Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

An optical effect is emerging. An illusion, one whose fidelity grows on the HP, as he creates second and third arrowheads. The field begins to flow outward in waves from the suddenly motionless platform, carrying buoys on waves that roll back from the distance. A hollow sky pulls at this figure, as he leans, in his fantasy, against the bailing chute. He raises the gloved fingers of his hand and traces an imagined coastline, as far away as the white morning moon, now a perfect pressure, light against his palm. The HP feels that he may die for seeing the field this way, and he very nearly cries. There is consciousness breaking in the soil, other people’s consciousness. A curl falling across Greg’s cheek appears in a quick spindrift of dust coming off a stone in the mud. As long as I can see the moment everything changes. As long as the HP can see the moment when everything changes, then everything in its vying is as good as home. And eventually, in an infinite cross-current of sadness and longing, every weak, blinking kindness is restored. And then, seconds later, lost. The HP feels for the first time in his short life, the millions of years it takes to produce a single, brief moment of passion.

At noon the tractor drops into neutral and Jackson jumps down. He turns off the baler and the HP realizes that in some way he has been sustained all morning by its roar. His arms throb, and his abdomen twitches. He looks down to make sure his body isn’t as huge as it feels. He feels like a perfect giant, gleaming and hard, with fingers too strong to move. Jackson stands beside the platform and removes his cap. He squats and presses a palm through the short grass.

“Ah-yeh. Don’t want it wet.”

The table is laid out with oversized plates and bowls steaming with multiple helpings of a variety of foods. A dozen steaks are bleeding down on each other beside a serving tray of ribs so tender that meat falls from the bones when the HP pulls back his chair. He fills his plate with slick, hot carrots and ice-cold beets. Harley, who has been cleaning the mow all morning, is watching television with his sister. Jackson stands, straddling the metal strip dividing the kitchen from the living room, watching the small black-and-white set. A young woman is holding a microphone under the chin of a man in a naval uniform.

“Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh. Don’t want rain.”

After lunch Harley helps Jackson on the baler and the HP is sent to the mow to wait for them to return from the field with the first load of hay. A neighbour was busy stacking bales on the truck while they ate lunch. The HP watches Harley trailing after Jackson across the field. He feels a drain of energy caused by the task of digestion. The HP walks slowly toward the barn. The younger man is picking up stones that his father kicks from the ground. He sails them through the air to bounce off an island of rocks in the middle of the field. The HP can see Jackson’s shyness even from this distance: his resignation and defiance. He’s a tightly packed, complex man who frowns when people laugh and seems never to have exhaled in his life.

The barn is dark inside, with shafts of white sunlight turning orange on the floor. The HP climbs a ladder of planks nailed across six-by-twelve uprights. At the top he has to jump across an opening of a metre and a half onto a loft. A window at the peak of the roof opens out onto the field where Jackson and Harley are working. The black rubber of a conveyor belt obscures the view. The HP sits on a bale of hay and waits. The mow is a trap of nearly unbreathable air, where waves of heat rise, cooking the atmosphere through stale hay into a gas that holds the oxygen near the roof in a dark poison. The HP is having difficulty breathing, and when the conveyor rattles to life it takes him three attempts before he can stand without support. He can see the first bale climbing towards him, and he lays his shaking hands on the edge of the conveyor belt, taking its vibrations up his arms.

He believes that this bale will fall against him and drive him to the floor. He knows that they vary in weight, from about forty to seventy pounds, and that the range represents what is possible and what is now, in this strength-sapping fire, clearly impossible. The bale teeters at the top on a brief fulcrum and falls against the HP, driving him to the floor. He kicks his legs across the sliding chaff and rolls the bale, end for end, to a corner of the mow. The first tier can go like this. The second has to be lifted. So does the third. The fourth has to be heaved. The fifth has to be built by arms that push upward, straining and, hopefully, the HP thinks, numb. At least I’m alone up here, no one can see me struggle.

Within an hour he has completed the first wall. He has begun to cough the cough that he’s been warned about. His lungs are skipping uncontrollably on a tripwire of chaff that is pulled taut inside them. He sputters up a gluey fluid, speckled yellow, and he wipes his burning lips in the black acid that coats his forearms. The second wall seems to go quicker and he feels a muscle in his back break free to dominate his dying arms. The new muscle is a bright and powerful sensation, equal to the ruin it compensates for, and when he straightens he feels it push against him, tripping a series of recoiling muscles, retrieving his arms to his sides and cracking his thighs.

As he steps over the foundation of his third wall the HP notices the light in the mow shift from orange flame to purple. The conveyor stops suddenly and squeaks backward horribly before settling. He feels the silence as he did this morning, as a barrier against sensation dropping, and gravity returns to his limbs, pulling him down towards the floor. Above his head the rattle of rain stones up off the aluminum roof. This sound, cool and falling from far away, intensifies the heat and deafness in the mow.

From within the barn below him: “Ah-right!”

The HP makes the jump across to the ladder, floating almost as he climbs down. He feels the rungs in his hands as empty spaces, their surfaces held from his palms by bruises.

The haying isn’t finished, and the rain means they won’t resume for several days. A barn full of wet hay will eventually explode.

The dinner table is twice as laden and the HP finds himself eating smaller portions. He eats alone. Harley has showered and sped off in the car towards town to drink, and Jackson is having a beer himself, sitting in a reclining chair. His daughter is colouring in a book on the floor in front of the television. Dolly is standing by the dishwasher with a long wooden spoon in her hand. She is looking through the house. It seems to the HP that she’s calculating. First, she looks to Jackson, then to the dog’s dish, then over to a fly banging against the window screen. She taps the spoon three times quickly and jumps visibly when she notices the HP looking at her. She recovers by smiling and tilts a bowl of greens toward him.

He returns the smile and says, “No, thank ya kindly, ma’am.”

She continues smiling and looks to her husband, who has now fallen asleep in the reclining chair.

That night the HP cannot sleep. He lies on the lower bunk, staring up into the dark. There is no space heater’s glow and the room is only present in its strong smells. He is picturing the people he shares the house with. Quiet, strong and beautiful. Jackson’s shyness and his intimate game with the sky. Harley’s coltish grin and addiction to showers. And Dolly. Dolly’s strange sight. She confers something with it. She sees. What?

The Higher Power decides he’ll get up and wander through the house a bit. Listening. He gets to the upper floor and finds himself tiptoeing down the hall.

I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t.

He stands in front of the master bedroom door and listens. The toy tractor of Jackson’s snore purrs. The HP turns and notices a soft light beneath the daughter’s door.