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

back, had been fascinated to see the provenance he'd turned up, an inventory sticker from the University of Toronto maintenance department indicating that this sofa had originally been installed at the Robarts Library, itself of great and glorious aesthetic obsolescence.

Here was Adam on the phone with this woman, closing a deal to turn a $3,000 profit on an item he'd acquired at the Goodwill As-Is Center for five bucks, and here were his brothers, in the store, angry about something, shouting at each other about something. They ran around like three fat lunatics, reeking of the BO that they exuded like the ass end of a cow: Loud, boorish, and indescribably weird. Weird beyond the quaint weirdness of his little curiosity show. Weird beyond the interesting weirdness of the punks and the goths and the mods who were wearing their subcultures like political affiliations as they strolled by the shops. Those were redeemable weirds, weirds within the bounds of normal human endeavor. His brothers, on the other hand, were utterly, utterly irredeemable.

He sank down behind the counter as George said something to Fred in their own little shorthand language, a combination of grunts and nonsense syllables that the three had spoken together for so long that he'd not even noticed it until they were taken out of their context and put in his. He put his back against the wall and brought his chest to his knees and tried to sound like he had a belly button as he said to the woman, "Yes, absolutely, I can have this delivered tomorrow if you'd like to courier over a check."

This check, it was enough money to keep his business afloat for another 30 days, to pay his rent and pay the minimum-wage kid and buy his groceries. And there were his brothers, and now Ed was barking like a dog -- a rare moment of mirth from him, who had been the sober outer bark since he was a child and rarely acted like the 17-year-old he was behaving like today.

"Is everything all right?" she said down the phone, this woman who'd been smartly turned out in a cashmere sweater and a checked scarf and a pair of boot-cut jeans that looked new and good over her designer shoes with little heels. They'd flirted a little, even though she was at least ten years older than him, because flirting was a new thing for Alan, and he'd discovered that he wasn't bad at it.

"Everything is fine," he said. "Just some goofballs out in the street out front. How about if I drop off the sofa for six o'clock?"

"KILLED HER, CUT HER UP, SLICED HER OPEN," George screeched suddenly, skidding around the counter, rolling past him, yanking the phone out of the wall.

And in that moment, he realized what the sounds they had been making in their private speech had been: They had been a reenactment, a grunting, squeaking playback of the day, the fateful day, the day he'd taken his knife and done his mischief with it.

He reached for the phone cable and plugged it back into the wall, but it was as though his hand were moving of its own accord, because his attention was focused elsewhere, on the three of them arrayed in a triangle, as they had been on the hillside, as they had been when they had chanted at him when the knife grip was sure in the palm of his hands.

The ritual -- that's what it was, it was a ritual -- the ritual had the feel of something worn smooth with countless repetitions. He found himself rigid with shock, offended to his bones. This was what they did now, in the cave, with Davey sitting atop their mother, black and shriveled, this was how they behaved, running through this reenactment of his great shame, of the day Danny died?

No wonder Darrel had terrorized them out of their home. They were beyond odd and eccentric, they were -- unfit. Unfit for polite company. For human society.

The phone in his hand rang. It was the woman.

"You know, I'm thinking that maybe I should come back in with a tape measure and measure up the sofa before I commit to it. It's a lot of money, and to be honest, I just don't know if I have room --"

"What if I measure it for you? I could measure it for you and call you back with the numbers." The three brothers stared at him with identical glassy, alien stares.

"That's okay. I can come in," and he knew that she meant, I won't ever come in again.

"What if I bring it by anyway? I could bring it by tomorrow night and you could see it and make up your mind. No obligation."

"That's very kind of you, but I'm afraid that I'll be out tomorrow evening --"

"Friday? I could come by Friday --" He was trying to remember how to flirt now, but he couldn't. "I could come by and we could have a glass of wine or something," and he knew he'd said the exact wrong thing.

"It's all right," she said coldly. "I'll come by later in the week to have another look.

"I have to go now, my husband is home," and he was pretty sure she wasn't married, but he said good bye and hung up the phone.

He looked at his solemn brothers now and they looked at him.

"When are you going home?" he said, and Edward looked satisfied and Fred looked a little disappointed and George looked like he wanted to throw himself in front of a subway, and his bottom lip began to tremble.

"It was Ed's game," he said. "The Davey game, it was his." He pointed a finger. "You know, I'm not like them. I can be on my own. I'm what they need, they're not what I need."

The other two stared at their fat bellies in the direction of their fat feet. Andrew had never heard George say this, had never even suspected that this thought lurked in his heart, but now that it was out on the table, it seemed like a pretty obvious fact to have taken note of. All things being equal, things weren't equal. He was cold and numb.

"That's a really terrible thing to say, George," is what he said.

"That's easy for you to say," is what George said. "You are here, you are in the world. It's easy for you to say that we should be happy with things the way they are."

George turned on his heel and put his head down and bulled out the door, slamming it behind him so that the mail slot rattled and the glass shook and a stack of nice melamine cafeteria trays fell off a shelf and clattered to the ground.

He didn't come back that night. He didn't come back the next day. Ed and Fred held their grumbling tummies and chewed at the insides of their plump cheeks and sat on the unsold Danish Modern sofa in the shop and freaked out the few customers that drifted in and then drifted out.

"This is worse than last time," Ed said, licking his lips and staring at the donut that Albert refused to feel guilty about eating in front of them.

"Last time?" he said, not missing Felix's quick warning glare at Ed, even though Ed appeared to.

"He went away for a whole day, just disappeared into town. When he came back, he said that he'd needed some away time. That he'd had an amazing day on his own. That he wanted to come and see you and that he'd do it whether we wanted to come or not."

"Ah," Alvin said, understanding then how the three had come to be staying with him. He wondered how long they'd last without the middle, without the ability to eat. He remembered holding the infant Eddie in his arms, the boy light and hollowed out. He remembered holding the three boys at once, heavy as a bowling ball. "Ah," he said. "I'll have to have a word with him."

When Greg came home, Alan was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa, holding his head up with one hand. Eli and Fred snored uneasily in his bed, breathing heavily through their noses.

"Hey," he said as he came through the door, scuffing at the lock with his key for a minute or two first. He was rumpled and dirty, streaked with grime on his jawline and hair hanging limp and greasy over his forehead.

"Greg," Alan said, nodding, straightening out his spine and listening to it pop.

"I'm back," George said, looking down at his sneakers, which squished with grey water that oozed over his carpet. Art didn't say anything, just sat pat and waited, the way he did sometimes when con artists came into the shop with some kind of scam that they wanted him to play along with.

It worked the same with George. After a hard stare at his shoes, he shook his head and began to defend himself, revealing the things that he knew were indefensible. "I had to do it, I just had to. I couldn't live in that cave, with that thing, anymore. I couldn't live inside those two anymore. I'm going crazy. There's a whole world out here and every day I get farther away from it. I get weirder. I just wanted to be normal.

"I just wanted to be like you.

"They stopped letting me into the clubs after I ran out of money, and they kicked me out of the caf�s. I tried to ride the subway all night, but they threw me off at the end of the line, so I ended up digging a transfer out of a trash can and taking an all-night bus back downtown.

"No one looked at me twice that whole time, except to make sure that I was gone. I walked back here from Eglinton."

That was five miles away, a good forty minute walk in the night and the cold and the dark. Greg pried off his sneakers with his toes and then pulled off his grey, squelching socks. "I couldn't find anyone who'd let me use the toilet," he said, and Alan saw the stain on his pants.

He stood up and took Greg by the cold hand, as he had when they were both boys, and said, "It's all right, Gord. We'll get you cleaned up and changed and put you to bed, okay? Just put your stuff in the hamper in the bathroom and I'll find you a change of clothes and make a couple sandwiches, all right?"

And just as easy as that, George's spirit was tamed. He came out of the shower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam found for him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam's bed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they were reassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal with raisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto.

"I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?" Alan said as he poured himself a coffee.

They looked up at him. Ed's eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut.

"And you'll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks, okay?"

Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put a purple ten on top of it. "For the taxi to the Greyhound station," he added.

They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing the signs of their stay.

"Well," he