wall of codeine, and Daisy dips her finger into her glass
of fizzy nauga-champagne and touches it to my lips at midnight.

#

I eat four codeine tabs before getting up, my usual dose. Feb is on us, as
filthy and darky as the grime around the toilet bowl, but I accentuate the
positive.

By the time I make it downstairs, Tony's in full dervish, helping unload a
freshly-scrounged palette of brown bread, lifted from the back of some bakery.
He grins his trademark at me when I come into the kitchen and I grin back.

"Foo-oo-ood!" he says, tearing the heel of a loaf and tossing it my way. A
half-doz of my housemates, new arrivals whose names I haven't picked up yet, are
already sitting around the kitchen, stuffing their faces.

I reach into my robe-pocket for my comm and shout "Smile!" and snap a pict, then
stash it in the dir I'm using for working files for the e-zine.

"What's the caption?" said Tony.

"*Man oh manna*," I say.

I eat my heel of bread, then stump into the room that Daisy calls the Butler's
Pantry, that I use for my office and shut the door. Our e-zine, *Sit/Spin,* went
from occasional to daily when I took it over after New Year's, and I
commandeered an office to work in. Apparently, it's *de rigueur* cafe reading in
Copenhagen.

Whatever. The important things are:

1) I can spend a whole day in my office without once remembering to need to take
a pill;

2) When I come out, Daisy Duke is always the first one there, grabbing my comm
and eating the ish with hungry eyes.

I start to collect the day's issue, pasting in the pict of Tony and Daisy under
the masthead.

#

I'm on a Harbourfront patio with a pitcher of shandy in front of me, dark
shades, and a fabbed pin in my knee when the mothaship comes back.

I took the cure in February, slipped out and left a note so Daisy wouldn't
insist on being noble and coming with, lying about my name and camping out in
the ER for a week in the newly recaptured Women's College Hospital before a doc
could see me.

Daisy kissed me on the cheek when I got home and then went upside my head, and
Tony made everyone come and see my new knee. While I was in, someone had sorted
out the affairs of the Process, and a government trustee had left a note for me
at general delivery. I got over fifty dollars and bought a plane-ticket for a
much-deserved week in the Honduras. I tried to take Daisy, but she had stuff to
do. I beach-fronted it until the melanomas came out,