?" she asked in the smallest voice.

He said nothing, couldn't will himself to talk.

"There's still food in the car," she said after some silence had slipped
by. "We can eat that."

And without any more words, they climbed into the car and he put the
pedal down, all the way to Toronto, stopping only once for gas and
cigarettes after he smoked all the ones left in her pack.

When they cleared the city limits and drove under the viaduct at
Danforth Avenue, getting into the proper downtown, he eased off the
Parkway and into the city traffic, taking the main roads with their high
buildings and stoplights and people, people, people.

"We're going home?" she said. The last thing she'd said was, "Are you
hungry?" fourteen hours before and he'd only shook his head.

"Yes," he said.

"Oh," she said.

Was Krishna home? She was rooting in her purse now, and he knew that she
was looking for her knife.

"You staying with me?" he said.

"Can I?" she said. They were at a red light, so he looked into her
eyes. They were shiny and empty as marbles.

"Yes," he said. "Of course. And I will have a word with Krishna."

She looked out the window. "I expect he'll want to have a word with you,
too."

#

Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his
computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he'd
moved into the house, he'd felt the shape of that story. All the while
that he'd sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the
surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.

But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the
evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him,
fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening
sentence,

I suspect that my father is dead

and deleted it. Then undid the delete.

He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb,
paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and
scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his
sentence.

My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue's roof for
God knows how long.

The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to
write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited
it. He hit the delete key.

The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because
she could always while away the hours looking up the rental
histories of the popular girls who'd shunned her in high school.

That's when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit the
text editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, he
thought.

"Link!" he said. "Come in!"

The kid had put on ten or fifteen pounds since they'd first met, and no
longer made Alan want to shout, *Someone administer a sandwich* stat*!*
Most of it was muscle from hard riding as a bike messenger, a gig that
Link had kept up right through the cold winter, dressing up like a
gore-tex Martian in tights and ski goggles and a fleece that showed
hints of purple beneath its skin of crusted road salt and pollution.

Andrew had noticed the girls in the Market and at Kurt's shop noticing
Link, whose spring wardrobe showed off all that new muscle to new
effect, and gathered from the various hurt looks and sulks from the
various girls that Link was getting more ass than a toilet-seat.

Her brother spent the winter turning into the kind of stud that
she'd figured out how to avoid before she finished high school,
and it pained her to see the hordes of dumb-bunnies making
goo-goo eyes at him.

That would be a good second sentence for his story.

"You okay, Abby?" Link said, looking concerned. Albert realized that
he'd been on another planet for a moment there.

"Sorry, just fell down a rabbit hole," he said, flapping his arms
comically. "I was writing " -- felt *good* to say that -- "and I'm in a
bit of a, how you say, creative fog."

Link took a step back. "I don't want to disturb you," he said.

But for all that, she still approved his outfits before he left
the house, refusing to let him succumb to the ephemeral awful
trendiness of mesh-back caps and too-tight boy-scout jamboree
shirts. Instead, she put him into slightly fitted cotton shirts
that emphasized his long lean belly and his broad shoulders.

"Don't sweat it. I could use a break. Come in and have a drink or
something." He checked the yellowing face of the tick-tock clock he kept
on the mantelpiece and saw that it was just past noon. "Past lunchtime,
that means that it's okay to crack a beer. You want a beer?"

And for all that, her brother still managed to come home looking
like some kind of frat-rat pussy-hound, the kind of boy she'd
always hoped he wouldn't be.

"Beer would be great," Link said. He stepped into the cool of the living
room and blinked as his eyes adjusted. "This really is a hell of a
place," he said, looking around at the glass cases, the teetering stacks
of books that Andrew had pulled down and not reshelved, making ziggurats
of them instead next to all the chairs.

"What can I do for you?" Adam said, handing him a glass of Upper Canada
Lager with a little wedge of lime. He'd bought a few cases of beer that
week and had been going through them steadily in the living room, paging
through the most favored of his books, trying to find something, though
he wasn't sure what.

Link sipped. "Summer's here," he said.

"Yeah," Alan said.

"Well, the thing is, summer. I'm going to be working longer hours and,
you know, evenings. Well. I mean. I'm 19 years old, Andy."

Alan raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. "What's the message
you're trying to convey to me, Link?"

"I'm not going to be going around your friend's shop anymore. I really
had fun doing it all year, but I want to try something different with my
spare time this summer, you understand?"

"Sure," Alan said. He'd had kids quit on him before. That's what kids
did. Attention spans.

"Right. And, well, you know: I never really understood what we were
*doing*..."

"Which part?"

"The WiFi stuff --"

"Well, you see --"

"Stop, okay? I've heard you explain it ten times now and I still don't
get it. Maybe after a semester or two of electrical engineering it'll
make more sense."

"Okay," Adam said, smiling broadly to show no hard feelings. "Hey," he
said, carefully. "If you didn't understand what we were doing, then why
did you do it?"

Link cocked his head, as if examining him for traces of sarcasm, then
looked away. "I don't know. It was exciting, even if I didn't quite get
it. Everyone else seemed to get it, sort of, and it was fun to work
alongside of them, and sometimes the money was okay."

Which is why she decided to --

Damn, what did she decide to do? That was shaping up to be a really good
opener.

Which is why she wasn't surprised when he didn't come home for
three nights in a row.

Aha.

"No hard feelings, Link," Adam said. "I'm really grateful for the help
you gave us and I hope you'll think about helping again in the fall..."

But on the fourth night, she got worried, and she started
calling his friends. They were all poor students, so none of
them had land-line numbers you could look up in the phone