The Grief Team (7 page)

Dogs’breath
, thought Ferria, the faculty at the Academy wouldn’t believe how many Stage Five virgins are currently losing their non-participatory status in these final days before Revelation Night. At least twenty classmates that she knew had already pressed the Disable icon on their Saf-T-Alarm anklets and had found a classmate willing to do the same. Something that I suppose I should do, she considered, just to go with the flow in case anybody’s noticing on behalf of the Revelation Night Committee. Those old lechers, every Stage Five’s worst nightmare…

Elias smiled. He knew that Ferria was prey to the excitement of the hot, busy TV studios, especially as it happened to be Thursday Night and Countdown to Horror, the most popular show on TV, was happening live right behind that door over there. What was that Dickie had said…all that shit about TV brainwashed children and caused teenage gangs to re-enact the violence they saw…how it had just gotten worse and worse until Prime Minister Haardvar had sent in C.S.I.S., the spy network, and seized control of all telecommunications facilities in the country.

Such a drastic action should have placed Canada’s gentle alliance with the Americans in great jeopardy—particularly as American-made shows ranged across all stations, Canadian-or-not—but, as it happened, Washington had turned loose the F.B.I. at the same time and thus, across the continent, station managers and their staffs and television stars were pulled off the air.  Inevitably there were a number of deaths as news-anchors fought for control of their news-anchor-desks and the subsequent carnage was broadcast live on each station until agents found the main fuse boxes and, one by one, gave them a big kiss each with a pound of Semtex 30/30 out of a shoulder launcher.  

“It was the single, stupidest decision which two political morons ever connived together!” Mayor Dickie had written.
(see endnote 6)
“The President of the United States was politically somewhere to the far right of the White Aryan movement and our own Prime Minister Haardvar was a fuckin’ nutbar!  You’d see lobsters on cocaine picking lint out of my asshole if those two were capable of acting with a shred of logic between them…and calling off the dogs twelve hours later and blaming it on hackers tampering with the government ‘net was a fucking cowardly lie!”    

It was true. Ferria loved the lights, the smells, the action, the electric charge of being at the very centre of live TV; the atmosphere felt like sexsweat.  She was dying to suggest that they join the studio audience in Countdown to Horror next door, but there was the Mayor’s prestige to be accomodated. 
             

Elias winked at Ferria. “I see Countdown to Horror is on next door.” He winked again, a thick fold of pink skin dropping over a deeply recessed blue eye. 

Ferria grinned. “Darn your Parenting skills, Mayor!”

Mayor Kraft shrugged. “Know thy child!  I used to like the slashers myself. I know it’s a Stage Five phenomenon. All 17-year-olds are 50% orgasm, or erection as the case may be, and 50% bloodlust. Mayor Dickie used to say that Stage Five’s were prisoners handcuffed to their sexuality.”

“Mayor, you’re embarassing me!” Ferria glanced around the studio, but none of the television crew were paying the slightest attention. She looked again at the Mayor, his grin now replaced by a soft frown of contrition. Ferria waited, she knew the Mayor’s better nature.               

“You can stay and watch the action if you like, I am going to my supper.” 

Ferria watched, elated, as the Mayor headed for the exit. As always, movement near his person stopped abruptly and he passed through citizen statues like an heroic if overfed Greek ghost.

Ferria was quick to take advantage of her great luck. How many other Stage Fives had ever been able to see this show  and live to tell about it? Ferria knew the answer: none she knew of. She’d heard stories of course but the fact was that no child below eighteen was capable of achieving access to the signal, controlled as it was throughout the malls by the Grief Team. 

No one, until me!              

She was instantly on her way to Studio H where, only thirteen minutes and two severed heads before, Countdown to Horror began beaming into TV sets across the malls. It was Thursday night and all Mall children were safely tucked into their beds and, as doors were promptly opened for the Mayor’s Executive Assistant by Mulls who bowed low with dignity, Ferria was already experiencing one hell of a thrill in anticipation of the events presently being enacted onstage for the (older) citizens of the malls. 

It was 11:15 before Elias reached his bedroom in his apartment on the top floor of the E.C.  On his way across the plush broadloom, he opened the door to his son’s bedroom but Gabriel was not inside. Often, Elias knew, his son slept at his desk one floor below in the Grief Team’s communications centre. Mary Clement, their neighbour, who shared kitchen privileges with them, would already have sent down a sandwich and coffee. She had always made a habit of making sure that Gabriel had what he needed whether he knew that he did or not. When Mary decided to look after you, you were looked after. Elias, who still had sex with her several times a month at her request, had never asked but assumed that Gabriel did as well. Mary was a great friend.

Elias opened the door to his small bedroom with its modest furnishings and pulled off his nightgown. He slept naked, a habit he was not above mentioning, usually when he’d had a skinful of Alf Barner’s Dark Lady cordial, that began when he was born. He would further enlighten those assembled by claiming that pajamas were invented by the old Catholic Church as a method of birth control. He always insisted that the temperature in his bedroom be maintained as that of a cool September evening in the Maritimes. Before he retired, he usually turned on his sleep enhancer, a gift from Gabriel on Father’s Day two years before and invariably set to the Sleep, Perchance to Dream icon. He often fell asleep before the crickets started.

On this particular evening, however, the thoughts of Elias Macdonald Kraft were disturbed. Ranging far and wide on disparate topics, pressing items and half-formed ideas that flickered and flitted about in his brain like confetti in a breeze, his brain would not relax. In an effort to make it do so, he lay down on his bed and held a pillow over his face, luxuriating in the cool touch of fabric. After several minutes, his breath now hot against the pillow, he flung it aside. Sleep, he knew, was out of the question. Rolling himself off the bed, swinging legs with calves as thick as tree trunks onto the floor, Elias stood, reached for his nightgown and pulling himself into it, opened his bedroom door and headed for the kitchen.  He needed food if he was going to be making decisions. And, he thought to himself, as he lumbered through the darkened apartment, refrigerator in sight, it may be that decisions have to be made.

On a planet where unusual circumstances had become as everyday as breathing itself, Elias still considered those events which surrounded his own birth to have been fateful, though decidedly less catastrophic. He had always accepted Mayor Dickie’s belief that a mathematical purpose existed in the universe and that this was otherwise known as fate. Elias wasn’t as heavy-handed about it as perhaps the old Mayor had been; instead, he preferred to mimic the downhome, straight-forward, practical approach to life that had comfortably served every Maritimer he had ever known. 

It was a Maritime attitude, born and bred before the planet went crazy, as logical in its steadfastness of purpose as it was inimical to bullshit. It was what Mayor Dickie referred to as “meat ‘n tatties.”  In Elias’ mind—a mind trained at the feet of the Father-of-the-Malls—fate and reality were fraternal twins and all else followed in their wake. Yet there were occasions, usually after sex when Elias was feeling regal, warm and toasty that he ruminated on the fact that a little “whipped cream” was also certainly worthwhile. 
             

Elias, father unknown, had entered a very different world in 1983, when his mother, Louise, who had come from Moncton in New Brunswick to visit her sister down the road apiece in Upper Canada and, although unplanned, also to give birth to her son under the huge brass clockworks in the centre of Oakville Place Mall. Mall shoppers and gawkers swore that the child had first opened his lungs to cry at precisely the same moment that the mechanism struck one o’clock, but they were simply echoing the sentiments of Louise who, barely concious at the time, quoted the astrological permutations she had read in the weekly supermarket tabloids. 

“It’s a sign!” she had declared and promptly pulled out a breast to allow Elias to suck. It was at that point, she would say—for she told the story often in the years before the viruses—that some in the crowd of mall-lookers turned against her and cursed her for the indecency of it. 

“They was pleased to have a front row seat to stare between my legs while I was bringin’ you along, but they reckoned a mom nursin’ her baby was a fuckin’ sin!”  This story, told many times in Elias’ presence unfailingly unnerved him, partly because he was embarassed by his mother’s penchant for some of the more evocative, gutter words in life, and partly because he wished that she would sound her goddamn g’s. 

These days, his own standard of English had gradually succumbed to the same level.  Indeed, he now realized that the shame he had felt for his mother was simply priggishness, that wisdom was in the knowing, and the knowing was that people respond more readily to a mix of jus’ plain folks and hard-ass workin’ than they do to lubricity and semantics. Elias knew that there was no more utilitarian a word than fuck. It scored as six parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and interjection. The articles and pronouns were of themselves, and as a preposition, he believed The fuckin’ house fuckin’-in the street satisfied.

“Right time, right place,” his mother always joked when asked about the famous birth.  “From that moment on, I knew that Elias would be the Mayor of the Malls, jus’ as he is today.”  But Louise’s today was now yesterday; her ashes, prepared by the friendly staff at the Crematoria, now sat prominently on the small mantlepiece in Elias’ apartment where, on a regular basis, he had taken to hiding the ashes and subsequent remains of one of his daily perks: a Player’s filtered cigarette. Elias knew it wouldn’t have bothered Louise to discover that she was now little better than an ashtray...or so he told himself when his conscience pricked him. He had long ago forgiven himself for smoking. After so much death, dying of cigarettes was, as Louise would likely say, “a fuckin’ joke!”

In his pre-morbidly-obese days, as a student at Oakville’s Trafalgar High School, Elias had achieved early recognition for himself. As a tough, savvy defenceman for the school’s varsity hockey team, his first accomplishment happened unexpectedly during a hockey game in his last season when one of his booming slapshots ricocheted off the Adam’s apple of the opposing goaltender and pursued an alternate course high into the stands where a large grey bulldog was standing. The bulldog, mascot of the opposing high school, received the frozen rubber projectile on the forehead just above an enormous, beady eye, killing it outright. A riot ensued as the students of the rival schools fought to protect their honour and their reputations for mindless violence, reaching a brief crescendo when it was learned that the goaltender had also expired. 

The police had been called and several arrests made, but there were no further significant injuries. Elias, who had expected to be charged with two murders, was told by the police and his hockey coach that the mascot’s death was unfortunate, but accidental, without any blame to be attached and, as for the goaltender, well, when all was said and done the kid was a sieve anyway and wouldn’t have made the draft. For months, Elias was recognized in the school hallways and avidly proclaimed as The Giant-Who-Slew-Two-With-One-Puck, as a result of which he felt only remorse and shame, turning to Mrs. Cooper’s Creamy Cupcakes, Ho-Ho’s, Mudpies, and a hundred other confections to assuage his feelings of guilt. He began gaining weight. Lots of it.

Elias had been scouted by several U.S. undergraduate universities who ignored his poor academic standards and what was happening with his waistline and offered him 100% scholarships anyway; the least of which was worth $90,000 at the time. Elias declined and, upon graduation, applied for a full-time position at Oakville Place Mall. His part-time record of employment there—seven years of evenings and Saturday mornings—easily qualified him for the position of Assistant Mall Manager. 

Subsequently, it was during one of his walking tours of the mall that Elias became aware that, in turning down the scholarships, he had somehow provoked the interest of the editor of the local newspaper who, upon hearing the story over lunch about the jerk who passed on a shitload of scholarship money to work in a fuckin’ mall, sent a photographer who duly snapped several photographs of Elias speaking into his portable phone and pressing buttons on his pager. The story—“Local Teen A Loser, Say His Friends”—did a lot to increase Elias’ recognition factor and, for every one smartass with a caustic comment to fling at him, there were ten older, more sympathetic local shoppers who praised him for knowing something only age could teach. 

Know thyself, one woman said to him. Know thy place. 

Elias knew his place. It was in the Mall. And, in the days following the first furious, frantic reports concerning some sort of plague, Elias knew that he had been born for this very moment in history. When he first strapped on his standard issue pager as Assistant Manager of Oakville Place, he was already tipping the scales at 272 pounds, but his skating ability had given him a physical grace which lasted until he hit 300.