Pontypool Changes Everything

He slaps the edges of his boots together and the cold seepage of melting ice through the seat of his pants causes him to jump to attention. He is not aware of the obvious. The thing he said aloud did not succeed. He knows exactly what he meant. In fact, even without being overheard, it probably would have been equal to what he actually said: How is the part I get for? This is not to say that he could remain oblivious to the disease. It will become dramatic. The detective climbs over the car again and drops his arm through the open window. He fishes his hand against the dash and retrieves the cord to his radio. The length of this cord, two, maybe two and a half feet, is all he has left. He doesn’t know how slowly to ravel it in his hand. He doesn’t see the resemblance between the handset and the tiny coffin of an infant. He squeezes the little dead hand in his, breaking its baby finger, making it cry.

The detective is a foolish man, not smart or pleasant; so, while he becomes even less appealing in these last days of his life, an angel will be assigned to him: the soul of an innocent child whose murderer he brought to justice. The angel is assigned to him to remind us that we are tormenting a man who is loved by God.

7 If the Illness Acts Up a Little…

Les Reardon is heading west on Highway 7 between Nestleton Station and Port Perry. This part of the country looks like a vast set of stairs, carpeted with trees, and is, in fact, the steps that lead down to the big city and its lake. Highway 7 runs along the edge of an incline, and to Les’s south the land drops away, greying into the phantom of a horizon. To the north the land sits high in the sun, like a cresting wave. The land is a market of conversions: farms into gravel pits, gravel pits into heavy machinery depots. And then these depots become the instant little communities that the machines have abandoned. Many people have travelled this highway to Port Perry, and many have carried tragedy. Children catching fire in the back seat with the meningitis that kills them between towns. A young man cradling a severed forearm between his thighs. The terrible family trips that end in violence on a sideroad. Les has joined those people who have suffered the unique agony of trying to escape impending doom by taking in the scenery. Most prefer to watch the land fall to the south, where they can be lost among hospitals. The north, on the right, has always risen in an opera of murder; it will broadside every family member, set in motion the suicides of giant people. Les, however, is looking across the front of his truck, into the white, for a place to pull over. He has vomited on himself and his vehicle is dark with the blood of a recent passenger. He pulls over at the sideroad to Caesarea and steps from the vehicle.

They think I’m doing this.

Les pushes handfuls of ice across the muck of his coat. He opens the passenger door and hurls snow across the seat and dash. On his knees he works the interior with circling hands. A thin pink soup covers everything. He attempts to flip the lather of blood with the edge of his hand, and the ground at his knees becomes a ruddy espresso.

Les’s feelings of guilt begin to fragment, and so he tires of cleaning. In fact, he tires of flight altogether. Instead, he stands beside his car to wait until he himself comes to a full stop. In this stop he is reunited with the feelings that he woke with this morning. I am a man who is trying. Helen. My son. This day has nothing to do with me. What am I doing? I’ve jeopardized everything. The police will catch this man. I have only done what anyone would do. Helen knows that. I have to turn around and help that detective. I have to report this.

Helen left Les just as he finished university. Going back to school had been his idea. At first it was a way of rehabilitating himself, of learning to live with a mental illness. He had worked in sanitation for twenty-five years; every day he’d pulled a garbage truck from the lot at four in the morning. On those mornings the sun rose on an isolated little man who waged a visionary war.

And then the war became real.