"There's a lot of real estate between here and there. A lot of trees and
high-rises, office towers and empty lots. You're going to have to knock
on doors every couple hundred meters -- at best -- and convince them to
let you install one of these boxes, made from garbage, and plug it in,
to participate in what?"
"Democratic communication!" Kurt said.
"Ah, well, my guess is that most of the people who you'll need to
convince won't really care much about that. Won't be able to make that
abstract notion concrete."
Kurt mumbled into his chest. Alan could see that he was fuming.
"Just because you don't have the vision to appreciate this --"
Alan held up his hand. "Stop right there. I never said anything of the
sort. I think that this is big and exciting and looks like a lot of
fun. I think that ringing doorbells and talking people into letting me
nail an access point to their walls sounds like a *lot* of fun. Really,
I'm not kidding.
"But this is a journey, not a destination. The value you'll get out of
this will be more in the doing than the having done. The having done's
going to take decades, I'd guess. But the doing's going to be
something." Alan's smile was so broad it ached. The idea had seized
him. He was drunk on it.
The buzzer sounded and Kurt got up to answer it. Alan craned his neck to
see a pair of bearded neohippies in rasta hats.
"Are you Kurt?" one asked.
"Yeah, dude, I'm Kurt."
"Marcel told us that we could make some money here? We're trying to
raise bus fare to Burning Man? We could really use the work?"
"Not today, but maybe tomorrow," Kurt said. "Come by around lunchtime."
"You sure you can't use us today?"
"Not today," Kurt said. "I'm busy today."
"All right," the other said, and they slouched away.
"Word of mouth," Kurt said, with a jingling shrug. "Kids just turn up,
looking for work with the trash."
"You think they'll come back tomorrow?" Alan was pretty good at
evaluating kids and they hadn't looked very reliable.
"Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there's always
enough kids and enough junk to go around."
"But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted and
powered. You've got to sort it out with people who own stores and
houses."
"You want to knock on doors?" Kurt said.
"I think I would," Alan said. "I suspect it's a possibility. We can
start with the shopkeepers, though."
"I haven't had much luck with merchants," Kurt said, shrugging his
shoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across the
claustrophobic hollow. "Capitalist pigs."
"I can't imagine why," Alan said.
#
"Wales Avenue, huh?" Kurt said.
They were walking down Oxford Street, and Alan was seeing it with fresh
eyes, casting his gaze upward, looking at the lines of sight from one
building to another, mentally painting in radio-frequency shadows cast
by the transformers on the light poles.
"Just moved in on July first," Alan said. "Still getting settled in."
"Which house?"
"The blue one, with the big porch, on the corner."
"Sure, I know it. I scored some great plumbing fixtures out of the
dumpster there last winter."
"You're welcome," Alan said.
They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowds
shopping the Chinese importers' sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols and
Hello Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sum
restaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensed
milk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treat
Kurt, but he declined.
"You never know about those places," Kurt said. "How clean is their ice,
anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?"
"You dig around in dumpsters for a living," Alan said. "Aren't you
immune to germs?"
Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. "I don't eat garbage, I pick
it," he said. He sounded angry.
"Hey, sorry," Alan said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to imply --"
"I know you didn't," Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods store
and spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to the
age-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dusted
her hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and took
the bag back. "I'm just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split because
she couldn't get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was never
clean enough for her."
"Sorry," Alan said again.
"I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner," Kurt
said. "One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last night
when he was in the park."
Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute university
girls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrapped
fish and bags of soft, steaming bagels. They stepped around him, lugging
their groceries over the curb and back onto the sidewalk, not breaking
from their discussion.
"What was it?"
Kurt gave him a sideways look. "It's weird, okay? The kid who saw it is
never all that reliable, and he likes to embellish."
"Okay," Alan said. The crowd was pushing around them now, trying to get
past. The dry-goods lady sucked her teeth in annoyance.
"So this kid, he was smoking a joint in the park last night, really
late, after the clubs shut down. He was alone, and he saw what he
thought was a dog dragging a garbage bag down the steps of your house."
"Yes?"
"So he went over to take a look, and he saw that it was too big to be a
garbage bag, and the dog, it looked sick, it moved wrong. He took
another step closer and he must have triggered a motion sensor because
the porch light switched on. He says..."
"What?"
"He's not very reliable. He says it wasn't a dog, he said it was like a
dried-out mummy or something, and it had its teeth sunk into the neck of
this big, fat, naked guy, and it was dragging the fat guy out into the
street. When the light came on, though, it gave the fat guy's neck a
hard shake, then let go and turned on this kid, walking toward him on
stumpy little feet. He says it made a kind of growling noise and lifted
up its hand like it was going to slap the kid, and the kid screamed and
ran off. When he got to Dundas, he turned around and saw the fat guy get
dragged into an alley between two of the stores on Augusta."
"I see," Alan said.
"It's stupid, I know," Kurt said.
Natalie and Link rounded the corner, carrying slices of pizza from
Pizzabilities, mounded high with eggplant and cauliflower and other
toppings that were never intended for use in connection with pizza. They
startled on seeing Alan and Kurt, then started to walk away.
"Wait," Alan called. "Natalie, Link, wait." He smiled apologetically at
Kurt. "My neighbors," he said.
Natalie and Link had stopped and turned around. Alan and Kurt walked to
them.
"Natalie, Link, this is Kurt," he said. They shook hands all around.
"I wanted to apologize," Alan said. "I didn't mean to put you between
Krishna and me. It was very unfair."
Natalie smiled warily. Link lit a cigarette with a great show of
indifference. "It's all right," Natalie said.
"No, it's not," Alan said. "I was distraught, but that's no
excuse. We're going to be neighbors for a long time, and there's no
sense in our not getting along."
"Really, it's okay," Natalie said.
"Yeah, fine," Link said.
"Three of my brothers have gone missing," Alan said. "That's why I was
so upset. One disappeared a couple of weeks ago, another last night, and
one this morning. Krishna..." He thought for a moment. "He taunted me
about it. I really wanted to find out what he saw."