Ghosted (2 page)

This side of Spadina was Chinatown, but on the other side of the road was Kensington Market—six square blocks of mom-and-pop shops from every culture you could think of (Portuguese butchers, Korean grocers, Jamaican candlestick-makers)—the
smell of barbecued sardines, mangos and pig’s blood mixing in the air.

He picked up a dozen disposable razors, ten oranges, five T-shirts, four pairs of underwear, a coffee, an empañada, and when he got back to the apartment he still had almost $480 left over. He disrobed and took the razors into the bathroom. As the steam rose he looked in the mirror. When Chaz had opened the door, what would he have seen? A world traveller? A drifter? A vagrant with a thrice-broken nose?

One more and it’ll be back in place
.

He plugged the sink, made a lather with the soap, and turned off the taps. “Out of the cold just in time,” he said. But a voice inside him muttered something else.

He soaked his beard then realized he had no scissors. With this kind of scruff, a dozen razors and you still couldn’t find your face. He went to get his knife.

An hour later he was sitting on the couch eating an orange and watching
Judge Judy
, the first item on his to-do list done, cheeks still stinging.

He hadn’t watched TV for a while and nothing made sense. Judy was cool but everyone else in the courtroom made him sad or angry. At a quarter to three he turned off the TV. The world was quiet. He was thirty now.

He began to shuffle cards, looking at the wall. It had all been mirrors, Chaz had said, floor to ceiling for the belly dancers. He’d agonized for days, then stripped it down to the brick. Mason could picture them—all those Toronto girls in sweatpants and sports bras, undulating towards him. He shuffled the deck for a long, long time. Eventually he got up, intending to eat another orange, but instead he left the apartment.

It was after five when he got back, and he’d acquired a few more of the basics: mid-range champagne, a ghetto blaster and a stack of used CDs, a steel sword—somewhere between a cutlass and a sabre—with a dog-faced dragon on the blade, a sharpening stone and scissors, toilet paper, a cheeseburger combo from the Harvey’s right there on the corner, a pack of Camel Lights. There was $280 left in his pocket.

He took a beer from the fridge, plugged the ghetto blaster in, put on
The Best of the Animals
and finished his fries. He opened one of the windows. The bottom pane slid up high enough that he could sit on the ledge drinking his beer, looking at Spadina.

His was the top of a three-storey red-brick. The apartment on the second floor was still being renovated. On the street level was an electronics store and a porno shop, then a narrow alley, Harvey’s and the Lucky Save Convenience on the corner.

The neighbourhood used to be Jewish, Chaz had told him, but they sold most of it to the Chinese—and soon thereafter the city decided to turn Spadina into an expressway, which only made it halfway down its planned route from the superhighway at the top of the city before it stopped, killed in its tracks by an enlightened group of urban activists, political academics, artists, hippies, Chinese businessmen and Jewish gangsters.

Across the street from his window were bars and Cantonese restaurants and then, on the corner, the new MHAD building: the Mental Health, Alcohol and Drug Centre. It no doubt added a little something—not that the neighbourhood needed much. The original saviours of Spadina were still out there, showing their stuff: marching down the street with placards protesting shark fin soup—“
Sharks are great! But not on your plate! Sharks are great!
But not on your plate!”
—past blankets on the sidewalk covered with DVDs, restaurant managers throwing fortune cookies, deals going down in the doorways.

On the median, conceptual art loomed: Corinthian columns rising from the concrete. Atop each column was a figure: a chicken made out of chicken wire, a steel horse, a plastic dog, and so on. Beneath the plastic dog stood a flesh-and-blood man—eyes focused on the sky, hands circling in the air, tugging—flying a kite that wasn’t there. A woman weaved out of the Palm Tree Tavern into the line of shark supporters. There was yelling and laughing. A cop car pulled onto the sidewalk. His siren gave a squawk—anyone’s guess as to who was in trouble.

Mason got another beer from the fridge. Through the back window he could see the green roof of the library. He poured himself a glass of Scotch. Sure, it was new-leaf-turning time and all that, but it was also his birthday. Just because Chaz wasn’t here didn’t mean he couldn’t celebrate. He’d never remembered Chaz’s birthday either. He walked from the back windows to the front ones.
The Best of the Animals
was over. He put on Billy Idol. The sun was going down. He lit a cigarette.

Soon everything glowed—the ember and the smoke, the violet exhaust rising from the street, twilight refracting off windowpanes. Through the music and the traffic he could hear his heartbeat. He picked up the cellphone and looked at it. He knew quite a few people in this city by now, but only one number.

It’s your birthday, bub. Go on—dial
.

Mason awoke to find that his body had stopped working.

He tried to breathe but the air only got halfway to his lungs. He tried to swallow and choked. It felt like there was a block of dry wood in his mouth. He tried to raise himself off the mattress, but his arms shook and he fell back.

Water
.

People had told him this would happen—that one day he’d turn thirty and wouldn’t be able to do the kind of things he’d always done, but he tended not to listen to people who said things like that. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have taken them so literally.

Water!

He managed to scootch to the edge of the bed. He saw the word
scootch
in his head, then the scales on a viper’s belly, his mean dry tongue. And now he was falling, like a snake from the bough of a tree.

When he woke again, he was lying on the floor beside the captain’s bed. There was something beneath his head: a piece of lined steno paper. He pulled at it—his to-do list, streaked with spittle and blood. On the back it read:
Thanks for the party, chump
.

There seemed to be a wind blowing. Slowly, he rose to his knees. It looked as if a meteor had hit the apartment. The window by the desk had been shattered—in the frame, a circle of shards like teeth in a tiger’s mouth. The floor was strewn with broken glass, underwear, cigarette butts. The TV was gone. One of the chairs had been smashed to kindling. It looked as if someone had tried to light it.

And now, as if punishing him for not getting
water
, something inside Mason had started playing a reel of the night before.

Clicks, flashes:
faces. He knows some of them, but barely, from shelters, soup kitchens, alleyways, the shantytown down by the lake—others he doesn’t recognize.

A pile of cocaine. Someone laughs. It billows up in a cloud.

Mason beheading champagne bottles with his dog-dragon sword—running the blade up the seam in the glass—the tops, cork intact, shooting across the room, the neck cut cleanly, champagne everywhere, golden and bubbling.

“And now … the Five Gallon Bottle Dance!” Mason grabs a hat off someone’s head. People gasp, but Mason has already begun—mixing five kinds of booze in the stranger’s hat. He begins to glug it down.

The stranger grabs the hat. His face contorts. Booze spilling over both of them.

Mason hits Play on the ghetto blaster. He steadies a wine bottle on his head, his arms stretched out for poise and glory, then bends his legs and begins to kick in time to the music, dropping to his knees for the finale.

The bottle exploding on the floor, his legs still circling through red wine and glass. Bright streaks of blood …

Click:
someone throws a punch.

Flash:
chaos.

And now it was morning. Mason on his knees again—sunrays streaming through the skylight, everything dry: the stains on the floor, the tongue in his mouth.

Water, you asshole!

This was no ordinary hangover. He made it to the sink, but every sip came up again. And then he just kept heaving—nothing in him but blood and bile and breath. He was at the point of accepting defeat, maybe even death, then decided to seek professional help. There was a clinic on Yonge Street that took you
even without a health card. Mason had gone there for an infected dog bite his first day in town.

He crawled across the floor and found his jacket. It was stuffed under the couch—the cellphone and the last of the money still in the pocket: enough for a cab there and back.

In the hall, atop the long straight flight of stairs, he wavered for a moment trying to balance between gravity and the banister. He reached for the rail and began the descent.

Once outside he clung to a lamppost, waving for a cab. Then he noticed something in the gutter, surrounded by a shimmering circle of broken glass. It looked like a coffee maker would, had it been thrown from a three-storey window.

A taxicab was honking. Mason lurched towards it.

The clinic was in a mall. The woman at reception looked bored.

“I need help,” Mason gasped.

“What exactly is the problem, sir?”

“I think I turned thirty.”

“Take a seat,” she said.

When the doctor saw him, she put her hands on his throat. “I’m Dr. Francis,” she said, then slipped a stethoscope beneath his shirt. “Breathe deeply.”

He inhaled, the cold metal on his chest, and started to giggle. “Are you really a doctor? You look so young.”

She pushed her chair back.

“You’re about to vomit,” she said. And then his guts were in his throat. “There’s a bathroom across the hall.”

Five minutes later he was back.

“Sorry about that.” Mason took a seat.

She looked at his eyes without looking in. His head was clear
from the purging, and now he could see how smart she was—a disturbing kind of intelligence.

“Really,” he said.

“Really what?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“You’ve got tonsillitis.”

“Really?”

“You say that a lot.” She turned to some papers on her desk. “Probably it’s been there for a while and you haven’t noticed. We’ll get you some antibiotics.” She wrote a prescription and handed it to him. “There’s a pharmacy past the food court.”

“Okay,” said Mason. “Thanks.”

“Take this, too.” She put a pamphlet in his hand. It was blue, with a chimpanzee on it.

Through the food court, past the Source, the Royal Bank, then the Yarn Barn, Mason finally reached the entrance to the Pharmasave—but things were starting to shake and swirl again. A sign hanging from the ceiling suggested there was a bathroom around here somewhere. He looked at it for a while, then turned and threw up on the roots of a small palm tree.

After getting the antibiotics he found the bathroom, swallowed a pill with water from the tap, then staggered into one of the stalls to heave some more, his body pressed against the cold tiles.

Businessmen came and went, washing their hands and faces after lunch.

When he could move again, Mason found the blue pamphlet in his jacket. He looked at it. The chimp, both mad and endearing, had a bottle in one hand, a syringe in the other, its eyes intense and bewildered. The billowing letters above its head said,
Get the monkey off your back!
Then, at the chimp’s feet:
To book an assessment call 1-800-TOO-MHAD or visit our central location
. He put the pamphlet
back in his pocket, then steeled himself and stood—made it out of the stall, across the mall, and up to the sunlit street.

He almost reached home but on College, just a block from his apartment, the traffic jammed and his stomach churned once more. He tossed the taxi driver a ten and climbed out of the back seat.

Mason figured that he, as much as anyone, knew how to be hung over—but this was something new. Staggering down an alleyway he came to a grassy courtyard and threw up again, his nose and eyes streaming. In front of him, on the other side of a chain-link fence, was the back of his apartment building. Behind him was the library, patrons reading and studying on the other side of a giant window. He crawled away from his puke then collapsed, limbs stretched in every direction.

He awoke to a woman shouting.

“Help me!” she yelled. Mason lifted his head from the soft dirt smell of the courtyard. He craned his neck until he could see a skinny woman and a fat man struggling on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Not now
, thought Mason. But the woman kept shrieking, and even from this distance he could see sweat on the fat man’s head.

Yes. Now
.

“Stop! Thief!” yelled the woman.

Stop thief? Do people actually say that?

He got up on his elbows and crawled across the grass. Grabbing hold of the fence, he pulled himself up to a kneeling position. “Hey! You better stop that, buddy….” Neither the thief nor the woman in distress took any notice. Mason couldn’t get to them without climbing over the fence, and that seemed improbable. He dug into his jacket pocket, pulled out his new cellphone and called 911.