Pontypool Changes Everything

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.