Ghosted

by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

  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.

  “Police, fire, ambulance?” said a voice.

  “Police,” said Mason.

  “Police,” said a voice.

  “There is a woman being robbed by a fat man in progress—right in front of me. There is a fence between us. Otherwise I’d …”

  “Where are you, sir?”

  “Behind the library. Wait …” He tried to focus. “Them—they’re in the alley. At College and Spadina, the southeast corner.”

  “Police are on their way.”

  By the time Mason got the phone back in his pocket, the robbery had transformed into a baffling argument. And now the victim seemed more like a crackhead with financial issues. “That’s my fucking money!” she yelled, as the man shuffled off. A fat man in progress, thought Mason. The angry woman swivelled on her heel, looked at Mason, then stomped away in the other direction, her ponytail bobbing down the alley.

  Now that they’d left, he noticed something else there at the back of the building: a giant poppyseed fedora on wheels. There was a sign on the side: He’ll make you a hotdog you can’t refuse! And then he heard the sirens.

  The cops looked at Mason clinging to the fence. His T-shirt was streaked with vomit—over that, a grass-stained jacket. There were twigs in his hair. At midnight on the weekend this might have been okay, but it was 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. They stepped out of their car. One was in uniform, the other in a pinstriped suit.

  “Can you stand up, sir?” asked the uniformed one.

  “If I could stand up I would have climbed the fence,” said Mason.

  “Okay, sir. We’re coming around to get you.”

  It occurred to Mason that when figures of authority called him sir it generally ended badly.

  They didn’t bother with handcuffs—just put him in the back of the cruiser.

  “I’m the one who called you,” he said. He’d been taken from alleys and put in cruisers a dozen times before, but never so ironically. “I was almost home, you know?”

  “It’s three o’ clock on a Tuesday,” said the one in the suit—his moustache the V of northbound geese, skin like dark mahogany. He was sitting in the passenger seat.

  “You’re arresting me for the time of day?” said Mason. “What is that … like a temporal infraction or something?” He laughed then coughed up bile, fluorescent and stringy—a glowing nest on his lap.

  “Here’s the thing,” said the mahogany one. “We can write you up for public drunkenness and hold y
ou till tomorrow. Don’t want that, right?”

  “Where’s your uniform?” Mason said.

  “But due to the state you’re in, and considering we found you like this, we can’t just let you go …”

  “Are you a detective? Don’t you have a murder to solve or something?”

  “What we can do,” said the detective, “particularly in light of the reverse peristalsis—is take you to emergency.”

  Mason nodded. For a while now he’d suspected his life was out of his hands. This just seemed to prove it.

  At the hospital they put him on a gurney in a hallway and left him there with a bottle of water. After a couple of hours he felt like he might be able to stand up, and eventually he did. He walked out of the hospital and flagged down a taxi.

  As he glided through the streets Mason realized he’d been thirty for only a day, and already he’d travelled by three different taxicabs, a cop car and a hospital gurney. It was an amazing world to live in. He gave the driver the last of his money, climbed the stairs to his apartment, then onto his captain’s bed. The wind was blowing across the room. He closed his eyes. A young leaf dropped from his hair and settled onto the pillow.

  3

  As far as hotdog carts went it was pretty cool—a three-wheeled hybrid truck, all chrome with a serving window that opened and closed by remote control. It came equipped with a sink, grill, cooler, electronic cash register and even a surveillance camera. And you could store things in the hollow fiberglass crown of the fedora. On its hatband in large letters were the words THE DOGFATHER.

  Mason had decided to make the best of it. He’d sell hotdogs in the open air, work on his novel at night. He’d get a membership at the Y and exercise every day. He’d pay Chaz for the damages, the rent, the gambling debts. He’d meet a girl, be a prince again—virtuous and clean, charming in a humble way. Five years was long enough.

  For the moment, however, there was a lot to keep track of: all-beef, chicken, veggie, buns, drinks, ice, condiments, propane levels, oven mitts, plastic serving gloves, fire extinguisher … And apparently there were city inspectors—hotdog watchdogs—who came around to check on all this.

  Then, of course, there was Fishy Berlin—a man with a face to fit his name, keeping his fishy eye on things. At least Mason had talked him out of the dogfather outfit, arguing that it made no logical or aesthetic sense for a man serving hotdogs to wear a hat when he was standing beneath a larger, more impressive, poppyseed one.

  As the morning wore on, the smell of propane, grilling wieners and car exhaust combined in a very particular way. Mason was still queasy from his birthday party, and the effort not to puke soon became distracting.

  “My first day,” he said when the dogs started burning. And for the most part, people were understanding.

  He’d set up at the edge of Matt Cohen Parkette, named for the famous writer who had called Spadina the centre of the universe. It wasn’t really a park, though—more a strange extension of space making up the gap where Bloor and Spadina didn’t quite meet. The Dogmobile was parked next to a stone sculpture of giant dominoes that stood and leaned like alien headstones. Embedded in the nearby tables were large granite chessboards. Sunlight reflected off passing windshields. Everything was framed by sharp angles, slants of silver, black and grey, and among them, a dishevelment of people: a woman and two men drinking out of the same paper bag, students slumped against the concrete planters, no energy left to keep reading. This was the lip of the famous writer’s universe—the intersection where, for some reason, Spadina Avenue ended and Spadina Road began.

  By 6 p.m., Mason had sold forty-two hotdogs, given away four and burned eleven. He packed up—not exactly the way Fishy had shown him, but close enough. Then he got behind the wheel, waited for a really big break in the traffic, and pulled out onto Spadina.

  Driving an oversized three-wheeled fibreglass hat through rush hour traffic was stressful. He only had to make it six blocks, but just before College came an inexplicable Gothic castle—right there in the middle of the avenue. It wasn’t easy trying to manoeuvre an already wobbly motorized fedora, dodging spaced-out students, bouncing over streetcar tracks, in a looping circle around a looming castle.

  By the time Mason reached College the chopped-up banana peppers were strewn across his feet. He turned into the alley, and pulled in next to Chaz’s silver, ’68, 750cc Norton. It was painful, parking the poppyseed Dogmobile (lawnmower engine) right there beside it.

  There was a new pane of glass in the window. Chaz was standing in front of it, backlit by the setting sun. His motorcycle helmet was on the counter, next to a new coffee maker.

  “Hey,” said Mason, more than a little sheepishly.

  “How’s the wiener business?” Chaz had not forgiven him yet, but the idea of Mason selling Mafia-themed hotdogs had done a lot to improve his mood.

  “Not too bad.”

  “I’m glad.” Chaz knocked on the glass. “Gotcha a new window.”

  “I see that.”

  “I figured you could do without a TV for the time being. Anything else missing?”

  Mason decided not to mention the sword with the dog-faced dragon—just shook his head.

  “Well, I got you something else,” said Chaz, and cocked a thumb towards the desk. There was a laptop on it. “It’s an old one, but it should work for book writing.”

  Mason walked over and flipped it open.

  “Happy Birthday,” said Chaz. “Try not to lose it. I hooked you up with Internet and a land line, too.” There was a phone on the table next to the couch. Chaz picked it up to check for a dial tone. Then he went to the fridge for a beer. “I got a question for you, Mason.” He sat on the couch. “How’d you find enough degenerates to trash this place in just one day? I mean I know you’re good, but …”

  “This city’s full of them.”

  Chaz shrugged and took a sip. “Well don’t ever go buying from somebody else again. It makes me look bad.” He tossed a baggy onto the coffee table.

  “Chaz …”

  “That’s 300 hotdogs. I’ll put it on your tab.” He got up, walked across the room and picked up his helmet. “And try to find the TV, will you?”

  After he was gone, Mason picked up the baggy of coke. Flicking it, he held it to the light. It was just like Chaz: even pissed off he couldn’t help doing favours for people. Mason walked over to his duffle bag and dumped it out on the floor. Then he gathered up his beaten-up spiral-bound notebooks—ten of them. He put them down next to the computer and pressed the power button. It made a ghostly sound, like breath in another dimension.

  Notes on the Novel in Progress

  Things to figure out:

  Who (or what) is narrating? Can we trust him? Inconsistent POV?

  Is there more than one street in this city?

  To research:

  Intensive care units, troglodytes, palominos, shark fin soup.

  Possible title:

  The Centre of the Universe

  4

  Mason was scraping the grill when a vast shadow fell—as if a mountain had suddenly risen between the Dogmobile and the sun. He looked up. A large man in mirrored sunglasses stood before him.

  “What can I get you?”

  The man’s head turned from side to side—surveying the grill, the counter, the square plastic bins of relishes, hot peppers, onions, the display of pop cans and water bottles, the rack of potato chips. It was like those scenes when the Terminator enters a room, his robot brain scanning the new environment. It occurred to Mason that a hotdog watchdog might act in such a manner, and he was glad to be scraping the grill. “Would you like something, sir?”

  “It’s very clean,” the man said, still looking around. “It looks new.”

  “Thank you,” said Mason.

  “But why is it a hat?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “It’s okay,” the man said. “I think I like it. There’s something contained about the whole idea—though I don�
��t really get it.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Mason.

  “Would you like to try a hotdog?”

  “Try. Exactly,” said the man. “I’d like to try one.”

  “Okay then,” said Mason. As he turned the dog on the grill he glanced again at his customer: a dark business suit, pressed neatly, with a blue handkerchief jutting out of the breast pocket. His hair was streaked with grey. There were deep lines in his face that seemed incongruous with the oval shape of it.

  Is this what a hotdog watchdog looks like?

  He tucked the dog into a bun and placed it on the counter. “Something to drink with that?”

  “Not just yet,” said the man

  “Gotcha,” said Mason, though he didn’t at all.

  Usually—insofar as the habits gained over two days of work could be described as usual—Mason would have turned to the next customer, or otherwise distracted himself by wiping down the counter or something. It seemed invasive to watch a man dress his dog. But it was one-thirty, past the lunch hour rush, and he couldn’t help but look.

  Holding the mustard bottle tightly, the man painted a careful line of yellow along one half of the bun. He then did the same on the other side with the ketchup. He looked up and caught Mason watching him. It didn’t seem to bother him. “I’m glad you have squeeze bottles,” he said. Mason just nodded. The man put the bottle down and began flipping open the condiment containers. He counted out four rounds of sweet pickle and laid them across the ketchup, then four slices of raw onion along the mustard line. “These are very well cut,” he observed.

  “Thank you,” said Mason.

  The man closed the bun carefully. He put the plate down then closed the lids of the condiment containers. “I’d like a Sprite.” Mason got him one. The man handed him five dollars. “Please keep the change.”

  “Thanks,” said Mason, but the man wasn’t listening. He was lifting his hotdog, slowly, as if about to take a bite. Just before it reached his mouth, he opened up the bun and looked inside. He closed it again, closed his eyes for a moment, then turned and walked away. A half-block down, without breaking stride, he dropped the hotdog into a garbage can.