Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town Page 3

  His liquid cash was tight, so he spent that night in the Rex Hotel, in the worst room in the house, right over the cymbal tree that the jazz drummer below hammered on until nearly two A.M. The bed was small and hard and smelled of bleach and must, the washbasin gurgled mysteriously and spat out moist sewage odors, and he’d read all his books, so he sat in the window and watched the drunks and the hipsters stagger down Queen Street and inhaled the smoky, spicy air, and before he knew it, he’d nodded off in the chair with his heavy coat around him like a blanket.

  The Chinese girl abruptly thumped her fist into the Russian boy’s ear. He clutched his head and howled, tears streaming down his face, while the Chinese girl ran off. Alan shook his head, got up off his chair, went inside for a cold washcloth and an ice pack, and came back out.

  The Russian boy’s face was screwed up and blotchy and streaked with tears, and it made him look even more like Doug, who’d always been a crybaby. Alan couldn’t understand him, but he took a guess and knelt at his side and wiped the boy’s face, then put the ice pack in his little hand and pressed it to the side of his little head.

  “Come on,” he said, taking the boy’s other hand. “Where do your parents live? I’ll take you home.”

  Alan met Krishna the next morning at ten A.M., as Alan was running a table saw on the neighbors’ front lawn, sawing studs up to fit the second wall. Krishna came out of the house in a dirty dressing gown, his short hair matted with gel from the night before. He was tall and fit and muscular, his brown calves flashing through the vent of his housecoat. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and clutching a can of Coke.

  Alan shut down the saw and shifted his goggles up to his forehead. “Good morning,” he said. “I’d stay on the porch if I were you, or maybe put on some shoes. There’re lots of nails and splinters around.”

  Krishna, about to step off the porch, stepped back. “You must be Alvin,” he said.

  “Yup,” Alan said, going up the stairs, sticking out his hand. “And you must be Krishna. You’re pretty good with a guitar, you know that?”

  Krishna shook briefly, then snatched his hand back and rubbed at his stubble. “I know. You’re pretty fucking loud with a table saw.”

  Alan looked sheepish. “Sorry about that. I wanted to get the heavy work done before it got too hot. Hope I’m not disturbing you too much—today’s the only sawing day. I’ll be hammering for the next day or two, then it’s all wet work—the loudest tool I’ll be using is sandpaper. Won’t take more than four days, tops, anyway, and we’ll be in good shape.”

  Krishna gave him a long, considering look. “What are you, anyway?”

  “I’m a writer—for now. Used to have a few shops.”

  Krishna blew a plume of smoke off into the distance. “That’s not what I mean. What are you, Adam? Alan? Andrew? I’ve met people like you before. There’s something not right about you.”

  Alan didn’t know what to say to that. This was bound to come up someday.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Up north. Near Kapuskasing,” he said. “A little town.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Krishna said. “Are you an alien? A fairy? What?”

  Alan shook his head. “Just about what I seem, I’m afraid. Just a guy.”

  “Just about, huh?” he said.

  “Just about.”

  “There’s a lot of wiggle room in just about, Arthur. It’s a free country, but just the same, I don’t think I like you very much. Far as I’m concerned, you could get lost and never come back.”

  “Sorry you feel that way, Krishna. I hope I’ll grow on you as time goes by.”

  “I hope that you won’t have the chance to,” Krishna said, flicking the dog end of his cigarette toward the sidewalk.

  Alan didn’t like or understand Krishna, but that was okay. He understood the others just fine, more or less. Natalie had taken to helping him out after her classes, mudding and taping the drywall, then sanding it down, priming, and painting it. Her brother Link came home from work sweaty and grimy with road dust, but he always grabbed a beer for Natalie and Alan after his shower, and they’d sit on the porch and kibbitz.

  Mimi was less hospitable. She sulked in her room while Alan worked on the soundwall, coming downstairs only to fetch her breakfast and coldly ignoring him then, despite his cheerful greetings. Alan had to force himself not to stare after her as she walked into the kitchen, carrying yesterday’s dishes down from her room; then out again, with a sandwich on a fresh plate. Her curly hair bounced as she stomped back and forth, her soft, round buttocks flexing under her long johns.

  On the night that Alan and Natalie put the first coat of paint on the wall, Mimi came down in a little baby-doll dress, thigh-high striped tights, and chunky shoes, her face painted with swaths of glitter.

  “You look wonderful, baby,” Natalie told her as she emerged onto the porch. “Going out?”

  “Going to the club,” she said. “DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is spinning and Krishna’s going to get me in for free.”

  “Dance music,” Link said disgustedly. Then, to Alan, “You know this stuff? It’s not playing music, it’s playing records. Snore.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Alan said. “Do you have any of it I could listen to? A CD or some MP3s?”

  “Oh, that’s not how you listen to this stuff,” Natalie said. “You have to go to a club and dance.”

  “Really?” Alan said. “Do I have to take ecstasy, or is that optional?”

  “It’s mandatory,” Mimi said, the first words she’d spoken to him all week. “Great fistfuls of E, and then you have to consume two pounds of candy necklaces at an after-hours orgy.”

  “Not really,” Natalie said, sotto voce. “But you do have to dance. You should go with, uh, Mimi, to the club. DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is amazing.”

  “I don’t think Mimi wants company,” Alan said.

  “What makes you say that?” Mimi said, making a dare of it with hipshot body language. “Get changed and we’ll go together. You’ll have to pay to get in, though.”

  Link and Natalie exchanged a raised eyebrow, but Alan was already headed for his place, fumbling for his keys. He bounded up the stairs, swiped a washcloth over his face, threw on a pair of old cargo pants and a faded Steel Pole Bathtub T-shirt he’d bought from a head shop one day because he liked the words’ incongruity, though he’d never heard the band, added a faded jean jacket and a pair of high-tech sneakers, grabbed his phone, and bounded back down the stairs. He was convinced that Mimi would be long gone by the time he got back out front, but she was still there, the stripes in her stockings glowing in the slanting light.

  “Retro chic,” she said, and laughed nastily. Natalie gave him a thumbs-up and a smile that Alan uncharitably took for a simper, and felt guilty about it immediately afterward. He returned the thumbs-up and then took off after Mimi, who’d already started down Augusta, headed for Queen Street.

  “What’s the cover charge?” he said, once he’d caught up.

  “Twenty bucks,” she said. “It’s an all-ages show, so they won’t be selling a lot of booze, so there’s a high cover.”

  “How’s the play coming?”

  “Fuck off about the play, okay?” she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to start writing my story tomorrow,” he said.

  “Your story, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s that for?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked playfully.

  “Why are you writing a story?”

  “Well, I have to! I’ve completely redone the house, built that soundwall—it’d be a shame not to write the story now.”

  “You’re writing a story about your house?”

  “No, in my house. I haven’t decided what the story’s about yet. That’ll be job one tomorrow.”

  “You did all that work to have a place to write? Man, I thought I was into procrastination.”

  He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I guess you could look at it that way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The story’s important to me, is all.”

  “What are you going to do with it once you’re done? There aren’t a whole lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know.”

  “Oh, I know it! I’d write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn’t for publication—yet. It’s going into a drawer to be published after I die.”

  “What?”

  “Like Emily Dickinson. Wrote thousands of poems, stuck ’em in a drawer, dropped dead. Someone else published ’em and she made it into the canon. I’m going to do the same.”

  “That’s nuts—are you dying?”

  “Nope. But I don’t want to put this off until I am. Could get hit by a bus, you know.”

  “You’re a goddamned psycho. Krishna was right.”

  “What does Krishna have against me?”

  “I think we both know what that’s about,” she said.

  “No, really, what did I ever do to him?”

  Now they were on Queen Street, walking east in the early evening crowd, surrounded by summertime hipsters and wafting, appetizing smells from the bistros and Jamaican roti shops. She stopped abruptly and grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard shake.

  “You’re full of shit, Ad-man. I know it and you know it.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, honestly!”

  “Fine, let’s do this.” She clamped her hand on his forearm and dragged him down a side street and turned down an alley. She stepped into a doorway and started unbuttoning her Alice-blue babydoll dress. Alan looked away, embarrassed, glad of the dark hiding his blush.

  Once the dress was unbuttoned to her waist, she reached around behind her and unhooked her white underwire bra, which sagged forward under the weight of her heavy breasts. She turned around, treating him to a glimpse of the full curve of her breast under her arm, and shrugged the dress down around her waist.

  She had two stubby, leathery wings growing out of the middle of her back, just above the shoulder blades. They sat flush against her back, and as Alan watched, they unfolded and flexed, flapped a few times, and settled back into their position, nested among the soft roll of flesh that descended from her neck.

  Involuntarily, he peered forward, examining the wings, which were covered in fine downy brown hairs, and their bases, roped with muscle and surrounded by a mess of ugly scars.

  “You…sewed…these on?” Alan said, aghast.

  She turned around, her eyes bright with tears. Her breasts swung free of her unhooked bra. “No, you fucking idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a year. They just grow back. If I don’t cut them, they grow down to my ankles.”

  Mimi was curiously and incomprehensibly affectionate after she had buttoned up her dress and resumed walking toward the strip of clubs along Richmond Street. She put her hand on his forearm and murmured funny commentary about the outlandishly attired club kids in their plastic cowboy hats, Sailor Moon outfits, and plastic tuxedoes. She plucked a cigarette from his lips, dragged on it, and put it back into his mouth, still damp with her saliva, an act that sent a shiver down Alan’s neck and made the hair on the backs of his hands stand up.

  She seemed to think that the wings were self-explanatory and needed no further discussion, and Alan was content to let them stay in his mind’s eye, bat-shaped, powerful, restless, surrounded by their gridwork of angry scars.

  Once they got to the club, Shasta Disaster, a renovated brick bank with robotic halogen spots that swept the sidewalk out front with a throbbing penis logomark, she let go of his arm and her body stiffened. She said something in the doorman’s ear, and he let her pass. When Alan tried to follow her, the bouncer stopped him with a meaty hand on his chest.

  “Can I help you sir,” he said flatly. He was basically a block of fat and muscle with a head on top, arms as thick as Alan’s thighs barely contained in a silver button-down short-sleeve shirt that bound at his armpits.

  “Do I pay the cover to you?” Alan asked, reaching for his wallet.

  “No, you don’t get to pay a cover. You’re not coming in.”

  “But I’m with her,” Alan said, gesturing in the direction Mimi had gone. “I’m Krishna’s and her neighbor.”

  “She didn’t mention it,” the bouncer said. He was smirking now.

  “Look,” Alan said. “I haven’t been to a club in twenty years. Do you guys still take bribes?”

  The bouncer rolled his eyes. “Some might. I don’t. Why don’t you head home, sir.”

  “That’s it, huh?” Alan said. “Nothing I can say or do?”

  “Don’t be a smart guy,” the bouncer said.

  “Good night, then,” Alan said, and turned on his heel. He walked back up to Queen Street, which was ablaze with TV lights from the open studio out front of the CHUM-City building. Hordes of teenagers in tiny, outrageous outfits milled back and forth from the coffee shops to the studio window, where some band he’d never heard of was performing, generally ambling southward to the clubs. Alan bought himself a coffee with a sixteen-syllable latinate trade name (“Moch-a-latt-a-meraican-a-spress-a-chino,” he liked to call them) at the Second Cup and hailed a taxi.

  He felt only the shortest moment of anger at Mimi, but it quickly cooled and then warmed again, replaced by bemusement. Decrypting the mystical deeds of young people had been his hobby and avocation since he hired his first cranky-but-bright sixteen-year-old. Mimi had played him, he knew that, deliberately set him up to be humiliated. But she’d also wanted a moment alone with him, an opportunity to confront him with her wings—wings that were taking on an air of the erotic now in his imagination, much to his chagrin. He imagined that they were soft and pliable as lips but with spongy cartilage beneath that gave way like livid nipple flesh. The hair must be silky, soft, and slippery as a pubic thatch oiled with sweat and juices. Dear oh dear, he was really getting himself worked into a lather, imagining the wings drooping to the ground, unfolding powerfully in his living room, encircling him, enveloping him as his lips enveloped the tendons on her neck, as her vagina enveloped him…Whew!

  The taxi drove right past his place and that gave Alan a much-needed distraction, directing the cabbie through the maze of Kensington Market’s one-way streets back around to his front door. He tipped the cabbie a couple of bucks over his customary ten percent and bummed a cigarette off him, realizing that Mimi had asked him for a butt but never returned the pack.

  He puffed and shook his head and stared up the street at the distant lights of College Street, then turned back to his porch.

  “Hello, Albert,” two voices said in unison, speaking from the shadows on his porch.

  “Jesus,” he said, and hit the remote on his keyring that switched on the porch light. It was his brother Edward, the eldest of the nesting dolls, the bark of their trinity, coarse and tough and hollow. He was even fatter than he’d been as a little boy, fat enough that his arms and legs appeared vestigial and unjointed. He struggled, panting, to his tiny feet—feet like undersized exclamation points beneath the tapered Oh of his body. His face, though doughy, had not gone to undefined softness. Rather, every feature had acquired its own rolls of fat, rolls that warred with one another to define his appearance—nose and cheekbones and brow and lips all grotesque and inflated and blubbery.

  “Eugene,” Alan said. “It’s been a very long time.”

  Edward cocked his head. “It has, indeed, big brother. I’ve got bad news.”

  “What?”

  Edward leaned to the left, the top half of his body tipping over completely, splitting at his narrow leather belt, so that his trunk, neck, and head hung upside down beside his short, cylindrical legs and tiny feet.

  Inside of him was Frederick, the perennial middle child. Frederick planted his palms on the dry, smooth edges of his older brother’s waist and levered himself up, stepping out of Ed’s legs with the unconscious ease of a lifetime’s practice. “It’s good to see you, Andy,” he said. He was pale and wore his habitual owlish expression of surprise at seeing the world without looking through his older brother’s eyes.

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Frederick,” Alan said. He’d always gotten along with Frederick, always liked his ability to play peacemaker and to lend a listening ear.

  Frederick helped Edward upright, methodically circumnavigating his huge belly, retucking his grimy white shirt. Then he hitched up his sweatshirt over the hairy pale expanse of his own belly and tipped to one side.

  Alan had been expecting to see Gregory, the core, but instead there was nothing inside Frederick. The Gregory-shaped void was empty. Frederick righted himself and hitched up his belt.

  “We think he’s dead,” Edward said, his rubbery features distorted into a Greek tragedy mask. “We think that Doug killed him.” He pinwheeled his round arms and then clapped his hands to his face, sobbing. Frederick put a hand on his arm. He, too, was crying.

  Once upon a time, Alan’s mother gave birth to three sons in three months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary—before these three came along, she’d already had four others. But the interval, well, that was unusual.

  As the eldest, Alan was the first to recognize the early signs of her pregnancy. The laundry loads of diapers and play clothes he fed into her belly unbalanced more often, and her spin cycle became almost lackadaisical, so the garments had to hang on the line for days before they stiffened and dried completely. Alan liked to sit with his back against his mother’s hard enamel side while she rocked and gurgled and churned. It comforted him.

  The details of her conception were always mysterious to Alan. He’d been walking down into town to attend day school for five years, and he’d learned all about the birds and the bees, and he thought that maybe his father—the mountain—impregnated his mother by means of some strange pollen carried on the gusts of winds from his deep and gloomy caves. There was a gnome, too, who made sure that the long hose that led from Alan’s mother’s back to the spring pool in his father’s belly remained clear and unfouled, and sometimes Alan wondered if the gnome dove for his father’s seed and fed it up his mother’s intake. Alan’s life was full of mysteries, and he’d long since learned to keep his mouth shut about his home life when he was at school.