Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

measurements off to a glazierin Mississauga.

  The glazier was technically retired, but he'd built every display casethat had ever sat inside any of Alan's shops and was happy to make useof the small workshop that his daughter and son-in-law had installed inhis garage when they retired him to the burbs.

  The bookcases went into the house, along each wall, according to asystem of numbers marked on their backs. Alan had used Tony'smeasurements and some CAD software to come up with a permutation ofstacking and shouldering cases that had them completely covering everywall -- except for the wall by the mantelpiece in the front parlor, thewall over the countertop in the kitchen, and the wall beside thestaircases -- to the ceiling.

  He and Tony didn't speak much. Tony was thinking about whatever peoplewho drive moving vans think about, and Alan was thinking about the storyhe was building the house to write in.

  May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dog shit hadmelted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells were allspringy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak fruit punch leftbehind by the pan-ethnic street-hockey league that formed upspontaneously in front of his house. When the winds blew from the east,he smelled the fish stalls on Spadina, salty and redolent of Chinesebarbecue spices. When it blew from the north, he smelled baking bread inthe kosher bakeries and sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic fromthe pizzas in the steaming ovens at Massimo's all the way up onCollege. The western winds smelled of hospital incinerator, acrid andsmoky.

  His father, the mountain, had attuned Art to smells, since they were theleading indicators of his moods, sulfurous belches from deep in thecaverns when he was displeased, the cold non-smell of spring water whenhe was thoughtful, the new-mown hay smell from his slopes when he washappy. Understanding smells was something that you did, when themountain was your father.

  Once the bookcases were seated and screwed into the walls, out came thebooks, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them.

  Little kids' books with loose signatures, ancient first-editionhardcovers, outsized novelty art books, mass-market paperbacks,reference books as thick as cinderblocks. They were mostly used whenhe'd gotten them, and that was what he loved most about them: Theysmelled like other people and their pages contained hints of theirlives: marginalia and pawn tickets, bus transfers gone yellow with ageand 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 previousowners.

  They came off his shelves at home, from the ten-by-ten storage down onthe lakeshore, they came from friends and enemies who'd borrowed hisbooks years before and who'd "forgotten" to return them, but Alan*never* forgot, he kept every book in a great and deep relationaldatabase that had begun as a humble flatfile but which had been importedinto successive generations of industrial-grade database software.

  This, in turn, was but a pocket in the Ur-database, The Inventory inwhich Alan had input the value, the cost, the salient features, theunique identifiers, and the photographic record of every single thing heowned, from the socks in his sock drawer to the pots in hiscupboard. Maintaining The Inventory was serious business, no lessimportant now than it had been when he had begun it in the course ofsecuring insurance for the bookshop.

  Alan was an insurance man's worst nightmare, a customer from hell who'dmessenger over five bankers' boxes of detailed, cross-referencedInventory 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 aroundthe living room, covered the wall behind the dining room in the kitchen,filled the den and the master bedroom and the master bath, climbed theshort walls to the dormer ceilings on the third floor. They wereorganized by idiosyncratic subject categories, and alphabetical byauthor within those categories.

  Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine -- hekept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. Hisbrothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller,and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but hetreasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them forlandscapes. 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 cordssnaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prongoutlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to makesure that it came out perfectly even.

  Tony helped Alan install the shallow collectibles cases along thehouse's two-story stairwell, holding the level while Alan worked thecordless powerdriver. Alan's glazier had built the cases to Alan'sspecs, and they stretched from the treads to the ceiling. Alan filledthem with Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin toys, felt tourist pennants fromcentral Florida gator farms, a stone from Marie Laveau's tomb in theSt. Louis I Cemetery in New Orleans, tarnished brass Zippos, smallframed comic-book bodybuilding ads, carved Polynesian coconut monkeys,melamine transistor radios, Bakelite snow globes, all the tchotchkeshe'd accumulated over a lifetime of picking and hunting and digging.

  They were gloriously scuffed and non-mint: he'd always sold off thesterile mint-in-package goods as quickly as he could, squirreling awaythe items that were marked with "Property of Freddy Terazzo" in shakyballpoint, the ones with tooth marks and frayed boxes taped shut withbrands of stickytape not offered for sale in fifty years.

  The last thing to go in was the cellar. They knocked out any wall thatwasn't load-bearing, smeared concrete on every surface, and worked in aloose mosaic of beach glass and beach china, smooth and white withspidery blue illustrations pale as a dream. Three coats of urethane madethe surfaces gleam.

  Then it was just a matter of stringing out the cables for the clip-onhalogens whose beams he took care to scatter off the ceilings to keepthe glare to a minimum. He moved in his horsehair sofa and armchairs,his big old bed, his pots and pans and sideboard with its noveltydecanters, and his entertainment totem.

  A man from Bell Canada came out and terminated the data line in hisbasement, in a room that he'd outfitted with an uninterruptible powersupply, a false floor, dry fire extinguishers and a pipe-breaksensor. He installed and configured the router, set up his modest rackand home servers, fished three four-pair wires through to the livingroom, the den, and the attic, where he attached them to unobtrusivewireless access points and thence to weatherproofed omnidirectionalantennae made from copper tubing and PVC that he'd affixed to thebuilding'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 someperambulatory cogitation, and he wanted to be able to take his laptopanywhere in the market and sit down and write and hop online and checkout little factoids with a search engine so he wouldn't get hung up onstupid details.

  The house on Wales Avenue was done. He'd repainted the exterior a lovelyrobin's-egg blue, fixed the front step, and planted a low-maintenancecombination of outsized rocks from the Canadian Shield and wild grasseson the front lawn. On July first, Alan celebrated Canada Day by crawlingout of the attic window onto the roof and watching the fireworks andlistening to the collective sighs of the people densely packed aroundhim in the Market, then he went back into the house and walked from roomto room, looking for something out of place, some spot still rough andunsanded, and found none. The books and the collections lined the walls,the fans whirred softly in the ceilings, the filters beneath the openwindows hummed as they sucked the pollen and particulate out of therooms -- Alan's retail experience had convinced him long ago of theselling power of fresh air and street sounds, so he refused to keep thewindows closed, despite the fantastic volume of city dust that blew in.

  The house was perfect. The ergonomic marvel of a chair that UPS haddropped off the previous day was tucked under the wooden sideboard he'dset up as a desk in the second-floor den. His brand-new computer satcentered on the desk, a top-of-the-line laptop with a wireless card anda 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 ofcoffees from the Greek diner. Five coffees, one for each bicycle lockedto 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 thebuzzer. It took two minutes more, he estimated, but he didn't mind. Itwas a beautiful summer day, soft and moist and green, and he couldalready smell the fish market over the mellow brown vapors of the strongcoffee.

  A young woman in long johns and a baggy tartan T-shirt opened thedoor. She was excitingly plump, round and a little jiggly, the kind ofwoman Alan had always gone for. Of course, she was all of twenty-two,and so was certainly not an appropriate