"But this is a journey, not a destination. The value you'll get out of this will be more in the doing than the having done. The having done's going to take decades, I'd guess. But the doing's going to be something." Alan's smile was so broad it ached. The idea had seized him. He was drunk on it.

The buzzer sounded and Kurt got up to answer it. Alan craned his neck to see a pair of bearded neohippies in rasta hats.

"Are you Kurt?" one asked.

"Yeah, dude, I'm Kurt."

"Marcel told us that we could make some money here? We're trying to raise bus fare to Burning Man? We could really use the work?"

"Not today, but maybe tomorrow," Kurt said. "Come by around lunchtime."

"You sure you can't use us today?"

"Not today," Kurt said. "I'm busy today."

"All right," the other said, and they slouched away.

"Word of mouth," Kurt said, with a jingling shrug. "Kids just turn up, looking for work with the trash."

"You think they'll come back tomorrow?" Alan was pretty good at evaluating kids and they hadn't looked very reliable.

"Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there's always enough kids and enough junk to go around."

"But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted and powered. You've got to sort it out with people who own stores and houses."

"You want to knock on doors?" Kurt said.

"I think I would," Alan said. "I suspect it's a possibility. We can start with the shopkeepers, though."

"I haven't had much luck with merchants," Kurt said, shrugging his shoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across the claustrophobic hollow. "Capitalist pigs."

"I can't imagine why," Alan said.

"Wales Avenue, huh?" Kurt said.

They were walking down Oxford Street, and Alan was seeing it with fresh eyes, casting his gaze upward, looking at the lines of sight from one building to another, mentally painting in radio-frequency shadows cast by the transformers on the light poles.

"Just moved in on July first," Alan said. "Still getting settled in."

"Which house?"

"The blue one, with the big porch, on the corner."

"Sure, I know it. I scored some great plumbing fixtures out of the dumpster there last winter."

"You're welcome," Alan said.

They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowds shopping the Chinese importers' sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols and h.e.l.lo Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sum restaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensed milk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treat Kurt, but he declined.

"You never know about those places," Kurt said. "How clean is their ice, anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?"

"You dig around in dumpsters for a living," Alan said. "Aren't you immune to germs?"

Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. "I don't eat garbage, I pick it," he said. He sounded angry.

"Hey, sorry," Alan said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to imply --"

"I know you didn't," Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods store and spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to the age-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dusted her hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and took the bag back. "I'm just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split because she couldn't get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was never clean enough for her."

"Sorry," Alan said again.

"I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner," Kurt said. "One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last night when he was in the park."

Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute university girls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrapped fish and bags of soft, steaming bagels. They stepped around him, lugging their groceries over the curb and back onto the sidewalk, not breaking from their discussion.

"What was it?"

Kurt gave him a sideways look. "It's weird, okay? The kid who saw it is never all that reliable, and he likes to embellish."

"Okay," Alan said. The crowd was pushing around them now, trying to get past. The dry-goods lady sucked her teeth in annoyance.

"So this kid, he was smoking a joint in the park last night, really late, after the clubs shut down. He was alone, and he saw what he thought was a dog dragging a garbage bag down the steps of your house."

"Yes?"

"So he went over to take a look, and he saw that it was too big to be a garbage bag, and the dog, it looked sick, it moved wrong. He took another step closer and he must have triggered a motion sensor because the porch light switched on. He says..."

"What?"

"He's not very reliable. He says it wasn't a dog, he said it was like a dried-out mummy or something, and it had its teeth sunk into the neck of this big, fat, naked guy, and it was dragging the fat guy out into the street. When the light came on, though, it gave the fat guy's neck a hard shake, then let go and turned on this kid, walking toward him on stumpy little feet. He says it made a kind of growling noise and lifted up its hand like it was going to slap the kid, and the kid screamed and ran off. When he got to Dundas, he turned around and saw the fat guy get dragged into an alley between two of the stores on Augusta."

"I see," Alan said.

"It's stupid, I know," Kurt said.

Natalie and Link rounded the corner, carrying slices of pizza from Pizzabilities, mounded high with eggplant and cauliflower and other toppings that were never intended for use in connection with pizza. They startled on seeing Alan and Kurt, then started to walk away.

"Wait," Alan called. "Natalie, Link, wait." He smiled apologetically at Kurt. "My neighbors," he said.

Natalie and Link had stopped and turned around. Alan and Kurt walked to them.

"Natalie, Link, this is Kurt," he said. They shook hands all around.

"I wanted to apologize," Alan said. "I didn't mean to put you between Krishna and me. It was very unfair."

Natalie smiled warily. Link lit a cigarette with a great show of indifference. "It's all right," Natalie said.