They found one of Davey’s old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market’s second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan’s attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he’d found in Bell Canada’s Willowdale switching station dumpster.Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue’s roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple’s youth caucus and gettingthemto explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.They’d worried about the fight they’d have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn’t have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt’s heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt’s face, ashen, wide-eyed.“I saw something,” he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.“What?”“Footprints,” he said. “There’s a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler’s footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs—so dried up that I couldn’t figure out what they were at first.“But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips.”Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.“Be careful, it’s all rotten up there,” Kurt called. Alan nodded.“Sure, thank you,” he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn’t been eaten, they’d been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue’s roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.He wondered if he was catching Bradley’s precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.
They found one of Davey’s old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market’s second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan’s attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he’d found in Bell Canada’s Willowdale switching station dumpster.
Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue’s roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple’s youth caucus and gettingthemto explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.
They’d worried about the fight they’d have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn’t have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt’s heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt’s face, ashen, wide-eyed.
“I saw something,” he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.
“What?”
“Footprints,” he said. “There’s a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler’s footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs—so dried up that I couldn’t figure out what they were at first.
“But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips.”
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
“Be careful, it’s all rotten up there,” Kurt called. Alan nodded.
“Sure, thank you,” he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.
The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn’t been eaten, they’d been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue’s roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.
He wondered if he was catching Bradley’s precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.