Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“Hello there.”

Ellen stands on the bank, closing the front of her bathrobe: a reeve in a bathrobe is better than no reeve at all. The person in the water stops and turns toward her with a splash.

“Excuse me, hello, is everything alright in there?”

“What do you mean?”

The man’s voice is whiny and defensive. There is something disturbing in the question.

“I’m Ellen Peterson, the reeve of Pontypool. There’s a great deal of trouble in the area tonight, and I’m asking if everything is OK with you in there. Aren’t you cold?”

Another voice to her left.

“Why, if he’s cold will he freeze?”

The voice, so tremulous, makes her shiver. The question somehow hasn’t been put to her rhetorically.

“Well, no, I don’t think he’ll freeze.”

A third voice in the bushes behind her.

“Are you lying to him? Is he going to freeze?”

The voice is so frightened that Ellen covers her mouth.

The man in the water has slipped behind the boulder and he holds its sides with his hands.

“If you’re lying to me then you could hate me.”

Ellen drops her hand. She feels the pull of sadness in the light that has emerged on the surface of the tree hiding these people.

“I don’t know you; I couldn’t… hate you.”

The head and shoulders of the man to her left glide into view at the centre of the pool.

“You don’t hate him yet. But if you don’t know him will you stab him with a knife?”

The man behind her squeals sharply, and he flees crashing through the trees. Ellen can’t quite believe this conversation. She has no idea how to meet its requirements.

The conversation that she is having isn’t, of course, normal.

That conversation would have its several participating members hitting a variety of vocal registers using a tiny lexicon. This lexicon has migrated to them from Parkdale, and they communicate through it with the sonic sensitivity of birds. They repeat the words Helen, help and hello in an evolution of the alliteration that’s more like an imbrication, shingling the words over a now silent H. And exactly who is stepping down into the pond and repeating the phrase “messy car, dirty bird”? Ellen has not detected the eighteen silent beings that surround the pool, hiding in fear among the trees. Each of them moves three words from cheek to cheek, like loose peas in a whistle.

“What do you mean stab you?”

Ellen’s robe rides in a terry cloth wake around her as she steps through the water toward the boulder.

“That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.”

Ellen stops still as three other beings float out from under branches that overhang the pool’s edge. They move steadily in the moonlight, forming a guard around the boulder.

“He means what he said. Now you want to kill him.”

“No. I don’t.”

“If you don’t want to kill him, does that mean that you want to run him over with a car?”

One of the silhouettes yelps as if struck and dives to the side.

“I… I… don’t want to hurt any of you.”

Ellen is aware that the pool is now occupied by at least a dozen of these strange people.

“Not hurt? Not hurt? Do you mean not hurt now, but later? Like in the morning you’ll want to punch all of us? Punch us with a cannon?”

“Or a missile?”

“Or… or… maybe poison?”

“And angry now? Are you angry now?”

Three zombies splash at the water in a strange seizure that ends in one of them attacking another. The zombie being attacked strokes the back of his assailant with a consoling hand. The assailant bites uncontrollably at the man’s chest, opening a honeycomb of muscle and flesh. The victim soon slides under the water, and his mouth, the last cup on his body to be filled, glides away to drown. Ellen feels a panic lock her.

The killer stands up straight and exhales heavily, sending a piece of tongue flipping into the water. A woman directly behind Ellen speaks.

“Say sorry.”

The killer shakes his hands in the water. He closes his eyes, and in an emotional outburst that is small and painful he rolls his head back.

“I can’t.”

Ellen steps forward, her heart pounding in her chest. She raises open hands across the water and moves slowly toward the killer.

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

A teenage girl jumps out of a tree and stands in a moonlit path that drops into the pool.

“He doesn’t?”

Ellen feels a carp slide itself like a cat against her ankle. A mile long. She catches her breath and waits for it to pass.

“No, he doesn’t have to be sorry.”

Another carp swims into Ellen’s joined heels. She turns her foot, letting it move between her calves. It’s slippery and fat and it tickles. A group of eight zombies moves quietly off the bank into the water. Several of them ask the same question at once.

“It’s OK that he killed Albert?”

Ellen scoops water up onto her dry lips. She notices the little bump of Albert’s floating tongue.

“It’s OK. It’s OK.”

Now the pool is becoming crowded with quiet zombies. They all seem to like being submerged up to their chests, so when they enter the water they sink to their knees in the mud and stone of its black bottom. Ellen is standing and she appears elevated on an artificial surface. Ellen notices that some of them have turned their backs and are busily working at something on the bank at the water’s edge. The soft fan of a tail runs against her shin. The carp is sitting on the floor of the pool, stationary. It caresses Ellen’s leg, and she is reminded again of a cat.

Nearly all the zombies have turned their backs on her. A woman working beside the fallen log turns her head to a man beside her.

“It’s OK to kill biting, y’know.”

The man remains hunched over.

“And I know it’s OK to tear fuckin’ fuckers’ heads off.”

The woman pulls from her spot and turns to Ellen.

“Is it OK?”

Ellen can see mud dripping down the woman’s chin. It looks like the chinstrap of a warrior’s helmet.

“Is what OK?”

All of the zombies stop, some of them grab the tree branches above their heads. A rhythm of ripples on the water’s surface smoothes. Ellen slips farther under, to her knees. She feels the little plosive blast as her carp propels itself off her thigh.

“It’s OK to… uh… sure, it’s OK.”

“How about killing them?”

Ellen feels a carp’s face in the upturned soul of her foot. It extends its sucker mouth and kisses her there. Ellen answers the question through a smile caused by a second carp on her other foot.

“Killing them is alright.”

“And slapping and slapping all the assholes in their heads?”

“Yes. Yes. It’s OK.”

“What else is alright?”

The carp have now settled into a synchronized kissing and Ellen drops her hands to her sides. She feels the soft drapery of fish moving along the insides of her wrists.

“Anything.”

“Can’t I ask?”

A zombie becomes agitated and turns from the bank.

“If she asks are you going to hit her in the ass?”

“No, no, she can ask whatever she wants.”

“Can I too?”

“Yes.”

“OK, OK. Is it OK to have a policeman banging on the door?”

“Yes.”

“Me too, me too. Um, I don’t have a question.”

“Will you bash his face in if he doesn’t have a question?”

“No. No, I won’t.”

As they turn and lobby questions at Ellen she finds herself struggling, with some success, to configure the affirmation. She begins to focus her eyes on what it is that they’re doing on the bank. A busy geometry of forms begins to emerge. It sits lit on the surface of the dark and appears like a computer language, a dense and complex glyphic architecture. The patterns emerging are uniform all around her. Ellen recognizes something in the tightly braided wall. She remembers doing things. After she got sick. She remembers emptying an ice cube tray into the sink and filling it again. Returning it to the freezer. And the terrible waiting for the water to freeze so that she could refill it with fresh water. It was in filling those awful hours that Ellen built, out of the contents of a cupboard, her library of seals. She recalls her surprise, her astonishment, that she was able to create and retain an infinite machine on a single shelf in the pantry. The complex stability of the number six in a can of pears, each half-fruit changing. The not-yet-ten in tiers across the cookie bag. The disappointing threes risen into a number only guessed at, but always guessed correctly, by a red hexagonal tower in the shadows. And when she had finished visiting her shelf she would check the ice cubes. And if they were not yet frozen, maybe nearly, little windowed boxes of water, she’d sit at the kitchen table and feel comfortable that she had set things in motion.