Shadow of the Mothaship | Page 8

a
decaying Rosedale mansion gone to spectacular Addams Family ruin,
this is where he took me in when I returned on my bike from the

ghosttown of Niagara Falls, where I'd built a nest of crap from the
wax-museums and snow-globe stores until the kitsch of it all squeezed
my head too hard and I rode home, to a Toronto utterly unlike the one
I'd left behind. I'd been so stunned by it all that I totally missed the
crater at Queen and Brock, barreling along at forty kay, and I'd gone
down like a preacher's daughter, smashing my poor knee and my poor
bike to equally dismal fragments.
"Hah!" I bark back at Tony the Tiger. "Merry happy, dude."
"You, too."
Which it is, more or less, for us ragtags who live on Tony the Tiger's
paternal instincts and jumbo survivalist-sized boxes of Corn Flakes.
And now it's the crack of noon, and my navel is thoroughly
contemplated, and my adoring public awaits, so it's time to struggle
down bravely and feed my face.
I've got a robe, it used to be white, and plush, with a hood. The hood's
still there, but the robe itself is the sweat-mat grey of everything in
Tony the Tiger's dominion. I pull it on and grope for my cane. I look
down at the bruisey soccerball where my knee used to be and gingerly
snap on the brace that Tony fabbed up for me out of foam and velcro.
Then it's time to stand up.
"Fricken-mother-shit-jesus-fuck!" I shout and drown out my knee's
howls of protest.
"Y'okay?" floats Tony's voice up the stairs.
"Peachy keen!" I holler back and start my twenty-two-year-old
old-fogey shuffle down the stairs: step, drag.
On the ground-floor landing, someone's used aerosol glitter to silver the
sandbags that we use to soak up bullets randomly fired into our door.
It's a wonderful life.

I check myself out in the mirror. I'm skinny and haunted and stubbly
and gamey. Num.
There's a pair of size-nine Kodiaks in a puddle of melting slush and
someone's dainty wet sock-prints headed for the kitchen. Daisy Duke's
home for the holidays. Off to the kitchen for me.
And there she is, a vision of brave perseverance in the face of
uncooperative climate. She's five-six average; not-thin, not-fat average;
eyes an average hazel; tits, two; arms, two; legs, two; and skin the
colour of Toronto's winter, sun-deprived-white with a polluted grey
tinge. My angel of mercy.
She leaps out of her chair and is under my arm supporting me before I
know it. "Maxes, hi," she says, drawing out the "hi" like an innuendo.
"Daisy Duke, as I live and breathe," I say, and she's got the same mix
of sweat and fun-smell coming off her hair as when she sat with me
while I shouted and raved about my knee for a week after coming to
Tony the Tiger's.
She puts me down in her chair as gently as an air-traffic controller. She
gives my knee a look of professional displeasure, as though it were
swollen and ugly because it wanted to piss her off. "Lookin' down and
out there, Maxes. Been to a doctor yet?"
Tony the Tiger, sitting on the stove, head ducked under the exhaust
hood, stuffs his face with a caramel corn and snorts. "The boy won't go.
I tell him to go, but he won't go. What to do?"
I feel like I should be pissed at him for nagging me, but I can't work it
up. Dad's gone, taken away with all the other Process-heads on the
mothaship, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The riots
started immediately. Process HQ at Yonge and Bloor was
magnificently torched, followed by the worldwide franchises.
Presumably, we'd been Judged, and found wanting. Only a matter of
time, now.

So I can't get pissed at Tony for playing fatherly. I kind of even like it.
And besides, now that hospitals are turf, I'm as likely to get kakked as
cured, especially when they find out that dear ole Dad was the
bull-goose Process-head. Thanks, Pop.
"That right? Won't go take your medicine, Maxes?" She can do this
eye-twinkle thing, turn it off and on at will, and when she does, it's like
there's nothing average about her at all.
"I'm too pretty to make it in there."
Daisy turns to Tony and they do this leaders-of-the-commune
meaningful-glance thing that makes me apeshit. "Maybe we could get a
doc to come here?" Daisy says, at last.
"And perform surgery in the kitchen?" I say back. All the while, my
knee is throbbing and poking out from under my robe.
Daisy and Tony hang head and I feel bad. These two, if they can't help,
they feel useless. "So, how you been?" I ask