Ghosted (17 page)

They drank in silence.

Then finally Mason spoke. “Okay,” he said. “So what happened the first time?”

Soon put his glass down. “The novel happened.”

“Excuse me?”

“
The Ghosts of Gauguin.”
He tipped the glass slightly and stared down into it. “It was a great premise—about this group of struggling artists who fake their own suicides then sell each other’s work on eBay for millions. They escape to a remote island in the South Pacific—rich and famous and supposedly dead.” He gulped at his beer. “Then of course they end up killing each other. It was
The Da Vinci Code
meets
Lord of the Flies.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. Huh. I’d been working on it for years. Everything I’d learned about art and the drama of life was going into that book.” He looked Mason in the eye. “It would have been a bestseller.”

“So what happened?”

Soon drained the last of his beer, then swallowed down a belch. He thumped himself in the chest. “This movie came out:
Posthumous Island
. You ever see it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t very good. But it was my book—exactly!” He waved at the bartender, who poured them another glass.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

The bartender put the beers on the table. Soon took a sip. When he spoke again his voice was a little louder, his words slightly slurred. “What the hell
could
I do? I couldn’t prove they stole it. And maybe they didn’t even know they had.” He took another gulp. “You know how one year there’s like four movies about people switching bodies? Or dogs playing sports …? You know what I mean?”

Mason nodded.

“But this was more than that!” He thumped the table, his beer sloshing over his hand. “It was so
specific!”
Soon took another sip. “Think of it! How long have people been writing books? Hundreds of years, right?” He stared at Mason.

“Right …”

“Right! So for hundreds of years nobody thought of this premise. Then suddenly—wham!” He slammed his hand onto the table and both their glasses jumped. The beer was beginning to pool. “Two people think of the
exact
same story in the
exact
same year! Or
close
to the same year?”

“Uh … no?”

“No way!” Another sip. “Or maybe yes!” A bit of beer sprayed from his mouth. “Maybe that’s how it works! Like there’s these ghosts of ideas roaming the earth, diving in and out of heads.” He mimed this happening, as if the ghosts were attached to his fingertips, and dripping with beer. “Maybe that’s what happened to me. Five years of my life, sanity, everything—sacrificed for what? Can you imagine what that’s like?”

The bartender had brought over a stack of napkins and now Mason was wiping the table. “So what did you do?”

“Oh, I did a lot of things … a
lot
of things! I yelled at God. I got addicted to sleeping pills. I even started drinking.” He took another glug. “I’d never really drank before that.” Some beer trickled out the side of his mouth. “I don’t always react that well to alcohol.”

Mason nodded, piling up the napkins.

“And then, of course, there was ‘Pee-Wee’s Big Mistake.’” He laughed and shook his head. “That,” he said, “was my real masterpiece! The original title was ‘If Pee-Wee Ran Things.’ It was a smart, kind of cheeky thing about civic duty and infrastructure and things like that and I got a big grant for it. But
then
—between the conception and the realization—I had a breakdown … Isn’t that a great word?”

“Yeah. Like a car,” said Mason. “So what happened to Pee-Wee?”

“Things got confusing …” He looked down at the table. “I set up these big speakers right outside the courthouse that blasted ‘Right on for the Darkness’ over and over—you know, Curtis Mayfield?”

Mason nodded.

“I had these floodlights that strobed in time with the music and a bunch of homeless people wrapping city hall in cellophane. And I can’t really remember why now, but I painted a bunch of stop signs blue. It was a messy night. There was like three million dollars in accident claims.” He sipped his beer. “Eleven injuries.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. That’s when I started teaching. But you know what?” He looked up at Mason, a glistening kind of hope in his eyes.

“What?” said Mason.

“In some ways, those failures—the novel, the viaduct—they’re the best things that ever happened to me.”

Mason waited.

“They’re pure inspiration!” he said. “The kind that turns art into life! Which brings us to here!” He held up his beer as if to make a toast. “To our collaboration!”

Mason lifted his drink, warily. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll do better than write
The Ghosts of Gauguin!
He crashed his beer into Mason’s. “I’m going to live the fucking book!”

    
29. I prefer solitary exercise to team sports.

30. Telling the truth is often foolish.

“Who is Sarah?”

“A girl I knew.”

“Do you want to tell me about her?”

“Not really?”

“What about Circe?”

“Same.”

“She’s the same as Sarah—or you don’t want to tell me about her?”

“That second one.”

“What about Sissy?”

“She’s the same as Circe.”

“Uh …”

“I mean she’s the same person.”

“You sure about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of amorphous identities going on here.”

Mason said nothing.

“Is she the friend who killed herself?”

Mason said nothing.

“What about the man on the motorcycle?”

“The man in the black helmet.”

“Have you dreamt of him before?”

“Sometimes.”

“Does he ever have a face?”

“I’m sure he
has
one. Under the helmet, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean I know who he is.”

“You do?”

“Not really his
identity
—but I met him once.”

“When was this?”

“I was ten.”

“Could you write about that?”

“I guess I could try.”

    
31. The past does not affect me much.

32. It hurts behind my eyes when I pee.

Between assisting a suicide and collaborating on a performance art piece (as Soon was describing his self-serving scam), Mason preferred the latter: less money up front, but easier on the soul.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised him, considering Soon’s previous endeavours, that aspects of the caper seemed less than airtight. The original plan had involved upstaging “The Saving Grace.” Mason had to convince Soon that faking a suicide off the Bloor Street Viaduct was impractical, if not impossible. The Don Valley was pretty much devoid of water, so when bodies fell they were quickly found, often stuck in the middle of a windshield. They needed a bodyless suicide—a location that could swallow a corpse.

Still, it seemed difficult for Soon to put aside his bitterness. And so they agreed to correspond “the event” with the unveiling of the Saving Grace, which was supposed to take place in early July. They’d chosen a new location: the Old Jackson Bridge, fifty miles northeast of Toronto. It was secluded and high enough, spanning tumultuous waters.

And the new plan was this: Soon would set up a video camera on the bridge and film himself delivering his final lesson, entitled “Drowning in the Presence of Art,” written by the two of them together. Soon would be wearing a long coat (colour and style as yet undetermined) and underneath it, a harness attached to a bungee cord (itself attached to the underside of the bridge). The last line still echoing, he’d turn and make the leap …

Then Soon would disappear, his legacy left in the hands of Mason. Mason would play a character based on the baser parts of himself—a dishevelled drifter who thinks he’s a writer, a directionless lover of art. Soon had already enrolled him in the summer class he taught. It would be Mason’s job (apart from helping with the jump) to make sure the public put it all together: misunderstood genius, unappreciated artist, a saviour who’d come in second.

He’d have the video in his possession—Soon having placed a last-minute call to his favourite student—and he’d put it out there for all to see. No matter how Mason tried to keep Soon focused on the money (Soon had promised him a cut of the windfall), the idea and the spectacle of the thing continued to distract him. He saw “Drowning in the Presence of Art” as the perfect showcase for his creativity and knowledge—a public phantasmagoria of art, death, art history and the death of public culture.

“But they won’t know it’s Art.”

“But
I
will,” said Soon. “And what if one day they find out the truth?”

Mason didn’t love that scenario. But compared to some of the things he’d done, the thought of owning up to Soon’s devious art project didn’t seem so bad. In the meantime, they both had work to do. They had to write the letter Soon would recite, and Soon had to create the art that would eventually be sold on eBay.
He envisioned a series of paintings that no informed collector could resist. The maudlin taste of prophecy would simply overwhelm them.

In addition to attending Soon’s summer classes, Mason had a wake to plan.

“In the Wake of Sahala” would embody the sensibility of the moment. It would be an outpouring of grief and artistic recognition—without a body to mourn—staged in a public space. Ideally, it would feel more like birth than death, the first spark of a movement: Soonism. The mourners would be known as Soonies, though Mason preferred Saholes. He knew where to find a bunch of those.

Mason spent his nights and mornings in the Cave, playing poker and hanging out with Willy whenever her friend Bethany ditched her. He hated Bethany. She was a snarky, nasty, mean-eyed bitch with stringy hair pulled back in a pink scrunchy. She treated Willy like a burden. Until someone got too close that is—and then Willy was her “precious.” Mason called her Gollum.

Without Bethany, Willy couldn’t move. She couldn’t get a drink, go to the bathroom or shoot heroin. Bethany would disappear then come back hours later, strung out or pissed off—ready to fight whoever had been helping Willy out.

“Sure she’s a bitch, but what am I supposed to do?” Willy said. “She cleans me, feeds me, gets me high … even braids my hair sometimes. Who else is going to do that?”

Mason said nothing. But it wasn’t like Bethany did it for free. Willy’s disability cheque paid for a lot of smack, and a small, subsidized apartment. Then there was the motorized chair Willy used to own. Bethany had sold it when they’d run out of money a few months back.

“Fucking Gollum,” said Mason.

Willy laughed. “It’s not just her,” she said. “I was jonesing, too.”

    
33. I would rather spend money on shoes than a night out.

34. A major world catastrophe would not affect me much.

During the afternoon Mason slept or hung out in Ho-vee’s. He’d pretty much given up on hotdogs. Then there was the class he was taking: Art and Death 101. He enjoyed it more than he thought he would. Located in the looming Gothic castle in the middle of Spadina Avenue (half of which, it turned out, was allotted to the University of Toronto’s Visual Arts program—the other half to the making of prosthetic eyes), it was a great place to be hung over.

There was something both soothing and invigorating about sitting half-asleep in a darkened room, images of beauty, passion and discord flashing on a screen. And from the darkness Soon’s voice was surprising, uttering the commanding narration of a beautiful nightmare.

It was a crossover course—on the cusp between art history and fine arts. So, while most of it was dedicated to Soon’s slide-show lectures, students in the Fine Arts Department were also required to complete a creative project of their own. At the end of the second week, they began the presentations. A young lady stood
in front of the class. She didn’t smile. She didn’t seem nervous. Her bangs were long, her voice thin.

“This is the Ghost Station,” she said. “Other than video and recording equipment, my materials are all found. They are the environment itself—that of Lower Bay Station. It existed as a subway stop for only six months, in 1966. Since then it has been abandoned, as are the tunnels leading in and out of it. The sounds you will hear are at least partially due to the movement of surrounding subway lines, running alongside and above the Ghost Station. The rest is ambient, unknown …”

The lights dimmed and the projector chugged on. For the next five minutes the room became a virtual tunnel, a hollow, haunting projection of echo and shadow, then a sudden flashing—the reflection off an old sign or a mirror. The tunnel stretched on and on, into a black hole, both claustrophobic and limitless. When it was over, Mason approached the young lady.

“How did you find this place?”

“Spooky,” she said, then smiled. And before he could rephrase the question she’d left the room.

    
35. In my dreams I’m often falling.

36. I like finding shapes in the clouds.

Mason asked Chaz if he could use the Cave to rehearse a performance art piece, using some of the patrons as extras. Chaz looked at him sideways, then shrugged. And so Mason recruited a couple of dozen Saholes—offering fifty bucks each for the rehearsal. The actual performance (date and location to be announced) would earn them another two hundred. He chose carefully among the Cave-dwellers: those who needed money, rarely
partook in sunlight (let alone street-level socializing) and never picked up a newspaper.