Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

glinting dully in thefluorescent tube lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who spoke a hundredlanguages but communicated with one another by means of this universaltongue of weights and measures and purity.

  The clerks who'd tended Alan's many stores -- the used clothing store inthe Beaches, the used book-store in the Annex, the collectible tin-toystore in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen Street -- had bothbenefited from and had their patience tried by Alan's discursivenature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious rolling ofeyes and twirling fingers aimed templewise among his employees when hegot himself warmed up to a good oration, but in truth very little everescaped his attention. His customers loved his little talks, loved theway he could wax rhapsodic about the tortured prose in a Victorianpotboiler, the nearly erotic curve of a beat-up old table leg, thevoluminous cuffs of an embroidered silk smoking jacket. The clerks wholistened to Alan's lectures went on to open their own stores all abouttown, and by and large, they did very well.

  He'd put the word out when he bought the house on Wales Avenue to allhis protégés: Wooden bookcases! His cell-phone rang every day, bringingnews of another wooden bookcase found at this flea market, that thriftstore, this rummage sale or estate auction.

  He had a man he used part-time, Tony, who ran a small man-with-vanservice, and when the phone rang, he'd send Tony over to his protégé'sshop with his big panel van to pick up the case and deliver it to thecellar of the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by coldstorages, root cellars, disused coal chutes and storm cellars. By thetime Alan had finished with his sanding, every nook and cranny of thecellar was packed with wooden bookcases of every size and descriptionand repair.

  Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The househad been gutted by the previous owners, who'd had big plans for thebuilding but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They'd had tosell fast, and no amount of realtor magic -- flowers on the dining-roomtable, soup simmering on the stove -- could charm away the essentialdagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wiresand conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers offurniture. Alan got it for a song, and was delighted by his fortune.

  He was drunk on the wood, of course, and would have paid much more hadthe realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk ontrivial things from others' lives that no one else noticed and he'ddeveloped the alcoholic's knack of disguising his intoxication. Alanwent to work as soon as the realtor staggered off, reeling with a NewYear's Day hangover. He pulled his pickup truck onto the frozen lawn,unlocked the Kryptonite bike lock he used to secure the camper bed, anddragged out his big belt sander and his many boxes of sandpaper of allgrains and sizes, his heat strippers and his jugs of caustic chemicalpeeler. He still had his jumbled, messy place across town in anondescript two-bedroom on the Danforth, would keep on paying the rentthere until his big sanding project was done and the house on WalesAvenue was fit for habitation.

  Alan's sanding project: First, finish gutting the house. Get rid of thesubstandard wiring, the ancient, lead-leaching plumbing, the crackedtile and water-warped crumbling plaster. He filled a half-dozendumpsters, working with Tony and Tony's homie Nat, who was happy to helpout in exchange for cash on the barrelhead, provided that he wasn'trequired to report for work on two consecutive days, since he'd need oneday to recover from the heroic drinking he'd do immediately after Alanlaid the cash across his palm.

  Once the house was gutted to brick and timber and delirious wood, theplumbers and the electricians came in and laid down their straightshining ducts and pipes and conduit.

  Alan tarped the floors and brought in the heavy sandblaster and strippedthe age and soot and gunge off of the brickwork throughout, until itglowed red as a golem's ass.

  Alan's father, the mountain, had many golems that called him home. Theylived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothersalone, because even a golem has the sense not to piss off a mountain,especially one it lives in.

  Then Alan tackled the timbers, reaching over his head with palm-sandersand sandpaper of ever finer grains until the timbers were as smooth asAdirondack chairs, his chest and arms and shoulders athrob with theagony of two weeks' work. Then it was the floorwork, but *not the floorsthemselves*, which he was saving for last on the grounds that they werelow-hanging fruit.

  This materialized a new lecture in his mind, one about the proper roleof low-hanging fruit, a favorite topic of MBAs who'd patronize hisstores and his person, giving him unsolicited advice on the care andfeeding of his shops based on the kind of useless book-learning andjargon-slinging that Fortune 100 companies apparently paid big bucksfor. When an MBA said "low-hanging fruit," he meant "easy pickings,"something that could and should be snatched with minimal effort. But*real* low-hanging fruit ripens last, and should be therefore picked aslate as possible. Further, picking the low-hanging fruit first meantthat you'd have to carry your bushel basket higher and higher as the daywore on, which was plainly stupid. Low-hanging fruit was meant to bepicked last. It was one of the ways that he understood people, and oneof the kinds of people that he'd come to understand. That was the game,after all -- understanding people.

  So the floors would come last, after the molding, after the stairs,after the railings and the paneling. The railings, in particular, werehorrible bastards to get clean, covered in ten or thirty coats of enamelof varying colors and toxicity. Alan spent days working with a wirebrush and pointed twists of steel wool and oozing stinging paintstripper, until the grain was as spotless and unmarked as the day itcame off the lathe.

  *Then* he did the floors, using the big rotary sander first. It had been years since he'd last swung a sander around -- it had been when he opened the tin-toy shop in Yorkville and he'd rented one while he was prepping the place. The technique came back to him quickly enough, and he fell into a steady rhythm that soon had all the floors cool and dry and soft with naked, exposed woody heartmeat. He swept the place out and locked up and returned home.

  The next day, he stopped at the Portuguese contractor-supply onOssington that he liked. They opened at five a.m., and the men behindthe counter were always happy to sketch out alternative solutions to hisamateur construction problems, they never mocked him for hisincompetence, and always threw in a ten percent "contractor's discount"for him that made him swell up with irrational pride that confusedhim. Why should the son of a mountain need affirmation from runtyPortugees with pencil stubs behind their ears and scarred fingers? Hepicked up a pair of foam-rubber knee pads and a ten-kilo box oflint-free shop rags and another carton of disposable paper masks.

  He drove to the house on Wales Avenue, parked on the lawn, which was nowstarting to thaw and show deep muddy ruts from his tires. He spent thenext twelve hours crawling around on his knees, lugging a tool bucketfilled with sandpaper and steel wool and putty and wood-crayons and shoprags. He ran his fingertips over every inch of floor and molding andpaneling, feeling the talc softness of the sifted sawdust, feeling forrough spots and gouges, smoothing them out with his tools. He triedputtying over the gouges in the flooring that he'd seen the day he tookpossession, but the putty seemed like a lie to him, less honest than thegouged-out boards were, and so he scooped the putty out and sanded thegrooves until they were as smooth as the wood around them.

  Next came the beeswax, sweet and shiny. It almost broke his heart toapply it, because the soft, newly exposed wood was so deliciously tenderand sensuous. But he knew that wood left to its own would eventuallychip and splinter and yellow. So he rubbed wax until his elbows ached,*massaged* the wax into the wood, buffed it with shop rags so that thehouse shone.

  Twenty coats of urethane took forty days -- a day to coat and a day todry. More buffing and the house took on a high shine, a slipperyslickness. He nearly broke his neck on the slippery staircase treads,and the Portuguese helped him out with a bag of clear grit made fromground walnut shells. He used a foam brush to put one more coat ofurethane on each tread of the stairs, then sprinkled granulat
ed walnutshells on while it was still sticky. He committed a rare error injudgment and did the stairs from the bottom up and trapped himself onthe third floor, with its attic ceilings and dormer windows, and feltlike a goddamned idiot as he curled up to sleep on the cold, hard,slippery, smooth floor while he waited for his stairs to dry. Theurethane must be getting to his head.

  The bookcases came out of the cellar one by one. Alan wrestled them ontothe front porch with Tony's help and sanded them clean, then turned themover to Tony for urethane and dooring.

  The doors were UV-filtering glass, hinged at the top and surrounded byfelt on their inside lips so that they closed softly. Each one had asmall brass prop-rod on the left side that could brace it open. Tony hadbeen responsible for measuring each bookcase after he retrieved it fromAlan's protégés' shops and for sending the