In the grip of Parkinson’s disease, a former plumber named Casey Eliot Durant was dealing with a host of family drama of the kind that is very routine but often disguised (even by the victims) when someone is at their end. The extended family was coming out of the woodwork as the last weeks drew near, saying who had what and what needed to be signed, what accounts were open and how much should be in there, making their little pre-emptive arrangements. It was all ugly shit – they might start accusing and suing each other once the man’s heart stopped, but that was nothing to me. Or Mr. Durant, at this point – he’d grown disgusted with almost everyone. Sure, he wanted out.

Dr. Adil Bashir was next, an ex-pediatrician. Immigrating from Egypt in the 1990s, his degree was not recognized in Canada, so he had pushed loads around warehouses for a while, eventually mastering English and working for certification here, in time qualifying as an OB/GYN as well. His karmic reward for basically becoming a doctor twice-over and pulling so many kids into the world was to be paralyzed from the neck down by a car accident within sight of scheduled retirement. He’d had enough.

Then there was Rachel Montgomery: another lingering fentanyl victim in the Hospice Simcoe, only in her forties. Her coma was deep, and I couldn’t shake much more out of her than shame and self-hatred and the desire to escape, her agreement terribly desperate.

The other man in the hospice who was incredibly miserable still wanted to live after his stroke, cringing away from my intruding voice, so I moved along, gliding around the small circles of light cast by streetlights.

It wasn’t far to the Royal Victoria Regional Health Center, a general hospital where I collected an old man who had fallen down a flight stairs at home, with major brain bleeding and not a single hopeful thought in any of the staff around him. The bruised face lost all its swollen colour as I fed from the wrist, assimilating the essence of Paul Massie, a radio DJ who had ‘kept it local’ all his career. A name for thirty years in Newmarket and Barrie, Massie had come to wider attention just once as part of the ‘Jocktober’ segment on the Opie and Anthony show, in which his show and performance and co-hosts were thunderously smashed for every little cliché and bit of corniness.

After Mr. Massie, I found a lesser signal of lingering misery in the general hospital, down under the street in what was an effective ‘drunk tank’. Here I noticed that the hospital’s fussy tutelary that I had compared to Nurse Ratched made no efforts to hover over my shoulder, letting me inspect these rooms on my own until I found the source of the psionic groaning curled up in a corner. The homeless man was hugging himself and rapping his knuckles against his forehead, looking like one of van Gogh’s last paintings. Now I needed all of Nancy Belmont’s powers at organizing scattered records, for this fellow to be let in and then let out regularly by the hospital was schizophrenic.

(… to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind … well, maybe that was our mission from the big guy upstairs)

Slurp. Inside my skull the schizophrenic hobo would have to have a better name than ‘Gumball’. (Nancy quickly determined that the nickname had actually been given based on a comparison to the town drunk Barney Gumble in The Simpsons). Gumball didn’t bring much of a resume to the inner army, but if schizophrenia was purely a hardware defect we’d see if he enjoyed my mind any better.

I zipped away after absorbing the two old men in the hospital, smashing the drunk tank’s door open – I was an emergency responder now, and I had a suddenly urgent call several blocks away, a dingy private home basement where another drunk was sliding off the furniture onto the floor. This man already had three cuts in his wrist from a shaky rusted razor blade, so there was little point in asking and no point in biting.

How many suicides in a big city like Toronto … that alone would be enough, though the long-term effects couldn’t be good for me …

While I considered this, I mechanically absorbed the suicidal fellow – I was starting to do this like it was my job. His name was Jeremy Ardagh: a man in his sixties with no one to miss him, ending it all in a squatter’s squalor. Part time chef, once a bouncer, once a lot of things – including a burglar and drug dealer in the States.

Two hours before dawn I was rejected once more by a trucker eying a gun in a dark motel room near the highway – I think I freaked him out enough to send him back to Jesus. I had ruled out depression alone earlier, but depression was most of the signal I chased and I needed to actually examine the situation closely to know what was around it. I wasn’t sure that I could take the full essence including mind contents from a corpse – a dying man like Mr. Ardaugh worked, but a man with a bullet in his cooling head?

Only one more left in Barrie tonight, looking at the wall or the sky and wanting it all to go away … and it was someone younger that Alexanne Floros, not even a teenager. What was wrong with this kid?

Dr. Bashir was oriented enough to tell me very quickly. “Juvenile Tay-Sachs. This case was after my time, but I heard about it. Very sad.”

The kid wasn’t actually looking at the wall or the sky because he was blind – he couldn’t remember not being blind. His moving options consisted of leaning to the left or to the right in his chair or trying to roll in his bed, and just after his eighth birthday Daniel Fairstein had noticed that his hearing was vanishing. Without music he couldn’t imagine enjoying anything, or wanting anything. He pretended to still hear normally, bouncing his head or making his sing-along noises, so that his parents thought things were okay. But he thought it wasn’t working anymore and he was very sad that they had found out that he was going deaf. He blamed himself for not faking it well enough.

Once again, I felt the people already in my head rising to attention like a troop of meerkats.

“Awww! C’mon, get him out of there!” Alexanne insisted.

“Wait,” Simon asked, “are you really going to kill and drink an eight-year-old?”

Allan Beilski was half-objecting. “Aren’t they coming up with new cures all the time? Maybe if he can live long enough he’ll get one of those electronic ears or eyes they’re always testing-” 

“Hey dybbuk!”

We were interrupted by the Farstein family’s tutelary, a Dr. Seuss-looking thing that had opened the window for me and directed me toward the bed in question.

“You can’t do anything when the sun rises! Chop chop!”

“Fine – do I get you too, or do you stay with the house?”

The tutelary grinned. This was the most ‘toonish’ of all the little guarding spirits I’d encountered so far, barely having a third dimension. I didn’t have a reflection, but this thing didn’t have a shadow. It was sort of like that elf in one of the Harry Potter movies, a pointy-nosed thing less than three feet high wearing a simple smock, though it was closer to a drawing of that elf made by a child’s crayons.

“I’m his, so I come with him.”

Understanding came with the blood as I extracted Daniel Fairstein from his degenerating body. The tutelary’s form was the work of young Daniel in his very early days when he could still watch movies – he had created this imaginary friend, and named it Buddy. It didn’t seem to have an ‘original’ undead human inside acting as a parasite feeding off the kid’s emotions – so this was a tulpa, a non-human thing made by the child. Chester might have been the same type of being, created by young Allan Beilski with no previous existence.

The sky was lightening to the east when I left the Fairstein house with a noisy head, and the beginnings of one terrific hangover.