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===== Blurb =====
SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there
are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any
book you've ever read.
- Gene Wolfe
========== Dedication ==========
For the family I was born into and the family I chose. I got lucky both
times.
========= The novel =========
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.
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 novitiate 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 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.
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 had their patience tried by 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 protégés: Wooden bookcases! His cell-phone rang every day, 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, Tony, who ran a small man-with-van
service, and when the phone rang, he'd send Tony over to his protégé'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.
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, soup simmering on the stove -- could charm away the essential
dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires
and conduit, the 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 on the Danforth, would keep on paying the rent
there until his big sanding project was done and the house on Wales
Avenue was fit for habitation.
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 Tony and Tony's homie Nat, 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 laid 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 many golems that called him home. They
lived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothers
alone, 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-learning 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 molding, 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. Alan spent days working with a wire
brush and pointed twists of steel wool and oozing stinging paint
stripper, until the grain was as 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 he'd 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.
The next day, he stopped at the Portuguese contractor-supply on
Ossington that he liked. They opened at five a.m., and the men behind
the counter were always happy to sketch out alternative solutions to his
amateur construction problems, they never mocked him for his
incompetence, and always threw in a ten 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
Portugees with pencil stubs behind their ears and scarred fingers? He
picked up a pair of foam-rubber knee pads and a ten-kilo box of
lint-free shop rags 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. He 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 shop
rags. He ran his fingertips over every inch of floor and molding 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 than 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 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. So he rubbed wax until his elbows ached,
*massaged* the wax into the wood, buffed it with shop rags so that the
house shone.
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 Portuguese 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
judgment 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.
The bookcases came out of the cellar one by one. Alan wrestled them onto
the front porch with Tony's help and sanded them clean, then turned them
over to Tony 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. Tony had
been responsible for measuring each bookcase after he retrieved it from
Alan's protégés' shops and for sending the measurements off to a glazier
in Mississauga.
The glazier was technically retired, but he'd built every display case
that had ever sat inside any of Alan's shops and was happy to make use
of the small workshop 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 Tony'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 Tony didn't speak much. Tony 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.
May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dog shit had
melted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells were all
springy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak fruit punch 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 authors' heads, and the world of their previous
owners.
They came off his shelves at home, from the ten-by-ten 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 he 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.
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 an 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 mantel, using two hooks and a level to make
sure that it came out perfectly even.
Tony helped Alan install the shallow collectibles cases along the
house's two-story stairwell, 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
ballpoint, 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 illustrations 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 data line in his
basement, in a room that he'd outfitted with an 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 copper tubing and PVC that he'd affixed to the
building's exterior on short masts, aimed out over Kensington Market,
blanketing a whole block with 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.
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 the 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.
#
Alan rang the next-door house's doorbell at eight a.m. He had a bag of
coffees from the Greek diner. 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 fish market over the mellow brown vapors of the strong
coffee.
A young woman in long johns and a baggy tartan T-shirt opened the
door. She was 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 was 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 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. Alan 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 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 gray 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. "Natalie,"
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," Natalie 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 guayabera.
"Adam," Natalie 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."