Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 29

One morning, Alan threw a clatter of toonies down on the Greek's counter and walked around the Market, smelling the last night's staggering p.i.s.sers and the morning's blossoms.

Here were his neighbors, multicolored heads at the windows of their sagging house adjoining his, Link and Natalie in the adjacent windows farthest from his front door, Mimi's face suspicious at her window, and was that Krishna behind her, watching over her shoulder, hand between her wings, fingers tracing the scars depending from the muscles there?

He waved at them. The reluctant winter made every day feel like the day before a holiday weekend. The bankers and the retail slaves coming into and out of the Market had a festive air.

He waved at the neighbors, and Link waved back, and then so did Natalie, and he hefted his sack of coffees from the Greek's suggestively, and Mimi shut her curtains with a snap, but Natalie and Link smiled, and a moment later they were sitting in twig chairs on his porch in their jammies, watching the world go past as the sun began to boil the air and the coffee tasted as good as it smelled.

"Beautiful day," Natalie said rubbing the duckling fuzz on her scalp and closing her eyes.

"Found any work yet?" Alan said remembering his promise to put her in touch with one of his fas.h.i.+onista proteges.

She made a face. "In a video store. Bo-ring."

Link made a rude noise. "You are *so* spoiled. Not just any video store, she's working at Martian Signal on Queen Street."

Alan knew it, a great shop with a huge selection of cult movies and a brisk trade in zines, transgressive literature, action figures and T-s.h.i.+rts.

"It must be great there," he said.

She smiled and looked away. "It's okay." She bit her lip. "I don't think I like working retail," she said.

"Ah, retail!" he said. "Retail would be fantastic if it wasn't for the f.u.c.king customers."

She giggled.

"Don't let them get to you," he said. "Get to be really smart about the stock, so that there's always something you know more about than they do, and when that isn't true, get them to *teach you* more so you'll be in control the next time."

She nodded.

"And have fun with the computer when it's slow," he said.

"What?"

"A store like that, it's got the home phone number of about seventy percent of the people in Toronto you'd want to ever hang out with. Most of your school friends, even the ones you've lost track of. All the things they've rented. All their old addresses -- you can figure out who's living together, who gave their apartment to whom, all of that stuff. That kind of database is way more fun than you realize. You can get lost in it for months."

She was nodding slowly. "I can see that," she said. She upended her coffee and set it down. "Listen, Arbus --" she began, then bit her lip again. She looked at Link, who tugged at his fading pink shock of hair.

"It's nothing," he said. "We get emotionally overwrought about friends and family. I have as much to apologize for as... Well, I owe you an apology." They stared at the park across the street, at the damaged wading pool where Edward had vanished.

"So, sorries all 'round and kisses and hugs, and now we're all friends again, huh?" Link said. Natalie made a rude noise and ruffled his hair, then wiped her hand off on his s.h.i.+rt.

Alan, though, solemnly shook each of their hands in turn, and thanked them. When he was done, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from him. Next door, Mimi's window slammed shut.

"What is it you're doing around here, Akin?" Link said. "I keep seeing you running around with ladders and tool belts. I thought you were a writer. Are you soundproofing the whole Market?"

"I never told you?" Alan said. He'd been explaining wireless networking to anyone who could sit still and had been beginning to believe that he'd run it down for every denizen of Kensington, but he'd forgotten to clue in his own neighbors!

"Right," he said. "Are you seated comfortably? Then I shall begin. When we connect computers together, we call it a network. There's a *big*

network of millions of computers, called the Internet."

"Even *I* know this," Natalie said.

"Shush," Alan said. "I'll start at the beginning, where I started a year ago, and work my way forward. It's weird, it's big and it's cool." And he told them the story, the things he'd learned from Kurt, the arguments he'd honed on the shopkeepers, the things Lyman had told him.

"So that's the holy mission," he said at last. "You give everyone a voice and a chance to speak on a level playing field with the rich and powerful, and you make democracy, which is good."

He looked at Link and Natalie, who were looking to one another rather intensely, communicating in some silent idiom of sibling body-language.

"Plate-o-shrimp," Natalie said.

"Funny coincidence," Link said.

"We were just talking about this yesterday."

"Spectrum?" Alan quirked his eyebrows.

"No, not exactly," Natalie said. "About making a difference. About holy missions. Wondering if there were any left."

"I mean," Link said, "riding a bike or renting out videos are honest ways to make a living and all, and they keep us in beer and rent money, but they're not --"

"-- *important*." Natalie said.

"Ah," Alan said.

"Ah?"

"Well, that's the thing we all want, right? Making a difference."

"Yeah."

"Which is why you went into fas.h.i.+on," Link said giving her skinny shoulder a playful shove.

She shoved him back. "And why *you* went into electrical engineering!"

"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 Tropical."

She nodded.

"You liked it, you used to shop there, right?"

"Yeah."

"And it inspired you to go into fas.h.i.+on 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 Tropical."

Natalie nodded. "Okay, I knew that, I guess. But it's not the same as *really* making a difference, is it?"

Link flicked his b.u.t.t to the curb. "You're changing people's lives for the better either way, right?"