Pontypool Changes Everything

Les focuses finally, resorting to a default set of perceptions. So, when he feels the weight of Mary on him, he thinks this is the morning after, that she is marsupial in her affection. He feels a centipede walking along his neck and he opens his eyes. Far above is the gymnasium ceiling, Mechano blue and space shuttle white. Mary is bleeding on him. She grinds against him to escape a man who is pushing her head with his own. She shakes herself and detaches the killer’s mouth, letting it free fall directly onto Les’s cheek. Les feels the lamprey gathering of skin and he rolls, sliding Mary out from between them. Beside him, the cannibal folds in half.

There have been two killings. Maybe a third. And nearly a fourth. But for now the Killings are a pair, a couple. And like couples do, the Killings look for what they have in common. They stand in line like all the other couples. Like other couples, the Killings share financial burden, discovering that as two they can afford so much more. They can take trips and buy things that as single nouns or verbs they never could. The Killings are combining their relatively limited horizons into something without limits, something dreamy. They share ambitions. Which is fine. Again, all couples do. All couples become all couples; however, they also harbour the seeds of their divorce. Right from the very beginning, in fact, what facilitated the attraction is always a tiny version of the end. He loved her because she broke the spines of books when she read. She loved him because he pretended he was misunderstood, which gave her licence to pretend she broke her ankle. In the end he felt she didn’t even try, and as she turned to tell him that he was being oblique, she twisted her leg. Tiny story. But now the Killings are open to each other. A gymnasium shadow over a frozen river. An exchange of vows leaps like flame from one pair of mouths to the other. Except, the tiny story, what brought them together, is never spoken of again: the unstable Les Reardon.

And so it follows that when the Killings end they will hold up Les as the reason that they could never have succeeded, when everyone knows that Les, in fact, was how they met. He was their medium of attraction. For now, however, Les is just driving his truck, with Mary breathing in the passenger seat beside him.

He decides he’ll drive her to the hospital and phone the police. They should probably call the military. In the rear-view mirror a car that Les has already seen today appears. The detective is catching up, and Les reacts by pushing his foot down on the gas pedal. As his truck surges, Mary rolls over against the passenger window and dies with her teeth rung around an orange button. Her first act as a dead person is to seize, jacking her head up, lifting the button, freeing up the door, which opens.

Her second act as a dead person is to drop out of a speeding car pursued by a detective. Les watches her legs twirl like propellers as she departs. Like the bladed device that Les has been sorting out his life with, Mary’s new machine takes her across the line. From sound body to unsound body.

The detective really can’t believe his eyes as the body cartwheels like a roadside zoetrope, alongside his car. He smacks his glove box and tosses a red light out and onto the roof of the car. Bands of candy run across the snow as the siren cuts open the side of another world. Mary’s body is held in the air for a second by this technology, caught at a right angle with its underside, until the engines of her disappearance coax her to the edge of Doppler. And then she is gone. The detective is thinking, no, actually he’s saying, “Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck!”

Peterson is not prepared when Les slows down to turn onto Highway 35, and the detective loses control of his vehicle. The car flips onto its side, and like a snow-removal device it bumps smoothly, still on its edge, fitting perfectly into the ditch where it plows sixty metres of snow. When it stops, the detective is alive, not even injured. Still, there is something altogether deadly occurring, something totally unrelated to this accident.

The detective, who has refolded himself to a sitting position on the driver’s window, looks up at the sun peeking in over the passenger’s seatbelt above his head. His head is clear of wounds and his eyes squint at the light. At the very moment his car began its clever trip along the ditch, up on its ear, a virus that Detective Peterson has carried for some time began a full relationship with its host. As he exits the car and drags his ass backwards up onto the icy shoulder, he does so as a man with a disease. The first thing he says, as a man with a disease, is also his first symptom: “How is the part I get for?”