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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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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 want to discuss it.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “It’s not fair to you to stay.”
“You want to have your wings cut,” Alan said. “That’s why you want to go back to him.”
She shied back as though he’d slapped her. “No—”
“You do. But what Billy didn’t tell you is that Krishna’s out there with other women, I saw him today. With a girl. Young. Pretty. Normal. If he takes you back, it will be as a toy, not as a lover. He can’t love.”
“Christ,” she said. “Why are you saying this?”
“Because I don’t want to watch you self-destruct, Mimi. Stay here. We’ll sort out Krishna together. And my brother. Billy’s here now, that means they can’t sneak up on us.”
“And these?” she said, flapping her wings, one great heave that sent currents of air across the room, that blew the loose frontispiece from Alice in Wonderland toward the fireplace grate. “You’ll sort these out, too?”
“What do you want from me, Mimi?” He was angry now. She hadn’t spoken a word to him in weeks, and now—
“Cut them off, Alan. Make me into someone who can go out again, who can be seen. Do it. I have the knife.”
Adam squeezed his eyes shut. “No,” he said.
“Good-bye,” she said, and stood, headed for the stairs. Upstairs, the toilet flushed and they heard the sink running.
“Wait!” he said, running after her. She had her hand on the doorknob.
“No,” she said. She was crying now. “I won’t stay. I won’t be trapped again. Better to be with him than trapped—”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “If you still want me to do it in two days, I’ll do it.”
She looked gravely at him. “Don’t you lie to me about this,” she said. “Don’t you dare be lying.”
He took her hands. “I swear,” he said.
From the top of the stairs then, “Whups,” said Billy. “I think I’ll just tuck myself into bed.”
Mimi smiled and hugged Alan fiercely.
Trey’s ardor came out with his drunkenness. First a clammy arm around her shoulder, then a casual grope at her boob, then a sloppy kiss on the corner of her mouth. That was as far as she was going to let it go. She waited for him to move in for another kiss, then slipped out from under his arm so that he fell into the roots of the big tree they’d been leaning against. She brained him with the vodka bottle before he’d had a chance to recover, then, as he rocked and moaned, she calmly took the hunting knife she’d bought at the Yonge Street survivalist store out of her bag. She prized one of his hands off his clutched head and turned it over, then swiftly drew the blade across his palm, laying it open to the muscle.
She hadn’t been sure that she’d be capable of doing that, but it was easier than she’d thought. She had nothing to worry about. She was capable of that and more.
They climbed into bed together at the same time for the first time since they’d come home, like a domesticated couple, and Mimi dug under her pillow and set something down with a tin tink on the bedstand, a sound too tinny to be the hunting knife. Alan squinted. It was the robot, the one he’d given her, the pretty thing with the Dutch Master craquelure up its tuna-can skirts.
“He’s beautiful,” she said. “Like you.” She wrapped her wings around him tightly, soft fur softer than any down comforter, and pressed her dimpled knees into the hollows of his legs, snuggling in.
He cried like a baby once the pain in his hand set in. She pointed the knifepoint at his face, close enough to stab him if need be. “I won’t kill you if you don’t scream,” she said. “But I will be taking one joint of one toe and one joint of one finger tonight. Just so you know.”
He tried not to fall asleep, tried to stay awake and savor that feeling of her pressed against him, of her breath on the nape of his neck, of the enfolded engulfment of her wings, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Soon enough, he was asleep.
What roused him, he couldn’t say, but he found himself groggily awake in the close heat of those
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