Pontypool Changes Everything

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.