Rockets Versus Gravity (10 page)

“Have I only got a month to live?”

Clementine looks at the floor tiles.

“I'm sorry, but due to doctor-patient confidentiality rules, only Doctor Brown can —”

“Have I only got a month to live?”

“I can schedule another appointment if you like, for as soon as possible. I really am sorry.”

“Am I dying?” James says to himself. Then to Clementine: “Am I dying?”

Dark clouds drift into Clementine's sky-blue eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she says

Inside James's jacket pocket, his Riskey and Gamble–issued BlackBerry chimes “We Are the Champions.”

James doesn't answer.

And then, underneath the doctor's discarded lab coat, beneath the stack of
Ass Master
,
Juggs, Biker Mamas
, and
MILF International
magazines, James sees the spine of a hardcover book:

YOU DESERVE BETTER!

YOU DESERVE MORE!

Rule the Boardroom! Rule the Bedroom! Rule the World!

For some reason, this is the detail that starts James crying.

“Hey,” Clementine says, “do you want a hug?”

She crosses the small room and puts her arms around him. Her body is warm. Her breasts feel exactly the way that James imagined they would. He cries even harder.

“Clementine,” he says to her, “you were right. I
am
James Why.”

Her lower lip quivers, and she sighs. “You were really good, you know.”

James feels an invisible noose tightening around his neck. His feet dangle from the examination table.

Was
really good.
Was.
Already in the past tense. Already gone.

B
eneath the iron arches of the bridge that spans the Rosedale Ravine, the Queen hisses and wags a finger at the interlopers.

“Git outta here, you thieving vultures! Shoo! Shoo!”

The raccoons stop and gaze at her for a moment, like teenagers preparing to ignore an ineffective substitute teacher; then they return to their task of ripping into the plastic bag and casually gnawing on the leftovers that the Queen salvaged earlier from the Dumpster behind that diner on Dundas Street.

“Git, you masked bandits! Git! Git! Git! Shoo! Shooooooooo!”

This time, the raccoons don't even look at her. Toronto raccoons are notoriously brazen; they look upon humans as nuisances, not threats.

It occurs to the Queen that she sounds like a scolding mother, and wild animals, no matter how tame they seem to be, are not afraid of scolding mothers; they fear hungry predators who will kill and eat them. So she raises her arms in the air, hooks her gnarled fingers like talons, and rushes at the raccoons, releasing a predatory shriek of mythological proportions.

The raccoons amble away, unfazed. There is no reason to stick around, anyway. They've already eaten all the food.

The Queen sighs. She was looking forward to savouring that unbitten quarter clubhouse sandwich with the half pickle. The Queen loves a good deli pickle.

Her stomach snarls, and the hollow, burning pain of hunger radiates through her abdomen.

She wishes that Rhymin' Simon were still here under the bridge with her; Simon surely would have traded some of his food for something from her borrowed Loblaw's shopping cart. Simon was useful to have around.

J
ust a ten-minute walk from the bridge where the Queen lives, inside a turreted Victorian mansion in South Rosedale, Tiffany Foley is poking her head through the half-open bevelled-glass doors of her father's den. It's unusual for him to still be home at this hour, so she must take advantage of this rare opportunity.

“Daddy?”

In trying to sound like both the little girl he once adored and the accomplished, academic
eighteen-year
-old she is now, Tiffany's voice becomes gratingly similar in tone to her mother's pseudo-sexy baby talk. She tries again, using the serious, all-business tone that works so well with her teachers at the Ladycrest Preparatory Academy for Girls.

“Daddy?”

Behind his custom-built desk, with the eagle talons for feet, Stringfellow Foley paces back and forth over the gleaming hardwood floor (which is hand polished weekly by their live-in maid). He raises a finger in his daughter's direction and then continues bawling into the phone.

“Look, it's too late for that, Baldy. We're already building a strategic ring of fire around the vulnerable target securities, understand? You gotta just trust me on this one. Just sit back and wait it out, okay? It's String you're talking to, remember? Just trust me.”

Tiffany's father, Stringfellow Foley, a.k.a. “String,” is a founding partner of Bloodstone-Talon Capital. His firm specializes in what he describes as “Active Distressed Investing,” but the bankers and lawyers in his Scotch-tasting club are more blunt about it; they call Bloodstone-Talon a “vulture fund.”

When she was ten years old, Tiffany Foley Googled the term. One website explained it as “a fund that buys securities in distressed investments, such as high-yield bonds in or near default, or equities that are in or near bankruptcy.”
At the time, she wasn't sure what any of that meant, but she was alarmed by the description that followed the definition.

“As the name implies,” the website read, “these funds are indeed like vultures, patiently circling their injured prey, waiting to pick over the remains of a rapidly weakening company. The goal is high returns at bargain prices. Some people look down on vulture funds because they buy up the debts of struggling companies for pennies on the dollar, then they force these companies to pay back the full value of the debts, plus interest.”

Tiffany's mouth hung open as she read one of the entries in the website's comments section: “A vulture fund bought the debts of my dad's business and then sued him for the full value of the debt. After my father went bankrupt, he drowned himself in a motel room bathtub. Enjoy your blood money now, you bastards. You won't be able to take it with you to hell.”

When Tiffany confronted her father about it all, he simply shrugged and said, “Don't believe everything that you read on the Internet, sweetie, especially in the comments section. Any anonymous rube can say anything there.” That reassured Tiffany somewhat, and she wishes now that he had stopped right there, but her father continued, raising his chin, inflating his chest, reciting in his most polished speech-giving voice, “Never feel badly for the losers, Princess. It's the way of the world: Winners win, and losers lose. You have to decide which one you're going to be, and be it.”

These words (minus the term “Princess”) are the opening lines of Stringfellow Foley's bestselling book on business success, but Tiffany understood her father's philosophy of life a long time before the book was published. Once, when she was four years old and their family was enjoying a beach vacation, Tiffany found a silver ring while digging in the sand. She brought it to her father so he could take it to the resort's
lost-and
-found office, but her father simply slipped the ring onto one finger of a hand already festooned with huge, glimmering rings, and said “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

The inside of the ring was engraved with the words
Forever More
, and Tiffany has always wondered if the ring somehow influenced the title of her father's book, embossed on the cover in bold, three-dimensional, gold-toned capital letters:

YOU DESERVE BETTER!

YOU DESERVE MORE!

Everything Tiffany's father says is always in big, bold, three-dimensional, gold-toned capital letters, at least in the minds of the
up-and
-coming Alpha Male Business Champions who read his words like Holy Scripture. Practically every twenty-something,
Brooks-Brothers
-
suit
-wearing wannabe on Bay Street owns a copy of her father's book.

The book's royalties
paid for their family cottage in the Kawarthas, which Stringfellow Foley has not had the time to visit in years. Every time Tiffany dives from the dock into the cool, clear water there, she thinks of that other girl's father, with his face under water in that motel room tub.

T
he Queen's final memory of Rhymin' Simon is of him lying face down in the sewage-tainted mud of the Rosedale Ravine.

Just before that, he had poked his dirty face through the little arch in the bridge, near the abutment that the Queen calls home. He bobbed his wild mane of dreadlocks and rhymed:

Your domain, may I enter it,

my sov'reign queen, Elizabeth?

Everyone calls her the Queen, but not just because her name is Elizabeth; she
demands
to be called the Queen. She has a vague recollection that she might once have been someone of importance, so she expects people to accord her the respect that she deserves. She's got Royal Blood pumping through her veins.

Nobody knows the Queen's last name; none of the other ragged loners who live in the ravine, none of the burly, tired cops at the police station, none of the sunken-eyed night-shift nurses in the emergency room, none of the social workers at the women's shelter where she sometimes sleeps when the nights get cold enough to kill.

Not even Elizabeth knows her last name. She can't remember it. She has blocked it from her mind. It was all too terrible. Too terrible to remember. It's impossible to sleep, or even to keep living, when you let yourself remember things like that.

Rhymin' Simon rephrased:

Wont'cha please allow me in,

my benev'lent sovereign?

The Queen remembers this. She has decided not to block Rhymin' Simon from her mind. Remembering him hurts, but it's the kind of hurt that she is strong enough to carry.

“You may enter, Rhymin' Simon,” the Queen decreed.

Once he ducked under the bridge, she could see it, tucked under Simon's leathery, bone-thin arm: the Stanley Cup replica that he had constructed from a dented public washroom garbage can, a tomato-juice tin, and a margarine container. He used this makeshift trophy for collecting change from hockey fans as they entered the arena; he said it was part of the show.

“Kin I have my tin back now?” the Queen said to him. “I need something to put my treasures in.”

He tugged apart the pieces of the makeshift trophy and handed her the
black-red
-
and
-white Heinz tomato-juice tin, while rhyming:

You may, you may, my most fair queen,

Season's over for the Maple Leafs.

No more dough to be had by the ACC.

“Not your best rhyme,” the Queen said to him, raising her regal nose in the air.

The Queen refuses to lower herself to begging for change on the street the way that Simon did. She is a collector; she survives on what she can find and use. Occasionally, her scavenging is mistaken for theft, but the Queen reckons that if she is able to freely take something, it must have been free for the taking in the first place.

When Rhymin' Simon was still around, the Queen was sometimes able to “acquire” things for him that he couldn't buy with his nickels, dimes, and quarters, and sometimes Simon would buy for her what she could not “acquire” for herself. It's not that they were friends, really; they were just useful to each other. And that was why the Queen allowed Rhymin' Simon to share her space beneath the bridge.

Simon didn't think of himself as a beggar, though; he was an entertainer, a busker, a troubadour. He would make you smile in exchange for the coins in your front pocket. In the time of real kings and queens, Simon would have been a minstrel, or a court jester, or maybe even poet to the queen.

She remembers that he tried another rhyme:

Then here's a rhyme that ain't so silly:

I brought the Queen some chili

to ease her growlin' belly.

He handed her a Styrofoam bowl filled with chili, and as she dug into the lukewarm feast with her fingers, the Scavenger Queen decreed to her Beggar Poet, “That's better rhymin', Simon.”

Simon laughed in that raspy way of his, and then he started coughing; long, wet, bloody coughs, which hurt even to hear. The Queen had tried to get Simon to go see a doctor the last time the outreach workers came around, but Simon had refused. “If I go into a hospital,” he had said, “I ain't ever comin' back out again.”

So Simon kept coughing, and he kept on coughing until he couldn't breathe.

And then he stopped breathing.

He fell to his knees and keeled over onto his side.

The Queen has a difficult time walking without her borrowed Loblaw's shopping cart to lean on, so she wasn't able to move fast enough to help Simon in time.

Simon's body rolled down the slope of the Rosedale Ravine until he stopped with a splash, face down in the shallow, mucky water.

There was no way that she could make it down the bottom of the valley, so the Queen wheeled herself up to the surface and began screaming and ranting until finally a cop showed up, who then called for an ambulance.

But it was too late. Simon was gone.

The Queen wishes that she could have cried for Simon, but Elizabeth ran out of tears a long time ago, and queens don't cry in public, anyway.

She misses Rhymin' Simon, though. They were useful to each other.

T
he subtitle of Stringfellow Foley's book is:

Rule the Boardroom! Rule the Bedroom! Rule the World!

Tiffany's father most definitely rules the boardroom at Bloodstone-Talon; he is also a ruthless, dictatorial force within the walls of any company in which his fund has “acquired” control. Although he would never consider wasting his precious time running for any public office, String is in command of so much money (on paper, anyway) that he believes that he is one of those few, rare men who are manifestly destined to rule the world

As for “Ruling the Bedroom,” though, Tiffany knows that it has been a long time since Stringfellow Foley has been inside the master suite that he theoretically shares with his wife, Tiffany's mother. On the nights when String manages to come home at all, he sleeps in the basement bedroom of their Rosedale mansion, across from the enormous wine cellar and the tiny maid's suite. Most nights, though, he sleeps in a top-floor suite in the luxury hotel next to his office tower, which Bloodstone-Talon rents on an ongoing basis.

Perhaps, Tiffany supposes, her father still
does
“rule the bedroom” when he's staying at the Royal York Hotel. She has seen that eager glimmer in the eyes of his personal assistant and the female junior associates at Bloodstone-Talon; she can almost
smell
their arousal. Tiffany tries not to think too much about it; he is her father, after all.

Tiffany's mother has had locks installed inside the double doors of the master suite, which she bolts every evening at midnight.

“If he wants
innnn
,” her mother says, placing special emphasis on the word
in
, like her idol Joan Collins would do, “then he'd better be home before I lock the doors.”

Brandy Foley would enjoy the drama of her husband kicking open the boudoir doors to get to her, to ravage her in that PG-rated way that women get ravaged in the soap operas she spends all day watching, but Stringfellow Foley hasn't been upstairs in the past six months.