They were gloriously scuffed and non-mint: he'd always sold off the
sterile mint-in-package goods as quickly as he could, squirreling away
the items that were marked with "Property of Freddy Terazzo" in shaky
ballpoint, the ones with tooth marks and frayed boxes taped shut with
brands of stickytape not offered for sale in fifty years.
The last thing to go in was the cellar. They knocked out any wall that
wasn't load-bearing, smeared concrete on every surface, and worked in a
loose mosaic of beach glass and beach china, smooth and white with
spidery blue illustrations pale as a dream. Three coats of urethane made
the surfaces gleam.
Then it was just a matter of stringing out the cables for the clip-on
halogens whose beams he took care to scatter off the ceilings to keep
the glare to a minimum. He moved in his horsehair sofa and armchairs,
his big old bed, his pots and pans and sideboard with its novelty
decanters, and his entertainment totem.
A man from Bell Canada came out and terminated the data line in his
basement, in a room that he'd outfitted with an uninterruptible power
supply, a false floor, dry fire extinguishers and a pipe-break
sensor. He installed and configured the router, set up his modest rack
and home servers, fished three four-pair wires through to the living
room, the den, and the attic, where he attached them to unobtrusive
wireless access points and thence to weatherproofed omnidirectional
antennae made from copper tubing and PVC that he'd affixed to the
building's exterior on short masts, aimed out over Kensington Market,
blanketing a whole block with free Internet access.
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