Pontypool Changes Everything (7 page)

At the outskirts of this scene a small observing crowd has assembled. Among them are three people in the early stages of the disease. They step back and look at each other meaningfully. They’ve been given something: “Hello. Helen. Hello.” And further back, in a house on the corner, a full-blown zombie sits at an open window howling “Helen!” across southern Parkdale.

A woman who is stepping across the railway tracks that cut through the
CNE
looks up and calls back through a bloodstained bubble: “Hello!”

Inside the house Les lies across a kitchen counter, frozen momentarily by the burn of hairline fractures in his elbows. He straightens them painfully, making angel wings of space in the dishes and debris that he’s sent crashing to the floor. He wiggles his nose like a witch at the thick gas of garbage. He notices a wasp’s nest of crack pipes on the kitchen table.

Helen’s a drug addict.

Les steps into the hall and cranes his head around the corner.

A living room. Empty. A huge new sofa and a television. There are about eighty burns packed tightly into a small area on the outer edge of one of the cushions. A laptop computer idles on the floor. It’s marked twice with long burnt grooves.
The writer’s a drug addict.
Les proceeds up the hall. There are five cell phones and two pagers on a low table by the front door.
They’re dealing.
Les hears someone coming down the stairs, so he steps back through a door into a small bathroom. He closes the door, softly releasing the knob to close it silently.

A man’s voice. “What the fuck is the army doing out there?”

Les opens the medicine cabinet. It’s lined with prescription bottles. Dilaudid. Percodan.
Junkies. My son.
He opens the doors under the sink. About twenty stiff, dirty rags. No. Diapers. The dirt shifts position, a vortex
of dots. Baby cockroaches the size of pinheads turn in a hurricane pattern at the edge of a diaper.
My little boy.
Two large plastic containers with biohazard labels hide in a shadow at the left. Used syringes.
My boy is learning the three R’s.

“What the fuck? Hey! Is somebody in here?”

Les grabs one of the plastic jugs. The side has been cut away. Les turns the opening upward. It holds a crazy tiara of stingers; bright, gleaming needles fill the space.
Never touch us, don’t even look at us for very long.
When the door opens behind him, Les swings the jug, releasing a swarm of tiny missiles across a man’s face and chest. The needles grab skin with their tips, and some, pushed by the weight of other syringes, are plunged deeper. The view from inside this man’s body would appear something like the night sky in the city, thousands of stars becoming visible. In the country, millions. One of the needles slides precisely into his tearduct, destroying its tiny architecture before burrowing far enough to permanently ruin the man’s ability to narrow his eyes. This particular jab also causes the man to flip a gun out of his hand. The gun slams heavily against the back of the toilet, cracking it, and then spins halfway around the rim before being carried to the bottom by the weight of its handle. The man collapses against the wall, disbelieving —
You just don’t do that
— and he watches Les retrieve the weapon from the bowl.

The first thing to exit the gun is a twist-tie drool of toilet water. The second is a speeding bullet. The bullet disappears into the man’s head and exits along with a single chunk of brain. The tofu cube of brain walks
down the wall on its slippery corners and covers the black spider hole left by the bullet.

All of the doors are closed at the top of the stairs. Les bangs on one. A baby cries.

“Helen?”

No answer.

“Helen?”

He breaks the door down. The room is empty except for a baby who doesn’t look over as he continues wailing. Les feels an energizing burst of relief.

“Helen?”

No answer. Les steps over to another door, and this time kicks it in. Helen is in this room. She is lying on her back across a bed. She has been dead for days. Her yellow arms are marked with bruises that run from her shoulders to hands that are pulled back in retraction. Eyeliner-black track marks fill the crooks of her arms. Her face is dry and large, with purple roots beneath the skin. A cracked riverbed of fluid crosses her cheek.

Helen is dead.

Beside the cupped toes of her right foot a spoon lies halfway under a roll in the carpet where she has kicked it.
Not paying attention.
The smell of her body causes Les to grab his mouth, and this sweet odour sinks deep enough into his face to prevent tears. He yells her name.

“Helen!”

The zombies in the yard outside are dead, and so the alliterative chain does not begin again. The first chain, however, is now speeding across Vaughn Township and west, deep into Mississauga.

Les returns to the playpen and lifts out his son.

The intersection of King and Dufferin is a solid cube of ice that Les has to pass through. The sun is lowering shadows and Les sees the dark drifts of jawlines, the eyes that spin like worms away from each other. A woman, her blanketed shoulders pinned against the bus shelter, listens to a siren: all mother she ignores it. Disappointed again, she pulls a towel up across her face. The ice cube melts behind him and Les spreads his fingers across the baby’s belly.
I am the adult.
He feels the tiny bird cage of the child’s chest.
Mother.
He remembers a guidance counsellor in grade 10 closing a file and, with a hand-washing return of a pencil to its packet, sliding his chair back from the desk to introduce the door to Les, saying: “You will probably end up alone. You shut me out, I shut you out.”

This baby is strange. The most important thing in my life
… 15
strange to me.

And it is crying.

Loud.

Les Reardon has not even pictured where he will go. The place does exist, of course. But where he goes is only partially dependent on pictures. For now the picture is a billboard in Gravenhurst. Not yet subjected to feasibility, it confuses southbound motorists with its baby-blue pyjamas, blonde widow’s peak and praying hands.

Ellen’s praying hands, pointed under her chin with infant formality, drop to her side; she leaves a fingerprint of her husband’s blood there, like a broad cleft. Her head is clearer and softer now. She stands at a full open acre of intersection in Pontypool and confers with a greater range of Ellens than ever before. The real estate agent, the Bewdley priestess, the killer of her husband, the reeve, the degenerated mind. Near the centre of each is a shrewd and deflecting person, more lens than light, who will tell Ellen when she has stopped being useful to herself.

Not yet. Ellen feels a clam-sized piece of breakfast seal off the base of her throat. It frightens her.
Now is when you just choke to death.
She presses four fingers deeply into the top of her chest. The clam leans off the opening and releases her swallow. The relief softens her mind further and she makes a fist of her long hand to push against her mouth. The crying that she feels is very young, and she cannot trust herself to let it up. The reeve soothes Ellen, telling her that these next
few moments won’t matter, she can feel exactly as she wishes — cry, Ellen, go ahead, cry.

A car leaps into the air over a hill to the west. As it slows, Ellen, the killer of her husband, turns her back, not daring to look down at what she’s wearing. She stares out into the field and, imitating a painting she once saw, holds her hand like a visor off her brow. She reaches down to bunch the side of her dress, still in imitation of the painting, and recognizes the fabric.
Damn, I’m in my dressing gown.
The car slows before it reaches the crossroad and it stops on the shoulder beside her. There is no way to collect herself, she knows, and even if there were she would still be incapable of speech. The sound of a man’s voice. In the turn she makes toward it, Ellen decides to present herself as unstable and unaware. A golf pro struck by lightning. A movie star found wandering.

“Excuse me?” The passenger window drops and a thin face appears. “Oh, my dear woman! Oh, precious, listen, get in the car.”

Ellen steps back and pulls the collars of her robe against her chin.

“
OK
sweetheart, it looks to me like you already failed Street Proofing 101, so you be brave and step over here and talk to Steve,
OK
? I just want to help.”

Steve pops the car door open and slaps the seat. Ellen looks at his face and decides this man is so exactly who she wouldn’t approach for help on a country road that he just has to be fine. As soon as she is seated inside the car a violent shake seizes her and her bare feet wag noisily across the plastic ribs of the floor mat.

“Good Lord! You’re having a trauma! What’s your name darling? You poor thing. Have you eaten? You’re lucky I came by. I have something for you. Here, have some tea. It’s calming. Chamomile.”

The man reaches in the back seat and lifts up a bright blue plastic bag. He pulls out a thermos and a folded black cloth. He lays the cloth across Ellen’s knees and pours her a cup in a yellow plastic lid. Ellen feels the steam warm her face and she lifts the cup, against the backdrop of Steve’s guiding hand, to her mouth. Heat, warmth.
Steve is the little girl, and I am the monster.
The tiny radiance in her mouth loosens an easy word: “Thanks.”

“There you go! You can talk. But no more. I’m taking you to a doctor. You have blood on you! Oh my God! Don’t say anything. Save your strength. You just sit back. I’m taking you to a doctor.”

Steve knows instantly what his role is, and he accepts it, creates it, with sensible limitations. He will take this woman to safety and from there apologize on his cell phone to his business partners for being sidetracked. With the silent woman beside him, looking out the passenger window, Steve does a mental inventory of the contents of his knapsack. Tommy Hilfiger aftershave. Vitamin B complex
. . . If I was her, that and some echinacea.
Condoms. Address book. Band-Aids. A Swiss army knife. He wants to suggest the echinacea and he turns to her.
Profound. Too late or too soon for the holistic approach.

Steve believes that most people have labelled the important things frivolous and he knows that they
suffer for it. Ellen has suffered for it. Steve decides that she needs some serious comforting, but seeing as they are strangers he can’t really reach across to her.

“We’ll be at Dr. Mendez’s soon, he’ll help you.”

Ellen doesn’t respond. Steve makes a concentrating face for a few seconds. Then, in frail voice and perfect key, he sings a song. The song is such a pretty replica of the original that it causes Ellen to look over to check that his lips are moving.
He’s a bit loony, isn’t he?

“Her name was Rio, and she dances on the sand. Just like that river twisting through the dusty land.”

A stupid song. A stupid, stupid song.
Ellen feels the sweep of a fish-eye lens bending the side of a sailboat. Tight, colourful shorts and leaping young men with bleached hair and tanned thighs. The boat surges up — breathtaking — and it cuts across a breaking wave. Ellen sings softly, not intruding on Steve’s note-perfect voice.

“And when she shines she really shows you all she can. Oh Rio, Rio, Rio — cross the Rio Grande.”

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.

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.