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.