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

Queen Street, walking east in the early evening crowd,
surrounded by summertime hipsters and wafting, appetizing smells from
the bistros and Jamaican roti shops. She stopped abruptly and grabbed
his shoulders and gave him a hard shake.

"You're full of shit, Ad-man. I know it and you know it."

"I really don't know what you're talking about, honestly!"

"Fine, let's do this." She clamped her hand on his forearm and dragged
him down a side street and turned down an alley. She stepped into a
doorway and started unbuttoning her Alice-blue babydoll dress. Alan
looked away, embarrassed, glad of the dark hiding his blush.

Once the dress was unbuttoned to her waist, she reached around behind
her and unhooked her white underwire bra, which sagged forward under the
weight of her heavy breasts. She turned around, treating him to a
glimpse of the full curve of her breast under her arm, and shrugged the
dress down around her waist.

She had two stubby, leathery wings growing out of the middle of her
back, just above the shoulder blades. They sat flush against her back,
and as Alan watched, they unfolded and flexed, flapped a few times, and
settled back into their position, nested among the soft roll of flesh
that descended from her neck.

Involuntarily, he peered forward, examining the wings, which were
covered in fine downy brown hairs, and their bases, roped with muscle
and surrounded by a mess of ugly scars.

"You...*sewed*...these on?" Alan said, aghast.

She turned around, her eyes bright with tears. Her breasts swung free of
her unhooked bra. "No, you fucking idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a
year. They just grow back. If I don't cut them, they grow down to my
ankles."

#

Mimi was curiously and incomprehensibly affectionate after she had
buttoned up her dress and resumed walking toward the strip of clubs
along Richmond Street. She put her hand on his forearm and murmured
funny commentary about the outlandishly attired club kids in their
plastic cowboy hats, Sailor Moon outfits, and plastic tuxedoes. She
plucked a cigarette from his lips, dragged on it, and put it back into
his mouth, still damp with her saliva, an act that sent a shiver down
Alan's neck and made the hair on the backs of his hands stand up.

She seemed to think that the wings were self-explanatory and needed no
further discussion, and Alan was content to let them stay in his mind's
eye, bat-shaped, powerful, restless, surrounded by their gridwork of
angry scars.

Once they got to the club, Shasta Disaster, a renovated brick bank with
robotic halogen spots that swept the sidewalk out front with a throbbing
penis logomark, she let go of his arm and her body stiffened. She said
something in the doorman's ear, and he let her pass. When Alan tried to
follow her, the bouncer stopped him with a meaty hand on his chest.

"Can I help you sir," he said flatly. He was basically a block of fat
and muscle with a head on top, arms as thick as Alan's thighs barely
contained in a silver button-down short-sleeve shirt that bound at his
armpits.

"Do I pay the cover to you?" Alan asked, reaching for his wallet.

"No, you don't get to pay a cover. You're not coming in."

"But I'm with her," Alan said, gesturing in the direction Mimi had
gone. "I'm Krishna's and her neighbor."

"She didn't mention it," the bouncer said. He was smirking now.

"Look," Alan said. "I haven't been to a club in twenty years. Do you
guys still take bribes?"

The bouncer rolled his eyes. "Some might. I don't. Why don't you head
home, sir."

"That's it, huh?" Alan said. "Nothing I can say or do?"

"Don't be a smart guy," the bouncer said.

"Good night, then," Alan said, and turned on his heel. He walked back up
to Queen Street, which was ablaze with TV lights from the open studio
out front of the CHUM-City building. Hordes of teenagers in tiny,
outrageous outfits milled back and forth from the coffee shops to the
studio window, where some band he'd never heard of was performing,
generally ambling southward to the clubs. Alan bought himself a coffee
with a sixteen-syllable latinate trade name
("Moch-a-latt-a-meraican-a-spress-a-chino," he liked to call them) at
the Second Cup and hailed a taxi.

He felt only the shortest moment of anger at Mimi, but it quickly cooled
and then warmed again, replaced by bemusement. Decrypting the mystical
deeds of young people had been his hobby and avocation since he hired
his first cranky-but-bright sixteen-year-old. Mimi had played him, he
knew that, deliberately set him up to be humiliated. But she'd also
wanted a moment alone with him, an opportunity to confront him with her
wings -- wings that were taking on an air of the erotic now in his
imagination, much to his chagrin. He imagined that they were soft and
pliable as lips but with spongy cartilage beneath that gave way like
livid nipple flesh. The hair must be silky, soft, and slippery as a
pubic thatch oiled with sweat and juices. Dear oh dear, he was really
getting himself worked into a lather, imagining the wings drooping to
the ground, unfolding powerfully in his living room, encircling him,
enveloping him as his lips enveloped the tendons on her neck, as her
vagina enveloped him... Whew!

The taxi drove right past his place and that gave Alan a much-needed
distraction, directing the cabbie through the maze of Kensington
Market's one-way streets back around to his front door. He tipped the
cabbie a couple of bucks over his customary ten percent and bummed a
cigarette off him, realizing that Mimi had asked him for a butt but
never returned the pack.

He puffed and shook his head and stared up the street at the distant
lights of College Street, then turned back to his porch.

"Hello, Albert," two voices said in unison, speaking from the shadows on
his porch.

"Jesus," he said, and hit the remote on his keyring that switched on the
porch light. It was his brother Edward, the eldest of the nesting dolls,
the bark of their trinity, coarse and tough and hollow. He was even
fatter than he'd been as a little boy, fat enough that his arms and legs
appeared vestigial and unjointed. He struggled, panting, to his tiny
feet -- feet like undersized exclamation points beneath the tapered Oh
of his body. His face, though doughy, had not gone to undefined
softness. Rather, every feature had acquired its own rolls of fat, rolls
that warred with one another to define his appearance -- nose and
cheekbones and brow and lips all grotesque and inflated and blubbery.

"Eugene," Alan said. "It's been a very long time."

Edward cocked his head. "It has, indeed, big brother. I've got bad
news."

"What?"

Edward leaned to the left, the top half of his body tipping over
completely, splitting at his narrow leather belt, so that his trunk,
neck, and head hung upside down beside his short, cylindrical legs and
tiny feet.

Inside of him was Frederick, the perennial middle child. Frederick
planted his palms on the dry, smooth edges of his older brother's waist
and levered himself up, stepping out of Ed's legs with the unconscious
ease of a lifetime's practice. "It's good to see you, Andy," he said. He
was pale and wore his habitual owlish expression of surprise at seeing
the world without looking through his older brother's eyes.

"It's nice to see you, too, Frederick," Alan said. He'd always gotten
along with Frederick, always liked his ability to play peacemaker and to
lend a listening ear.

Frederick helped Edward upright, methodically circumnavigating his huge
belly, retucking his grimy white shirt. Then he hitched up his
sweatshirt over the hairy pale expanse of his own belly and tipped to
one side.

Alan had been expecting to see Gregory, the core, but instead, there was
nothing inside Frederick. The Gregory-shaped void was empty. Frederick
righted himself and hitched up his belt.

"We think he's dead," Edward said, his rubbery features distorted into a
Greek tragedy mask. "We think that Doug killed him." He pinwheeled his
round arms and then clapped his hands to his face, sobbing. Frederick
put a hand on his arm. He, too, was crying.

#

Once upon a time, Alan's mother gave birth to three sons in three
months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary -- before these three
came along, she'd already had four others. But the interval, well, that
was unusual.

As the eldest, Alan was the first to recognize the early signs of her
pregnancy. The laundry loads of diapers and play clothes he fed into her
belly unbalanced more often, and her spin cycle became almost
lackadaisical, so the garments had to hang on the line for days before
they stiffened and dried completely. Alan liked to sit with his back
against his mother's hard enamel side while she rocked and gurgled and
churned. It comforted him.

The details of her conception were always mysterious to Alan. He'd been
walking down into town to attend day school for five years, and he'd
learned all about the birds and the bees, and he thought that maybe his
father -- the mountain -- impregnated his mother by means of some
strange pollen carried on the gusts of winds from his deep and gloomy
caves. There was a gnome, too, who made sure that the long hose that led
from Alan's mother's back to the spring pool in his father's belly
remained clear and unfouled, and sometimes Alan wondered if the gnome
dove for his father's seed and fed it up his mother's intake. Alan's
life was full of mysteries, and he'd long since learned to keep his
mouth shut about his home life when he was at school.

He attended all three births, along with the smaller kids -- Bill and
Donald (Charlie, the island, was still small enough to float in the
middle of their father's heart-pool) -- waiting on tenterhooks for his
mother's painful off-balance spin cycle to spend itself before
reverently opening the round glass door and removing the infant within.

Edward was fat, even for a baby. He looked like an elongated soccer ball
with a smaller ball on top. He cried healthily, though, and gave hearty
suck to their mother's exhaust valve once Alan had cleaned the soap suds
and fabric softener residue from his little body. His father gusted
proud, warm, blustery winds over them and their little domestic scene.

Alan noticed that little Edward, for all his girth, was very light, and
wondered if the baby was full of helium or some other airy
substance. Certainly he hardly appeared to be full of *baby*, since
everything he ate and drank passed through him in a matter of seconds,
hardly digested at all. Alan had to go into town twice to buy new
twelve-pound boxes of clean white shop rags to clean up the slime trail
the baby left behind him. Drew, at three, seemed to take a perverse
delight in the scummy water, spreading it around the cave as much as
possible. The grove in front of the cave mouth was booby trapped with
clothesline upon clothesline, all hung with diapers and rags drying out
in the early spring sunlight.

Thirty days later, Alan came home from school to find the younger kids
surrounding his mother as she rocked from side to side, actually popping
free of the grooves her small metal feet had worn in the cave floor over
the years.

Two babies in thirty days! Such a thing was unheard of in their father's