Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

A living room. Empty. A huge new sofa and a television. There are about eighty burns packed tightly into a small area on the outer edge of one of the cushions. A laptop computer idles on the floor. It’s marked twice with long burnt grooves. The writer’s a drug addict. Les proceeds up the hall. There are five cell phones and two pagers on a low table by the front door. They’re dealing. Les hears someone coming down the stairs, so he steps back through a door into a small bathroom. He closes the door, softly releasing the knob to close it silently.

A man’s voice. “What the fuck is the army doing out there?”

Les opens the medicine cabinet. It’s lined with prescription bottles. Dilaudid. Percodan. Junkies. My son. He opens the doors under the sink. About twenty stiff, dirty rags. No. Diapers. The dirt shifts position, a vortex of dots. Baby cockroaches the size of pinheads turn in a hurricane pattern at the edge of a diaper. My little boy. Two large plastic containers with biohazard labels hide in a shadow at the left. Used syringes. My boy is learning the three R’s.

“What the fuck? Hey! Is somebody in here?”

Les grabs one of the plastic jugs. The side has been cut away. Les turns the opening upward. It holds a crazy tiara of stingers; bright, gleaming needles fill the space. Never touch us, don’t even look at us for very long. When the door opens behind him, Les swings the jug, releasing a swarm of tiny missiles across a man’s face and chest. The needles grab skin with their tips, and some, pushed by the weight of other syringes, are plunged deeper. The view from inside this man’s body would appear something like the night sky in the city, thousands of stars becoming visible. In the country, millions. One of the needles slides precisely into his tearduct, destroying its tiny architecture before burrowing far enough to permanently ruin the man’s ability to narrow his eyes. This particular jab also causes the man to flip a gun out of his hand. The gun slams heavily against the back of the toilet, cracking it, and then spins halfway around the rim before being carried to the bottom by the weight of its handle. The man collapses against the wall, disbelieving — You just don’t do that — and he watches Les retrieve the weapon from the bowl.

The first thing to exit the gun is a twist-tie drool of toilet water. The second is a speeding bullet. The bullet disappears into the man’s head and exits along with a single chunk of brain. The tofu cube of brain walks down the wall on its slippery corners and covers the black spider hole left by the bullet.

All of the doors are closed at the top of the stairs. Les bangs on one. A baby cries.

“Helen?”

No answer.

“Helen?”

He breaks the door down. The room is empty except for a baby who doesn’t look over as he continues wailing. Les feels an energizing burst of relief.

“Helen?”

No answer. Les steps over to another door, and this time kicks it in. Helen is in this room. She is lying on her back across a bed. She has been dead for days. Her yellow arms are marked with bruises that run from her shoulders to hands that are pulled back in retraction. Eyeliner-black track marks fill the crooks of her arms. Her face is dry and large, with purple roots beneath the skin. A cracked riverbed of fluid crosses her cheek.

Helen is dead.

Beside the cupped toes of her right foot a spoon lies halfway under a roll in the carpet where she has kicked it. Not paying attention. The smell of her body causes Les to grab his mouth, and this sweet odour sinks deep enough into his face to prevent tears. He yells her name.

“Helen!”

The zombies in the yard outside are dead, and so the alliterative chain does not begin again. The first chain, however, is now speeding across Vaughn Township and west, deep into Mississauga.

Les returns to the playpen and lifts out his son.

The intersection of King and Dufferin is a solid cube of ice that Les has to pass through. The sun is lowering shadows and Les sees the dark drifts of jawlines, the eyes that spin like worms away from each other. A woman, her blanketed shoulders pinned against the bus shelter, listens to a siren: all mother she ignores it. Disappointed again, she pulls a towel up across her face. The ice cube melts behind him and Les spreads his fingers across the baby’s belly. I am the adult. He feels the tiny bird cage of the child’s chest. Mother. He remembers a guidance counsellor in grade 10 closing a file and, with a hand-washing return of a pencil to its packet, sliding his chair back from the desk to introduce the door to Les, saying: “You will probably end up alone. You shut me out, I shut you out.”

This baby is strange. The most important thing in my life … 15 strange to me.

And it is crying.

Loud.

Les Reardon has not even pictured where he will go. The place does exist, of course. But where he goes is only partially dependent on pictures. For now the picture is a billboard in Gravenhurst. Not yet subjected to feasibility, it confuses southbound motorists with its baby-blue pyjamas, blonde widow’s peak and praying hands.

Ellen’s praying hands, pointed under her chin with infant formality, drop to her side; she leaves a fingerprint of her husband’s blood there, like a broad cleft. Her head is clearer and softer now. She stands at a full open acre of intersection in Pontypool and confers with a greater range of Ellens than ever before. The real estate agent, the Bewdley priestess, the killer of her husband, the reeve, the degenerated mind. Near the centre of each is a shrewd and deflecting person, more lens than light, who will tell Ellen when she has stopped being useful to herself.

Not yet. Ellen feels a clam-sized piece of breakfast seal off the base of her throat. It frightens her. Now is when you just choke to death. She presses four fingers deeply into the top of her chest. The clam leans off the opening and releases her swallow. The relief softens her mind further and she makes a fist of her long hand to push against her mouth. The crying that she feels is very young, and she cannot trust herself to let it up. The reeve soothes Ellen, telling her that these next few moments won’t matter, she can feel exactly as she wishes — cry, Ellen, go ahead, cry.

A car leaps into the air over a hill to the west. As it slows, Ellen, the killer of her husband, turns her back, not daring to look down at what she’s wearing. She stares out into the field and, imitating a painting she once saw, holds her hand like a visor off her brow. She reaches down to bunch the side of her dress, still in imitation of the painting, and recognizes the fabric. Damn, I’m in my dressing gown. The car slows before it reaches the crossroad and it stops on the shoulder beside her. There is no way to collect herself, she knows, and even if there were she would still be incapable of speech. The sound of a man’s voice. In the turn she makes toward it, Ellen decides to present herself as unstable and unaware. A golf pro struck by lightning. A movie star found wandering.

“Excuse me?” The passenger window drops and a thin face appears. “Oh, my dear woman! Oh, precious, listen, get in the car.”

Ellen steps back and pulls the collars of her robe against her chin.

“OK sweetheart, it looks to me like you already failed Street Proofing 101, so you be brave and step over here and talk to Steve, OK? I just want to help.”

Steve pops the car door open and slaps the seat. Ellen looks at his face and decides this man is so exactly who she wouldn’t approach for help on a country road that he just has to be fine. As soon as she is seated inside the car a violent shake seizes her and her bare feet wag noisily across the plastic ribs of the floor mat.