Pontypool Changes Everything Read online

  The song moves through her without seams or connection, and like a gentle learning curve it explains nothing while giving her the joyful experience of riding it. Steve smiles, encouraging her to sing. He closes his mouth to supply only a prompting hum. Ellen remembers that at one time the whole world seemed to love Duran Duran. And now, now, no one does. Steve drops the windows an inch, letting a warm wind pull at Ellen’s hair. Ellen turns her face and mouths the song; its lyrics are lost again in the new spring air. Cow shit. Wet trees. The first lungful of the new season is a rainbow of young gasses that thoroughly clean the world that has survived. A valley dips below the surface of the road, dragging trees down. The forest then flies back up, banking high above the car. Ellen gasps and touches her mouth. Four large white mailboxes skip by the window. Tiny red flags. Ellen has gone silent and thoughtful. For the rest of the trip Steve will continue singing snatches of songs. Girls On Film. This Is Planet Earth. Reflex. View To A Kill.

  17

  The Rio Grande

  In the waiting room of Dr. Mendez are crammed a thousand people. This place has a capacity of maybe seventy, so over nine hundred of these people are dead, crushed beyond recognition. Their internal organs have been pushed out and across a firm terrain of shoulders. For a full hour a popcorn flurry of brains, squeezed through the open lids atop hundreds of heads, have jiggled and danced against each other in the free air above the dead. Blood has found a way to the floor and it moves around ankles. The bodies are under a pressure that binds most in the upper torso, gently curving them in an arched structure across the room. It is under the centre, where legs have been lifted, that the survivors huddle. Their chins push above the blood’s surface and the tops of their heads drive up into the soles of stiff feet, trying to bend them at the ankle. They gasp desperately in these tiny pockets of red air.

  Dr. Mendez is seated at his desk, across which is stretched a body. He has decided to perform an unscheduled autopsy. So many strange deaths. Nothing to lose. Maybe a quick answer will show itself.

  All of the body cavities have been opened and then hastily folded shut. Mendez lifts a corner of cheek back into position with his pen. The structure of the room behind him groans, the studs are returning to ninety-degree relationships. The waiting room is emptying.

  All over the floor I imagine.

  Dr. Mendez is right. As the crammed bodies redistribute their contents, under pressure, to fill the upper and lower parts of the space, the waiting room is returning to its shape. The living few are drowning and will not survive.

  An epidemic of broken necks.

  As he says this to himself Mendez knows that in two million years another species will unearth the skeletons of human beings. And then they will begin a great pastime. What broke all their necks? Did they build their ceilings too low? Did kick-boxing aliens once visit this planet? Did a meteor fall from the sky and whip around the globe at shoulder height? Mendez stands and approaches his file cabinet. He thinks: Well this is when the good physician should off himself, overwhelmed and thrust suddenly into such a medieval role. But no, instead he counts the bodies on his floor — six. The best is probably yet to come.

  Down the road from the doctor’s office Ellen and Steve sit silently in the car. Steve is shaking his head. He wonders what all these cars are doing here. Ellen knows. She can hear the movement of zombies in the woods. The hunting stealth of exact steps carrying rabid people in the dark, just inside the bushes. Coiling their necks like cobras. Painful, empty minds. Their hundreds of round, open mouths hanging like bats from slick, wet branches.

  Ellen knocks her door open and runs up the centre of the road, back beyond the cars, and turns quickly to leap blind into a wall of soft cedar. Steve remains in the car. He is so afraid that he can’t even move. The zombies are indiscriminate, and even though Steve has been sweet beyond compare, they will snatch him from behind the wheel and fight among themselves for the chance to snap his neck.

  At that moment the angel who has been patiently rocking the ghost of the shallow and inconsolable Detective Peterson will look up with interest.

  Ellen hides just inside the trees. Huddled, she stays still and silent. Just a few feet from where she sits a continuous line of zombies make their way down a path that runs parallel to, but hidden from, the road. She closes her eyes and feels herself drop inside and then plunge like a loose elevator. She has no time to imagine where she’s going. The core of her experience is free falling and the only visible sign of this is in the tightening of her lips. When she comes to rest she looks up the hundreds of feet above her head where she is crouched beside a tree. The atmosphere around her is black and cavernous. Ellen thinks: So long as this is somewhere that I am, someone can find me. She blinks her eyes, attempting to adjust to the darkness, and discovers fine streamers of red waving vertically, caught in an updraft just beyond her reach. She steps toward them, thinking, again: If I can move in this place, someone can find me here. I am in a place that can support life. She presses her hands against the invisible wall and feels a cork-board of resistance; it finally feathers against her fingers and disappears. If you come here to find me, I hope you discover this: the walls aren’t really walls here. Keep going, keep going. You’ll find me.

  In this place, a bony little peninsula slicing into shallow silver water, Ellen is stepping forward, her bare toes gripping rock and displacing little black egg cups of water. When she reaches the crooked tip she returns to her crouch. She looks offinto the air above the water, into the streaks of a soft illumination around her, a hanging moss, impenetrable and glowing. This is an isolated place. Her heart sinks. People don’t come here. She drops her chin onto her knee and glides the backs of her knuckles, as if stroking a cat, in a little velvet inlet by her foot.

  18

  Your Name Is Wild

  How often is a baby supposed to cry? There are probably answers. You can picture them. A doctor is saying every crying baby is in distress. Another says every crying baby is an exploring person. Ten times a day. The baby cried constantly. The baby cried in the morning but only for an hour. An hour? Doctor? An hour? The baby never cries. Never? No, never. OK, we’ll have to run some tests. Never?

  Always. Les pulls over in Green River. The baby has been bent in a rigid bow on the seat beside him, crying a continuous wail for a full half-hour. Les slides his hand under the space beneath the baby’s arched back. Too intense. He tilts the stiff body back to rest across his palm. The wailing rises sharply. He’s in pain.

  Les carefully slips his hand away. He makes a reassuring face to the infant. He touches its toes and its face inflames. Why, little boy? A man nearby pulls himself out from under an open hood. He looks over at Les. Les panics for a second. He cups both his hands, scaring himself. They are made for stifling babies. He feels a rush of compassion for the baby, but his compassionate hands can only press into the seat surrounding it, and failing thus he lifts them to his chest and grabs handfuls of himself, compassionately. I don’t know your name.

  Its fingers are as blue as a baby sparrow’s head, and its entire body is locked in scream. Les looks out the window to make sure nobody else is nearby. The man repairing his car has gone. Repaired. The screams have caused the forest to close itself off and tuck its edges into a finer line under the sky. The painful tone sustains a frequency of such duration that it becomes soundless, and Les feels the blood leave his face. The silence packs his ears. He is afraid because he knows that the soundless car, leaning like a spike among the tick of gas pumps, is prompting him to know something — to know exactly, now, why his son is in such pain.

  Withdrawal.

  An opiate withdrawals crack jones intolerance of time.

  I may have to kill my son.

  Les hovers his hands over the baby, now little more than a knot of his own agony, and drops three fingers lightly on its face. Such a small commitment to infanticide. He curls the fingers up into his palm and withdraws the fist. Loving his son has suddenly become impossible.
Les steps out of the car, and when he slams the door he again hears the little creature’s pain. He feels a terrible flood of guilt and grief. These feelings are kept from spilling by a tiny mopping sponge of self-pity.

  His encroaching insanity has already converted this shadowy experience, which sits near his centre, into a delicate model. A mobile of silver half moons and flat gold slippers redistributes Les around the car. He feels the threads of suspension and the little wind that means so much now. Something is still here. Something can be done. If I Jail, I will destroy that baby and kill myself. Strong alternatives are needed. My son and I are crossing the line from sound to unsound body.

  Across the highway is a mall. A drugstore. Les feels a strange smirk twist his face, and for the first time he loves his son, the little drug addict son of a bitch. He was born knowing what I know. When he reenters the car he opens the surface of his body onto the searing noise, feeling it drill deeply, and he smiles at his son through this atmosphere of pain.

  19

  Sound

  Having never robbed a store before, Les has a nagging feeling, as he fingers the antihistamines, that the handgun tucked against his back just isn’t enough. He looks up at a camera swaying like a metal remora in the corner, and he brings his hand up to his face. Mask. He goes down the school-supplies aisle and, sure enough, finds a plastic mask tucked behind stack of lab books. It’s a cheap one. A thin elastic is hastily attached to the sides with staples. Small. He turns it over. A smiling blonde witch. A good witch. Les puts it on and reaches behind for the gun as he makes his way to the pharmacist. He waves the gun at a shape he can little more than locate through the slit windows of the dark interior of the mask. He sees a young man, a sideburn. Hand comes up. Stops. Goes down again.

  “OK. Don’t shoot. Anything you want.”

  Suddenly the elastic snaps and Les feels a wasp sting his ear. The mask jumps from his face directly into the open, pleading hands of the pharmacist. Les pulls the trigger of the gun and it clicks. It just clicks. No bullets. Les instinctively coughs to cover up the tiny noise, to camouflage it quickly. The pharmacist is looking down with horror at the mask in his hands. He feels the sheer panic of torn impulses and misses the click. He drops the mask on the counter.

  “I won’t look. I didn’t see you. Please don’t shoot.”

  Realizing he’s still in the game, Les sweeps the mask up, inadvertently dragging its code across a smudged window, setting off the piercing beep. A fuckin’ alarm. Les levels the gun at the pharmacist and fires. Click. This second click is covered up by the louder clang of the cash register opening as the pharmacist tries to illustrate the source of the beep. Les thinks, I’m doing a lot of killing. He waves the gun and instructs the pharmacist: “Dilaudid. All of your Dilaudid.”

  The pharmacist races down an aisle and returns with a large plastic jar and drops it in front of Les. As he turns to leave, an elderly couple who have been watching everything take a step backward. He raises the gun and clicks it three times. Kill everybody. The couple don’t even flinch. Les barks at them and they run. Kill everybody.

  20

  How Many Times Have I Told You?

  As they pull out of Green River, father and son are dissolving the blue halves of a Dilaudid under their tongues. As they sail through Greenwood, some minutes later, Dad thinks to himself: Well really, if the baby gets half, maybe I should take one and a half. He twirls off the lid and pops another into his mouth. Beside him his son is quiet. This is what it takes. Les flops a hand across the comfort of the steering wheel. I’m stoned. He feels the tiny fractures in his elbow melt over and strengthen. I have been conscripted into an army. Les smiles to himself. That kid at the pharmacy knows a little more now. The world has revealed the gun it points at him. Along the stretch of road between Brooklyn and Manchester, Les has his first fantasy about life with his son. A son he names Ernie.

  21

  It’s a Wonderful Life With Ernie

  The church in Pontypool is one of those rural teeth that have turned slightly toward the back of the throat, missed by the toothbrush. It appears as a space, sometimes dark with dirt, sometimes cast in shadow. A round black-orange structure that sits off the back, under the trees, hides a tiny cemetery from the road. Two black Labradors are running between white-skinned headstones. One dog moves with a dip and find gait, and the other follows, not trusting its own navigation because of the chopstick deformity in its jaw which causes its lower teeth to slap eastward when it goes south. The dogs stop in the woods just beyond the back row of headstones and they circle a contraption made of metal tubing and the flesh of old tires. The lead dog takes a hunk of this rubber in its mouth and growl whines at the other while it blinks its intelligent eye from side to side. The contraption is a large cartoon of a bear trap made out of a bike rack. Around the playing dogs are trees cut to their stumps.

  This is the theatre of Les Reardon. The sculpture, now being dragged to the back door of the church by one of the Labs, is the skeletal form of a stage prop that was to have been central in his first production, The Harrowing of Hell. Les had spent many afternoons sitting on a stump here, blowing cigarette smoke at the bugs in his face — a new habit — picturing the children of Pontypool emerging through hinged jaws to climb up onto a sunlit bed of moss and lie spent and ancient at the feet of their proud parents. The Harrowing of Hell was not to be. The drama coach of Pontypool, Les Reardon suffered a massive relapse of a painful mental illness. He was treated; however, that treatment forced him to eventually stagger off home from school, under the draining influence of strong medication. His wife, Helen, and their son, Ernie, spent the last couple of months walking as light as prayer around Les as he lay on the couch under an orange throw. He clutched the remote in two fingers that he poked through the loose crochet of the blanket. The medication eventually worked, and the drama of his psychosis quieted; still, he was so weighted with the drug’s wisdom that he was unable to coach, unable to lead the children from hell to their parents’ feet.

  The priest who had donated an area around the cemetery to the teacher’s project took pity on the man who lost his mind in the woods behind his church. When Les returned some weeks later, altered but less wild, to wander with stiff limbs across his stage, the priest offered him a job. The job that the holy man concocted for Les already existed in larger city parishes. He applied for the funding and was immediately granted the means to hire the first rural Custodian of Dogs. Les managed to walk and feed the dogs for one week only — the brief spell after his energy rose from under the medication and before that energy was wasted against a chaotic range of depressions. As his desire to live met with the life he would have to live, Les slipped on his own weight, down a rope that dropped him under a crocheted blanket on the couch, where he sits, once again, with two fingers poking through the loose weave to direct a remote control. This summer, Ernie experiences his first vacation from school as an adolescent. The priest, who still needed an employee, gave the son the father’s job and Ernie inherited the title Custodian of Dogs.

  Ernie spent July wandering in disgust among the ruins of his father’s life: the destroyed bits of forest, the hiding places under plastic. And the job: waiting for dogs to shit — a wait his father was now unable to endure. In the evening he couldn’t bear to be in the same house as the man, so he’d invent things he had to do at the church and then drive off in the car his father could barely understand. His nightly request for the keys was met with an uncomprehending stare and lips so dry that Ernie winced when they touched to speak.

  Tonight, Helen will answer the phone and learn that someone has stolen one hundred and forty-six dollars from the church’s petty cash. In three days the police will call to tell her that they have apprehended Ernie Reardon. She spends these days comforting a poor husband who has long retreated into an uncaring silence. In the coming months, as his depression sinks into a lifelong organization, Les will never miss an opportunity to appear misunderstood and wounded. He feels him
self domineering, emerging in his family for the first time, and he will twist forever in a kind of happiness that will never abandon him.

  22

  Midlife Heat Score

  As they pull through Myrtle Station an OPP car passes them and slows. Les looks at the baby drowsing peacefully on the seat, its small feet pressed against the barrel of a handgun and the bulk jar of Dilaudid sitting on the floor mat. The arrangement makes Les think of pieces gathered at the start square of a board game. He moves the handgun onto the floor and slides it with his foot under the seat. The lights on the OPP cruiser fire off and Les pulls his stolen car onto the shoulder. The cop steps out onto the pavement of the highway and, before approaching Les’s vehicle, takes in the spot: the six cows gathered near the muddy back of a barn, the twenty odd birds strung like pointy teeth on a hydro wire. He calculates something, reading the fresh spring with a local’s discerning eye, and moves his hat forward to accept a message given. He stops halfway between the two cars and realizes that he’s approaching a stolen vehicle. He drops to a squat, withdraws his sidearm and, with his hands joined and fingers pointing along with the barrel, shouts from his elbows. Les lays his hand on the spot that has grown so comforting to him, his son’s warm belly, and decides, while there’s time, barely perhaps, to imagine yet another life for him and little Ern.

  23

  Yet Another Life For Him and Little Em

  “Did Ernie take the Boy or the Girl for lunch?”

  Helen hasn’t sat down all morning. She hovers over the kitchen sink: above it stretches a narrow shelf littered with Mommy’s drug things. A spoon with a soggy bit of filter; a lighter; three origami packets lined in some priority to the left; a thin razor blade. Helen pushes a long fingernail into the enveloped opening at the top of one of the packets.