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Before Paphos

By Cory Doctorow

by Loretta Casteen

31 March 2003

8 January 2007

It starts again. The baby argument that implied that everyone in earshot was savvy begins to cough o Poetry and bold, and that the diatribe-du-jour was directed at the and choke. Enemies of Art ranged without. His thesis advisor bought o Reviews it every time. Sean turned in his due-diligence, a bunch of Locked Doors theses written in the last century: collected memoirs of the o Archives survivors of electroshock, lobotomies, thalidomide. His by Stephanie ABOUT US advisor signed off and within twenty-four hours, he was Burgis debarking in Orlando and renting a car to take him to the 1 January 2007 o Staff Home. You can never o Guidelines He didn't tell his father. He'd have to, eventually, before he let anyone could finish the thesis. But for now, it was just him and o Contact suspect, his Grampa, head-to-head. mother told o Awards Grampa was switched off when Sean found him on the him. That was ward, which throbbed with a coleslaw of laser-light and the first rule she o Banners video games and fuck-pix and explosions and car wrecks taught him, and the last, before SUPPORT US and fractals and atrocities. she left him o Donate here alone with Sean remembered visits before the old man was committed, he and his dutiful father visiting the impeccable It. o Bookstore apartment in the slate house in Kingston, Ontario. Grampa Heroic o Merchandise made tea and conversation, both perfectly executed and Measures without soul. It drove Sean's father bugfuck, and he'd COMMUNITY inevitably have a displaced tantrum at Sean in the car on by Matthew the way home. The first time Grampa had switched on in Johnson o Forum Sean's presence -- it was when Sean was trying out a prototype of Enemies of Art against his father's own As 18 December o Readers' All Right-Thinking People Know -- it had scared Sean 2006 Choice stupid. Pale as he was, Grampa had been in maintenance mode, running through a it was hard to series of isometric stretching exercises in one corner while believe he Sean and his father had it out. Then, suddenly, Grampa would never was between them, arguing both sides with machinegun rise from this passion and lucidity, running an intellect so furious it bed. Even in appeared to be steam-driven. Sean's tongue died in his the darkest mouth. He was made wordless by this vibrant, violent times, she had intellect that hid inside Grampa. Grampa and his father hadnever really traded extemporaneous barbs until Grampa abruptly feared for him; switched back off during one of Sean's father's rebuttals, he had always conceding the point in an unconvincing, mechanical tone. been strong, so Sean's father stalked out of the house and roared out of strong. the driveway then, moving with such speed that if Sean hadn't been right on his heels, he wouldn't have been able Love Among the Talus to get in the car before his father took off. o

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Sean had a way of getting his way -- a way of delivering

And now, here was Grampa in maintenance mode. He

by Elizabeth