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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“Well, I’d be happy to introduce you to some of the people I know—there’s a vintage shop that a friend of mine runs in Parkdale. He’s always looking for designers to help with rehab and repros.”
“That would be so cool!”
“Now, Link, what do you study?”
Link pulled at his smoke, ashed in the fireplace grate. “Not much. I didn’t get into Ryerson for electrical engineering, so I’m spending a year as a bike courier, taking night classes, and reapplying for next year.”
“Well, that’ll keep you out of trouble at least,” Alan said. He turned to the nameless woman.
“So, what do you do, Apu?” she said to him, before he could say anything.
“Oh, I’m retired, Mimi,” he said.
“Mimi?” she said.
“Why not? It’s as good a name as any.”
“Her name is—” Link started to say, but she cut him off.
“Mimi is as good a name as any. I’m unemployed. Krishna’s a bartender.”
“Are you looking for work?”
She smirked. “Sure. Whatcha got?”
“What can you do?”
“I’ve got three-quarters of a degree in environmental studies, one year of kinesiology, and a half-written one-act play. Oh, and student debt until the year 3000.”
“A play!” he said, slapping his thighs. “You should finish it. I’m a writer, too, you know.”
“I thought you had a clothing shop.”
“I did. And a bookshop, and a collectibles shop, and an antique shop. Not all at the same time, you understand. But now I’m writing. Going to write a story, then I imagine I’ll open another shop. But I’m more interested in you, Mimi, and your play. Why half-finished?”
She shrugged and combed her hair back with her fingers. Her hair was brown and thick and curly, down to her shoulders. Alan adored curly hair. He’d had a clerk at the comics shop with curly hair just like hers, an earnest and bright young thing who drew her own comics in the back room on her breaks, using the receiving table as a drawing board. She’d never made much of a go of it as an artist, but she did end up publishing a popular annual anthology of underground comics that had captured the interest of the New Yorker the year before. “I just ran out of inspiration,” Mimi said, tugging at her hair.
“Well, there you are. Time to get inspired again. Stop by any time and we’ll talk about it, all right?”
“If I get back to it, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Tremendous!” he said. “I just know it’ll be fantastic. Now, who plays the guitar?”
“Krishna,” Link said. “I noodle a bit, but he’s really good.”
“He sure is,” Alan said. “He was in fine form last night, about three a.m.!” He chuckled pointedly.
There was an awkward silence. Alan slurped down his second coffee. “Whoops!” he said. “I believe I need to impose on you for the use of your facilities?”
“What?” Natalie and Link said simultaneously.
“He wants the toilet,” Mimi said. “Up the stairs, second door on the right. Jiggle the handle after you flush.”
The bathroom was crowded with too many towels and too many toothbrushes. The sink was powdered with blusher and marked with lipstick and mascara residue. It made Alan feel at home. He liked young people. Liked their energy, their resentment, and their enthusiasm. Didn’t like their guitar-playing at three a.m.; but he’d sort that out soon enough.
He washed his hands and carefully rinsed the long curly hairs from the bar before replacing it in its dish, then returned to the living room.
“Abel,” Mimi said, “sorry if the guitar kept you up last night.”
“No sweat,” Alan said. “It must be hard to find time to practice when you work nights.”
“Exactly,” Natalie said. “Exactly right! Krishna always practices when he comes back from work. He blows off some steam so he can get to bed. We just all learned to sleep through it.”
“Well,” Alan said, “to be honest, I’m hoping I won’t have to learn to do that. But I think that maybe I have a solution we can both live with.”
“What’s that?” Mimi said, jutting her chin forward.
“It’s easy, really. I can put up a resilient channel and a baffle along that wall there, soundproofing. I’ll paint it over white and you won’t even notice the difference. Shouldn’t take me more than a week. Happy to do it. Thick walls make good neighbors.”
“We don’t really have any money to pay for renovations,” Mimi said.
Alan waved his hand. “Who said anything about money? I just want to solve the problem. I’d do it on my side of the wall, but I’ve just finished renovating.”
Mimi shook her head. “I don’t think the landlord would go for it.”
“You worry too much,” he said. “Give me your landlord’s number and I’ll sort it out with him, all right?”
“All right!” Link said. “That’s terrific, Albert, really!”
“All right, Mimi? Natalie?”
Natalie nodded enthusiastically, her shaved head whipping up and down on her thin neck precariously. Mimi glared at Natalie and Link. “I’ll ask Krishna,” she said.
“All right, then!” Alan said. “Let me measure up the wall and I’ll start shopping for supplies.” He produced a matte black, egg-shaped digital tape measure and started shining pinpoints of laser light on the wall, clicking the egg’s buttons when he had the corners tight. The Portuguese clerks at his favorite store had dissolved into hysterics when he’d proudly shown them the $300 gadget, but they were consistently impressed by the exacting CAD drawings of his projects that he generated with its output. Natalie and Link stared in fascination as he did his thing with more showmanship than was technically necessary, though Mimi made a point of rolling her eyes.
“Don’t go spending any money yet, cowboy,” she said. “I’ve still got to talk to Krishna, and you’ve still got to talk with the landlord.”
He fished in the breast pocket of his jean jacket and found a stub of pencil and a little steno pad, scribbled his cell phone number, and tore off the sheet. He passed the sheet, pad, and pencil to Mimi, who wrote out the landlord’s number and passed it back to him.
“Okay!” Alan said. “There you go. It’s been a real pleasure meeting you folks. I know we’re going to get along great. I’ll call your landlord right away and you call me once Krishna’s up, and I’ll see you tomorrow at ten a.m. to start construction, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise.”
Link stood and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Albert,” he said. “Really. Thanks for the muds, too.” Natalie gave him a bony hug, and Mimi gave him a limp handshake, and then he was out in the sunshine, head full of designs and logistics and plans.
The sun set at nine p.m. in a long summertime blaze. Alan sat down on the twig-chair on his front porch, pulled up the matching twig table, and set down a wine glass and the bottle of Niagara Chardonnay he’d brought up from the cellar. He poured out a glass and held it up to the light, admiring the new blister he’d gotten on his pinky finger while hauling two-by-fours and gyprock from his truck to his neighbors’ front room. Kids rode by on bikes and punks rode by on skateboards. Couples wandered through the park across the street, their murmurous conversations clear on the whispering breeze that rattled the leaves.
He hadn’t gotten any writing done, but that was all right. He had plenty of time, and once the soundwall was in, he’d be able to get a good night’s sleep and really focus down on the story.
A Chinese girl and a white boy walked down the sidewalk, talking intensely. They were all of six, and the boy had a Russian accent. The Market’s diversity always excited Alan. The boy looked a little like Alan’s brother Doug (Dan, David, Dearborne) had looked when he was that age.
Doug was the one he’d helped murder. All the brothers had helped with the murder, even Charlie (Clem, Carlos, Cory), the island, who’d opened a great fissure down his main fault line and closed it up over Doug’s corpse, ensuring that their parents would be none the wiser. Doug was a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, though, and his corpse had tunneled up over the next six years, built a raft from the bamboo and vines that grew in proliferation on Carlos’s west coast. He sailed the raft through treacherous seas for a year and a day, beached it on their father’s gentle slope, and presented himself to their mother. By that time, the corpse had decayed and frayed and worn away, so that he was little more than a torso and stumps, his tongue withered and stiff, but he pled his case to their mother, and she was so upset that her load overbalanced and they had to restart her. Their father was so angry that he quaked and caved in Billy (Bob, Brad, Benny)’s room, crushing all his tools and all his trophies.
But a lot of time had gone by and the brothers weren’t kids anymore. Alan was nineteen, ready to move to Toronto and start scouting for real estate. Only Doug still looked like a little boy, albeit a stumpy and desiccated one. He hollered and stamped until his fingerbones rattled on the floor and his tongue flew across the room and cracked on the wall. When his anger was spent, he crawled atop their mother and let her rock him into a long, long slumber.
Alan had left his father and his family the next morning, carrying a rucksack heavy with gold from under the mountain and walked down to the town, taking the same trail he’d walked every school day since he was five. He waved to the people that drove past him on the highway as he waited at the bus stop. He was the first son to leave home under his own power, and he’d been full of butterflies, but he had a half-dozen good books that he’d checked out of the Kapuskasing branch library to keep him occupied on the 14-hour journey, and before he knew it, the bus was pulling off the Gardiner Expressway by the SkyDome and into the midnight streets of Toronto, where the buildings stretched to the sky, where the blinking lights of the Yonge Street sleaze-strip receded into the distance like a landing strip for a horny UFO.
His liquid cash was tight, so he spent that night in the Rex Hotel, in the worst room in the house, right over the cymbal tree that the jazz-drummer below hammered on until nearly two a.m.. The bed was small and hard and smelled of bleach and must, the washbasin gurgled mysteriously and spat out moist sewage odors, and he’d read all his books, so he sat in the window and watched the drunks and the hipsters stagger down Queen Street and inhaled the smoky air and before he knew it, he’d nodded off in the chair with his heavy coat around him like a blanket.
The Chinese girl abruptly thumped her fist into the Russian boy’s ear. He clutched his head and howled, tears streaming down his face, while the Chinese girl ran off. Alan shook his head, got up off his chair, went inside for a cold washcloth and an ice pack, and came back out.
The Russian boy’s face was screwed up and blotchy and streaked with tears, and it made him look even more like Doug, who’d always been a crybaby. Alan couldn’t understand him, but he took a guess and knelt at his side and wiped the boy’s face, then put the ice pack in his little hand and pressed it to the side of his little head.
“Come on,” he said, taking the boy’s other hand. “Where do your parents live? I’ll take you home.”
Alan
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