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

apologetic
smile. "I've been watching," he said.

They crossed the park together and Buddy stopped to look hard at the
fountain. "That's where he took Edward, right? I saw that."

"Yeah," Alvin said. "Do you know where he is now?"

"Yeah," Billy said. "Gone."

"Yeah," Adam said. "Yeah."

They started walking now, Billy's limp more pronounced.

"What's with your leg?"

"My foot. I lost a couple toes last year to frostbite and never got them
looked at properly." He reeked of piss and booze.

"They didn't...grow back?"

Bradley shook his head. "They didn't," he said. "Not mine. Hello,
Krishna," he said.

Alan looked to his neighbors' porch. Krishna stood there, stock still,
against the wall.

"Friend of yours, huh?" Krishna said. "Boyfriend?"

"He offered me a bottle of wine if I let him take me home," Bradley
said. "Best offer I had all week. Wanna make it a threesome? An *'ow you
say* 'mange ma twat?'"

Krishna contorted his face into an elaborate sneer. "Puke," he said.

"Bye, Krishna," Buddy said. Alan put his key into the lock and let them
in.

Blaine made a hobbling beeline for the sideboard and picked up the Jim
Beam Apollo 8 commemorative decanter that Adam kept full of Bushmills
1608 and poured himself a tall glass of it. He drank it back in two
swallows, then rolled his tongue around in his mouth with his eyes
closed while he breathed out the fumes.

"I have been thinking about that bottle ever since you bought it," he
said. "This stuff is legendary. God, that's good. I mean, that's fucking
magical."

"It's good," Andrew said. "You can have more if you want."

"Yeah," Burke said, and poured out another drink. He carried it and the
decanter to the sofa and settled into it. "Nice sofa," he said. "Nice
living room. Nice house. Not very normal, though."

"No," Andrew said. "I'm not fitting in very well."

"I fit in great." He drank back another glug of whiskey and poured out
another twenty dollars' worth. "Just great, it's the truth. I'm totally
invisible and indistinguishable. I've been sleeping at the Scott Mission
for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can't
even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes
or my food in the night, I'm always awake and watching them and just
shaking my head."

The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac
tinge. "What if I find you some clothes and a towel?"

"Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration
and become visible again?" He drank more, breathed out the fumes. "Sure,
why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You've seen me, Krishna's seen
me. Davey's gonna see me. Least I got to see them first."

And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the
bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art
potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the
stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a
back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets -- though
the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of
an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes
where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which
neither of them had.

And so he let his brother trim away his beard, first with scissors and
then with an electric razor, and so he let his brother brush out his
long hair and tie it back with an elastic taken from around a bunch of
broccoli in the vegetable crisper.

And so, by the time the work was done and he was dressed in too-big
clothes that hung over his sunken chest and spindly legs like a tent, he
was quite sober and quite clean and quite different.

"You look fine," Adam said, as Brent fingered his chin and watched the
reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of Alan's study. "You
look great."

"I look conspicuous. Visible. Used to be that eyes just slid off of
me. Now they'll come to rest on me, if only for a few seconds."

Andy nodded. "Sure, that's right. You know, being invisible isn't the
same as being normal. Normal people are visible."

"Yeah," Brad said, nodding miserably. He pawed again at the smooth
hollows of his cheeks.

"You can stay in here," Alan said, gesturing at his study. The desk and
his laptop and his little beginning of a story sat in the middle of the
room, surrounded by a litter of access points in various stages of
repair and printed literature full of optimistic, nontechnical
explanations of ParasiteNet. "I'll move all that stuff out."

"Yeah," Billy said. "You should. Just put it in the basement in
boxes. I've been watching you screw around with that wireless stuff and
you know, it's not real normal, either. It's pretty desperately
weird. Danny's right -- that Kurt guy, following you around, like he's
in love with you. That's not normal." He flushed, and his hands were in
fists. "Christ, Adam, you're living in this goddamned museum and nailing
those stupid science-fair projects to the sides of buildings. You've got
this comet tail of druggy kids following you around, buying dope with
the money they make off of the work they do for you. You're not just
visible, you're *strobing*, and you're so weird even *I* get the
crawlies around you."

His bare feet slapped the shining cool wood as he paced the room, lame
foot making a different sound from the good one.

Andy looked out the window at the green maple-keys rattling in the
wind. "They're buying drugs?"

Benny snorted. "You're bankrolling weekly heroin parties at two
warehouses on Oxford, and three raves a month down on Liberty Street."

He looked up at the ceiling. "Mimi's awake now," he said. "Better
introduce me."

Mimi kept her own schedule, mostly nocturnal, padding quietly around his
house while he slept, coming silently to bed after he rose, while he was
in the bathroom. She hadn't spoken a word to him in more than a week,
and he had said nothing to her. But for the snores and the warmth of the
bed when he lay down and the morning dishes in the sink, she might not
have been living with him at all. But for his constant awareness of her
presence in his house and but for the shirts with cut-away backs in the
laundry hamper, he might be living all on his own.

But for the knife that he found under the mattress, compass set into the
handle, serrated edge glinting, he might have forgotten those wings,
which drooped near to the floor now.

Footsteps crossing between the master bedroom and the bathroom. Pausing
at the top of the stairs. A soft cough.

"Alan?"

"It's okay, Mimi," he said.

She came down in a pair of his boxer shorts, with the topsheet
complicatedly draped over her chest in a way that left her wings
free. Their tips touched the ground.

"This is my brother Bentley," Adam said. "I told you about him."

"You can see the future," she said reproachfully.

"You have wings," he said.

She held out her hand and he shook it.

"I want breakfast," she said.

"Sounds good to me," Brent said.

Alan nodded. "I'll cook."

#

He made pancakes and cut up pears and peaches and apples and bananas for
fruit salad.

"This reminds me of the pancake house in town," Bart said. "Remember?"

Adam nodded. It had been Ed-Fred-George's favorite Sunday dinner place.

"Do you live here now?" Mimi said.

Alan said, "Yes." She slipped her hand into his and squeezed his
thumb. It felt good and unexpected.

"Are you going to tell her?" Billy said.

She withdrew her hand. "What is it." Her voice was cold.

Billy said, "There's no good comes of keeping secrets. Krishna and Davey
are planning to attack Kurt. Krishna says he owns you. He'll probably
come for you."

"Did you see that?" Adam said. "Him coming for her?"

"Not that kind of seeing. I just understand enough about people to know
what that means."

Trey met her at six, and he was paunchier than she'd remembered,
his high school brawn run to a little fat. He shoved a gift into
her hand, a brown paper bag with a quart of cheap vodka in
it. She thanked him simperingly and tucked it in her
knapsack. "It's a nice night. Let's get takeout and eat it in
High Park."

She saw the wheels turn in his head, meal plus booze plus
secluded park equals pussy, pussy, pussy, and she let the tip of
her tongue touch her lips. This would be even easier than she'd
thought.

"How can you tell the difference?" Arthur said. "Between seeing and
understanding?"

"You'll never mistake them. Seeing it is like remembering spying on
someone, only you haven't spied on him yet. Like you were standing
behind him and he just didn't notice. You hear it, you smell it, you see
it. Like you were standing *in* him sometimes, like it happened to you.

"Understanding, that's totally different. That's like a little voice in
your head explaining it to you, telling you what it all means."

"Oh," Andy said.

"You thought you'd seen, right?"

"Yeah. Thought that I was running out of time and going to die, or kill
Davey again, or something. It was a feeling, though, not like being
there, not like having anything explained."

"Is that going to happen?" Mimi asked Brad.

Brad looked down at the table. "'Answer unclear, ask again later.'
That's what this Magic 8-Ball I bought in a store once used to say."

"Does that mean you don't know?"

"I think it means I don't want to know."

#

"Don't worry," Bert said. "Kurt's safe tonight."

Alan stopped lacing up his shoes and slumped back on the bench in his
foyer. Mimi had done the dishes, Bill had dried, and he'd fretted about
Kurt. But it wasn't until he couldn't take it anymore and was ready to
go and find him, bring him home if necessary, that Billy had come to
talk to him.

"Do you know that for sure?"

"Yes. He has dinner with a woman, then he takes her dumpster diving and
comes home and goes to bed. I can see that."

"But you don't see everything?"

"No, but I saw that."

"Fine," Adam said. He felt hopeless in the face of these predictions, as
though the future were something set and immutable.

"I need to use the bathroom," Billy said, and made his way upstairs
while Alan moved to a sofa and paged absently through an old edition of
*Alice in Wonderland* whose marbled frontispiece had come detached.

A moment later, Mimi joined him, sitting down next to him, her wings
unfolded across the sofa back.

"How big are they going to get, do you think?" she said, arranging them.

"You don't know?"

"They're bigger than they've ever been. That was good food," she
said. "I think I should go talk to Krishna."

Adam shook his head. "Whoa."

"You don't need to be in between us. Maybe I can get him to back off on
you, on your family."

"Mimi, I don't even