Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

Peterson is not prepared when Les slows down to turn onto Highway 35, and the detective loses control of his vehicle. The car flips onto its side, and like a snow-removal device it bumps smoothly, still on its edge, fitting perfectly into the ditch where it plows sixty metres of snow. When it stops, the detective is alive, not even injured. Still, there is something altogether deadly occurring, something totally unrelated to this accident.

The detective, who has refolded himself to a sitting position on the driver’s window, looks up at the sun peeking in over the passenger’s seatbelt above his head. His head is clear of wounds and his eyes squint at the light. At the very moment his car began its clever trip along the ditch, up on its ear, a virus that Detective Peterson has carried for some time began a full relationship with its host. As he exits the car and drags his ass backwards up onto the icy shoulder, he does so as a man with a disease. The first thing he says, as a man with a disease, is also his first symptom: “How is the part I get for?”

He slaps the edges of his boots together and the cold seepage of melting ice through the seat of his pants causes him to jump to attention. He is not aware of the obvious. The thing he said aloud did not succeed. He knows exactly what he meant. In fact, even without being overheard, it probably would have been equal to what he actually said: How is the part I get for? This is not to say that he could remain oblivious to the disease. It will become dramatic. The detective climbs over the car again and drops his arm through the open window. He fishes his hand against the dash and retrieves the cord to his radio. The length of this cord, two, maybe two and a half feet, is all he has left. He doesn’t know how slowly to ravel it in his hand. He doesn’t see the resemblance between the handset and the tiny coffin of an infant. He squeezes the little dead hand in his, breaking its baby finger, making it cry.

The detective is a foolish man, not smart or pleasant; so, while he becomes even less appealing in these last days of his life, an angel will be assigned to him: the soul of an innocent child whose murderer he brought to justice. The angel is assigned to him to remind us that we are tormenting a man who is loved by God.

Les Reardon is heading west on Highway 7 between Nestleton Station and Port Perry. This part of the country looks like a vast set of stairs, carpeted with trees, and is, in fact, the steps that lead down to the big city and its lake. Highway 7 runs along the edge of an incline, and to Les’s south the land drops away, greying into the phantom of a horizon. To the north the land sits high in the sun, like a cresting wave. The land is a market of conversions: farms into gravel pits, gravel pits into heavy machinery depots. And then these depots become the instant little communities that the machines have abandoned. Many people have travelled this highway to Port Perry, and many have carried tragedy. Children catching fire in the back seat with the meningitis that kills them between towns. A young man cradling a severed forearm between his thighs. The terrible family trips that end in violence on a sideroad. Les has joined those people who have suffered the unique agony of trying to escape impending doom by taking in the scenery. Most prefer to watch the land fall to the south, where they can be lost among hospitals. The north, on the right, has always risen in an opera of murder; it will broadside every family member, set in motion the suicides of giant people. Les, however, is looking across the front of his truck, into the white, for a place to pull over. He has vomited on himself and his vehicle is dark with the blood of a recent passenger. He pulls over at the sideroad to Caesarea and steps from the vehicle.

They think I’m doing this.

Les pushes handfuls of ice across the muck of his coat. He opens the passenger door and hurls snow across the seat and dash. On his knees he works the interior with circling hands. A thin pink soup covers everything. He attempts to flip the lather of blood with the edge of his hand, and the ground at his knees becomes a ruddy espresso.

Les’s feelings of guilt begin to fragment, and so he tires of cleaning. In fact, he tires of flight altogether. Instead, he stands beside his car to wait until he himself comes to a full stop. In this stop he is reunited with the feelings that he woke with this morning. I am a man who is trying. Helen. My son. This day has nothing to do with me. What am I doing? I’ve jeopardized everything. The police will catch this man. I have only done what anyone would do. Helen knows that. I have to turn around and help that detective. I have to report this.

Helen left Les just as he finished university. Going back to school had been his idea. At first it was a way of rehabilitating himself, of learning to live with a mental illness. He had worked in sanitation for twenty-five years; every day he’d pulled a garbage truck from the lot at four in the morning. On those mornings the sun rose on an isolated little man who waged a visionary war.

And then the war became real.

The bags of garbage held bodies, and the dogs in the street were licking the entrails of orphaned children caught in the crossfire. Next came the truly terrible morning, when Helen guessed, and he thought she was a spy. It was all so real. Even now, in the sometimes fragile, smart system of a new chemistry, Les is holding out until the day the war is acknowledged by Ontario and his wife is forced to return to him. A matter of national security. Their marriage, their son. He had become a drama teacher, and Helen left him, in the first month of her pregnancy, to live with a writer in the village of Parkdale. The post-breakdown Les asked far too many smart questions. He had begun to desire things that had never been discussed with Helen.

Les has never seen his son. He doesn’t even know his name. He’d moved to Pontypool, to work at the farm and the school, the summer before the boy was born. Les feels calm as he returns to the driver’s seat of his truck. The events of the day have guided him out of crisis, and he rolls the vehicle toward Caesarea, where he’ll telephone the OPP. He feels the safety and the sadness of this decision drop his gearshift from neutral to drive.

At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sit across from each other. Their mouths are opened and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point. Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane. This couple, unlike the Killings, will never act out the tiny story that brought them together. Instead, they are doomed to suspension, to act out a compulsion that has never been fully explained. But as Les Reardon steps up to their front door the compulsion will be given another opportunity to shock and revile.

No one answers the door, so Les pounds it harder, knocking it back under his knuckles. Les steps through the opening and immediately understands, by the choir of animal sounds coming from within, that the killer is here. How does he know? Who is this? Les steps backward outside, but too late. Two people in dressing gowns move into the hall like vampires and with surprising swiftness they stuff their hands across the frame just as Les slams the door. He looks down at the fingers he’s grinding. Wiggling zombie pawns. Sacrificed, they break and snap. The things are relentless, and as he repeatedly bangs the door on their hands they manage to stuff their arms through, up to their elbows. They will get through.