Chapter 25

"My foot. I lost a couple toes last year to frostbite and never got them looked at properly." He reeked of piss and booze.

"They didn't...grow back?"

Bradley shook his head. "They didn't," he said. "Not mine. Hello, Krishna," he said.

Alan looked to his neighbors' porch. Krishna stood there, stock still, against the wall.

"Friend of yours, huh?" Krishna said. "Boyfriend?"

"He offered me a bottle of wine if I let him take me home," Bradley said. "Best offer I had all week. Wanna make it a threesome? An *'ow you say* 'mange ma twat?'"

Krishna contorted his face into an elaborate sneer. "Puke," he said.

"Bye, Krishna," Buddy said. Alan put his key into the lock and let them in.

Blaine made a hobbling beeline for the sideboard and picked up the Jim Beam Apollo 8 commemorative decanter that Adam kept full of Bushmills 1608 and poured himself a tall glass of it. He drank it back in two swallows, then rolled his tongue around in his mouth with his eyes closed while he breathed out the fumes.

"I have been thinking about that bottle ever since you bought it," he said. "This stuff is legendary. God, that's good. I mean, that's fucking magical."

"It's good," Andrew said. "You can have more if you want."

"Yeah," Burke said, and poured out another drink. He carried it and the decanter to the sofa and settled into it. "Nice sofa," he said. "Nice living room. Nice house. Not very normal, though."

"No," Andrew said. "I'm not fitting in very well."

"I fit in great." He drank back another glug of whiskey and poured out another twenty dollars' worth. "Just great, it's the truth. I'm totally invisible and indistinguishable. I've been sleeping at the Scott Mission for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can't even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes or my food in the night, I'm always awake and watching them and just shaking my head."

The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac tinge. "What if I find you some clothes and a towel?"

"Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration and become visible again?" He drank more, breathed out the fumes. "Sure, why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You've seen me, Krishna's seen me. Davey's gonna see me. Least I got to see them first."

And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets -- though the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which neither of them had.

And so he let his brother trim away his beard, first with scissors and then with an electric razor, and so he let his brother brush out his long hair and tie it back with an elastic taken from around a bunch of broccoli in the vegetable crisper.

And so, by the time the work was done and he was dressed in too-big clothes that hung over his sunken chest and spindly legs like a tent, he was quite sober and quite clean and quite different.

"You look fine," Adam said, as Brent fingered his chin and watched the reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of Alan's study. "You look great."

"I look conspicuous. Visible. Used to be that eyes just slid off of me. Now they'll come to rest on me, if only for a few seconds."

Andy nodded. "Sure, that's right. You know, being invisible isn't the same as being normal. Normal people are visible."

"Yeah," Brad said, nodding miserably. He pawed again at the smooth hollows of his cheeks.

"You can stay in here," Alan said, gesturing at his study. The desk and his laptop and his little beginning of a story sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by a litter of access points in various stages of repair and printed literature full of optimistic, nontechnical explanations of ParasiteNet. "I'll move all that stuff out."

"Yeah," Billy said. "You should. Just put it in the basement in boxes. I've been watching you screw around with that wireless stuff and you know, it's not real normal, either. It's pretty desperately weird. Danny's right -- that Kurt guy, following you around, like he's in love with you. That's not normal." He flushed, and his hands were in fists. "Christ, Adam, you're living in this goddamned museum and nailing those stupid science-fair projects to the sides of buildings. You've got this comet tail of druggy kids following you around, buying dope with the money they make off of the work they do for you. You're not just visible, you're *strobing*, and you're so weird even *I* get the crawlies around you."

His bare feet slapped the shining cool wood as he paced the room, lame foot making a different sound from the good one.

Andy looked out the window at the green maple-keys rattling in the wind. "They're buying drugs?"

Benny snorted. "You're bankrolling weekly heroin parties at two warehouses on Oxford, and three raves a month down on Liberty Street."

He looked up at the ceiling. "Mimi's awake now," he said. "Better introduce me."

Mimi kept her own schedule, mostly nocturnal, padding quietly around his house while he slept, coming silently to bed after he rose, while he was in the bathroom. She hadn't spoken a word to him in more than a week, and he had said nothing to her. But for the snores and the warmth of the bed when he lay down and the morning dishes in the sink, she might not have been living with him at all. But for his constant awareness of her presence in his house and but for the shirts with cut-away backs in the laundry hamper, he might be living all on his own.

But for the knife that he found under the mattress, compass set into the handle, serrated edge glinting, he might have forgotten those wings, which drooped near to the floor now.

Footsteps crossing between the master bedroom and the bathroom. Pausing at the top of the stairs. A soft cough.

"Alan?"

"It's okay, Mimi," he said.

She came down in a pair of his boxer shorts, with the topsheet complicatedly draped over her chest in a way that left her wings free. Their tips touched the ground.

"This is my brother Bentley," Adam said. "I told you about him."

"You can see the future," she said reproachfully.

"You have wings," he said.

She held out her hand and he shook it.

"I want breakfast," she said.

"Sounds good to me," Brent said.

Alan nodded. "I'll cook."

#

He made pancakes and cut up pears and peaches and apples and bananas for fruit salad.

"This reminds me of the pancake house in town," Bart said. "Remember?"

Adam nodded. It had been Ed-Fred-George's favorite Sunday dinner place.

"Do you live here now?" Mimi said.

Alan said, "Yes." She slipped her hand into his and squeezed his thumb. It felt good and unexpected.

"Are you going to tell her?" Billy said.

She withdrew her hand. "What is it." Her voice was cold.

Billy said, "There's no good comes of keeping secrets. Krishna and Davey are planning to attack Kurt. Krishna says he owns you. He'll probably come for you."

"Did you see that?" Adam said. "Him coming for her?"

"Not that kind of seeing. I just understand enough about people to know what that means."

Trey met her at six, and he was paunchier than she'd remembered, his high school brawn run to a little fat. He shoved a gift into her hand, a brown paper bag with a quart of cheap vodka in it. She thanked him simperingly and tucked it in her knapsack. "It's a nice night. Let's get takeout and eat it in High Park."

She saw the wheels turn in his head, meal plus booze plus secluded park equals pussy, pussy, pussy, and she let the tip of her tongue touch her lips. This would be even easier than she'd thought.

"How can you tell the difference?" Arthur said. "Between seeing and understanding?"

"You'll never mistake them. Seeing it is like remembering spying on someone, only you haven't spied on him yet. Like you were standing behind him and he just didn't notice. You hear it, you smell it, you see it. Like you were standing *in* him sometimes, like it happened to you.

"Understanding, that's totally different. That's like a little voice in your head explaining it to you, telling you what it all means."

"Oh," Andy said.

"You thought you'd seen, right?"

"Yeah. Thought that I was running out of time and going to die, or kill Davey again, or something. It was a feeling, though, not like being there, not like having anything explained."

"Is that going to happen?" Mimi asked Brad.

Brad looked down at the table. "'Answer unclear, ask again later.' That's what this Magic 8-Ball I bought in a store once used to say."

"Does that mean you don't know?"

"I think it means I don't want to know."

#

"Don't worry," Bert said. "Kurt's safe tonight."

Alan stopped lacing up his shoes and slumped back on the bench in his foyer. Mimi had done the dishes, Bill had dried, and he'd fretted about Kurt. But it wasn't until he couldn't take it anymore and was ready to go and find him, bring him home if necessary, that Billy had come to talk to him.

"Do you know that for sure?"

"Yes. He has dinner with a woman, then he takes her dumpster diving and comes home and goes to bed. I can see that."

"But you don't see everything?"

"No, but I saw that."

"Fine," Adam said. He felt hopeless in the face of these predictions, as though the future were something set and immutable.

"I need to use the bathroom," Billy said, and made his way upstairs while Alan moved to a sofa and paged absently through an old edition of *Alice in Wonderland* whose marbled frontispiece had come detached.

A moment later, Mimi joined him, sitting down next to him, her wings unfolded across the sofa back.

"How big are they going to get, do you think?" she said, arranging them.

"You don't know?"

"They're bigger than they've ever been. That was good food," she said. "I think I should go talk to Krishna."

Adam shook his head. "Whoa."

"You don't need to be in between us. Maybe I can get him to back off on you, on your family."

"Mimi, I don't even want to discuss it."

"It's the right thing to do," she said. "It's not fair to you to stay."

"You want to have your wings cut," Alan said. "That's why you want to go back to him."

She shied back as though he'd slapped her. "No --"

"You do. But what Billy didn't tell you is that Krishna's out there with other women, I saw him today. With a girl. Young. Pretty. Normal. If he takes you back, it will be as a toy, not as a lover. He can't love."

"Christ," she said. "Why are you saying this?"

"Because I don't want to watch you self-destruct, Mimi. Stay here. We'll sort out Krishna together. And my brother. Billy's here now, that means they can't sneak up on us."

"And these?" she said, flapping her wings, one great heave that sent currents of air across the room, that blew the loose frontispiece from *Alice in Wonderland* toward the fireplace grate. "You'll sort these out, too?"

"What do you want from me, Mimi?" He was angry now. She hadn't spoken a word to him in weeks, and now --

"Cut them off, Alan. Make me into someone who can go out again, who can be seen. Do it. I have the knife."

Adam squeezed his eyes shut. "No," he said.

"Good-bye," she said, and stood, headed for the stairs. Upstairs, the toilet flushed and they heard the sink running.

"Wait!" he said, running after her. She had her hand on the doorknob.

"No," she said. She was crying now. "I won't stay. I won't be trapped again. Better to be with him than trapped --"

"I'll do it," he said. "If you still want me to do it in two days, I'll do it."

She looked gravely at him. "Don't you lie to me about this," she said. "Don't you dare be lying."

He took her hands. "I swear," he said.

From the top of the stairs then, "Whups," said Billy. "I think I'll just tuck myself into bed."

Mimi smiled and hugged Alan fiercely.

Trey's ardor came out with his drunkenness. First a clammy arm around her shoulder, then a casual grope at her boob, then a sloppy kiss on the corner of her mouth. That was as far as she was going to let it go. She waited for him to move in for another kiss, then slipped out from under his arm so that he fell into the roots of the big tree they'd been leaning against. She brained him with the vodka bottle before he'd had a chance to recover, then, as he rocked and moaned, she calmly took the hunting knife she'd bought at the Yonge Street survivalist store out of her bag. She prized one of his hands off his clutched head and turned it over, then swiftly drew the blade across his palm, laying it open to the muscle.

She hadn't been sure that she'd be capable of doing that, but it was easier than she'd thought. She had nothing to worry about. She was capable of that and more.

#

They climbed into bed together at the same time for the first time since they'd come home, like a domesticated couple, and Mimi dug under her pillow and set something down with a tin *tink* on the bedstand, a sound too tinny to be the hunting knife. Alan squinted. It was the robot, the one he'd given her, the pretty thing with the Dutch Master craquelure up its tuna-can skirts.

"He's beautiful," she said. "Like you." She wrapped her wings around him tightly, soft fur softer than any down comforter, and pressed her dimpled knees into the hollows of his legs, snuggling in.

He cried like a baby once the pain in his hand set in. She pointed the knifepoint at his face, close enough to stab him if need be. "I won't kill you if you don't scream," she said. "But I will be taking one joint of one toe and one joint of one finger tonight. Just so you know."

He tried not to fall asleep, tried to stay awake and savor that feeling of her pressed against him, of her breath on the nape of his neck, of the enfolded engulfment of her wings, but he couldn't keep his eyes open. Soon enough, he was asleep.

What roused him, he couldn't say, but he found himself groggily awake in the close heat of those wings, held tight. He listened attentively, heard something else, a tinny sound. The robot.

His bladder was full. He gently extricated himself from Mimi, from her wings, and stood. There was the robot, silhouetted on the end table. He smiled and padded off to the toilet. He came back to find Mimi splayed across the whole bed, occupying its length and breadth, a faintly naughty smile on her face. He began to ease himself into bed again, when he heard the sound, tinny, a little rattle. He looked at the robot.

It was moving. Its arms were moving. That was impossible. Its arms were painted on. He sat up quickly, rousing Mimi, who let out a small sound, and something small and bent emerged from behind the robot and made a dash for the edge of the end table. The way the thing ran, it reminded him of an animal that had been crippled by a trap. He shrank back from it instinctively, even as he reached out for the table light and switched it on.

Mimi scrunched her eyelids and flung an arm over her face, but he hardly noticed, even when she gave an outraged groan. He was looking at the little, crippled thing, struggling to get down off the end table on Mimi's side of the bed.

It was the Allen. Though he hadn't seen it in nearly 20 years, he recognized it. Tiny, malformed, and bandy-legged, it was still the spitting image of him. Had Davey been holding on to it all these years? Tending it in a cage? Torturing it with pins?

Mimi groaned again. "Switch off the light, baby," she said, a moment's domesticity.

"In a sec," he said, and edged closer to the Allen, which was huddled in on itself, staring and crazy.

"Shhh," Adam breathed. "It's okay." He very slowly moved one hand toward the end table, leaning over Mimi, kneeing her wing out of the way.

The Allen shied back farther.

"What're you doing?" Mimi said, squinting up at him.

"Be very still," he said to her. "I don't want to frighten it. Don't scream or make any sudden movements. I'm counting on you."

Her eyes grew round and she slowly looked over toward the end table. She sucked in sudden air, but didn't scream.

"What is --"

"It's me," he said. "It grew out of a piece of me. My thumb. After Davey bit it off."

"Jesus," she said.

The Allen was quaking now, and Alan cooed to it.

"It's hurt," Mimi said.

"A long time ago," Andreas said.

"No, now. It's bleeding."

She was right. A small bead of blood had formed beneath it. He extended his hand farther. Its bandy scurry was pathetic.

Holding his breath, Alan lifted the Allen gently, cradling it in his palms. It squirmed and thrashed weakly. "Shh," he said again. His hands were instantly made slippery and sticky with its blood. "Shh." Something sharp pricked at his hand.

Now that he had it up close, he could see where the blood was coming from: A broken-off sewing needle, shoved rudely through its distended abdomen.

"Cover up," Bradley said, "I'm coming up." They heard his lopsided tread on the steps.

Mimi pulled the blanket up around her chin. "Okay," she said.

Bert opened the door quickly. He wore nothing but the oversized jeans that Alan had given him, his scrawny chest and mutilated feet bare.

"It's going to die," Brad said, hunkering down beside the bed. "Davey pinned it and then sent Link over with it. It can't last through the night."

Adam felt like he was choking. "We can help it," he said. "It can heal. It healed before."

"It won't this time. See how much pain it's in? It's out of its mind."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"We need to put it out of its misery," Brad said. "It's the right thing."

In his hands, the thing squirmed and made a small, hurt sound. "Shhh," Alan said. The sound it made was like sobbing, but small, so small. And weak.

Mimi said, "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Yeah," Brian said. "Yeah, I can see that."

She lifted herself out of bed, unmindful of her nudity, and pushed her way past him to the door, to the bathroom.

"Stop being such a baby," she told Trey as he clutched at his foot. "It's almost stopped bleeding already."

He looked up at her with murder in his eyes. "Shall I take another one?" she said. He looked away.

"If I get word that you've come within a mile of my brother, I will come back and take your eyes. The toe and the finger joint were just a down payment on that."

He made a sullen sound, so she took his vain and girlish blond hair in her fist and tugged his head back and kissed his throat with the knife.

"Nod if you understand. Slowly."

#

"The knife is under Mimi's pillow."

"I can't do it," Alan said.

"I know," Brian said. "I will."

And he did. Took the knife. Took the Allen. It cried. Mimi threw up in another room, the sound more felt than heard. The toilet flushed and Brian's hands were sure and swift, but not sure enough. The Allen made a sound like a dog whistle. Bruce's hand moved again, and then it was over. He dug a sock out of the hamper and rolled up the Allen's remains in it. "I'll bury it," he said. "In the back."

Numbly, Alan stood and began dressing. "No," he said. "I will."

Mimi joined them, wrapped in a blanket. Alan dug and Brent held the sock and Mimi watched solemnly.

A trapezoid of light knifed across the back garden. They looked up and saw Krishna staring down at them from a third-floor window. He was smiling very slightly. A moment later, Link appeared in the window, reeling like he was drunk, giggling.

They all looked at one another for a frozen moment, then Alan turned back to his shoveling. He dug down three feet, and Brent laid the little Allen down in the earth gently as putting it to bed, and Alan filled the hole back up. Mimi looked back up at the window, eyes locked on Krishna's.

"I'm going inside," Adam announced. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah," Mimi said, but she didn't. She stayed out there for ten minutes, then twenty, and when Alan looked out his window at her, he saw she was still staring up at Krishna, mesmerized.

He loudly opened his window and leaned out. Mimi's eyes flicked to him, and then she slowly made her way back into the house.

She took his pants and his shoes and left him in the park, crying and drunk. All things considered, it had gone well. When Trey told her that he had no idea where her brother was, she believed him. It was okay, she'd find her brother. He had lots of friends.

Alan thought that that was the end of the story, maybe. Short and sweet. A kind of lady or the tiger thing. Let the reader's imagination do the rest.

There on the screen, it seemed awfully thin. Here in the house he'd built for it, it seemed awfully unimportant. Such a big and elaborate envelope for such a small thing. He saved the file and went back up to bed. Mimi was asleep, which was good, because he didn't think he'd be able to fall asleep with her twice that night.

He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to forget the sound the Allen had made.

#

"What is wrong with you?"

"Not a thing," she said. Her brother's phone-call hadn't been unexpected.

"You're fucking insane."

"Maybe," she said.

"What do you *want from me*?"

"I want you to behave yourself."

"You're completely fucking insane."

He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a note on the kitchen table, terse: "Gone out. B." The handwriting sent him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days when they'd been a family, when he'd signed Brad's report cards and hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.

Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare words there. She was draped in her wings.

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know," Alan said. "Out."

"Is this what your family is like?"

"Yeah," Alan said. "This is what they're like."

"Are you going to go out, too?"

"Yeah."

"Fine," she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. "Tomorrow, you cut these tomorrow!" she said, and her wings flared open, knocking the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books. "Tomorrow!" she said.

#

"Good morning, Natalie," he said. She was red-eyed and her face was puffy, and her hand shook so that the smoke from her cigarette rose in a nervous spiral.

"Andy," she said, nodding.

He looked at her across the railing that divided their porches. "Would you like to join me for a coffee?"

"I'm hardly dressed for it," she said. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs and house slippers and a shapeless green T-shirt that hung down past her butt.

"The Greek doesn't stand on ceremony," he said. He was hardly dressed better. He hadn't wanted to go up to the master bedroom and face Mimi, so he'd dressed himself out of the laundry hamper in the basement.

"I don't have *shoes*, Alan."

"You could go in and get some," he said.

She shook her head.

Her shoulders were tensed, her whole skinny body a cringe.

"We'll go barefoot and sit on the patio," he said after a moment, kicking his shoes off.

She looked at him and gave a sad laugh. "Okay."

The sidewalk was still cool enough for bare feet. The Greek didn't give their bare feet a second look, but brought iced coffees and yogurt with walnuts and honey.

"Do you want to tell me about them?"

"It's been bad ever since -- ever since Mimi left. All of a sudden, Krishna's Link's best friend. He follows him around."

Alan nodded. "Krishna beat Mimi up," he said.

"I know it," she said. "I heard it. I didn't do anything, goddamn me, but I heard it happen."