Ghosted

by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

  “What?”

  She flipped the folder closed. “How are you sleeping?”

  He stared at her. “Not well.”

  “No. I can imagine not. Do you dream at all?”

  “Yeah….” He looked at the desktop. “They’re pretty intense.”

  “Coke dreams,” said the doctor.

  “Coke dreams,” said Mason.

  “How about, for next week, you write me one of those?” She handed back “The Book of Sobriety.” “Have you thought of a better title?

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you can work on that, too.”

  Mason got up to leave.

  “Good luck, Mason. I’m sorry about your friend.”

  THE BOOK OF SOBRIETY

  She is a different kind of Circe: a warrior—nothing Sissy about her. She’s on a horse—and her size is ferocious, her belly bare beneath a bra made of bronze. She is riding into battle alone—a thunder of hooves moving towards her through the dark. The horse rears, and she pulls out her sword.

  The air is full of ash.

  The ash turns to fog, a fog so thick the approaching army, though deafening, is still invisible—the rumble like an earthquake.

  Then, out of the fog appears a rider on a motorcycle, speeding straight for Circe. The liquid air funnels around him and his mirrored visor flashes. He is the man in the black helmet.

  And he is coming.

  34

  “I love this place!” said the man sitting across from Mason. They were in Kensington Market, in a bar called This Place. A surfboard with the words licence plate scrawled across it was hanging from the ceiling above their heads. On the wall were dozens of licence plates. He pointed to the one in the centre. It read SRFBORED. “I come here all the time.”

  Mason nodded.

  He was slight, with large eyes and olive skin. His head was shaved and he wore a purple T-shirt beneath a brown suit jacket. He smiled when the server approached and they both ordered a beer, then Mason asked for a double Jameson.

  “Drinker,” said the man, as if taking a mental note.

  “I’m Mason,” said Mason, and held out his hand.

  “Soon,” said the man.

  For a dodgy instant Mason thought the guy was declaring his unreadiness to shake hands. “That’s my name,” he said. They shook.

  “Soon?”

  “Soon Sahala—but I’m usually right on time.”

  Mason nodded, as if it were a normal name and the guy hadn’t made a joke. The drinks arrived. “What can I do for you, Soon?”

  “I’m interested in your business.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “For a per—”

  “A personal project. Yeah, I know.”

  Soon pointed a finger at Mason as if to say You got it, brother. Mason drank his whisky, then said, “From your emails, it doesn’t seem like you need a ghostwriter.”

  “Perhaps not.” He grinned. “I was thinking we could work on the note together.” Mason waited. “You know … the suicide note.”

  “Most people don’t smile so much when they say that.”

  “I like collaboration.”

  Mason stared at him. He took out a cigarette, put it to his lips, then flicked it back out. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Art!” said Soon, with a grand sweep of his arm, as if they were drinking beer in the Louvre. “I’m talking about Art! And Death of course.”

  As it turned out, Soon talked about Art and Death for a living. He taught a course by that name at the university. “I used to be a big deal,” he said, with only a hint of irony, “at least in the Toronto art scene. My forte was the filling of public space.”

  He meant this more literally than Mason could have imagined. For one project he’d selected seventeen outdoor pools (drained for the fall season) and filled them each with something different: goldenrod, dental floss, cupcakes (the birds loved it), stuffed monkeys with Velcro paws, blueberry jam, paper clips, beer (that one caused some problems in the neighbourhood), baseball cards, Guatemalan worry dolls (picketed, for no apparent reason, by a suburban church group), cock rings (oddly, not picketed by a suburban church group), takeout menus, feathers, typewriters, taco shells and breath mints. He called it “Swim in This!” and filled the last one with water.

  In a less ambitious project, Soon drove around the city at night with his headlights off and filmed people trying to get his attention. For a week he projected the film, entitled Hey Buddy! as a continuous loop on the side of the Manulife building.

  Then there was “What God Sees,” a series of flat-roof murals, photographed via helicopter. The photos were placed in a bucket and lowered into a well before a live audience of six baffled onlookers.

  “Then came the Pee-Wee project,” said Soon, a bit too seriously. “That’s when things started going south—both artistically and personally.” He held his hand up like he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Mason waited.

  “That was a real bad time.”

  Mason nodded.

  “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Okay then,” said Mason. “What can I do for you?”

  “I told you,” said Soon, and glanced around the bar. “I’m looking for a collaborator.”

  “Or an accomplice.”

  “Call it what you will.” Soon put a leather-bound satchel on the table and pulled out a large file folder. “I want you to read everything in this folder and get back to me.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me what you want?”

  “You need to spend some time with the material.”

  If there was one thing Mason didn’t like, it was people telling him what he needed to do. And anyway, he had that buzzing in the back of his throat that called for cocaine. “Bullshit,” he said, and stood up.

  “I’ll pay you,” said Soon, “just to read it and meet with me after.”

  “How much?”

  “Is five hundred dollars enough?”

  “Six,” said Mason, and headed to the bathroom.

  35

  The folder was full of files. Mason lit a smoke and pulled out the first one, labelled “The Contest.” He turned to the first page. Project Saviour, it read:

  A call to artists, architects and engineers to plan and submit designs for an artistic and functional jump-prevention barrier for Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct.

  Following the contest guidelines was a rather overwrought history of the viaduct:

  Built in 1919 to unite the City of Toronto by spanning the Don Valley, its design was revolutionary—made to accommodate a subway line, even though no such thing would exist in Canada for another thirty years. And still, with all that foresight, they constructed guardrails only four feet high. By the time the first subway crossed the viaduct the only place more people committed suicide in North America was the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. To this day the Bloor Street Viaduct remains the second most popular suicide destination on the continent.

  This first file was full of such facts. For instance, the Taft and the Duke Ellington were two bridges a block apart in Washington, D.C., but people only dove off the Duke. When they put up a jump barrier the suicides stopped. Nobody went over to the Taft. In the margin next to this anecdote was a handwritten note: The music still matters!

  There was a story about Mount Mihara, an active volcano into which, in 1933, two Japanese classmates jumped, followed in the next couple of years by hundreds of others. It became a tourist destination until a barricade was erected. In the margin: No better metaphor than a volcano.

  Under the subheading “Access Is Everything” was this: “After Sylvia Plath gassed herself to death, the British government replaced coal gas with a less lethal one and immediately the suicide rate dropped by a third—the same percentage of Brits with gas ovens.” Scrawled below it: or those who read Sylvia Plath?

  Even without these insightful notes it was obvious to Mason how this “call to ar
tists” would have sounded to Soon: like destiny—redemption, profundity and millions of dollars—the mother of all grant applications.

  The contest deadline had been a year ago and Mason knew they were already building the thing. He’d seen it: a nauseating mess of lines and crosses, cables and gables. It wrecked the bridge and blocked the view—the kind of thing that made people want to kill themselves in the first place. So either way, Soon had failed, whether he’d won the contest or not.

  The second file was labeled “The Process.” Before he started reading, Mason did a couple of lines.

  21. If something’s a challenge it’s probably worth doing.

  22. I’d rather fold a napkin (or tablecloth) than unfold one.

  Despite whatever missteps Soon had made in the art world, his college decided to back the bid. They even gave him a team: two architecture students looking for credits and an engineering graduate preoccupied with “light in public space.”

  Any hopes the others may have had about a cooperative process should have been quickly dashed by Soon’s working title: “Save Your Breath.”

  There were journal entries, photocopied. Certain sections had the ring of someone who expected future generations to study his diary.

  I go there in the evenings to patrol the ramparts: “I will save you,” I want to say, to the lost souls of this city. I walk back and forth across the bridge for inspiration.

  Inspiration! From the ancient Greek—meaning “to breathe; to give life to.” The Greeks understood. They knew that art and life are one and the same. And breath created both—the whole universe—from the atom to the setting sun, the Acropolis to the A-bomb. Art is the breath of God.

  Mason sat back. He took a breath, then lit another smoke. Sure, it was self-involved, overdone, verging on mania. But one thing was clear: this mattered to Soon. He’d decided, as part of his journals, to compile a list of everyone who’d jumped from the viaduct—over four hundred of them. Some had earned whole paragraphs.

  On the evening of July 5, 1991, Constable Rick Terrain—veteran cop and gambling addict—is entrusted with $3,400 he helped raise for the Toronto Sick Kids Hospital. Instead of driving home he goes to the casino. In less than two hours he’s lost it all. At 7:15 the next morning he jumps off the viaduct, and as he falls he shoots himself in the head with his service revolver.

  Just after 2 a.m. New Year’s Day, 1988, Joseph Andrew Selkirk is walking across the viaduct with three friends. They are all in the same biochemistry program at U of T, and live in the same dorm. They are sharing a bottle of champagne and laughing about how Joe struck out with a girl they all like at a party they’ve just been to. Joe is laughing too. Then he says, “It’s going to be a tough year,” takes a step towards the railing, and is gone.

  On October 10, 1970, two women walk through early twilight onto the viaduct—one from the east, one from the west. Tabitha Gault and Linda Delarosa don’t know each other, but they’ve come for the same reason and meet by chance at the centre of the bridge. Sitting twenty feet apart on top of the stone railing, they begin to talk. They speak for a while, until a police cruiser pulls up. The officer gets out of his car and approaches, asking if they’re all right, and to please return to the sidewalk. The two women look at each other. One pushes off, diving backwards into the air. Then the other does the same.

  There were some who hadn’t even made it to adulthood.

  January 3, 1978. Geoffrey Grayson. 13 years old. Runaway. High on mescaline.

  June 6, 1988. Robert Eddie. 17 years old. Blind from birth. Abused by an alcoholic father.

  December 15, last year. Rebecca Lapin. 16 years old. Victim of a savage childhood rape. Years of reconstructive surgeries, and near-constant psychiatric care.

  The list went on—the youngest among them not even in her teens.

  April 18, 1994. Sandra Pappalia. 10 years old. Bullied at school. Her pet puppy beaten to death by gang of neighbourhood children.

  Mason closed the second file and moved on to the third, labelled “The Submission.” It consisted of the package Soon had given to the jury: eight blueprints, a twelve-page breakdown of materials, work schedule and cost projection, a twenty-two-page description of the project, as well as a thousand-word manifesto.

  The name had changed from “Save Your Breath” to “The Wings of Hope.” The tag line read: If you’re caught today, you can fly tomorrow.

  The “wings” would be made of a strong, translucent material—the same stuff they make parachutes out of—suspended from the sides of the bridge by airplane cables that angled upwards. They wouldn’t necessarily stop someone from jumping, but rather catch them if they did. And there was no real way to climb out of them. Once caught in the wings’ embrace there’d be little to do but wait.

  “The wings will hold them, soft yet secure,” wrote Soon. “Beautiful wings, shining in the sun—they’ll lift the spirit of the entire city. And that troubled, heavy bridge will rise.”

  In his manifesto, Soon suggested that the idea for a barrier would never have been agreed to if it weren’t for lobbying by the families of suicides and also by a rash of recent high-profile jumpers: a local midday talk-show host, a freelance journalist on commission to write the memoirs of a genocide survivor, a much-loved math teacher and gymnastics coach who, having just been nominated for Ontario teacher of the year, hurled his infant son off the viaduct, then dove after him.

  Soon wanted to carve their names into the top of the stone railing.

  Starting with Brigadier General Reginald Bunt who, nine months after the opening of the viaduct and one month after the Treaty of Versailles, marched the bridge in his uniform and medals, saluted the honking motorists, then stormed the Toronto sky.

  After that, nearly four hundred more names. All the way to Samuel Ray Shelf—a seventy-six-year-old widower with a rebuilt hip, cataracts and a monthly bus pass. On November 30, just weeks ago, he got off the bus on Bloor Street, then walked the last mile slowly.

  It was obvious that Soon, well versed in the lexicon of suicide, knew there’d be resistance to commemoration of any sort:

  You will no doubt balk at the engraving of names. But I want you to think about it again—about redemption, about the fact that sometimes the fallen can rise, as can ideas once thwarted. And please remember that rethinking is an essential step toward meaningful creation—the blessing known as hope.

  23. When a door closes, a window opens.

  24. I’d like to be a fighter pilot.

  The last file was labelled “The Victor.” The first page was a letter congratulating Soon on being a runner-up. It had been torn into six pieces, then taped back together. The rest of the file was a copy of the winning proposal, entitled “The Saving Grace.”

  For now, though, Mason had read enough. He felt bad for Soon and even worse for the thirty dozen people whose suicides he’d been forced to consider. He was jittery and anxious, out of booze and almost out of coke. It was time to hit the Cave.

  Uncle Fishy was working the door. There was supposed to be a ten-dollar cover charge but Mason rolled his eyes and pushed on through. Fortunately Chaz got to him before the bouncers did.

  “You owe him hundreds of dollars!” said Chaz, grinning.

  “I thought the door goes to the house.”

  “Well, you’re into me for a lot more!”

  “Sure. But there’s no way I’m paying cover.”

  “Course not,” said Chaz, his arm around him as they pushed through the curtains, Fishy left twitching in the doorway. “He thinks you’re going to lose his Dogmobile in a poker game.”

  Mason laughed. “It hadn’t even occurred to me.” He pulled out the six hundred.

  Chaz looked at him but didn’t say anything—just went to get him chips.

  The game was relatively steep: blinds of five and ten dollars, no limit. You could feasibly lose five hundred dollars every few minutes, from 2 a.m. till noon, every day. This made some people edgy.

  Mason sat down.
He was loose and wound up at the same time. The combination of booze, cocaine, poker and too much reading about suicide will do that to you. He decided tonight was his night. Of course, he decided that a lot, and in many different ways: his night to win, his night to lose, his night to find love, his night to overdose, his night to show these guys something they’d never seen.

  Within an hour he’d lost the six hundred, plus another four he’d borrowed from the house. But he could feel his cards coming, his game hitting, just around the corner. He did rails at a quicker rate, to find more energy, to focus it—but then something started to mess with his focus.

  Coked-up gamblers aren’t easily distracted. The felt is a dark green galaxy. Even in the Cave, where every night was New Year’s on Mars, Mason’s attention rarely strayed from the game. But now he kept glancing at the girl in the wheelchair.

  If he looked beyond the smoky solar system of the table she was right in his line of sight. She’d been pushed there by another girl—just sort of dumped, like yard clippings. It felt like a while ago now, and the way time disappeared at the poker table it was probably twice that at least. It was hard to see her face out there, but it seemed like she was watching him—a busted satellite, stuck in orbit, waiting …

  And then Mason was out of chips again, and needed another drink. He had to get by her wheelchair to reach the bar, but it lurched forward and he stumbled into it.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “I’m paralyzed.”

  “Oh … really?”

  “Yes, really,” she said and smiled. “Are you getting more chips?”

  “I dunno…,” said Mason.

  “You’re not very lucky.”

  She had a slow deliberate way of talking, her head tilted to one side. Her right hand was on the wheel, rolling it back and forth. The left lay in her lap.