Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 8

"My dad's, you know, gone," he said. "Since I was a little kid." That line always got the office ladies, "since I was a little kid," made them want to write it down for their family Christmas newsletters.

The office lady smiled a powdery smile and put her hand on his shoulder. "All right, Alan, come with me."

Davey was sitting on the dusty sofa in the vice princ.i.p.al's office. He punched the sofa cus.h.i.+on rhythmically. "Alan," he said when the office lady led him in.

"Hi, Dave," Alan said. "What's going on?"

"They're stupid here. I hate them." He gave the sofa a particularly vicious punch.

"I'll get Mr Davenport," the office lady said, and closed the door behind her.

"What did you do?" Alan asked.

"She wouldn't let me play!" David said, glaring at him.

"Who wouldn't?"

"A girl! She had the blocks and I wanted to play with them and she wouldn't let me!"

"What did you hit her with?" Alan asked, dreading the answer.

"A block," David said, suddenly and murderously cheerful. "I hit her in the eye!"

Alan groaned. The door opened and the vice princ.i.p.al, Mr. Davenport, came in and sat behind his desk. He was the punishment man, the one that no one wanted to be sent in to see.

"h.e.l.lo, Alan," he said gravely. Alan hadn't ever been personally called before Mr. Davenport, but Billy got into some spot of precognitive trouble from time to time, rus.h.i.+ng out of cla.s.s to stop some disaster at home or somewhere else in the school. Mr. Davenport knew that Alan was a straight arrow, not someone he'd ever need to personally take an interest in.

He crouched down next to Darren, hitching up his slacks. "You must be David," he said, ducking down low to meet Davey's downcast gaze.

Davey punched the sofa.

"I'm Mr. Davenport," he said, and extended a hand with a big cla.s.s ring on it and a smaller wedding band.

Davey kicked him in the nose, and the vice princ.i.p.al toppled over backward, whacking his head on the sharp corner of his desk. He tumbled over onto his side and clutched his head. "Mother*f.u.c.ker*!" he gasped, and Davey giggled maniacally.

Alan grabbed Davey's wrist and bent his arm behind his back, shoving him across his knee. He swatted the little boy on the a.s.s as hard as he could, three times. "Don't you ever --" Alan began.

The vice princ.i.p.al sat up, still clutching his head. "That's enough!" he said, catching Alan's arm.

"Sorry," Alan said. "And David's sorry, too, right?" He glared at David.

"You're a stupid mother*f.u.c.ker*!" David said, and squirmed off of Alan's lap.

The vice princ.i.p.al's lips tightened. "Alan," he said quietly, "take your brother into the hallway. I am going to write a note that your mother will have to sign before David comes back to school, after his two-week suspension."

David glared at them each in turn. "I'm not coming back to this mother*f.u.c.ker* place!" he said.

He didn't.

The rain let up by afternoon, leaving a crystalline, fresh-mown air hanging over the Market.

Andrew sat in his office by his laptop and watched the sun come out. He needed to find Ed, needed to find Frank, needed to find Grant, but he was out of practice when it came to the ways of the mountain and its sons. Whenever he tried to imagine a thing to do next, his mind spun and the worldless howling thing inside him stirred. The more he tried to remember what it was like to be a son of the mountain, the more he felt something he'd worked very hard for, his delicate normalcy, slipping away.

So he put his soaked clothes in the dryer, clamped his laptop under his arm, and went out. He moped around the park and the fountain, but the stroller moms whose tots were splas.h.i.+ng in the wading pool gave him sufficient dirty looks that he walked up to the Greek's, took a table on the patio, and ordered a murderously strong cup of coffee.

He opened up the screen and rotated around the little cafe table until the screen was in the shade and his wireless card was aligned for best reception from the yagi antenna poking out of his back window. He opened up a browser and hit MapQuest, then brought up a street-detailed map of the Market. He pasted it into his CAD app and started to mark it up, noting all the different approaches to his house that Davey might take the next time he came. The maps soothed him, made him feel like a part of the known world.

Augusta Avenue and Oxford were both out; even after midnight, when the stores were all shuttered, there was far too much foot traffic for Davey to pa.s.s by unnoticed. But the alleys that mazed the back ways were ideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pa.s.s, but most of them -- he'd tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himself utterly lost. He'd had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CN Tower and use it to get his bearings.

He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from the Greek's son, who hadn't yet figured out that he was a regular and so sneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. "Computers, huh?" he said. "Doesn't anyone just read a book anymore?"

"I used to own a bookstore," Alan said, then held up a finger and moused over to his photo alb.u.m and brought up the thumbnails of his old bookstore. "See?"

The Greek's son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits of his white "The Greek's" T-s.h.i.+rt, sat down and looked at the photos. "I remember that place, on Harbord Street, right?"

Alan smiled. "Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortion clinic next door," he said. "Insurance paid out, but I wasn't ready to start over with another bookstore."

The Greek's son shook his head. "Another coffee, right?"

"Right," Alan said.

Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception again.

"You got a wireless card in that?" a young guy at the next table asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoff.u.c.kinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and sweaty high boots draped with chains.

"Yeah," Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn't getting anywhere, anyway.

"And you get service here? Where's your access point?" Crusty-punk or no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you'd find shopping for bargains on CD blanks on College Street.

"Three blocks that way," Alan said, pointing. "Hanging off my house. The network name is 'walesave.'"

"s.h.i.+t, that's you?" the kid said. "G.o.ddammit, you're clobbering our access points!"

"What access point?"

"Access *points*. ParasiteNet." He indicated a peeling sticker on the lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio towers underneath it. "I'm trying to get a mesh-net running though all of the Market, and you're hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Dude, you've got to turn down the freaking *gain* on those things."

"What's a mesh-net?"

The kid moved his beer over to Alan's table and sat down. "Okay, so pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless phones generate." He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the coverage area. "Right, so what happens if I'm out of range, over *here*

--" he put his beer back on his own table -- "and you want to reach me?

Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of sight."

"Right," Alan said, sipping his coffee.

"Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you radiate over everyone else's signal, so if I've got an access point *here*" -- he held his fist between their tables -- "no one can hear it because you're drowning it out. It's like you're shouting so loud that no one else can carry on a conversation."