Tony Burgess: Pontypool Changes Everything

“Hello?”

“Detective?”

“Yes?”

“We need a report on what happened this afternoon. The sargent has called in the RCs on this one. They think we got more than one killer. We gotta find Les Reardon.”

“Purse snatch… purse snatch… fucker…”

Peterson lowers the phone and feels a wind across his face. Bits of words catch in the sunlight across the top of the stove like barbs off a wire. He swings the receiver through them and they part in eddies around his wrist. He brings the phone back up to his ear.

“What? Detective Peterson, are you there? Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Yeah, sir, what did you say?”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“Say?”

“Yeah, what did you say?”

“Say?”

“Are you OK, sir?”

“Is barn, is messy.”

“I think I’ll come out there, sir, if that’s all right. I gotta couple of things to do first, but I think I’ll come out there. Is that all right, sir?”

Peterson thinks, Well, there isn’t anything wrong. I’m fine for fuck’s sake, I just can’t seem to say so. And he says: “Dirty dump… dirty day.”

“Uh… detective, we have a very serious situation unfolding in the region and if you don’t think you can… uh… handle it right now… I have to tell somebody.”

“Dirty, dirty, dirty.”

Peterson places the phone back in its cradle. He hears his wife call his name and he jumps. A flash of rage fills his chest. He runs into the living room and snatches the TV Guide before dashing up the stairs. By the time he reaches the top he calms again. He hears Ellen singing softly to herself. The song is very familiar. He can’t name it. As he enters the television room and lays the TV Guide in her lap he asks her what the song is. She tells him and he smiles, remembering its source. He hums a bar as he flips the macramé throw over the top of the television screen. Ellen suggests a television show and the detective pretends to consider it — he’s going to watch whatever she wants, and eventually smiles at her choice. The television pops on and the Rembrandt hues of a soap opera appear. This is the program they had decided on, and as they settle in each other’s arms to begin watching it they both feel an identical discomfort. Without discussing it Ellen switches the channel until she finds something. It happens to be exactly what the detective would have chosen.

Night Court. A rerun.

As Bull looks for a place to hide a mop, the Petersons nod to the closet that waits off camera.

The moon breaks into little pieces and sprinkles itself as confetti onto the front lawn of the Peterson household. A man in uniform steps up to the front door. He lays the back of his hand flat across the doorbell and by sinking his second knuckle he depresses the button.

Inside the house, up the flight of stairs that the front door opens to, is the television room. Detective Peterson sits up on the edge of the couch, straightening his arms to his knees. His head turns in the direction of the door. His eyes are new. Near him a wounded caribou pulls at a leg wedged in ice. Ellen looks to him, in the way she has had to these last few months, and when the bell rings a second time he turns on her, clasping one hand around her face and the other across the back of her neck. He attempts to shush her, but his teeth are too wet and his bottom lip is too sloppy.

The Honeymoon in Aphasia is over.

Detective Peterson’s difficulties speaking have spread out to his face, and now, in his panic, he feels that he must escape through the only door left open: his own mouth.

Ellen scrambles to resurrect the barrier between them — He is sick, really sick — and she rolls her tomato backwards from the corner of her mouth, subtracting the afternoon. Something is wrong with my husband. He’s holding my head like a newspaper. The detective drops Ellen’s head from his hands, giving her neck an assaultive twist, and he leaps from the couch. He pulls a painting off the wall and throws it across the television. Ellen has a sudden impatience with her own disorder and she belts her better self into action. She rises off the couch. He’s willing to break his own neck to stop me. She pushes her husband back against the wall and runs up the hall and down the stairs.

Before she can reach the bottom her husband’s body rolls against the backs of her legs. She knows the level this has reached. So fast. He’s going to break his neck to stop me. Ellen sweeps aside her disability with a flat hand on her husband’s back and she vaults over his pommel horse body. The detective spins and swipes at her ankle before she reaches the door.

The man on the other side enters the scene by slamming his body against the barrier. Ellen has rolled out of the way and the new man in her life is wrapped around the old one. The uniform pulls his head back to take in what he holds in his arms. No time. A hot mouth clamps onto his lips and sinks its teeth to close them. The uniform feels the power of an industrial press punching into the centre of his face.

Ellen scuttles backwards down the hall, and as her husband flicks his head she hears the snap of both men’s necks breaking. The detective drops the body to the ground and he turns his damaged upper torso toward Ellen. His mouth is full and he releases the contents down his shirt, hissing across bloody teeth. His bottom lip jumps up to make a consonant but falls short and swings slack across his chin. He sways his head, grinding the break in his neck. Ellen thinks she sees a wolf appear in shadow across the back of his throat and she fires at the blue moon of his uvula.

The already taxed anatomy of the detective surrenders utterly to the bullet and his head lifts from his shoulders; clear of them, it flips like a coin. The head drops to the floor, sitting against the door on the empty sock of its neck, and looks directly at Ellen. The look, though inanimate, is fresh with the experience of abjection, of failure. This look, familiar to the followers of zombies, is not entirely new to Ellen either. And if she weren’t so tightly packaged with terror she would, probably, cry.

The long pier in Port Perry floats its spine out into Lake Scugog, and among its ribs bob long sanitary sailboats with their own spare and polished spines. Seagulls lead each other’s capes in and off the tips of these skeletons, keeping the temperature just past winter with their cries. A great deal of soap floats in white castles out from the orange waterlines of the boats and they repel the surface slicks of gasoline like poles meeting. A boy wearing an outsized captain’s hat that loops off his head sits on the edge of a boat watching the patterns of gasoline as they leap clear on the smooth woven surface of the water. A giant goldfish, in fat flames, appears below. The boy catches his breath. The carp is almost as big as he is. The two creatures hang in the air marvelling at their equal volume, sharing the suspension, the yellow light of gills and the white ring of an ankle. The carp leans off the surface and carries its glow to the bottom, disappearing from the boy, who looks up at the seagulls that have brought their paper flight to within feet of him. He thinks that if clouds could shit they’d shit seagulls. He notices an empty boat floating close to shore across the harbour.

Les Reardon opens his eyes and watches a seagull at his feet tearing through the back of a perch. He slams the side of the boat with his foot, but the seagull doesn’t move. He flaps both his legs apart, hitting the sides, and this time the bird jumps into the air. It rises a foot or two and then returns inverted, standing this time with the tip of its beak through the forehead of the fish. Les leaps up and, missing the bird, squishes the desiccated fish in his hands, sending it in a slurp up into the air and overboard. The seagull hangs above his head, screaming, and finally lifts backward.