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Question for the Masses: Why does society think that any tragedy that involves a child is infinitely more terrible than something that involves real people who’ve actually accomplished something? Car Crash Kills Three never disturbs people as much as Car Crash Kills Two and Baby. And where does a hunk of protoplasm the size of a loaf of bread get off taking up the space of three people in an elevator? Baby buggies and strollers do not have to double as parade floats.

• • •

“I think there might be a health code against that.”

Mohammed heard KateLynn’s voice drift back to him in the office. She must have been bussing the back tables. Mohammed put down the time cards and headed for the front. He paused just before the doorway, just in time to see Dag put down the stainless steel whipped cream container he’d been holding against his forehead.

“You don’t look so great,” KateLynn said. Exactly what Mohammed was thinking, even from where he was standing. “You’re really pale. Are you sick or something?”

“I’m not pale,” he said. “I’m Swedish. And sick is, like, throwing up. If I can get out of bed, I can work.”

“Where’d you get that rule?” KateLynn asked.

“My mom’s a nurse. I know. I went to school with sore throats, colds, everything that wasn’t life-threatening. It never killed me.”

“Whatever your mom says,” KateLynn replied, “I think you look sick.”

Mohammed stepped out into the seating area, and picked up some crumpled straw wrappers that KateLynn had missed. “What have you got?”

“What have you got, Mo, radar? How did you hear that way back there?”

Mohammed looked him over. “KateLynn’s right, you look like hell.”

“Okay, I have a sore throat,” Dag said. “Look, I’m drinking tea.” He held up his cup. “With honey.”

“Do you have a fever?” Mohammed asked.

Dag shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“KateLynn,” Mo said, “feel his head, see if he has a fever.”

“I don’t think that’s in my job description,” she said. “Why don’t you do it?”

“Because it’s a girly thing to do,” Dag said. “And he doesn’t want to be caught dead, right?”

“Correct,” Mohammed said. He gestured to KateLynn. “Go on.”

KateLynn sighed as she stepped over to Dag. “Lean over here.”

“This is a lot of fuss over nothing,” Dag said. But he bent down for KateLynn to reach him. She wiped her hand off on her apron before putting it on his forehead.

“He’s hot.” KateLynn nodded over to Mohammed.

“We all know that, but am I sick?” Dag said with a grin.

“Clock out and go home,” Mohammed said.

“I’ve been standing over a cappuccino machine all morning!” Dag said. “Of course I’m hot! Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of Dickensian taskmaster? Doesn’t the chain insist that you exploit the staff cruelly and force labor out of us regardless of fatigue, illness or personal emergency? Am I going to have to report you to Corporate on one of the comment cards for being all wussy and caring?”

“You want to make all the customers sick?” Mohammed said. “This isn’t the only coffee shop in the village. This isn’t even the only BlackArts in the village—they could all go over to Northside.”

“It’s not like I’m spitting in the coffees, Mo.”

“Say that a little louder, won’t you?” Mohammed said. “I don’t think the people on Blackcomb heard you.”

“No fair,” KateLynn said. “I’ll have to be out here all on my own.”

“No, I’ll come out and help you,” Mohammed told her. “Let me just grab an apron and put the time cards away first.”

Dag followed him to the back. “Look, I can’t afford to lose my hours,” he said when no one else could hear. “It costs me paid days to be off sick. I’m not like these high school kids living at home. I’ve got rent to make.”

Mohammed thought about it for a moment. “I’ll swap some shifts around so you can make up some of the hours you’ll miss. Oh, and before you go, can you write down whose favourite mug is whose? Nobody else here has them memorized.”

Dag grinned. “Mo,” he said. “I think it’s time we talked about moving me up on the pay grid.”

• • •

Heathen and Tim were on first thing Saturday morning when a woman came in, and instead of placing an order, she plunked a heavy plastic grocery bag on the counter. “Where do you want these?”

“What are they?” Tim asked.

“Cans for the food bank,” she said.

“This isn’t the food bank,” Tim said.

The woman rolled her eyes. “No, really? I was told you could take them here. So here they are. And I’ll take a half-caff cappuccino to go.”

Tim turned to Heathen. “Do you know anything about a food drive? Mohammed say something to you?”

She shook her head. “Maybe some new promotion from corporate they forgot to tell us about.”

“It was on the web,” the woman said. “My kid told me. We’ve got the car full of ski gear, about to beat the traffic out of the city, and suddenly he has to run back and raid the cupboards because he wants to be a hero.”

Heathen and Tim shrugged at each other. But something tweaked in Heathen’s brain. “I think there was something on the web,” she said. “A few days ago. I’ll check it on my break.” She usually surfed the web late at night after coming back from bars or parties, when she was blasted or exhausted or both, and it didn’t all necessarily imprint reliably. The only reason that “food bank” stuck in her head at all was because of a “there but for the grace of God” thought that flashed through her head when she read it.

“Well, you guys can sort it out amongst yourselves,” the woman said, taking her cup from Tim. “But I’m leaving them here. We have lift tickets.”

Tim moved the bag to the side counter. A half an hour later, a young guy came in with another bag. “Do I get a free coffee for this?” he said.

“Sorry,” Tim said. “Just the satisfaction of doing a good deed.” For a minute, it didn’t look like the kid was going to leave the bag, after all, but he looked around, shrugged, and did.

A couple that were regulars finished their coffees, left, and came back about twenty minutes later with a bag of their own.

A few more bags had accumulated on the side counter by lunchtime, when Mohammed and KateLynn came in for the afternoon. “What’s all this?” he said, looking into the bags. “Your grocery shopping?” he said to Tim.

“People keep dropping that stuff off for the food bank.”

“Why?”

“We were going to ask you. Are we doing a food drive?”

“No, anybody call Northside?”

“I did,” said Tim. “They’re not, but they got some cans, too. Hey,” he turned to Heathen, “weren’t you going to look something up?”

She hadn’t had a chance in the Saturday rush. “I might have seen something. It rings a bell. I’ll check it at the Internet café.”

“Take your break then,” Mo said. “And Tim, how about tidying this up at least? Bring out a box to put all this in.”

Heathen took a couple of loonies out of the tip jar and beetled off to the cyber café a couple of doors down. Kaz was outside having a smoke. Heathen flipped a loonie at him on her way in. “I just need, like, five mins—cool?” He nodded and waved her in.

It was very dark inside, with only a couple of people at the terminals like ghosts in the dim.

Heathen took the nearest computer, which was in line with the door, in daylight and therefore never in demand. She fired up the browser and tried her regular sites.

She checked the usual ski news and ski conditions sites, and the Blackcomb site—maybe the resort was running some kind of charitable program, but she crapped out. Since she was here anyway, she decided to do a little personal surfing. Television Without Pity had posted new recaplets of a couple of her favourite TV shows, which she consistently missed now that her VCR wasn’t working and she was always out. As a last indulgence, she punched up the Hero of the Teeming Masses, just because she was still reading that regularly. And there it was, from a couple of days ago:

Does the Hero have to think of everything? All right. Mission to the masses: your community needs you. Gather unto you some canned goods and render them unto the nearest food bank. They can use it. If thou hast no idea where your local food bank is, bring them unto your local BlackArts Coffee shop on Saturday. The Hero knows you can find *that*.

Well, that was kind of cool. Heathen imagined people going into BlackArts all over the country and dropping off cans. Assuming the Hero had that many readers.

She’d never been to it before herself, but she punched up the BlackArts site to see if there was any acknowledgement or reaction to the Hero’s blog. Nothing. So maybe the Hero didn’t have that many readers. Or maybe it was just too early to expect a corporate reaction. She liked the idea of store managers from all over calling up head office in Seattle to ask why people were dropping food off and why they hadn’t been told about it.

She went back and cleared up the mystery for the guys. By then, Mohammed had received a mass e-mail to all the stores from Seattle saying that a lot of stores were getting unsolicited donations. “Someone’s going to have to take this stuff over to the real food bank,” Mohammed said. “Wherever it is. Do we even have one in town?”

“Yeah,” Heathen said. “They give stuff out from a trailer behind the church on Lorimar Road. But not every day. I’ll find out when and where. I can drop this stuff off in my car.”

Tim smirked. “What’s with you being so goody-two-shoes all of a sudden? Or do you know all this stuff from experience?”

Tim could really be an asshole sometimes. “I know people who’ve needed it, smartass,” she said. She had friends who’d had to resort to the Whistler food bank when they’d used up their summer funds, and the lack of early snow meant their seasonal paycheques were late in starting.

Mohammed jumped in. “I think we should take the tips from the whole day and put them into buying some stuff to put in the box. Show of hands?” Heathen and KateLynn stuck their hand up immediately, and Mohammed did, too.

“Too bad Dag’s still off sick,” Heathen said, looking smugly at Tim. “Tips are always better when he’s on.”

• • •

Heathen wasn’t in on Monday morning, but she got up early and drove over to work. There was no roadway in front of the store, which was on the pedestrian shopping area, so she had to pull around to the loading area for the Village shops. She put her flashers on and walked in to pound on the back door to the store. Dag opened it up for her. “Hey, Heathen.”

“Hey,” she said. “You feeling better? All the regulars were asking for you and were grouchy when you weren’t there. You got that box of food bank stuff?”

“Right here,” he said. There were three now, not just the one that Tim had put up when Mohammed told him to.

“Hey, we did better than I thought. I guess people like that blog.”

“Yeah, weird, isn’t it?” he said. But he didn’t seem his usual bright self. Maybe he wasn’t totally better yet. But she’d thought he’d find this as cool as she did. Dag liked odd things.

He hefted one of the boxes. “Where’s the car?”

“Just over there,” she pointed. “Somebody out front?”

“Mohammed’s holding the fort.” He helped carry them over and load them in. She thumped the trunk shut.

“Hey, Heathen,” Dag said. “Wait a minute.”

She lit up a smoke. “You on a break?” He looked kind of serious, though, not like he just wanted to hang.

“I have to tell you something,” Dag said. He paused. “Don’t think this sounds self-aggrandizing or anything, because it’s not, okay? In fact, I’m kind of freaked out by it.” Another pause. Heathen wished he’d get on with it. “I think I had something to do with this,” he said at last.

Heathen blew smoke up at the sky. “With what?”

He gestured to the trunk. “This.” “What are you talking about?” Heathen said. “It came off the Heroblog.”

“Yeah, I know,” he nodded.

“What? You’re saying the Heroblog is yours? Oh, you are so full of shit.” Heathen blew a smoke ring at him. People always wanted to cop a connection to the next big thing.

“I’m not.” He shook his head. She squinted at him through her smoke. He looked sincere. “It said—”

“I know what it said,” she cut him off.“I read that blog.” As far as she knew, she was the first among all the people she knew who did. She’d even been mentioning it to all the people she knew. And now, here was Dag, claiming to have come up with the damn thing.

“Do you?” he said, looking surprised. “I didn’t think anybody did.”

“Dag,” she said, “everybody I know reads it. It’s like The Smoking Gun or the Onion. It got mentioned on kottke’s ‘sites I’ve enjoyed recently’ last week, for chrissakes.”

Dag looked perturbed. “I’m not sure how I feel about that. See, I don’t even know how that happens,” he said. “I never promoted it, ever. I don’t even think it comes up on Google. How’d you find out about it?”

“I saw it,” she said. “At your place. Don’t you remember? I checked it out on my own later and thought it was kind of different, so I kept reading it. And when they did the up-and-comer bit on me in the magazine, I mentioned it as one of my indispensable sites. Maybe it took off from there.” She liked the idea that maybe it was people reading about her that had made the website popular. Suddenly she had a thought. “You didn’t see the mention?” she asked. “You did read my profile. I was standing right there in the shop.”

He went kind of red at that. “I was mostly looking at the photos. You asked whether the photos looked dorky.”

She let him get away with that for now, because this other thing was just so bizarre. “The Heroblog couldn’t be you,” she said. “It doesn’t even sound like you.”

He shrugged in response. Which made her wonder, in light of the roles he put on in the store, what “he” really sounded like. And if she’d even seen the real him yet.

“How the hell did you come up with it?” He shrugged again. “You are a weird, weird boy,” Heathen said. “But that was a nice thing you, the Hero, whichever one of you, did— about the food donations.”

“It wasn’t really thought out,” Dag said. “It could have been better. I wanted to run a sort of controlled test—something that people could only have read about in the blog, and I figured someone who needs it should benefit. I don’t know if I expected nothing, or truckloads of food to show up and see a big story in the news about all the BlackArts being inundated.”

“Wait a minute,” Heathen said. “You called in sick on Saturday. You don’t do sick days unless Mohammed makes you. Which means, you ditched so you wouldn’t be there. If you ran this thing, why wouldn’t you want to be around to see the payoff?”

“Because I felt weird about it. I didn’t know if I was going to like knowing that people were reading the Hero or not. I still don’t know how I like it.” He seemed rather troubled. “I’m not in it for fame, you know,” he said. “I don’t need to see my name in lights, or on stone tablets.”

“You going to keep writing it?” Heathen asked.

“Are you going to keep reading it?” he replied. “It’s not always about charity and stuff.”

“No shit,” she said. “There’s some creepy stuff on there, too.” It threw a real wrench into her monkeyworks. She wasn’t sure she was ready to believe him. “I still think you’re shitting me.”

“Fair enough,” Dag said. “Maybe I am.”

When he said stuff like that, someone like Heathen had no hope of pinning down who he thought he was. “Prove it,” Heathen said suddenly.

“How?” he asked.

Good question. She didn’t know how. Ask him what was on the blog? Anybody who read it would be able to answer.

Then she had a thought. “Put my name in it tomorrow,” she said.

• • •

The Hero sayeth: Lest you all think that because of his cadence, the Hero of the Teeming Masses promotes spiritual values, let’s see how many of you don’t believe in eternal damnation and hellfire. Mission to the Masses: In the name of all that is Heathen, find a little girl in a pink dress. Pay her a dollar for every dirty word she can tell you. If she doesn’t know any, teach her some.

• • •

Holy shit. Heathen gaped at her screen. First because of what the Hero was daring people to do, and second, because there was her name staring right out at her from the middle of it. She didn’t know whether to be jazzed or appalled, but it was the proof she’d asked for. Or maybe it wasn’t. It could simply prove that maybe Dag knew the guy who was writing the blog and asked him to put it in. As far as she was concerned, telling people to behave that way with little kids was more proof that Dag, everybody’s super-duper, good-guy, ever-friendly barista, wasn’t behind this thing. The darkest thing Heathen knew for sure he had done was trade insults with her. On the other hand, if by some stretch of the imagination it was him, Heathen didn’t like the way he thought. At all.

The next time they were on together, she confronted him at the lockers in the back. “That was appalling,” she said, “the Hero of the Teeming Masses using my name as an excuse to encourage perverted behaviour.”

“Maybe it wasn’t an excuse,” Dag said, putting his jacket away. “Maybe the Hero was going to write about that anyway.”

“Well, it totally sucks.”

He clanged his locker door shut. “What were you expecting when you asked to see your name in there? That the Hero would talk up your skiing? Aren’t you the one who said not to feed people’s attempts to aggrandize themselves?”

She stomped off into the store and barely spoke to him for the entire shift.