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.