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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He kissed my cheek after he’d wound a second bandage, holding a second cold compress over my second wound. “You’re a very brave girl,” he said. “Come on.”
He led me into the living room, where he pulled the cushions off his sofa and opened it up to reveal a hide-a-bed. He helped me lie down on my belly, and arranged pillows around me and under my head, so that I was facing the TV.
“I got you movies,” he said, and held up a stack of DVD rental boxes from Martian Signal. “We got Pretty in Pink, The Blues Brothers, The Princess Bride, a Robin Williams stand-up tape and a really funny-looking porno called Edward Penishands.”
I had to smile in spite of myself, in spite of the pain. He stepped into his kitchenette and came back with a box of chocolates. “Truffles,” he said. “So you can laze on the sofa, eating bonbons.”
I smiled more widely then.
“Such a beautiful smile,” he said. “Want a cup of coffee?”
“No,” I said, choking it out past my raw-from-screaming throat.
“All right,” he said. “Which video do you want to watch?”
“Princess Bride,” I said. I hadn’t heard of any of them, but I didn’t want to admit it.
“You don’t want to start with Edward Penishands?”
Alan stood out front of the video shop for a while, watching Natalie wait on her customers. She was friendly without being perky, and it was clear that the mostly male clientele had a bit of a crush on her, as did her mooning, cow-eyed co-worker who was too distracted to efficiently shelve the videos he pulled from the box before him. Alan smiled. Hiring cute girls for your shop was tricky business. If they had brains, they’d sell the hell out of your stock and be entertaining as hell; but a lot of pretty girls (and boys!) had gotten a free ride in life and got affronted when you asked them to do any real work.
Natalie was clearly efficient, and Alan knew that she wasn’t afraid of hard work, but it was good to see her doing her thing, quickly and efficiently taking people’s money, answering their questions, handing them receipts, counting out change… He would have loved to have had someone like her working for him in one of his shops.
Once the little rush at the counter was cleared, he eased himself into the shop. Natalie was working for him, of course, in the impromptu assembly line in Kurt’s storefront. She’d proven herself to be as efficient at assembling and testing the access points as she was at running the till.
“Alan!” she said, smiling broadly. Her co-worker turned and scowled jealously at him. “I’m going on break, okay?” she said to him, ignoring his sour puss.
“What, now?” he said petulantly.
“No, I thought I’d wait until we got busy again,” she said, not unkindly, and smiled at him. “I’ll be back in ten,” she said.
She came around the counter with her cigs in one hand and her lighter in the other. “Coffee?” she said.
“Absolutely,” he said, and led her up the street.
“You liking the job?” he said.
“It’s better now,” she said. “I’ve been bringing home two or three movies every night and watching them, just to get to know the stock, and I put on different things in the store, the kind of thing I’d never have watched before. Old horror movies, tentacle porn, crappy kung-fu epics. So now they all bow to me.”
“That’s great,” Alan said. “And Kurt tells me you’ve been doing amazing work with him, too.”
“Oh, that’s just fun,” she said. “I went along on a couple of dumpster runs with the gang. I found the most amazing cosmetics baskets at the Shiseido dumpster. Never would have thought that I’d go in for that girly stuff, but when you get it for free out of the trash, it feels pretty macha. Smell,” she said, tilting her head and stretching her neck.
He sniffed cautiously. “Very macha,” he said. He realized that the other patrons in the shop were eyeballing him, a middle-aged man, with his face buried in this alterna-girl’s throat.
He remembered suddenly that he still hadn’t put in a call to get her a job somewhere else, and was smitten with guilt. “Hey,” he said. “Damn. I was supposed to call Tropicál and see about getting you a job. I’ll do it right away.” He pulled a little steno pad out of his pocket and started jotting down a note to himself.
She put her hand out. “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I really like this job. I’ve been looking up all my old high school friends: You were right, everyone I ever knew has an account with Martian Signal. God, you should see the movies they rent.”
“You keep that on file, huh?”
“Sure, everything. It’s creepy.”
“Do you need that much info?”
“Well, we need to know who took a tape out last if someone returns it and says that it’s broken or recorded over or whatever—”
“So you need, what, the last couple months’ worth of rentals?”
“Something like that. Maybe longer for the weirder tapes, they only get checked out once a year or so—”
“So maybe you keep the last two names associated with each tape?”
“That’d work.”
“You should do that.”
She snorted and drank her coffee. “I don’t have any say in it.”
“Tell your boss,” he said. “It’s how good ideas happen in business—people working at the cash register figure stuff out, and they tell their bosses.”
“So I should just tell my boss that I think we should change our whole rental system because it’s creepy?”
“Damned right. Tell him it’s creepy. You’re keeping information you don’t need to keep, and paying to store it. You’re keeping information that cops or snoops or other people could take advantage of. And you’re keeping information that your customers almost certainly assume you’re not keeping. All of those are good reasons not to keep that information. Trust me on this one. Bosses love to hear suggestions from people who work for them. It shows that you’re engaged, paying attention to their business.”
“God, now I feel guilty for snooping.”
“Well, maybe you don’t mention to your boss that you’ve been spending a lot of time looking through rental histories.”
She laughed. God, he liked working with young people. “So, why I’m here,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I want to put an access point in the second-floor window and around back of the shop. Your boss owns the building, right?”
“Yeah, but I really don’t think I can explain all this stuff to him—”
“I don’t need you to—I just need you to introduce me to him. I’ll do all the explaining.”
She blushed a little. “I don’t know, Abe… ” She trailed off.
“Is that a problem?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She looked distressed.
Suddenly he was at sea. He’d felt like he was in charge of this interaction, like he understood what was going on. He’d carefully rehearsed what he was going to say and what Natalie was likely to say, and now she was, what, afraid to introduce him to her boss? Because why? Because the boss was an ogre? Then she would have pushed back harder when he told her to talk to him about the rental records. Because she was shy? Natalie wasn’t shy. Because—
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Sorry. I was being stupid. It’s just—you come on a little strong sometimes. My boss, I get the feeling that he doesn’t like it when people come on strong with him.”
Ah, he thought. She was nervous because he was so goddamned weird. Well, there you had it. He couldn’t even get sad about it. Story of his life, really.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “What if I assure you that I’ll come on easy?”
She blushed. It had really been awkward for her, then. He felt bad. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. Sorry, man—”
He held up a hand. “It’s nothing.”
He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who’d endowed it with huge tin testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the time he was done, he was feeling much better.
They got into Kurt’s car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to set. The sun hung on the horizon, right at eye level, for an eternity, slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.
“Summer’s coming on,” Alan said.
“And we’ve barely got the Market covered,” Kurt said. “At this rate, it’ll take ten years to cover the whole city.”
Alan shrugged. “It’s the journey, dude, not the destination—the act of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the art. It’s all worthwhile in and of itself.”
Kurt shook his head. “You want to eat Vietnamese?”
“Sure,” Alan said.
“I know a place,” he said, and nudged the car through traffic and on to the Don Valley Parkway.
“Where the hell are we going?” Alan said, once they’d left the city limits and entered the curved, identical cookie-cutter streets of the industrial suburbs in the north end.
“Place I know,” Kurt said. “It’s really cheap and really good. All the Peel Region cops eat there.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you about the cop,” he said.
“You were,” Alan said.
“So, one night I’d been diving there.” Kurt pointed to an anonymous low-slung, sprawling brown building. “They print hockey cards, baseball cards, monster cards—you name it.”
He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and spat it out. “Shit, that was last night’s coffee,” he said. “So, one night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean, hockey cards are just paper, right? The only thing that makes them valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks.”
“Tell me how you really feel,” Alan said.
“Sorry,” Kurt said. “The hockey players in junior high were real jerks. I’m mentally scarred.
“So I’m driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they know me, mostly, ‘cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespass to Property Act that says that I’m allowed to do what I’m doing, and then I open the trunk and I show him, and he busts a nut: ‘You mean you found these in the garbage? My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the garbage?’ He keeps saying, ‘In the garbage?’ and his partner leads him away and I put it behind me.
“But then a couple nights later, I go back and there’s someone in the dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards.”
“The cop,” Alan said.
“The cop,” Kurt said. “Right.”
“That’s the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?” Alan said.
“That’s the story. The moral is: We’re all only a c-hair away from jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it.”
“C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?”
“C stands for cock, okay?”
Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn’t had an evening chatting together in some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much Danny on his mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.
“Okay,” Alan said. “We going to eat?”
“We’re going to eat,” Kurt said. “The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing—it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly fucked-up tourist. People suck.”
“Do they?” Alan said. “I quite like them. You know,
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