Tony Burgess: Pontypool Changes Everything

On May 19, 1995, Ellen Peterson was attempting to intervene in what she perceived was a rash seizure of property by the game warden. The warden had stumbled on a family of four standing nearly waist deep in a small river-fed pond. The family were slapping the water with surveyor’s stakes as they ran back and forth, falling and squealing. As he got closer the game warden realized that they were playing a sort of British Bulldog with a school of carp. When the family saw the man they rushed back up to shore, more embarrassed and excited than aware that they were doing anything wrong. None of the carp was harmed, and in fact many of them left the game to mate upstream with renewed vigour.

Ellen didn’t see any harm in what they were doing, but the warden tried to describe the removal of surveyor’s stakes as vandalism, or at least as an illegal use of spears. He wanted to seize the family home and prosecute to the full extent of the law. Ellen recognized a man whose heart, unlike her husband’s, would beat faster if only the world were just a little more crooked than it already is.

As she looked for a phrase that would let the game warden and the family off the hook, a phrase that didn’t include the word eager, Ellen had a stroke. The stroke was the first of three that would hit her over the next year, each one dropping her deeper beneath the last, placing a baffling distance between her thought and the words that negotiate it. The second stroke caused the doctors to prematurely diagnose Pick’s disease, a gradual shrinking of the brain. This was suggested when a brain scan and several tests, involving draining her brain pan of fluid and inflating it with air, revealed a wider gap than a previous test. For days Ellen lay in the hospital, frightened by the fierce pain and the needle jolts of electricity in her head. Whenever she turned her head on the pillow her brain slid off its cushion of air and clunked, like a bumper car, into a corner of her skull.

After the third stroke and a third scan the doctors noticed that the affected area had changed appearance, shrinking from the size and shape of Sarnia to that of, say, Bewdley. Their prognosis this time was brighter. No organic damage. A part of her brain had been sealed off from the rest, and its contents needed to be coached out of the shadow they’d been cast in and reintroduced to the engines of their history: the physical context of their temporarily unavailable contents. The doctors thought that two years of therapy could bring her language back fully. When asked if she would be able to function as well as she had, however, they responded honestly: no.

Detective Peterson was given the impression that he had asked for too much and from then on he felt uneasy, like he was offending every doctor he consulted. Ellen kept her job as reeve and her secret position in the Wiccan religion. Detective Peterson knew this was the desire of the community — but only until the world replaced the role model that it had so wantonly destroyed. The sadness and, at times, the despair of the detective and the people of Pontypool were matched only by the millions of tiny tears shed by twenty-four thousand carp as they squeezed out their eggs and misted them with sperm. These tears lost their distinctive drop shape in the current of the river and were thus saved from appearing sentimental. They sank to the bottom and formed a rough fur of salted water over stones. Sediment.

The detective, on the other hand, took to sentimentalizing everything. He refused to treat Ellen differently, though she had become a different person, and he felt his own denial as a terrible sentence that he alone must unfairly endure. If her mood lightened, which it did sometimes in the afternoon, he felt a searing rage. And when, at night, fatigue caused her to repeat the words dead… dead over and over again, he felt a calmness fall over the house. At these times he also felt joy.

A walk through the kitchen for him contained enough signs of their other life together that he sometimes ate out for several days in a row to avoid being confronted by a past that, as the doctors had said, could be expected to return someday — changed, reduced, perverse. This was what frightened the detective the most. The return.

After her third stroke Ellen’s therapy began to take, and her progress exceeded the expectations of the specialists. She was able to go out and shop for groceries, provided that she rehearsed the shopping list before heading off. Ellen prepared for these outings tirelessly, and except for the occasional tantrum, usually triggered by having to make an unexpected decision, she was successful: decision making was often accompanied by terrible sensations.

Each shopping list disappeared from her when it was discarded. Along with it, the domestic life signified by the taxonomy was also lost. Ellen experienced these words and lists as thick, heavy blanks and their weight pulled at the muscles in her back. In order to make the words bearable she cored them with noise, a bright, prickling noise that vacuumed the area inside and immediately around them. Doing this, she was able to lift herself from the couch or walk into the kitchen.

Soon, as she stood in front of a stack of frozen fish or sat over a pile of unsigned documents, Ellen began detailing, with a meticulousness and energy she had never known, a catalogue of seals, made hermetic by the new shoots that were growing off the signs of her world. A pentagram of signatures burned against the side of a trout, its eye a frozen pea, the “P” that begins her last name.

A tomato was told to keep all of the events of her life before the stroke beneath the sheen of its skin. It was obedient.

In her tomato, in one of its tiny translucent seeds, Ellen has every plot of land she ever sold. Stored there are her various machines for telling the future.

She now studies future images in the afternoon, before the sun abandons her to suicide, and she translates them, using another set of machines sealed between the halves of an adjacent seed. Many of the images depict scenes of murder, but Ellen knows they only shock her to get her attention.

Occasionally, however, she will open a seal and a brief piece of song or snippet of conversation will make her laugh at some discrepancy. This is the mischief of her seals and machines.

Ellen bites the tip of her tongue to squeeze the coffee from it and she tastes blood the moment she drops her mug. The sound of the mug as it spins and stops, hitting the leg of the table, causes her to cry. She bunches up the cold wet of her shirt and pushes her fists into her mouth. She clenches her eyes shut, feeling the blankness of the event scare her, and she hears the voice of a little girl in her mouth.

Detective Peterson hears his wife’s strange sobs and he pounds up the stairs, remembering as he gets to the top: Don’t make a big deal of this, don’t make a big deal of this. When he reaches the television room Ellen is holding herself tightly, straining to keep the voice from her throat. The detective slips in beside her and gently loosens the knot of her arms. He guides her head onto his shoulder and encourages her to cry. She does, and it’s the cry of a grown woman, full of softness for the little girl who is so scared. While he rocks his wife Detective Peterson realizes, without guilt, that none of this is Ellen’s fault. He says, “Is banned, in cape.” She looks up, grateful for the words; restored, she feels his affection diminish the barrier. The detective has failed to notice that he did not, in fact, say the words It’s OK, it’s OK. Rather, he felt their effect on Ellen. At this point he feels ashamed, knowing how wrong he was to have blamed her. Detective Peterson scoops up the mug and asks Ellen if she wants another and she explains to him that she’s already had two cups and maybe better not. He kisses her cheek and leaves the room, turning back as he steps into the hallway to ask if she wants to watch television with him later. She says that she would. It has been so long. Television has been a source of great anguish to her, but maybe now, with her husband sitting beside her, it would be like it was. Detective Peterson walks into the kitchen just as the phone rings.