Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow (best classic books to read .txt) 📗

and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table, but I couldn't sit there, though I can't remember why."

"Wait a second," Alan said. "You don't remember?"

She made a sad noise in her throat. "I was told I was welcome, but I knew I wasn't. I know that sounds paranoid -- crazy. Maybe I was just a teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don't know what it was. I knew then. They knew it, too -- no one blamed me. They loved me, I guess."

"You stayed with them until you went to school?"

"Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse, more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee's and drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one bugged me.

"When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered that I'd been away all night. If anything, the parental people might have been a little distraught that I came home. 'I think I'll get my own place,' I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name to make things easier. I got a crummy little basement in what the landlord called Cabbagetown but what was really Regent Park, and I switched out to a huge, anonymous high school to finish school. Worked in a restaurant at nights and on weekends to pay the bills."

The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a cigarette and rolled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind and the smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of the roadside.

"Give me one of those," Alan said.

She lit another and put it between his lips, damp with her saliva. His skin came up in goosepimples.

"Who knows about your wings?" he said.

"Krishna knows," she said. "And you." She looked out into the night. "The family in Oakville. If I could remember where they lived, I'd look them up and ask them about it. Can't. Can't remember their names or their faces. I remember the pool, though, and the barbecue."

"No one else knows?"

"There was no one else before Krishna. No one that I remember, anyway."

"I have a brother," he said, then swallowed hard. "I have a brother named Brad. He can see the future."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He pawed around for an ashtray and discovered that it had been removed, along with the lighter, from the rental car's dashboard. Cursing, he pinched off the coal of the cigarette and flicked it to the roadside, hoping that it would burn out quickly, then he tossed the butt over his shoulder at the back seat. As he did, the body in the trunk rolled while he navigated a curve in the road and he braked hard, getting the car stopped in time for him to open the door and pitch a rush of vomit onto the roadway.

"You okay to drive?"

"Yeah. I am." He sat up and put the car into gear and inched to the shoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled of sour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in the trunk.

"It's not easy to be precognizant," Alan said, and pulled back onto the road, signaling even though there were no taillights or headlights for as far as the eye could see.

"I believe it," she said.

"He stopped telling us things after a while. It just got him into trouble. I'd be studying for an exam and he'd look at me and shake his head, slowly, sadly. Then I'd flunk out, and I'd be convinced that it was him psyching me out. Or he'd get picked for kickball and he'd say. 'What's the point, this team's gonna lose,' and wander off, and they'd lose, and everyone would hate him. He couldn't tell the difference between what he knew and what everyone else knew. Didn't know the difference between the past and the future, sometimes. So he stopped telling us, and when we figured out how to read it in his eyes, he stopped looking at us.

"Then something really -- Something terrible... Someone I cared about died. And he didn't say anything about it. I could have -- stopped -- it. Prevented it. I could have saved her life, but he wouldn't talk."

He drove.

"For real, he could see the future?" she said softly. Her voice had more emotion than he'd ever heard in it and she rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.

"Yeah," Alan said. "A future or the future, I never figured it out. A little of both, I suppose."

"He stopped talking, huh?"

"Yeah," Alan said.

"I know what that's like," Mimi said. "I hadn't 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. I'd dropped out of school after Christmas break, just didn't bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn't be any living thing that depended on me."

She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.

"Krishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my wings were long -- the longest they've ever been -- and wearing a big parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the shoulder.

"I turned to look at him and he said, 'I get off at the next stop. Will you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I've been riding next to you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you're like.'

"I wouldn't have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I'd already said, 'I beg your pardon?' because I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. And once I'd said that, once I'd spoken, I couldn't bear the thought of not speaking again."

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 drag -- which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he'd waited out half a day to change buses -- was deserted, the only evidence of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store drive-through lane.

"Jesus, who divorced me this time?" Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.

"Fear and Loathing again, right?"

"It's the road-trip novel," she said.

"What about On the Road?"

"Oh, that," she said. "Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isn't fit for human consumption."

"Thompson isn't a dope fiend?"

"No. That was just a put-on. He wrote about drugs, not on drugs."

"Have you read Kerouac?"

"I couldn't get into it," she said.

He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.

"What's this?" she said.

"The library," he said. "Come on."

It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books he'd ever seen. Sweet, dusty.

"Here," 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. "Here," he said, running his finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the faded Dewey labels.

H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he'd remembered from all those years ago. On the Road.

"Come on," he said. "We've got it."

"You can't check that out," 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 driver's license -- not 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 pirate's 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 librarian -- a boy of possibly Mimi's age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his patrons, but at a certain angle that suggest urbane irony -- goggled 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.

"This isn't --" the boy began.

"It's a library card," Alan said. "They used to let me use it here."

The boy set it down on the counter again.

Mimi peered at it. "There's no name on that card," she said.

"Never needed one," he said.

He'd 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. She'd rolled it into her typewriter and then they'd both gone chasing after Brad, then she'd asked him again for his name and they'd 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 again -- not even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who'd 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.

"I have to give you a new card," the mesh-back kid said. "With a bar code. We don't take that card anymore." He picked it up and made to tear it in half.

"NO!" Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kid's wrists.

The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan's 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.

"Give it to me," Alan said. The boy's 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