Chapter 19

"I know what that's like," Mimi said. "I hadn't spoken more than three words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail house, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything to me, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, reading all those names. I'd dropped out of school after Christmas break, just didn't bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn't be any living thing that depended on me."

She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.

"Krishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my wings were long -- the longest they've ever been -- and wearing a big parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the shoulder.

"I turned to look at him and he said, 'I get off at the next stop. Will you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I've been riding next to you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you're like.'

"I wouldn't have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I'd already said, 'I beg your pardon?' because I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. And once I'd said that, once I'd spoken, I couldn't bear the thought of not speaking again."

#

They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag -- which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he'd waited out half a day to change buses -- was deserted, the only evidence of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store drive-through lane.

"Jesus, who divorced me this time?" Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.

"*Fear and Loathing* again, right?"

"It's *the* road-trip novel," she said.

"What about *On the Road*?"

"Oh, *that*," she said. "Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isn't fit for human consumption."

"Thompson isn't a dope fiend?"

"No. That was just a put-on. He wrote *about* drugs, not *on* drugs."

"Have you *read* Kerouac?"

"I couldn't get into it," she said.

He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.

"What's this?" she said.

"The library," he said. "Come on."

It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books he'd ever seen. Sweet, dusty.

"Here," he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section at the library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupied its own corner of overstuffed bookcases. "Here," he said, running his finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the faded Dewey labels.

H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he'd remembered from all those years ago. *On the Road.*

"Come on," he said. "We've got it."

"You can't check that out," she said.

He pulled out his wallet as they drew up closer to the checkout counter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the health card and the driver's license -- not a very good likeness of his face or his name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that it looked like a pirate's map on parchment. He slid it delicately out of the plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlike surface of the card, the furry type.

He slid the card and the book across the counter. Mimi and the librarian -- a boy of possibly Mimi's age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his patrons, but at a certain angle that suggested urbane irony -- goggled at it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece.

The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf of his card.

"This isn't --" the boy began.

"It's a library card," Alan said. "They used to let me use it here."

The boy set it down on the counter again.

Mimi peered at it. "There's no name on that card," she said.

"Never needed one," he said.

He'd gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle off into the shelves and start pulling down books. She'd rolled it into her typewriter and then they'd both gone chasing after Brad, then she'd asked him again for his name and they'd gone chasing after Brad, then for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No one ever looked closely at it again -- not even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who'd let him take out a stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for the morning bus to Toronto.

He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece of identification he ever owned, and in some ways, the most important.

"I have to give you a new card," the mesh-back kid said. "With a bar code. We don't take that card anymore." He picked it up and made to tear it in half.

"NO!" Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kid's wrists.

The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan's iron grip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid dropped the card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.

"Give it to me," Alan said. The boy's eyes, wide with shock, began to screw shut with pain. Alan let go his wrists, and the kid chafed them, backing away another step.

His shout had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to terminating children's mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving cautiously toward them, sizing them up.

"We should go," Mimi said.

"I need my library card," he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and wounded.

Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of her man's jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when she took to the air.

She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.

"We're going," Mimi said. "Now."

Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi's hand, though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his throat.

"Here," she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card stock, he snapped back to himself. "Sorry," he said lamely to the mesh-back kid.

Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.

He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He'd forgotten about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.

"Alan?" Mimi said.

"It was my first piece of identification," he said. "It made me a person who could get a book out of the library."

They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.

"What did I just say?" Alan said.

"You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving, steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around the traffic. "You said it made you a person --"

"That's right," Alan said. "It did."

#

He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.

Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.

Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels, catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his brothers', when their time came to enroll.

At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a brief exposition.

"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'd figured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.

They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say, *Do I know you from somewhere?* or, if he was feeling generous, *I wonder where you live?* The latter was scarier than the former.

For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he'd fancied himself. There wasn't much money around the mountain that season -- the flakes he'd brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he'd brought to fill Bradley's little round belly.

He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He'd walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn't welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.

It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.

Credentialed.

He'd read the word in a book of war stories.

He liked the sound of it.

#

"What did Krishna do?"

"What do you mean?" She was looking at him guardedly now, but his madness seemed to have past.

"I mean," he said, reaching over and taking her hand, "what did Krishna do when you went out for coffee with him?"

"Oh," she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a steep hill. "He made me laugh."

"He doesn't seem that funny," Alan said.

"We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about them. 'She's a little old to be breeding,' or 'Oh, is that how they're wearing their eyebrow in the old country?' or 'Looks like he beats his wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.' And when he said it, I *knew* it wasn't just a mean little remark, I *knew* it was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn't take long before I guessed that that meant that he might know my secret."

"So we drank our coffee," she said, and then stopped when the body thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a hill. "We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open palm with his fingertips and he said, 'Why did you come out with me?'

"And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, 'You look like a nice guy, it's just coffee, shit, don't make a big deal out of it,' and he looked like I'd just canceled Christmas and said, 'Oh, well, too bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I'd be a good guy to really hang out with a *lot*, if you know what I mean.' He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I'd had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I'd never returned the signals, never could.

"I told him I didn't think I could be romantically involved with him, and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table under it and he said, 'If it's your deformity, don't let that bother you. I thought I could fix that for you.' I almost pretended I didn't know what he meant, but I couldn't really, I knew he knew I knew. I said, 'How?' as in, *How did you know* and *How can you fix it*? but it just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back on and said, 'Does it really matter?'

"I told him it didn't, and then we went back to his place in Kensington Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to the bathroom and took off my shirt and he --"

"He cut you," Alan said.

"He fixed me," she said.

Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. "Were you broken?"

"Of *course* I was," she snapped, pulling back. "I couldn't *talk* to people. I couldn't *do* anything. I wasn't a person," she said.

"Right," Alan said. "I'm following you."

She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing with rain. "Is it much farther?" she said.

"An hour or so, if I remember right," he said.

"I know how stupid that sounds," she said. "I couldn't figure out if he was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never needed it after that. He'd do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and I was able to be a person again -- to wear cute clothes and go where I wanted. It was like my life had started over again."

The hills loomed over the horizon now, low and rolling up toward the mountains. One of them was his. He sucked in a breath and the car wavered on the slick road. He pumped the brakes and coasted them to a stop on the shoulder.

"Is that it?" she said.

"That's it," he said. He pointed. His father was green and craggy and smaller than he remembered. The body rolled in the trunk. "I feel --" he said. "We're taking him home, at least. And my father will know what to do."

"No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks," she said.

Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. "You can wait in the car if you want," he said.

#

Krishna came home,

(she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway, looking at the mountains on the horizon)

Krishna came home,

(she said, after he'd pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them)

Krishna came home,

(she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn't look at him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold)

and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street that I'd walked past a hundred times but never gone into.

He'd left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I felt...*glorious*. Gloried *in*. He'd been so attentive.

He'd touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had *ever* touched me that way. He'd touched me with...*reverence*. He's gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in *church* or something. He'd kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he'd been saying all along, "Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God," and I'd felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious.

He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I *knew* they'd never go on over my wings, and they were *so* beautiful.

"This one will look really good on you," he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I'd never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn't, my wings would stick out a mile.

I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for -- the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.

I'd been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh, I had *loved it*, I realized. I'd thought I'd hated it, but I'd loved it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I would never be part of, but I could be *next to* the stories and that was enough.

I was going to live in an attic again.

I started to cry.

He came to me. he put his arms around me. He nuzzled my throat and licked up the tears as they slid past my chin. "Shhh," he said. "Shhh."

He took off my jacket and my sweater, peeled down my jeans and my panties, and ran his fingertips over me, stroking me until I quietened.

He touched me reverently still, his breath hot on my skin. No one had ever touched me like that. He said, "I can fix you."

I said, "No one can fix me."

He said, "I can, but you'll have to be brave."

I nodded slowly. I could do brave. He led me by the hand into the bathroom and he took a towel down off of the hook on the back of the door and folded it into a long strip. He handed it to me. "Bite down on this," he said, and helped me stand in the tub and face into the corner, to count the grid of tiles and the greenish mildew in the grout.

"Hold still and bite down," he said, and I heard the door close behind me. Reverent fingertips on my wing, unfolding it, holding it away from my body.

"Be brave," he said. And then he cut off my wing.

It hurt so much, I pitched forward involuntarily and cracked my head against the tile. It hurt so much I bit through two thicknesses of towel. It hurt so much my legs went to mush and I began to sit down quickly, like I was fainting.

He caught me, under my armpits, and held me up, and I felt something icy pressed to where my wing had been -- I closed my eyes, but I heard the leathery thump as my wing hit the tile floor, a wet sound -- and gauzy fabric was wrapped around my chest, holding the icy towel in place over the wound, once twice thrice, between my tits.

"Hold still," he said. And he cut off the other one.

I screamed this time, because he brushed the wound he'd left the first time, but I managed to stay upright and to not crack my head on anything. I felt myself crying but couldn't hear it, I couldn't hear anything, nothing except a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.

He kissed my cheek after he'd wound a second bandage, holding a second cold compress over my second wound. "You're a very brave girl," he said. "Come on."

He led me into the living room, where he pulled the cushions off his sofa and opened it up to reveal a hide-a-bed. He helped me lie down on my belly, and arranged pillows around me and under my head, so that I was facing the TV.

"I got you movies," he said, and held up a stack of DVD rental boxes from Martian Signal. "We got *Pretty in Pink*, *The Blues Brothers*, *The Princess Bride*, a Robin Williams stand-up tape and a really funny-looking porno called *Edward Penishands*."

I had to smile in spite of myself, in spite of the pain. He stepped into his kitchenette and came back with a box of chocolates. "Truffles," he said. "So you can laze on the sofa, eating bonbons."

I smiled more widely then.

"Such a beautiful smile," he said. "Want a cup of coffee?"

"No," I said, choking it out past my raw-from-screaming throat.

"All right," he said. "Which video do you want to watch?"

"*Princess Bride*," I said. I hadn't heard of any of them, but I didn't want to admit it.

"You don't want to start with Edward Penishands?"

#

Alan stood out front of the video shop for a while, watching Natalie wait on her customers. She was friendly without being perky, and it was clear that the mostly male clientele had a bit of a crush on her, as did her mooning, cow-eyed co-worker who was too distracted to efficiently shelve the videos he pulled from the box before him. Alan smiled. Hiring cute girls for your shop was tricky business. If they had brains, they'd sell the hell out of your stock and be entertaining as hell; but a lot of pretty girls (and boys!) had gotten a free ride in life and got affronted when you asked them to do any real work.

Natalie was clearly efficient, and Alan knew that she wasn't afraid of hard work, but it was good to see her doing her thing, quickly and efficiently taking people's money, answering their questions, handing them receipts, counting out change... He would have loved to have had someone like her working for him in one of his shops.

Once the little rush at the counter was cleared, he eased himself into the shop. Natalie *was* working for him, of course, in the impromptu assembly line in Kurt's storefront. She'd proven herself to be as efficient at assembling and testing the access points as she was at running the till.