Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

cigarette androlled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind andthe smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of theroadside.

  "Give me one of those," Alan said.

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

  "Who knows about your wings?" he said.

  "Krishna knows," she said. "And you." She looked out into thenight. "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 theirnames 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 brothernamed Brad. He can see the future."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah." He pawed around for an ashtray and discovered that it had beenremoved, along with the lighter, from the rental car'sdashboard. Cursing, he pinched off the coal of the cigarette and flickedit to the roadside, hoping that it would burn out quickly, then hetossed the butt over his shoulder at the back seat. As he did, the bodyin the trunk rolled while he navigated a curve in the road and he brakedhard, getting the car stopped in time for him to open the door and pitcha 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 theshoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled ofsour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in thetrunk.

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

  "I believe it," she said.

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

  "Then something really -- Something terrible... Someone I cared aboutdied. 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 moreemotion than he'd ever heard in it and she rolled down the window andlit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.

  "Yeah," Alan said. "*A* future or *the* future, I never figured itout. 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 threewords in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mailhouse, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything tome, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, readingall those names. I'd dropped out of school after Christmas break, justdidn't bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away myhouseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn'tbe 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 mywings were long -- the longest they've ever been -- and wearing a bigparka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on theshoulder.

  "I turned to look at him and he said, 'I get off at the next stop. Willyou get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I've been riding next toyou 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'dalready said, 'I beg your pardon?' because I wasn't sure I'd heard himright. And once I'd said that, once I'd spoken, I couldn't bear thethought of not speaking again."

  #

  They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawnedwith drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag-- which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he'dwaited out half a day to change buses -- was deserted, the only evidenceof habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut storedrive-through lane.

  "Jesus, who divorced me this time?" Mimi said, ungumming her eyes andstuffing 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. Dopefiend 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 ofthe biggest collection of books he'd ever seen. Sweet, dusty.

  "Here," he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section atthe library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupiedits own corner of overstuffed bookcases. "Here," he said, running hisfinger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, thefaded Dewey labels.

  H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he'd remembered from all thoseyears 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 checkoutcounter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the healthcard and the driver's license -- not a very good likeness of his face orhis name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that itlooked like a pirate's map on parchment. He slid it delicately out ofthe plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlikesurface 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 hispatrons, but at a certain angle that suggested urbane irony -- goggledat it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece.

  The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf ofhis 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, trickedher out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddleoff into the shelves and start pulling down books. She'd rolled it intoher typewriter and then they'd both gone chasing after Brad, then she'dasked him again for his name and they'd gone chasing after Brad, thenfor his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simplysnitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. Noone ever looked closely at it again -- not even the thoroughlyprofessional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who'd let him take out astack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited forthe morning bus to Toronto.

  He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece ofidentification 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 barcode. We don't take that card anymore." He picked it up and made to tearit in half.

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

  The kid startled
back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan's irongrip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid droppedthe card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.

  "Give it to me," Alan said. The boy's eyes, wide with shock, began toscrew 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 officesbehind the counter, women with the look