"Okay," Alan said. "It's not necessarily about what career you
pick. It's about how you do what you do. Natalie, you told me you used
to shop at Tropicál."
She nodded.
"You liked it, you used to shop there, right?"
"Yeah."
"And it inspired you to go into fashion design. It also provided
employment for a couple dozen people over the years. I sometimes got to
help out little alternative girls from North Toronto buy vintage prom
dresses at the end of the year, and I helped Motown revival bands put
together matching outfits of red blazers and wide trousers. Four or five
little shops opened up nearby selling the same kind of thing, imitating
me -- that whole little strip down there started with Tropicál."
Natalie nodded. "Okay, I knew that, I guess. But it's not the same as
*really* making a difference, is it?"
Link flicked his butt to the curb. "You're changing people's lives for
the better either way, right?"
"Exactly," Alan said.
Then Link grinned. "But there's something pretty, oh, I dunno, *ballsy*,
about this wireless thing, yeah? It's not the same."
"Not the same," Alan said grinning. "Better."
"How can we help?"
#
Kurt had an assembly line cranking out his access points now. Half a
dozen street kids worked in the front of his place, in a cleared-out
space with a makeshift workbench made from bowed plywood and scratched
IKEA table-legs. It made Alan feel better to watch them making sense of
it all, made him feel a little like he felt when he was working on The
Inventory. The kids worked from noon, when Kurt got back from breakfast,
until 9 or 10, when he went out to dive.
The kids were smart, but screwed up: half by teenaged hormones and half
by bad parents or bad drugs or just bad brain chemistry. Alan understood
their type, trying to carve some atom of individual identity away from
family and background, putting pins through their bodies and affecting
unconvincing tough mannerisms. They were often bright -- the used
bookstore had been full of their type, buying good, beat-up books off
the sale rack for 50 cents, trading them back for 20 cents' credit the
next day, and buying more.
Natalie and Link were in that morning, along with some newcomers,
Montreal street punks trying their hand at something other than squeegee
bumming. The punks and his neighbors gave each other uneasy looks, but
Alan had deliberately put the sugar for the coffee at the punks' end of
the table and the cream in front of Natalie and the stirs by the
bathroom door with the baklava and the napkins, so a rudimentary social
intercourse was begun.
First, one of the punks (who had a rusty "NO FUTURE" pin that Alan
thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors' market) asked
Natalie to pass her the cream. Then Link and another punk (foppy silly
black hair and a cut-down private school blazer with the short sleeves
pinned on with rows of safety pins) met over the baklava, and the punk
offered Link a napkin. Another punk spilled her coffee on her lap,
screeching horrendous Quebecois blasphemies as curses, and that cracked
everyone up, and Arnold, watching from near the blanket that fenced off
Kurt's monkish sleeping area, figured that they would get along.
"Kurt," he said pulling aside the blanket, handing a double-double
coffee over to Kurt as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing a
white T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, and
baggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sipped
reverently.
Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on on
the other side of the blanket. "Christ, they're at it already?"
"I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago -- or maybe they
were up all night."
Kurt groaned theatrically. "I'm running a halfway house for geeky street
kids."
"All for the cause," Alan said. "So, what's on the plate for today?"
"You know the church kittycorner from your place?"
"Yeah?" Alan said cautiously.
"Its spire is just about the highest point in the Market. An
omnidirectional up there..."
"The church?"
"Yeah."
"What about the new condos at the top of Baldwin? They're tall."
"They are. But they're up on the northern edge. From the bell-tower of
that church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side of
Oxford Street, along with the backs of all the shops on Augusta."
"How are we going to get the church to go along with it. Christ, what
are they, Ukrainian Orthodox?"
"Greek Orthodox," Kurt said. "Yeah, they're pretty conservative."
"So?"
"So, I need a smooth-talking, upstanding cit to go and put the case to
the pastor. Priest. Bishop. Whatever."
"Groan," Alex said.
"Oh, come on, you're good at it."
"If I get time," he said. He looked into his coffee for a moment. "I'm
going to go home," he said.
"Home?"
"To the mountain," he said. "Home," he said. "To my father," he said.
"Whoa," Kurt said. "Alone?"
Alan sat on the floor and leaned back against a milk crate full of
low-capacity hard drives. "I have to," he said. "I can't stop thinking
of..." He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge of
tears. It had been three weeks since Davey had vanished into the night,
and he'd dreamt of Eugene-Fabio-Greg every night since, terrible dreams,
in which he'd dug like a dog to uncover their hands, their arms, their
legs, but never their heads. He swallowed hard.
He and Kurt hadn't spoken of that night since.
"I sometimes wonder if it really happened," Kurt said.