Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

An excerpt from a novel in progress.

Posted June 5, 2003.

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

Chapter Zero.

1.

There.

Alan sanded the house on Wales Avenue. It took six months, and
the whole time it was the smell of the sawdust, ancient and
sweet, and the reek of chemical stripper and the damp smell of
rusting steel wool.

There are.

Alan took possession of the house on January 1, and paid for it
in full by means of an E-Gold transfer. He had to do a fair bit
of hand-holding with the realtor to get her set up and running on
E-Gold, but he loved to do that sort of thing, loved to sit at
the elbow of a noviate and guide her through the clicks and taps
and forms. He loved to break off for impromptu lectures on the
underlying principles of the transaction, and so he treated the
poor realtor lady to a dozen dozen addresses on the nature of
international currency markets, the value of precious metal as a
kind of financial lingua franca to which any currency could be
converted, the poetry of vault-shelves in a hundred banks around
the world piled with the heaviest of metals, glinting dully in
the fluorescent tube-lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who
spoke a hundred languages but communicated with one another by
means of this universal tongue of weights and measures and
purity.

There are only.

The clerks who'd tended Alan's many stores -- the used clothing
store in the Beaches, the used book store in the Annex, the
collectible tin-toy store in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen
Street -- had both benefited from and tired of Alan's discursive
nature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious
rolling of eyes and twirling fingers aimed templewise among his
employees when he got himself warmed up to a good oration, but in
truth very little ever escaped his attention. His customers loved
his little talks, loved the way he could wax rhapsodic about the
tortured prose in a Victorian potboiler, the nearly erotic curve
of a beat up old table-leg, the voluminous cuffs of an
embroidered silk smoking jacket. The clerks who listened to
Alan's lectures went on to open their own stores all about town,
and by and large, they did very well. He'd put the word out when
he bought the house on Wales Avenue to all his proteges: Wooden
bookcases! His cellphone rang every day or two, bringing news of
another wooden bookcase found at this flea-market, that
thrift-store, this rummage sale or estate-auction. He had a man
he used part time, Greg, who ran a small man-with-van service,
and when the phone rang, he'd send Greg over to his protege's
shop with his big panel-van to pick up the case and deliver it to
the cellar of the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by
cold-storages, root-cellars, disused coal-chutes and
storm-cellars. By the time Alan had finished with his sanding,
every nook and cranny of the cellar was packed with wooden
bookcases of every size and description and repair.

There are only two.

Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The
house had been gutted by the previous owners, who'd had big plans
for the building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston.
They'd had to sell fast, and no amount of realtor-magic --
flowers on the dining-room table, family photos in the hall --
could charm away the essential dagginess of the gutted house, the
exposed timbers with sagging wires and conduit, the finger-width
runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of furniture.
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 had
the realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk
on trivial things from others' lives that no one else noticed and
he'd developed the alcoholic's knack of disguising his
intoxication. Alan went to work as soon as the realtor staggered
off, reeling with a New Year's Day hangover. He pulled his pickup
truck onto the frozen lawn, unlocked the Kryptonite bike-lock he
used to secure the camper bed, and dragged out his big belt
sander and his many boxes of sandpaper of all grains and sizes,
his heat-strippers and his jugs of caustic chemical peeler. He
still had his jumbled, messy place across town in a nondescript
two-bedroom in the Danforth, would keep on paying the rent there
until his big sanding project was done and the house on Wales
Avenue was ready for human habitation. In the course of his long
entrepreneurial career, Alan had occasionally moved into a new
shop before it was set up and ready to go, and by his estimate,
moving in before you're done setting up complicated the procedure
by a factor of approximately 1,000,000.

There are only two stories.

Alan's sanding project: First, finish gutting the house. Get rid
of the substandard wiring, the ancient, lead-leaching plumbing,
the cracked tile and water-warped crumbling plaster. He filled a
half-dozen dumpsters, working with Greg and Greg's homie Lance,
who was happy to help out in exchange for cash on the barrelhead,
provided that he wasn't required to report for work on two
consecutive days, since he'd need one day to recover from the
heroic drinking he'd do immediately after Alan laid the cash
across his palm. Once the house was gutted to brick and timber
and delirious wood, the plumbers and the electricians came in and
lay down their straight shining ducts and pipes and conduit.

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

Alan's father, the mountain, had a dozen golems that called him
home. They lived round the other side of his father, and left
Alan and his brothers alone, since 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-sanders and sandpaper of ever-finer grains until the timbers
were as smooth as Adirondack chairs, his chest and arms and
shoulders athrob with the agony of two weeks' work. Then it was
the floorwork, but *not the floors themselves*, which he was
saving for last on the grounds that they were low-hanging fruit.

This materialized a new lecture in his mind, one about the proper
role of low-hanging fruit, a favorite topic of MBAs who'd
patronize his stores and his person, giving him unsolicited
advice on the care and feeding of his shops based on the kind of
useless book-larnin' and jargon-slinging that Fortune 100
companies apparently paid big bucks for. 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 as
late as possible. Further, picking the low-hanging fruit first
meant that you'd have to carry your bushel-basket higher and
higher as the day wore on, which was plainly stupid. Low-hanging
fruit was meant to be picked last. It was one of the ways that he
understood people, and one of 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 moulding, after the
stairs, after the railings and the paneling. The railings, in
particular, were horrible bastards to get clean, covered in ten
or thirty coats of enamel of varying colors and toxicity. Art
spent days working with a wire brush and pointed twists of steel
wool and oozing stinging paint-stripper, until the grain was
spotless and unmarked as the day it came 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 had 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.

There are only two stories: Someone.

The next day, he stopped at the Portuguese contractor-supply on
Ossington that he liked. They opened at 5AM, and the men behind
the counter were always happy to sketch out alternative solutions
to his amateur construction problems, they never sneered or
mocked him for his incompetence, and always threw in a 10 percent
"contractor's discount" for him that made him swell up with
irrational pride that confused him. Why should the son of a
mountain need affirmation from runty Pourtugees with pencil-stubs
behind their ears and scarred fingers? He picked up a pair of
foam rubber kneepads and a ten kilo box of lint-free shoprags and
another carton of disposable paper-masks.

He drove to the house on Wales Avenue, parked on the lawn, which
was now starting to thaw and show deep muddy ruts from his tires
that he'd have to deal with once the house was done, and spent
the next twelve hours crawling around on his knees, lugging a
tool-bucket filled with sandpaper and steel-wool and putty and
wood-crayons and shoprags. He ran his fingertips over every inch
of floor and moulding and paneling, feeling the talc softness of
the sifted sawdust, feeling for rough spots and gouges, smoothing
them out with his tools. He tried puttying over the gouges in the
flooring that he'd seen the day he took possession, but the putty
seemed like a lie to him, less honest that the gouged-out boards
were, and so he scooped the putty out and sanded the grooves
until they were as smooth as the wood around them.

Next came the beeswax, sweet and spicy and shiny. It almost broke
his heart to apply it, because the soft, newly exposed wood was
so deliciously tender and sensuous. But he knew that wood left to
its own would eventually chip and splinter and yellow, and he had
to do right by the place. So he rubbed wax until his elbows
ached, *massaged* the wax into the wood, buffed it with shoprags
so that the house shone.

There are only two stories: Someone comes.

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

There are only two stories: Someone comes to.

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

The doors were UV-filtering glass, hinged at the top and
surrounded by felt on their inside lips so that they closed
softly. Each one had a small brass prop-rod on the left side that
could brace it open after it was affixed to the shelf it guarded.
Greg had been responsible for measuring each bookcase after he
retrieved it from Alan's proteges' shops and for sending the
measurements off to a glazier in Mississauga.

The glazier was technically retired but who had built every
display case that had ever sat inside any of Alan's shops and who
was therefore willing to use the small workshop to build Alan his
glass doors that his daughter and son-in-law had installed in his
garage when they retired him to the burbs .

The bookcases went into the house, along each wall, according to
a system of numbers marked on their backs. Alan had used Greg's
measurements and some CAD software to come up with a permutation
of stacking and shouldering cases that had them completely
covering every wall -- except for the wall by the mantelpiece in
the front parlor, the wall over the countertop in the kitchen and
the wall beside the staircases -- to the ceiling.

He and Greg didn't speak much. Greg was thinking about whatever
people who drive moving vans think about, and Alan was thinking
about the story he was building the house to write in.

There are only two stories: Someone comes to town.

May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dogshit
had melted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells
were all springy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak
fruitpunch left behind by the pan-ethnic street-hockey league
that formed up spontaneously in front of his house. When the
winds blew from the east, he smelled the fish-stalls on Spadina,
salty and redolent of Chinese barbecue spices. When it blew from
the north, he smelled baking bread in the kosher bakeries and
sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic from the pizzas in the
steaming ovens at Massimo's all the way up on College. The
western winds smelled of hospital incinerator, acrid and smoky.
His father, the mountain, had attuned Art to smells, since they
were the leading indicators of his moods, sulfurous belches from
deep in the caverns when he was displeased, the cold non-smell of
spring water when he was thoughtful, the new-mown hay smell from
his slopes when he was happy. Understanding smells was something
that you did, when the mountain was your father.

Once the bookcases were seated and screwed into the walls, out
came the books, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them.
Little kids' books with loose signatures, ancient first-edition
hardcovers, outsized novelty art books, mass-market paperbacks,
reference books as thick as cinderblocks. They were mostly used
when he'd gotten them, and that was what he loved most about
them: they smelled like other people and their pages contained
hints of their lives: marginalia and pawn-tickets, bus-transfers
gone yellow with age and smears of long-ago meals. When he read
them, he was in three places: his living-room, the author's head,
and the world of their previous owners.

They came off his shelves at home, from the 10x10 storage down on
the lakeshore, they came from friends and enemies who'd borrowed
his books years before and who'd "forgotten" to return them, but
Alan *never* forgot, he kept every book in a great and deep
relational database that had begun as a humble flatfile but which
had been imported into successive generations of industrial-grade
database software.

This, in turn, was but a pocket in the Ur-database, The Inventory
in which Alan had input the value, the cost, the salient
features, the unique identifiers and the photographic record of
every single thing he owned, from the socks in his sock-drawer to
the pots in his cupboard. Maintaining The Inventory was serious
business, no less important now than it had been when had begun
it in the course of securing insurance for the bookshop.

Alan was an insurance-man's worst nightmare, a customer from hell
who'd messenger over five bankers' boxes of detailed,
cross-referenced Inventory at the slightest provocation.

The books filled the shelves, row on row, behind the dust-proof,
light-proof glass doors. The books began in the foyer and wrapped
around the living room, covered the wall behind the dining-room
in the kitchen, filled the den and the master bedroom and the
master bath, climbed the short walls to the dormer ceilings on
the third floor. They were organized by idiosyncratic subject
categories, and alphabetical by author within those categories.

There are only two stories: Someone comes to town, someone.

Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing
machine -- he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their
clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting
dolls, a fortune teller and a island. He only had two or three
family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who
saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where
his family stood on his father's slopes, mom out in the open for
a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away
from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong
outlet. He hung it over the mantle, using two hooks and a level
to make sure that it came out perfectly even.

Greg helped Alan install the shallow collectibles cases along the
house's two stairwells, holding the level while Alan worked the
cordless powerdriver. Alan's glazier had built the cases to
Alan's specs, and they stretched from the treads to the ceiling.
Alan filled them with Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin toys, felt
tourist pennants from central Florida gator farms, a stone from
Marie Laveau's tomb in the St Louis I cemetery in New Orleans,
tarnished brass Zippos, small framed comic-book bodybuilding ads,
carved Polynesian coconut monkeys, melamine transistor radios,
bakelite snow globes, all the tchotchkes he'd accumulated over a
lifetime of picking and hunting and digging. They were gloriously
scuffed and non-mint: he'd always sold off the sterile
mint-in-package goods as quickly as he could, squirreling away
the items that were marked with "Property of Freddy Terazzo" in
shaky ball-point, the ones with tooth-marks and frayed boxes
taped shut with brands of stickytape not offered for sale in
fifty years.

The last thing to go in was the cellar. They knocked out any wall
that wasn't load-bearing, smeared concrete on every surface, and
worked in a loose mosaic of beach-glass and beach-china, smooth
and white with spidery blue illustration pale as a dream. Three
coats of urethane made the surfaces gleam.

Then it was just a matter of stringing out the cables for the
clip-on halogens whose beams he took care to scatter off the
ceilings to keep the glare to a minimum. He moved in his
horsehair sofa and armchairs, his big old bed, his pots and pans
and sideboard with its novelty decanters and his entertainment
totem.

A man from Bell Canada came out and terminated the twin T1 lines
in his basement, in a room that he'd outfitted with a
flywheel-driven uninterruptible power supply, a false floor, dry
fire-extinguishers and a pipe-break sensor. He installed and
configured the router, set up his modest rack and home servers,
fished three four-pair wires through to the living room, the den,
and the attic, where he attached them to unobtrusive wireless
access points and thence to weatherproofed omnidirectional
antennae made from Pringles cans and plexiglass that he'd affixed
to the building's exterior on short masts, aimed out over
Kensington Market, blanketing most of it in free Internet access.

He had an idea that the story he was going to write would require
some perambulatory cogitation, and he wanted to be able to take
his laptop anywhere in the market and sit down and write and hop
online and check out little factoids with a search engine so he
wouldn't get hung up on stupid details.

There are only two stories: Someone comes to town, someone
leaves.

The house on Wales Avenue was done. He'd repainted the exterior a
lovely robin's egg blue, fixed the front step, and planted a
low-maintenance combination of outsized rocks from the Canadian
Shield and wild grasses on the front lawn. On July first, Alan
celebrated Canada Day by crawling out of the attic window onto
the roof and watching the fireworks and listening to the
collective sighs of the people densely packed around him in the
Market, then he went back into the house and walked from room to
room, looking for something out of place, some spot still rough
and unsanded, and found none. The books and the collections lined
the walls, the fans whirred softly in the ceilings, the filters
beneath the open windows hummed as they sucked the pollen and
particulate out of the rooms -- Alan's retail experience had
convinced him long ago of the selling power of fresh air and
street sounds, so he refused to keep the windows closed, despite
the fantastic volume of city dust that blew in.

The house was perfect. The ergonomic marvel of a chair that UPS
had dropped off the previous day was tucked under wooden
sideboard he'd set up as a desk in the second-floor den. His
brand new computer sat centered on the desk, a top of the line
laptop with a wireless card and a screen big enough to qualify as
a home theater in some circles.

Tomorrow, he'd start the story.

There are only two stories: Someone comes to town, someone leaves
town.

2.

Alan rang the next-door house's doorbell at 8AM. He had a bag of
coffees from the Greek diner on Kensington Avenue. Five coffees,
one for each bicycle locked to the wooden railing on the sagging
porch plus one for him.

He waited five minutes, then rang the bell again, holding it
down, listening for the sound of footsteps over the muffled
jangling of the buzzer. It took two minutes more, he estimated,
but he didn't mind. It was a beautiful summer day, soft and moist
and green, and he could already smell the fishmarket over the
mellow brown vapors of the strong coffee.

A young woman in long-johns and a tartan t-shirt opened the door.
She was kind of excitingly plump, round and a little jiggly, the
kind of woman Alan had always gone for. Of course, she was all of
twenty-two, and so certainly not an appropriate romantic interest
for him, but she was fun to look at as she ungummed her eyes and
worked the sleep out of her voice.

"Yes?" she said, through the locked screen-door. Her voice was
sharp and brooked no nonsense, which Alan also liked. He'd hire
her in a second, if he were still running a shop. He liked to
hire sharp kids like her, get to know them, try to winkle out
their motives and emotions through observation.

"Good morning!" Alan said. "I'm Alan, and I just moved in next
door. I've brought coffee!" He hefted his sack in her direction.

"Good morning, Alan," she said. "Thanks and all, but --"

"Oh, no need to thank me! Just being neighborly. I brought five
-- one for each of you and one for me."

"Well, that's awfully nice of you --"

"Nothing at all. Nice morning, huh? I saw a robin just there, on
that tree in the park, not an hour ago. Fantastic."

"Great." She unlatched the screen door and opened it, reaching
for the sack.

Alan stepped into the foyer and handed it to her. "There's cream
and sugar in there," he said. "Lots -- don't know how you folks
take it, so I just figured better sure than miserable, better to
err on the side of caution. Wow, look at this, your place has a
completely different layout from mine. I think they were built at
the same time, I mean, they look a lot alike. I don't really know
much about architecture, but they really do seem the same, don't
they, from the outside? But look at this! In my place, I've got a
long corridor before you get to the living-room, but your place
is all open. I wonder if it was built that way, or if someone did
that later. Do you know?"

"No," she said, hefting the sack.

"Well, I'll just have a seat while you get your roommates up, all
right? Then we can all have a nice cup of coffee and a chat and
get to know each other."

She dithered for a moment, then stepped back toward the kitchen
and the stairwell. Allan nodded and took a little tour of the
living room. There was a very nice media totem, endless shelves
of DVDs and videos, including a surprisingly good selection of
Chinese kung-fu VCDs and black and white comedies. There was a
stack of guitar magazines on the battered coffee table, and a
cozy sofa with an afghan folded neatly on one arm. Good kids, he
could tell that just by looking at their possessions.

Not very security conscious, though. She should have either
kicked him out or dragged him around the house while she got her
roomies out of bed. He thought about slipping some VCDs into his
pocket and returning them later, just to make the point, but
decided it would be getting off on the wrong foot.

She returned a moment later, wearing a fuzzy yellow robe whose
belt and seams were grey with grime and wear. "They're coming
down," she said.

"Terrific!" Alan said, and planted himself on the sofa. "How
about that coffee, hey?"

She shook her head, smiled a little and retrieved a coffee for
him. "Cream? Sugar?"

"Nope," Alan said. "The Greek makes it just the way I like it.
Black and strong and aromatic. Try some before you add anything
-- it's really fantastic. One of the best things about the
neighborhood, if you ask me."

Another young woman, rail thin with a shaved head, baggy jeans
and a tight t-shirt that he could count her ribs through shuffled
into the living room. Alan got to his feet and extended his hand.
"Hi there! I'm Adam, your new neighbor! I brought coffees!"

She shook his hand, her long fingernails sharp on his palm.
"Terry," she said.

The other young woman passed a coffee to her. "He brought
coffees," she said. "Try it before you add anything to it." She
turned to Alan. "I thought you said your name was Alan?"

"Alan, Adam, Andy. Doesn't matter, I answer to any of them. My
mom had a hard time keeping our names straight."

"Funny," Terry said, sipping at her coffee. "Two sugars, three
creams," she said, holding her hand out. The other woman silently
passed them to her.

"I haven't gotten your name yet," Alan said.

"Right," the other one said. "You sure haven't."

A young man, all of seventeen, with straggly sideburns and a
shock of pink hair sticking straight up in the air, shuffled into
the room, wearing cutoffs and an unbuttoned guyabera.

"Adam," Terry said, "this is Link, my kid brother. Link, this is
Arthur -- he brought coffees."

"Hey, thanks, Arthur," Link said. He accepted his coffee and
stood by his sister, sipping reverently.

"So that leaves one more," Alan said. "And then we can get
started."

Lance snorted. "Not likely. Krishna doesn't get out of bed before
noon."

"Krishna?" Alan said.

"My boyfriend," the nameless woman said. "He was up late."

"More coffee for the rest of us, I suppose," Alan said. "Let's
all sit and get to know one another, then, shall we?"

They sat. Alan slurped down the rest of his coffee, then gestured
at the sack. The nameless woman passed it to him and he got the
last one, and set to drinking.

"I'm Andreas, your new next door neighbor. I've just finished
renovating, and I moved in last night. I'm really looking forward
to spending time in the neighborhood -- I work from home, so I'll
be around a bunch. Feel free to drop by if you need to borrow a
cup of sugar or anything."

"That's so nice of you," Terry said. "I'm sure we'll get along
fine!"

"Thanks, Terry. Are you a student?"

"Yup," she said. She fished in the voluminous pockets of her
jeans, tugging them lower on her knobby hips, and came up with a
pack of cigarettes. She offered one to her brother -- who took it
-- and one to Alan, who declined, then lit up. "Studying fashion
design at OCAD. I'm in my last year, so it's all practicum from
now on."

"Fashion! How interesting," Alan said. "I used to run a little
vintage clothes shop in the Beaches, called Tropic‡l."

"Oh, I *loved* that shop," she said. "You had the *best* stuff! I
used to sneak out there on the streetcar after school." Yup. He
didn't remember *her*, exactly, but her *type*, sure. Solo girls
with hardcover sketch-books and vintage clothes home-tailored to
a nice fit.

"Well, I'd be happy to introduce you to some of the people I know
-- there's a vintage shop that a friend of mine runs in Parkdale.
He's always looking for designers to help with rehab and repros."

"That would be so cool!"

"Now, Lance, what do you study?"

Lance pulled at his smoke, ashed in the fireplace grate. "Not
much. I didn't get into Ryerson for Electrical Engineering, so
I'm spending a year as a bike courier, taking night classes and
reapplying for next year."

"Well, that'll keep you out of trouble at least," Alan said. He
turned to the nameless woman.

"So, what do you do, *Apu*?" she said to him, before he could say
anything.

"Oh, I'm retired, Mimi," he said.

"Mimi?" she said.

"Why not? It's as good a name as any."

"Her name is --" Lance started to say, but she cut him off.

"Mimi is as good a name as any. I'm unemployed. Krishna's a
bartender."

"Are you looking for work?"

She smirked. "Sure. Whatcha got?"

"What can you do?"

"I've got three-quarters of a degree in environmental studies,
one year of kinestheology, and a half-written one-act play. Oh,
and student debt until the year 3000."

"A play!" he said, slapping his thighs. "You should finish it.
I'm a writer, too, you know."

"I thought you had a clothing shop."

"I did. And a bookshop, and a collectibles shop, and an antique
shop. Not all at the same time, you understand. But now I'm
writing. Going to write a story, then I imagine I'll open another
shop. But I'm more interested in *you*, Mimi, and your play. Why
half-finished?"

She shrugged and combed her hair back with her fingers. Her hair
was brown and thick and curly, down to her shoulders. Alan adored
curly hair. He'd had a clerk at the comics shop with curly hair
just like hers, an earnest and bright young thing who drew her
own comics in the back room on her breaks, using the receiving
table as a drawing board. She'd never made much of a go of it as
an artist, but she did end up publishing a popular annual
anthology of underground comics that had captured the interest of
the *New Yorker* last year. "I just ran out of inspiration," Mimi
said, tugging at her hair.

"Well, there you are. Time to get inspired again. Stop by any
time and we'll talk about it, all right?"

"If I get back to it, you'll be the first to know."

"Tremendous!" he said. "I just know it'll be fantastic. Now, who
plays the guitar?"

"Krishna," Lance said. "I noodle a bit, but he's really good."

"He sure is," Alan said. "He was in fine form last night, about
3AM!" He chuckled pointedly.

There was an awkward silence. Alan slurped down his second
coffee. "Whoops!" he said. "I believe I need to impose on you for
the use of your facilities?"

"What?" Terry and Lance said, simultaneously.

"He wants the toilet," Mimi said. "Up the stairs, second door on
the right. Jiggle the handle after you flush."

The bathroom was crowded with too many towels and too many
toothbrushes. The sink was powdered with blusher and marked with
lipstick and mascara residue. It made Alan feel at home. He liked
young people. Liked their energy, their resentment and their
enthusiasm. Didn't like their guitar-playing at 3AM, but he'd
sort that out soon enough.

He washed his hands and carefully rinsed the long curly hairs
from the bar before replacing it in its dish, then returned to
the living room.

"Abel," Mimi said, "sorry if the guitar kept you up last night."

"No sweat," Alan said. "It must be hard to find time to practice
when you work nights."

"Exactly," Terry said. "Exactly right! Krishna always practices
when he comes back from work. He blows off some steam so he can
get to bed. We just all learned to sleep through it."

"Well," Alan said, "to be honest, I'm hoping I won't have to
learn to do that. I have trouble getting to sleep under the best
of circumstances. But I think that maybe I have a solution we can
both live with."

"What's that?" Mimi said, jutting her chin forward.

"It's easy, really. I can put up a resilient channel and a baffle
along that wall there, soundproofing. I'll paint it over white
and you won't even notice the difference. Shouldn't take me more
than a week. Happy to do it. Thick walls make good neighbors."

"We don't really have any money to pay for renovations," Mimi
said.

Alan waved his hand. "Who said anything about money? I just want
to solve the problem. I'd do it on my side of the wall, but I've
just finished renovating."

Mimi shook her head. "I don't think the landlord would go for
it."

"You worry too much," he said. "Give me your landlord's number
and I'll sort it out with him, all right?"

"All right!" Lance said. "That's terrific, Albert, really!"

"All right, Mimi? Terry?"

Terry nodded enthusiastically, her shaved head whipping back and
forth on her thin neck precariously. Mimi glared at Terry and
Lance. "I'll ask Krishna," she said.

"All right, then!" Alan said. "Let me measure up the wall and
I'll start shopping for supplies." He produced a matte black,
egg-shaped digital tape-measure and started shining pinpoints of
laserlight on the wall, clicking the egg's buttons when he had
the corners tight. The Portuguese clerks at his favorite store
had dissolved into hysterics when he'd proudly shown them the
$300 gadget, but they were consistently impressed by the exacting
CAD drawings of his projects that he generated with its output.
Terry and Lance stared in fascination as he did his thing with
more showmanship than was technically necessary, though Mimi made
a point of rolling her eyes.

"Don't go spending any money, yet, cowboy," she said. "I've still
got to talk to Krishna, and *you've* still got to talk with the
landlord."

He fished in the breast-pocket of his jean-jacket and found a
stub of pencil and a little steno pad, scribbled his cellphone
number and tore off the sheet. He passed the sheet, pad and
pencil to Mimi, who wrote out the landlord's number and passed it
back to him.

"OK!" Alan said. "There you go. It's been a real pleasure meeting
you folks. I know we're going to get along great. I'll call your
landlord right away and you call me once Krishna's up, and I'll
see you tomorrow at 10AM to start construction, God willin' and
the crick don't rise."

Lance stood and extended his hand. "Nice to meet you, Albert," he
said. "Really. Thanks for the muds, too." Terry gave him a bony
hug, and Mimi gave him a limp handshake, and then he was out in
the sunshine, head full of designs and logistics and plans.