Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

the twilightof the light from under the bathroom door. Mimi came off the bed on theother side and hit the overhead light switch, turning the room as brightas an icebox, making Alan squint painfully. She closed the blindsquickly, then went to the door and shot the chain and the deadboltclosed.

  Mimi looked down at him. "Ugly sumbitch, whoever he was."

  "My brother," Alan said.

  "Oh," she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facingthe wall. "Sorry." She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making thesprings squeak.

  Alan wasn't listening. He knelt down and touched George's cheek. Theskin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertipscame away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.

  "Davey?" Alan said. "Are you in here?"

  Mimi's foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-timesounds in the motel, distant muffled TVs and car engines and fucking,but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.

  "He must have come up through the drain," Alan said. "In the bathroom."The broad pale moon of George's belly was abraded in long grey stripes.

  He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for thebathroom doorknob. The door swung open, revealing thesanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the watersloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.

  "How'd he find us here?"

  Mimi, in her outsized blazer and track pants, touched him on his bareshoulder. He suddenly felt terribly naked. He backed out of thebathroom, shoving Mimi aside, and numbly pulled on his jeans and ashapeless sweatshirt that smelled of Mimi and had long curly hairslurking in the fabric that stuck to his face like cobwebs. He jammed hisfeet into his sneakers.

  He realized that he'd had to step over his brother's body six times todo this.

  He looked at his brother again. He couldn't make sense of what he wasseeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His balls, shrunk to an albinowalnut, his cock shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly,matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.

  He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he hadthat didn't require stepping over George's body, back and forth, twopaces, turn, two paces, turn.

  "I'm going to cover him up," Mimi said.

  "Good, fine," Alan said.

  "Are you going to be okay?"

  "Yes, fine," Alan said.

  "Are you freaking out?"

  Alan didn't say anything.

  George looked an awful lot like Davey had, the day they killed him.

  #

  Mimi found a spare blanket in the closet, reeking of mothballs andscarred with a few curdled cigarette burns, and she spread it out on thefloor and helped him lift Grant's body onto it and wind it tightlyaround him.

  "What now?" she said.

  He looked down at the wound sheet, the lump within it. He sat downheavily on the bed. His chest was tight, and his breath came in short*hup*s.

  She sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder, tried to pull hishead down to her bosom, but he stiffened his neck.

  "I knew this was coming," he said. "When we killed Darren, I knew."

  She stood and lit a cigarette. "This is your family business," she said,"why we're driving up north?"

  He nodded, not trusting his voice, seeing the outlines of Grad's face,outlined in moth-eaten blanket.

  "So," she said. "Let's get up north, then. Take an end."

  The night was cold, and they staggered under the weight of the bodywound in the blanket and laid him out in the trunk of the car, shiftingluggage and picnic supplies to the back seat. At two a.m., the motellights were out and the road was dark and silent but for the soughing ofwind and the distant sounds of night animals.

  "Are you okay to drive?" she said, as she piled their clothesindiscriminately into the suitcases.

  "What?" he said. The cool air on his face was waking him up a little,but he was still in a dream-universe. The air was spicy and outdoors andit reminded him powerfully of home and simpler times.

  He looked at Mimi without really seeing her.

  "Are you okay to drive?"

  The keys were in his hands, the car smelling of the detailing-in-a-canmist that the rental agency sprayed on the upholstery to get rid of thediscount traveler farts between rentals.

  "I can drive," he said. Home, and the mountain, and the washing machine,and the nook where he'd slept for 18 years, and the golems, and thecradle they'd hewn for him. Another ten or twelve hours' driving andthey'd be at the foot of the trail where the grass grew to waist-high.

  "Well, then, *drive*." She got in the car and slammed her door.

  He climbed in, started the engine, and put the hertzmobile into reverse.

  #

  Two hours later, he realized that he was going to nod off. The thumps ofthe body sliding in the trunk and the suitcases rattling around in theback seat had lost their power to keep him awake.

  The body's thumping had hardly had the power to begin with. Once theinitial shock had passed, the body became an object only, a thing, apayload he had to deliver. Alan wondered if he was capable of feelingthe loss.

  "You were eleven then," he said. It was suddenly as though no time hadpast since they'd sat on the bed and she'd told him about Auntie.

  "Yes," she said. "It was as though no time had passed."

  A shiver went up his back.

  He was wide awake.

  "No time had passed."

  "Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me toa nice girls' school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had apermanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of fourhundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn'ttake her top off was hardly noteworthy."

  "The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With aWhy. When I asked them where I'd been before, about 'Auntie,' theylooked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. Theyhugged me and touched my wings and never said anything -- and neverwiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me aroom with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, andasked me to bring home my friends.

  "I had none.

  "But they found other girls who would come to my 'birthday' parties, onMay 1, which was exactly two months after their son's birthday and twomonths before their daughter's birthday.

  "I can't remember any of their names.

  "But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinnerand they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in theback yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroomwindow. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks inthe winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did myhomework 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 Iknew I wasn't. I know that sounds paranoid -- crazy. Maybe I was just ateenager. There was a reason, though, I just don't know what it was. Iknew then. They knew it, too -- no one blamed me. They loved me, Iguess."

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

  "Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their sonwent to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had twomore years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With theirchildren gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make meeat 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 andthen got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kidsand feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finallyready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent thenight out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee's anddrinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pittsoverlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 1
7-year-old girl from thesuburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no onebugged me.

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

  The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a