Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

hospital incinerator, acrid and
smoky.

His father, the mountain, had attuned Art to smells, since they were the
leading indicators of his moods, sulfurous belches from deep in the
caverns when he was displeased, the cold non-smell of spring water when
he was thoughtful, the new-mown hay smell from his slopes when he was
happy. Understanding smells was something that you did, when the
mountain was your father.

Once the bookcases were seated and screwed into the walls, out came the
books, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them.

Little kids' books with loose signatures, ancient first-edition
hardcovers, outsized novelty art books, mass-market paperbacks,
reference books as thick as cinderblocks. They were mostly used when
he'd gotten them, and that was what he loved most about them: They
smelled like other people and their pages contained hints of their
lives: marginalia and pawn tickets, bus transfers gone yellow with age
and smears of long-ago meals. When he read them, he was in three places:
his living room, the authors' heads, and the world of their previous
owners.

They came off his shelves at home, from the ten-by-ten storage down on
the lakeshore, they came from friends and enemies who'd borrowed his
books years before and who'd "forgotten" to return them, but Alan
*never* forgot, he kept every book in a great and deep relational
database that had begun as a humble flatfile but which had been imported
into successive generations of industrial-grade database software.

This, in turn, was but a pocket in the Ur-database, The Inventory in
which Alan had input the value, the cost, the salient features, the
unique identifiers, and the photographic record of every single thing he
owned, from the socks in his sock drawer to the pots in his
cupboard. Maintaining The Inventory was serious business, no less
important now than it had been when he had begun it in the course of
securing insurance for the bookshop.

Alan was an insurance man's worst nightmare, a customer from hell who'd
messenger over five bankers' boxes of detailed, cross-referenced
Inventory at the slightest provocation.

The books filled the shelves, row on row, behind the dust-proof,
light-proof glass doors. The books began in the foyer and wrapped around
the living room, covered the wall behind the dining room in the kitchen,
filled the den and the master bedroom and the master bath, climbed the
short walls to the dormer ceilings on the third floor. They were
organized by idiosyncratic subject categories, and alphabetical by
author within those categories.

Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine -- he
kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His
brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller,
and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he
treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for
landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes,
Mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords
snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong
outlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to make
sure that it came out perfectly even.

Tony helped Alan install the shallow collectibles cases along the
house's two-story stairwell, holding the level while Alan worked the
cordless powerdriver. Alan's glazier had built the cases to Alan's
specs, and they stretched from the treads to the ceiling. Alan filled
them with Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin toys, felt tourist pennants from
central Florida gator farms, a stone from Marie Laveau's tomb in the
St. Louis I Cemetery in New Orleans, tarnished brass Zippos, small
framed comic-book bodybuilding ads, carved Polynesian coconut monkeys,
melamine transistor radios, Bakelite snow globes, all the tchotchkes
he'd accumulated over a lifetime of picking and hunting and digging.

They were gloriously scuffed and non-mint: he'd always sold off the
sterile mint-in-package goods as quickly as he could, squirreling away
the items that were marked with "Property of Freddy Terazzo" in shaky
ballpoint, the ones with tooth marks and frayed boxes taped shut with
brands of stickytape not offered for sale in fifty years.

The last thing to go in was the cellar. They knocked out any wall that
wasn't load-bearing, smeared concrete on every surface, and worked in a
loose mosaic of beach glass and beach china, smooth and white with
spidery blue illustrations pale as a dream. Three coats of urethane made
the surfaces gleam.

Then it was just a matter of stringing out the cables for the clip-on
halogens whose beams he took care to scatter off the ceilings to keep
the glare to a minimum. He moved in his horsehair sofa and armchairs,
his big old bed, his pots and pans and sideboard with its novelty
decanters, and his entertainment totem.

A man from Bell Canada came out and terminated the data line in his
basement, in a room that he'd outfitted with an uninterruptible power
supply, a false floor, dry fire extinguishers and a pipe-break
sensor. He installed and configured the router, set up his modest rack
and home servers, fished three four-pair wires through to the living
room, the den, and the attic, where he attached them to unobtrusive
wireless access points and thence to weatherproofed omnidirectional
antennae made from copper tubing and PVC that he'd affixed to the
building's exterior on short masts, aimed out over Kensington Market,
blanketing a whole block with free Internet access.

He had an idea that the story he was going to write would require some
perambulatory cogitation, and he wanted to be able to take his laptop
anywhere in the market and sit down and write and hop online and check
out little factoids with a search engine so he wouldn't get hung up on
stupid details.

The house on Wales Avenue was done. He'd repainted the exterior a lovely
robin's-egg blue, fixed the front step, and planted a low-maintenance
combination of outsized rocks from the Canadian Shield and wild grasses
on the front lawn. On July first, Alan celebrated Canada Day by crawling
out of the attic window onto the roof and watching the fireworks and
listening to the collective sighs of the people densely packed around
him in the Market, then he went back into the house and walked from room
to room, looking for something out of place, some spot still rough and
unsanded, and found none. The books and the collections lined the walls,
the fans whirred softly in the ceilings, the filters beneath the open
windows hummed as they sucked the pollen and particulate out of the
rooms -- Alan's retail experience had convinced him long ago of the
selling power of fresh air and street sounds, so he refused to keep the
windows closed, despite the fantastic volume of city dust that blew in.

The house was perfect. The ergonomic marvel of a chair that UPS had
dropped off the previous day was tucked under the wooden sideboard he'd
set up as a desk in the second-floor den. His brand-new computer sat
centered on the desk, a top-of-the-line laptop with a wireless card and
a screen big enough to qualify as a home theater in some circles.

Tomorrow, he'd start the story.

#

Alan rang the next-door house's doorbell at eight a.m. He had a bag of
coffees from the Greek diner. Five coffees, one for each bicycle locked
to the wooden railing on the sagging porch plus one for him.

He waited five minutes, then rang the bell again, holding it down,
listening for the sound of footsteps over the muffled jangling of the
buzzer. It took two minutes more, he estimated, but he didn't mind. It
was a beautiful summer day, soft and moist and green, and he could
already smell the fish market over the mellow brown vapors of the strong
coffee.

A young woman in long johns and a baggy tartan T-shirt opened the
door. She was excitingly plump, round and a little jiggly, the kind of
woman Alan had always gone for. Of course, she was all of twenty-two,
and so was certainly not an appropriate romantic interest for him, but
she was fun to look at as she ungummed her eyes and worked the sleep out
of her voice.

"Yes?" she said through the locked screen door. Her voice brooked no
nonsense, which Alan also liked. He'd hire her in a second, if he were
still running a shop. He liked to hire sharp kids like her, get to know
them, try to winkle out their motives and emotions through observation.

"Good morning!" Alan said. "I'm Alan, and I just moved in next
door. I've brought coffee!" He hefted his sack in her direction.

"Good morning, Alan," she said. "Thanks and all, but --"

"Oh, no need to thank me! Just being neighborly. I brought five -- one
for each of you and one for me."

"Well, that's awfully nice of you --"

"Nothing at all. Nice morning, huh? I saw a robin just there, on that
tree in the park, not an hour ago. Fantastic."

"Great." She unlatched the screen door and opened it, reaching for the
sack.

Alan stepped into the foyer and handed it to her. "There's cream and
sugar in there," he said. "Lots -- don't know how you folks take it, so
I just figured better sure than miserable, better to err on the side of
caution. Wow, look at this, your place has a completely different layout
from mine. I think they were built at the same time, I mean, they look a
lot alike. I don't really know much about architecture, but they really
do seem the same, don't they, from the outside? But look at this! In my
place, I've got a long corridor before you get to the living room, but
your place is all open. I wonder if it was built that way, or if someone
did that later. Do you know?"

"No," she said, hefting the sack.

"Well, I'll just have a seat while you get your roommates up, all right?
Then we can all have a nice cup of coffee and a chat and get to know
each other."

She dithered for a moment, then stepped back toward the kitchen and the
stairwell. Alan nodded and took a little tour of the living room. There
was a very nice media totem, endless shelves of DVDs and videos,
including a good selection of Chinese kung-fu VCDs and black and white
comedies. There was a stack of guitar magazines on the battered coffee
table, and a cozy sofa with an afghan folded neatly on one arm. Good
kids, he could tell that just by looking at their possessions.

Not very security-conscious, though. She should have either kicked him
out or dragged him around the house while she got her roomies out of
bed. He thought about slipping some VCDs into his pocket and returning
them later, just to make the point, but decided it would be getting off
on the wrong foot.

She returned a moment later, wearing a fuzzy yellow robe whose belt and
seams were gray with grime and wear. "They're coming down," she said.

"Terrific!" Alan said, and planted himself on the sofa. "How about that
coffee, hey?"

She shook her head, smiled a little, and retrieved a coffee for
him. "Cream? Sugar?"

"Nope," Alan said. "The Greek makes it just the way I like it. Black and
strong and aromatic. Try some before you add anything -- it's really
fantastic. One of the best things about the neighborhood, if you ask
me."

Another young woman, rail-thin with a shaved head, baggy jeans, and