Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“North,” he said. “Past Kapuskasing.”
She whistled. “How long a drive is it?”
“Fifteen hours. Twenty, maybe. Depends on the roads—you can hit cottage traffic or a bad accident and get hung up for hours. There are good motels between Huntsville and North Bay if we get tired out. Nice neon signs, magic fingers beds. A place I like has ‘Swiss Cabins’ and makes a nice rosti for dinner.”
“God, that’s a long trip,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, wondering if she wanted out. “I can pull off here and give you cab fare to the subway station if you wanna stay.”
“No!” she said quickly. “No. Want to go.”
She fed him as he drove, slicing cheese and putting it on crackers with bits of olive or pepper or salami. It appeared that she’d packed his entire fridge in the picnic bags.
After suppertime, she went to work on an apple, and he took a closer look at the knife she was using. It was a big, black hunting knife, with a compass built into the handle. The blade was black except right at the edge, where it gleamed sharp in the click-clack of the passing highway lights.
He was transfixed by it, and the car drifted a little, sprayed gravel from the shoulder, and he overcorrected and fishtailed a little. She looked up in alarm.
“You brought the knife,” he said, in response to her unasked question.
“Couldn’t leave it with him,” she said. “Besides, a sharp knife is handy.”
“Careful you don’t slice anything off, okay?”
“I never cut anything unintentionally,” she said in a silly-dramatic voice, and socked him in the shoulder.
He snorted and went back to the driving, putting the hammer down, eating up the kilometers toward Huntsville and beyond.
She fed him slices of apple and ate some herself, then rolls of ham with little pieces of pear in them, then sips of cherry juice from a glass bottle.
“Enough,” he said at last. “I’m stuffed, woman!”
She laughed. “Skinny little fucker—gotta put some meat on your bones.” She tidied the dinner detritus into an empty shopping bag and tossed it over her shoulder into the back seat.
“So,” she said. “How long since you’ve been home?”
He stared at the road for a while. “Fifteen years,” he said. “Never been back since I left.”
She stared straight forward and worked her hand under his thigh, so he was sitting on it, then wriggled her knuckles.
“I’ve never been home,” she said.
He wrinkled his brow. “What’s that mean?” he said.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“Well, let’s get off the highway and get a room and you can tell me, okay?”
“Sure,” she said.
They ended up at the Timberline Wilderness Lodge and Pancake House, and Mimi clapped her hands at the silk-flowers-and-waterbeds ambience of the room, fondled the grisly jackalope head on the wall, and started running a tub while Alan carried in the suitcases.
She dramatically tossed her clothes, one item at a time, out the bathroom door, through the clouds of steam, and he caught a glimpse of her round, full ass, bracketed by her restless wings, as she poured into the tub the bottle of cheap bubble-bath she’d bought in the lobby.
He dug a T-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers to sleep in out of his suitcase, feeling ridiculously modest as he donned them. His feet crunched over cigarette burns and tangles in the brown shag carpet and he wished he’d brought along some slippers. He flipped through both snowy TV channels and decided that he couldn’t stomach a televangelist or a thirty-year-old sitcom right then and flicked it off, sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the splashing from the bathroom.
Mimi was in awfully good spirits, considering what she’d been through with Krishna. He tried to think about it, trying to make sense of the day and the girl, but the splashing from the tub kept intruding on his thoughts.
She began to sing, and after a second he recognized the tune. “White Rabbit,” by the Jefferson Airplane. Not the kind of thing he’d expect her to be giving voice to; nor she, apparently, for she kept breaking off to giggle. Finally, he poked his head through the door.
She was folded into the tub, knees and tits above the foamline, wings slick with water and dripping in the tile. Her hands were out of sight beneath the suds. She caught his eye and grinned crazily, then her hands shot out of the pool, clutching the hunting knife.
“Put on the White Rabbit!” she howled, cackling fiendishly.
He leapt back and she continued to cackle. “Come back, come back,” she choked. “I’m doing the tub scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I thought you were into reading?”
He cautiously peeked around the doorjamb, playing it up for comic effect. “Give me the knife,” he said.
“Awww,” she said, handing it over, butt first. He set it down on the dresser, then hurried back to the bathroom.
“Haven’t you read all those books?”
Alan grinned. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?” He dropped his boxers and stripped off his T-shirt and climbed into the tub, sloshing gallons of water over the scummy tile floor.
When I was two years old,
(she said, later, as she reclined against the headboard and he reclined against her, their asses deforming the rusted springs of the mattress so that it sloped toward them and the tins of soda they’d opened to replenish their bodily fluids lost in sweat and otherwise threatened to tip over on the slope; she encased him in her wings, shutting out the light and filling their air with the smell of cinnamon and pepper from the downy hair)
When I was two years old,
(she said, speaking into the shaggy hair at the back of his neck, as his sore muscles trembled and as the sweat dried to a white salt residue on his skin, as he lay there in the dark of the room and the wings, watching the constellation of reflected clock-radio lights in the black TV screen)
When I was two years old,
(she began, her body tensing from toes to tip in a movement that he felt along the length of his body, portending the time when lovers close their eyes and open their mouths and utter the secrets that they hide from everyone, even themselves)
When I was two years old, my wings were the size of a cherub’s, and they had featherlets that were white as snow. I lived with my “aunt,” an old Russian lady near Downsview Air Force Base, a blasted suburb where the shops all closed on Saturday for Sabbath and the black-hatted Hasids marked the days by walking from one end to the other on their way to temple.
The old Russian lady took me out for walks in a big black baby buggy the size of a bathtub. She tucked me in tight so that my wings were pinned beneath me. But when we were at home, in her little apartment with the wind-up Sputnik that played “The Internationale,” she would let my wings out and light the candles and watch me wobble around the room, my wings flapping, her chin in her hands, her eyes bright. She made me mashed up cabbage and seed and beef, and bottles of dilute juice. For dessert, we had hard candies, and I’d toddle around with my toys, drooling sugar syrup while the old Russian lady watched.
By the time I was four, the feathers had all fallen out, and I was supposed to go to school, I knew that. “Auntie” had explained to me that the kids that I saw passing by were on their way to school, and that I’d go some day and learn, too.
She didn’t speak much English, so I grew up speaking a creole of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and English, and I used my words to ask her, with more and more insistence, when I’d get to go to class.
I couldn’t read or write, and neither could she. But I could take apart gadgets like nobody’s business. Someone—maybe Auntie’s long dead husband—had left her a junky tool kit with cracked handles and chipped tips, and I attacked anything that I could get unplugged from the wall: the big cabinet TV and radio, the suitcase record player, the Sputnik music box. I unwired the lamps and peered at the workings of the electric kitchen clock.
That was four. Five was the year I put it all back together again. I started with the lamps, then the motor in the blender, then the toaster elements. I made the old TV work. I don’t think I knew how any of it really worked—couldn’t tell you a thing about, you know, electrical engineering, but I just got a sense of how it was supposed to go together.
Auntie didn’t let me out of the apartment after five. I could watch the kids go by from the window—skinny Hasids with side-curls and Filipinos with pretty ribbons and teenagers who smoked, but I couldn’t go to them. I watched Sesame Street and Mr. Dressup and I began to soak up English. I began to soak up the idea of playing with other kids.
I began to soak up the fact that none of the kids on the TV had wings.
Auntie left me alone in the afternoons while she went out shopping and banking and whatever else it was she did, and it was during those times that I could get myself into her bedroom and go rooting around her things.
She had a lot of mysterious beige foundation garments that were utterly inexplicable, and a little box of jewelry that I liked to taste, because the real gold tasted really rich when I sucked on it, and a stack of old cigarette tins full of frayed photos.
The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they’d been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if you squinted at them and cocked your head, you could kind of see her features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and sober.
The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as though they’d put their heads through a black curtain.
But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of the old pictures.
The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on Auntie’s armchair in the living room, which had whorls of paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.
And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently sketched. I’d seen a Polka Dot Door episode where the hosts showed how you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid
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