Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“Hello, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline.”

Grant held his Robusto out and watched a long grey toe of ash tumble end over end into the ashtray.

“Hi.” A tiny voice. Casual. Scratchy. Male? Female?

“Hello. What’s your name?”

“My name’s Mark, what’s yours?”

“My name’s Bill, Mark. Hey Mark, waddaya want to talk about?”

Grant opened his refrigerator and shrouded the milk in cigar smoke.

“Well, I have a crisis, Bill.”

Grant peeled the plastic wrap off a glass plate and nudged the pickles and cheese that were arranged there. He re-sealed the plate and flipped open a plastic lid.

“It’s good you called, then, Mark.”

Grant grimaced at a smell that shot out of the container, and he hit back with a spray of smoke, then closed the fridge.

“It’s not gonna sound like a crisis.”

“Doesn’t matter how it sounds, Mark. You tell me it’s a crisis, that makes it one. So shoot, buddy. What’s up?”

A long cord stretches out across the lake. Its frayed surface prickles the water. A needle width of blood and bone courses along the interior of this rope with such force and speed that if directed it could easily shave the poles clean off the planet. This is a dreaming AMPS victim. This is what its dream is. The AMP doesn’t fall asleep. Instead, it collapses from exhaustion and, before going under, batters itself to prevent sleep. Most unconscious AMPS put themselves there with a blow to the head which is, in fact, meant to keep them awake. The AMP who is having this dream now is lying on the floor of the Wheelers’ cottage. His throat is crushed and his eyes are draped across open fingers at his side. His spinal column is broken at the neck and a glistening area of spinal fluid laps at his shoulder like a lake teeming with fish. But he lives on, this thing. He sails on for the rest of his natural life striving towards his goals, different now, surely very different, and he’s cut down before he can reach them.

His heart stops and he dies.

Dr. Rauf pulls at his sides as if looking for seat belts. He wiggles his hips in his chair, trying to fit his legs onto them. Eventually he settles. Grant pauses, scanning over Rauf’s cluttered pose, and phrases the question like this:

“Dr. Rauf, the explanations for this disease are very baffling, to say the least. It’s been said over and over again that this is not a physical disease or a mental one. And I suppose, while you’re here, we can clear the air totally. Is this a spiritual plague, as has recently been suggested? Clear that up for us now, could you doctor?”

Rauf rolls his upper lip under his nose, sealing his nostrils with the slick insides of his mouth.

“No. There’s no such thing. A very motivated speculation, indeed.”

Grant smiles. In fact, he is prepared to laugh if any answer turns out to be funny.

“OK. So we hear a lot about what this virus is not. And in fact, once we run through all the negatives, it appears that the thing doesn’t exist at all. So how is it that people are testing positive?”

“Well, one of the first things to understand about this virus is that its existence is incomprehensible because it exists contrary to the way our rational minds comprehend. And because the virus is situated, quite physically, anterior to the process of comprehension itself.”

Grant cannot hide his discomfort and his next question is impatient.

“OK. If you had to answer quickly, what would you say? Where is this virus?”

“Simple. It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc. A common effect being the sensation that the present moment is a copy of itself. It’s been misnamed déjà vu. Other early symptoms occur when the act of selecting a word becomes jammed. This process finds paradigms attempting to reinvent themselves as syntagma, and this manifests in the patient as fairly common aphasia. The person wants a fork but asks for a table or an oar or a knife. The next stages are more chaotic. As conditions within the personality become ultra-sensitive to their own construction, there is a kind of sped-up production of reality. This is a compensation for, or an escape from, the rending of their once invisible frames. Or horizons. Horizons that are quite literally looming. A frightening and painful type of madness ensues, and some of the incidents that we’re hearing about, cannibalism and whatnot, start to manifest themselves in the later stages of the disease. There are some radical metaphysicians now speculating about the potential for this virus to destroy the constitution of things beyond those physical individuals who have the disease. I would suggest that this, of course, would be suicide for the virus. It has, after all, a vested interest in keeping its host alive. I believe that the host is, in fact, everything beyond the boundaries of infection. Or, more conventionally, the host is the reality constructed to support us, and produce us, and on and on. Reality is an organism to this virus. That is, however irrational it may sound, a serviceable version of what has happened.”

Grant is in the grip of frenzied self-consciousness. He is close to understanding this disease and he can feel a terrible fear gathering in his good looks. He worries that his next question, that any question, or worse, that communication itself, is unsafe.

“OK Dr. Rauf, how are we catching this disease, how is it contagious?”

“Well, that’s a difficult question. One that is now being asked by teams of doctors, semioticians, linguists and anthropologists worldwide. A whole host of disciplines are working together on this one. It seems that people are waking up with it, so dreams seemed the obvious site of entry. It has been suggested that it is more likely that people are catching it as they move into a dream state. The structure of consciousness, identical to that of the unconscious, moves from the more or less illusory conditions of the personality into an automatic concrete version of the self found in dreams. The redistribution of elements may leave a person momentarily vulnerable to the virus, which may have already been there, dormant. Some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage. Like, well, like we’re using right now, Grant.”

“What does the virus look like, Dr. Rauf?”

“The immature virus looks a bit like a sunfish, brightly coloured, with spiky fins. And it has two long, pointy fangs, which it uses to practise scratching at the paradigms it will eventually invade. It’s important to remember, of course, that it is also becoming a tangent, and eventually the mature virus resembles the figure of abjection. The copy is a different matter. The copy is a strange, full and undetectable presence.”

Grant prepares his next question, pushing his finger into pursed lips, but he doesn’t ask it. Instead, he slides the finger into his mouth while making a slashing gesture across his throat with his free hand.

Grant has strong convictions when it conies to counselling the young, and he believes that adolescence is almost entirely a political passage. Young women should be made aware of the plight of their older sisters in shelters before being introduced to the thrill of the blouse. The connection, Grant acknowledges, is a male one, the short length of a long, punitive and controlling chain. He advises girls to seek out women who have enthusiasm, energy, exuberance. He instructs young men to proceed cautiously, to become aware of the complexity of the world, to seek out men who have a wide range of feeling. He cheers on the teenage homosexual, while sadly noting the complicated degrees of acceptance that await him. Grant listens with principled uncertainty, never hearing a wrong note in the broken voices of young men, or an awkwardness in a teenage girl, that isn’t important to the whole world. He gathers young people up and down, along the sides of his soft, kind voice, and asks some of them, with a hand dipping down through a circle of sunlight, if they would like to come and work in a big, beautiful television studio.