Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“So, so, so.” He’s trying to say something, but he doesn’t know how. “You’re a painter, huh?”

You milk the painter angle whenever you can, it seems to satisfy something about you.

“Yes.”

“OK, you’re gonna think this is a little odd, but I want your professional opinion on something.”

You squint to picture yourself at an easel, in a paintsmeared smock, with one of those wood things hanging from your thumb. Art history: Cézanne, Polenc, and… and… Walt Whitman. You imagine lifting the back of your smock, flashing your ass at H/ellen, who is your model.

“Sure doc, anything. Shoot.”

“Yeah, so I bought this painting, that one over there.”

You recognize the building in the painting. It’s the Queen St. Mental Health Centre. And it’s painted by Mendelson Joe.

“Yeah, that’s Mendelson Joe, isn’t it?”

The doctor becomes tense again. Your observation is almost too astute.

“Well, I wanted to know if it’s… if you thought, whether you thought it was any good.”

You stand up and square off in front of the painting. You try to raise your hand to your mouth, but the cast clunks against the desk.

“Oh dear!”

You gesture for him to stay seated.

“I’m fine. I’m OK.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Yeah, it’s good.”

The doctor sits up.

“Really? You think so? I thought so. Sort of… uh… primitive, wouldn’t you say?”

You cough and hold your mouth in a plaster palm.

“Yeah, I like this kind of thing. Sure. I was there.”

The doctor nods seriously. You were there. Oh yes, oh, I see. You were there.

You’re lying. You were in the Clarke Institute.

“Well, good. Everything else is OK? We have you on the medication now, do we?”

You cough again.

“Yes, but I think that the Lorazipam dose is too low and I think I need some Percodan.”

You hold out your hands and they jump involuntarily at the air. You wince and pull your cast to your chest.

“Ah, yes, it’s going to be a rough couple of days for you. I’ll tell the med-girl to double up on that for a while.”

It’s Friday night, so the staff allows the patients to rent a movie and stay up to watch it. The titles patients request are all meant to upset and disturb the nurses. Science Crazed, Phantasm, 2,000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead, Carnival of Souls. The nurse on duty looks at the selection and says: “You don’t think this is funny, do you?”

No one answers; instead, you all look down at her hand, flipping your list against her thigh. Her fingers are yellowed with slick nicotine tips and you look at each other. There is only one smoking room. Where does she smoke? The tiny world of the nurse hiding in the half moons on her fingernails scratches to the surface. This suggests to you, emotionally, negligently, that her people can get away with anything. They would like you to watch Terms of Endearment. You don’t even know how to begin to explain how hateful this movie is.

At the appointed hour she turns off the college basketball game you’re watching and brings a heel down an inch from H/ellen’s face. March Madness. She adjusts the blue of a blue screen with a remote. H/ellen turns her head on the floor and looks at you. She gives the universal sign for being in close proximity to a hated person’s smelly foot. The nurse leaves before the movie begins and it proves unwatchable right from the beginning. Not a fault of the film exactly; the nurse has adjusted the colour up into a spectrum where everyone appears to be wearing huge, flaming life preservers. Jeff Daniels is in more trouble than most of the actors. His character frequently drops his head toward his chest, exposing his face to the charring effects of flame. You each decide silently that the nurse has unwittingly given you the kind of movie you wanted after all. You turn the sound up so loud that the Terms of Endearment are transformed into the Agonizing Screams of Endearment. H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one. You just recycle the ones she doesn’t smoke. She has a beautiful smile. Crazy. All trouble. Never learning.

Just as Jack Nicholson attempts to extinguish the fire covering Shirley MacLaine by driving an ultra-violet car into a white ocean, the nurse comes running across the room. She’s pissed. She turns the television off, looking at no one. She kicks the air over H/ellen and flees the room. The VCR is still running, so it takes a few minutes for people to pull themselves away. When they do, H/ellen and you are left alone to smoke and listen to the movie purring along in its machine.

H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one.

She sits up to grab the cigarette, and instead of lying back down slides over to the coffee table. She looks you straight in the eye as she lifts her little dress up over her hips. She pulls the leg of the table between her legs. You look down quickly and then look up again. She looks down herself, encouraging you to do the same. The foot of the leg is surrounded by her large vagina and she draws it against her flesh by flexing her thighs. She looks back up to you and, while you are looking directly into each other’s eyes, you unbutton the top of your pants and slip down your hand.

You feel for a brief second, Tommy’s laboured breathing. He lays on his back, sleeping, with medication applied to the scrapes on his face and a white sheet pulled tight across his tall chest. He will wake up soon and come to find you. You concentrate on this.

This was exactly twelve years ago. Four days later you will discover a surprising alternative to suicide.

In the waiting room of Dr. John Mendez the corpses of a woman and her teenage son are being unwoven from the stiff limbs that have held them through the week. Dr. Mendez lays the bodies out on the floor of an examining room. There are already three other bodies there, stacked on the cushioned table. There is such an abundance of diving board stiffness in the people that surround him that Mendez finds himself performing loose little dances to distinguish himself. He is conscious of not being dead. He is less conscious of the people around him not being alive, and so along with his dancing he’s carrying on conversations with the cadavers.

He jigs down to a squat and pulls blond hair off the youth’s forehead.

“Hello young man.”

Mendez steps around, still in a squat, so that he’s looking across the teenager’s chest.

“Now we have no choice. We’re starting to really get to know one another, aren’t we?”

Mendez places a hand on the boy’s chest.

“You’re a beautiful lad, Doomsday Boy. You’ve backed off a bit from all this, though, haven’t you?”

He lifts the youth’s forearm and his entire upper body comes off the floor.

“I can’t believe that you’re like wood now, Doomsday Boy! Five days ago I said to your mother that little bags of marijuana never killed anyone. And now where is she? There, beside you. What a pair. Like planks of wood! Jesus has left a few carvings for me.”

Mendez pushes the tip of his finger into the hard skin between the boy’s eyebrows.

“I think you were just starting to go crazy with the world — right in here, Doomsday Boy, where your eyebrows are preparing to reach across and join hands. The long Ontario boy, now just a little carving of the rest of the world.”

A telephone rings in the reception area across the hall. Mendez lets it ring three times before tapping the boy’s shoulder with a closed hand and rising to his feet. He counts the other corpses with his eyes. “All you exhausted and serious people. I think I will take a walk to the telephone.”