Ghosted Read Free Page A

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 pamphletback 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