of persons accustomed toterminating children's mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equalaplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were movingcautiously toward them, sizing them up.
"We should go," Mimi said.
"I need my library card," he said, and was as surprised as anyone at thepout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, andwounded.
Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, thenat the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surfaceseveral paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter andswung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back ofher man's jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread whenshe took to the air.
She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt intothe air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter andshe began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-outindustrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her titcrashing 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 histhroat.
"Here," she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted cardstock, he snapped back to himself. "Sorry," he said lamely to themesh-back kid.
Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the keyinto the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloonon 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 forgottenabout it for a while in the library and now he remembered itagain. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but heswallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels goingover the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimisucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by arusted-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 personwho could get a book out of the library."
They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over thespeed 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 twitchingworriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving,steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered aroundthe 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 inthose late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whoseliteracy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by asheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-oldAlan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and hisMartian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitchedoff of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first dayof school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time thefirst permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the timevaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home andforging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His ownenrollment 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 firehouse.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of hisclassmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels,catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, andKodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent traysof cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during thesummer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did hisbrothers', when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but oneday he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the roomboring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and theteacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitchedspring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for abrief exposition.
"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice orcalculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed thewaters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previouslyinvisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously anobserver of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place whereattention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strangelunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'dfigured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point thathe could be one, but he was so wrong.
They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and theydisappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, andwhen 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 youfrom somewhere?* or, if he was feeling generous, *I wonder where youlive?* The latter was scarier than the former.
For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half soclever as he'd fancied himself. There wasn't much money around themountain that season -- the flakes he'd brought down to the assayer hadbeen converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids andchocolate bars that he'd brought to fill Bradley's little round belly.
He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was thatlack that drove him to the town library. He'd walked past the squatbrown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed itsthreshold. He had a sense that he wasn't welcome there, that it was notintended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himselfin the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed theother patrons coming and going.
It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for gettinghis own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled thebooks off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned inexasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card inhis 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 hismadness seemed to have past.
"I mean," he said, reaching over and taking her hand, "what did Krishnado when you went out for coffee with him?"
"Oh," she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over asteep 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 ata tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and hebrought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag ofbiscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks aboutthem. 'She's a little old to be breeding,' or 'Oh, is that how they'rewearing their eyebrow in the old country?' or 'Looks like he beats hiswife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.' And whenhe said it, I *knew* it wasn't just a mean little remark, I *knew* itwas true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they wereself-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secretswere. And he made me laugh, even though it didn't take long before Iguessed that that meant that he might know my secret."
"So we drank our coffee," she said, and then stopped when the bodythudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of ahill. "We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my openpalm 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 anice guy, it's just coffee, shit, don't make a big deal out of it,' andhe looked like I'd just canceled Christmas and said,
'Oh, well, toobad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I'dbe 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'dhad a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I'd neverreturned 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 tableunder it and he said, 'If it's your deformity, don't let that botheryou. I thought I could fix that for you.' I almost pretended I didn'tknow what he meant, but I couldn't really, I knew he knew I knew. Isaid,