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."