Pontypool Changes Everything Read online

  “Les, honey.”

  Les is seated at the kitchen table. A light sweat has broken out on his forehead.

  “No, thank you dear.”

  Helen stops twirling the plunger of a syringe in her spoon and looks over her shoulder at her husband.

  “No? I mean, no. What do you mean? I didn’t get that.”

  Les scratches his shoulders with crossed arms.

  “I mean no, darling, I’m OK. I did some of the Girl after I did the Boy, so I’m alright — you just make yourself right, there, don’t worry about me.”

  “OK, OK. I’m glad that you did the Girl already, that’s what I’m fixing here, but I asked whether Ernie went off with the Boy and the Girl. He never forgets the Boy, he thinks that’s all he needs, but he misses half his lessons, so I tell him if he takes some of the Girl, not too much y’know, but a little wake up, and he’ll do better at school. Makes the Boy a nice after-school wind down. So I was asking, did Ernie take the Girl with him to school this morning?”

  Les is doing his morning reading, an interview with Liv Tyler in Details; beside his right hand is a thawing cup of wheat grass juice.

  “Oh honey, I don’t know. He left early.”

  Helen walks across the kitchen floor with a syringe dangling and clinging to the crook of her arm. She stands in front of a large television. A Breakfast Television celebrity is watching a small man drag a comb through brown paint to create a fake wood grain. Helen observes the process, mindless of the unadministered drug laying like a broken branch from her arm. As the segment concludes, opening a replay box over the audience and a scroll of the next segment beneath them, Helen lifts the syringe away from her forearm and works it slowly, playing in her arm with its searching tip. She is obviously enjoying herself as she parries with the moment of injection. The moment comes and goes and Helen returns to the kitchen sink. She turns her back to it and leans long enough to push herself into a walk through the kitchen again. Her walking, not quite a pace, and not without some meaningful gestures, is what she concentrates on, experimenting with the pleasure of appearing not so crazy.

  “I think … I think . . . Lester, I think Ernie is doing really well at school.”

  Les is reading the advertisement for a hair-loss treatment on the page opposite the Liv Tyler interview. The interview continues seventy-five pages later, but Les thinks he may never return to this particular point in the magazine again, so he’s taking his time before moving on. Helen has left the kitchen again, and she exits down the hallway. But she returns too soon to have actually left for any other reason than the opportunity to come back to the kitchen.

  “He’s really good with math, y’know? He gets that from me, I think. I have a cousin who’s an architect. But he also gets it from you, you’re good with numbers.”

  Helen disappears and returns again, this time having retrieved three notebooks from a room down the hall. She sits across from Les, who has moved on to the conclusion of the Liv Tyler interview. Helen stacks the books in front of her and opens the first with a formality that reminds her of her own mother.

  “Look at this . . . Oh my god! . . . This is totally neat . . . He’s doing algebra … I knew it . . .”

  Helen looks up, irritated. Les is flipping through the magazine now, comparing the icons that signify the conclusions of articles, wondering whether the feeling of conclusion is just an effect of their appearance on the pages.

  “Oh, look, he does drawings here in the margins . . . That’s cool . . . He could draw for the comics . . .”

  Les looks up, closing the magazine on a finger to mark his place.

  “Do some of the Boy. I think I need some of the Boy — let’s split a tenth, honey.”

  Helen closes the notebook and returns to her narrow shelf. “I wonder if he forgot those books this morning. He needs his notebooks.” She opens the lid of a packet with a fingernail. “A student can’t take notes without a notebook. How come he left his notebooks here?” As she sets up a small blue jar of distilled water on the counter she flips two antiseptic swipes out of her pyjama pocket. “Maybe he has a locker. Maybe the books he uses at school are in his locker.”

  Les is distracted. He’s looking at a large photograph of Lena Olin that fills a tall page in an old issue of Interview. A bar of sand clings to the side of her bare foot. So wrinkled, he thinks. Not age, just . . .foot wrinkled.

  “Sweety, I’ve only got a quarter left . . .”

  Les rumples his nose with a loose fist; the skin of his face, now arid, folds and bends without resisting.

  “Sweety, how … uh … how much do you have?”

  Les scratches the back of his head with the vigour of a porch dog. He has been preparing to ignore this question long before it has occurred to Helen. Not that he won’t answer, and she won’t mind asking two or three times, it’s just a kind of protocol of married life.

  “Hmmm … I thought I had at least a half. . . Well, let’s do a Tee anyway, right honey?”

  Les is drawing bubbles on a photograph of a martini glass. Mmmmm. Hmmm.

  “OK, yes, a nice half-Tee, that’ll be nice for us. Uh . . . Les, how much do you have left?”

  Les draws the stick of an umbrella leaning out of the martini.

  “Sorry, sugar. What did you say?”

  Helen snaps a blade through a pebble of heroin, pinning the halves on either side of the tiny knife with her fingers. She asks again with a voice that is patient and refreshed.

  “Oh, I was just wondering how much of the Boy you have left.”

  Les pushes the magazine to the edge of the table, conscious of what it would take to send it sailing onto the floor.

  “How much of the Girl is left there?”

  Helen lifts her hands from what she’s doing and slides another packet into the area of her operation. She opens it without lifting it from the shelf.

  “Two big grams.”

  She looks over her shoulder at Les. She feels she deserves her answer now.

  “Three-quarters. Second drawer. In the purple box. Pull it out.”

  Les puts a flint of power in his mouth and it only allows him to use short sentences. When Helen puts the larger bindle on the table in front of Les, he covers it with one hand, watching her back while she loads two syringes.

  “Here darling.”

  They silently administer the heroin and listen, in the seconds that follow, for more comfortable breathing in each other. Helen smiles at Les and he returns the gesture. Her smile twists apologetically and she returns to the shelf. The Girl again. Christ. Helen, you’re not in control of what you’re doing. Les says nothing as he spins the packet towards himself and opens it.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Helen jumps, dropping a new syringe into the sink.

  “Fuck Les, fuck!”

  “No. No. Really, Helen, what the fuck is this? There’s only a couple of Tees here.”

  “No! Oh no! Fuck! Fuck! Are you sure? Lemme see!”

  “There was almost a gram in here this morning! Where the fuck is it?”

  “I don’t know, Les! I don’t fucking know. Oh God!”

  Helen is screaming now. Crying and angry, she reaches across the table for the packet. Les makes quick fists, striking distance; to protect her he stomps his feet.

  “Ernie! Fucking Ernie! He’s selling at school! The fucker!”

  Helen whips open the top drawer and pulls out a handgun.

  “OK you little fuck! I can’t fuckin’ believe him! I’ll kill him.”

  “No you won’t.”

  Helen looks up, confused, still crying, the rims of her eyes are flicking around her sockets.

  “But keep the fucking gun out anyway.”

  Helen places the gun on the table and with a gluey pull at her nose she returns to the shelf. Les stares at her back. She is struggling with the cocaine, messing up her fix and saying “Fuck!” every six or seven seconds. Les picks up the gun, checks the chamber for rounds, and lays it flat against t
he inside of his thigh.

  “I can’t fucking take this. I need some music.”

  24

  Yet Another Life for Him And Em: Part 2

  Les looks down at his son before stepping out onto the highway. He takes the word Ernie away from his boy. He leaves the baby to scratch, nameless and alone, at the red patches that have risen on his wrists. The OPP officer and Les stare at each other. Neither of them has a clear idea of what happens next. They are both expecting to die, though they have probably never been in safer company. In fact, they are both pretty much willing to die for each other. The officer makes the first move. Gracefully and delicately, he floats his right hand out and down. Down. Lie down. The gesture is so compelling that a shrub nearby bends several of its tiny white flowers toward the ditch it overhangs. It encourages Les to crouch against the road, to block out a place there. On his stomach, Les breathes out the weight of his back onto his lungs, blowing clear a patch of asphalt by his cheek.

  This is the end of the line.

  At the station house Les is put into custody. He is asked quietly for his rare possessions. The arresting officer is agreeable and polite. The superficial pleasure of the procedure baffles Les. It reminds him of a Latin exercise from school. He is a noun in declension — all the handcuffs, the five coils of smoke on his fingertips, the secretive case, the ablative justice of the peace and an entire world that will, except for him, run on a series of sentences that begin with the letter O.

  Les is sitting in just such a circle. He has given his son up to the law. He has surrendered his illegal firearm. The controlled substance he shared with the baby. The stolen vehicle and its violent history. Murder. He has given the OPP a murder.

  Les sits in a chair in the small police station outside Caesarea not knowing that a growing number of people in Ontario are now also giving the OPP murder. All across the province vicious gangs of cannibals are moving on the police, sweeping through like a system of weather, snatching up large parts of the population. Les fishes in his pocket for one of the Dilaudid that he had managed to scoop from the jar before his arrest and he pops it in his mouth. He has already begun to contemplate other forms of consuming the drug, and he anticipates, with an excitement that makes him chew the pill, a man he’ll meet in the shower who’ll slip a syringe into his hand and then drop his fingers against the side of his penis. The officer has left him sitting alone for over an hour to picture prison life. In an adjacent room Les hears the first yelp of a son who is stirring back up into cutting discomfort.

  There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into diphthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught by surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and the sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

  If Les were to remove his shirt, turn his broad back to a light source and allow a map to be drawn there, sharp metal flags could be used to mark the progress of his dead wife’s name, while the top of his underwear could be used to absorb blood as it flows past his belt. The curved red stain that dips over the cleft of his buttocks resembles the smile that has yet to become important to him.

  He stands over his son, a little pink twitching man, and he shrugs out our pushpins as he lifts the infant in his blanket. The baby spits out the pill. Les has to insert it into the baby’s throat across the tongue with a finger. Les holds the tiny body against himself; it resists like an insect would, kicking with limbs that improvise. Les holds on in a crush, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

  Soon the baby slackens, the way that babies do when they give up, and Les realizes that he is alone in the police station. Alone with his son and, lying beside a jar of Dilaudid, on the desk, both his gun and the keys to his car. Les puts the keys in his pocket and, juggling the jar and baby like twins, thinks: not mine, really, nobody’s.

  He leaves the empty station and finds his car. Driving it from the small pound, he feels a little less excited about his escape than he had about his capture. The objects he carries cling together in inventory. They are only designed to go full circle and he feels them moving beside him. He hears them: “How can we stay meaningful in this, the loose wing of your adventure?”

  Les looks down at the son he renames Ernie in desperation, and he cries because a mighty army of questions is bursting in on him from somewhere. I am too small. A tear, followed quickly by another, hangs off his upper lip and turns to a salty drizzle on his tongue. I want to be him. Les lays his hand across baby Ernie’s tiny forearm and he feels the cool chiaroscuro of the tubular limb in his palm — a peaceful place, a narcotic baby world.

  I want to drive my car in there.

  25

  Somewhere Familiar

  One of the circles that remains for Les to complete is made round in Caesarea. Les pulls the grey Datsun up into a driveway over an oil stain that drops like a tumbler beneath the car, clicking into place midway along the chassis. The house is a long lakefront structure with wide windows. He steps out of the car. He doesn’t recognise this place, though he has been here before. He does hear the distant jungle thrum of his wife’s name distorted and repeated by a relay of zombie mumbling. He can’t distinguish the word as he stands searching the white air for the source of what he thinks, with alarm, must be a very loud noise somewhere. Some kind of crazy tree bugs. Les scoops his inventory out of the car and sneaks like Santa Claus around the house, into the backyard that slopes its fine yellow lawn down to Lake Scugog.

  “Hello!”

  The voice is deep and torn; booming out around him it scrapes the water.

  “Helen!”

  What the hell? Les turns from the boat he’s loading with guns and drugs and babies. The Knockouts. The woman he had struck earlier, still in her pyjamas, is lying on her back, tucked under the hedge that Les has just walked by. She waves a hand that’s missing two fingers and bangs her knees together in what sounds like an attempt to strike out the consonant L.

  “Helen!” The little bald man appears through the sliding door. He is not Helen. He is also in pyjamas that bear a long stripe of mud. He grabs the doorframe and launches himself, on hips that pop audibly, into a surprisingly quick flight across the yard. In seconds he is on the dock driving his open mouth at Les’s face. The zombie’s mouth is now telescopic in its reach, and migrating birds take off and land through a hole that opens on his cheek. Les clamps onto the fiend’s arms and propels him into the water. He then jumps into the boat and hauls on the rip cord. The Knockout emerges waist high at the rear of the craft. He has been screaming under water and his voice pierces the air, exploding past sluggish submarine vibrations. He leaps up into the boat, locking his teeth on Les’s knee, and grabs the gun from the seat. With a dorsal fin flip of his arm the gun flies up onto the shore. Les pulls on the cord again, knocking the zombie’s head from his knee with a speeding elbow. The engine finally blathers to life.

  The propeller, it should be said, is entering the zombie’s stomach. It releases an underwater ticker tape parade around the man’s waist. His intestines blow their contents out into the lake like party favours unravelling and filling with breath, marking and limiting the excitement. A school of perch, with pointy hats that fall drunkenly
over their eyes and straps that pull at delicate gills, is circulating through the loose ambergris. The zombie caves in over the cannon ball in its middle and folds in half on the bottom of Lake Scugog. The boat, something of a paintbrush now, is still tied to the dock. As it extends itself it floats a long feather boa of blood on the clear water. Les scrambles to the front to untie the boat, and after some jagged manoeuvring, made complicated by the interfering scalp of the zombie, the boat is soon cutting the lake into one of the infinite number of wakes that water places under all vessels. Les and his son are finally carried away, on a silver tray, out from Ontario’s zombies towards and horribly close to a fierce little island that is caught in a discrete destiny, one that’s strange to the rest of the province.

  26

  What Is So Fine?

  Ellen Peterson is not a zombie. She is standing in the dark, at the edge of a pool. She is not entirely sure whether she has walked here or whether magical inward steps have led her here to a place that she makes of herself. The surface of the pool reflects the full moon, and, Ellen thinks, it looks like a large plate in the centre of a satin tablecloth. Ellen drops to a crouch and places the tips of her fingers into the cool, still water. She wriggles her fingers and watches the reflected moon. It soon breaks into diamonds on the surface — diamonds she feels against the back of her hand. Ellen stops moving her fingers and the moon collects itself as white filings haloed over a magnet. Then it breaks again. This time clear in half. Someone is in the water. Ellen shrinks back from the edge. She focuses in the dark and silhouettes start to appear. A fallen tree lies across the bushes. This is familiar. A boulder, now lightly glowing, sits in the water at the far side of the pool. This is the carp pond. Ellen is relieved that she is in fact somewhere: a somewhere that she knows. I am the reeve of this pond. Someone is gliding through the water near the boulder. Ellen feels less threatened. She has jurisdiction here.