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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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His bladder was full. He gently extricated himself from Mimi, from her wings, and stood. There was the robot, silhouetted on the end table. He smiled and padded off to the toilet. He came back to find Mimi splayed across the whole bed, occupying its length and breadth, a faintly naughty smile on her face. He began to ease himself into bed again, when he heard the sound, tinny, a little rattle. He looked at the robot.
It was moving. Its arms were moving. That was impossible. Its arms were painted on. He sat up quickly, rousing Mimi, who let out a small sound, and something small and bent emerged from behind the robot and made a dash for the edge of the end table. The way the thing ran, it reminded him of an animal that had been crippled by a trap. He shrank back from it instinctively, even as he reached out for the table light and switched it on.
Mimi scrunched her eyelids and flung an arm over her face, but he hardly noticed, even when she gave an outraged groan. He was looking at the little, crippled thing, struggling to get down off the end table on Mimi’s side of the bed.
It was the Allen. Though he hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years, he recognized it. Tiny, malformed, and bandy-legged, it was still the spitting image of him. Had Davey been holding on to it all these years? Tending it in a cage? Torturing it with pins?
Mimi groaned again. “Switch off the light, baby,” she said, a moment’s domesticity.
“In a sec,” he said, and edged closer to the Allen, which was huddled in on itself, staring and crazy.
“Shhh,” Adam breathed. “It’s okay.” He very slowly moved one hand toward the end table, leaning over Mimi, kneeing her wing out of the way.
The Allen shied back farther.
“What’re you doing?” Mimi said, squinting up at him.
“Be very still,” he said to her. “I don’t want to frighten it. Don’t scream or make any sudden movements. I’m counting on you.”
Her eyes grew round and she slowly looked over toward the end table. She sucked in sudden air, but didn’t scream.
“What is—”
“It’s me,” he said. “It grew out of a piece of me. My thumb. After Davey bit it off.”
“Jesus,” she said.
The Allen was quaking now, and Alan cooed to it.
“It’s hurt,” Mimi said.
“A long time ago,” Andreas said.
“No, now. It’s bleeding.”
She was right. A small bead of blood had formed beneath it. He extended his hand farther. Its bandy scurry was pathetic.
Holding his breath, Alan lifted the Allen gently, cradling it in his palms. It squirmed and thrashed weakly. “Shh,” he said again. His hands were instantly made slippery and sticky with its blood. “Shh.” Something sharp pricked at his hand.
Now that he had it up close, he could see where the blood was coming from: A broken-off sewing needle, shoved rudely through its distended abdomen.
“Cover up,” Bradley said, “I’m coming up.” They heard his lopsided tread on the steps.
Mimi pulled the blanket up around her chin. “Okay,” she said.
Bert opened the door quickly. He wore nothing but the oversized jeans that Alan had given him, his scrawny chest and mutilated feet bare.
“It’s going to die,” Brad said, hunkering down beside the bed. “Davey pinned it and then sent Link over with it. It can’t last through the night.”
Adam felt like he was choking. “We can help it,” he said. “It can heal. It healed before.”
“It won’t this time. See how much pain it’s in? It’s out of its mind.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“We need to put it out of its misery,” Brad said. “It’s the right thing.”
In his hands, the thing squirmed and made a small, hurt sound. “Shhh,” Alan said. The sound it made was like sobbing, but small, so small. And weak.
Mimi said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Yeah, I can see that.”
She lifted herself out of bed, unmindful of her nudity, and pushed her way past him to the door, to the bathroom.
“Stop being such a baby,” she told Trey as he clutched at his foot. “It’s almost stopped bleeding already.”
He looked up at her with murder in his eyes. “Shall I take another one?” she said. He looked away.
“If I get word that you’ve come within a mile of my brother, I will come back and take your eyes. The toe and the finger joint were just a down payment on that.”
He made a sullen sound, so she took his vain and girlish blond hair in her fist and tugged his head back and kissed his throat with the knife.
“Nod if you understand. ”
“The knife is under Mimi’s pillow.”
“I can’t do it,” Alan said.
“I know,” Brian said. “I will.”
And he did. Took the knife. Took the Allen. It cried. Mimi threw up in another room, the sound more felt than heard. The toilet flushed and Brian’s hands were sure and swift, but not sure enough. The Allen made a sound like a dog whistle. Bruce’s hand moved again, and then it was over. He dug a sock out of the hamper and rolled up the Allen’s remains in it. “I’ll bury it,” he said. “In the back.”
Numbly, Alan stood and began dressing. “No,” he said. “I will.”
Mimi joined them, wrapped in a blanket. Alan dug and Brent held the sock and Mimi watched solemnly.
A trapezoid of light knifed across the back garden. They looked up and saw Krishna staring down at them from a third-floor window. He was smiling very slightly. A moment later, Link appeared in the window, reeling like he was drunk, giggling.
They all looked at one another for a frozen moment, then Alan turned back to his shoveling. He dug down three feet, and Brent laid the little Allen down in the earth gently as putting it to bed, and Alan filled the hole back up. Mimi looked back up at the window, eyes locked on Krishna’s.
“I’m going inside,” Adam announced. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah,” Mimi said, but she didn’t. She stayed out there for ten minutes, then twenty, and when Alan looked out his window at her, he saw she was still staring up at Krishna, mesmerized.
He loudly opened his window and leaned out. Mimi’s eyes flicked to him, and then she slowly made her way back into the house.
She took his pants and his shoes and left him in the park, crying and drunk. All things considered, it had gone well. When Trey told her that he had no idea where her brother was, she believed him. It was okay, she’d find her brother. He had lots of friends.
Alan thought that that was the end of the story, maybe. Short and sweet. A kind of lady or the tiger thing. Let the reader’s imagination do the rest.
There on the screen, it seemed awfully thin. Here in the house he’d built for it, it seemed awfully unimportant. Such a big and elaborate envelope for such a small thing. He saved the file and went back up to bed. Mimi was asleep, which was good, because he didn’t think he’d be able to fall asleep with her twice that night.
He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to forget the sound the Allen had made.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Not a thing,” she said. Her brother’s phone-call hadn’t been unexpected.
“You’re fucking insane.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to behave yourself.”
“You’re completely fucking insane.”
He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a note on the kitchen table, terse: “Gone out. B.” The handwriting sent him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days when they’d been a family, when he’d signed Brad’s report cards and hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.
Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare words there. She was draped in her wings.
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said. “Out.”
“Is this what your family is like?”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “This is what they’re like.”
“Are you going to go out, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine,” she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. “Tomorrow, you cut these tomorrow!” she said, and her wings flared open, knocking the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books. “Tomorrow!” she said.
“Good morning, Natalie,” he said. She was red-eyed and her face was puffy, and her hand shook so that the smoke from her cigarette rose in a nervous spiral.
“Andy,” she said, nodding.
He looked at her across the railing that divided their porches. “Would you like to join me for a coffee?”
“I’m hardly dressed for it,” she said. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs and house slippers and a shapeless green T-shirt that hung down past her butt.
“The Greek doesn’t stand on ceremony,” he said. He was hardly dressed better. He hadn’t wanted to go up to the master bedroom and face Mimi, so he’d dressed himself out of the laundry hamper in the basement.
“I don’t have shoes, Alan.”
“You could go in and get some,” he said.
She shook her head.
Her shoulders were tensed, her whole skinny body a cringe.
“We’ll go barefoot and sit on the patio,” he said after a moment, kicking his shoes off.
She looked at him and gave a sad laugh. “Okay.”
The sidewalk was still cool enough for bare feet. The Greek didn’t give their bare feet a second look, but brought iced coffees and yogurt with walnuts and honey.
“Do you want to tell me about them?”
“It’s been bad ever since—ever since Mimi left. All of a sudden, Krishna’s Link’s best friend. He follows him around.”
Alan nodded. “Krishna beat Mimi up,” he said.
“I know it,” she said. “I heard it. I didn’t do anything, goddamn me, but I heard it happen.”
“Eat,” he said. “Here.” He reached for a clean napkin from the next table and handed it to her. She dried her eyes and wiped her nose and ate a spoonful of yogurt. “Drink,” he said, and handed her the coffee. She drank.
“They brought those girls home last night. Little girls. Teenyboppers. Disappeared into their bedrooms. The noises they made.”
“Drink,” Alan said, and then handed her the napkin again.
“Drunk. They got them drunk and brought them home.”
“You should get out of there,” Andrew said, surprising himself. “Get out. Today, even. Go stay with your mom and find a new apartment next month.”
She set her cup down carefully. “No,” she said.
“I’m serious. It’s a bad situation that you can’t improve and the more you stay there, the worse it’s going to get.”
“That’s not a practical suggestion.”
“Staying there, in potential danger, is not practical. You need to get out. Staying there will only make things worse for you.”
She clenched her jaw. “You know, there comes a point where you’re not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you’re just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. That’s not very fucking helpful, you know. I’m holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it’s not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I’m capable of.”
Alan digested this. She’d said it loudly, and a few of the other morning patrons at the Greek’s were staring at them. He looked away, across the street, and spied Billy standing in a doorway, watching. Billy met his eyes, then looked away.
“I’m sorry, Natalie,” he said. “You’re right.”
She blew air out her nostrils.
“What about this. You can knock on my door any time. I’ll make up the sofa for you.” He thought of Mimi
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