Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“He’s really good with math, y’know? He gets that from me, I think. I have a cousin who’s an architect. But he also gets it from you, you’re good with numbers.”

Helen disappears and returns again, this time having retrieved three notebooks from a room down the hall. She sits across from Les, who has moved on to the conclusion of the Liv Tyler interview. Helen stacks the books in front of her and opens the first with a formality that reminds her of her own mother.

“Look at this… Oh my god!… This is totally neat… He’s doing algebra… I knew it…”

Helen looks up, irritated. Les is flipping through the magazine now, comparing the icons that signify the conclusions of articles, wondering whether the feeling of conclusion is just an effect of their appearance on the pages.

“Oh, look, he does drawings here in the margins… That’s cool… He could draw for the comics…”

Les looks up, closing the magazine on a finger to mark his place.

“Do some of the Boy. I think I need some of the Boy — let’s split a tenth, honey.”

Helen closes the notebook and returns to her narrow shelf. “I wonder if he forgot those books this morning. He needs his notebooks.” She opens the lid of a packet with a fingernail. “A student can’t take notes without a notebook. How come he left his notebooks here?” As she sets up a small blue jar of distilled water on the counter she flips two antiseptic swipes out of her pyjama pocket. “Maybe he has a locker. Maybe the books he uses at school are in his locker.”

Les is distracted. He’s looking at a large photograph of Lena Olin that fills a tall page in an old issue of Interview. A bar of sand clings to the side of her bare foot. So wrinkled, he thinks. Not age, just… foot wrinkled.

“Sweety, I’ve only got a quarter left…”

Les rumples his nose with a loose fist; the skin of his face, now arid, folds and bends without resisting.

“Sweety, how… uh… how much do you have?”

Les scratches the back of his head with the vigour of a porch dog. He has been preparing to ignore this question long before it has occurred to Helen. Not that he won’t answer, and she won’t mind asking two or three times, it’s just a kind of protocol of married life.

“Hmmm… I thought I had at least a half… Well, let’s do a Tee anyway, right honey?”

Les is drawing bubbles on a photograph of a martini glass. Mmmmm. Hmmm.

“OK, yes, a nice half-Tee, that’ll be nice for us. Uh… Les, how much do you have left?”

Les draws the stick of an umbrella leaning out of the martini.

“Sorry, sugar. What did you say?”

Helen snaps a blade through a pebble of heroin, pinning the halves on either side of the tiny knife with her fingers. She asks again with a voice that is patient and refreshed.

“Oh, I was just wondering how much of the Boy you have left.”

Les pushes the magazine to the edge of the table, conscious of what it would take to send it sailing onto the floor.

“How much of the Girl is left there?”

Helen lifts her hands from what she’s doing and slides another packet into the area of her operation. She opens it without lifting it from the shelf.

“Two big grams.”

She looks over her shoulder at Les. She feels she deserves her answer now.

“Three-quarters. Second drawer. In the purple box. Pull it out.”

Les puts a flint of power in his mouth and it only allows him to use short sentences. When Helen puts the larger bindle on the table in front of Les, he covers it with one hand, watching her back while she loads two syringes.

“Here darling.”

They silently administer the heroin and listen, in the seconds that follow, for more comfortable breathing in each other. Helen smiles at Les and he returns the gesture. Her smile twists apologetically and she returns to the shelf. The Girl again. Christ. Helen, you’re not in control of what you’re doing. Les says nothing as he spins the packet towards himself and opens it.

“What the fuck is this?”

Helen jumps, dropping a new syringe into the sink.

“Fuck Les, fuck!”

“No. No. Really, Helen, what the fuck is this? There’s only a couple of Tees here.”

“No! Oh no ! Fuck! Fuck! Are you sure? Lemme see!”

“There was almost a gram in here this morning! Where the fuck is it?”

“I don’t know, Les! I don’t fucking know. Oh God!”

Helen is screaming now. Crying and angry, she reaches across the table for the packet. Les makes quick fists, striking distance; to protect her he stomps his feet.

“Ernie! Fucking Ernie! He’s selling at school! The fucker!”

Helen whips open the top drawer and pulls out a handgun.

“OK you little fuck! I can’t fuckin’ believe him! I’ll kill him.”

“No you won’t.”

Helen looks up, confused, still crying, the rims of her eyes are flicking around her sockets.

“But keep the fucking gun out anyway.”

Helen places the gun on the table and with a gluey pull at her nose she returns to the shelf. Les stares at her back. She is struggling with the cocaine, messing up her fix and saying “Fuck!” every six or seven seconds. Les picks up the gun, checks the chamber for rounds, and lays it flat against the inside of his thigh.

“I can’t fucking take this. I need some music.”

Les looks down at his son before stepping out onto the highway. He takes the word Ernie away from his boy. He leaves the baby to scratch, nameless and alone, at the red patches that have risen on his wrists. The OPP officer and Les stare at each other. Neither of them has a clear idea of what happens next. They are both expecting to die, though they have probably never been in safer company. In fact, they are both pretty much willing to die for each other. The officer makes the first move. Gracefully and delicately, he floats his right hand out and down. Down. Lie down. The gesture is so compelling that a shrub nearby bends several of its tiny white flowers toward the ditch it overhangs. It encourages Les to crouch against the road, to block out a place there. On his stomach, Les breathes out the weight of his back onto his lungs, blowing clear a patch of asphalt by his cheek.

This is the end of the line.

At the station house Les is put into custody. He is asked quietly for his rare possessions. The arresting officer is agreeable and polite. The superficial pleasure of the procedure baffles Les. It reminds him of a Latin exercise from school. He is a noun in declension — all the handcuffs, the five coils of smoke on his fingertips, the secretive case, the ablative justice of the peace and an entire world that will, except for him, run on a series of sentences that begin with the letter O.

Les is sitting in just such a circle. He has given his son up to the law. He has surrendered his illegal firearm. The controlled substance he shared with the baby. The stolen vehicle and its violent history. Murder. He has given the OPP a murder.

Les sits in a chair in the small police station outside Caesarea not knowing that a growing number of people in Ontario are now also giving the OPP murder. All across the province vicious gangs of cannibals are moving on the police, sweeping through like a system of weather, snatching up large parts of the population. Les fishes in his pocket for one of the Dilaudid that he had managed to scoop from the jar before his arrest and he pops it in his mouth. He has already begun to contemplate other forms of consuming the drug, and he anticipates, with an excitement that makes him chew the pill, a man he’ll meet in the shower who’ll slip a syringe into his hand and then drop his fingers against the side of his penis. The officer has left him sitting alone for over an hour to picture prison life. In an adjacent room Les hears the first yelp of a son who is stirring back up into cutting discomfort.