Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) š
- Author: Cory Doctorow
Book online Ā«Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) šĀ». Author Cory Doctorow
He drove.
āFor real, he could see the future?ā she said softly. Her voice had more emotion than heād ever heard in it and she rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.
āYeah,ā Alan said. āA future or the future, I never figured it out. A little of both, I suppose.ā
āHe stopped talking, huh?ā
āYeah,ā Alan said.
āI know what thatās like,ā Mimi said. āI hadnāt spoken more than three words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail house, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything to me, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, reading all those names. Iād dropped out of school after Christmas break, just didnāt bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldnāt be any living thing that depended on me.ā
She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.
āKrishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my wings were longāthe longest theyāve ever beenāand wearing a big parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the shoulder.
āI turned to look at him and he said, āI get off at the next stop. Will you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? Iāve been riding next to you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what youāre like.ā
āI wouldnāt have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, Iād already said, āI beg your pardon?ā because I wasnāt sure Iād heard him right. And once Iād said that, once Iād spoken, I couldnāt bear the thought of not speaking again.ā
They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main dragāwhich Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where heād waited out half a day to change busesāwas deserted, the only evidence of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store drive-through lane.
āJesus, who divorced me this time?ā Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.
āFear and Loathing again, right?ā
āItās the road-trip novel,ā she said.
āWhat about On the Road?ā
āOh, that,ā she said. āPfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isnāt fit for human consumption.ā
āThompson isnāt a dope fiend?ā
āNo. That was just a put-on. He wrote about drugs, not on drugs.ā
āHave you read Kerouac?ā
āI couldnāt get into it,ā she said.
He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.
āWhatās this?ā she said.
āThe library,ā he said. āCome on.ā
It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books heād ever seen. Sweet, dusty.
āHere,ā he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section at the library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupied its own corner of overstuffed bookcases. āHere,ā he said, running his finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the faded Dewey labels.
H, I, J, Kā¦ There it was, the edition heād remembered from all those years ago. On the Road.
āCome on,ā he said. āWeāve got it.ā
āYou canāt check that out,ā she said.
He pulled out his wallet as they drew up closer to the checkout counter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the health card and the driverās licenseānot a very good likeness of his face or his name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that it looked like a pirateās map on parchment. He slid it delicately out of the plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlike surface of the card, the furry type.
He slid the card and the book across the counter. Mimi and the librarianāa boy of possibly Mimiās age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his patrons, but at a certain angle that suggested urbane ironyāgoggled at it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece.
The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf of his card.
āThis isnātāā the boy began.
āItās a library card,ā Alan said. āThey used to let me use it here.ā
The boy set it down on the counter again.
Mimi peered at it. āThereās no name on that card,ā she said.
āNever needed one,ā he said.
Heād gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle off into the shelves and start pulling down books. Sheād rolled it into her typewriter and then theyād both gone chasing after Brad, then sheād asked him again for his name and theyād gone chasing after Brad, then for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No one ever looked closely at it againānot even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch whoād let him take out a stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for the morning bus to Toronto.
He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece of identification he ever owned, and in some ways, the most important.
āI have to give you a new card,ā the mesh-back kid said. āWith a bar code. We donāt take that card anymore.ā He picked it up and made to tear it in half.
āNO!ā Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kidās wrists.
The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alanās iron grip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid dropped the card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.
āGive it to me,ā Alan said. The boyās eyes, wide with shock, began to screw shut with pain. Alan let go his wrists, and the kid chafed them, backing away another step.
His shout had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to terminating childrenās mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving cautiously toward them, sizing them up.
āWe should go,ā Mimi said.
āI need my library card,ā he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and wounded.
Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of her manās jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when she took to the air.
She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.
āWeāre going,ā Mimi said. āNow.ā
Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimiās hand, though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his throat.
āHere,ā she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card stock, he snapped back to himself. āSorry,ā he said lamely to the mesh-back kid.
Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.
He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. Heād forgotten about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.
āAlan?ā Mimi said.
āIt was my first piece of identification,ā he said. āIt made me a person who could get a book out of the library.ā
They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.
āWhat did I just say?ā Alan said.
āYou said it was your first piece of ID,ā Mimi said. She was twitching worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving, steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around the traffic. āYou said it made you a personāā
āThatās right,ā Alan said. āIt did.ā
He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was itāthe five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmates did have Big Wheels, catcherās mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parentsā night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdaysāAlanās birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldnāt be an issue. So did his brothersā, when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasinsāa tithe of the golemsāwere fit subject for a brief exposition.
āDid your mom buy you any real shoes?ā It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alanās flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought heād figured out how to fit in, that heād observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.
They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him,
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