Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 42

Craig was halfway around the world, he was in Toronto, and Brian was G.o.d-knew-where. That left just Ed-Fred-George and Davey, alone in the cave. No wonder they were here on his doorstep.

"What's he doing?"

"He just sits there and watches us, but that's enough. We're almost finished with school." He dropped his chin to his chest. "I thought we could finish here. Find a job. A place to live." He blushed furiously. "A girl."

Ed and Fred were staring at their laps. Alan tried to picture the logistics, but he couldn't, not really. There was no scenario in which he could see his brothers carrying on with --

"Don't be an idiot," Ed said. He sounded surprisingly bitter. He was usually a cheerful person -- or at least a fat and smiling person. Alan realized for the first time that the two weren't equivalent.

George jutted his chin toward the sofa and his brothers. "They don't know what they want to do. They think that, 'cause it'll be hard to live here, we should hide out in the cave forever."

"Alan, talk to him," Fred said. "He's nuts."

"Look," George said. "You're gone. You're *all* gone. The king under the mountain now is Davey. If we stay there, we'll end up his slaves or his victims. Let him keep it. There's a whole world out here we can live in.

"I don't see any reason to let my handicap keep me down."

"It's not a handicap," Edward said patiently. "It's just how we are. We're different. We're not like the rest of them."

"Neither is Alan," George said. "And here he is, in the big city, living with them. Working. Meeting people. Out of the mountain."

"Alan's more like them than he is like us," Frederick said. "We're not like them. We can't pa.s.s for them."

Alan's jaw hung slack. Handicapped? Pa.s.sing? Like them? Not like them?

He'd never thought of his brothers this way. They were just his brothers. Just his family. They could communicate with the outside world. They were people. Different, but the same.

"You're just as good as they are," he said.

And that shut them up. They all regarded him, as if waiting for him to go on. He didn't know what to say. Were they, really? Was he? Was he better?

"What are we, Alan?" Edward said it, but Frederick and George mouthed the words after he'd said them.

"You're my brothers," he said. "You're. . ."

"I want to see the city," George said. "You two can come with me, or you can meet me when I come back."

"You *can't* go without us," Frederick said. "What if we get hungry?"

"You mean, what if I don't come back, right?"

"No," Frederick said, his face turning red.

"Well, how hungry are you going to get in a couple hours? You're just worried that I'm going to wander off and not come back. Fall into a hole. Meet a girl. Get drunk. And you won't ever be able to eat again."

He was pacing again.

Ed and Fred looked imploringly at him.

"Why don't we all go together?" Alan said. "We'll go out and do something fun -- how about ice-skating?"

"Skating?" George said. "Jesus, I didn't ride a bus for 30 hours just to go *skating*."

Edward said, "I want to sleep."

Frederick said, "I want dinner."

Perfect, Alan thought. "Perfect. We'll all be equally displeased with this, then. The skating's out in front of City Hall. There are lots of people there, and we can take the subway down. We'll have dinner afterward on Queen Street, then turn in early and get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow, we'll negotiate something else. Maybe Chinatown and the zoo."

They are stared at him.

"This is a limited-time offer," Alan said. "I had other plans tonight, you know. Going once, going twice --"

"Let's go," George said. He went and took his brothers' hands. "Let's go, okay?"

They had a really good time.

George's body was propped up at the foot of the bed. He was white and wrinkled as a big toe in a bathtub, skin pulled tight in his face so that his hairline and eyebrows and cheeks seemed raised in surprise.

Alan smelled him now, a stink like a mouse dead between the gyprock in the walls, the worst smell imaginable. He felt Mimi breathing behind him, her chest heaving against his back. He reached out and pushed aside the wings, moving them by their translucent membranes, fingers brus.h.i.+ng the tiny fingerlets at the wingtips, recognizing in their touch some evolutionary connection with his own hands.

George toppled over as Alan stepped off the bed, moving in the twilight of the light from under the bathroom door. Mimi came off the bed on the other side and hit the overhead light switch, turning the room as bright as an icebox, making Alan squint painfully. She closed the blinds quickly, then went to the door and shot the chain and the deadbolt closed.

Mimi looked down at him. "Ugly sumb.i.t.c.h, whoever he was."

"My brother," Alan said.

"Oh," she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facing the wall. "Sorry." She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making the springs squeak.

Alan wasn't listening. He knelt down and touched George's cheek. The skin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertips came away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.

"Davey?" Alan said. "Are you in here?"

Mimi's foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-time sounds in the motel, distant m.u.f.fled TVs and car engines and f.u.c.king, but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.

"He must have come up through the drain," Alan said. "In the bathroom."

The broad pale moon of George's belly was abraded in long grey stripes.

He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for the bathroom doork.n.o.b. The door swung open, revealing the sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.

"How'd he find us here?"

Mimi, in her outsized blazer and track pants, touched him on his bare shoulder. He suddenly felt terribly naked. He backed out of the bathroom, shoving Mimi aside, and numbly pulled on his jeans and a shapeless sweats.h.i.+rt that smelled of Mimi and had long curly hairs lurking in the fabric that stuck to his face like cobwebs. He jammed his feet into his sneakers.

He realized that he'd had to step over his brother's body six times to do this.

He looked at his brother again. He couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His b.a.l.l.s, shrunk to an albino walnut, his c.o.c.k shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly, matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.

He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he had that didn't require stepping over George's body, back and forth, two paces, turn, two paces, turn.